Diarist A01
EDLM Diary for Jan. 3, 2021
6:30-ish. Wake, notice that it’s still dark, lie in bed for a few minutes, stretch, start to think about the day, including this diary. Get up, put on a shirt and pajama bottoms, look at clock. C. asks “what time is it?” and I say “6:33.” “That’s not bad,” she says. “On the contrary, it’s good,” I say. C. sleeps erratically, but we’ve both slept a bit extra the last few days. We went to bed at about 11:30 last night, so that was 7 hours: fair enough.
Go to the bathroom and then into the office to meditate. Write down the lines above, then meditate for 20 minutes. Could hear C. showering while I meditated. Opened my phone and read a Washington Post story about the latest attack on the November election results—on Wednesday 11 Senators are going to object to the electoral vote, force a debate, and advocate for a 10-day emergency investigation of the vote in swing states.
Maybe not the best way to start the day, but I breathe it in and breathe it out.
So, today is a day off—the last in a series! From about Christmas Eve I’ve been on vacation, more or less. I’ve spent about two hours writing on a little more than half of the days since Dec. 23 or so. Beyond that, I’ve been cooking, reading, watching movies, walking, having Zooms with friends and family, having drinks in the evening, &c &c &c. Tending mainly to my mental health in this Pandemic/Collapse of the American Experiment Year Two.
Tomorrow I go back to work. So, I have a modest and self-chosen agenda today: plan out next week’s work schedule, clean the bathroom, watch a movie, finish reading my diary for last year (acting on some pop culture mental health advice suggesting that taking stock of last year is a better practice than making New Year’s resolutions). I also hope to take a walk, so let’s see how I do.
It’s 7:21 now that I’ve meditated and written the above, and time for breakfast.
7:30—I walk down the steps out front and pick up the Sunday New York Times, and sit on the couch and survey. The paper feels skimpy but all the sections are there, including a special section in which they’re reprinting all the year’s overnight emails written by the night editor, summarizing for the newspaper staff yesterday’s biggest stories. This is something I won’t be reading. I am going to continue being deliberate and discerning in my news and social media consumption, which has served me well over the last month or so. I know the most important things that are going on but I’m not indulging my political rage by reading lots of opinion and all the stories about the latest political atrociousness. Closer to
8 a.m. C. and I gather our breakfasts in the kitchen then sit at the dining room table and eat. I put jazz on the Bluetooth speaker, warm my leftover half-omelet from Café Patachou in the microwave, warm my leftover toast in the oven, discovering (bonus from the Universe!) that the second order of toast from yesterday is cinnamon toast. (This is a first, reader: I’ve never rewarmed toast from a restaurant before. But yesterday’s take-out breakfast from Patachou was large, and they gave me a second order of toast that I didn’t order, so I saved half of it for today. And it turned out to be cinnamon toast! I’m the King of the World!). C. ate chicken salad on toast and a clementine and we sat and drank coffee and ate our breakfast, in silence for a while; then C. told me about her conversation with her friend during their walk on the art museum grounds yesterday, and we talked a little bit about money—about the money we’re putting in accounts for great nephews and nieces, etc.
On the speaker Shirley Horn was singing a languid love song—not exactly Sunday morning-ish—and C. and I went into the office to see if I could make the printer talk to her new computer. It worked, miraculously—miraculous because when it comes to technology I am Terrible at Everything.
Now it’s 8:58 and I’m writing this while some distressingly smooth piano-and-sax jazz is playing. I’m going to spend an hour or so with the morning paper then start working on my list of objectives. The weather app on my phone says it’s going to be 35 degrees and dry at noon so I’ll go for my walk then.
As it turns out, as soon as I typed the last line I looked briefly at my email and spent about 15 minutes on Twitter. My Twitter feed is dominated by academic people, and its most productive function is alerting me to interesting articles and books. This co-exists with political rage (of course) as well as academics a generation or so younger than me giving voice to resentments and insecurities which I shared when I was a grad student and assistant professor but which I voiced over beer with friends or wrote in my diary or told a therapist or kept to myself. Ah, nostalgia, for those years before the Externalized Self became a thing. In fairness, fewer people have landed in permanent jobs, so there’s more reason for resentment and insecurity. But whatevs. From about
9:15-10:30 I read in the Sunday New York Times: in the business section about Wall Street firms buying up water rights in the west (what could go wrong? Honestly, I can’t pretend to understand much of that. I don’t know what a derivative is and shit); and also about cooperatives, in the Basque region of Spain, which operate like normal companies except that CEO pay is capped at 3X the average worker’s salary and there are strict rules that most profit needs to get plowed back into the company, which is jointly owned by all the workers. Also, the front matter of the Sunday magazine, including a story about the monolith that someone installed in a remote canyon in Arizona around 2016, and which sat unnoticed until a few months ago, when its discovery spurred (guess what?) conspiracy theories, until locals tore it down late last year. Then I tidied up a bit and around
11 – cleaned the bathroom, shaking out the rugs and clearing the surfaces then wiping the fixtures down with diluted Mr. Clean and hot water, stooping and getting down to one knee, then spraying off-brand Windex onto the large mirror that takes up most of one wall in the small room, then sweeping and mopping the floor, with a fresh bucket of hot water and Mr. Clean. Around the time I was finishing up mopping I realized that I was starting to get the first effects of a workout—prickly feeling on the skin of my face, warming up, a little sweat. I tried to do all this briskly and mindfully, not impatiently looking ahead to getting it done.
[You want everyday life? You got it: me cleaning my bathroom. Although that’s really more like Once Every Month Or Less Life nowadays. The complete shutdown in having people over, which we enjoy and do often, has sapped some of the urgency around housecleaning.] [Note, also, how often nowadays we think about everyday things that are different “nowadays.” “Nowadays” is a word that registers change in EDL.]
So cleaning took me till a little before
Noon—at which point I change clothes, put on layers and a light jacket, and go for a one-hour walk. It’s damp; the streets are wet but it isn’t raining. Recently I’ve been walking, usually for at least an hour, at least four times a week, and I have walked a ton since the pandemic started, which has made me notice such things as the fact that not all cloudy days are alike: sometimes the clouds are dense enough (even though the sky doesn’t look darker, necessarily) that all the color seems washed out of all the surfaces, houses and lawns and stop signs &c. I’ve seen this in England, long ago: there are some days where everything looks totally washed out and gloomy; and I noticed the same thing, walking through the neighborhood last week. But today, though there’s no hint of sunshine, the grass still looks fairly green and the paint on the houses looks at least half as bright as usual. Empiricism!
I walk down Broadway Street (I live in Indy) where I live and down to 46th then turn west and cross Meridian to Boulevard Place—a slightly variation on my 4-5 standard routes. The few pedestrians out are pretty friendly, and a lady in an SUV smiles warmly at me when I jog across an intersection to get out of her way. Noted along the way, things that I note frequently: Biden/Harris signs still out, and a lot of Black Lives Matter signs and those “In this house we believe” signs. (There is a conservative response sign, which includes “America is a force for good” along with “All Lives Matter” and some other things, at one house a block north of us. But for the most part this is a deep blue island in the deep blue archipelago which is Indianapolis, in the vast Red Sea of Indiana. Cue Cecil B. DeMille.) For most of the walk my mind wanders among various things. I cut myself off when I start to stew about work things a little (there’s plenty of time for that, starting tomorrow). I periodically wander into the street to give social-distancing berth to other walkers and a few runners and their dogs.
After 30 minutes my phone alarm chimes, just as I reach Boulevard, to remind me to turn back. I plug in my earbuds and listen to my Amazon music on spin, which kicks out Kasami Washington (“Humility”—an apt day-of-reflection, start-of-the-new-year title), Joni Mitchell (“Free Man in Paris”—sigh), Oliver Nelson (“Moment’s Notice”), something by Clifford Brown, and “Funky Kingston” by Toots and the Maytalls, among other things. I get back to the house at
1:15—to find C. finishing the bathroom, wiping down the tub and shower walls with anti-mildew stuff; I throw together lunch: chicken salad (more Café Patachou leftovers) and make a little salad of grape tomatoes, cucumber, onion, & oil & balsamic and eat it on the couch reading the Arts section of the paper (features about David Fincher—whose new film Mank, about the writing of Citizen Kane, I seem to have liked more than most people—and the actress Vanessa Kirby, whose getting Oscar buzz about a movie in which she plays a woman who has a miscarriage). I like the information architecture of an old-fashioned, actual, physical newspaper, the sense of sections containing depths with some physical reality. This is deep in my psyche, as I studied journalism in college in the 80s and worked as a reporter and editor, if you add it all up, full- and part-time, for about a decade I guess, including part-time and summer jobs when I was in grad school. Shortly after
2—I start to look for a movie to watch. I had planned to watch “First Cow” but found out that you have to pay for it ($5! Ridiculous!), so instead watch “Education,” the last of the five “Small Axe” films by the British director Steve McQueen, about the Caribbean community in London, mainly in the 80s. I vowed to watch a movie a day from about Christmas Eve to now—the day before I go back to work (This is one of the keys to mental health: set achievable goals!) The “Small Axe” films helped, since a couple were as short as an hour.
This film is not quite as electrifying as a few of the others. It’s about a kid who’s placed in a “subnormal” school at a time when the British school system was doing that excessively to West Indian kids; and about the community organizers who pushed back on it and opened up free Saturday schools. Community is the strongest theme across the films—it’s really the story of how a community came into being in response to oppression.
I watch this while finishing up my lunch and then drinking coffee and eating a couple dates. Afterwards I finish the Arts section and do a bit more tidying, which brings us to
4:43 p.m., and it’s time to check the old list for today:
Plan out next week’s schedule
Clean the bathroom
Watch a movie
Finish reading last year’s diary
Take a walk
…so it would appear to be time to retire to the office, where until about ….
5:15 — I
Plan out next week’s schedule
…which is, roughly, spend: 2 hours a day on teaching (I have to heavily tweak my class to make it transportable online and accessible to students who are in quarantine); 2 hours a day working on a book chapter that’s due in a couple weeks, which requires an even mix of reading and writing; 2 hours a day on admin; and 2 hours on other projects, including the journal I edit.
I’m writing this on the couch in my office, where I’ve not been terribly orderly of late. Really I’ve been messy in a contained fashion, dumping anything I was reading or planning to read and some other stuff on the right side of the couch, next to the seat where I sit to read and mediate (and where I sit as I’m writing this). Looking to my left now, I find:
- An empty cardboard Amazon box which contained two monthly planners Ibought online thendecided I don’t want
- My diary, a fat blue spiral notebook
- An issue of Real Simple, a magazine that sells the promise of simplifying your bourgeois life through the purchase of a magazine, which C. must have dumped in here one day while I was watching a movie in the living room.
- My new work computer
- Modernism, Magazines, and the British Avant-Gardeby FaithBinkes (library book: unread)
- Reflectionsby Walter Benjamin (library book, substantially unread)
- New Yorkerof November 23 (substantially read, but I’m holding onto it because the fiction, which I haven’t read, is by Salman Rushdie)
- The Silenceby Don DeLillo (read)
- Footprints: The Life and Work of Wayne Shorterby Michelle Mercer (inner flap of book jacket suggests I’m on page 20).
- A legal pad marked “Chair Stuff 11”—a serious harbinger of the work that begins again in earnest tomorrow.(I keep mentioning that: did you notice?)
- Master and Man and Other Storiesby Tolstoy. Partially read.
Tomorrow I will put this mess to order as one of my first tasks of the day.
[Digression: While there’s a good deal that’s pretty “everyday” about today—i.e. waking, eating, walking, mind-wandering, housework, etc.—this really isn’t an “everyday” day. It’s the last day of Christmas vacation; I’m not embroiled in work and have had almost two weeks substantially away from the administrative tangles and obligations that comprise about half of my job; plus the holidays have just ended and the annus horibilis of 2020 is over and this day is really one of those out-of-the-stream-of-things, way-station kind of days. Sabbath-like.]
Also somewhere in here I peaked at today’s Washington Post long enough to learn that the President of the United States spent an hour on the phone yesterday trying to get the Secretary of State of Georgia to “find 11,780 votes” so that he can reverse the election. So yeah, maybe that’s why the Biden/Harris signs are still up in the neighborhood, because even though the annus horibilis has ended, the election, for some people, hasn’t. Big sigh. It’s now about 5:45 and until
6:18 I read last year’s diary, which I did not finish (perhaps I’ll read a bit more later, or finish tomorrow). I wrote a lot last year, especially in those summer months when campus was completely closed and I was working at home full-time. Re-encountering the difficulty of working amid conflict and tons of ambient anxiety (some of my own, but mostly others’) in the summer via phone and Zoom and email; reminding me also that I got a book accepted and completed final revisions and page proofs in the annus horibilis. But there’s a good chance “read last year’s diary” won’t get a line through it today. Somewhere in here C. comes in with my phone, which she was using to play on the NYT Crossword Puzzle app, and says, “You’ve been getting texts.” I actually have one text, from A., my grad school mentor, asking if I can have a Zoom check-in on Thursday; we were supposed to have one last week but she had a cat health emergency. In the text she says, “I promise to try not to be mopey. That darn cat died a week ago today.” Poor A!
I’m a bit tired and it’s time for dinner and some high-quality television programming.
I leave the office and tell C. I’m going to start getting dinner together. I cooked yesterday, making a big pot of butternut squash soup and some black beans to cover us for the early part of the week. So from the fridge I pull some rice that C. cooked yesterday, the vertical Tupperware container of black beans, and a Ball jar of quick-pickled jalapenos and set them on the counter, and get a cutting board and dice some red onion. I warm tortillas in a hot skillet while we take turns microwaving our rice and beans. We retire to the living room and watch two episodes of “Derry Girls”—a sitcom about a set of high school girls in Northern Ireland during the last years of the troubles. Funny. We pause while I go back to the kitchen to get a vegan chocolate muffin (made with dates and delivered by Market Wagon, no added sugar) which I split with C.
About an hour later we turn on a movie called “The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry” (1945), Saturday’s film from TCM’s “Noir Alley,” which we taped. It’s not really a noir—it’s more like a slow-burn family dysfunction murder story, like “Rebecca” or “Shadow of a Doubt” but not nearly as good. A once-wealthy family in decline in a small New England is thrown into a tizzy when a hottie from New York (Ella Rains) comes to town and steals the heart of the brother & breadwinner (George Sanders). C. really doesn’t like it so we switch it off maybe 45 minutes through; I’ll finish watching it during lunch tomorrow. C. flips channels for the next hour or so while I do the Sunday crossword puzzle, which I finish, although I get hung up in the northwest corner and will not learn until tomorrow (when I consult “Rex Parker does the NYT Crossword Puzzle,” a hilariously cranky blog) that I actually finished it, because as I was doing it I did not know that “egest” (“to expel from the body”) is a word.
I look at my phone and read a little more about the Trump/Georgia phone call (violating the terms of the media/social media diet: see above); C. is now watching “In the Line of Fire” (1993), in which Clint Eastwood is a crusty old hypermasculine secret service agent trying to keep John Malkovich from assassinating the president, all the while falling in love with Rene Russo, whose influence softens his hypermasculine edges; I remember seeing it at a theater when it was new. I pick up my kindle and read two Jennifer Egan short stories. (I’m in the middle of Egan’s book and H.G. Wells’s Ann Veronica, which I got interested in because I’m also reading Inventing Tomorrow: H. G .Wells in the Twentieth Century, by Sarah Cole. In addition to all the stuff splayed on my office couch. See above.)
Now I’m getting really tired, and I put my head in C.’s lap and start drifting off to sleep.
The last few hours weren’t the height of consciousness—I was quite checked out, not even having a sense of concentration as I was doing the puzzle. I suppose what I was doing was not thinking about the fact that it’s back to the grind tomorrow. I was also out of juice: 7 hours sleep isn’t quite enough
Just before 11 I brush my teeth and set the alarm for 7 (8 hours!: I’ll gradually get myself back to waking up at 6 over the next few days). And I slide into bed, with the lights on, while C. does her nighttime ablutions. By the time she turns out the light I’m already half the way off to sleep.