Day Diary
September 17, 2018
5:45 a.m. – Alarm goes off; classical music. I lay there for a minute and listen. Chamber music, sounds like syrupy 19th c. romanticism. Get up; body creaky—went on a long bike ride yesterday. Waddle into the office; send a work email. Ablutions part 1: brush teeth, medicine, etc. The dream I was dreaming comes back to me: I was going to a dinner with four people, including a girl I knew in college; she didn’t show up; the group got bigger, and I was seated at a large t-shaped table. Later B., my dissertation director from long ago, appeared.
- has made coffee, which I put in a plastic go cup. I sit on the couch & eat half a banana & we chat and exchange affectionate words for a few minutes. Then I get in the car and drive to the YMCA for racquetball. The news is on the radio & leaving it on is a MISTAKE: off and on for the next few hours my brain is roiling with the political crises. The Kavanaugh accuser has come forward. I don’t want Kavanaugh confirmed, but I fear backlash. The optimistic reading of all this—Trump, #Metoo, all of it—is that patriarchy & white supremacy are crumbling and that these are its death throes. I hope that’s true. Then again, though, sometimes death throes last for a long time—like, maybe, it could be all of my lifetime. It took Europe 300 years to break down the authority of the church.
6:45-8:30 At the racquetball courts, T. is talking to S.—both long-time morning players. S has just finished playing singles with another guy named S. T. and I play three games of singles, the last two very intense—lots of running, long points—very absorbing and fun. And I win all three games. Not that I care. (Come on, I totally care.) Resting between games T. and I talk about our weekends and many things. (We’ve been playing 1-2 times a week for two years, and played frequently years ago when the morning r-ball group was more robust.) T’s discourse has a shaggy-dog-story quality: this morning’s example: I asked what he knew about the Italian Renaissance (he’s a history buff, and I’m going to Florence for vacation soon.) This leads circuitously and inexplicably to a story about him breaking his foot in Austria in 1976.
Shower and change in the locker room. Sports is on the big TV—good. Sometimes it’s Fox News or MSNBC, and I would prefer that the Y be a haven from that stuff. But it’s not to be today: as I’m undressing I hear T. saying to someone, two rows of lockers over, “Is that your car with the ‘Socialism Sucks’ bumper sticker? I love that.” Sets my mind back on the politics. I think I should send T. the NYT magazine story from yesterday about the working poor. 7.9 million people in the U.S. work > 20 hours per week and are below the poverty line; the myth of the indolent poor seems unbreakable; child and elder care doesn’t count as “work” for the purpose of social programs. I think about all this as I
8:30 – drive from the Y to the coffee shop, where I’m meeting V. for a writing session. This is a mutual accountability practice. We meet once a week and drink coffee for a few hours and write, breaking only for 5 minutes here and there to chit-chat. I’ve written this and now it’s
9:03 – and time to write.
Write till 10:30: got four more pages of my current book, which is about pedagogy, written—that brings me to 101 pages, which makes me happy. I am on research leave this semester, a tremendous luxury, and making progress on multiple projects. At 10:30 I process some emails and chat with V. We talk about a work task I have to complete and some about scheduling for next year. I check my to-do list (on my Luddite paper calendar to which I am inordinately committed). I have a grant application to work on but first I’m supposed to read a couple short stories to prep for tomorrow’s writing. The book is at home, so I’ll now pack up my things and head to the house. Part of me wants to stay here & just keep working, but I need that book and it’s a bit noisy here—two people next to me are having a Christian-tinged discussion at fairly high volume (well, one of the guys is high-volume). He’s talked about being a ‘commissioned minister’ and being ‘angry at God’—little tidbits that filtered through in 30-second breathers during writing. Now he is saying, “That’s liberals for you. Just jump on a platitude and go from there.” But now I’m eavesdropping and I’m going to start getting angry again so HOME.
Outside it’s mostly sunny and warm and a little sticky. Drive the 8 blocks between the coffee shop and home. (I live in Indy, but I suppose my 18 years working in Muncie qualifies me as an EDLM diarist). Flip satellite radio stations, landing at Mick Jagger singing, “It’s so very lonely, you’re 1,000 light years from home.”
At the house, C. comes to the kitchen and talks to me as I put things away. Tells me she fixed the clogged drain in the tub. “I just unscrewed the stopper and pulled out the gunk,” she says. I put my sweaty gym clothes in the laundry basket, put two coffee go-cups in the sink. I get on my computer in my office and show C. that my book is at page 101. (I want praise.) She kisses my head. It’s now
11:35 and I set my phone alarm for 90 minutes (this is a self-discipline thing) and work in my home office. The office is the small bedroom in our small, two-bedroom house, a 1929 Craftsman in Meridian Kessler. I face the north wall of this room as I work, with windows in front of me to the left and right, through which I can see the neighbors’ shrubs and their very popular bird feeder. My desk is a tad messy—small pile of books to the left, small pile of notebooks to the right. I resolve to tidy a bit before I sit down to work tomorrow. (there’s like a 30 percent chance I’ll do this.) I slouch in a cushy, rolling office chair as I work.
2:13 – Apparently I made a mistake in setting my alarm, and was absorbed in work, b/c I worked through almost 2 and a half hours, drafting material for the application and gathering info. At about 1:45 C. popped in the office and I got her to make me a PDF of a printout. (C. is a consultant and works at home a little more than half the time. It took us a few years to adjust to the periods where we both work at home—to stay out of each other’s hair, etc., but we’ve got a good rhythm now.) Then at 2 I assembled lunch—a spinach and kale salad with blue cheese, nuts, oil & vinegar and am now going to eat it and finish watching “Stromboli,” a 1950 Vittorio de Sica film I’ve been watching in bits over the last few days. Before I sat down I noted that it’s a bit too cool in here and turned down the AC.
I’ve eaten lunch and watched the movie—so interesting—Ingrid Bergman plays an urbane Lithuanian refugee who, denied asylum, marries an Italian soldier and goes home to Stromboli, the volcanic fishing island he lives on, and struggles not to go mad living in a traditional society. Powerful and sad. Long realistic scenes of an evacuation during an eruption and a tuna fishing expedition. I tooled around on the internet and read about the movie for a few minutes. This is the movie that got Bergman denounced on the floor of the House or Representatives, etc. Did I say something about the decline of the patriarchy taking a long time? Now it’s
3:21 and time to look at my list and get back to doing things. First I’ll walk around and stretch and get a few breaths of air on the porch, then pick up a set of short stories from the thirties that I want to refer to in tomorrow’s book-writing. I’m getting sleepy but I don’t want to drink coffee because I need to sleep well tonight—had difficulty getting to sleep last night.
At 4:52 the alarm went off from another 90-minute work session. I found quickly that I don’t need to read the short stories thoroughly to be able to write want I want about them in the morning; so I truncated that and started writing a blog post and got it largely framed and half-written. I’ve been sitting in front of this computer enough today that my butt hurts now. So it’s time to get up and stretch again. I’m also starting to feel pretty seriously tired and am missing the afternoon coffee. I’m trying to cut down some—I lean on the coffee too much, so I’m just going to soldier through.
So I walk, stretch, talk to C. a bit. She’s working lightly on her laptop on the couch with Judge Judy playing on TV. I change into tennis clothes and walk into the kitchen to refill my water jug. C. is now getting herself dinner—leftovers from jerk chicken and potato salad I made yesterday. “I’m going to eat early,” she says, “then work for a couple more hours and go to bed early.” I razz her about eating dinner at 5:03, asking if she wants to go to the Early Bird special. Now it’s
5:07 and I’m back at the computer: going to put in one more hour on various tasks. Until about
6:10 I spend and respond to emails, including stuff about the journal I edit, and re-schedule a meeting for next week; straighten out a snafu, by phone, about some books I ordered from the library; review the instructions for the grant carefully (about 30 minutes, bolding & highlighting sections); and plan out the day for tomorrow. That’s enough work for today. I leave to play tennis in 15 min.
6:30-9:30—Drove to tennis and played for an hour. This is a class run by a gym teacher from one of the local Catholic schools. A shifting group of parents from the school with occasional high school kids, mostly girls, play “kings and queens”—a doubles game, for an hour twice a week. I know a bunch of these folks for a few years, and I’ve not played much this summer so it was nice to be greeted by people. Playing was fun. It’s a low-key, medium-light aerobic workout. Talked to a guy about baseball (I was wearing a Phillies hat), had catch-up small talk with a few of the ladies. There were a couple high school kids I didn’t know. Got mosquito bites.
Drove home and ate dinner (leftover jerk chicken, see above) and drank a glass of wine, watching an episode of “You’re the Worst.” Turned on a baseball game for a few minutes and watched. Then turned the TV off, and C. began emoting about Kavanaugh and the ultimately said the very same thing I said about the long death-throes of the patriarchy. Made me slightly depressed—I had avoided the news since the morning, keeping busy and not taking little breaks to click on the newspapers. Now I want to look at them and just see what exactly is new and how it’s being packaged. Oddly I think it will make me feel better. We’ll see. This second C. is stretched out on the couch next to me and is watching “A Chef’s Life”; this week’s episode is about peaches.
9:30 – Pre-cooked some oatmeal so I could finish cooking it quickly in the morning. Checked the papers briefly, so I know the big news: that Kavanaugh and his accuser will testify in the Senate on Monday. Also Trump doubled the China tariffs; and flooding continues in N. Carolina. (I heard about the tariffs on “Marketplace” as I was driving.) I want to know what’s going on but I’m staying off social media for the next few days: I don’t expect enlightening commentary there. Also checked baseball scores: Phillies lost 9-4 to Mets and are just about dead. He who cares about sports teams hath given hostages to fortune. I’m typing this; C. is watching “Office” reruns. Going to read for a bit.
I read a long story by Lorrie Moore, glancing up periodically at “The Office.” C. goes to bed at 11; I finish the story, barely able to keep my eyes open, and go to sleep at 11:22.