Category — Uncategorized

I feel like I’m crawling each week toward the weekend. Which is ridiculous because I’m in the same location, doing pretty much the same thing, whether it’s a Tuesday or a Saturday. With the exception of the time I need to wake up. I guess I am crawling toward the weekend so I don’t need to set an alarm.

My life isn’t all that different with the exception that we can’t go out and everyone is home. I’ve always worked from home, so that’s still the same. I usually work a few hours on the weekend, so that’s the same. I’ve always cooked and cleaned. So that’s still the same. I’ve always read and played solitaire and watched television with everyone. So. Again. The same.

But it feels like I’m living life at a different altitude. It’s the same activities—working, cooking, cleaning—but it feels harder. Like I’m moving through thicker air and it takes that much more energy to get from Point A to Point B.

Which is all in my mind. I know I’m in the same place. I know everything around me is familiar. But it feels like someone changed the altitude. And now I need to readjust and figure out how to efficiently work, cook, and clean at a different height.

For an indefinitely period of time.

I read a Forbes article about taking a “bookcation” if you can’t take the real thing. You mentally go to another place for a duration of time—let’s say the weekend—reading travel guides or fiction set in the place and imagining yourself there. I’m assuming you can even extend your bookcation into meals, making food from the place, or peppering in appropriate movies at night.

In week one of the lockdown, this would have been a great idea. (Though at that point, I was collecting ideas and not executing any of them.)

But now we’re in week… six. (I think? Time is funny at the moment.) A bookcation sounds more exhausting than refreshing. And possibly sadness-inducing. Plus, I don’t think I can handle one more good intentioned article putting one more thing on my you-should-do-this list.

I’m now in the stage where I read articles about a possible resurgence of cases in the winter, and I make lists of things I need to do if we have a window of time when we can leave between the first and second surge. I methodically watch a single television show, one episode per day, because I don’t want to have to get to know another cast. (“New” feels tiring at the moment.) I read books. A lot of books. I try to convince the kids they want to play cards with me. That’s about all I can handle at the moment.

But I think if I could muster up the energy for a bookcation, it would be to visit Devonshire. We’d eat scones and read Agatha Christie and look at other people’s photos.

Where would you go?

I’m reading through a backlog of People magazines. I’m still back in January, issue-wise, so I find myself yelling at the celebrities, frozen in time at various parties. “BRAD PITT, WHY IS YOUR HAND ON TOM HANKS’S ARM? HE WILL HAVE COVID-19 IN WEEKS! SIX FEET APART SIX FEET APART SIX FEET APART!”

Just kidding, it’s now something like eighteen feet apart. Isn’t it quaint how once upon a time—like between the printing of the issue of People magazine and now—we thought six feet was enough?

Anyway, the pictures are old and the people are blissfully unaware.

Josh and I went through this back in 2016 with the election. We had old episodes of @Midnight, and we watched them after we knew the results. There’s Chris Hardwick, joking about Trump, AND HE HAD NO IDEA THE SORT OF SHIT THAT WAS ABOUT TO GO DOWN.

I wanted to shake Chris Hardwick and tell him to wake up and join us eight days down the road.

It’s awful.

I’ve also become jealous of fictional characters. They go out to dinner. They do not think about COVID-19. Of course, they don’t when the book was written in 2018. The author had no clue, therefore her characters have no clue. They get to dine out and see their friends and ride on public transportation. They take planes. They travel.

No one dies. Or, sometimes people die, but they don’t die because they’ve gotten COVID-19. They do not worry about every little cough. They never think about toilet paper.

I want to live in a book. Or an old issue of People magazine.

One of the nicest things about keeping a bullet journal (beyond the fact that I don’t forget to do things) is that I have a single sentence that sums up every single day since May 2014. I like to flip back and look at what I was doing on the same day a year earlier or figure out how much time passed between two events.

But lately, I’ve been flipping to February and watching life change. It goes from the pandemic being barely mentioned to mentioned frequently to mentioned every day. I can literally see the moment where it flips over from random-event-that-may-or-may-not-ever-reach-us to event-that-is-everywhere-in-the-world.

There is the time before, the old normal, and the time now, the new normal.

There was an article in LitHub about the last train trip the author took before travel stopped. She meant to write an essay about why people should write on trains. Instead, she wrote an essay on grief and fear; two feelings that keep growing for her because there’s nowhere she can go to move away from them from a few moments. They’re always in the home because all of us are always in the home.

She explains, “One of the troubles with writing, now—one the troubles I’m having writing this essay—is that in our forced isolation grief gets in the way, and so does fear. I guess this has been true for me for longer than I’ve realized. Moving fast kept the fear and grief at bay. But now there’s nowhere to go.”

It is so strange to see my journal change from plans and meetings and errands to home, just home, pretty much every day. What was unfathomable in February is happening now. I think if I had to describe the feeling that keeps popping up for me, it’s disbelief. How can things be like this now when they weren’t like this just a month or two ago? Disbelief keeps following me around the home because there’s no place to go and move away from the feeling for a little bit.

That Melissa from two months ago has no clue what is coming down the road.

I have heard multiple people say that they don’t have the patience right now for books. Reading requires focus, and focus is in short supply. So they’re okay with certain types of books or they’re forgoing books for a little bit to watch television, but dense books are a no-go.

I’ve found that I’m the exact opposite.

I cannot stream anything right now. People keep sending me links for Hamilton sing alongs or Indigo Girl concerts or web series. And I cannot get more than 30 seconds in before my skin starts crawling. I have no clue what is causing this reaction, but I can barely hold it together with something highly edited such as a Broadchurch episode. I cannot watch comedians chatting in feel-good videos online.

This is a new thing.

Once upon a time, I would have been jumping from online event to online event. But now, I cannot watch performers performing unless it is in something structured… like a television show or movie or staged play a la National Theater Live. And even then, it is hit-or-miss. Some days I can get through a whole episode. Other days, I start wishing for the end of the show when we’re five minutes in.

The only thing I consistently have patience for right now are books. Books are silent. Books do not ask me to process things quickly. I can handle a book’s pace. They’re not trying to entertain me or make me forget about the world or come together as a community. If online streaming is like a puppy, books are a cat. They are quiet. They are okay if I come and go. They don’t try to get my attention. They just… are.

I need things that just are right now.