Category — Uncategorized

Before we went to Orkney, the Wolvog “took” me to Orkney via his VR headset and plopped me down at the port where we would be landing. I wanted to see what the roads looked like and figure out the layout of the island.

When we reached the very real Orkney Islands, we landed in Stromness without a plan. We had zero clue how we were going to get around, but we were directed to go to the library where there was a makeshift tourism office. When we stepped outside, I immediately knew where to walk. It looked exactly as it had in the headset, and I could point in one direction and say, “There’s a restaurant around the corner,” and then run a few feet away and peek around the corner to see the restaurant from the VR headset, waiting for me.

It was surreal.

I’ve thought about that experience while we enjoyed the “beach.” Was I there? No. Did I feel like I was there? Sort of. I’ve revisited places I’ve been before via pictures or movies and been able to connect to the place via memories, but this was a situation where I connected to the place via virtual reality BEFORE arriving. Whether or not I ever arrived was actually beside the point. I had a sense of the space, albeit a flat understanding stripped of the smells and people and food and sounds that greeted me once I was off the boat. The same was maybe true for the beach we chose on YouTube.

Eater had an article about whether virtual experiences were “enough” in the age of pandemic. If we can’t travel, is setting up armchair travel experiences good enough? Can it satisfy the itch, especially if we cook some food from the area and try to recreate the atmosphere as much as possible?

The author reached the conclusion that it’s not quite enough, even though sometimes it’s interesting. The jury is still out on my end. Maybe it’s enough right now to be trying to solve the problem, even if we sort of know that there isn’t a real solution to arrive at in the end.

Lest we think our pandemic is special, the Guardian reminds us that while we (as in, you and me) may have not lived through a pandemic prior to this point, humanity has lived through a pandemic multiple times. And written about it.

Over millennia, there has been a consistent pattern to behaviour during epidemics: the hoarding, the panicking, the fear, the blaming, the superstition, the selfishness, the surprising heroism, the fixation with the numbers of the reported dead, the boredom during quarantine.

Uh… yes… that sounds familiar.

And maybe I need this reminder right now because I’m reading about things re-opening and thinking, “I cannot imagine myself going back to the beach.” I mean, yes, I know there will be a point when I return to the beach because we are a beach family. But in the short term, I cannot imagine getting there any time soon, even as beaches reopen.

Theater = yes, because it’s time-sensitive.

Movies = no, because they eventually come to DVD so I don’t need to take the risk.

Haircut = will hit my breaking point one day.

Bookstore = guilty pleasure so I’ll figure out how to justify it to myself.

Clothing store = will use my pandemic fears to get out of ever trying on new clothes.

But right now, it doesn’t feel like we’re in the after yet. At all. I’m holding my breath watching states reopen and wondering what the numbers will look like next week.

At the same time, it brings me comfort to read this:

And then, of course, the plague ends. That’s the actual good news that these books bring. The epidemic always passes. The majority of people survive.

This too shall pass. At some point in the future.

I read something that I found helpful recently, and I’m passing it along because I hear a lot of people doing this—including myself. It’s the idea of the “second arrow” or compounding pain with the secondary feelings that follow the first pain.

The Buddha taught that when we experience something painful — a physical illness, or the news that someone we love has died, or witnessing suffering all around us — it’s as if the world has shot an arrow into us … But often, what we then do is shoot a second arrow into ourselves. That second arrow is any thought we use to spin up a “story” around our pain, as a way of resisting simply being with the experience of pain. This can manifest in many different ways.

It’s in the family of the Pain Olympics except that it’s turned inward instead of outward. You can berate yourself for not dealing with things better or lash out in anger at the people around you because you’re upset with the situation. Second arrows can be worry or guilt. They’re the secondary crappy feelings that we trot out as if the first crappy feelings aren’t enough. But, of course, if we take a step back, we can see that they’re not the same thing. They’re two different sets of feelings; the initial bad thing (the pandemic) and then our reaction to it (all the other feelings).

I liked the article because it outlined how to put it into practice. How it feels on the page is very different from how it feels when you try to do it. Because it’s HARD. It’s hard not to let my mind go to the worst place and justify it with the fact that anxiety = preparation.

Passing it along in case it’s helpful to you, too.

I miss libraries, too.

They really were a place where you could say yes to everything. I mean, you still can if you’re checking out e-books, but it’s different because I’m always aware that when I check out an e-book, I’m using up one of the book checkouts. (Libraries pay for a two-year contract for each copy of the e-book or 52 checkouts. Then they have to buy a new copy.) I didn’t feel badly saying “yes” to a physical book and then not reading it, but I don’t do that with e-books because that wastes library budgets.

Prior to Covid-19, if I was in a bad mood, I’d go to the library and browse the shelves. Sometimes I went home with nothing. Sometimes I checked out a book just for the sake of bringing something home. Retail therapy without any money exchanged.

So this is exactly what I miss:

Because libraries are places of abundance. Where else can you look at something, be only 13% sure you want it, and bring it home anyway, risk-free? Where else can you say to your children, “Pick out anything you want, anything at all.” I’m not rich, but at the library I could be extravagant.

At the heart of that post is the real question that has been thumping in my heart every time I’ve seen our closed library: “Who knows how we’ll feel about sharing books with strangers in the future?”

I can’t imagine walking around the library just because. I can’t imagine going out anymore just because I feel like getting out of the house. I can’t imagine lingering in a place or wandering around or sharing an aisle with another human. I can’t imagine picking up books that other people have touched. I can’t imagine bringing them into my house.

I don’t want to live like that. I want to be a library person because “library person” was part of my identity. Without that, I don’t feel like myself. But I also don’t know how to go back to seeing that community space as a safe space. Which makes me really miss libraries.

I encountered two books this spring that built their plots on spoilers for other books.

The first one I started reading and realized that a bunch of Agatha Christies were going to be spoiled for me if I continued reading the book, so I needed to stop, check which ones they were, weigh out how I felt about having a bunch of mystery endings revealed, and then read on. The books “spoiled” were mostly books I already knew, so it was a low annoyance. But considering I only started reading Agatha about 18 months ago, if I had encountered this book at a different time, it would have sucked. Especially because it wasn’t clear that this was going to be part of the plot until I was several chapters into the book.

The other book is built on the premise that someone is using the murders in famous mystery novels to conduct murders around town. You’ll be able to figure out which book I’m talking about when you see my monthly book review post tomorrow. (Hint: if you don’t want to know which book, skip that post.) The book also ruins another famous mystery by revealing the twist ending during a conversation between two characters in the book. So… one book ruins almost ten books.

As in, literally ruins them because why else do people read mysteries except to try to figure out the mystery? If you know everything before you start reading, it’s not really an exciting read. It’s like setting up a game of Clue and having the person tell you, “By the way, Professor Plum is going to use the candlestick in the study. Let’s play!”

Anyway, I knew which books were being ruined in that book (with the exception of the one that popped up in the conversation, which I had luckily already read), and I had to stop reading it in order to rush through one of the books on the list so I could enjoy that mystery before returning to have the ending revealed in the spoiler-laden book.

Most of the books being spoiled were pretty old, and in a bunch of cases, the author was no longer alive. But in one case, the book being spoiled came out while I was in college. So it’s old, but it’s not that old. I kept poking around online to see if the author commented on how she felt about her book being ruined in order to have another author’s plot work, but I haven’t seen anything yet.

Which brings me to the thing that kept running through my head as I read the spoiler-laden book. The whole idea felt shitty. Clearly the author would not like the ending of his mystery revealed, so why would he ruin many other books? I mean, yes, on one hand, you can go with the thought that people don’t deserve to have things be spoiler-free after X amount of time. And it wasn’t like the book was required reading. But the whole thing left me shaking my head, even though I mostly enjoyed the spoiler-laden book once I had read the one mystery that I cared about. Still, it shat on the golden rule of doing unto others yadda yadda yadda.

So readers spoiling books—it accidentally happens. But writers spoiling other books in order to create their book… what do you think about that?