Tag: quarantine

Blog

Right of Way

I got unexpectedly emotional driving home from my COVID test tonight when a line of cars (myself among them) pulled over to let two blaring firetrucks barrel past on their way to make someone’s Very Bad Day less worse.

There it was! An immediate, unspoken acknowledgement that there are more important things going on right now, followed by straightforward collective action to protect and support the people most involved in addressing the crisis at hand.

It doesn’t take a lot, on a day where I’ve passed a boisterous group of twelve unmasked diners on a restaurant patio, to feel overwhelmed seeing people do something that comes from an ethic of mutual care.

I know pulling off the road for 30 seconds isn’t the same as asking the entire populace to avoid human contact for twelve straight months, but I still wish it could be this easy. We’ve clearly figured out how to do this as a society sometimes, y’know? It’s just a question of extending that behavior in a wider circle.

Blog, Brain Food

Higher Education

I’m a hindsight junky. I’m always flipping through old journals and sketchbooks, trying to find a narrative through-line that I can string up and hang insights on like so much laundry. The weird contemplative timelessness of Quarantine—not to mention the exhaustive self-reflection that tends to accompany a breakup—has only encouraged this behavior. But it’s not recriminatory! I love making sense of my life this way; seeing how the seeds of everything dear to me took root far earlier than I could’ve known.

2016 to 2020: a period bookended by two formative talks. The first wrestling with the paradox of gaining professional recognition faster than my financial situation was improving, the second realizing what I wanted to do with my time once that discrepancy had evened out.

Those four years also held a presidential term of unprecedented dreadfulness, a deeply formative relationship, profound shifts in my creative practice, and the growing realization that the systems underpinning this country are deeply broken. My undergraduate degree also took this amount of time, albeit from 2009-2012, which has had me thinking about the last four years as an education of its own. What do I hold a degree in now?

I asked people this question on Twitter, and the responses were predictably fascinating and funny in equal measure, but I wasn’t sure how to bring the conversation to this venue. And THEN the other day I saw Robin Sloan playing with inline response forms via his newsletter/blog and everything clicked into place. The invitation to contribute creates a bit of interactive magic without the bloat of a comments section—just a quick way to remind the reader that this is a collaborative experiment.1 I thought implementing something like this was out of my technical reach, but it turns out I have a plugin for contact forms already installed, so LET’S TRY:

    (If you’re reading this via RSS, the contact form doesn’t carry over. Beyond my skill to heal, I’m afraid, so just open this post in your browser if you’re dying to play.)

    Maybe I’ll update this post with some of your impressive new diploma titles? But then again, maybe not.

    1. I know I’ve said that I like how private this space feels right now, and this could break that illusion by inviting people to get in touch, but I also really like tiny emails as a form of call and response—and I’m not asking for anyone’s name or email address, so I literally can’t respond. ↩

    Blog

    In the Beginning

    “I miss possibility,” she says.

    It’s March 29th and we’re walking home through falling blossoms, couples edging off the sidewalk to avoid coming within contagion distance as we pass. We point at the rippling edges of tulips, paint jobs on houses we’ve never seen before. I look for sequences of color in the world—a car (orange) parked in front of a stop sign (red), and behind them both: a glass recycling bin (yellow).

    This is one of my favorite games.

    “I could take a dance class, I could go to a coffee shop, I could go out with friends and buy flowers and try things on at Goodwill.” We sidestep a Russian family gathered around a call on speakerphone.

    “God I miss Goodwill.”

    I keep my mouth shut, feeling traitorous because this absence of choice is precisely the thing that’s granted me a giddy sense of freedom over the past week. I am no longer paralyzed by lost opportunities, choosing incorrectly, disappointing those around me. Something is coming to the fore that hasn’t previously been heard over the din of expectation and activity.

    Maybe the thing that’s emerging in this space is me.