Month: April 2020

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To Pack A Pen With Vinegar And Insight

One of the untold casualties of the coronavirus: the webseries that Wired was planning on making out of the weekly While You Were Offline column I write for the site. I’m not sure if it’s totally dead or just sleeping due to circumstances, but I do know that the week everyone at Condé Nast started working from home was, ironically, going to be the week the series launched. So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut was fond of saying.

I had this strange relationship with the webseries — on the one hand, I wasn’t really involved in developing or making it beyond talking to the producers early on in the process, so I was pretty much on the outside. But I also was on the inside; each episode was to be built around the column I had written for that week, meaning that I was responsible to some degree for each week’s video. I was in two places at once.

The development process took months; the first I heard about it was in the second half of last year, and what seemed tentative and slightly stuttering in terms of progress soon became much more constant. There was a pilot made — I never saw it, which I’m at once relieved about because I know I would have broken everything down and been highly critical of my role as minimal as it was, but at the same time, I do kind of wonder what it was like — and then, I believe, a series of weekly dry run episodes as a proof of concept that the production and turnaround time was possible on a weekly, ongoing basis.

For my part, I just kept doing what I do with the column with the one change being that I filed it a day earlier each week in order to let the video team do their thing. It was something that I struggled with at first, because it shortened the time I had to get the column done and made it less timely when it ran, but I soon settled into the new rhythm of things.

And now, to the best of my knowledge, it’s all off. It was an odd experience, the feeling of expectation and excitement and uncertainty, of weird responsibility, almost, but not a bad experience. We’ll see what happens when the post-virus world starts to assert itself.

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But Now There’s A Place To Go

A partial list of things I miss during current events.

  • The sound of regular, everyday, foot traffic walking past the house. It’s gotten to the point where I miss the drunk, excitable 20-somethings that would stumble past the house after 10pm on the weekends, loudly telling friends and the world alike how they really felt.
  • The ability to just run around the corner to the restaurants and grab takeout on the nights when we’re feeling exhausted and overwhelmed and not up for cooking. I didn’t realize quite how much I’d taken that for granted until I called up one of those places a few weeks ago and was told that they’d closed for the foreseeable.
  • Along similar lines: God, but I miss going to the movies far more than someone who didn’t really go to the movies that much should. I specifically miss the Bagdad, my local theater, with its cheap prices and welcome, wonderfully underwhelming burger (always accompanied by the far higher quality tater tots, or else you weren’t doing it right); when that place finally re-opens, I can see myself going no matter what’s playing, just because I’m craving the experience so much. I’m going to end up being the only person in a months-after-the-fact screening of Onward, I can tell.
  • For the last couple of weeks, I’ve really wanted to go to the local park. I’ve been craving it, oddly; just walking through the park. But here’s the problem: I’ve walked past parks in Portland since we all started social distancing, and it seems as if everyone else in Portland wants to go to the park, and no-one else in Portland is into the idea of keeping away from each other. This isn’t true elsewhere, with passers-by generally great at the six-feet-apart rule otherwise. But parks, apparently, are full of assholes. I don’t want to be one of them. Sorry, park.
  • Regular mail. Right now, it’s trickling down to junk mail from politicians.
  • Everyone else working in offices. It’s not that I feel special working from home when they’re in the office as much as it’s, when people were in the office, at least I could generally get responses quicker. Rassenfrassen.
  • Posts where I could come up with punchlines that work.
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Something Going On That’s Not Quite Right

All things considered, I think it took about a week and a half before I realized that self-isolation was getting to me. I’d known before that that I was feeling off; I was more tired than usual, finding it harder to concentrate and just generally slower. But, overall, I told myself, I was holding together pretty well.

That’s probably true, in the grand scheme of things — certainly, judging from what I could see on social media and the internet in general, there were those dealing with things far worse, and in far more dramatic manners than I — but I was ignoring, or perhaps simply entirely unaware of, a tension growing inside me the entire time.

This isn’t a story of how I snapped, though, because I didn’t. There wasn’t one dramatic moment where I threw everything on the ground and yelled that I couldn’t do it anymore. (Sorry; I’m sure it would’ve been exciting.) Instead, I just had this slow moment of realization through other people’s behavior that, hey: everyone needs to give themselves a break right now, and that includes me. Somehow, that was enough.

It doesn’t seem to make sense, I know, and dramatically, it’s a disappointment. Yet, it’s what really happened. I had this realization that I was more overwhelmed and overloaded than I’d actually accepted, and that realization in itself somehow felt like a release of pressure. Just thinking about it made it better, counterintuitively.

I’m not entirely sure what happened, if it was simply that I allowed myself the imperfection of being overwhelmed, or whatever — it’s not that I prided myself  in having it altogether during all of this, but perhaps I felt good about not losing it entirely — but just the thought of, if I need to, I’m allowed to admit this is a lot and do something about it felt like something big and important nonetheless. That alone meant something, and still does.

Honestly, that’s probably for the best; with everything that’s going on right now, it’s not as if there’s much alternative to feeling better about things. I can’t exactly go out and see a movie while eating a shitty burger and good tater tots to decompress or anything.

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Who Will Buy This Beautiful Morning?

The largest window in the bedroom faces east, as does the bed; it only makes sense, then, that I watch the sun rise more often than not. It’s part of my morning routine, now, especially in the winter months and early spring when I wake up long before it happens. I lie in bed reading or writing, waiting for the show.

Some mornings, it happens subtly — the day just slowly begins as the sky lightens with no great fanfare. The blues soften and, inevitably, turn to the greys of the clouds that hang in the sky on those mornings, with none of the drama of other sunrises; the day just rolls out of bed and stumbles into being, rubbing its eyes and mumbling to itself on the way to the bathroom.

Other mornings, it’s more dramatic but no more bright, as the rain and/or wind storming keeps everything in motion and loudly declaring its presence and the day sneaks in behind this main event, afraid to upstage it. It’s just suddenly light, daytime, and you’re not sure when that actually happened. (On these days, “light” is a misnomer, because the overcast dimness just perpetually feels like twilight through the entire day, because of course it does. But still.)

And there are the best sunrises, the ones where the light hits the clouds or whatever is in the sky just right and everything becomes color, these all-so-vivid yellows and reds and oranges and pinks and purples, and it just amazes. The mornings where you look on with wonder and think to yourself, this is how art got started because how can you look at this and not get inspired? and just look on quietly.

(I try to take photos of such mornings often, holding up my iPad and hoping that this will be the morning that it works, but it never is. How could it be, though? The colors are so vivid that it would never photograph well.)

Each morning, no matter my mood or what I’m doing, how stressed I am about whatever, there’s always at least one instant where I notice the sunrise and stop to pay attention. It’s become a ritual of sorts, and one that reminds me to not get too wrapped up in my own nonsense.

I’m glad everything faces east in the bedroom.