It's All So Exhausting

Longing for a boring existence of compassion, competence, and progress

Photo by Kier in Sight Archives on Unsplash

Dear Reader - In case you haven’t noticed, my writing has been a little sporadic lately. And while the thoughts all just keep spinning in my head, I’m finally figuring out how to put them into words and have the time to do so. I hope this speaks to some of your own thoughts over the past few months, and I promise the opening story has a point.

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Our kitchen sink stopped draining in late February.

It had been running slow for a while, and yes, I probably should have considered dumping some enzymes down there when I first noticed it, but I figured simple plunger action would fix it.

At the end of a weekend waiting for it to go down, I finally told my husband that I had given up trying with simple fixes, so we went to the store and bought a 25-foot snake.

Still nothing.

My husband, who normally works at home, was traveling for the next three days, so I took a day off work to call a plumber and see if they could come fix it. Nope. He couldn’t find the clog either, but he had a several-thousand-dollar plan that would fix all of the plumbing in our crawl space.

Then we thought it might be the septic, so while my husband was still in Michigan, he got someone to come out in the afternoon, and I had to take off another half day so I could be around for the guy to clean out our full septic tank.

Still, the water didn’t go down.

Since I was already home, I called another plumber. That didn’t work. Another plumber came out to try later in the week, but still, nothing.

I’ve been washing dishes in a dishtub and tossing the water out of our front door for weeks, through freezing temperatures, rain, storms, and wind. We think we’ve finally figured out which stretch of drain is the culprit, but we haven’t had the time to struggle underneath our house to open it up. We have to decide how much money to spend and what really needs to be done, all while spending our weekends watching show choir and our weeks running our son to track practices and football conditioning. Time is not on our side.

This minor inconvenience continues to disrupt the lives in our household and serves as a constant annoyance, but then I open my phone and read the latest news about my country.

ICE is still terrorizing cities, the GOP refuses to just fund TSA which causing long lines at airports, the Western states didn’t have a real winter and my friends and family out there are terrified of what that could mean for summer fire threats, fire is sweeping across Nebraska, and in Indiana we’re experiencing daily weather swings that have brought tornadoes and snow within 24 hour periods.

All of that awfulness pales in comparison to the news coming out of West Asia (a more geographically accurate term for the Middle East),¹ where our president decided to start a war that very few American citizens ever wanted, and the consequences of which are going to be paid by nearly all of us for at least the next decade.

Whoever said, “May you live in unprecedented times,” must have been really bored, because I could go for a good case of boring predictability right now.

I remember reading Chuck Klosterman’s book The 90s and being struck by just how much happened in the decade that encompassed my entire adolescence. Seeing everything stacked on top of each other reminded me just how much breaking news shaped the adult I would become: the Oklahoma City bombing, the Branch Davidian compound, the OJ Simpson trial, etc. And while the 2000 election and 9-11 both happened officially in the next decade, they still felt like part of that era, the shift happening shortly after as we entered a new war in the West Asia.

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But the World Just Keeps Spinning

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And yet, with all of that breaking news, there were still moments that were so boring. I didn’t have “breaking news” constantly coming across my social media feed because social media didn’t exist. I had to call people if I wanted to talk to them outside of school or work. My peers and I were pretty much watching the same television shows, and we had to wait a week between episodes before we would find out what would happen next.

That’s not to idealize the 90s. There was plenty we could have done better, and I don’t want to demonize the very technology that I’m working on right now to write this blog post. But the 2020s have just been…a lot.

A pandemic, an insurrection, hope in progress wiped out with a single election, diseases making a comeback, rights being erased, friendships and family relationships destroyed by the political climate, faith in institutions destroyed, and so much more.

I miss going for weeks without being concerned about what the president was saying or doing. I miss believing my elected leaders cared more about what was happening to their country than they did about their bank accounts. I miss believing my fellow Christians were more concerned about reflecting Jesus in their actions than in seeking political power and influence. I miss believing the future looked bright and that progress was a constant slope upward.

And like many, I’m looking for hope in the strangest of places.

I missed it the first time around because I was a college student who barely had time for ER and Friends when it launched,² but I’m finally working my way through The West Wing, because I want to see idealized fictional characters leading my country with their humanity intact. Seeing these characters deal with national and personal disasters with competence and grace gives me hope that this is still possible in America, but not America as it is right now.

The only excitement I want in my life right now is change that makes life better for me, my family, and my neighbors. I want there to be consequences for those who are destroying my children’s future, both the economic future in careers they hope to build and the environmental future of the world they inhabit. I want to be bored of people showing compassion to those who are less fortunate than them as they raise them out of poverty and despair. I want to yawn at the competence of leadership at all levels because they are so good at their jobs that we no longer have to constantly rush to fill the gaps and repair what gets broken along the way. I want to be so used to progress that improves the lives of every citizen that innovators come up with new and fresh ideas that even the most creative science fiction writers never imagined.

I want a boredom that gives me the freedom to read, write, and explore the world around me after a full day of doing a job that both pays the bills and brings me some measure of personal pleasure and fulfillment. I want a boredom that makes a clogged bathroom drain the biggest worry in my day, instead of just one more thing on top of so many other things occupying my heart and mind.

Is that all really too much to ask?

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1. For more information on using the term West Asia over Middle East, read the following blog post: Push for Terminology Change: Middle East — Arabizi Translations

2. It also recently dawned on me that it premiered while I was studying abroad in London, and American television shows were still at least half a season behind across the Atlantic.