Tuesday 3.25 The Day

One of the tougher things about isolation for me is that for long periods of time, I find that I have nothing to write about. So for my recent absence, you have my apologies. After about a month into the NYC quarantine, I realized just how much the banalities of everyday movement drove the majority of my work. It gave me a new appreciation for the writer as active observer. James Joyce spent the majority of his life trying to explain what it was like to walk around a particular place, and that makes more sense to me now than it ever did before.

He thought if he could just fully express this one place, he could express the whole of human experience. I don’t know that I’ve ever found the exegesis of constraint or isolation as intriguing, despite the fact that I guess I like those very “interior” books sometimes.

Anyway, here’s my day.

6 am

I wake up to my phone’s alarm, which is an approximation of birdsong that, surprisingly, has not grown irritating or tiresome in the two years I’ve used it as my alarm. I turn the alarm off. It’s pouring outside, and I notice that my clock radio is four minutes faster than my phone, a disparity which seems to happen over the course of a month or so, probably because the clock radio is very old. Usually, I’d be forcing myself to wake up and go for a morning run, but I ran last night, so I give myself the morning off. I make a mental note to reset the clock radio at some point, and go back to sleep.

7 am

I wake up again, scroll Twitter until I come across something that makes me angry, type a comment, delete it, and close the app. I download the new Poolside FM app, which Alex has texted about. I look through a few emails and delete some newsletters I never read. I go back to sleep.

8 am

I get up in earnest and look at the New York Times on my phone. I tell myself it’s important not to get bogged down in the latest details regarding the president’s disdain for the military or admitted dishonestly about the pandemic that brought weeks of terror to my city and has delineated my reality for six months now. One of the cats (Frankie) is crying because he wants to go outside, even though it’s pouring. I try to calm him down with a few pats, but he hits me (no claws; he likes to do things his own way, but he’s not violent), so I let him outside. He seeks shelter beneath the tarp covering the bikes.

8:15 am

I begin the process of making coffee and read a short article by a dentist about a troubling rise in tooth fractures. He posits that pandemic-related stress and bad work-from-home posture habits have led to an increase in tooth-grinding. He claims at healthy rest, one’s teeth should not be touching, which strikes me first as absurd, then terrifying. Have I been doing this wrong my entire life? I promise myself that I will be better to my mouth. My teeth feel very foreign in my mouth. I retrieve my laptop and open it in the kitchen as I grind the coffee and the water boils.

8:20 am

I open a Substack newsletter about the early human history of agriculture. It opens with a good point about just how strangely it is that the cultivation of crops has evolved on the planet, but still without the coffee, I start to get drowsy. It’s too early for this kind of essay. I focus on the coffee, which requires me to first pour 40ml of hot water into an empty filter an mug, discard, add 23g of ground coffee beans, then 60ml of hot water for 45 seconds to “bloom.” After 45 seconds, I slowly add another ~300ml of water. The whole process is very relaxing, and once it’s finished, I feel ready to resume the farm essay. However, I fall into some clicks, get mad at something on Twitter again and have the though that Twitter seems to be full of many little clubs and sub groups, none of which I’m a member of. I send a nonsensical tweet that’s funny to me (“Typhoid Mary was the first Boater for Trump.”) in an attempt to rebel against this perceived alienation. I should delete the account, as I have a less than healthy relationship with social media.

9:15 am

I begin clicking work things. Time passes.

10:15 am

I eat a bowl of Reese’s Puffs, deftly avoiding one of the cats, who badly wants the milk. I am aware of my teeth again.

11 am

I perform an actual task for work, though a significant amount of energy is expended articulating the ways in which I find the task pointless. It takes me about 45 minutes.

12 pm

I sign into an all-staff meeting on my computer, the first half of which is a presentation I have already seen. When asked how difficult my last six months have been, I vote 8 on a 1-10 scale, assuming that’s what most people will say, and not wanting to devote much effort to determining how difficult things have actually been for me, and for that matter, I don’t see how it’s any of my job’s business, even anonymously. I’m correct, and most people vote 8. I cry foul at managements suggestion that, “We want this to improve, but we obviously never want to see everyone at 1.” Why wouldn’t you want everyone at 1?

12:43 pm

I put a Marx quote in the side chat we’re having during the meeting.

1 pm

I become aware of the fact that I am surrounded by paper, and decide to clean my desk.

1:14 pm

I put a Simpsons quote in the side chat.

1:30 pm

The meeting ends. I am maybe 80% done cleaning my desk, and feel acccomplished.

1:50 pm

I catch up on the last two hours of dictation and decide to take a shower. I also shave, which I have not done in several days.

2:11 pm

I had a bit of a scare earlier this week when an ill-advised trip to the beach (the first of the year) on Labor Day led to what I suspect was sun poisoning and a concomitant eye infection, which left me incapacitated and embarrassingly disoriented for most of Monday night, sort of whimpering and mewling between bouts of intense chills and drenching sweats, punctuated by an occasional sharp pain in my right eyeball.

I went to an emergency clinic the following day and was, as is the case whenever anyone ever goes to an emergency clinc, provided with a grevious warning from a non-expert who insisted I see an opthamologist before my eyeball burst from its socket.

Armed with about $300 in prescribed drug orders that the non-expert could not technically approve without the input of a real doctor, I sat on the phone with my insurance company for an hour and a half, in an effort to certify the existence and determine the location of a Primary Care Physician I have never met. I was unsuccessful, but in the interim, the eye improved.

Understanding that the suspected ailment (a rare sort of ocular herpes virus) diagnosed by the non-expert would produce increasingly worse symptoms, and following my own measured assesment that I did not in fact really exhibit any of the more common telltale signs of the alleged virus, I made the executive decision to hold off on a) taking the drugs I had and b) jumping through the many Kafkaesque beaureaucratic hoops required to pay anything less than $243 for a goop to rub on my now only mildly irritated eyeball.

So, while today is Thursday, it kind of feels like a Tuesday.

2:28

I consider artwork to hang on my walls.

2:52 pm

I realize that I am incredibly hungry and make two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, again deftly avoiding one of the cats, who apparently likes peanut butter. Foiled, the cat takes to carrying a small teddy bear (unknown origin) around the house, which is impossibly adorable.

3 pm

Defector, which is the new, writer-owned-and-operated version of Deadspin, is live, so I log in and read several articles. I also review and reject a trade offer in my fantasy baseball league. Corey Seager is absolutely raking, and you cannot have him for Sonny Gray and Sergio Romo, even if you want to throw in a hurt Matt Chapman, who is hitting .211.

5 pm

I agree to trade Corey Seager for Ryan Mountcastle and Sonny Gray. I immediately regret it.

6 pm

I sign off for the day, having exhausted my cache of questionable jokes on my internet work chat.