Mutating like a virus

It's Mother's Day, quiet outside except for the wind. Delicious breakfast in bed — I'm so lucky. My mother will have to leave her bed to collect delivery at the front door.

It's day 60 at home, and I'm on a 68-day streak of German lessons on Duolingo. Es hilft nichts.

The workweek was long. Apart from the usual stresses — underestimating the time required for one project, misreading the deadline on another — I made a great mistake in judgment. We had a townhall meeting, over the lunch hour, and for some reason I thought I'd like to leave my workspace, such as it is, at the end of the kitchen counter, to curl up in bed with a blanket to watch it on my laptop. So I did. And at some point I found myself monitoring communications on a particular project. And I looked around me and started crying. Not only has my job invaded my home, it managed to infiltrate my bed and made me think it was my idea.

Last night I dreamt about work, a rush project handed to me in a physical file. The editing work was simple, but the instructions for transmission were byzantine — changes needed to be described according to a precise formulation, handwritten into the boxes on the form in triplicate (ensuring the carbon copies were legible) and delivered by fax. I had to take a bus (the 125 past the university — meaningless to me in real life) and I waited in a parking lot for a very long time. The work was done just before deadline, but the form took several more hours to complete and it jeopardized my employment.

In another dream this morning I went to the spa but everyone was breaking the rules, bringing food and drink and their pet dogs. I had a key (I'd taken it from someone) but no one would help me find the locker it belonged to. The neighbourhood was still in lockdown but the spa was crowded, and I was appalled by the lineup for the public toilets (it looked a little like the cloister in Marrakech). I couldn't understand why the authorities would've shut off the beautifully sculpted water fountain.

Fuck the Bread. The Bread Is Over.

What does it mean to be worth something? Or worth enough? Or worthless? What does it mean to earn a living? What does it mean to be hired? What does it mean to be let go? [...]

And maybe the bread, as I've always understood it, really is over. The new world order is rearranging itself on the planet and settling in. Our touchstone is changing color. Our criteria for earning a life, a living, is mutating like a virus that wants badly to stay alive. I text a friend, "I can't find bread flour." She lives in Iowa. "I can see the wheat," she says, "growing in the field from outside my window." I watch a video on how to harvest wheat. I can't believe I have no machete. I can't believe I spent so many hours begging universities to hire me, I forgot to learn how to separate the chaff from the wheat and gently grind.

I participated in a research study that aims to understand the psychological impact of the current pandemic. Asked to respond to "My life has meaning and purpose," I replied, not at all. I firmly believe my life, all life, has no purpose, but this is no bad thing. I find this beautifully liberating in fact. If there is no purpose, one cannot fail to achieve it.