Editors’ note: When we prompt our diarists to record the activities, thoughts, and feelings of a day, we invite them to be creative, to write with whatever form and style suits them best. And they respond in a wide variety of ways. We’ve received quite lengthy diaries that report a great number of intimate details; had people share dreams and daydreams; had people address the reader—or even readers of the future—directly.
But the award for ingenuity may go to the diary featured below, in which the writer uses footnotes to give himself space for perceptive, engaging, and often hilarious meditations on contemporary life.
The diary enacts one of the fundamental precepts of Everyday Life in Middletown, and of the study of everyday life in general: the sense that banal events and activities have meaning, have roots and causes, and are connected to larger social and historical forces. The ordinary activities of a single person might seem insignificant, but they register larger, widely shared conditions of our lives that are intimately tied to our moment in history, our place in the larger human story.
This diarist is acutely attuned to such significance. What is more, he has invented a form that enables him to report the everyday in the main narrative and use the footnotes to explore questions of significance, giving free rein to his engaging and original narrative voice. In the process, the footnotes become the space for examination of what generally goes unexamined: causes, contexts, conflicts, fears, or simply comical or absurd connections that lie just below the surface of our routines. Addressing his footnotes to a hypothetical future reader, the diarist explains such phenomena as emojis and the common cold in a way that makes us think of them—and our own awkward posturing between a transforming present and an unknown future—in unexpected ways. “A ‘cold,’ or rhinovirus, is a viral infection that I trust no longer exists in your brave future, as it was no longer supposed to exist in ours fifty years ago,” he writes, satirizing our (now compromised) trust in science and progress to improve our daily lives. He does so with a comic touch that is at once light and razor-sharp.
More portentously still, our diarist gets mildly sweaty taking the dog to the park; the footnotes provide space for him to remark on the summer-ish weather that has persisted into fall, which brings to mind the threat of global climate change and the cultural conflict around it. The diarist is doubtless one of millions of people who—today or tomorrow or next month—will experience exactly this sequence: the stimulus of unseasonable warmth, followed by an evocation of a global-scale anxiety. Here we see a precise, locally grounded instance of this much larger pattern: it’s located at a local dog park, which people who know Muncie, and follow the diarist’s description of his neighborhood, will be able to identify. Yet it exemplifies a structure of feeling that is very widely shared.
In short, this diary rises to the level of art, doing two of the things we want art to do: to tell the truth, and to give pleasure. Enjoy.
September 17, 2018
0612: I wake suddenly in my recliner. I must have fallen asleep last night reading in my office, as I sometimes do. I remember that my wife (henceforth W.), who is an administrator at Ball State, has a meeting this morning and will probably wake up soon.[1] I start the coffee maker for her, go back to my chair to sleep a bit more, and at 0615 I hear W.’s alarm from the bedroom.
0800: I awaken again, pour myself a cup of coffee, and feed our two cats. W. is dressing and she tells me she needs a ride to school before 0900. I wash and dress, and while sitting on the toilet looking at Twitter, I inadvertently learn the alternate meaning of a certain emoji whose use was puzzling me.[2],[3]
0845: I drive W. to her meeting on campus. Normally she takes the bus, but she wants to be fresh for this meeting because it’s important, and I need to run an errand anyway. I then go to the pharmacy for cold medicine because I have a bad cold.[4]
0920: I arrive home and walk our dog.[5] Our neighborhood, a mix of student rentals and occupant-owned homes, is near campus and reasonably walkable. We go to the local dog park but find no one else there. Our dog, a small, excitable, anxious breed, requires frequent walks, though today’s is comparatively short. It is warm and humid for this time of year and I find myself sweating a bit.[6] I’m also very tired because of my cold.
0945: We return home, and I give the dog his medicine.[7] I make a fresh half-pot of coffee, empty the dishwasher, make the bed, and start a load of laundry.
1015: I begin writing this diary from notes made earlier, while simultaneously carrying on conversations with friends via Slack and Facebook Messenger[8] about an upcoming get-together. I pay a couple of bills and download a podcast of another friend’s radio show and listen to it while I type this.
1320: I’ve mostly continued doing the things listed above—plus writing, attending to laundry, getting a snack, feeding the cats, etc. I don’t normally keep a diary: I’m a slow writer, and so there wouldn’t be a great deal of time left in my day to do the things I’m supposed to write about if I wrote everything down.
1330: W. comes home. Her meeting went well.
1430: It happens that this is a very uneventful day. We had a party over the weekend for W.’s birthday, but now there’s just a little bit of aftermath to clean up and then the remainder of the daily routine to complete. Next I make W.’s lunches for the rest of the week and decide what we’re having for dinner. A friend who learns that I am participating in this diary project suggests I read William Gibson’s The Peripheral.I assure him I will.[9]
1645: Second dog walk. The dog remains unenthusiastic about being outdoors in the swelter, as do I. Muncie stinks of rotting garbage in the heat.
1700: Home again, treats for the dog. W. tells me she doesn’t need me to make dinner because she has another meeting at 1900 hours where there will be pizza. So I will be eating leftover catered party food (probably also pizza) for dinner.
1815: W. leaves for meeting; I forage for dinner. Ordinarily we try to eat at least one meal together, ideally made by me, ideally without the use or intrusion of any social media- or telecommunication-enabled device. We achieve this ideal on occasion.
1830: My post-dinner routine on nights we stay home, which is to say most nights, is to put on my pajamas and read until 0100 or so. We don’t watch television, though we own a TV set for watching streaming internet movies, if only rarely. For many people, cable television is the constant background noise of life. We both find it annoying and distracting, which is one of the reasons we fell in love and got married. Neither of us watches or participates in sports, or really has any interesting hobbies—we mostly read in our spare time, or go to movies, or travel. Our current level of community involvement is low, though that hasn’t always been the case. We’ve moved once since we’ve been in Muncie, a year ago, from a lovely but ailing Victorian mansion in the Emily Kimbrough Historic District on the old East Side to our current home (built in 1970) in Riverside-Normal City. Living in the Emily Kimbrough District afforded—really demanded—a certain modicum of neighborhood involvement, for various reasons, most of which had to do with keeping our property value from decreasing precipitously. Life in this neighborhood is more socially atomized, due partly I think to the large percentage of rental properties here, partly because many of the homeowners are Ball State faculty or staff, and university teaching life is often transient and doesn’t lend itself to lasting relationships.
Life is pretty good, although given the current state of affairs, we often worry.
Should we?[10]
[1] My occupation is what’s known among academics as a “trailing spouse,” which means that, because my earning capacity and/or employment status is less than my wife’s, I have followed her through one or more job change and geographical location, and so must find such work as is locally available. I am a college graduate and culinary school student in my late forties whose work background includes mostly kitchen and clerical work. Though in the eight years we’ve lived in Muncie I have worked as both a cook and a title closing agent (a person who is licensed to perform certain bureaucratic operations related to the sale or transfer of residential real estate), my health isn’t good anymore and I’m frequently ill, so my wife and I have decided that it’s best for me to stay home as be a house-husband and assistant to her. This is an unusual arrangement in Indiana in 2018, and I frequently find myself explaining it to people as if we belonged to a strange cult. We are still so new at figuring out sane gender roles. So what you are reading, dear Scholar of the Future, is the diary of a male housekeeper (although because my masculine ego is fragile I prefer to be called majordomo).I hope that from your future socialist paradise you can look upon our patriarchal capitalist dystopia with compassion.
[2] Specifically the corncob, thus: ?. It is used to indicate when another Twitter user you’re arguing with has lost the argument but is refusing to concede. I’m going to assume you’ve done your research and you know what Twitter is, and how the putative President of the United States is using this platform to render the country unlivable, or at least unpleasant and constantly on edge. In some possible fascistic future, I can envision this diary page being used against me in a show trial as evidence of sedition. However, I refuse to believe in this possible future, just as most people now refuse to admit the possibility of every likely unpleasant future. This mass denial may be the defining folly of my time.
[3] People in 2018 think that everyone except themselves spends far too much time on social media. But of course you, the entity reading this, may already be a hive-mind and find my individualistic worldview funny, or pathetic, or merely repellent. Let us banish it from our minds, reader—excelsior!
[4] A “cold,” or rhinovirus, is a viral infection that I trust no longer exists in your brave future, as it was no longer supposed to exist in ours 50 years ago.
[5] We adopted our dog from ARF, a local no-kill shelter, during our second year in Muncie. There are a lot of stray and mistreated pets here as people move away or are faced with dwindling income; see also: Middletown, economy of.
[6] I can hear you laughing bitterly as you read my complaints about the heat, but the effects of climate change are in the early stages of manifesting themselves, and those of us who can still remember cool autumn days miss them dearly. We still generate waste at an appalling rate, still (mostly) drive cars with gasoline internal-combustion engines, even as today Hurricane Florence ravages the southeastern U.S. and the west coast recovers from record-setting wildfires. If you’re there, reading this, you know what happens next. I wish I had greater faith in your existence.
[7] For anxiety and pain. He’s an elderly and anxious little guy.
[8] Yes, I appreciate your concern and bafflement that we still use social media in 2018, given their role in the political catastrophes of 2016, given that we know how the engineers behind social media sites have weaponized our need for affirmation and reward, and located and subverted the weaknesses in our reason and judgment. I imagine you have greater insight into our problems of self-aware irrationality: our deadly addiction to a virtual world where the consequences of our actions in the real world don’t matter, our refusal to curtail or condemn practices that are known to be harmful. Sometimes we here in the center of the maelstrom don’t always recognize the self-destructiveness of our own behaviors, or care when we do recognize it. Believe me when I say that some of us do know that our present contentment (or the self-deception we have come to accept in place of contentment) is balanced on the sharp fulcrum of denial, that our luck is over-leveraged, and that we ought to shake our heads every day in wonderment at our own continued complicity in the whole show and change how we live. Some of us see the parallels to how the world sleepwalked into disaster in 1914 and 1939—but now the possible outcomes are even worse. We see it, some of us. But we fail to act in unison to prevent it. This is our Hard Problem. End of lamentation.
[9] Of course, this exchange of information happens via Facebook. The friend, incidentally, is a research geneticist who would really much rather be living in your time.
[10] The point is moot: I got leftover chocolate cake and ice cream.