Category: Uncategorized

I read, somewhere, that people worldwide were having trouble sleeping during the self-quarantine era in which we’re currently living. I also read, somewhere, that people worldwide were having particularly vivid, almost lucid, dreams during the self-quarantine era in which we’re currently living. I’m not entirely sure that these things aren’t somewhat contradictory.

Neither one is necessarily true for me, right now, anyway. After a few weeks where I was sleeping poorly — for reasons that had far more to do with restless dogs deciding that they needed to go outside at 1am than anything to do with the virus — I seem to have rediscovered my ability to sleep incredibly well. In fact, not only am I sleeping more deeply than usual right now, I’m sleeping longer, as well; I’m waking up anywhere between 30 and 90 minutes later than where/when I’ve woken up since the Brazil trip, and I’m feeling more refreshed and relaxed, as well. Global pandemics are, it appears, good for my sleep cycle.

With the sleeping in comes something else new; I’m remembering my dreams (slightly) more.

I think it’s happening because, more often than not, I’m actually getting woken up by something external — the dogs, most mornings — and, therefore, getting woken up mid-dream, so they’re fresher in my head. This probably doesn’t stand up to scientific thinking, I’m sure, but it’s what I’ve got, and I’m sticking with it.

It’s particularly unexpected because… well, I feel like I haven’t really been remembering a lot of dreams in general for awhile. I’ve been told that this, the not remembering, is a sign of being in a good, relaxed headspace and getting comfortable sleep, and that might be true, but it’s particularly dull at the same time. Doesn’t everyone want to have a little insight into what their brain is thinking when they’re not using it…? Isn’t that something other people are curious about…?

What I’m remembering aren’t full stories, or even complete scenes. Instead, they’re feelings, glimpses of other things that honestly make a lot of sense right now: there’s a lot of traveling, being in different countries and just being outside, being amongst other people. The things that are impossible now, and which may in different circumstances feel exhausting or oppressive, but right now feel exciting and exotic. I dream of things that don’t exist anymore. This feels right, somehow.

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.

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.

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.

I hate April Fools Day. I’m pretty sure I’ve said this before.

I must have liked it once, I’m sure; there are vague memories of being a kid and laughing hard at the kind of kid “pranks” that get pulled on April 1st, when there’s no demarcation between joking and outright lying and anything and everything is deemed permissible if you shout APRIL FOOL at the top of your lungs afterward, so I’d like to think that I’ve not always been this much of a curmudgeon.

By my early twenties, though, I was already over it. I remember there being some attempt at a big April Fools stunt when I was at art school, and the utter disdain and disgust I felt at the very notion when it was first suggested to me, a passion for eye-rolling that only comes from being so young. Even then, though, it was something that I found tiring and pointless and, most of all, almost painfully un-fun. Why bother?

My true hatred didn’t arrive until I started writing on the internet for a living, however. In a trend that, thankfully, died off as we all got older and wiser, there was once a point where April 1st was when internet writers were encouraged to just lie in order to try and fool readers with something so “funny” and “outrageous” that it would drive up page views and those all important ad views as readers incredulously clicked through to share their anger and frustration at the news that wasn’t real. And then, get this, we were encouraged to write a second article, revealing that we’d been lying all along and betraying the readers’ trust in us! For fun and profit! It was, uh… “hilarious,” apparently.

And then, once that had died off, there was the horror of having to try to report news on a day when you literally couldn’t believe anything, because lying was the law. More than once on April 1st, I’ve written stories about things that seemed entirely real, only for it to subsequently be revealed as a joke where the entire joke was, “That thing isn’t happening.” All April 1sts should be considered days when all reporting is suspended, just to save time.

Only joking! I love April Fools and you’re all dumb for believing what you just read and this is a funny joke because oh God, I can’t even go through with it. April Fools Day, you fucking suck as a concept and an annual event.

For months now, I’ve had trouble with the O key on my laptop. It’s been happening for so long that I genuinely don’t remember when it first started, but I remember being concerned about going to Brazil with it acting up, which means that we’re talking about November last year at least, if not even earlier. That’s a long time.

The problem is, simply, that the key likes to… well, pop off. It’ll just detach from the keyboard at inopportune times, whether or not I’m actually touching it or not. Pop! It’s gone. Well, that was the first problem, at least; it happened and I googled and got this quick fix and reattached it, and that would happen a few times a week. It was frustrating, sure, but it was fine, really.

Less fine was the second, related, problem. After the key had been popping off for awhile, it stopped working sometimes. Not always, and not often, but every now and then, I’d hit it and… nothing. Well, not nothing nothing; sometimes the key would lift off when I lifted my finger, as if my hands were covered in glue — that was fun — but, despite that, there would be no “o” on the screen.

During all of this, I’d think to myself, I should put the laptop in to get fixed, this can’t go on, and then I’d think to myself, But I need my laptop to work, eh, I’ll do it later. Weekends would roll around and I’d think of it and remember I have the podcast to record, and when I didn’t, I’d simply get distracted, so it stayed like this for months. I didn’t mean for that to be true, but it was, alas.

Cut to two weeks ago, and I’m working at 5am because deadlines, typing away in bed and feeling very determined to just do the job and get it done, and the O key just… stops working entirely. Entirely. I hit it repeatedly, I let the key come off and reattach it, and it just doesn’t work. It’s at that point, at 5 in the morning with a deadline due, that I realize just how often the letter O appears (Spoiler:  a lot), and that things can’t go on like this.

Within ten minutes, I’d jury-rigged a workaround and have spent the last week or so working with that and thinking, Maybe I don’t need to get it fixed, after all, because the shutdown of everything makes it hard to get it repaired, sure, but also because I am, at heart, very stupid.

It feels entirely unworthy, I feel, to characterize this moment we’re all in as “weird,” but that’s what I’ve found myself doing repeatedly, in multiple conversations with multiple people this week.

The context of the usage is, perhaps, instructive, though; I’ve used it in many cases as a response to people apologizing for not doing something, or really, not being able to do something, because they’re so emotionally overloaded and overwhelmed. “Look, I get it, everything’s weird right now, it’s okay,” I’d say, and they’d agree, and we’d take a second to silently think about just how weird everything actually is right now, how the world as we know it is, if not over, then certainly gone for now.

There are so many things that are weird. How quiet the streets are, for one thing. The complete lack of foot traffic outside the house that isn’t people walking their dogs is something that’s been causing me no end of low level anxiety all week, but that’s nothing compared with the one trip to the store I made midweek, where there was no-one around me and the restaurants had signs saying take-out only and the bars were closed. It felt unreal, unreasonable; there are usually so many people we have to step around each other carefully. Now this.

Or the mental pressure of it all — something that felt as if I was imagining it, until I saw a Twitter thread from a psychologist that suggested that we’re all in mourning and not accepting or even processing it, because we don’t think that the death of our lives as-was is actually a real thing. But that idea explains why my concentration has been poor, why I feel so tired, where my energy has gone. (Is it true? Is it a theory that holds water? I have no idea, but it feels true.)

The strangest, most unsettling thing of all is something so small, but something that very much messed with me until I realized what had happened. We live a block from a school, and that school’s bell is automated. It rings every day, even holidays, at 8:30, 8:40, 8:45, lunchtime, end of lunch, and then 3pm. Except, for three days this week, it didn’t, for whatever reason — maybe they were sanitizing the school and switched it off? The lack of that background noise, more than anything else, was a sign that things were weird.

Pavlov would be proud.

There’s something almost unthinkable about the coronavirus effect on reality right now. As I write, locally, schools and libraries are closed for the next few weeks at the very least, my various employers are all working from home or in the process of setting up plans to — something particularly amusing to me, who’s been doing that all along, I confess — and the grocery store shelves are creepily empty, thanks to panic-buying and people preparing for something akin to an apocalypse.

And maybe they’re not overreacting, as much as my brain like to pretend. The spread of COVID-19 is such that, even when it was, in theory, outside the US — although, let’s be honest, it was certainly here before that was officially the case; I’m genuinely half convinced that’s what my “mystery viruses” from January and February actually were at this point — it still had a scale and a speed that felt fictional in its power. “How can something so big move so fast?” as the cliche dialogue put it.

The first point where I really felt it, the impact it was having, wasn’t when I was sick, oddly enough. At that point, I was just sick and trying to get through it but, generally keeping my spirits high. No, it was just after, when making the decision whether or not to attend Emerald City Comic Con in what would’ve been a couple of weeks. By then, the virus was clearly rampant in Seattle, where the con was to be held, and I kept thinking that, if I went, I would almost certainly get infected, given how weak my immune system was at the time. The forward planning of, if you do this, you will get sick was surreal mental math that brought home just what was going on.

Somehow, still, I didn’t expect the breadth of what’s happened in response. Conferences and conventions cancelled, sure, they’re gatherings of thousands of people. But movies being pulled from release, the widespread shutdown of businesses and workplaces, the slow but steady removal of the everyday that shrinks what we think of as life to just what’s inside our homes…? With each step, it feels more serious and important, and I get that little bit more scared.

I should probably wash my hands more.

I’m  unsure if I ever shared the story about being told that I had cancer here before — I didn’t, it was a pretty severe misdiagnosis — but it’s something I thought about a bunch back when I was sick a couple of weeks ago, which prosays something about where my head was at during that plague week.

It wasn’t just that I was sick, again, after having been similarly sick a month earlier, although that was as exhausting and, honestly, as depressing as it sounds. (There was a feeling of, is that just what this year is going to be, with me in bed for a few days with a spiking fever every month?, I have to admit; can you blame me? And that was before my back went.) It’s that I was struggling against the sickness at the same time that news of the coronavirus was spreading, and my latent hypochondriac tendencies had a thing or two to say.

I didn’t think I had the coronavirus, I should say that right now. The closest I’ve ever come to that was the sickness in January, when news of the virus was first breaking and I asked the doctor what the odds were and she basically made fun of me in response. That reply, it seems, was basically enough to put that idea to bed, even in this more recent go-around as people were being diagnosed with it closeby. It didn’t seem like an option.

Nonetheless, I became very aware of how dangerous viruses were, how inexplicable, and as the sickness steadfastly refused to leave my body, I kept thinking about, imagine just suddenly finding out that this was what it was going to be like from now on. I didn’t think that I was going to die, but I did think, what if I never actually get better and this is it?

I knew that wasn’t really the case, of course; as quickly as I got sick, the recovery came: By day three, every morning I woke up and felt appreciably better. But I couldn’t help myself but think back decades to that bad diagnosis and wonder, what if a doctor just told me, “you’ll live, but you’ll live like this, weak and short of breath and every now and then you’ll have a coughing fit that will end with you on your knees, crying.” What would that be like, knowing that?

There’s something about the quiet of a house at night.

I live in an old house, an oddly-shaped thing with corners that don’t make sense and appear when you least expect it; a house that, when you look from outside, doesn’t make sense. I’m oddly happy about that last part, in particular, as if it proves how old the house is — they don’t build them like that anymore, after all — but there’s one thing to remember about an old house: they’re filled with creaky floorboards.

When I walk from the bedroom to the bathroom in the dead of night, I tread as carefully as I can, and I still make noises that sound loud to an unlikely degree, as if I’m setting off alarms to wake everybody up. Before that, everything is so still, so quiet, that it feels almost holy, and then my foot touches the wrong part of the floor and it’s… not.

As I said, there’s something about the quiet of a house at night.

It feels impossible, almost; how complete and still it is, how enveloping. Perhaps that’s simply in comparison to the day, when everyone and everything is awake, the people, the animals, the outside world, and there’s always some kind of noise from somewhere. That’s not the case at night, it’s literally the opposite. It’s a void, but one that somehow echoes, or finds a tone that can still be felt — something that makes it comforting instead of disturbing.

As is clear, it’s hard to describe. I end up going to strange metaphors: it’s a dark red tone, a blanket that’s warm, it’s how water feels in that space between the first shock of getting in and the feel that you should probably get out. It’s all of these for me, as much as these descriptions likely seem nonsensical to anybody else. It’s something that feels right, in a clearly indescribable way.

Perhaps what I’m trying to say is, I find comfort and security in that silence, that stillness. The knowledge that those I care about are asleep, comfortable, safe. That everything is done, for a short while, and we can enjoy that still space no matter how brief it is.

And then I step on that wrong floorboard.