Captain’s Log 1/16/20, Consumerism at its Greatest
This blog is about living aboard a boat in the Pacific Northwest and snow-birding to Arizona while training an artificial intelligent mental health virtual assistant named Rubi ready to provide support in the traumatic aftermath of COVID-19.
We had raided our storage unit with our former house supplies before coming to Arizona, but everything was so buried, I failed to find my essential kitchen things such as pots and pans, my cutlery, my spare coffee pot, pillows and bedding and other living essentials. James encouraged me to go on a shopping spree with his mom to get what we needed and have bonding time with her. Mom loved to shop and had a fine nose for a good deal. I learned a lot about bargain shopping with Mom making the rounds going to Costco, Walmart, Sam’s Club to Bed Bath and Beyond. I think I saved over $400 at Bed Bath and Beyond by simply signing up for their VIP membership. I noticed the satisfaction I got from finding the perfect purchase, but how quickly the high faded.
I was nesting and felt privileged to be able to set up another nest for our nomadic lifestyle and was reminded of my biological mom’s inability to nest.
In my youth, after not being able to live with us, Mom struggled to keep an apartment. I remember her at her first apartment coming back from the half-way house after the mental institution. It was weird. While I watched Transformers and Rainbow Bright there after school, she had a mess of undone dishes going on, clothes strewn about and weird magazine photos taped to the walls of erotic models, posed, as if speaking to her. This is the time she swore spiders were coming out of the faucet, as her dishes piled up and she claimed a man had been sitting on top of his truck outside her apartment yelling at her for sex. I wondered if the models on the wall were asking the same. This was the period of time my mom recalls that she is still confused by. To this day she asks the question “why would the banks have plants to conspire against me?” She was so paranoid at the time, she thought that certain tellers at the bank were actual, plants, people planted as part of a conspiracy, to short her on her money when cashing her disability check. I knew that coming out of a mental institution could be confusing and I wished she could have had Rubi to help sort through it because, to this day, she still is confused by which delusion to believe. She still lives in a world where there are plants in the neighborhood bank out to get her and her little money!