Ok, so it’s technically the day after Christmas as I post this. I was having a nice day with the family and things got away from me. I hope you had a lovely holiday with whomever you spent it.
The Black Laser
Goodreads tells me it took me nearly five months to read Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven. That is between October 5, 2020 and February 10, 2021. Quite a long time to read a mere 333 pages of prose. While I am not the world’s speediest reader, five months for a novel this length is pretty long even for me.
I jumped into the book knowing nothing about it on the recommendation of a friend. And, boy howdy, was it a humdinger. Eight months into heavy COVID, and I am greeted to a post-apocalyptic novel about a world ended by a super flu. I found the whole setup a little TooCloseToHome dot com for me and had to put it down after a little while, hence the protracted reading period. And if you’re worried about spoilers, this all happens within the first chapter of the book.
It’s not that the novel is bad. Not at all. It’s fantastic. Compelling characters. Beautiful prose. A lushly painted world. But it was causing me all sorts of anxiety reading it, and in October of 2020 I just was not in the headspace to finish it. So, I spent some time with some horror novels and short stories and came back to the book when I felt a little more balanced. Which, doing the math, must have been around when the girls were born. Makes sense. While the pandemic hadn’t lifted, a vaccine was in sight and Trump had lost. Two major stressors out of the way allowed me to dig back in without losing my dang mind.
Would I recommend this one? You bet. If you’re happy to experience a beautifully-written, time-hopping story in which the plot is a distant second to the inner lives of the characters, then this one is for you. St. John Mandel has a gothic sensibility with the way she treats the ephemerality of life after the end of the world as it contrasts to the always-on, always-available life before. It is almost poetic, a meditation on how easily things come and go and how fragile our lives actually are.
Plus, there’s an adaptation coming out on HBO any day now. You might as well spend less than five months with the novel before binging the show.
The announcement of Anne Rice’s death is making the news today. As with many weird kids, her Vampire Chronicles books were formative for me during my teen years. My friend Derek Lomas let me read his well-worn copy of The Vampire Lestat one summer at camp in the mid-1990s and it kind of blew my mind? I’d never read anything quite like it before—lurid, violent, sexy, rich—and I’m not sure I’ve read anything quite like it since. I went on to read everything through The Vampire Armand before sort of losing track of the series as one does as an 18 year old.
More recently, I listened to the audio book of The Witching Hour, the first book in her Lives of the Mayfair Witches series. It accompanied me while driving to doctor appointments 2 hours away during Sarah’s pregnancy, then to see the girls in the NICU, and finally to see Olive in the PCICU. It is a massive book and the recording clocks in at more than 50 hours, providing me with a lot to listen to during one of the harder moments in my adult life. Kate Reading’s narration (and amazing Dutch accent) of Anne Rice’s words is an inextricable part of the memory collage of the whole experience. A nice part, as it goes.
So, thank you, Anne Rice, for the escape. First for the escape from aches and pains of being a teenager, and second for the escape from the nightmare around a terminally ill child. Rest easy.
COVID has turned me into a shut-in.
Ok. That’s not entirely true. A more accurate statement would be that COVID, moving across the country to a place where I have no friends, having kids, taking care of those kids while Sarah works, and working exclusively from home have turned me into more of a shut-in than I already was. Not some manifesto-writing, greasy-package-sending, sunglasses-mugshot sort, but quicker to stay in and avoid interacting with other people in other than a passing way.
During lock down, I’ve realized I am more of an introvert than I ever gave myself credit for. I knew for a long time that social events took a lot out of me, that the recovery time from those social events was long. I’d much rather hang out at home or with a small group somewhere quiet than be surrounded by people. I am excellent at entertaining myself! It’s a skill I honed through endless years of being grounded as a teenager. Going to be alone for a few days? Perfect! I’ll fill the time with something that I enjoy.
Lock down was that multiplied by, what is it at this point, 18 months? I still haven’t run out of things to do to keep myself busy. I’ve learned that I can go on for a long time and be basically all right with the situation.
Similarly I’ve never been good at spur-of-the-moment social outings. I’ve always needed a long time to prepare mentally for engaging. Even when I have a long time, sometimes I get to the day of the thing I’ve been preparing for and I can’t think of anything I’d rather do less. The idea of going somewhere and being stuck in a large crowd fills me with anxiety. Concerts, sporting events, parades, the mall before Christmas, or any place with a ton of people are immediate “No”s for me.
I don’t draw energy from being around people; I spend it. And that equation is not in balance. I am often left in psychic debt after a company Christmas party. Or after schmoozing at an industry event. Or any time I have to turn on the charm and interact with people, especially in a context where that interaction has an impact on the greater scope of my life. When I was an editor, I had this sort of interaction all the time and often left me totally drawn out, temperamental, and grouchy. And while I like to imagine I was reasonably good at hiding my moodiness, I know that I was not.
This tendency had been slowly worsening for the last five years or so, but the protracted period of isolation that COVID brought on accelerated the downward spiral. I can remember in the recent past being at shows with friends and becoming overrun with anxiety about being there and wanting nothing more than to leave. Some of the shows I did leave! But, at the very least, I made the effort to go out in the first place. Now? No way. Don’t even ask if I’ll go. The answer is no.
And, really, there is absolutely nothing wrong with not wanting to be social. Staying in and tinkering or having quiet time is a perfectly valid, reasonable choice. I don’t miss parties. I don’t miss crowded bars. I don’t miss concerts. I don’t miss any of it. I’ll kiss my babies’ drooly cheeks, drink a beer, and learn about something all by myself. A perfect evening.
The problem at the root of all this is that I feel anxiety over feeling like I should miss those social interactions. Part of me is super cool with not having that stuff in my life for the foreseeable future, but another part of me—a mean part—is all twisted up with this idea that I should be making an effort to get out and interact with the world, make new friends (another thing I am traditionally BAD at), and do more than spend time alone. That part drives me to make bad decisions, fueled by agitation, in the expectation that my life would be richer with more external interaction.
For example, tonight I was supposed to go to a dinner at Sarah’s restaurant that they do every year where they pair a multi-course menu with various beers. Pretty cool! Yet, the idea of sitting at the bar by myself, while Sarah worked, making small talk with people I don’t know so I could create some appearance of wanting to not be a weird shut-in dropped a red-hot glowing lump of iron in the center of my chest. I almost went, too, even though I knew I wouldn’t enjoy myself. I knew it. Certain as sunrise. But part of me thought, Well, I should just go and do the thing because I never go out, even though the rest of me was like, This sounds like pulling teeth.
And when Sarah gave me an out? Oh, you know I took it as quickly and definitively as I could.
Do I feel bad about taking the out? Yeah, a little. But not as bad as I would have felt engaging with strangers tonight, pretending that I wanted to be there.
Would my life be better for having more adult interaction than just Sarah and our babysitter? Honestly, yeah, it would. I’ve been pretty depressed and the growing tendency toward being a shut-in is pretty clearly an expression of that. This has been a hard year. But the solution to my depression is not small talk, surrounding myself with strangers at some event, or engaging socially. I feel confident in that. Still, I feel bad.
Picture this:
It’s Thanksgiving. The 23-pound turkey is in the oven and cooking nicely. Stuffing is warming in the slow cooker. The first bottle of wine is open and halfway to the bank. Your kids are dressed like little turkeys in outfits gifted by the babysitter. You find yourself with a brief moment before the sun dips behind the horizon.
What do you do?
If you’re me, you throw the kids on the lawn and take some dang photos. And, with the help of our friendly neighbor Doug, you get a couple almost-good family portraits. To be fair to Doug, he had the barrel of the lens pointed directly into the setting sun. A valiant effort, but we’ll have to try again.
Enjoy the photos.
Sarah purchased these outfits for the girls a while and ago and we’d been looking for a good time to use them. She worried that we were too far into autumn for another outdoor shoot, but the climate change gods came through for us, delivering a warm, lovely November afternoon. We were also fortunate enough to have the sunset shining directly between the houses with which we share a weird, communal back yard.
All in all, we had about four minutes of prep time for these. Get the girls dressed. Throw a blanket on the lawn. Go go go. The sun dipped behind the buildings shortly after taking the last photo. It’s nice when things come together at the last minute.
Sometimes you just bathe the kids and force them to sit near a window as the sun sets so you can get some photos. I think it is important to make regularly scheduled photos of the girls, even if you have no great purpose. They’re just growing so dang fast.
A bunch of these came out really nice. I find I have a hard time editing out photos because I have emotional feelings about the subjects. So, you get bloated, unfocused galleries. No big deal.
I was playing with a diffusion filter I purchased recently. I think it added a pleasing, dreamy haze to some of the photos, even if it wasn’t quite the right light for it. In other photos, it kind of just looks, I don’t know, soft? Diffuse? That’s the point, of course, even if the outcome wasn’t exactly what I normally like.
One of the nice things about working from home is that I can decide to get up and go to the pumpkin patch in the middle of the day on a Thursday in late October with Sarah and the girls. And no one except my dwindling prospects and collapsing career can tell me otherwise! Supreme freedom!
It was a beautiful day here in lower, slower Delaware and we couldn’t bear to miss the opportunity to drag the children out for photos. And I think they’re pretty dang cute in their Halloween-y witch outfits. They seemed to enjoy the trip. Penny was totally jazzed the rest of the day, until 6pm when she promptly fell asleep.