How is the Covid-19 pandemic impacting your everyday life?
I wanted to address that question spontaneously or holistically, but when I think about the question my interior monologue halts abruptly. So I’m loosely using the directive questions as cues.
Routines
Before the Pandemic, I was a commuter, spending more than two hours on most days driving to and from Muncie from Indianapolis. Simultaneous with losing the commute, work has become more difficult and demanding. There was an adjustment period where I and my team got used to doing everything we do via email, conference call, video meeting, and Cisco Jabber (what a ridiculous and unpleasant name)—a messaging and phone call app provided by Ball State and created by the people who bought you WebEx. There’s been a learning curve on how to use internet tools to teach a class (although as a department chair, with a light teaching load, this has been much less of a burden for me than for my colleagues). And there’s also my role—both semi-official and de facto—as chief morale officer of my department, which means helping people who come to me struggling emotionally or logistically or pedagogically and putting up a brave and steely though cheerful front in all official interactions (and most of my interactions are official). It’s freaking exhausting….
…which is related to routines this way: staying in a routine feels really, really important, because I need to get my work done and also allow time for exercise and stress relief, so having organized, well-planned days and routines is important, and the morning and evening commutes, I now find, used to serve as the brackets around the day, containing work and work stress.
More concretely: I set the alarm for sometime between 6 and 6:30. I meditate for 10-15 minutes; brush my teeth and do morning ablutions; have breakfast at the dining room table with my wife: we get in each other’s way and jostle and joke and sometimes get a teensy bit annoyed with each other as we make our separate (usually) breakfasts in the kitchen; we’re pretty quiet but chat intermittently while we eat, and it’s pleasant; I’m at my desk at 8 and check in via Jabber (ick, that name) with my admin assistant; I work—phone calls, emails, web meetings, writing documents, solving problems, conference calls; with intermittent work on my class; and even more infrequent and intermittent work on my creative and scholarly work. Sometime during the afternoon—like 2 or 3 o’clock, or sometimes at 5 or 6, I go outside and walk for an hour, practicing mindfulness for the first half-hour and listening to music on my phone for the second. Or, increasingly now that the weather is better—I ride my bike for an hour. (One mercy from the universe: this April has been beautiful: not much rain, and the trees and shrubs blooming madly, with many days in the high to mid 60s; lots of sunny and mostly-sunny days). I punctuate the work day with doing dishes, doing little cooking tasks, going out into the living room to exchange affectionate remarks and updates with my wife; filling my water bottle, etc. I check the news periodically in 5- or 10-minute breaks; and sometimes look at Twitter, the Washington Post, the New York Times, Facebook for 15 minutes or so while I eat lunch; otherwise I work. At 6 or so I go to the kitchen and start getting dinner ready—if I’m cooking that night, if not I sometimes work, cleaning up emails or writing a daily update for my department colleagues—until almost 7. I have a cocktail or a glass of wine, eat dinner (again at the dining room table—a ritual we initiated back in December and January, when I was recovering from an eye injury); and then—usually—space out in front of the TV. Some days, alone or together, we have virtual happy hours with friends. It seems like everyone is drinking more. Many nights we do the NYT crossword together on my phone.
It feels dispiriting and exhausting to lay it out in these terms. In the last couple days (I began writing this on April 28) I’ve initiated a few new routines to try to break the dispiritedness: a 20-minute stretch in the morning (all this sitting at the computer is making me stiff and sore); recording my food and sharing it with accountability friends; and—most crucially—spending the first half-hour or hour of my day on creative or research work, intellectual work. This was my therapist’s suggestion.
Activities
I’ve been sleeping pretty well (only a couple nights of irregular wakefulness), and have been sleeping more than usual—by a half-hour or so a day, I’d say. I’ve been eating well also, as usual a bit more than is ideal. Food preparation feels like it takes a lot of time, and was becoming a chore early on, say in the first three weeks of stay-at-home; but I think we’ve unconsciously adapted and it seems more manageable now. I didn’t think we ate out that much but it was definitely notable how much time it takes to make three meals a day at home. (We don’t really use prepared foods, frozen dinners, stuff like that.)
Food generally feels more important. It’s one of the day’s major pleasures. And a topic of (sometimes fraught) discussion (my wife has intermittently been obsessing about provisions and grocery shopping for a while; she recognized it when I brought it up and relaxed about it for a while, then started again, then recognized it, then relaxed about it again). We like food and like to cook, and we eat lots of fruits and vegetables, so it’s been a change to not be able to pop into a store any time we like, and I’m more aware of how much of things we have on hand.
Entertainment? Not enough. See daily activities above: I’m usually too tired to give my brain to anything good on TV or to read at the end of the day. In dribs and drabs I’ve been watching The Americans on Amazon, and just finished Fleabag, both of which are great. Most nights I stare at something dumb (reruns of The Office) that C. has put on, or scroll through Twitter and Facebook, or read distractedly. I’m re-reading Bleak House by Dickens with a friend; we email about it once a week, and Elena Ferrante’s Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay I think it’s called. I catch up on reading on weekends, when my eyes are fresh and I’m not exhausted. I read Camus’s The Plague from about weeks 2 to 5 of the Pandemic, which was surprisingly helpful: seeing someone smart and humane represent experiences and feelings you’re having, and thinking through the experience of pestilence philosophically, for its big implications about human existence.
Having written that, maybe I’m wrong that I’m not getting enough entertainment. Maybe the thing is that it’s not getting through. I feel insufficiently diverted.
Other routine activities are laid out above, aside from a few miscellaneous things: In the early weeks I was playing chess at www.chess.com, which sets you up with online games with people around your skill level all over the world. I did this a couple times a week, and have been on a hideous losing streak. Weekends I try to stay away from work except for a few hours Sunday morning. Saturdays and Sundays I schedule in reading, exercise, guitar playing, along with Zoom happy hours. We talk to my family (brother and his wife and their grown kids, in their various hidey-holes) for happy hour on Fridays, and work in others on Saturdays, Sundays, sometimes during the week. I was enjoying these more earlier; the Zoom experience is wearing thin. But I had a few pleasurable ones recently.
I’m showering less (I’ve always thought Americans and, in recent decades, other westerners are absurdly obsessed with cleanliness); showering everyday dries out my skin and hair, but I usually do it because, you know, SOCIETY. So I’m not showering every day now; my hair is gigantic and ridiculous. I put on clothes and shoes for work because it makes me feel self-disciplined—feels like a significant ritual. I’ve put on a tie three times, once when I had to make a video for our department awards ceremony and for two online “Admitted Students” events.
As the Pandemic has gone on, I’ve spent less and less time on the news. I’m down to probably a half-hour a day of the newspapers and Twitter and Facebook, not including time I spend on social media for work reasons. I feel like I get what I need to know from the headlines and short read-outs and live updates, and from tuning into the governor’s weekly press conferences; and anything beyond the minimum of what I need to know starts provoking political rage, which is not good for me. Occasionally I see a post on one of the social media outlets that gets in my craw; I find myself grinding my teeth while I’m out on my bike, thinking about it. Not good.
Going out
I’ve been doing this mainly for exercise, which on the worst days has been the thin thread by which I’ve been hanging on. My wife and I have been taking turns grocery shopping, about once a week, with ordering in from a local business-and-farm collaborative to replenish the veggies around mid-week. We’ve fallen into a pattern where I specialize in Costco, though I did go to Fresh Market a couple weekends ago—making the mistake of wearing my glasses, not contacts, and so having my glasses fogged up from my mask for the whole trip, as I tried to judge the freshness of veggies and avoid stepping into the Minus Six Foot Zone of Death with fellow shoppers. I sit on the front porch and read when it’s nice on weekends, and sometimes take my Zoom happy hours out there. I was shooting baskets in the driveway for a while, then one day played this game where I had to hit 20 > 15-footers before I could go in, and I woke up the next day with bursitis in my right shoulder, and had to pound Ibuprofen for two weeks.
What I’ve noticed while being out: When I walk, there are more people out than usual if the weather is nice. Everyone in my neighborhood is working from home—this is a neighborhood of mainly young to middle aged professionals, so everyone is going stir crazy and getting less exercise so, if the sun’s out, when I walk, I rarely go more than half a block between seeing people with dogs, little kids, or just themselves with their ear buds. When I cycle, the streets seem deserted—there’s very little traffic, which makes cycling on the streets safer and more pleasurable. I rode to the war memorials in downtown Indy one Sunday and there wasn’t a person in sight on the mall. I’ve mainly been avoiding the bike paths because they are crowded and it’s difficult to distance there. Everywhere I find myself judging the incomplete social distancing I see, then shutting my mind up and saying, “Not helpful.”
Something memorable
Early on, maybe a week into work-from-home, I was nearing the end of a long walk, on a brisk sunny day. I was walking down College Avenue and heard sirens from behind. I stopped and watched, the sirens getting closer. It was a funeral. Two cops on motorcycles, hearse, one SUV. Eerie and sad.
Then I turned the corner towards my house and, as I was getting to the end of the block, heard a voice calling “Sir! Sir!” I stopped and it was a woman in her yard. She walked towards me with an egg carton, and said, “Would you like some eggs?” I initially said, “I think we’re pretty good on eggs,” then I noticed that there were chickens clucking in a little henhouse in the yard. “From them, sure I’ll take them,” I said. “Best eggs you’ll ever get,” she said. There were a half-dozen, large and multi-shaded; I had to wash the mud from them. When cracked they had very large yolks. I nod and wave to the hens every time I walk by now.
Negatives/Positives
Negatives: work has been exhausting. Too much time on screens (eye strain, and I had eye surgery in December and so am always worried about my eyes anyway). I want to hug my friends and can’t. I want to sit in a coffee shop and read a book. (By the end of a day with all work on screens, my eyes are often too tired to read). I want to eat dinner with friends in a restaurant and drink wine and laugh, and see their real faces, not their slightly pixillated images, in front of me, and hug them. I can’t think too far into the future because it looks bleak—we’re opening too soon, we’re going to have subsequent waves, the economy…see? I’m stopping myself, right here and now.
Positives: reconnecting with some people on video chats. Very regular exercise—I may have missed 3-4 days, because of rain or deadlines, since March 13. Walking outside and witnessing spring unfold day by day. Eating at the dinner table with C. Cycling on uncrowded streets on nice days. The weather. Not spending as much time in the car.
Emotions
I think the details are all in there, above. What I’ve mainly noticed is more ups and downs. For a time it was every Tuesday I was in a bad mood. Then it shifted to Mondays. On bad days I don’t want to get out of bed, and when I go to bed at night I feel beaten down, like someone’s on top of me and grinding my face into the dirt. Around the start of May this got better—because of the stretching and doing pleasurable work first thing in the morning, and it started to feel more like depression and anxiety and doom were still there, but I was holding them at arms’ length, like a nasty little guy I’m facing in the boxing ring, trying to get in a couple good blows in at his ugly head.
I’ve not been afraid often—my attitude is that we are being careful about precautions; if we do get the virus we do, and hopefully it wouldn’t be too bad, but we’re doing what we can do. I did get very stressed out in Costco one day, when it seemed like a good 10 percent of people just weren’t paying any attention to social distancing, bearing down on others in the aisles while vacantly reading shopping lists on their phones. It made me angry but also anxious—afraid, I guess.
Thoughts
It’s hard to generalize. The days are taken up with work tasks, so I’m thinking about those things, just moving from task to task, and like I said I’m too tired to think much at the end of the day. Avoiding the news helps me not go often into dark places, analyzing the federal response to the catastrophe or the small number of idiots who are reading public health measures as an assault on “freedom.” Beyond that I work hard to keep focused on the moment and the very near future—planning my work (school is over as I’m finishing this, a month after I started writing it, so I’ll get to spend more time on my scholarly projects) and collaborating with C. on food and house stuff for the week. If I start speculating about the future it can get dark pretty quick—less about the disease than the economy, the stock market, what society and daily life will look like when we transition into next and subsequent stages. I have to believe that our society is going to emerge from this crucible into a more humane form, and I will be ready to do my part, but at the same time, it might not, considering the breakdown of our institutions and our sense of shared identity that predated the current catastrophe. I will be ready to adjust and to do whatever it takes, if that means getting involved in organizations, marching in the streets, whatever. But I know the larger outcomes will be out of my hands regardless. So, yeah, not thinking about that. Ha.
The space/time in my days where I have some time to think is when I’m on walks or bike rides. I’ve been seeing parts of the city close-up that I usually only drive through, and of course noticing inequality and poverty and the way the conditions of life change drastically in the course of a few blocks. And I think about how, for the entire time I’ve lived in Indy (almost 20 years), the narrative has been how much it’s improved as a place to live. In our current ideological formation, of course, this means “as a place to live for middle- and upper-middle-class professionals.” Even with this awareness, I still like bougie creature comforts and diversions and I wonder if that’s all over and what comes next, as I bike my way through gentrifying neighborhoods and past restaurants I like and look at houses I would covet if I coveted houses. Cycling through poor neighborhoods I worry about the people living there; one day at the peak of the case numbers I saw about 15 young men gathered on a porch, laughing, while a couple of doors down a young woman in scrubs and a mask was walking from her car to a front door. I don’t know if I actually saw her scowl at them or have since imagined it. When I see the Red Line bus coming up College Ave, this triggers the concise thought that synthesizes much of what I’m feeling as I cycle around the city: “I miss Indianapolis.” In yesterday’s New York Times there was a story expressing this very thought among New Yorkers—the strange and paradoxical feeling of missing the place where you are still living.
The future
See the first paragraph of “Thoughts.” It’s now May 28, more than two months after I started writing this. The state has started “re-opening the economy,” although Indianapolis is a couple weeks behind most of Indiana’s counties because it’s the epicenter of the pandemic in the state. As of today 547 of the state’s 1,871 deaths have taken place in Marion County, as have 9,371 of its 32,437 cases. I’m on “vacation” (working on my own writing, reading books to judge a book award—working half-days, mainly, and watching movies in the afternoons) and am for right now focused on the immediate future, and worrying that we’re opening too fast. In five days I’ll go back to my job and will be embroiled in trying to get the university ready for the fall. But everything is so unclear and impossible to predict. We could work for weeks to get ready to come back and then there could be a spike in new cases and deaths, and we’ll be completely online. This is really the strangest and most disorienting thing about the whole experience to me: the loss of a vision of the future, in its most ordinary forms. One’s assumptions that life will be much the same as it has been, with imagined highlights (trips, work accomplishments, plans with friends) mixed in—all of this forms the backdrop of our daily lives, and that space is now vacant but for a generalized sense of anxiety. Whenever I imagine something happening in the future, it’s difficult to picture in detail (when I teach in fall, where will I be? Will I be wearing a mask? Will the students? Will we even be together face to face?). I picture myself out with friends—but, are we sitting six feet away from each other, somehow? Are we wearing masks? Can I even relax and enjoy that?
I do have hope, as I’ve said, that the society that emerges from this crucible will be more equitable and sane. But if there’s no way to know even basic things, how could we know that? Will there be any positive changes in my life because of this experience? I have no idea. I hope so.