The COVID Diaries: Summoning my Inner Opposite

Not long ago I lost my right-hand man, fellow builder, compatriot creator of shit, companion of contradictory and too specific counsel, and general partner in getting into trouble, Andrew Fritz. We valued the same things: curiosity, compassion, creativity, continuous learning. We lived the same ultimate purpose: serve the world well. The rest was pretty Mutt and Jeff, day and night, different approaches. Andrew went backcountry with 80 pounds of gear with a rainjacket, while I took less than a third of that including full rain gear and extra socks. Aside from our opposite genders, nearly foot difference in height, and of course our differing sexual-orientations, one of our biggest differences was in our approaches to photography.

As a computer scientist, Andrew loved the technical details and finer points of light and focus. He was continuously pushing himself to learn new software, new gear, new tools and new ways of capturing a painting of light. I love his work, but I also dubbed him the "Gear Whore." As a social scientist, I'd rather experiment with the relationships of colors and contrasts. Andrew thought nothing of spending twelve hours on a computer stitching 60,000 photos together into one Star Trail. I refuse to do any editing out of the camera (on a computer). I am point-and-shoot lazy and have had the same three of lenses on the same Pentax body type for decades. Andrew bought quality gear. I am cheap. If we were composers, Andrew would have been Mozart, while I remain Scott Joplin in his early days writing Ragtime above a bordello. The funny thing, the brilliant thing, is that we respected each other and our different methods. This allowed us to push each other. Andrew isn't around to nag me into taking my photo into Capture One for a little post-editing, or to quit being lazy and set up that flower shot using a longer lens...to see what more my art can become with a little opposite in my approach. I have to do that part myself now. Play Andrew in my head.

Fortunately, I had 24 years of training before I had to do it on my own. As much as missing my friend sucks, this ability to play my same-purpose, different-approach opposite is a gift right now. None of us have all the same supplies, resources, outlets, or places to work that we had a month ago, but I can see other ways of creating art, of being happy without my norms available. It's just like having a conversation (aka argument) across the kitchen counter with Andrew...he was a baked goods guru and I'm more of a short-order cook, but we made a lot of popular party meals on a dime by doing both/ neither composites.

The moral of this post is: summoning your inner opposite some more right now might save your sanity. I don't mean an opposing opinion or argument. No need to squint your Republican self into a Democrat or anything so drastic (although that is a good empathy exercise). I mean imagine yourself, still with your same values and purpose, but a completely different way of achieving those things. This is more than just an empathy exercise, it's a survival panacea of sorts. No matter all of the things we can't control, we can still control our how...and that is incredibly comforting, like a big lug guarding your back during those slum photo shoots in the middle of the night.

My opposite, the day he married his soul-mate, Dr. Adrian Fritz-Dahood.

The COVID Diaries: Can I Graduate?

I write this to all graduates this year, but especially those who have slaved an extra eight to twelve years earning a doctoral degree. I have empathy for the effort and struggle you have endured. As my former study-buddy (a Marine NCO) used to say, "It's like getting F*cked up the @ss with a corncob and having to say thank you for the privilege." Especially if school didn't come easy for you, or you paid your own way one class at a time, or if you're somehow a first in your family and had to navigate the social path (and all those strange new terms and rules) on your own.
You were likely looking forward to skipping across the stage in some seriously hotter-than-sin formal regalia, complete with an unflattering hat of Cambridge or Oxford design. Some of you skipped walking for your undergrad degrees and master's degrees, saving money and family travel for the big one...the one that really matters...the last one you planned to do. I hope you all still get the pomp and circumstance in person someday, even if delayed. But even if you don't, I offer you my heartfelt congratulations and appreciation.
I also offer one bit of hard-won wisdom from my own strut across that stage in velvet. I thought that would be the day I finally felt it was done. I thought that would feel like a big victory. I was wrong. The surge of pride and a real feeling of victory and meaning to the struggle was NOT that day, or even the first day someone called me Doctor Schmidt, or even the first day I received my 1,000 new business cards with the Ph.D. on them, or even the day I got my first seriously real-doctor-job paycheck. Turns out the day that felt like graduation was really the day I first had to pull out all of those fancy new intellectual tools and use them to make lives better...something I was only able to do because I endured and persisted and kept practicing perfecting my learning well after the rented velvet robes were all returned. I think your big day is now to come because you were also brave and bold enough to persist in learning and now it's a bone-deep habit. Congratulations! You came, you learned, and you will soon conquer your first of many challenges in making the world work better. No matter how you celebrate it this year, allow yourself to feel the free fall into your most-amazing potential. Graduation is just a very brief welcome to the best adventure of your life. Dum vivimus vivamus, and God Speed!

Even without the monkey suit, you still win (maybe more so because you can pick your own ceremonial robes that you look cool in now).

*Note: The title of this post is borrowed from a Third-Eye Blind song, "Graduate." I used to sing it to myself a lot as I spent night after night running stats programs in SAS for my research (back when a comma out of place might mean another 4 hours to fix and rerun your analysis...Yes, I know I am old.).

The COVID Diaries: Life on ICE

We're living in an Isolated and Confined Environment (ICE)! This has special meaning to me as a scientist who studied and trained groups living and working in ICE  (i.e. Antarctica, Outer Space, Aircraft Carriers, Drilling Rigs, Prisons) for 15 years. All of the teams who thrive in ICE do certain things well...and at least 10 of these can be applied to my own tiny ICE crew in COVID quarantine. 

1. Keep YOUR routines as much as possible. I don't make my bed or brush my hair normally every morning, so doing that in ICE isn't the secret to my success. However, I do have a morning routine feeding all the animals and looking over all my plants before heading off to work and I can still do that routine. The bottom line is that keeping as much of your existing routine intact as you can creates a small but lovely illusion of some stability and normalcy...but it has to be YOUR real routine and not some ideal routine you read about or were told about by some fitness or self-help guru. Keep it real, keep it you!

2. Focus on the social exchanges you do have and can control, and make them good (not perfect, but positive). Create a good culture, with positive traditions, in your own home or within your own virtual friend group. We're social animals and it helps if we keep fulfilling that biological drive to cooperate and communicate, even if we're introverts (the dose just varies). One of the most important social exchanges to get right is the use of humor. There are different styles of humor, but without getting into all of them and getting too technical about it, the best styles to use in a crisis or ICE environment are Affiliative Humor and Self-Enhancing Humor. Affiliative because it enhances relationships by letting everyone in on a positive joke. For example, exchanging puns or doing additive improv (like everyone co-writing a Quarantine SNL skit together Who's Line Is It Anyway? style). Self-enhancing because it involves accepting and laughing at life's absurdities, like how my "Apocolypse Costume" is really mismatched sweats covered in cat fur instead of Milla Jovovich's Resident Evil look.

3. Fight brain shrinkage! Yes, when your sensory stimuli are limited, your brain actually shrinks! While you don't likely have it as bad as an expeditioner in an all-white sterile isolation chamber, you still have fewer stimuli than your brain is accustomed to if you're staying at home. Use all the assets of your home's sensory variety. Sniff plants. Touch flowers and trees. Look at complex colors. Gaze at things up close and far away and in-between for a few seconds every single waking hour of the day. Taste a bit of a different dried spice from your cupboard each day. Use a different bath bomb. Whatever it takes to shake up your senses and keep your brain swole like a baller!

4. Create reasons to celebrate and celebrate all holidays too. In ICE, and in crisis, it is way to easy to focus on all the threats and things that could go wrong. Having something to celebrate and look forward to can help your brain and stress level reset. Expeditioners often invent holidays and goofy ways to celebrate existing holidays with whatever they have on hand just so they have something to celebrate every week. Some examples? Crazy hat Thursday dance party. Easter hula dancing competition, bonus cookies if you wear a costume. Bad coronavirus jokes for Cinco de Mayo night. Our 14-day stay-at-home anniversary dinner (save the Mac and Cheese special for it).

5. Leadership on ICE is not about authority and getting things done, it's about fairly distributing social support and trusting others to find a way to make things happen. Also, in ICE, everyone is a leader at one time or another. Leadership is situational and belongs to whoever is controlling the informational or social support at that moment. You must learn to accept five different answers to the same problem as long as the outcome is satisfactory and safe for all. Not everyone cleans to the same standard, but is it clean enough to eat off without salmonella happening? Then accept it and praise someone for getting it done.

6. Write down racing thoughts, let them sit a day or two, and then decide if you need to do anything about them. Often times, they will have resolved themselves. Small things seem like big things in a confined environment unless you give yourself some time for the emotion and anxiety to air out before you take action on them. Some successful ICE crews write all of their complaints and worries on a page, put them in an envelope, and meet to burn their envelops one night each week and eat cake or have a cocktail while they watch them burn together (no, you don't get to tell anyone what is in your envelope and you can't look in anyone else's either). The act of just writing down racing thoughts or worries, for some magical psychological reasons still not fully understood, lets your brain fully offload them.

7. Contrary to Antarctic Expeditioner's experience, you didn't sign up to go into ICE. However, unlike them, you DID sign up to go into ICE with your crewmates. Expeditioners who signed up with a spouse or sibling or parent, etc. usually faired a lot better than those who signed up on their own (assuming those couples weren't in the middle of an impending divorce or bitter existential fight). Your crewmates might be a nuisance, but they are also an emotional advantage if you remember to focus on each others' resilience and courage and do some basic mutual admiration every day.

8. Move around a little every hour. Do one yoga pose, or stretch one group of muscles, or walk around your living quarter in 3 circles, or have a dance. It's easy to get frozen up in ICE and then you stay that way because the more frozen up you let yourself get the better being too still feels.

9. Fifteen minutes a day of doing any art (besides drinking) keeps the batshit crazies away. You don't have to be good at it, and on the flip side, you don't have to be bad at it either (now may not be the time to pick up a new skill or habit if you're stressed). Just pick an art or craft that gives you a feeling of total absorption and flow -- you can just go all-in on it and create without worrying about anything else. It brings you joy for a moment. It can be playing spoons with your two-year-old on the kitchen floor to while your dog wails Itsy-Bitsy Spider off-key, or drawing stick figures on Post-It notes to cover a bathroom wall for everyone to read in there. Pretend you are the only art critic in the world and create something that makes you happy.

10. Sleep hygiene is even more important than brushing your teeth. It is very easy to mess up your circadian rhythm in ICE, and once that happens you are highly susceptible to depression, weight gain or loss, anxiety, and a whole other host of mental and physical hurts. Falling asleep with the TV on when your eyes become too heavy to hold opens seems like a good idea in ICE, but it isn't. Protect your bed for sleep and/ or sex only. Keep as close to a regular bedtime and wake time as humanly possible. Stay in bed for 8 hours. Bored and sleepless in bed? That's okay! Resting in the dark is the next best thing to sleeping (count the how long each breath takes you, focus on how your ribs feel expanding and contracting with your breath, and you may lull yourself from boredom to sleep). Keep the room at the right temperature for you. Make the bedding as comfortable as you can and make the room as dark as you can. It's your sleep cave and it may be the most effective vitamin in any one's arsenal.

11. And one for bonus... think about yourself as part of some great expedition now, because you are. This is history in the making. We're all astronauts riding this Earth into unexplored frontiers of human experience. We all belong to a greater culture of exploration, and the greater meaning within that will set you free even in ICE. There is a beauty in the experience, but you definitely have to hunt to find it.

An old adventure, in 2003, while studying teams on ICE.