Inaudible

For the first time in a while, I have unused Audible credits, and a pile of unplayed episodes from even my favorite podcasts. Turns out, the vast majority of my prior listening time was either commute- or shopping-related, and I’ve jettisoned both of those almost entirely from my quarantine life.

Indeed, as my daily rhythm has shifted during this pandemic, I’ve dropped a ton of habits and technologies that were otherwise just defaults. If nothing else, it’s been a good chance to see which ones I actually miss in their absence – and miss enough that I’m willing to proactively find ways to add back in.

As I’m still using Streaks to track a more limited daily habit rotation, and still sticking to a wildly pared down project / to-do list, those constraints, plus rebuilding my schedule from scratch, are a pretty excellent way to hone in more generally on what matters to me in everyday life.

April 19, 2020

Somnambulate

Out of an abundance of caution, Jess and I have been staying almost entirely indoors, aside from our weekly-ish trips to the grocery store and our building’s laundry room.

But as recent research seems to imply that longer-distance airborne transmission is unlikely, and as we had started to go a little stir-crazy with apartment fever, last night we strapped on masks, and braved a long walk through Central Park.

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The paths were almost entirely deserted. Which, on top of our general anxiety these days, gave everything a subtle undercurrent of dread.

Still, as we looped around the Reservoir, I was increasingly glad to be out, reminded of how beautiful NYC is.

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Even if, at every turn, we were confronted by small reminders that these aren’t normal times.

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Or, at least, not normal times for humans. The rats and squirrels and ducks and racoons were out en masse. And the flora had begun to awaken for spring, flowers sprouting and trees budding all around us.

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At the top of the reservoir, we saw lights that weren’t normally there, and realized it was the (controversial, evangelical-run) COVID-19 field hospital.

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It was still a ways off in the distance, but we were doubly glad to be wearing masks nonetheless.

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So, again, a slightly strange trip. But, on balance, a comforting one. Even in difficult times, New York keeps on being New York. We’ll be alright.

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Eye of the Storm

Early this week, Jess ended up in a group text with her extended family. They were worried about her being here in New York, at the epicenter of the pandemic, and sent along their love and healthy wishes.

At the time, Jess and I were in the kitchen, making grilled cheese sandwiches. And I couldn’t help but think about the incongruity of it all. The worried family members, the exponentially-growing epidemiology statistics, the scary news alerts, the quarantine lockdown, the constant sirens outside our windows. And yet, standing in front of our stove, cooking dinner, it was like any other night.

In the past, when I’d read about war-torn Middle Eastern cities besieged by endless bombing campaigns, I couldn’t understand why people were still living there. I knew, perhaps, that some had nowhere else to go, but imagined they therefore spent those months huddled, terrified, under their beds.

Now, however, I wonder if that’s true. I’ve started to think that there’s a quirk of human nature, a limitation of our simple brains, that makes it nearly impossible, moment by moment, to square abstract threat with immediate normalcy right in front of us. And so, I suspect, even as war raged around them, the people in those cities were standing in front of their own stoves, cooking their version of grilled cheese, too. And I hope it was delicious.

April 14, 2020

Doubling Down

I owe most of whatever writing ability I have to my mother, who brutally copy-edited all of my papers throughout my childhood. Whether correctly comma-fying appositives, or matching prepositions in parallel structures, she’d mark up my papers, red pen in hand, and then make me talk through all the corrections with her, one by one.

Frankly, our styles are quite distinct – in fact, she’d likely object to the start of this sentence, on the grounds that ‘distinct’ is an absolute adjective and can’t be modified – and I still hear her voice in my head, chastising me, whenever I end sentences with prepositions, or split infinitives, or make other conscious, conversationally-written choices that run against the most traditional (or, one might say, pedantic) grammar ‘rules.’

But the biggest legacy of her teaching might be my long-standing habit of double-spacing after periods. As she grew up using a typewriter, that habit was deeply ingrained in her own typing. In turn, she passed it along to me, even circling with the aforementioned red pen anywhere I let things slip and single-spaced post-sentence instead.

For years, even as I read typographers’ screeds decrying that double-space practice, I still held onto the idea that it made good sense, a kerning assist to help break one sentence from the next. But, over time, I was slowly swayed by the monospaced vs already-proportionally-spaced font argument. And, by now, I’m certain that single spacing after periods is indeed the correct choice.

Still, like in so many areas of life, there’s a gap between knowing and doing. Especially in a sphere, like touch-typing, that depends so highly on muscle memory. For years, I was saved from myself by technology. For example, WordPress depended on HTML, which automatically collapsed multiple spaces to a single one. And MacOS (like iOS) began to convert double-spaces to periods, so I would catch slip-ups as they occurred.

Still, the Pavlovian conditioning of those MacOS conversions hasn’t appeared to override my years of prior typing. Because even in this very post, I reflexively double-spaced preceding five sentences, INCLUDING THIS VERY SENTENCE. Good grief.

Once WordPress switched to their new Gutenberg editor, it began to preserve (and post) multiples spaces as typed in blog posts. I only realized as much of late. So on top of actively trying to stop double-spacing when I type here, I’ve also been using a quick script to highlight and correct the spots where I slipped up. And, as already evidenced, I wouldn’t say it’s going great.

But, I’m working on it. The road to change is a long and difficult one indeed.