I Had a RWR Day!

So I have a pretty solid* metric for what constitutes a good** day***. 

There are some caveats though:

* "solid" means, the best I have found so far for myself.

** "good" means a day when I can at least go to bed at the end of it without that gnawing feeling that I wasted yet another day in this life. So it is not a metric that one would use for measuring the best days of one’s life. It is a metric for measuring the boring, forgettable ones, which are the ones that make up the bulk of our lives.

*** "day" here applies basically to weekday workdays. Those unspectacular periods of 24 hours when what we’re supposed to be doing is paying the rent and earning grocery money. Those days when we have to wedge our lives in around our vocation.

So all that being said, here is my very simple, but solid metric for what constitutes a good day:

It is a day when I can manage to run, write, and read. All in one day!

I’m sure that does not sound like much to some people and I’m sure that to others it sounds like an absolute horror show of a day. 

For me a Run Write Read (RWR) day ends up being rather fulfilling. This is in part because it is actually REALLY HARD TO DO! You try it!

Partly it is a matter of scheduling. All three of those things are better when one can devote some real time to them, but to make the math easy, let’s just say that each one of those takes or should take an hour. So we are talking about a day where I can muster 3 free hours. 

That shouldn’t be that hard. On the weekday workdays I’m describing, I sleep 8 hours, I work 8 hours, but those 8 hours really cost me about 9 total out of my day, leaving 7 other hours. I spend 2 of those hours in the mornings before work drawing my silly comic (@standard_kink) and writing these blog posts and doing a little bit of yoga. Now I have 5 hours left. In the evenings cooking and eating dinner usually takes about an hour. So I have 4 hours left in a day. That’s if I don’t have to go anywhere or do anything. And all of this assumes that my job stays in its box (which we have allocated about 9 hours to).

You can begin to see how the hours slip away and how fitting 3 hour-long endeavors into those remaining 4 hours can quickly become difficult. And I don’t even have kids or anything. God bless though of you who do; I don’t know how you manage to accomplish anything.

All that being said, scheduling is only the first difficulty. The second is the truly difficult one: getting myself to do these things. I think that Quarantine really took a big bite out of my ability to motivate myself. It has been a very real challenge. I think we all did whatever we needed to to get ourselves through all that and that’s okay. Napping on the couch listening to podcasts, half watching movies with the sound turned down while munching on kettle chips, that was all totally fine under those circumstances. But not anymore! Now I’m trying to break the habits of the lazy napping-ness that go me through Quarantine. Here’s the thing about habits though, you don’t just break them, you have to bury them and then replace them.

I’m working on that, but I’m not very good at it yet.

However, yesterday (Monday 7-19-21) was a Run Write Read (RWR) Day! How cool is that?!

The thing I always realize at the end of a RWR Day is how not impossible they are. Every time I pull it off, I always end up thinking to myself, “I could do this all the damn time!” and that might even be true. Maybe some people do it everyday, but who wants to hang out with someone who has that kind of discipline?

What I do want, is to have more RWR Day. Doesn’t have to be every day (I’m often proud of myself when I can manage ONE of those things in a day), but it should be MORE of the days.

That’s what I’m working on now: more better days. 

Like I said, these are not the days that you’ll end up telling your grandkids about; these aren’t fall-in-love-at-first-sight days, win-the-lottery, or make-a-new-friend days. These are all the other days. I’m trying to make those days better.

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How Long Does it Take to Sleep?

Next month I’m going to have to start getting up crazy early. I start going back to working face-2-face about 80% of the time and when I got to negotiate my schedule, I asked if I could go in early and leave early. I was thinking at the time that I’d like to be able to leave work in the Fall while there is still light out so that I can have a little bit of time at the end of the workday to be alive.

That’s all fine and good, so I just did the math and said, “I will start work at the crack of dawn! This seems like a good idea!”

So now I am trying to train my body to get up extra early and it is not going well. 

I figure I am going to start getting up at 5 am. That will give me time to still do my morning things, clean up, and commute to work, but here’s the things: THAT IS REALLY EARLY!

Right now I am struggling to get up at 6 am, and 5 am is a WHOLE HOUR EARLIER!

On top of that, if one wakes up at 5 am, then in order to get a solid 8 hours of sleep, one would have to go to bed at 9 pm. 9 o’clock at night! I have got gone to bed at 9 at night since I was in like First grade. So I may have screwed this up. 

What I’m going to need to do is cram 8 hours of sleeping into about 6 hours. Not sure how that is going to work, especially since I am a restless sleeper and it take sme FOREVER to get to sleep!

This is when you say, “Perhaps you should stop listening to podcasts when you go to bed. Maybe try a white noise machine or something …”

Well, fine.

Maybe you are right.

Obviously something is going to have to give. 

Maybe if I go to bed at 10 pm, wake at 6 am and then have an hour to do yoga, do my silly morning drawings, then clean up … I could probably get all of that done in an hour, then about a 30 minute commute, then I could write these little blogs in the evenings when I am supposed to be doing my own writing … I mean, you make a good point, that might work ....

Or I could circle back to the 8 hours of sleep in 6 hours idea … that seems more efficient, it just happens to be impossible. But remember what Aristotle said: a plausible impossibility is preferable to an implausible possibility!

I think about that saying a lot.

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4 July, 2021: On the Bus.

 Yesterday was the 4th of July and for the first time in literally years, the fireworks were a part of my life. I actually had a good three day weekend. I had people in town and we went exploring. We ended up in San Francisco and then ended up and what turned out to be an entirely sanctioned (re: illegal) fireworks show that was one of the most chaotic and dangerous and American thing I have maybe ever seen. It is certainly on the list.

Probably it is just because we’re gradually coming out of the Quarantine, but I did experience an unusual wave contentedness and happiness about this big, dumb, messy country of ours. Just walking the streets of various cities, exploring new places, and seeing the weird and wonderful and frequently bad smelling mish-mash of people who actually are this country, it left me with a twinge of … I think “patriotism” is too weird of a word after the last few years … let’s go with “pride” … I felt a twinge of pride about this country.  At one point my little group of (fully vaccinated and masked) adventurers road a bus in SF and I really think that you will never get a better idea of what we really are as a population than riding a city bus. Low-key I looked at all the people and (what I could see of) their faces and — while no one was experiencing this emotion but me — I felt like we were part of a community; people who have survived the Pandemic, people who were all out in the city on a nice July 4th, people who were all on that bus at the same time, breathing the same air. Normally it would have been anxiety inducing, but this time — for the first time since early 2020 — it felt good again to be alive and out in the world. 

I have so many mixed feelings about what we have all gone through and my faith in humanity has been so devastatingly harmed by the way people behaved last year, but I suddenly became aware that sitting there on that bus yesterday heading down Haight to the botanical gardens, I was starting to heal a little. I like to hope that maybe every single one of us was.

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The Butterfly Part.

 

Let us recap: Previously on this blog …

Since about February I have been trying to figure out how to construct a life. I’ve been trying things out. I’ve been looking for ways to protect my personal life and time from my job which is constantly trying to expand beyond its box. I’ve been testing out better sleep schedules. I’ve been testing out different diets, different foods, different ways to spend an evening. 

Because I moved here shortly before Quarantine dropped on all of us, I didn’t really much of a life to speak of when we went into lock down and I have realized — much to my horror — that as life begins to start up again, it means that I have to begin anew the work of building a life for myself. 

I’ve done this sort of work before, but usually it was because I was in grad school a couple of times and, say what you will about grad school, it comes with a built in cohort of people. This life doesn’t, not exactly. I’m blessed with a handful of great coworkers who are fun people to grab dinner and a drink with occasionally, but because they’re my coworkers I can’t just call them up and be like, “I’m lonely!”

I have a couple of friends in the Bay Area, but more than a hour away, so that limits our interactions.

So in the weird period where the world is open, but not fully up to speed yet, I’m concentrating on myself and what I can do to build up a life that I like, so that when I eventually have to go meet people and try to make friends and — god forbid — try to date, I will at least be a person who has his shit together and has something to offer.

With all of that in mind, I’ve been doing the basics: getting enough sleep, drinking enough water (never once paid any attention to this before like a month ago), I am more consistently doing yoga in the mornings, I’ve been scouting out new running trails, I’ve been trying to both clean up my diet and remove most meat from it (two things I have needed to do for awhile), I’m also going to cut back on the booze and try to dry out for a month or two. Red wine got me through Quarantine, and I will always appreciate that, but Quarantine has ended here in California and now I can’t justify the extra 600-800 calories in a bottle of Malbec. I’ll still grab drinks with people out in the world, but both meat and booze I’m just not going to bring into the apartment anymore (with the possible exception of tune, I’ve been eating a lot of tuna and rice lately).

I also purchased a scale recently because I was convinced I’d put on 20 pounds during the big Q. The reality is that I weigh about what I did when I moved here. I know I have lost muscle mass and put on flab, but my weight has about netted out, so that’s something. I figure that just by losing the wine, the pizza, and the potato chips I’m off to a good start. Add to that a cleaner diet that involves actually eating the fruit I buy, and now we are off to the races. On a day when my job does not eat my life, I can get in about half an hour of yoga in the mornings and I have scheduled time to run for about an hour in the early evening. In the latest interaction of my daily schedule I have built in time specific to writing, which I hadn’t really done before. If you add up all of these small changes I’ve been working on, you start to see how full on habits could emerge. That is the idea. I always get ambushed by life and work, so each time I try to make improvements, only a few end up sticking, but that’s why I keep trying; some of them do stick, it just takes time and effort.

Such is life.

One thing I have learned from earlier attempts is that if I can actually have one of these good days (yoga, clean food, a reasonable work day, running, writing, reading) I actually sleep better (I toss and turn a lot lately) and when I sleep better, I wake up feeling better, which makes it easier to have a good day, and a good day means I sleep better, which means it is easier to have another good day, and on and on and on … but that cycle is somewhat difficult to get into to, but I’m trying to get back into it.

When I feel bad about my failures in these efforts, I find some grace in reminding myself that everyone in the world has endured a terrible trauma over the last year and a half (and in some places that trauma still endures) and so we can’t really judge this new life we’re entering into the same way we might have judged our previous lives. In some ways the fact that I have to build a new life from scratch here in this place is actually kind of thematically fitting. I did the chrysalis of Quarantine here, I just need to now figure out how to do the butterfly part.

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Together Apart

Technically I am still on Work From Home until the middle of August, but lately more and more I have been having to go into the office to do things and today I will head in and be there all day. The particulars are unimportant, but I will be around what feels like a lot of people throughout the day. I’m vaccinated and they are all vaccinated, everybody will be wearing masks, socially distanced, all the things. 

It’s strange the way that this country is coming back on line. I live in California and as of June 15th all of the Quarantine measures are basically gone. That is different in workplaces and some other places, but out there in the world, all bets are off. I went to Target on June 16th and I was still wearing a mask because I honestly just didn’t think about it when I got out of the car. Putting on the mask is just part of the routine now, you know?

In the store people were mostly still wearing masks, except for white men. White men were just all like, “Fuck your feelings.”

I am a white man and man, I gotta tell you, most of the time I feel like I’m adopted.

I don’t wear baseball caps or watch football or go in for libertarianism or gun ownership or the KKK. I know that I am infected with that toxic white masculinity that you hear so much about and sometimes it still comes out even though it is something that I work on. And keep in mind, I have basically three English degrees. You know how much of my life I have spent reading and thinking about Critical Theory? You know how much time I have devoted to figuring out what my brain is doing and why? I’ve said to people before that I am still running 20th Century white American male software no matter how many fixes and updates I try to install.

And yet, walking into Target the other day and looking at these pale baseball cap wearing football dudes, I was all like, “Do you not see how much of an asshole you look like, dude?”

Look, I get it, these are MAYBE vaccinated and so not actually doing anything illegal, but I think that the thing that has so completely shaken my faith in humanity over the last 15 months has been discovering how many people (sometimes people close to me) just lack actual human empathy. We are members of a society and that means we have obligations to one another, which means that we are all supposed to give a damn about other people. 

So maybe read the room, my dudes. We have all experienced trauma since this virus thing started, but we have not all experienced the exact same trauma and we certainly have not experienced it collectively. We should have though, but we didn’t navigate it that way. That’s what the “Together Apart” slogan was supposed to be about, but that was a slogan, not a description of what we did.

I’ve really been shaken the last 15 months about the way people behaved, especially since it was so clear that the solution was so simple: choose to care about other people and then make all of your pandemic decisions downstream of that.

As our society comes back to life, I don’t know what the next few months are going to feel like, especially once we start getting pocket spikes among people who have refused to get vaccinated. I fear we are going to be stretched even further apart. People are still dying in this country, but now there is even less that any one of us can do about that individually.

Vaccine Summer is going to be fantastic for some of us, but terrible for others. 

The worst parts of this may be behind us, but this next part is still going to be weird.

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Boating with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Aaaaaaand I’m back!

I took a little vacation. I went up to Washington state with some people and spent a few days staying in a beautiful house on a lake. I had a wonderful time, thank you for asking. I got to ride on a boat. I got to run in the forest. I went to new places and met new people and I only embarrassed myself a little more than the normal amount.

The pandemic is not over, I know, but the scientific miracle that is these vaccines has given us back a version of life that I am incredibly grateful for.

It wasn’t until I arrived back in my empty little apartment on Tuesday night that I realized how debilitatingly lonely I have been. My situation is not unique. Lots of people went through quarantine alone. I was lucky to have family zoom calls and a supportive group of coworkers and friends to talk to, but nothing is quite as life affirming as being in the same room with other people. It is with good reason that some countries consider solitary confinement to be a cruel and unusual form of punishment. 

I’m not going to lie, I cried a little when I got back here. Not because it is terrible here — I’ve made the best of quarantine, I suppose — but because of how much simply being around other people felt like such a warm blanket. It was like walking in out of a bone chilly cold into a room warmed by a fireplace and with chocolate chip cookies baking nearby. I had to go back out into the cold eventually, but the experience of the cold is different after you’ve known warmth.

There is a scene I always think about from the book One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. It is a book about prisoners in a Stalinist gulag. Each morning they have to pile out of the bunkhouse into the Russian winter and the guards inspect each prisoner to make sure they’re not taking anything illicit out on their work day. Solzhenitsyn goes on for like two pages about Ivan’s strategy for standing in front of the fire in the bunkhouse absorbing as much warmth as he can before he has to step out for inspection. About the way he’s learned to buckle his coat over his body to make sure he takes as much heat with him as possible. The thing that sticks in my mind about it is that Ivan knows that the guards are going to make him open his coat once he lines up outside. He’s not trying to take the warmth with him all day, he knows he’s only going to get to enjoy it for a few brief moments. But he has a whole strategy for it, because he knows that at the very least, those are moments that he can enjoy. Ivan has learned to appreciate things as brief as that.

Now, I am not in a gulag. I did think of Ivan though while I was gone. I so enjoyed being able to be a person in the world again, to talk to people, to drink with people, to play cards with people, to enjoy people again, to laugh until I cried. There is so much life out there still and bit by bit by ever-too-slow bit, it is coming back. And I am eager for its return.

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Leaving on a Jet Plane (Tomorrow)!

Short post today.

I am doing a half day of work this morning and then this afternoon I am driving up to the Bay Area to meet up with some travel buddies and then in the morning we are driving to Oakland Airport from which we will be flying to Washington state where we will be spending a few days in a beautiful house on the shores of Lake Whatcom, which is basically in Canada.

I know what you’re thinking: Is this an adventure? Because it sounds like an adventure …

Let me ask the judges … Judges???

Judges say: YES! IT IS AN ADVENTURE!

Man, I love an adventure.

I am especially looking forward to this one because of — you know — Covid. While I know that the pandemic is not, strictly speaking, over in America, I am fully vaccinated as are all my travel compatriots. My county is doing great, the county we’re flying to is doing great. We have reached the point where those of us who are vaccinated in this country need to start giving the middle finger to this disease. Vaccine summer, baby!

I have practice-packed and repacked my little black backpack, my travel clothes are ready to go, my devices are charged, my airplane snacks are ziplocked and loaded. Let’s go!

We are getting to that point where life like sunlight after a storm is beginning to break through the glowering clouds of quarantine and I am here for it. Like the swallows returning to Capistrano, I am returning to cheap airfares on budget airlines to go to weird places just for the pure fuck all joy of being alive.

It is good to be alive again.

Not sure if I will be able to blog tomorrow morning, not sure what the morning will be like, but if I don’t just know it is because I am just so busy being alive again.

It is good to be alive again. 

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The Memory Hole Mindset.

One day someone is going to write the definitive Covid-19 book. It will be big and heavy and heavily footnoted, meticulously researched. We are all going to buy it and none of us will actually ever finish reading it. The author will hit all the morning shows and all the news shows and all the late night shows and Trevor Noah will ask her, “So what should we have done differently?”

That’s the part that I know will make me angry all over again. Because there isn’t going to be anything new. There aren’t going to be any revelations, not really. We should have worn masks earlier, we shouldn’t have worried so much about disinfecting our groceries.

But Trevor will nudge her a little more, “Let’s imagine that you run the world in January 2020, but you get to know everything you know now …”

She won’t want to go there, but she will and she’ll say that we should have done all the things we know that we should have done: that we could have contained the virus in a couple of months if we’d actually shut the country down. If we had done what they did in South Korea where the government was delivering food to people’s doors. If we had done what they did in New Zealand and just sent people gobs of money to stay home. That we could have suppressed it by limiting people’s movements, by contact tracing their movements using cell phone data. That the NSA should have been involved. We should have had testing mobiles driving up and down every street in America like ice cream trucks. That we should have shut down every single Target and Walmart in the country. That we could have been reasonably safe in about two months. That we could have opened schools again by the summer of 2020, but it would have meant keeping bars closed.

“Why do you think we didn’t do that?” Trevor will ask thoughtfully.

She’ll say something about the American character. About the tradition of individualism in America. About the fact we are actually a libertarian country, we just don’t know it.

Then Trevor will pause and say, “So we’re assholes?”

And she’ll laugh, but then sheepishly agree. Then Trevor will throw it to a commercial.

As we begin to return to something like life, I think that we will collectively do everything we can to never have to talk about Covid again. We aren’t going to want to talk about all the ways we failed and why. We aren’t going to have any of the hard conversations about people’s behaviors. We’re going to want to put it all behind us and I understand that inclinations, but I think it is the wrong one.

Where I work the process is beginning to return workers back to face-to-face work and while I am happy about that, I have coworkers who do not want to go back. And why would they? The commutes? The cramped little work spaces? Being around other people? Not being around their kids or their dogs throughout the workday? I completely understand why someone would want to continue working from their kitchen table in their PJs. What has been weird though is that the management class keeps creeping right up to the line of saying, “Well, you CAN’T do your job from home!” 

The problem of course is that these jobs have been getting done from home for more than a year. But we have not collectively LEARNED that. It has not become something that is universally understood as true. In the rush to forget all that we have experienced in the last year, we are leaving behind the lessons of the last year.

That concerns me because it also means that we are not going to address the collective trauma of the last year. This has been hard for everyone and hard in different ways and it really seems like we should all just get a month off over the summer to clear our heads and get our shit together, but that insn’t going to happen either.

I fear that when this is all said and done, we will have learned nothing.

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Limiting Factors.

I have been thinking a lot about traveling. As we can see the light at the end of the Covid tunnel, the very idea of traveling has come roaring back into my consciousness. I already have a trip booked with some friends NEXT WEEK! I am very excited. That trip kind of fell into my lap though because someone else organized it. By next Friday I will be sitting on the shore of a little lake outside Bellingham Washington, probably drinking a beer, soaking my feet in the cold cold water and thinking deep, deep thoughts. It is going to be great!

That will be an unusual trip because left to my own devices, I don’t usually take relaxing chill-out trips. I tend to take random wander-around-and-look-at-stuff trips. Last week I was making a list of the places I would still like to go wander around and look at stuff. I set some parameters: I focused on domestic destinations because it feels like international travel will still be sort of weird for awhile. Destinations also had to be somewhat reasonable. For instance, I can’t reasonably go hike the Pacific Crest Trail because that takes months and I have a job. However, I do want to see Great Sand Dunes National Park and that is reasonable because I have family in Colorado. For years I’ve wanted to go to Pittsburgh because I love bridges and I want to see the Cathedral of Learning. If I find cheap enough tickets, I could probably do that trip in three or four days. I’ve never seen Redwood National Park and it is a seven hour drive from where I live, so I could reasonably make that happen, but I’m not sure if I want to do that much driving. 

I want to go to The Rothko Chapel in Houston and Houston is a pretty big airline hub, so I can probably knock that out in two of three days. I want to go to Cleveland because I was supposed to go there last year on a work trip that was cancelled due to Covid and I feel now that I have a duty to make that trip. It is one of the very specific things that Covid took from me and as a personal little Fuck You to Covid, I’m going to see Cleveland, even if it is just out of spite. But anyway, I did some research on it back in the Before Times and I bet I could make a fun little weekend trip out of it.

The list goes on and go: I want to ride the Alaska ferries, I want to go to New Orleans, to Marfa Texas, I want to be on a boat on one of the Great Lakes, I want to walk the Skyways in the Twin Cities, I want to see Hawaii, I want to drink at a cool rooftop bar in Miami. I want to stand at 4-Corners (which is way in the middle of nowhere, BTW).

What limits me in all of this are the normal things that have always been limiting: time and money. What is no longer a limiting factor in these things is the dumb, deadly, airborne disease known as Covid-19. The world will likely never entirely return to whatever we mean when we say “normal” and probably that is a good thing, but we are very near to the world returning to life, and I am looking forward to that.

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Vaccine Summer in Bloom.

I’m trying to grow flowers now. I have avoided flowers because I am apparently so proficient at killing herbs that I was certain flowers would not be hearty enough to survive my poor farming skills. But the other day I was browsing the seed aisle at my local Walmart and they had packets of perennial wildflower seeds and I thought, “Ah yes, WILDflowers! They will grow anywhere! Surely they can survive little old me!” 

I bought a few packets and came home and potted them and now they are sitting here on my windowsill. It has only been about five days but they have already started to sprout. Thai little green head already have the shape of a tiny leaf and their little stalks do look healthy. I’m really impressed how quickly they have come up. 

This is maybe the part that I enjoy the most; when the little seedlings start to emerge and there is a little more life in the world. I really admire these tiny plants. There’s so much hope in them. During the day I find myself getting up from my desk and wandering into the dining room to bend down over their pots and just study them. It makes me really happy.

The next part is the part I have proven to not be good at: keeping them alive. I think I am getting a little better at it. I’m more careful about when and how much I water them. That’s about all I can do. I can’t control the amount of sunlight they’ll get, but I’ve done the best I can by completely giving over my window sills to them.

It would be really nice to go into summer — particularly this summer, our Vaccine Summer — with actual flowers blooming in my little apartment. There would be something fittingly promising about it.

We’ll see. 

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The Wonderful Return of Being Boring.

Today is Monday. So get this: I just had the closest thing to a normal weekend that I’ve experienced in the last 14 months!

There was nothing amazing about it. In fact it was pretty mundane. I went to see a coworker’s kid perform in a little play at an outdoor theater. I went to BOTH Target and Walmart. I planted some new seeds in my window sill garden. Yesterday I made a frittata and as I was getting started I realized I was out of cheese, so I just hopped in the car and drove to the store and bought some cheese, without even feeling any trepidation about it! No Greco-Roman mental wrestling about the ethical implications of making an unplanned grocery store trip. I even went to a thrift store on Saturday! 

Now I am not saying life is back to normal. It will be a long long long time before we get back to whatever “normal” was, and we probably won’t ever get there anyway.

But what I am saying is that this past weekend was the closest thing to life I have experienced since the quarantine began. And that is a good thing.

I should say here: I’m fully vaccinated as of about a month ago. And YOU should go get vaccinated too. Everybody should. If you’re not inclined to protect yourself, then do it because it protects the people around you. This is not complicated.

After the so so so many months of quarantine, it was so very nice to be able to return to even the most mundane aspects of living in a society. I walked around Target slowly and just looked at all the stuff and I even touched some of the clothes! Can you even believe that? What joy it is to be alive.

It gets even more exciting! I have PLANS! With other people! PLANS TO SPEND TIME WITH HUMANS! Later this week I am going to go with a small group of fully vaccinated people to get drinks! DRINKS, I SAY! I have not had proper drinks in more than a year. I think sometimes about whiskey and I wonder, “How is whisky doing? How has whiskey been without me all this time? Will whiskey remember me???”

And even more exciting! Next month I am taking a trip! Yes, A TRIP! I have requested vacation days and everything!

I’m slowly trying to get my head in gear for that. We have all — well most of us anyway — internalized the Covid caution over the past year and I think that for some of us it will take a little bit of time to be able to deprogram ourselves out of that. I think that the fact we still have to do mask wearing is actually a good thing. The masks function kind of like training wheels for us as we begin to take those tentative steps back into the world. When I walked around Wal-Mart this weekend, I could often hear the sirens going off in my brain telling me that I shouldn’t be inside, that there were too many people in the store, that my trip wasn’t essential.  Then I’d have to calmly remind myself that it was okay, that I was vaccinated, that I wasn’t going to hurt anybody with my germs, that it was okay to do something non-essential. It will take some time for those sirens to quiet, they’re on a hair trigger after the last 14 months, but with time, they will fade.

While it is true the pandemic is not over and while it is true that the pandemic may never entirely end, it is also true that we are probably through the worst of it now. We are entering a new phase of this whole thing and by all accounts, this phase is so much better.

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Sky Butlers.

Back in 2019 I was flying back to Arizona after a job interview in California and at that point I had already not gotten several jobs I’d interviewed for and I was feeling pretty bad about myself. I ended up getting the job in California, it’s the one I have now. The plan had landed and we were sitting on the tarmac and I was sitting in the back of the plane because I prefer to sit in the back of the plane and I was watching over the top of the seats as the passengers did that slow and frustrating thing where they both take forever to gather their stuff and also try to push past the people in front of them. You can learn a lot about a person by watching how they behave during this small moment. You can learn who is organized or not, who is pushy, who is patient, who is kind, who is self-important.

I was sitting at the vert back of the cabin and I could overhear a couple of the flight attendants chatting about what’s next and what city they would end their day in that day and I thought for a moment that I would enjoy that life. The notion of spending the day hoping from city to city, looking at hundreds or thousands of strangers, getting to watch them all in these liminal moments, getting to study strangers for a living, that all seemed really appealing to me. Plus, it would be an excuse to live a slim and streamlined life, since my days would have to fit into a single bag that I traveled with each and every day. I imagined having a cool little studio apartment that I barely ever lived in. I imagined nights at odd bars in strange cities. Having friends in lots of places. Having a life that took place mostly in the air.

Obviously I’m romanticizing that life, but I was having a tough time then getting the kind of work that I wanted and so it was probably healthy to think outside the box of my own expectations. After all, people do live a life like the one I’d imagined. Probably it is more grueling and stressful than I’d imagined. I’d heard before that flight attendants are actually extensively trained and actually highly skilled and have to be knowledgeable about their aircraft, but that they spend 90% of their time doing 10% of what they’re trained for. Most of the time they’re sky butlers, but every once and a while they have to save someone having a heart attack. What a weird job.

That weirdness appealed to me and, if I’m being honest, kind of still does. I even looked into it some, but before I could spend much time on it, I was offered this job and then it was off to California to do what I am doing now. 

And lucky me, because a few months later Covid hit and lots and lots of airline employees lost their jobs and the ones that didn’t were hurtling around the skies in sealed steel tubes with strangers who were so poor at risk assessment that they were on the plane in the first place. It must have been complete terrifying hell there for a while. I really feel for people who had to do that work, it must have been a total trauma and I haven’t really heard people talk about that. Honestly, we have kind of stopped having discussions about the sacrifices that front-line workers made. Probably because as we draw nearer the end of the pandemic, if we talked about them more, we might be asked to actually reward them in some way, which I think we should do, but which this country will never do because we are kind of a nation of assholes. But I digress, that is a topic for another time.

As we creep ever so slowly back toward some kind of normalcy, I have been thinking more about a life spent in the air. My own employer has been making plans about returning to face-to-face work and there are committees and proposals and waivers and union negotiations and clarifications of terms and underneath it all is the implication that some work simply can’t be done from home even though that work has been getting done at home for 15 months. I have been thinking more about a life spent in the air perhaps because we are approaching a point where many of our lives will return to something like normal, like we are all coming in for a landing, or maybe we already have landed (I remember hearing the whooshing noise of a 737 engine when I got my second vaccine injection) and so now our whole society is just sitting on the tarmac and we are learning a lot about each other while we sit here waiting. We are stuck here waiting and thinking about all the things we’ll need to do once we deplane. We are thinking about the lives we live when we are not up in the air, we are getting ready for our return and so we are thinking about what exactly we are returning to.

It is good to think on what we want to return to and what we don’t

It is good to spend this time thinking on the other lives we could be living, it is good to think on the world of possibilities that will be opening to us as the world is reopening to us. 

A lot of lives will be completely different a year from now, not just because of the vaccines, but because of what coming back to life will mean for so many of us. A lot of marriages are going to end. A lot of people are going to quit jobs that they realized they don’t want. A lot of weird little businesses are going to get started because people will realize that life is brief and if they really do want to open that cupcake shop, they had better get on it.

I doubt I will become a flight attendant any time soon, but I’m certainly thinking on it. And that is a good thing.

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A Pretty Silly Self-Reinforcing Behavior.

Throughout the pandemic, there have been occasional days here and there where for various reasons I had to go into the office to do something or get something. These always felt like lively events. Any valid non-grocery reason to leave the house was basically a field trip during quarantine. Yesterday though, I spent a full 8+ hours in the building working with people and around students (everyone is vaccinated and everyone was masked up) and it felt less like an exciting non-standard event and more like a preview of the kind of work life I will likely be returning to in the next few months and I have some mixed feelings about it.

This whole time in quarantine I have said that I am eager to (responsibly) get back to something that isn’t working from home. I have not really enjoyed it, but I guess I have become accustomed to it. It felt weird yesterday. It felt abnormal, because, of course, it was not normal.

Get this: I had to leave the house early because I had to GET GAS. I had to use my own time and my own money so that I could put gasoline into my little car SPECIFICALLY so that I could then spend MORE of my own free time driving TO WORK. I had to use MY OWN time and money in the service of a job that was not compensating me for any of that.

Now I know that I am simply describing the basic functioning of a capitalist society (ie: the exploitation of labor in every way that is still legal), but it felt unreasonable.

I already understand that I’m not going to get the system to change on this point, but I am describing how it FELT.

After 15 months of having to commit a lot of energy to drawing lines between what is work and what is life, only to have work consistently fail to respect those lines, it seems that as we begin to return to something like “normal”, all the little things from the Before Times are going to be thrown into a sharp focus as they start to return to our lives. I work to make money and then have to spend that money on a car and gas so that I can get to work so I can make money to pay for the car and the gas to get to work … etc.. That all seems like a pretty silly self-reinforcing behavior, doesn’t it?

I recognize that I’m not breaking any new intellectual ground here, and it isn’t even like I didn’t know any of this (I’ve read Adorno and Althusser, thank you very much), but it was just funny to LIVE it yesterday and — this is the important part — to be AWARE that I was living it as I was watching the gas pump tell me how much it was going to cost to get to work.

It gets even stranger when you zoom out to see the whole picture of the whole quarantine work-from-home situation. I have had two work computers plugged in and running for the last 15 months and I have used them both extensively in my work, but I don’t get a stipend in my paycheck to cover that additional cost of electricity. Meanwhile my actual office has been sitting empty with the lights off that whole time. The entire cost burden of what it takes to get my job done has been shifted from my institution to me. Multiply that amount of money against the number of people like me who have been paying it and I imagine you’ll end up with a staggering sum. An operational cost that has been forced onto the employee to ensure the continued operation of the institution. That just seems bonkers, right?

I want to be clear, I recognize how lucky I am to have kept a job this whole time and one that can be done from my apartment, but that being said, I still think these are worthwhile things to ponder. 

Don’t even get me started on the amount of additional work people have been doing either because working from home is less efficient (so they need to work more to stay on top of workloads that were never reduced or even properly adjusted) or because the complete collapse of the work/life barrier has made it easier (ie: basically guaranteed) that work will flood out beyond its confines and drown people’s lives. This is PART of what has happened to me, but only part. I do know anecdotally from others though, that when you’re “home office” is a laptop on your living room couch, then you’re never really “off work” because while you’re supposed to be eating dinner and winding down, it is just SO EASY to check your email, then respond to some emails, and then do some research for some emails, and then before you know it you have accidentally worked an extra three hours when you were supposed to be sleeping. All the things that were sold to use as improvements in connectivity — that were supposed to improve our lives — have made existing just terrible. Where is the stipend in our paychecks for that?

I didn’t intend to go off on a Marxist rant or anything this morning, I’m just beginning to do the math on what it will mean to return to something like a normal work life. This is a calculation that many of us are going to have to do as we emerge from our quarantine caves into the blinding sunlight of the world we haven’t experienced in a very long time.

I really do hope that some changes come out of everything we have been through and everything we have learned about ourselves, our systems and each other. I hope that happens, I don’t know that I have faith it will.

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