Adventures in social distancing

I just texted Marie with my highlights from the last couple of days.

" So yesterday I got bored with having done so little physical activity for so long, and after work I went on a 3.5 mile walk around the extended neighborhood...."

" Today I had to go to the drugstore to pick up some prescription refills, and they actually had toilet paper in stock! So of course I bought one pack. (I was running low, not hoarding.)"

Gosh, I seem to be living in such exciting times. Of course excitement would probably mean disaster, so maybe I'm fine with "boring" instead. At least it's on-brand!

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Sheltering in place

I've been at home for four weeks now. At first it was just my company "recommending" that anybody who could work from home should do so. Later on, of course, the Governor ordered it. The good part is that I can work from home ... though I will add that it's a damn good thing I finally got myself Internet access in the apartment last year.

I still have work. That's the good part. Of course part of my work involves travel -- always has -- and that part's now in Limbo. I've made proposals for how to handle it, but we'll just have to see what works out. Also my company has noticed that our customers are closing (we sell to other businesses) which means we don't have as much income as we did. Every division is handling this differently. For us, everyone has to take four vacation days in April. Then starting in May we shift to a 32-day work week at 80% pay. They say they'll review the business situation every month, but we should be prepared for this to last three months. (That would mean until the end of July.) Nothing I've heard in the news gives me any hope we'll be through the crisis so soon, but what do I know? Also I've got no grounds to complain, because at least I still have a job. For now.

Marie, for what it's worth, is working harder than ever. She's in retail, but her family-owned business has been designated part of her state's "critical infrastructure." So they are still open, but some team members are out sick, demand is high, and they have to figure out how to service customers while maintaining social distance. When I told her it was definite that we would be transitioning to a 32-hour week in May, she told me her management had promised not to ask more than 65 hours a week. Yes, that's double. A little more.

I've held grocery shopping down to once every two weeks, and laundry once every three. It's amazing ... if you don't go anywhere and never bother to shower, you don't really have to change your clothes all that often either. I sure could use a haircut, though.

Marie and I text each other every morning, each to make sure the other is still alive. (A couple of months ago a coworker of hers never came back from vacation and was finally found dead in her apartment. In her case it was diabetes and not COVID-19, but it seriously spooked Marie and she recommended that we check in with each other like this.) Once she gave me the idea, I started to do the same thing with Son 1 (now in his own apartment since February) and my mother (eighty but still working). Son 1 had a fever for a couple days several weeks ago; he says he assumes in was COVID-19, but he was never tested and seems to be feeling better now. I haven't seen him since then, but he just ordered a new computer and is having it delivered to my place; so in another week or so he'll come and get it. On the other hand he is postponing any trips to visit Wife until he's sure he's not a carrier, because with her lupus medication she is definitely immunocompromised.

What is amazing to me is how seemingly easy it has been for me to adapt to this new way of living. Honestly, hanging around at home not going anywhere or doing anything is a pretty easy target for me to hit. I try to go outside once a day just to walk around the street, so I remember that there really is an outside world. But I've blocked out an hour on my work calendar to take a nap, or interrupted what I was doing to go fetch a snack -- the latter any number of times. It's really easy. My weight and any semblance of an exercise regimen have both gone completely to hell. At least I haven't yet started drinking in the middle of the day. I guess that's something.

One other bright spot is that I've been emailing a couple of guys I used to know (in a virtual way) on a discussion board years ago. I've reworked one of my posts into an essay over on the Patio and there are a couple of others that could follow it if I'd just get my ass in gear. So that's been fun.


This is terrible but I'm not sure I want it to end. Of course, the bad news is that maybe it won't.
    

Do we really have to take this pandemic seriously?

"Il y a eu dans le monde autant de pestes que de guerres. Et pourtant pestes et guerres trouvent les gens toujours aussi dépourvus.... Quand une guerre éclate, les gens disent : << Ça ne durera pas, c'est trop bête. >> Et sans doute une guerre est certainement trop bête, mais cela ne l'empêche pas de durer. La bêtise insiste toujours, on s'en apercevrait si l'on ne pensait pas toujours à soi. Nos concitoyens à cet égard étaient comme tout le monde, ils pensaient à eux-mêmes, autrement dit ils étaient humanistes : ils ne croyaient pas aux fléaux. Le fléau n'est pas à la mesure de l'homme, on se dit donc que le fléau est irréel, c'est un mauvais rêve qui va passer. Mais il ne passe pas toujours et, de mauvais rêve en mauvais rêve, ce sont les hommes qui passent, et les humanistes en premier lieu, parce qu'ils n'ont pas pris leurs précautions. Nos concitoyens n'étaient pas plus coupables que d'autres, ils oubliaient d'être modestes, voilà tout, et ils pensaient que tout était encore possible pour eux, ce qui supposait que les fléaux étaient impossibles. Ils continuaient de faire des affaires, ils préparaient des voyages et ils avaient des opinions. Comment auraient-ils pensé à la peste qui supprime l'avenir, les déplacements et les discussions? Ils se croyaient libres et personne ne sera jamais libre tant qu'il y aura des fléaux."

— Albert Camus, La Peste, pp. 41-42. Éditions Gallimard, 1947, 

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Laundry in the time of coronavirus

I went to the laundromat this evening, and halfway through one of my loads the machine stopped working. I thought maybe the electronics were faulty because it seemed stuck on "16 minutes" for half an hour. But the attendant called the owner, who explained that no it was the drain. He opened the machine, pulled out my clothes dripping wet, and moved them to another machine which he set going with a key. Oh, and put an Out of Order sign on the first machine. All in all a pretty normal story — I mean, not the malfunction, but the response.

When it was all set he asked me, "Are you well equipped?" I thought maybe he meant was that all I needed, so I explained that my other load had finished just fine. Then he asked, "At home, are you well equipped with food and other things?"

Oh.

"Yes, sir, I am. Thank you for asking."

Times are a little different right now, I guess.


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My cough is back

Back in the spring of 2017 I had a chronic cough that seemed to last forever. I didn't really understand what caused it, although it seemed linked to some kind of post-nasal drip. It lasted so much longer than any cold ought to have that I blamed it on allergies ... except that it followed me wherever I went. Finally on one of my trips for work that spring I promised a co-worker that I would see a doctor as soon as I got home. She warned me she would follow up with me closely because she took promises "very seriously"; so I did go, and my doctor treated me for allergies. After a while the cough went away. I thought I had written about it here, but the only references I can find are this poem (which I added fairly recently and back-dated) and this one.

Well, it's back. I started this post On January 19, and that weekend was when I first noticed it. It hasn't gone away since. I've tried treating it the way I did three years with at best limited success: a month and a half later, it still hasn't gone away. Of course last time it lasted a lot longer than that.

Should I go to the doctor? Maybe. I probably won't.
    

Anger and regret

Right at the beginning of Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, the narrator John Ames writes, "... people who feel any sort of regret where you are concerned will suppose you are angry, and they will see anger in what you do, even if you're just quietly going about a life of your own choosing. They make you doubt yourself, ...."

I wonder if this is why Wife thought I was always angry with her? ... if she felt so guilty over her own behavior over the years that she could not hear my voice at all without hearing reproach in it?

And of course when she would accuse me out of the blue of being angry with her, my immediate response was usually to feel attacked and to deny it hotly.

See also two other posts: 

https://hoseasblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/word-i-thought-id-never-hear.html?m=1

https://hoseasblog.blogspot.com/2008/12/like-lump-of-clay.html?m=1

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A visit from Debbie, part 2

So the third night that she was in town, Debbie joined us at Sangha and the whole normal dharma study was suspended. (We still did our normal meditation, though.) Debbie was there partly as just one more meditator but also unavoidably as the Founder-and-visiting-VIP; and the woman who normally leads us had gotten her to agree just to talk to us about what she had been doing spiritually and professionally since she left town in mid-2013. And then people had questions, but it meant that she talked a lot about her meditation practice, its ups and downs, and what she was getting out of it. And it was really interesting. She’s been practicing a lot longer and a lot more diligently than I have, so there’s a lot that she can talk about — some of it was about how in the long run meditation really did make her mind more stable and less subject to hair-trigger emotions, and some of it was about how she thought it was going to solve all her problems and make life smooth and easy only to find out that ... no, it really didn’t do that. In fact when there were ugly things lurking inside her somewhere, meditation stripped away all the stories and excuses they usually hid behind to leave them ever more visible. (Oops.) 

I wrote some of this to Marie afterwards, who replied,

I suspect if I'd been to your sangha, I would have been fighting feelings of inferiority as I listened... which would, mind you, be its own spiritual exercise. But it would also have been interesting....  

Wait, meditating won't solve all my life problems?  Or eliminate everything about myself I dislike???  WAAH!  Okay, I'm never doing it again!  Heck, I'll stop eating healthily too, because veggies don't solve all my health problems.  All or nothing!

My reply to her was a little long:

“Fighting feelings of inferiority”? If I was reading tone of voice correctly during Sangha, I think you wouldn’t have been the only one. It seemed to me that a couple of the other members were reacting much the same way, and that the feeling was mellowed only by their knowing Debbie for years as an old friend. But still ... when your old friend wins the Nobel Peace Prize and you’re still puttering around in the garden and shooing kids off your lawn, it’s hard not to notice the difference. 

That’s a deliberate exaggeration, of course. But envy can be a funny thing.

At the same time, though, Debbie strongly resists being put up on a pedestal. I remember early on when we were together saying something fond and doting about how exemplary she was, and she almost snapped at me. In any event she shut me down very brusquely. She made it clear that she did not want to hear such talk, and that she felt it was unhealthy in a relationship. You may remember in your first email to me back around New Year’s Day 2016, you told me to stop idealizing you, and I replied that yes, I knew I had a bit of a problem with that but was trying to work on it. This is why. 

And if you listen to Debbie long enough, she can unravel a story that makes everything she has done and learned look like a simple, natural reaction to problems she was having, as if anyone in the same pickle would have done the same thing. She volunteered to lead meditation groups in urban prisons because students in her M. Div. program were required to put in a certain number of hours in pastoral service of some kind. She was in that program in the first place because she had learned over the years she wasn’t very skillful at the core nursing tasks of giving shots or changing bedpans, but she had a knack for talking to grieving families. She was in nursing at all because she felt like her earlier career (which was where I met her) wasn’t personally fulfilling at a values level, and at that point her husband was making so much money she didn’t have to work to pay the bills. Hell, she got into that earlier career through a friend of her mother’s, and it beat her previous job which was as a salesgirl at the jewelry counter at some department store. She started meditating because her mind and emotions used to jump around too much; she started following Thich Nhat Hanh because he so directly addressed the kinds of suffering she was trying to get out of (related not only to whatever was going on at the time but to her childhood growing up around alcohol and abuse); she founded our sangha here — and then more recently the sangha at her current UU church where she lives now — for selfish reasons, because she needed other people to practice with. And so on. On and on. It all makes sense, it all hangs together as a story, and when she tells it no single step seems particularly remarkable. And yet here we are. 

Maybe there are a couple of ways to confront these kinds of feelings. One is the meditative approach, which is first to notice them; and then to remind yourself that fame and blame are both pretty random and fundamentally meaningless, and that you already have more than enough conditions to be happy. Another approach is to critique the feelings intellectually. Recognize that everyone spends their time on something, and that after you spend 10,000 hours on something you start to get good at it. Debbie has spent her time on this spiritual work. The rest of us spend it wherever we spend it. To make that observation a little less abstract, consider that I started writing poetry again when I was writing poems to send to D. She would send me in turn poems that she had read somewhere and particularly liked. When I got together with Debbie, I was thrilled — thrilled! — that over the course of several months she sent me three haikus that she had actually composed herself. Now remind me, sweetness — how many poems have you written and sent me?

Well, then. 

Of course none of this is a competition, not really. But ... well, then. 

Also I recognize that it is always a lot harder to see achievements in oneself than in others. And while I am deeply fond of Debbie and credit her with a lot, I find it easy to believe that she doesn’t see herself as clearly as we see her from the outside because she knows the less attractive parts all too well. Same as any of us. When I said (a couple of paragraphs above) that she could tell a story that made all these things she has done seem natural and obvious, I assume that the words “tell a story” chimed inside your head, and that you thereby understood that her discomfort with excessive praise might have an element of story-itis about it. Not saying that for sure, but it’s possible. And truly it is harder to see achievements in yourself. To me your literary achievements are obvious; but I have to strain hard to realize that not everyone can do the things I do at work, or raise children, or calm hysterical women (a skill which clearly I no longer need, and boy am I grateful!). But I wouldn’t be surprised if you have a story to tell that pretends your literary ability is nothing much. Just for the record that story is wrong, but you might believe it anyway. It’s hard to see achievements in oneself.   

The next morning, Debbie left town after breakfast to head back to her mother's house, from which -- a few days later -- she returned home. But it was a very pleasant visit, and the two of us seem to be settling into a confortable kind of post-romance friendship. I'm glad.