Category — Uncategorized

I mean, beyond everything.

Everyone is home, pretty much all the time.

Josh and I take walks. We walk down to our friend’s house and stand on the sidewalk outside their house while they stand about 30 feet away at their door. And we talk to each other across the lawn.

Josh and I rarely made time for walks before this. It was one of those three-times-a-year thing we did on the few days when the weather was nice. But now I’ve put firm limits in place. I’m going to take a daily walk. I’m going to shout across the lawn to my friend. I am not going to work 24 hours per day.

We’re meal planning. We always did a loose weekly meal plan so we wouldn’t have to take a dozen trips to the store. But now we have an iron-clad meal plan. When you don’t have the luxury to go to the store all the time, and said store doesn’t have many ingredients in stock, you get a lot less choosy about what you’re having for dinner.

I am trying to read things that are not virus-related. I’m reading fiction. Unfortunately, all the fiction seems to veer into virus territory. Like I’m reading a book in which the characters are all in isolation due to a war. So it makes me think about how we’re in isolation due to a virus. But when I catch my mind wandering into hysteria, I return to the story and try to focus again on fiction. Mysteries are good. Fantasy is good. Family dramas are good. Dystopias are not.

We are watching Broadchurch. I never wanted to see it when it was first on, but now I’m giving it a chance. I love it, even though it’s gut-wrenching.

What are you doing differently?

Yesterday, while thinking about living backwards, I came across this Wikipedia page which catalogs stories set in the future that is now in the past. Like 1984. It’s clearly past the year 1984, so it’s a story “set in a future now past.”

Or 12 Monkeys––which I’ve been thinking about non-stop since COVID-19 started spreading––in which a virus wipes out humanities in 1996. 2001: A Space Odyssey. Astro Boy. Back to the Future II. Infinite Jest. We’ve lived through their time periods.

There’s some comfort in it. After all, right now my brain is going wild with questions about what the future will be like. I’m writing a story that may or may not come true. The comfort comes from looking down the list and realizing that we’re not ruled by robots (unless you count our mobile devices… we’re sort of ruled by our phones) and the planet’s oceans haven’t been “dissolved due to an atomic experiment.” Small silver linings.

When things feel uncertain, it’s a nice reminder that everything we fear doesn’t actually happen. That’s what I’m telling myself today.

The New York Times recently had an article about a woman who teaches people how to live civilization-free. It’s survival skills for a world in which there is no end to the survival period. As in, she’s not teaching you how to get through an experience. She’s teaching you how to adapt and continue on as the experience becomes the new normal. Or the old normal because she’s returning people to how we lived before cities and cars and books and hospitals.

The reporter spoke to people who live this way all year round after going through a six month Stone Age Immersion:

“People say, ‘Oh when the apocalypse comes. …’ What are you talking about? It’s here. I’m a collapsist,” she said. “I’m not invested in maintaining the comforts we have.”

A collapsist. It certainly feels like something is collapsing. It has felt this way for a long time; before COVID-19. There’s a fin-de-siècle, pessimistic odor in the air, except that we’re not actually in a fin-de-siècle. We shouldn’t feel like there’s a proverbial cliff in front of us.

I don’t think I could live like the people in the article. Not just the idea of living close to nature… I mean, I’m not really a nature person, especially when there are crickets outside. But because I associate thinking about the future with hope. Nature is lovely, but I think the thing I love about cities is the innovation. And that is what I would miss. I don’t know if I could feel hope if living backwards was my existence.

I would hopefully survive the collapse of civilization because that’s what humans do; we continue on. But there was something that made me so sad as I read the article.

I hate losing things.

I even hate it when other people lose things.

I was once traveling in Spain with a friend when she lost a watch with sentimental value. We were having a hard time at that point in the trip because we were both sick, and we had a miserable time in Córdoba.

We returned to the train station to leave the city, and I told my friend that we should check the lost and found because we first noticed the watch was missing when we entered the city a few days earlier. What if someone found it on a train? My friend thought this was a terrible idea; what were the chances that someone turned in a watch? It was a waste of time to ask.

But she humoured me and watched me pantomime a lost watch at the station desk. “Oro? Plata?” were the only two words I knew in Spanish that applied to this situation. The man looked up and said, “Si!” He reached under the desk AND PULLED OUT HER WATCH.

It was probably the best moment of the whole trip.

The moral of the story is “always ask.”

Even if you’re outside of Japan, which has the most amazing-sounding lost-and-found system… ever.

What have you lost recently?

Right as I am embracing e-books and seeing their ease and virus-containing beauty, I read something like this and feel completely creeped out. Kindle — and likely other e-book readers — are tracking what you’re reading, when you’re reading, how long you’re reading, what you’re highlighting, the notes you took, the words you’ve looked up, the segments you’ve copied.

Some of this information I’ve willingly posted online. You know a bunch of the books I read because I talk about them. If I remember (maybe a quarter of the time?), I log books I’ve liked on GoodReads. Or leave an Amazon review. But, of course, that is under my control. I can decide to post or not post. To say what I’ve highlighted or not.

It’s a reminder of how much we trade in exchange for convenience; though, of course, in this case, you’re already paying for the service by paying for the book. So the information they’re taking is an additional, hidden cost of the transaction.