Is it fear or boredom?

Is it depression or uncertainty?

Are you burnt out or shutting down to recharge?

Why don’t we think about our minds the way we do our bodies? If you have a cold with the accompanying sneezes, coughs, and headache, you don’t try to outthink it. If you slam your knee into the side of a cabinet, you don’t assume you can “snap out of” the pain.

But when your mind is tired? When you start to spiral? When the bottom seems closer to the top? You refuse to rest. You don’t stop and think it’s something that will pass with time. You convince yourself that you’re bad, dumb, slow, untalented.

You should stop doing that.

Bodies don’t necessarily become stronger when they heal from injury. But they do learn new information. So do minds. You won’t come out on the other side of this experience with nothing. But your period of learning must be preceded by a period of rest.

Just shut down for a while. Recharge. Keep yourself from overheating. The machine of your mind can’t run at the same pace forever. If it does, some of the parts will fail.

At the Father/Daughter Dance, a friend of mine and I were standing outside the gym talking to a third father about our jobs.

(This is not really a dance for fathers after and daughters about third grade or so. After that it’s really a Fathers Get Abandoned by Their Daughters and Go Play with Their Friends. Which is fine.)

My friend works in public service, too, but in the suburbs and in a way that is more street-level than mine. We’d both described our jobs as some variation of getting yelled at by people. His is more of that than mine is most days though that week I’d seen my fair share of it.

On some level, that’s the job. You’re trying to fix things (usually me) or keep bad things from happening (usually my friend) and people disagree with you so there’s yelling. Sometimes at yelling volume, sometimes not.

But then you leave work, come home, and there’s less yelling.

That’s because neither my friend nor I have our names on the door.

At some point, we decided it was OK to follow that person home and keep up the yelling there, too.

Look, like it or not, we’re public servants. So getting yelled at in public – maybe it’s in a meeting, a political event, or maybe it’s in a restaurant – goes along with the job. You’re being yelled at but they’re not yelling at you so much as they’re yelling at (or about) what you represent.

That third father at the dance? He kinda shook his head at me and my public sector friend as we were taking a break from wondering where our kids were inside a dark gym colored by the strains of Taylor Swift. I don’t think he saw the good that comes with the bad of a job like ours.

I remember having a disagreement with a former co-worker about the phrase “public servant.” He hated it. Didn’t care for being thought of as a servant to anyone. Or really having to explain himself to the public. He works in the private sector now but is still public-adjacent which I suppose is the best of both worlds but also I don’t think you learn as much.

If you can listen to what’s behind the words or talk to someone when they think no one’s watching them yell? You’re going to learn something.

The exchange has to happen in public though.

I don’t think I’d have been OK getting yelled at during the Father-Daughter Dance. Technically, it’s in public, but … less so. Mainly because there are other fathers and daughters there and they didn’t sign up for that.

Neither do neighbors. So it’s why the tactic of showing up at someone’s house to yell at them strikes me as particularly venal.

I’m all for protest. Uncomfortable protest. The societal pressure of public debate. But that’s what a public space is for.

Home is for rest. For a brief reprieve from the public. For television and birthday parties. For fathers and daughters.

Follow someone home? Keep up the yelling there? I’m not sure what that achieves other than hearing the sound of your own voice. That’s not a public debate, that’s a photo op.

And if you’re afraid of having that debate in public, well…maybe you’re not cut out for jobs like the kind me and my friend have.

Hope is not a fuzzy, rainbow-covered alternative to the facts on the ground.

It is reflective of our present moment, not a future that should only live in our imaginations.

Hope is a collection of sparks that need oxygen.

It’s a vision of a path that begins in your immediate vicinity. Hope is the ability to clear the path as it gets harder to see the farther away you get from where you stand now.

Hope is not waiting for someone to save you. Hope is saving yourself.

A hunk of twisted metal and plastic. That’s all it is now.

It used to be the derailleur on my bike. The piece that helps me go faster or slower. Or work harder. Or make things a little easier.

You need it to shift gears.

No idea how or why it broke. I started to pedal up a hill, shifted gears, and SNAP. It twisted up and over the sprockets. Every bike nerd I showed it to expressed shock and disbelief that such an orientation was possible. “It’s not supposed to do that.”

It was only a couple of months old so it must have been installed wrong. But the metaphor that occurred to me was one of trying to do too much. Shifting too quickly. Or overextending.

So now it sits on the windowsill in my office. As a visual reminder to check your equipment and don’t shift into something new too quickly.

“I don’t see a way in which this doesn’t end badly.”

It had been going on for months. But lately he’d been thinking about that first couple weeks. The initial rush followed by the almost immediate concern for Where This Was Headed.

The two of them were not people who settled into things easily. Couches, maybe. But not new relationships. They were overthinkers and oversharers who overthought whether they should have shared that much.

It was exciting at first. Tentative steps became jumps with both feet. Each got a little lost in the other.

Truth be told, he was more uncertain than she. This was a pattern, of course. A mixture of general anxiety and an unwillingness to be honest about what he wanted. His style was to wait until enough pressure built and wait for things to blow up. This was…not ideal.

So was he trying to signpost a different way for himself this time? A warning to her? Still unfair, and less than ideal. But progress?

He was right, of course. But things ended badly because of the way they started. And that was his fault. A signpost at the start, yes. But the wayfinding trailed off after that.

From this story:

On the Republican side, Carlson has an uphill battle and has had to address that he spent nearly six years in prison after being convicted 27 years ago of sexually assaulting a woman following a South Side Irish Parade.

Yes, I suppose that could be described as … an uphill battle.

Or a complete dereliction of duty by the Cook County GOP to prevent a man who served time for sexual assault from running for Congress in its midst.

From an election preview story back in June:

According to court records in his unsuccessful appeal of his conviction, Carlson met a woman at a bar in 1994 near the South Side Irish Parade route on the day of the parade.

The woman testified she left the bar with Carlson and agreed to accompany him in his car to another bar, but instead he pulled the car around a street corner and assaulted her as she begged him to stop, according to court records in the case.

But according to the candidate, this isn’t disqualifying. In fact, it’s a point in his column.

Asked last week whether the sexual assault conviction would make it difficult for him to represent residents of the district, which stretches from the South Loop to the edge of Kankakee County, Carlson said he is better suited than other candidates to represent citizens in Washington, D.C., “because I know the ins and outs of the system.”

“I’m the only one who has lived all of this stuff,” he said.

For all the hand-wringing the Illions and Cook County GOP are doing over the SAF-T Act, they sure seem to have not noticed that they have a violent criminal running for a Congressional seat who sees his violent acts as a reason to support him.

One could see this as a pattern:

The long-shot candidacy of a Holocaust denier’s Republican bid for Congress was defeated Tuesday, but not before the neo-Nazi received more than 56,000 votes in Illinois’ 3rd District.

[snip]

Jones, a 70-year-old from Lyons, had run for office several times before but never advanced to the general election. He received 20,681 votes when he ran unopposed in the Republican primary in March.

Jones has previously described himself as a “white racialist,” or someone who “knows the facts of race,” in an interview with the Chicago Tribune.

A former member of the American National Socialist Workers Party, Jones said he also opposed equality, interracial marriage and school integration.

So for those keeping track: In the last six years, the Cook County GOP has allowed a Nazi and a rapist to run for Congress.