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Diarist A01 Day07

Everyday Life in Middletown
Day Diary for Feb. 4, 2018

6:26 – alarm goes off; classical music. I hit the snooze. Had been dreaming about a weird faculty meeting at multiple locations on campus; it was an all-day meeting and it was lunch time; I was going somewhere to look for better food options. During the previous session an administrator was suspended from a wire and dropped on his head. He laughed it off but looked injured to me.

6:46 — after listening in a slight fog to the music for a while, get up and brush teeth, take medicine. Sometimes I listen to the music and try to guess which century it’s from. Not today.
My rhythm this semester is to take Saturdays off (or mostly off) and get up early on Sundays and get straight to work, no breakfast or anything. I work until I’m done and then make myself an omelet and relax. So that’s the plan today. I’m at my desk before 7.

7-10 a.m. Write a 1,200-word sample wiki entry for my literature class. The students will be writing entries like this on historical figures, writers, texts, cultural phenomena. I wrote one about Mass Observation, an experiment in recording everyday life for political purposes in the late 1930s. It was pleasurable work, with much concentration—flipping between sources on the computer and in book form, etc. I like what I wrote.
During this, at about 7:40 C. came in and gave me coffee. Maybe 40 minutes later I got a banana and re-filled my coffee and took the pot into the living room to refill C’s cup. We exchanged signs of affection. At about 9 C. came in and gave me the last few ounces of coffee.
By 9:20 or so I was done drafting (leaving some stuff to be filled in later—I want to model for students working steadily on a long-term project; also, I feel like stopping). I set up a google doc and invited all the students to editing privileges on it. This entailed getting on to my work email: just one work-related email, dealt with by my boss.
By about 9:40 I’m writing this. I’m looking forward to the Super Bowl later. I’m looking forward to eating an omelet. For now I have to work some more—probably put in about two hours on the book my students are reading for class this week, George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier. I need to go outside to get the book (damn it!) because I left my brief case in the car all weekend. This requires getting out of my pajamas and putting on pants. I do so; it was supposed to snow last night but did not; cold and clammy, driveway wet.
Converse with C. in the kitchen. “Are you doing laundry?” she asks. “Mmmm, maybe” “No, I mean right now.” “No.” “Alright, I’m going to get a shower,” she says. “Are you making black beans today?” she asks. “Yes.” “Ok, I’ll let this pot out.”

At 10:08, back at computer, where I call up a file called “George Orwell notes,” taken last summer, or perhaps the summer before. Find that I have notes on the diary Orwell kept during the Wigan Pier trip but no notes on the book itself. Darn.

Establish myself on the couch in my home office with book & highlighter at 10:06. Set phone alarm for 90 minutes to remind myself to get up and stretch.

11:36—Phone alarm goes off; get up, stretch, bathroom. Note that C is watching TV in the living room. Sit here and type this. Birds chirping outside. Re-set alarm for 30 more minutes of reading.

12:10 p.m.—Phone alarm goes off; set aside Orwell. Figure that I’ve read 84 pages in two hours = 42 pages an hour, which means I have to budget four more hours this week to get the book finsihed– 2 before Wednesday’s class and 2 before Friday’s. I realized once I started I haven’t read it before. (I’ve read the diaries he kept while he was on the trip to research it.) Wonder how students will react to his inventories of the squalid interiors of miners’ houses; to his account of visiting mines; his descriptions of the almost unbelievable work conditions: walking miles stooped over to get to the coal face, etc. Makes me think of my ancestors who were miners.

Make an omelet—cook bacon and, while it’s cooking, chop celery, peppers and carrots for black beans I’ll make later. Steam frozen broccoli in the microwave. Make coffee. Then make omelet with broccoli, bacon, blue cheese, a little bit of red pepper I threw in with the bacon. While I’m cooking, listen to music on the IPod dock in the kitchen. All the songs on my Ipod on spin. Random juxtapositions: Sergio Mendes, Dinosaur Jr., Diana Krall, the Rolling Stones. Hearing the stones sing “Salt of the Earth” resonates with Orwell: “Raise a glass to the hard-working people.” I recognize around this point that the diary is making me notice more details than usual.

Eat my omelet with toast sitting on the couch. Glance briefly at the Sunday Times. The lead travel story is about Iraqi Kurdistan, which I visited on a Ball State trip a few years ago.
Eat while watching about half of last night’s Saturday Night Live on DVR. Pretty funny.

2 p.m. – Clean the kitchen a little and write this. Now to start black beans cooking. I like to cook and haven’t been doing it much—have to be in Muncie 4-5 days a week now, so C. is handling most of the load at home.

3 p.m. – Black beans simmering in the kitchen. I sauteed the vegetables, adding an onion and an apple; chopped some fresh cilantro; dumped in beans (dried, Rancho Gordo) and covered with stock and boiled hard for 15 minutes. IPod spinning all along, with more juxtapositions: Stevie Wonder, Johnny Cash, Mingus (singing “Freedom for your mama’s mama/Freedom for your daddy’s daddy,/Freedom for your brothers and sisters/But no freedom for you”). Cleaned the kitchen. Windows steamed from doing dishes. Turned beans down to simmer. Sat back down at the computer in the office, wrote this; emailed students with some light instructions for reading Orwell.
Put laundry in the washing machine; stirred beans; put on shoes and walked to the Fresh Market to get lettuce and rolls. This trip required because the loaf of bread I bought yesterday to make an Italian hoagie (a nod to Philadelphia cuisine for the Super Bowl) turned rock-hard overnight.
Outside it was grey and surprisingly warm, with a few tiny snowflakes falling. We were supposed to get snow accumulation last night but it missed us. The grass everywhere is brown and dead. But it was pleasant walking. I walked on the east side of college past Yats’, where some young people were seated inside, drinking sodas and looking at laptops; outside, I said hello to a couple that was trying to get a coathanger inside a car door (red, old, faded, American car) to retrieve keys they had locked inside. Walked past the Jazz Kitchen and looked at the calendar. In the grocery store, baroque music was playing fairly loudly over the intercom. (What kind of mood work is this? Complimenting us for our refined taste, so that we’ll buy more kale?) I find a head of iceberg and some decent-looking sourdough rolls. (The secret of the authentic Philly hoagie is the roll, unobtainable outside certain Southeastern Pa. zip codes.) Put into little clear plastic baggies chocolate-covered almonds and raisins with a silver scoop. In line, comment on the cuteness of the tiny zucchinis the woman in front of me is buying. She smiles and nods: “Little ones.”
Get back, taste beans, find that they’re almost soft; set alarm for 10 more minutes. Switch wash from washer to dryer. (I do laundry on Sundays, and am inordinately pleased to not have gotten behind on my washing since we moved into this house in July). Taste the beans again and re-season: cilantro, cumin, salt, cider vinegar, tabasco. Stir and taste: delicious. Decide not to whirr it with a blender or mash it with a masher, to leave it at a soupy consistency. Take about a third-cup of the soup in a coffee cup and a spoon, let it cool, and sit on the couch sipping it and reading the NYTimes story about Kurdistan. C. tastes and seconds my plan for the leaving the beans soupy.
Read a story in the Times Book Review—a review of a book by a Dutch author arguing that old-fashioned humanism is what is required to combat fascism. The reviewer quibbles with his use of fascism (fair enough) and concludes by arguing that Europe and much of the Liberal west have gone wrong by emphasizing universal rights and extra-national loyalties (the European union, etc.) He says that it was a mistake to de-emphasize “love of one’s own.” I disagree with this—check myself from labeling that kind of thought “fascist”—and remember Guillermo del Toro, interviewed about his film “The Shape of Water,” saying “There is no us and them. There’s only us.” Think about mailing this review to students. Then think maybe not. This brings us to

4:55—and I’m going to relax and continue reading the Sunday paper now until the game starts. This has been a pleasant day—consumed in one absorbing, self-chosen task after another; a quiet day, with Cindy busy working (on the couch, on her laptop). I’ve been needing a day like this—more or less to myself—after several weeks of office work being fairly constant, with many, varied, sometimes conflicting demands.

Read the sports & the Sunday review in the Times; made my hoagie and wrapped it in cellophane & put it in the fridge to firm it up: Italian dressing I made, hot cherry peppers, Italian meats: yum. Warmed myself some black bean soup for an appetizer and made it to the couch by 6:30 for kickoff.

6:48 – on the couch, game on, with my computer on my lap. Feeling the adrenaline I used to feel watching Eagles games years ago. I stopped watching football almost completely about five years ago, because of the brutality, the CTE, the deleterious effects of college football on higher education, etc etc. etc. The last five years the only game I’ve watched has been the super bowl. With some guilt I got sucked into the excitement about the Eagles—of whom I was a serious fan for –what? – three or four decades? Still this is the first game I’m watching from start to finish this year. I’ll also keep an eye on twitter and Facebook to see if anyone’s saying anything funny about commercials or the game. My brother is watching the game in a bar in London and he & his wife posted a selfie. My oldest brother, a sportswriter, is at the game, live-tweeting.

8:12 – halftime. Enjoying this very much. Eagles winning 22-12. Time to eat a sub shortly. Been tweeting and Facebooking, which enhances the sense of a shared experience. My brother re-tweeted a few of my tweets, and I got a few likes as well.
C. watched the most of the first half with me then went into my office to do some work.

9:50 Game over, Eagles won, feeling euphoric. C. came back and watched the last 5 minutes of game time and instantly got really tense as it came down to the conclusion. Noted that my face is red, and expressed bemused concern when I yelled “Fumble” at 2:20, on the key defensive play of the game.
C. and I sit on the couch and watch highlights and analysis: what my friend B. would call “sports porn.” Thinking that my father would have enjoyed this: he got to see the Phillies win two world series (thank God!) but never to see the Eagles win a Super Bowl. (He died in 2010). Thinking about my brother in England who is as fervent a fan as there is, watching this at 2:30 in the morning GMT. Getting little bursts of pleasure watching the key plays again, especially that touchdown that Nick Foles caught.

10:45 – Having watched sports porn for almost an hour, go to bed, wondering if I’ll be able to sleep. Tomorrow may be a draggy day; playing racquetball at 6:30 so I’ll be out of bed at 10 till 6, then off to Muncie for a full work day.