notes on another person

I'm not big on offering advice. I would never presume, just for instance, to share my thoughts on how to work from home, though I have done so for most of my adult life. I have zero boundaries and multiple levels of catastrophic sleep disease, and while I prefer my own coffee and the lack of commute there are times when I feel like I'm coming up short on every side of the equation--at work, at life, etc.

There are an awful lot of articles right now on how to do this thing, huh? Judging from appearances all my work-from-home brethren have been living right! They have routines. But all that advice...whatever listicles there are for these poor souls who have suddenly found themselves running an old-fashioned schoolhouse for their kids out of two-bedroom apartments, plus all this new required public health reading, the interviews with epidemiologists, all this shit we've got to read to feel we're on top of all the different ways in which we're about to die...the answers these words on our screens purport to offer feel more inadequate than usual. As disorienting as the moment may feel, I believe the world is weirdly simple right now: a stunning series of object lessons about obvious issues that too many people have tried very hard to ignore.

I mean, don't get me wrong. I've fully subscribed to the empty American dream of using this time to organize the closets and heal my gut. There's just the horrible unease of being forced to nest when you're feeling crazy that feels like it's going unacknowledged. It's the elephant in the room that's never mentioned in each day's packet of explainers, right? The strain of it.

The question that people are asking isn't how do I work from home. It's when will life go back to normal. And it's in thinking about that subject that I realized I actually do have a piece of advice to offer: It won't. And that's okay.

People are still asking if this is going to change the world, when it seems very plain that it already has.

There is a thinness to things I've always felt, a sort of tenuousness or transience. I assume it comes from the experience of having been a kid who saw my parents in crisis. A difficult fact of life is that some of the most basic things you take for granted are secretly subject to sudden, violent revision. That reality is a contract that is easily broken. I learned about how events beyond your control can change the person you thought you were into another person who feels unfamiliar. Then 9/11 happened! I was living in another country at the time, and had been laid off from my first grown-up job. I came home and I started someone else's life again, and at some point it became mine.

I don't mean to sound flip. Last night I heard the mayor of Chicago is looking at empty schools and convents to house thousands of sick people, which is somehow the most sobering fact I've heard to date. But the bigger picture according to my reading packet suggests this won't be an extinction event. What I know is that when the world changes, you become another person.

This is the New Productivity: becoming whoever we need to be next. It's day nine of quarantine. Yesterday I ordered a cookbook with the dumb fantasy of preparing simple, nourishing Japanese food in a methodical way, like a character in a Murakami story. I want to meet whatever intensely weird thing the world throws out next with instant acceptance and unflappable patience. I did not expect to find myself in a reality in which unknown forces are trying to murder me. Whatever. I'm going to heal my fucking gut.

I'm posting through it, y'all. Please be well.

 
Some good things:
Just listened to my favorite episode of my favorite podcast
That cookbook
Series of lectures that explains pandemics as a product of history, not an outside attacking force
New hobby: pretending your living room is various Witcher taverns