January 2022
Monthly Archive
Jan 17, 2022
Spring semester starts tomorrow at both of the colleges where I teach. Tomorrow I’ll teach my Framingham State classes from my desk at home, and on Wednesday I’ll teach my Babson classes from my office on campus, followed by my first COVID test of the semester.
I’m so accustomed to pandemic-related modality shifts, I didn’t bat an eye when FSU then Babson announced the first week of the in-person semester would be remote to give returning students and faculty time to get tested before returning to the classroom. I had a similar lack of response when FSU announced we’d actually spend the first two weeks of the semester remote. At this point of the pandemic, I have practice with nearly any modality: been there, done that.
At this point of the pandemic, teaching college feels like some sort of Green Eggs and Ham-style nursery rhyme:
I can teach standing in class
Or sitting at my desk on my ass.
I can teach in a room
Or I can teach in a Zoom.
Students can Webex from home
Or from wherever they roam.
I can teach from home when I’m sick
Or when the snow and ice are too thick.
I’ll teach however we need to stop the spread.
I’ll teach however you’d like, as long as I’m not dead.
Jan 11, 2022
Today was the winter’s first BPC Day: a day so cold, I wore my Big Puffy Coat.
I’ve lived in New England long enough, I have a closet full of winter coats. There’s the green fleece jacket I wear when the temperature is in the 40s and 50s, the pink jacket I wear when the temperature is in the 30s, the mid-length brown coat I wear when the temperature is in the 20s, and the Mother of All Coats: a purple, full-length down coat I wear when the temperature is in the teens, single digits, and below.
My Big Puffy Coat is as warm and cumbersome as a down comforter: imagine walking around swaddled in all your bedding. It has a hood, which I typically wear over a knit beret: on BPC Days, it takes a hat and a hood to stay warm.
If I zip my BPC all the way up, I don’t need a scarf, as the collar covers my throat and chin…and since my BPC has deep, fleece-lined pockets, I can get away with wearing thin knit gloves instead of thick Bernie mittens.
It was 8 degrees when I walked Roxy this morning, but tomorrow the temperature is supposed to rise to the mid-30s, and on Thursday we’ll enjoy a 40-degree thaw.
This means I’ll repeatedly swap one coat for another over the next few days: not only do I have a closet full of winter coats, each one has a hat in the sleeve and a pair of gloves and a roll of dog-poop bags in the pockets. It’s important to be prepared for whatever weather any given dog-walk brings.
Jan 9, 2022
Back in November, when J and I were newly boosted and the daily number of new COVID cases in Massachusetts was low, J and I went to the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, briefly roaming the grounds before heading inside to see the colorful fringe towers at the heart of Jeffrey Gibson’s INFINITE INDIGENOUS QUEER LOVE.
November’s trip to the DeCordova was in part a purification ritual. The last time J and I had gone to the DeCordova was January 6, 2021: a pandemic-appropriate birthday celebration, where we wore masks to wander the grounds before the day turned strange.
Among the many things I missed during the height of COVID lockdown, wandering museums was near the top of the list. After we learned how to Zoom with friends, order grab-and-go takeout from our favorite restaurants, and schedule curbside pickup from our favorite stores, we were still denied the joys of museum bathing: something I enjoy so much, for years I’ve kept a tradition of going to a museum on or around my birthday.
Wandering the DeCordova grounds in January 2021 and going inside the museum in November 2021 was a step toward reclaiming an activity I enjoyed in the Before Times. I love the reverent attentiveness of museums. While the Zen Center is still shuttered, museums are the closest thing I have to an indoor sacred space outside my own home.
This year on my birthday, J and I stayed home. Thanks to the Omicron variant, COVID cases are surging here, and we’ve spent my winter break hunkering at home, retreating from the risk of infection. Once the semester begins, my retreat will end; for now, I’m enjoying the tranquility of a self-imposed stay-at-home order.
In the early days of the pandemic, it sometimes felt like we’d never return to our once-cherished activities. In the first days of the Vaccinated Times, it felt like life was returning to normal, but Delta then Omicron complicated matters.
I’m now realizing that life in the age of COVID will be a hybrid entity: in some ways like the Before Times, and in other ways not. We talk of “the pandemic” as if it were a monolithic thing, constant and consistent from one week to the next, when in actuality, the pandemic has its own seasons and cycles.
J and I aren’t currently going to museums even though they are open…but we know we will return, eventually. Case counts will surge, case counts will fall: sickness will come and go in waves, and we’ll learn to surf those changes, venturing out when it’s safe and going to ground when it’s not.
William Wordsworth said that poetry is “emotion recollected in tranquility,” and as I look at the photos I took at the DeCordova last January and again last November, I experience a kind of vicarious thrill. During the reclusive moments of a pandemic, we sustain our spirits with the memory of past adventures recollected in tranquility.
Jan 5, 2022
Two years ago, on January 5, 2020, I celebrated the day before my birthday by going to the Cambridge Zen Center, sitting one meditation session, then walking from Central to Harvard Square, where I sipped hot chocolate and wrote in my journal at Burdick’s Cafe.
We all have spent countless hours ruminating on the Before Times: the simple pleasures we took for granted before the pandemic changed our lives in profound and unpredictable ways. There are many things I miss from the Before Times, but this one will probably surprise you: I miss a certain kind of solitude.
Over the past two years, most of us have gotten more than our fill of remote, socially distanced, work-from-home solitude: the kind of isolation that comes from not going out, not seeing friends and family, not hanging around the office water cooler. But I miss the quiet anonymity of sitting alone in a crowded cafe, strangers buzzing amiably around me.
For the past two years, we’ve spent a lot of time alone together in the separate squares of Zoom screens, communicating with friends, family, and coworkers across our individual isolations. What I miss, though, is time spent together alone: time, that is, spent in the presence of strangers without any need to interact.
For the past almost-two years, I’ve gotten good at what I call duck-in interactions. Tonight, for instance, J and I wanted to try takeout from a new restaurant, so I followed the now-familiar drill: order and pay online, show up at the restaurant, scope out the register from outside to make sure there isn’t a line, then duck inside to pick up my order. Even allowing for brief, masked pleasantries, this kind of interaction lasts no more than a minute: duck in, grab food, duck out.
I miss the casual leisure of sitting in a cafe sharing space with strangers without worrying about shared air and exposure times. I miss the days when sitting alongside strangers was a welcome form of communion, not a potential source of contagion.
Jan 3, 2022
It’s been almost a month since I taught my last in-person class of the Fall semester, and nearly two weeks since I submitted my final grades. During that time, J and I have been hunkered down at home, riding out the current Omicron surge.
After three full semesters of pandemic teaching, I’m used to the COVID drill. I’m accustomed to teaching in a mask, and my work weeks now revolve around the regular ritual of a PCR test, with results coming via email in a day or two. When you teach during a pandemic, the best day of any week is when your negative COVID test results come back.
Once my on-campus obligations are over, however, the cumulative exhaustion of pandemic teaching sets in. Once I’m no longer navigating a college classroom, I realize how much energy it takes to be ever-vigilant, constantly monitoring my own and my students’ symptoms: was that cough just allergies or something more troubling?
Over the holidays, while other folks flocked to airports, family gatherings, and social events, all I’ve wanted to do is stay home, retreating into myself like a rabbit gone to ground. Outside, the virus is running rampant; inside, I recharge and refuel, craving hibernation more than social interaction.
A few days before New Year’s Eve, I heard yet another NPR interview with an infectious disease expert answering questions about What Is or Isn’t Safe over the holidays. After another semester of wondering what is or isn’t safe every second I’m on campus, all I want for Christmas, New Year’s, and the next few weeks is a break from non-stop vigilance. Here’s hoping the Omicron wave has crested before classes resume later this month.
Jan 1, 2022
This morning I sorted through stationery, bundling the monthly letters I wrote to myself in 2020 and making room for the letters I’ll write to myself in 2022. This is a habit I’ve kept for the past few years: every month, I read a letter I wrote the previous year, then I write a letter to my Future Self.
I’m realizing my perennial reluctance to set New Year’s Resolutions isn’t based on any reluctance to set goals for myself–I set goals for myself all the time. Instead, this reluctance stems from an aversion to setting new goals, the whole spirit of New Year’s resolutions resting on the attitude of “out with the old, in with the new.”
I don’t want to start any new habits in 2022; instead, I want to continue cultivating the habits that have sustained me so far. Instead of “out with the old,” I want to continue in with the old.
Every year, I set the same basic goals for myself: read 50 books, write daily, blog more, and get a certain number of steps (currently, my daily step goal is 17,000). Every year I also resolve to take lots of pictures: at least one a day.
Looking back on the past few years, I’ve kept these goals, mostly. Throughout the pandemic, I’ve journaled nearly every day, and I have a shelf of notebooks to show for it. I wear a Fitbit to track my steps, and I use Goodreads to track the books I’ve read. For the past few years, I’ve religiously taken at least one photo every day even though I’ve been largely remiss about publicly posting those photos.
The only goal I continue to struggle with is the intention to blog more regularly. Given the choice between posting to my blog and writing in my journal, my journal always wins. If I had a secretary to transcribe each day’s scribbles so I could easily share them online, I’d have no shortage of things to share. But since I am my own secretary, editor, and muse, there are rarely enough hours in the day.
Every new year, I tell myself that THIS is the year when all this daily writing–all the journal-keeping and blog-posting–will result in an actual Book, “publish a book” being the biggest un-checked item on what is probably the world’s shortest bucket list. But like the opening montage in the movie Up where one mishap after another prevents Carl and Ellie from taking their dream trip to Paradise Falls, the elusive Book I presumably have in me is perpetually pushed to the back burner.
The last print book I finished in 2021 was Ruth Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness, where the Book within a boy named Benny literally cries out to be written. Unlike Benny, my Book has yet to speak to me, at least in any language I can hear. But my notebooks still cry to be filled, so I continue to show up at their pages.
Hoarded Ordinaries 