You too have experienced time

And then it is another day and another and another, but I will not go on about this because no doubt you too have experienced time.

There's a lot happening in this little book, even while it feels like there's nothing happening at all.

Just the other day I heard one woman tell another that slowness is a form of goodness.

Weather, by Jenny Offill, covers climate crisis and survivalism, drug addiction and depression. Relationships under strain. Health concerns and health care concerns. The political climate. How to turn dread into action. How to use a can of tuna as an oil lamp. How life doesn't quite go to plan. Whom to invite into your doomstead.

Spare on the surface but dense with meaning, as the LARB put it.

This book was released February 11, with several positive reviews published at that time and throughout the month, largely before COVID-19 affected our privileged Western lives in a material way. Had it been released a scant six weeks later, it might've been considered in a different light.

My reading of it, the beauty of it for me, is inextricably linked to the backdrop against which I experienced it.

There is a period after every disaster in which people wander around trying to figure out if it is truly a disaster. Disaster psychologists use the term "milling" to describe most people's default actions when they find themselves in a frightening new situation.

We've been milling for weeks now. We are milling at home alone. Don't go out unless you need to, they tell us.

"Why don't they farm deer?" I wonder. "Is it because they are too pretty?" She shakes her head. "It's because they panic when penned."

Groceries once a week. The occasional sanity-preserving walk to breathe in the fresh air, although it's sometimes more stress-inducing than is worth it. Avoid physical proximity; nod in acknowledgement when someone veers off the sidewalk to make way.

"Make eye contact and small talk. This is not just polite. It is a way to stay in touch with your surroundings, break down unnecessary social barriers, and come to understand whom you should and should not trust. If we enter a culture of denunciation, you will want to know the psychological landscape of your daily life."

It is eerie how relevant I find her words. I did not read this novel for plot; I read it slowly, for daily meditation.

It is important to remember that emotional pain comes in waves. Remind yourself that there will be a pause between the waves.

Tragically, I will not remember this as a novel that inspires environmental change. There is no disaster event, other than the one we've lived with for years. No climate climax. Weather does not show us a world gone wrong, but slowly going wrong, anticipating the effects. It's the atmosphere we live in, and with a more pressing crisis now invading our lives, it's hard to remember that we even care about the environment. It's a luxury to think about the future of the planet when our daily actions may have more immediate life-or-death consequences.

Ironically, pollution is down and oil consumption has dropped drastically, as traffic dwindles to a trickle of essential services.

He tells me that at the wilderness camp they teach the kids something called "loss-proofing." In order to survive, you have to think first of the the group. If you look after the needs of others, it will give you purpose and purpose gives you the burst of strength you need in an emergency. He says you never know which kids will do well. But in general the suburban kids do the worst. They have no predators, he says.

Weather is full of meditative wisdom, though it hits a mark other than the one intended.

The book ends in hope, kind of. Disaster doesn't strike, it only continues to loom. Everything seems to come into balance.

Literally, the closing page leads us to the Obligatory Note of Hope, where Offill invites us to consider, "How can we imagine and create a future we want to live in?" She also offers Tips for Trying Times, which I find are perfectly suited to these pandemic days.

It's summer and there's nowhere for anyone to go.

"Why did you wash your hands for so long?"

"They were very dirty."

Love in the time of corona

Allegedly you are not supposed to cut to the chase and ask your fellow dater to tell you about the time he was most soul-crushingly lonely. Allegedly this is not a best practice. But it makes a date so much less boring.

I considered deleting my dating apps. What's the point of them? It's not like I could actually meet up with someone for a date these days. Besides, I'm too busy barely surviving and self-caring and learning German.

But sometimes those apps help keep boredom at bay, if not loneliness. They help me maintain romantic hope: some photogenic and articulate man will someday swipe me off my feet.

Maybe this plague will give me perspective. Dating has been tiring and tiresome of late. Generally I prefer to meet my potential matches as soon as possible — in-person chemistry is so important — but the rules are changing.

I don't know what's wrong with me. I can't seem to stop making bad decisions. The weird thing is they don't sneak up on me. I can see them coming all the way down the pike.

Maybe I could use this time to consider what it is I really want and possibly even nurture something meaningful through text.

I shouldn't be surprised: dating apps are seeing a lot of activity during lockdown, you horny bastards. Men I barely glanced at are suddenly concerned for my well-being. At least there are some forthright ones among them: "Wanna have video sex?" (I don't see the point of video sex with a stranger. I date because I want someone to touch me.)

One fellow invited me over to his place, suggesting I simply stay there for the duration. In another lifetime I might've taken him up on it. But plague-dating requires a different level of trust.

I just... I couldn't bear the part where you fell out of love with me, I tell the guy who smiles at me on the subway. Telepathically. But he hears me. Now he's playing some game on his phone, not looking at me at all.

Techniques for calming a fearful mind

There are little signs everywhere in the library now that say BREATHE! BREATHE! How did everyone get so good at this breathing thing? I feel like it all happened while I was away.

Today nothing much happened. I feel outside of time.

I burst into tears while making my morning cappuccino. The coffee was so much better at the office. Maybe it's the hormonal flood of PMS, or the onset of menopause, one or the other, I can't tell which. Maybe it's because I didn't sleep well.

I'd read an article before going to sleep about a study of coronavirus in cats and whether they could carry the virus from human to human. Apparently cats can become infected from a human and can pass the disease to other cats, and if you are sick, you should protect your pet by keeping your distance. Yesterday I'd noticed Rosie sneezing more than usual, so I drifted off to sleep thinking I must've picked up the virus on my grocery excursion, I must be asymptomatic, and Helena's simply lucky, or immune, and while I've been wallowing in the company of my cat and relishing our early mornings together when she burrows into my right hip, the whole time I have in fact been killing her, and this preoccupied my dream life last night.

I tried to work, but that didn't go very well. I'm mad at myself for having taken on work I shouldn't have to do. I'm mad at myself for not initially understanding the extent of another job. And I'm mad at myself for not being able to pay attention.

At least I had a yoga break (via Zoom, with coworkers), difficult as I find it to breathe these days. I zoned out through my other two meetings today.

I did spend some downtime deliberating over which jigsaw puzzle to purchase. My current puzzle is 2000 pieces and slow going, it's fucking hard actually, a veritable tsunami of puzzle, everything is blue. I bought it for myself at Christmas because I like to have a puzzle to get me through the cold, but this winter I went to Morocco instead, as if I knew I wouldn't have the opportunity to travel again anytime soon, as if I knew I should save that puzzle for a metaphorical rainy day. Ordinarily when I start a puzzle, I have to finish it — I forgo sleep and showers and spend all my time on it. But this is no Christmas vacation. There's no deadline — it's not as if I have to clear the table before the dinner party. So I've been pacing myself. But someday in the not-too-distant future I will finish it. I have my eye on a couple 4000-piece more-conventional landscapes, and I should pick one while shipping is still available.

I wonder if I were reading something other than Weather right now, would I also find it profoundly appropriate?

Q: What are the best ways to prepare my children for the coming chaos?

A: You can teach them to sew, to farm, to build. Techniques for calming a fearful mind might be the most useful though.

The incredulity response

"Wait," I say. "Were you talking about seconds? When you said you were so out of step and living slowly, did you mean by seconds?" She considers this. "Yeah," she says, "seconds probably."

I feel out of step.

Today I had a nap. A rainy-day late-afternoon two-hour nap. An emotionally necessary nap, not a physical one. I feel guilty about it. I need to make up work time.

Apparently thousands of masks arrived in Quebec the other day, which were then mysteriously routed to Ohio.

They are starting to fine people for being outside unnecessarily, for gathering. This is fast becoming constitutionally treacherous territory. As if groups of two or more might be "conspiring." (Conspiring to what?)

The provincial premiers plan to release their modeled projections, but the prime minister is holding back. What does he not want us to know? Is he afraid of instilling panic? What would we do as a panicked society? The toilet paper and the flour are already gone. Congregate in the parking lot of Timmie's?

Or is it a question of timing? Maybe he's timing the panic response for maximum effect. To stop us dead in our tracks.

"What it takes to survive a crisis" looks at how people respond to life-threatening situations:

People simply don't believe what they're seeing. So they go about their business, engaging in what's known as "normalcy bias." They act as if everything is OK and underestimate the seriousness of danger. Some experts call this "analysis paralysis." People lose their ability to make decisions.

The incredulity is starting to wane. We are entering another phase.

But this is a crisis on another scale. The times call for a benevolent dictator. We might be lucky. If we're lucky.

Weather is clearly about a different sort of crisis, but it's discussed (to this point) only tangentially. The feeling of crisis is broadly applicable.

That night on the show, there's an expert giving advice about how to survive disasters, natural and man-made. He says it's a myth that people panic in emergencies. Eighty percent just freeze. The brains refuses to take in what is happening. This is called the incredulity response. "Those who live move," he says.

Where can we move to?

The acceleration of days

Young person worry: What if nothing I do matters?

Old person worry: What if everything I do does?

Day 21 of wfh. Today I went to the grocery store.

I woke later than planned. No reading ritual, straight to work. There is not enough separation between work and real life these days. Whatever "real life" is.

I'm trying to find the optimal off-peak shopping time. I wanted to put in a couple hours before a midmorning excursion.

Today I put on real pants, not yoga pants or cozy leggings.

I haven't done groceries in two weeks. I used to simply pick up whatever I needed on my way home from work. I haven't figured out how to shop in this new world. I made a list, but it stopped making sense as I filled my cart. It doesn't help that my local grocery store recently renovated and reorganized. I don't know where anything is anymore.

In and out, they say. Be efficient with your time and in your choices. I have a mini meltdown in aisle five because I can't find any harissa spice blend. If they've stopped carrying it, my life will change drastically.

Part of the stress of shopping lies in the mystery of what I may bring home with me. Not so much that I will be infected — I don't matter — but that I will inadvertently infect my daughter. She's not a child anymore, but I'm still responsible for her. It's not just me fending for myself.

It's a variation of the rescue distance: the further I venture from our safehouse, the more chance of encountering a disease vector that will lock onto me and breach our perimeter.

I bought flowers.

I got home in time to catch the last half of my workplace's guided meditation session. (What does "workplace" mean if it's not a place anymore?) I notice that I spend a lot of the time holding my breath.

I changed my pants. Real pants are overrated.

This evening I read a few more pages of Weather. The narrator (does she have a name yet?) tried a meditation class. Like me. She's cynical. She's a realist. She has garbage to take out.

My #1 fear is the acceleration of days. No such thing supposedly, but I swear I can feel it.

The moon will be fine

It's been twenty days of working from home. I feel flabby and sluggish. And there is too much to do.

This evening I turned my bathroom into a spa, tried to melt my muscles with epsom salts. My new work environment is clearly non-ergonomic.

I miss my commute, my reading time. A few mornings last week, I sat in my nook with my morning coffee and read. I need to reinforce this ritual.

But tonight I read in the bath. Weather, by Jenny Offill. It's off to a terrific start. It's a short book and I want to savour it. I need to slow down.

Despite not having as much time to read, I feel I've been racing to get the end of too many books lately (though, sometimes legitimately so, before my library ebooks expired into the ether).

I'm a person who likes slow things, like the boy in Lost Children Archive has reminded me to be, even if I generally manage to keep up.

The narrator said her brother "missed drugs because they made the world stop calling to him." Calling to him for him to intervene? Or to succumb? I wonder if the world called to my brother too. Crazy, fucked up world.

The moon will be fine, I think. No one's worrying about the moon.

Speculation

The Buddhists say there are 121 states of consciousness. Of these, only three involve misery or suffering. Most of us spend our time moving back and forth between these three.

I've had trouble reading lately. Doing much of anything really. I can't focus, yet I need to distract myself.

Enter Jenny Offill's Dept. of Speculation. It's damn near the most perfect book I could've hope for, for my here and now. "The wife is praying a little. To Rilke, she thinks."

It mirrors my reality, so that I may reflect upon it. I want to read it again immediately.

It's the story of love and marriage and a lovely daughter, and betrayal.

Taller?
Thinner?
Quieter?
Easier, he says.

I also was not a good wife. I also go to yoga to cry.

The wife has never not wanted to be married to him. This sounds false but it is true.

She has wanted to sleep with other people, of course. One or two in particular. But the truth is she has good impulse control. That is why she isn't dead. Also why she became a writer instead of a heroin addict. She thinks before she acts. Or more properly, she thinks instead of acts. A character flaw, not a virtue.

It's so hard to be kind.

Reviews
"The Smallest Possible Disaster," by Elaine Blair in The New York Review of Books:

In the history of the novel, female adulterous desire has been a major force, female jealousy a minor one.

"Bridled Vows" by Roxane Gay in The New York Times:

The wife's pain and sorrow are rendered through a wryer brand of observation as she becomes the betrayed. It is easy to feel for her because she is a desperately interesting character. Each newly disclosed flaw only makes her more compelling. In fact, we know everything about the wife and how she thinks and feels and moves through the world. It is much more difficult to feel anything about the marriage because the husband is so secondary a character. He is an accessory and a bit player in the wife's meditations.

(My husband was always a secondary character.)

"Mother Courage," by James Woods, in The New Yorker:

If it is a distressed account of a marriage in distress, it is also a poem in praise of the married state. If it brutally tears apart the boredom and frustrations of parenthood, it also solidly inhabits the joys and consolations of having a child. If it laments the work not done, the books not written, the aspirations unfulfilled, it also represents work well done, a book written, the fruit of aspiration. [...] It is often extremely funny, and often painful; earnestly direct but glancingly ironic, even whimsical.

If you had a crooked heart

It is important if someone asks you to remember one of your happiest times to consider not only the question but also the questioner. If the question is asked by someone you love, it is fair to assume that this person hopes to feature in this recollection he has called forth. But you could, if you were wrong and if you had a crooked heart, forget this most obvious and endearing thing and instead speak of a time you were all alone, in the country, with no one wanting a thing from you, not even love. You could say that was your happiest time. And if you did this then telling about this happiest of times would cause the person you want to be happy to be unhappy.

— from Dept. of Speculation, by Jenny Offill.

I sometimes think I have a crooked heart.