Category — Uncategorized

Erin McKeown is one of the most honest songwriters on the planet, and she writes the best newsletter. I’ve been thinking nonstop about her recent newsletter—”hold your nerve.” She recounts how hard it is to put yourself out there artistically at the best of times. During the pandemic, it’s near impossible.

She has a new album out, and she’s currently touring as safely as she can. But ticket sales are down because audiences aren’t coming, and she talks about the balance she faces between continuing with what she needs to do and pulling back—something everyone faces at some point with the pandemic. Everyone has to hold their nerve and do something:

Maybe you have to as well in whatever your situation is. Maybe you have to hold your nerve and send your kids to school even though it worries you sick. Maybe you have to hold your nerve and keep working at a job you hate because there is no other option.

She also fears—”I have probably scuttled my career further by not writing you a cheery essay about how great everything is going.” Except the opposite is true. Someone pointing how hard it is to be creative in the best of times and comparing it to being creative in a pandemic is exactly what I wanted to read. It’s what makes her such a great songwriter; her deep honesty and vulnerability.

P.S. Her upcoming tour dates (masked and vaccinated) are at the bottom of the newsletter.

I kind of sort of love this. A social media platform called Minus.

Gizmodo explains that the user gets 100 posts. That’s it. Once those 100 posts are gone, you can’t post anything else. It would make us think twice about what we share and whether the moment is worth capturing.

As Grosser described it in an email to Gizmodo, “no likes, no follows, no feed algorithms, no accumulating metrics at all — only a single dwindling count of how many posts each user has remaining.” The only interactive function is a reply field.

The description on the front of the site promises there is still information to be gained by looking at a post—just not the same information you’re accustomed to when judging a post on another site:

The feed is reverse chronological, not algorithmic. Post timestamps are vague. Nothing is monetized. There are no likes or follows or noisy notifications. The site’s only visible metric counts down, showing how many posts each user has remaining.

I made an account and went on. Most of the posts are not as profound as you hope knowing that you only get to say 100 things. So maybe better in theory than in practice. But it’s still a super interesting idea.

Everything Happened has an essay about how she pulled her kid out of soccer so she would have time for going to the gym. She riffs on a familiar tale: you add one activity and that grows into many activities, and suddenly your weekends and afternoons are packed and you have no time for wall-staring. And I need wall-staring time.

She perfectly sums up how it feels to restart activities after the pandemic: “We were having to get ourselves places, ‘all of a sudden,’ and how do I put this undramatically… it felt like a creeping, shapeless asphyxiation. A gas leak.”

I used to have a lot of energy. I did a lot of activities. And a lot of work. And saw friends. A lot. And now, it feels like too much if we have to leave the house on both days of the weekend. If I don’t have 24-hour pyjamas time somewhere in there.

How am I still this tired 19.5 months into this?

The ChickieNob and I finished listening to the Magicians trilogy a few weeks ago. We were wistful on the final walk. For months, it had provided structure to the afternoon. We launched immediately into Good Omens, and it took me a day or two to settle into that story, but we’ve found our rhythm again.

We can, of course, always return and listen to the trilogy again. I’ve clearly read (or now listened) to the books many times. But it’s still hard to release it at the end of each go-around.

Nicole Zhu says it best: “Rereading, with or without a specific lens, reveals aspects about the writing you may not have noticed before.” Reading these books during the pandemic, when things seem so hard and our efforts are often thwarted and the rules change daily, was an especially perfect pairing.

Moments like the flower on the underside of the world made the day-to-day moments in this world a little easier.

I am choosing to be optimistic. I read an article on NPR about modeler projections for COVID-19, based on what we know now. The predictions show a decline in cases between now and March, giving me hope that we will be able to travel by next summer.

For once, I am hopeful and everyone else is doom-and-gloom. “I’ll believe it when we’re on the plane,” the Wolvog told me. Fair enough.

We are still being cautious—we don’t socialize inside. We’re still doing takeaway; no meals indoors or outdoors at clustered tables. We wear masks indoors always and outdoors when we’re around people. But we’re also returning to regular life when it makes sense. In-person meeting when there is a Zoom option? No. But returning to the classroom when the county has returned to the classroom? Yes.

When brings me to the theater. The theater was one of the last things we did, pre-pandemic. It’s not really post-pandemic, but returning to the theater feels like a step out of the isolation. One of our favourite actors is doing Hedwig (one of our favourite plays) this fall. So we’re joining the vaccined, masked audience and enjoying Mason Alexander Park. I’m sure I will sob walking back into the theater.

Baby steps.