This week is also the anniversary of adopting Toby, prince among cats, who is living his absolute best life with everyone home right now. Every time I think about what this kitty has meant to me and helped me through, I can only think of my mom saying, “You and he are just really bonded.” Indeed.
(Photo by Doc, the only male Toby will permit to touch his head. What honor!)
After you’ve worked from home in elastic-waist pants and a knit top (with a real sports bra underneath!), what nicer feeling than to change into even COMFIER elastic-waist pants and a DIFFERENT knit top?
I didn’t buy all these fabrics with the intention of making a new wardrobe of pajamas to wear at home during a pandemic, but it happened to work out that way:
Last week I didn’t really get “dressed” for working at home and I felt like a slug by the end of the week, so this week I’m putting on woven pants (ok, they still have an elastic waist) from 9-5. Which makes changing into fresh spring loungewear at the end of the day even better.
Saturday was the sixth anniversary of Doc and I meeting at a friend’s birthday dinner. We talked about that night and the span of time since then and I jokingly said, “Thanks for staying on the emotional roller coaster with me.” Then I realized it had been a roller coaster, and how much had happened: the country went to shit after 2016, I started therapy and anxiety meds, we lost Mom, now there’s a pandemic and earthquakes and god knows what else.
Through it all, though, Doc has been there for me–being reliable, telling jokes, adjusting to things long before I do. He is my rock, which is a thing I would never have said before therapy. But thankfully I’ve learned that humans have evolved to need close personal connections. Having that need met doesn’t make you weak; it makes you lucky.
I say it every year, every birthday with him, but there hasn’t been another phrase that captures that feeling of winning the cosmic lottery better than Sagan’s: “In the vastness of space and the immensity of time, it is my joy to share a planet and an epoch” with him. Thank you for being there, honey. I love you.
1. We’ve made it through the first week of isolation. Every day is an emotional roller coaster for me, but it’s hard to have every routine totally upset. I, um, punched my punching bag off its hanger yesterday morning so, you know, we’re working through all the feelings as best we can.
2. It was the Spring Equinox yesterday–the earliest it’s been in over a century. My friend sent out a lovely newsletter for it about courage and change and gardening, literal and figurative:
As you are present with how you are feeling, allowing yourself to experience the slower pace, more stillness, you are prepping the soil. As you tune into what feels like the next best step for you, for your family you begin planting seeds to heal the shock of rapid change and gently rebuild trust in the power of creation.
3. Do you need something to read? Libraries are closed but you can still get ebooks and audiobooks sent to your phone or Kindle. Here’s a list of recommendations–they all looked good.
4. Do you need some opera in your life? (Who doesn’t?) The Met is live streaming an opera every night for the foreseeable future. Sunday night is Onegin with Hvorostovsky!
How’s everyone doing? I slept with the emergency go-bag and a flashlight next to the bed last night, but so far <knocks wood> no more earthquakes. Back to worrying about plague instead of natural disasters!
I’m assuming that, like me, everyone needs distractions and reassurance. Something that distracted and reassured me on Monday was Robin Sloan’s March newsletter. It’s rambling, it’s full of links, it has C.S. Lewis quotes about hard times, and tells us how to keep going when nothing seems to matter:
We’re entering a stretch during which no subject, no task, other than this pandemic and its prevention will seem to “matter,” and I am here to insist, as you contemplate the next level of the video game you were building, the next stitch in the fanny pack you were designing, the next edition of the newsletter you just started:
It matters.
[…]
Every calamity fractures the world, opens new seams: many economic, some political, still others aesthetic.
In 1816, the gloomy “Year Without a Summer,” Mary Shelley stayed indoors at a lakeside hotel; not quarantine, but maybe quarantine-adjacent. There, bored and haunted, she conceived the story that would grow into her novel Frankenstein, the foundation stone of the genre we now call science fiction.
It’s moderately annoying when people invoke work like that, because it feels like the implication is, if you’re not writing Frankenstein what are you even DOING? That’s not what I mean. It’s just that the big, bright examples help us see it clearly: toil in the shadow of calamity will have its day.
Toil in the shadow of calamity WILL have its day.
A crack in everything; that’s how the art gets in.
Jesus CHRIST, as if the news every day about a global pandemic weren’t bad enough, Salt Lake was hit with a 5.7 earthquake this morning. I’ve never felt one that strong and, as my friend said, “I didn’t know my house could move like that, and I don’t like it.”
So! Let’s read some Mary Oliver in addition to using ALL of our anxiety-coping tools. Because I think this is all of us right now, worrying:
I Worried
I worried a lot. Will the garden grow, will the rivers
flow in the right direction, will the earth turn
as it was taught, and if not how shall
I correct it?
Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven,
can I do better?
Will I ever be able to sing, even the sparrows
can do it and I am, well,
hopeless.
Is my eyesight fading or am I just imagining it,
am I going to get rheumatism,
lockjaw, dementia?
Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing.
And gave it up. And took my old body
and went out into the morning,
and sang.
(From Swan: Poems and Prose Poems)
This is going to be the last “modeled” shot for a while (taken last week) but it definitely won’t be the last of the Greenstyle Brassie Joggers–this is my fifth to date (only the third blogged) and I stress-sewed two more pair this past weekend for comfy isolation wear.
These are in an Ankara print “DTY knit,” which I’d never heard of before, from a big Fabric.com order after Christmas. To me, the DTY (draw textured yarn) feels like a cross between a brushed nylon/Supplex activewear and a double brushed poly knit. It has that cotton-y feel of the Supplex and the softness (but not the sponginess) of a DBP.
Either way, I wore them to work last week and then to dinner with my BFF and he saw them and exclaimed, “Are those Pucci?” Quite a win for what could be pajama pants.
These are unknown times, my friends. I was working from home but still going to the gym at off hours. Doc, who works retail, was still going to his shifts (along with the rest of the store). I got Anne Helen Petersen’s newsletter Sunday morning and it finally hit me that what we were doing wasn’t enough:
It’s difficult to strike the right tone here, between inspiring the appropriate amount of concern to actually act and scaring or lecturing in a way that makes people shut down or become obstinate. Last week my approach was encouraging us all to be proactive, and think of what we could do for our communities. This week, I keep thinking of a line from this harrowing piece from an Italian in the Boston Globe:
“We thought a few local lockdowns, canceling public gatherings, and warmly encouraging working from home would be enough stop the spread of the virus. We now know that wasn’t nearly enough.”
People are hoarding toilet paper because they are scared of the abject worst: what will happen if society unravels, if we lose our ability to sustain the practices, routines, postures that make us feel human today. This, I think, is such a huge part of why people are still going to bars, why older people are insisting on keeping up their routines, why people are furtively going to the gym and telling themselves it’s okay because they’re wiping down the equipment. If you behave like nothing’s happening then maybe nothing will. This delusion will be responsible for so much continued spread, so much unnecessary suffering.
[emphasis mine]
Yes, I felt personally called out by the gym comment. But after I read that Boston Globe article she linked, I felt more and more strongly that we needed to cancel EVERYTHING for the next two weeks. No trip to Lowes to pick up the shower door, no more gym, no visits to family (Dad! I’ll call you!), groceries only when we absolutely have to. Doc was going to take some sick time and stay home–when he emailed his boss Sunday night, he got the reply that REI was closing all stores* and giving employees their pay to stay home.
I still know some people who think all of this is a huge overreaction, and I hope it is! But for now I’m behaving like the only thing I can do to help this situation is to have no social contact. If you have the ability to do that, too, please join me. (And let’s all be thankful we have a fabric stash.)
*From the press release: “Our decisions are grounded in the belief that there are more important things than business right now—we owe that to one another.”
1. I got the OK to start working from home yesterday, my state seems to be taking things seriously and canceling lots of events, and I went to therapy last night–so I’m feeling better all around. My therapist’s take on it: “The world needs a two-week time out.” Looks like I picked the right month to sew a bunch of stretchy pants.
2. This also made me feel better (yes it’s from Twitter whoops I was back on):
i think the impulse for many people is to look at things closing down or events cancelling right now as a sign of doom, but for the most part i think it’s cause for optimism—someone in charge of something is taking this seriously, and doing what they can to limit interactions
— Amanda Mull (@amandamull) March 12, 2020
3. The most important question of all: Is It Safe to go to the Gym in the Midst of the Coronavirus Outbreak? (Short answer: yes if you and your household are healthy, be clean, avoid crowds.)
Whew. Hang in there, friends. We’re all in this together.
As my anxiety ratchets higher and the world gets crazier, this post from Allyson Dinneen (the “Notes From Your Therapist” Instagram account) is gonna be my new motto:
