I am writing this from New Haven, Connecticut, a place I have some happy memories attached to. I also love a gritty port town, especially one with excellent pizza and used bookstores. This time I am here with a group of students from my high school competing in a model congress competition at Yale. While I have enjoyed walking around the campus, eating at Frank Pepe's and other fine dining establishments, browsing the Grey Matter bookstore, and drinking Common Grounds' coffee, I am feeling pangs of dread and a certain kind of spiritual suffocation.
Some of this comes from students in the model congress seeing the whole thing as some kind of joke. During the presidential election at the start a student gave a lazy, tossed-off speech threatening to invade Canada. Evidently he thought this was funny. It was telling that the three girls in the running constructed serious speeches full of ideas, while two of the four boys recited MAGA rhetoric without proposing anything concrete. It seemed to encapsulate the rising tide of misogyny in this country that reacts to girls being better at a lot of things because they actually work hard by trying to subjugate them instead of demanding more from young men.
Other dread comes from the stark contrasts one sees walking around New Haven. Our hotel is near the Green, where one often sees homeless people and poor and working-class residents catching the bus just two blocks from a university with a $41 billion endowment. I have seen starker contrasts of wealth and poverty in Manhattan, but the fact that the contrast comes from a "non-profit" educational institution just seems to make it worse. The whole scene lays this country's failures bare.
Even worse, today is the dreaded "Santa Con," when America's stupidest and loudest suburban frat and sorority types converge on city centers to get drunk and act even more brain dead than they do on an average day. Walking the streets around my hotel feels suffocating, and not just because of the clouds of cheap weed smoke. Perhaps it's fitting that Trump has returned to the White House, since he reflects the trashy, decadent nature of the nation he is about to rule over.
It probably hasn't helped my mood that my big used book store score was a copy of Theodor Adorno's Minima Moralia. I have felt it to be quite bracing, and I maybe am absorbing his deep critique of American life at a particularly bad time. Since the election I have been embracing a fundamental pessimism about certain aspects of American life. At base, I think it's obvious that most people have a completely nihilistic attitude about public life and what they owe to others. Much as Adorno worried, the processes of more modern capitalism have shredded individuality and reduced it into nothing more than consumer desire. Life will go on, there will still be good books, pizza, and coffee in the world, but I don't expect much of anything to get better soon. As the last few days have made clear, the younger generation is most definitely not going to save us. There are plenty of exceptional young people, but they are being eaten up by the ever-growing adherents to nihilism. That's my sad report from New Haven.
I know I have not been as active on this site as usual. I got derailed on my Richard Thompson project (which will be revived) due to the level of work at my new job. That's made it hard to find time and energy to write, which I have mostly been saving for the more involved writing I do on my Substack. There are some things I do need to get off of my chest and out of my head, and now that I am on break I can actually process them.
Even before the election, I found myself attracted to quietism as a response to the current political situation, what some in Germany referred to as "inner migration" in response to the onset of fascism. I used to think of that as a weak cop-out, but now I have been tempted to think that discretion is the better part of valor. In my dark moments I think that nationalist populism is here to stay as the dominant force in American politics, in no small part because the oligarchs have swung their support to it. That, along with the rise of AI, have made me think that anyone trying to tell the truth in public is on a fool's errand.
All things must end, and I think that anything resembling what we used to think of as a functioning public sphere in American life is dead. Of course there are still newspapers, news networks, blogs, etc., but they do not in any way allow for a common understanding of reality. The people who own them decided, in their own corporate or ideological interests, to have it this way. Bezos and others killed endorsements for Harris, Musk bought Twitter and turned it into a right wing propaganda outlet, and Zuckerberg has let the wolves run wild on his platforms. TikTok, YouTube, and others are set up in ways that drive people towards fascist and anti-vax material. The old system wasn't optimal, but wouldn't you rather have Walter Cronkite than Joe Rogan?
This is a country in the grips of a crippling disease of the heart. Most people buy into the nihilism of late capitalism and care about nothing more than their own personal desires, which are so whipped into a frenzy by consumerism that they cannot be fully met. This leads to frustration and resentment that can be easily channeled by rightwing populists. Voices that once would have tempered this nihilism have bought into it. Religious leaders decry moral decline but don't dare call out this most fundamental moral decline in their flock, or they just accept it themselves. Just look at the dominance of prosperity gospel preachers. The Left ought to be a powerful voice against the late capitalist Moloch, but it too has been captured by its logic. The people who call themselves "the Left" mostly live online, not in the real world. They spend their days stewing in resentment and contrarianism, harvesting clicks and likes, living their lives according to the same consumerist logic as the rest of society. They accomplish nothing, but at the end of the day, they get to feel good about themselves, which is the only thing that matters in this society.
At times it seems like the only way to win is to just not play. As a child I had a weird obsession with the monks of the early middle ages. In the aftermath of societal collapse, they maintained learning and literacy, all while removed from the day to day world. I fantasized about being a monk, since at that age the thought of spending most of my days reading and writing in isolation was my idea of heaven. At my darker moments I view our current situation not as a blip, but the harbinger of decades or even centuries of decline. More and more it feels like there is no hope for a better and more just society in my ever-shortening lifetime. Things will change at some point, of course, but it will be too late for me.
Instead of wallowing in despair or going out in the public sphere I have been tempted to stay in my own version of a monk's cell, preserving the cultural life being snuffed out elsewhere. In an increasingly illiterate society, I will read books and spend as little time on social media as I can. (I do the former well, the latter not so much.) In the midst of the consumer frenzy, I will buy as little as possible. I will save my money for live theater and live music, places where artists directly connect with people without the mediation of screens or the trickery of AI. I will not withdraw from political life, but focus my efforts on the local level to preserve small flames that may one day turn into a cleansing fire. With any luck this kind of thing will be of assistance to the people left to clear up the wreckage far after my own life is done.
This last week has been a real roller coaster. My winter break began, and on Wednesday I got to see a bunch of my former students at an event at my school. On Thursday, I got to bum around New York City for the day. When I got home, I went into the basement and saw that our boiler was leaking and our heat was off. Turns out we need a new one! Merry fucking Christmas.
In a strange twist of events, this whole fiasco has me feeling more optimistic than I have in awhile. Yeah we are confronted with an annoying and expensive problem, but we are going to fix it. I was also able to find a way to travel with my family instead of being stuck here waiting to get the boiler fixed, so Christmas has been saved, too. In a fit of good feeling I wrote a Substack piece on establishing some good habits for engaging in politics in 2024. The fascists want us confused and hopeless, we need to put our shoulders to the wheel and ignore the bullshit.
I have to get up at 3AM tomorrow for my flight so I am trying to relax myself by drinking a Manhattan and listening to Tom Waits music from the 70s. I don't think he really showed his true genius until the 80s, but in the polyester decade he cut one of the great sad Christmas songs, "Christmas Card From A Hooker in Minneapolis." It's resonating with me because it's about persevering through some shit times. After every crappy day comes sleep and then a new morning. Maybe that new day will be shit too, but perhaps it won't.
The whole premise of the song is a dark joke. Christmas cards that come with a yearly round-up of life events usually come from middle-class families wanting to brag on Susie's grades and Bobby's position on the varsity squad. They don't come from sex workers living a hand to mouth existence on the margins of society. The narrator's life is hard. She talks about a record from the person she's writing to, but also that her record player had been stolen. She tried going back to live with her parents in Omaha but "everyone I used to know is either dead or in prison." Now's she's back in Minneapolis "and I think I'm going to stay." By the end she admits she's in jail and needs help. In the worst and most desperate straits, she's still thinking that things can turn around. After all, "I'll be eligible for parole come Valentine's Day."
The holidays are a time of reflection, which can often make us rue the ways our lives didn't turn out the way we thought they would. But even in the worst circumstances, people still find ways to keep on living. My busted boiler is pretty minor in the grand scheme of things. Tomorrow is another day.
Yesterday I had the good fortune to see The Holdovers in the theater. It's been out for awhile, so I saw it in a small box inside of a small-town independent movie theater, which was pretty much the perfect combination.
I had seen the trailer multiple times, and I knew the movie would be catnip for me. Not only was one of the main characters a history teacher at a private school (like me), it was about the melancholy side of the holidays, it was set in the 1970s, and it was directed by Alexander Payne. What a combo! I was glad that it exceeded my expectations.
Payne has long been one of my favorite filmmakers, and not just because he's a fellow Nebraskan. He started out making wicked satires like Citizen Ruth and Election, but since About Schmidt has mostly made films about life itself, in particular how we deal with its inevitable pains and disappointments. As I have entered middle age, that subject has felt much more real. I have probably never cried harder in a movie theater than I did when I watched Nebraska because it so perfectly represented the world where I am from and I had never imagined ever seeing its stilted emotional landscape being put up on a big screen for all the world to see.
I cried a lot at the movie theater yesterday, too. I knew that mourning a loved one was a theme because of the school's chef losing her son in Vietnam. I did not know it was also about the experience of mourning a loved one while they are still alive because a mental illness has made them into someone else. (I won't give away any spoilers beyond that.) That's a kind of mourning I am very familiar with.
The pains and disappointments of life are often followed by resentments, something Payne explores deftly in this film and others. Giamatti's teacher character resents his wealthy students for their privilege, even more for their obliviousness to it. He may live in a campus apartment and drive a shit car, but he gets to put them in their place when he fails them on their exams. Of course, this is not a healthy way to go through life. I think too of his character in Sideways, the father in Nebraska, and the title character in About Schmidt. All of them seem beaten down by life's unfairness and the feeling that things should have turned out differently.
The other characters in The Holdovers have ample reasons for resentment. Angus is stuck alone on the holidays because his mother would rather vacation with her new husband. Mary had her son's promising life snuffed out by a stupid and unjust war. In middle age I have learned that resentment is the soul killer. Life is unfair and heartless but dwelling on it will make you insane. If I think too long about how I work hard to teach students who are often blase about an education that costs more than my old yearly salary as an assistant professor I get paralyzed.
We all have to find ways to overcome the dynamic of disappointment and resentment because there are only a blessed few whose lives turn out the way they want them to. Even then, bad things happen. I heard this week that an old classmate of mine who was a good dude and had gone on to be a highly successful basketball coach is beset with a painful, deadly illness. For some cruel reason the hardest and most untimely losses of life among people I care about have happened in December, so I can't get through the holiday season without thinking about how some people are robbed of the time they should have had on this earth.
I appreciate Alexander Payne's cinema of life because he gets at the dailiness of these emotions. Certain feelings are always with us, sometimes as a barely perceptible ache, sometimes as an all-consuming fire. I also appreciate how the endings are never neat. The characters in The Holdovers find ways to survive and gain some needed perspective, but there's no guarantee that they won't get pulled back into the undertow of disappointment and resentment. We can only try to handle it as best we can. I hope Payne keeps making movies like this because they've helped me with my own process.
Thanksgiving came, and with it, winter. Night falls hard, the darkness at 5 making it feel like ten o'clock at night. The wind bites, stabbing through the buttons of my coat. Even when the clouds clear, the sunlight feels feeble, cut at an angle.
I feel the transitions in the seasons more than most people. My clothing, diet, and even music choices change radically this time of year. The outdoors goes from something to be enjoyed to something to be endured. I embrace the holiday season as a fun distraction, but that makes the first two and a half months of the year even more bleak. Knowing I will soon have to live through them is already weighing on me.
I have well-worn coping mechanisms, but a little perspective is helping me face this winter. It hit me today that we are almost four years away from the anniversary of the first COVID-19 cases in Wuhan. I suddenly remembered the awfulness of the winters of 2020-2021 and 2021-2022. The deaths, the disruptions, illnesses and uncertainty are something I never want to revisit. Last winter I was still waiting for the axe to drop. This winter, for the first time in years, I can just have the good ole winter ache without a big blast of fear. Maybe things will go south and we will have another outbreak, but I am at enough peace right now to not get antsy about it.
As those of us in the northern latitudes face winter I'd like to share some of my traditional coping mechanisms.
Root Vegetables
To get through winter you've got to stay healthy, and as quality fresh fruits and vegetables get scarcer with the change in temperature, root vegetables are there for you. Throw those parsnips in your stews, boil and mash up a rutabaga with some carrots and your stomach will since a happy song.
Canadian Folk Music
I listen to inordinate amounts of Gordon Lightfoot, early Leonard Cohen, and Ian & Sylvia in winter. Who knows better how to weather the cold than Canadians? The music soothes me to boot. No song embodies winter to me more than Gord's "The Way I Feel," either the acoustic or electric version.
Bourbon
When you've got to shovel your walk there's no better prep or reward than a shot of bourbon. The whiskey keeps you warm, and that complex bourbon flavor has the depth to match the emotions of the winter months. Putting it in a hot toddy? Even better.
Cardigans
Feeling chilly when you want to be cozy? Put on a cardigan and all your problems are solved, baby!
One of the things I like about the town I live in is how people go all out for Halloween. We usually get a ton of trick or treaters and it's just a blast overall. I was having fun in the leadup to this week, but suddenly I've lost the spirit.
Part of it has to do with the ridiculous obligations in my life right now, both in terms of work and parenting. I am just tired, all of the time. During the few moments I have to rest my mind is preoccupied with the sad, depressing state of the world. This month has brought war in the Middle East, related murders in this country, a mass shooter, a radical anti-democratic gerrymander in North Carolina, and an election-denying Christian nationalist weirdo being elevated to the Speaker of the House. (I wrote about the latter on Substack.)
This is all being experienced through a media filter that constantly promotes lies and manipulations of all kinds. It's getting hard to tell the truth, and soon people will stop trying. Once that happens, there's no bottom.
I can't escape the feeling that everything is collapsing. On inauguration day in 2021, I cried tears of relief and joy, hoping we were through the Trump years. I had been vaccinated against COVID the day before and the two events together felt like two horrible crises might finally be ending. Looking back I can't believe my naivete. Trumpism and COVID are not past. They were tipping points knocking down a rotten and rickety American and world social order that had been teetering for decades.
Neoliberalism hollowed everything out, including basic social obligations and connectivity. We've lost the capacity for positive collective action and the privations of COVID have made us even more angry and suspicious. We interact through social media, which only brings out the worst in us. In the face of all of this progressives have retreated into making self-righteous statements ("In this house we believe...") because deep down they know there's nothing that can be done about it in any material sense. Social movements have adopted a "leaderless" model allowing them to take to the streets while accomplishing nothing.
The scariest thing this Halloween is the world we are living in. I once believed in the capacity for change, but right now my main focus is trying to survive the coming onslaught. Just take the shooting in Lewiston, for example. We know there's absolutely no chance that we will regulate guns, and that our society is awash in so many guns and gun nuts that any attempt to regulate them would be useless. A conservative Supreme Court would strike that down, anyway. We talk about the 2024 election as if it's a referendum on democracy, but democracy already lost.
I tried posting about this on Facebook and people assumed my feeling that Halloween had no joy this year is curmudgeonly, not the result of existential dread over the state of the world. Don't worry, you'll probably be feeling the same way by next Halloween.
A lot of famous people died this week, and I feel like the passing of Ian Tyson got lost in the shuffle. A Canadian cowboy turned folk singer, he wrote "Four Strong Winds," the ultimate New Year's Eve song.
It's about how the winds of life scatter us from the people we love, and the sadness that comes with it. The line "But our good times are all gone/ And I'm bound for moving on" always makes me think of my amazing circle of friends in grad school and how fate condemned us to be separated. It also makes me think of being a high school teacher, where I get to watch teenagers blossom into adults but then have to say good-bye to them. I repeat this bittersweet ritual every year and it never gets easier.
I used to love New Year's Eve as a holiday. It meant a fun gathering with a group of my friends in Lincoln. Nebraska, made merry by food and drink. I haven't been able to take part for over a decade now, and the old professor who linked us all together has been dead for a few years. Nowadays New Year's Eve just reminds me of the impermanence of everything in this life.
I've got more yesterdays than tomorrows, and the burden of the past weighs heavy on my heart. The new year represents less a new beginning for me than it does a stark reminder of my mortality. I am thinking a lot tonight about how the strong winds of life have separated me from so many people over the years, some of them permanently through death.
I know this isn't exactly the cheeriest New Year's Eve message but tomorrow I will focus on the future. We owe it to those we've lost through death, distance, and estrangement to remember the good times we had together before they were all gone.
I saw that recent article in the Times about students at a school in New York who have called themselves "Luddites" and are logging off of social media and subsisting on flip phones. Their reasons are pretty compelling to me, since I know deep down in my soul that I use my smartphone and social media far far too much. The article reminded me of how I used to be very much like those kids.
When cell phones first emerged in the 1990s, I did not have any interest. It took me forever to even get an answering machine. When I started teaching as a grad student TA in the 2000s, I noticed how cell phones brought disruption and distraction to classroom spaces. Back then I reveled in living the life of the mind., which meant a lot time spent in contemplation.
I still used and loved the internet, but as something alongside my daily life, not central to it. I started blogging all the way back in 2004, a great way to articulate all the ideas banging around my head back then. Did people read what I blogged? Not many, but I didn't really care, readership wasn't the point.
I finally had to get a cell phone when I moved out of grad school, an already antiquated flip phone I kept for four years until I replaced it with a slightly slimmer flip phone that a buddy of mine used to tease me for. When Facebook first hit the scene I signed up to see what it was all about, but I found it pretty vapid and disorienting. The world of smartphones and social media seemed like a useless time suck to me and I was pretty proud of being out of step. I spent my time at home listening to music and reading books, the thing that still relaxes me most. I didn't think I would ever bother changing my habits.
Then I got hooked.
Partly this was because I was living far away from most of my friends and family at the time, and Facebook offered a crucial lifeline to the people I missed most. More crucially, once I got my first smartphone about ten years ago, boredom mostly left my life.
My wife likes to joke that smartphones have helped reduce smoking since cigarettes used to be such an effective boredom killer. Stuck waiting for the bus? Sitting bored on the couch? Need to step out of a lame social engagement? Light up! This was brought home to me by the recent Get Back documentary about the Beatles' recording sessions in 1969. So much time is spent sitting around waiting for things to happen, and smoking the boredom away. Today folks in the studio could be checking Twitter or Instagram or playing games during downtime. Part of me wonders, however, if that boring downtime is actually crucial to the creative process, that our brains need to slow down to find the solution to our creative impasses.
In any case, my phone and social media have allowed me to lift the crushing weight of boredom. Waiting in line at the store, waiting for my train, getting my car fixed, and all other dull situations can be escaped. Instead of my mind wandering, I get to alternately chuckle at the jokes or get irritated by the discourse on Twitter. So many of the people on Twitter that I follow are also just so damn smart and insightful. Day to day conversations in real life can be so mundane, on Twitter I can get far deeper opinions on things I actually care about.
I am trying hard to reduce my social media usage, and with the changes on Twitter to ween myself off of that particular site altogether. I've gone from filling up those boring minutes to getting distracted when I am with my kids or agitated over stupid fights online. My new year's resolution this year is basically to use my smartphone and social media a lot less. I will report back later if having more boredom in my life is a good or bad thing.
Thanksgiving is usually one of my favorite holidays. I like its theme (thankfulness and reflection) and simplicity (get friends and family together for a giant feast of comfort food.) My emotions about it have never been that complicated.
This year is different, for some reason. Yesterday, riding home on the commuter train, I had a moment of existential horror. The holidays can comfort us in their regularity and rituals, but I suddenly felt overwhelmed by it all. Here I am, another year later, repeating the same old cycle until I'm dead. Once the holiday is over, there will be another round of miserable winter months, and after I endure them, I will have to suffer again in less than a year, and repeat that year after year after year after year.
These are the kinds of emotions that come with middle age, that moment when you realize the future you spent your youth planning is happening now and that the rest of your life is going to look a lot like the present, with a door to a new possibility slamming shut every single day until there aren't any left. I was kind of shocked by my horror and Thanksgiving because I have pretty much made peace with the life I have built and am happy to live it.
I suddenly realized that my emotions were actually coming from the missing chairs at the proverbial Thanksgiving table. In the last decade, I have lost many friends and family members. Some to death, and some to permanent falling out, which can feel like a kind of death. The deaths almost all took place in the late fall and early winter, so the sudden cold in the air was hitting the face of my memories, reminding me of funerals under the dismal November and December Nebraska skies. I also thought about the dark days of the pandemic, watching my Aunt Sue's funeral in Texas over a live stream, bawling my eyes out on my back porch between teaching Zoom classes.
It makes me think some of my dread comes also from the collective trauma of the past two and half years. This is our first post-pandemic Thanksgiving, and it's as if a million people didn't die and our lives weren't upended. For understandable but deeply unhealthy reasons, we are all going on as if nothing happened. All the sacrifices I made in those dark days have added up to nothing. Heck, considering how much teachers have been villainized nowadays, my sacrifices have added up to less than nothing. I guess I should have taken the day of my Aunt Sue's funeral off.
I had my moment of profound dread and sadness yesterday, so as a form of therapy common in my family today I threw myself into useful physical activity. I raked the leaves, got our malfunctioning toilet replaced, cleaned the house, baked a pie, and went for a long walk. I feel a lot better now. My time in Hot Stoic Summer reading Marcus Aurelius has paid off. I am following his advice and focusing on the thing before me and doing it. Most of the time that's all we can really do in this unyielding world.
Many of the people who made me who I am have died or become estranged from me, but I've got my own Thanksgiving traditions to maintain. Tomorrow my wife's family will be coming over, we will be preparing a feast, and I'll by watching the Macy's Parade with my kids. Instead of dreading having to repeat the cycle, I am relishing the break I am getting from the drudgery of daily life, a far worse repetitive cycle. You could even say I am thankful for it. I hope you too find your moments of comfort this holiday.
Loyal readers know that I have been trying to cope with my usual bouts of anxiety and depression during the summer by turning to Stoic philosophy. It's actually helped me a lot, especially Marcus Aurelius' command to do what's set out in front of you. I've been far less likely to doomscroll Twitter, and instead go swimming, walking, or do work around the house.
Now we are entering the time of summer that no one enjoys, not even the freaks who like baking in the sun: the late Dog Days. The first ten days of August are usually pretty miserable. Extreme heat after months of heat fatigue and the coming school year looming over my head. (For some of my friends and family in other parts of the country it means starting school now. Yikes!) People I know are likely to be out of town and there just seem to be fewer people around. The euphoria of summer felt back in June has fully worn off. I have hated this time since high school, when marching band required a "camp" that was spending all day marching in the blazing Nebraska sun.
In the spirit of Hot Stoic Summer I have been thinking of the unique pleasures of this time of year, and how I can embrace them to shake the malaise out of my head.
The first for me is baseball. The trade deadline is today, the moment when teams proclaim to the world whether they are contending or rebuilding for next year. With my Mets in first place, it's an especially thrilling time. The baseball season is long and each game is a drop in the bucket, until August. With pennant races heating up each game takes on more meaning. Even if my team is doing poorly I can enjoy the races and start having hopeful thoughts about next season. As a baseball fanatic I also enjoy how it's the last moment of baseball having the sports stage to itself before giving way to football.
Another is food. Growing up in Nebraska this was sweetcorn season, and we would be able to go to a farmer we knew and pick it straight off of the plant. Here in Jersey we always try to go peach picking right about now. Since moving here I like to take that sweetcorn and use it to make a low country boil. The heat makes it hard to bake but I can't resist making a pie around now, either. It just tastes better on days like this.
With it getting so hot another dog days pleasure is taking my kids to the town pool. It's within walking distance for us, and when we go we always seem to run into people we know. After the pandemic starved me of chance meetings it's a small pleasure in life I cherish more than I ever did before. Speaking of pandemic deprivation, I am using these last days of summer to visit my far-flung friends, too. Since so many of them are professors and teachers, it's far easier for me to do a short trip or casual drop-by. The heat is actually a benefit here, since it reduces the pressure to go out and do things when we are together. We can just sit and chat and stay out of the sun and feel like we haven't missed out on something.
The last two years have taught me that life is short and that I want to spend what little time I have left very intentionally. That insight has made me try to find what I can salvage even from this most miserable of weeks. I hope you find something more fun than band camp for yourself in these dog days.
My school year is almost done. The students have graduated, my reports are almost finished, and now I just need to hunker down for some meetings. Every summer I get major whiplash from having no time at all to having all the time in the world. This usually sends me into a spiral of anxiety and depression.
This spiral has been more acute in the last six years because I end up spending a lot of time reading the news and on Twitter. With the state of the world being what it is, my depression just ends up snowballing to the point where I get paralyzed with fear and anxiety. This year I have resolved to break this cycle.
Some of that is going to involve restrictions on my online time, some of it is going to involve a bunch of cleaning and home improvement projects, and I have decided some of it is going to involve better reading habits. Instead of descending into the swamps of online discourse every day, I want to explore Stoic philosophers.
For the last Christmas in the Beforetimes a dear friend and reader sent me a book about Stoicism. I didn't read it right away, but dug in during the start of the pandemic. I found much consolation in it, which started me back down a path of reading philosophy again. That experience has really helped me ward off the demons of despair. It has allowed me to be clear-eyed about how I am going to approach living the rest of my life in a broken world that will likely be a much worse place than the already bad one I was born into.
I don't go all in on Stoicism, but there's wisdom there to be mined in these awful times. Stoicism is ultimately about dealing with the fact that the world is a place rife with disappointment and suffering. Happiness is ephemeral, our inner sense of self is not. When faced with tragedy we need to steel ourselves. I don't embrace the Stoic denial of emotions, but if I can't get control of them I won't be able to function when a lot of people are relying on me.
So first up is going to be Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, which I will be reading with a former student. Not sure where I will go after that, but I'm hoping for a summer of wisdom and reflection.
I had a great day today. My wife and I took our kids into the city. We had a wonderful meal in Koreatown then went to Broadway to see Wicked, the first Broadway show for my kids. We were masked the whole time but it was still a sublime slice of "normal" fun after a year and a half of COVID. These are the kinds of days one cherishes.
This week also brought yet another release of The Beatles' Let It Be, a taste of the coming Peter Jackson doc. I put it on tonight after everyone else went to bed and the first song, "Two Of Us," resonated like never before. When it came out people thought it was about John and Paul, but it really describes a fun day Paul and Linda had together. It's a song about the quiet joy one gets when you've finally found the person you want to share your life with. Today for me was certainly a "four of us" version of that.
Back in my teens and twenties John was my favorite Beatle. I admired his rebellion and wit, but later learned he could be an abusive drunk. My belief in the Lennon myth had been punctured, and so I gravitated to George. In my tumultuous thirties I admired George's deadpan taking the piss attitude. As I struggled to find a way post grad school and eventually left academia I identified with George's frustrations in the band. His first album, All Things Must Pass, is loaded with amazing songs and proof that his talents were not being fully recognized. Laboring in the halls of academe as tirelessly as I did with so little reward made this something I could understand so well.
Strangely enough, I have elevated Paul to favorite Beatle status in my 40s. This was mostly due to becoming a family man and learning about how much Paul prioritized his wife and children. Linda got horribly mocked for her amateur musicianship but I still find it touching that Paul always had her by his side on the road. This is a man who had his priorities straight. Family was always more important than rock star decadence. (It has also become clear to me that Paul was both the best musician and song writer in the band.)
"Two of Us" also reflected Paul's correct instincts that the Beatles needed to get back to basics in order to stay relevant. Dylan's Basement Tapes and the first Band album were signs that psychedelia had played itself out and there was a need to "get back." The song is stripped down, driven by acoustic guitar and Paul's always supple bass playing. In sound and attitude it's a million miles from the likes of "I am the Walrus." Lyrically it's just a plain ode to having a great fun day with the ones you love. We have so few such days in our short lives of toil that we have to cherish the sublime ones we do get on occasion.
It has the repeated assertion "we're on our way home." My God it feels so good to have a home in this world. The biggest reason I left academia was the physical distance it put between my wife and I. Being together and starting a family was what I chose and I will never regret that. Days like today are why.
I turn 46 years old today, far enough into my 40s that I cannot deny that 50 is looming. This birthday I feel oddly at peace with that fact. It's taken me this long into my 40s to get comfortable with the reality that I have more yesterdays than tomorrows and that each day another door of possibility closes. These are difficult thoughts to sit with, and I have seen them cause a great deal of emotional distress. When you're young it feels like doors of possibility are constantly opening up, to lose that and live the opposite feels horribly cruel.
A few years ago I started to notice the unnamed problems of middle age. It's considered cringe and lame for middle-aged people to talk about the discontents of this life transition, so we rarely do. This only makes the problems worse. Imagine if we just ignored the emotional difficulties of adolescence? Middle age is just as trying to the soul, but in a different register. I have witnessed many people become bitter to the point that other people don't want to associate with them. I have seen others wall themselves off and give up on living. Others still descend into addiction.
The statistics show the toll. Even before COVID life expectancy was going down on America due to the opioid epidemic and increase in suicides and alcoholism. The main danger zone was among the middle aged, especially white working class women.
You go through your youth dreaming of the future, once you hit a certain age you realize that your present in going to be your future, every damn day until your looming demise. If, like a lot of working people, you spend your days doing shitty menial work for low pay and benefits and no financial security and your body is breaking down due to that work that fails to provide you a decent livelihood it's no wonder people turn to drink, the needle, or kill themselves. Even those who are more well-off must face the dread that they are not going to be able to break out of the rut they have found themselves in, albeit a comfier rut.
I've tried to not focus on the things that won't happen. I will likely never finish the book project I have been working on, for example. I will never be a respected historian. My writing will probably never reach a larger audience than this blog. That's okay. The last year and a half has been trying in the extreme, but my job is more meaningful than ever, even though it has been harder than ever. I own a house and have cleared my debts. I have a wonderful spouse and my children bring me joy even on the days that they annoy the hell out of me. As the last few years have shown, the world is unpredictable in horrific ways. Instead of being bitter about what I don't have, it's just best to enjoy what I've got.
The pandemic was also clarifying in terms of my middle-aged priorities. For instance, I got to spend a lot more time with my family, and I am glad for it. For me and a lot of other folks it seems to have pushed us to de-prioritize our jobs and careers. When death looms those PTS reports can sit for a bit. So on this birthday I'm going to take a little hike with my family and get some takeout. We'll watch a classic film I've been dying for my kids to see. What could be better?
At the end of the school year, with my reserves of energy depleted, I was in a meeting and for an ice breaker we were asked to say what the first sentence of our memoir would be. My response was "A voluntary exile is still an exile." Perhaps my complete fatigue had allowed me to dig deep for that insight, since I have been thinking about it ever since.
I will soon be driving back to my rural Nebraska homeland for the first time since Christmas of 2019. I am very excited to see my parents, sisters, niece, nephews, cousins, aunts, uncles, family friends, childhood chums, college compatriots and random encounters with old acquaintances. At the same time I have other, more conflicted emotions.
These stem from my voluntary exile.
While I long to see the endless Plains skies, the shoulder high July corn, and experience the eerie pressure drop whiplash of a prairie storm, I am dreading the negative comments about my move to the East Coast or the masks my children will be wearing in public places. A relative of mine is making a similar trip to the interior from the west coast, and we have promised to share a list of "WTF Americuh?!?" moments from our respective journeys to commiserate.
Every time I go home it feels more and more foreign to me. Some of this is to be expected, of course. People I know have died or left, old haunts have closed down. With the deepening political and regional divides, however, the sense of distance has intensified. For all intents and purposes, I have chosen the "other side."
The process began in my teen years, when my political consciousness emerged and I got some chances through school activities to go to cities (Omaha, St Louis, and Chicago). This happened after enduring years of bullying, which already made me feel like an outsider in my own hometown from a very young age. I knew probably as early as age 12 that I was not going to be staying in my hometown. It didn't feel like I was making a choice, more that it had been chosen for me. Still, I never saw myself going that far away. I went to college in Omaha, and for most of that time sort of figured that's where I would settle down. That way I could have the pleasures of a mid-sized city without really leaving my home region.
However, I embarked on an academic career and went to live in Chicago for two years after college, and that changed everything. Committing to that profession is like committing to the clergy, and I knew from that point that I would live wherever the four winds took me, which I pretty much did in the eleven years after I left Chicago. By the time all was said and done I met a Jersey girl and moved to the east coast and was working in Manhattan. At no point did I ever think I had to move back to Nebraska, but as the years went on I realized I had become a sort of voluntary exile.
Ten years ago when I moved from rural Texas to New Jersey the red-blue divide was stark; nowadays it seems completely insurmountable. The yard signs and bumper stickers tell the tale pretty clearly. The Black Lives Matter and LGBT signs and banners I see in my New Jersey neighborhood are far scarcer back home, where I am more likely to see anti-abortion billboards and Trump stuff. The feeling I get is that I am an imposter, a representative of enemy forces. A couple of times people I don't even really know have questioned my living in New Jersey when making casual conversation, as if there is something wrong with me. I dread having that happen again because my reservoirs of politeness have been drained.
This also pains me because as much as I felt alienated from my surroundings in my teen years, rural Nebraska still feels more like home than anywhere else. I feel like an imposter when I go back there, but I also have never really felt like I truly belonged anywhere else that I've lived, except for the college town where I went to grad school (which being a college town is a special case.) I like Jersey better than any of the many places I've lived since leaving home, but I don't know if it will ever be home to me like rural Nebraska is. The only thing I can do about it is make peace with the fact that I am a permanent exile.
New cases and infections have dropped drastically here in New Jersey as vaccinations have gone up. My kids are back in school and more and more of my students are opting to come in. It feels like we have finally turned a corner.
As is natural in a traumatized people after months of fear and death, just about everyone is ready to forget all of this and move on with their lives. I understand the impulse, but I think it will continue to allow people who did some truly terrible things to get let off of the hook.
We've been here before, of course. The traitors responsible for the Confederate rebellion and this country's deadliest war never faced punishment for their nefarious deeds. The slave labor camp masters still got to keep their land. After the civil rights movement only a smattering of the acts of horrific violence committed by the Klan and its allies in law enforcement were punished. Richard Nixon never spent a day jail for Watergate, George W Bush got to launder his image in retirement instead of facing war crimes charges. America is incapable of punishing its high malefactors of power because to do so would mean admitting that this nation is indeed not the land of the free and home of the brave.
We have already forgotten the how the last president's behavior cost hundreds of thousands of lives. He tried to pretend the virus wasn't happening, then promised a reopening in April of last year. He told people to inject bleach. He failed to create any kind of national policy, lazily giving responsibility to the states. He openly discussed denying aid to states with Democratic governors, forcing them to grovel while their people were dying.
The whole time his rank and file conservative supporters have been repeating the same mantra: "it's not a big deal!" They have expressed far more consternation and anger over having to wear masks than the deaths of over 600,000 of their fellow Americans. Last March it was "this is no worse than the flu" and then it became "it only hurts those who are sick and old" to now basically ignoring the deaths.
Well I do not aim to forget. I will never forget that when hundreds of people were dying every day here in New Jersey last spring there were conservatives complaining about "blue state bailouts" and the president making my governor humiliate himself to keep my fellow New Jerseyans alive. I may be capable of forgiving people I love when they stayed silent while my family and I were being endangered by the man they voted for. But I will not forget it. Never never never.
I won't forget how the local school board and teacher's union heads completely failed to find a workable solution this year, delaying my children's return to the classroom to May 3. I won't forget the people who behaved irresponsibly during the winter surge, helping the virus infect more people because going to brunch was oh so important. I won't forget how many of my friends and acquaintances felt free to slag teachers to my face with the patronizing assumption that I was "one of the good ones." I won't forget how employers did absolutely nothing to consider the burdens of working parents with "essential" jobs, sticking us with unbelievable stress and painful financial costs. I won't forget the people who cared more about having to wear a mask than the piles of dead bodies all around them. I won't forget the colleagues who stayed at home even after they were vaccinated while I was commuting for three hours a day every damn day and eating thousands of dollars in child care costs and doing the extra labor of watching over their virtual classroom for them.
I can forgive, and in many of these cases, I already have. But I will not forget. Not now, not ever.
But there are other things I won't forget. I won't forget how responsible and patient my children have been this last year under terrible circumstances. I won't forget the help we received from my in-laws, friends, and neighbors. I won't forget how hard most of my colleagues have worked to make hybrid and distance learning as close to what students are missing as possible. I won't forget the 98% of subway riders who have been willing to mask up. I won't forget the breaks and random acts of kindness I have received from my superiors at my job. Most of all, I won't forget the engagement and effort from my students, without which teaching in this way never would have been possible.
We must remember the good and the bad, and resist the urge to look away. If not, we will never fix what's wrong or derive needed inspiration from what we did right.
This past week I got new marching orders. From now until the end of the school year I am going to be teaching face to face in the classroom five days a week, as opposed to two. This weekend it suddenly hit me: I have perhaps taught my last class from home.
I have used four different spaces in my home as a classroom in the past year, all depending on availability and who was at home at the time. When it's been warm I have preferred our screened-in back porch. When I am here and my kids are too I've used either my office nook at the top of the stairs, or the guest bedroom if it was especially loud in the house. On those rare days when I was home alone I would use the dining room table, with our beautiful glassed-in cherry wood bookcase as a background.
Gone are the days of frantically preparing lunch for my children and desperately trying to keep them on task while I had my own work to do. Gone are the days as well of taking my laptop to the breakfast table at 7AM, the only hope I had of processing all of the mountains of work that needed to be done that day.
I will miss having a commute of one minute, and that is all I will miss. Parenting and teaching simultaneously is a nearly impossible task. It's also just really hard for me to concentrate on my work when I'm at home. Everything took more time to do, and while at home 11-12 hour work days were pretty regular.
The blurring of work and personal life has also been giving me a headache. A little compartmentalization is a good thing. I remember back to this fall when I watched the webcast of my aunt's funeral in Texas between teaching classes on my back porch. I was bawling my eyes out with my kids nagging me for attention while checking the clock to see when I had to be back in the classroom. I should have taken a personal day, but that just seemed weird considering I was already at home.
Leaving the virtual classroom behind is a reminder to me of the sacrifices and adjustments I have been forced to make over the past year. I despair thinking of how many of them will be made permanent. Every day I powered through a ridiculous amount of work while being my children's cook, nurse, and teacher's aide was a victory for the bosses. They could be oh so pleased that their employees didn't abandon them. We do it for the kids and not for the money, and I worry that makes us suckers.
So goodbye, virtual classroom. As exhausting as teaching hybrid is, I hope I can avoid you forever.
I trust most other people as much as I trust the Joker right now
The last four years, and the last year in particular, have reduced my circle of trust considerably. I get the feeling this is not an uncommon thing.
Trump's ascendancy was bad enough. Conservatives I've long disagreed with but respected showed me that deep down they were indifferent (at best) to fascism as long as it delivered what they wanted. It's made me question my trust in them, and even my trust in my own ability to see people for who they are. I at least thought (naively) back in 2016 that Trump's behavior once he took power might alienate them, but they gleefully doubled down. All of the lawbreaking, racism, family separations, and hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths from COVID only strengthened their ardor. The naked attempt to overthrow democracy on January 6th and the weeks leading up to the insurrection was met with silence (at best) or obfuscations and what-aboutism.
Despite all of that, COVID has eroded my trust in others far more. Every day I have commuted by train I have had to ride with people nose-hanging, chin-strapping, or outright refusing to wear masks. Every scroll through social media shows all the trips and visits and parties made with complete disinterest for the well-being of others. So many conversations reveal a lack of concern with the virus or even denial of its potency. Multiple people have told me of friends dying after contracting COVID, then sharply telling me "but that's NOT what killed them!" Others refuse to get vaccinated.
More personally, I have to hear teachers being attacked and dragged by frustrated parents who don't even consider the effect these statements have on me. (This goes for social media and more direct convos.)
All of this makes me feel like a sucker for trusting other people, and I was a distrustful person to begin with. I honestly don't know how I am going to be able to go through my day to day life in these circumstances. So much of quotidian existence relies on the trust that must be invested in others. I wonder sometimes if my standards are too high, if I am an insufferable killjoy, or more hypocritical than I realize. I don't think I am, but maybe you can correct me. Or maybe as a cishetero white guy I am having to confront something other people have been forced to reckon with far before this.
So far I have been leaning hard on the people I know can be trusted. They've been a rock for me in this. It just pains me to know that when this is all finally over I will be incapable of going through life the same way again. I am trying my best to forgive, but it seems impossible to forget.
Today I was suddenly overcome by a burst of burning rage inside me. It was sparked by the shamelessness of Trump's defense in the impeachment hearings, but it was not a new feeling.
It struck me that this is how I felt every single day for over four years. (The feeling began before November, 2016). Every single day I looked out at the world, at my government and my fellow citizens (including people very close to me) and just burned on the inside. This week I looked at the photos I took a year ago, right on the eve of COVID. I saw a selfie and it stopped me in my tracks. I must have aged five years in the last 11 months alone.
It's hard to walk around every day with the thought that people you love are complicit in fascism. It's hard to experience mass death met by government neglect. People here in Jersey were dying in droves back in the spring and much of the rest of the country didn't seem to care because they held us in contempt. It's hard to watch families broken apart, refugees having their hopes destroyed, good people deported, and democracy itself under attack.
On inauguration day my rage was released and I broke down and had an ugly cry. Years of fear and tension were leaving my body. Things are still bad, people are still dying, and the fascists are still out there, but at least I don't feel like there's a psychopath with the ability to destroy lives and upend the world while firing off tweets on the shitter.
The constant feeling that some horrible thing could come and sweep in at any moment and that so many in this country supported it kept the fire inside me burning. Getting a taste of that again today I do not know how I managed to survive it for four long years. We have been so keen to put the past behind us and forget about it. That's natural after trauma. Despite the pain of memory, I refuse to forget.
This wretched year of 2020 is finally coming to a close. Unfortunately, the forces of nature and history do not recognize dates on the calendar. The coming winter months will lead to a lot more COVID deaths and potentially more violence from right wing extremists. Nevertheless, I want to honor the dates on the calendar as a tool for some reflection.
Between the pandemic and the election, I consider 2020 to be the Great Unmasking. The realities of our society and a lot of the people I know have been revealed. This has been horribly disheartening but there have been a couple of bright spots. Some of the unmasking involves things I knew to be true but was loathe to confront.
For example, a lot of people I have known my entire life voted for Trump in the 2016 election. To a person those I had the most respect for did not vote for him in the primaries, and seemed to be voting for him in the general election out of their hatred of liberals (HRC was someone some of these folks had intensely hated for decades) or religious imperative to be anti-abortion. I thought that many of these people, after seeing the damage wrought by the past four years, would reconsider or maybe not vote. Instead they started openly praising Trump on social media and going to local rallies. I reproached myself for being so completely naive. Conservatism has become an authoritarian personality cult, why should I surprised that conservatives in my life, no matter how virtuous they are otherwise, would be taken in? Trump losing the election has helped me cope, but I know there's a lot of people in my life that I will never be able to view the same way ever again.
The same goes for responses for the pandemic, which are not easy to break down along political lines as you may think. I have seen a lot of selfish, irresponsible behavior from outspoken liberals with comfortable lives who did not need to break quarantine out of necessity. There's also people like the guy who owns the local comic book store, who never wears a mask or shield. I won't be patronizing that store anymore. There are also those in my community who quickly turned to demonizing teachers when they did not want to go back into the classroom out of health concerns. These are steadfast New Jersey liberals, not Trumpers I am talking about.
On top of this, of course, are the innumerable jackasses on public transit and in other crowded areas who refuse to mask up for some inscrutable reason. If the pandemic has taught me anything, it's that I should be very careful about who I trust. I learned this lesson before during my ill-starred time in academia, but I think after recovering from that experience I let my guard down a little too much.
Our society's hierarchies have been exposed this year like never before. In terms of race it was telling that many people in my life expressed angry outrage about looting in the aftermath of George Floyd's death and absolutely zero concern that his life was taken. The widely disparate impacts of the virus based on race and class have shown just how much racism and classism literally kill. I remember when the virus first hit, and the wealthy of New York City decamped to their second homes in the country while working class people of color stuck in overcrowded housing died in fearsome numbers.
We have also seen in the past year who actually does the most valuable work and how badly exploited they are. Delivery and truck drivers, nurses, warehouse workers, and grocery clerks have kept the country afloat. Teachers have completely changed their practice in impossible circumstances. What all these "essential workers" have received for this is just lip service. In fact, when someone calls you an "essential worker" you should run for the hills. It means you are about to be put in the line of fire to do grueling work with little regard for your safety. These essential workers will be facing layoffs and pay cuts (educators already are) when their work will no longer be considered so important. All the while the stock holders are still raking it in and university administrators whose only role has been to add to the burden of the educators on the front line are making top dollar.
(All this talk of "essential workers" should also have us asking some hard questions about the people whose work has been exposed as inessential. They should be feeling much, much more afraid than they are.)
The worst part is I do not see much changing positively after the pandemic. As the election showed, America's constitutional system and geography make sweeping change very difficult and 40% of the country is dead-set against any changes and will in fact burn the country down if they are attempted. Plenty of people who voted against Trump are still committed to the status quo. Since I work on the Upper West Side I have been exposed to multiple "liberals" who thought it was good that Biden won but the Democrats did not win the Senate. The class solidarity of keeping taxes on the wealthy low is not going to break anytime soon. Six months after the streets of America were full of more protest than I have ever seen in my life, many who paid lip service seem to have forgotten that moment even happened, and are secretly glad about it fading, too.
On a bigger scale, the pandemic was a test that this country has failed. We never had a national response, meaning the virus has never been under control. People refuse to cooperate with contact tracing, authorities refuse to enforce restrictions, and many worn down by months of sacrifice have understandably given up right at the moment when it's worse than ever. And so the deaths keep piling up, another 9/11 every two days in a country where many still say "it's no big deal."
It's the same country where our life expectancy was falling before this happened. The same country where suicides, drug overdoses, and gun deaths were epidemics that were also "no big deal." Plenty has been unmasked, but America's status as a nation that any other country would want to imitate is perhaps the biggest. I have never been more convinced that I stand a fair chance of outliving the United States. Currently doses of the long awaited vaccine may expire before they can be distributed. This country does not have much of a future, but it just might keep dragging its wrecked carcass around for a century more.
This year even I, a middle class cishetero white guy, got to experience what it's like when your own government abandons you. I remember how back in March and April, when the hospitals were overflowing in New York and New Jersey and the death totals spiked, yet the federal government did little to help. I remember people in other parts of the country acting as if it was our problem, and not theirs. They were fine letting people die here. Most people -including those in the Tri-State area- have forgotten about this. I never have, and I never will.
In the short term, I try to find hope. Trump will soon no longer be president. The vaccines are coming even if their distribution is being botched. A young generation took to the streets to demand justice this year, and their commitment gives me the most hope of all.
In my personal life I have tried to cling to what is good and sustaining. I have been able to spend so much more time with my wife and children, usually rare during the school year with our impossible commutes and schedules. I have strengthened friendships with friends who live both far and near. During the pandemic I fell in with a group of local dads and we started watching backyard movies every week together. For the first time since moving here seven years ago I feel like I am actually a part of the town I live in, rather than a temporary sojourner.
I have thrown myself into the work of distance and hybrid teaching and am quietly proud of how well this old dog has learned new tricks. I have had the joy of teaching sustain me through some difficult straits. Forget all the "essential worker" lip service, I am just glad to be doing work that actually matters. Not many people who make more money than me can actually say that about what they do.
And so I take joy in my family, take heart in my work, and spend my free time reading stimulating books and listening to music and getting a lot better at making pies and cornbread. My hope for the wider world is dim, but life is a short shining moment and I aim to make the best of it. Perhaps 2021 will be better. I am certainly mentally prepared for it to be worse.
This Thanksgiving is not one I could have ever anticipated. Back in March when my school went remote I was shocked when the head said we might be remote to the end of the school year. Now I wonder when the next day I teach all of my students in the classroom will come, if it ever will. Sometimes I think of the World War I trench soldiers who thought about the war just going on forever, an eternal hell.
This month has given hope and fear in equal measure. The election and news of successful vaccines has lifted my spirits, but inauguration isn't until January and the drugs have yet to be administered. In the meantime the infection rate has skyrocketed and the winter weather will only make things worse. Millions have decided to have a "normal" Thanksgiving in these circumstances that will probably kill more people than Sturgis did. Your move, Christmas.
In the past week things have been hitting closer to home. The households of friends have been hit by the disease, including in the house literally next door to mine. This feels like the proverbial darkest hour before the dawn. Well, at least I hope there's a dawn.
In the midst of this gloominess comes Thanksgiving, a time of reflection. As I take stock of things, I certainly have plenty to be thankful for. In this time of economic anxiety I still have my job, and my employer has to my estimation done a good job of keeping me safe even though I am going in to school. Because of quarantine I have been able to spend a lot more time with my wife and children, and I am glad for that. During normal work weeks my commute made it so I barely saw them, and that when I did I was either stressed trying to get to work or exhausted coming home from it. I know I am fortunate and am planning on making some donations to help people who have not been as lucky.
I am also feeling thankful on a slightly different level. This week I started reading Thoreau's Walden, a book I had been circling around for almost thirty years. I had heard such conflicting things about it, but in September we took a trip to Cape Cod and I picked up his travelogue of the area at a local bookstore. I found that I really liked his prose style, so often derided by others.
Some books that are assigned to high school students never should be, and Walden is obviously one of them. The issues it raises only become clear once one has gone far into adulthood. At a certain point, usually middle age, most people realize they are no longer becoming the person they will be, but have already become the person they will be for the rest of their lives. This reckoning can be a tough one, and one no teenager on earth can truly comprehend. (And that's to be expected! Let them have their days in the sun because the sun will soon be clouded.)
The question the book forces the reader to ask, again and again, is "What am I doing with my life?" The one true gift the horror of COVID and the boredom of quarantine has given me is the clear knowledge that I am not wasting it. My work as a teacher, especially under the demands of quarantine, is difficult and draining. But it is also meaningful. I know what I am doing makes a positive impact on my students, and the paper shufflers, bureaucrats and salesman that make double and triple my salary really can't say that. All the time with my family has brought home to me that I have made the right choices in my priorities.
When this all started I had a couple of days of deep reflection, wondering if my soul was prepared if my life were to be taken in the pandemic. I have so much more to live for, but if the universe doesn't have that in the cards for me I know I did a lot with the time I managed to eek out. For that, I am thankful.
