Virus Journal 3-22-2020

Since my last entry my routine has been well established. During the week I mixed the required assignments from my daughters' teachers with activities of my own. This wasn't just so I could play teacher, my wife is doing necessary work as a tech specialist at her school and the kids need to stay out of her hair. By Friday my lessons got less regimented, and we could relax some more. That afternoon we took a long walk to drop a birthday gift off at a friend's house and had long conversations about what my daughters observed on the way. This allowed for tangents discussing the different levels of government (prompted by them noticing that electrical wires are above the ground here but not in New York City.) When we got home we put together a little robot model with a solar-powered electric motor.

Thursday I ventured out to get some groceries. The main supermarket had everything I needed, except for chicken. The only thing on the shelf was hearts and gizzards! I then went to the local Polish butcher, where I bought their last chicken thighs, which my wife made into an amazing chicken adobo yesterday. I also stopped at the liquor store to get a supplement to my current supplies. My strategy has been to go cheap on beer (which I buy in bulk) and pricey on whiskey. I got some Elijah Craig single barrel (a great value for the quality) and a four pack of a local microbrew just to give my beer supply some variety. The line was the biggest I've ever seen at the liquor store. A rumor raged that the stores would be shut down, but the order yesterday shutting down non-essential businesses did not cover liquor stores. There goes my new career in bootlegging.

I have mostly been making myself as busy as possible. In fact, I am not able to do all the things I want to do each day, which I take as a good sign. In normal times as well boredom is a luxury that I don't have. Yesterday I finished cleaning our screened-in porch, scrubbing away with a sponge and pail of water and Murphy's Oil Soap. I got special motivation from an anxiety attack, the first I've had since the virus hit, and work was my only way out.

This attack came after checking the news and realizing that the only way for the economy to start up again is for there to be massive testing, which is not forthcoming. I began to fear that the president, in all his infantile mania. thought that some "miracle drug" would save us all from the need to take public health measures. I was also freaking out over the lack of support for states suffering the worst, thinking that he didn't care if people in places that didn't vote for him lived or died. I also started freaking out about how the national media has not broken their tendency to bend over backwards to treat Trump as a "normal" president. That combined with his daily propaganda briefings I think has legitimated his authoritarian behavior. Even as Trump shits his pants in public each day and tells lies I can see that this actually makes him MORE powerful.

So I went out back and started scrubbing, then took a three mile walk.

On a happier note, I developed a Dungeons and Dragons adventure to play with my family this week. I am really looking forward to it.

Books

I am still reading Middlemarch, about 200 pages in. I realized that I needed to keep that book at a slow pace due to the richness of the writing. Eliot is one of those authors who packs a lot of meaning on the page. I really love how she is giving such a thick description of a provincial Midlands town circa 1830. When I wrote my dissertatation I was obsessed with how the 19th century novel was grounded in historical thinking, and this one is now exception. Eliot is writing about the world 40 years in the past to get a sense of what in her time represents change. If I had the time and talent I'd love to write something like this about my rural Nebraska stomping grounds and how that out of the way place has gone through its own transformations in recent history.

While I have been moving through Eliot slow, I read another, breezier book more quickly: William B. Irvine's A Guide To The Good Life: the ancient art of stoic joy. It was a Christmas gift from an old dear friend (and reader of the blog) who sensed my growing despair towards the end of last year. I figured the middle of a pandemic was the perfrect time to read a book about Stoic philosophy. I was a philosophy co-major in college, but haven't read any philosophy in quite a long time. The book reminded me of a kind of deep thinking I have missed. The main point of the book is about incorporating Stoic practice in everyday life, rather than the logic chopping of contemporary academic philosophy.

I took a lot of this book to heart. It is important for us to contemplate our eventual death, and the impermanence is everything in our lives. It is important to evaluate our attachments, and to not keep our negative emotions from overwhelming us. I have recently had to deal with some passive aggressiveness from people in my life and the book made me think about how I can deal with that while not bringing me down. Of course, the book has many of the flaws of philosophy as a discipline, namely the excision of social context from its thought process. Saying, for example, that disadvantaged people should merely banish the negative emotions caused by discrimination and oppression is some real bullshit.  But I do not want to be too negative, this book has helped center me this week and remind me that my wife and kids are what matter to me most and that I am lucky to get all this time with them.