04/25/21 - Photonastic Movements
"It's okay / I don't even cry / all I think about is a memory"
Shouldn’t have jinxed it.
Just when I thought my family was in the clear, my mom was diagnosed positive for mild symptoms of COVID. A PCR test confirmed her suspicions about an itchy throat, but otherwise, no feelings of bodily weakness or loss of sense of taste. We learned this two Sundays ago, right after I put out the last newsletter.
We quickly established a system for keeping my mom in isolation, partitioning the house and physically distancing from each other. This place has been feeling both large and small. I felt like Alice in that scene with the cake.
We got hold of a contactless thermometer, some oximeters, and a shit-ton of Vitamin C. Acquaintances and loved ones sent over lots of food, and breaks in the day mostly came in the form of another random delivery person ringing our doorbell. It’s weird to say that the past two weeks were still incredibly mentally taxing despite all this luck and care, but it was. It’s like being lost at sea with shark-proof floaties.
My room catches light poorly. At high noon and even with windows open and curtains drawn, the room is still dark enough to make me switch on the lamp above my desk to work. When I wash dishes I don’t overhear anymore my mom and younger brother’s chitchat at the dining table, voices tossed like powder into the air. Coop Grocer has been the app of choice for vegetables, fruits, non-dairy milk, and other products that jive with my wellness-related neuroses. I’ve been getting my antioxidants in, reducing meat intake, exercising less to minimize muscle ache. Conditions like these incentivize you to get persnickety. The devil is in the microbes.
I think the first time I saw an oximeter was on my first visit to the Mind Museum, when it was still new and exciting and Bonifacio Global City was still being touted as some metropolitan miracle. Multiple oximeters were attached by cables to an installation that looked like a wall of honeycomb, and inside each hexagon were quotes and passages from classic literature—Shakespeare, Hemingway, the usual dead white guys. The gimmick was that you clipped the oximeter to your finger and the installation would measure how much your heartbeat jumped upon reading your chosen passage. The whole thing was kind of farcical, as you can imagine—your heart’s BPM doesn’t automatically spike just because your inner world register a pithy truth. For a few seconds though, I tried to believe in the premise, and felt for micro tremors.
These little dispatches aren’t meant to be displays of woe. Or, that’s not what they feel like to me. This is the usual. I am, like many others, held in the long arms of communal antipathy. I am keeping track of time in an accurate manner, and my memory is growing deep, twisted roots. That’s part of what makes it hurt so much, no?
My dudes, I must confess, ennui was a cool concept to talk about until the pandemic rolled in. Been spending a lot of time looking out the window. I feel like a damn plant. Once we get another test that confirms us all negative, I’m treating the family to mushroom gyudon. For now, media I’ve been consuming:
Some Are Lakes by Land of Talk. “It’s Okay” is a favorite.
Just… random clips of Invincible. I didn’t know the show was that gory.
Gokushufudou! I know a lot of people outside of Japan are disappointed that The Way of the Househusband Netflix adaptation is just the manga with voice acting, and I am too, but I enjoyed it anyway.
Been trying to read This Is Marketing by Seth Godin, thinking it might help with my new job. It reads like self-help, which is fashionable to detest, but it was Internet Shaquille’s favorite book of 2019, and I trust his opinion.
A short essay about how people have enjoyed picnics throughout history, which goes way harder than it has to in the first two sentences. “Much of what made life pleasurable is now gone. We must seek out what remains.”
This anime called Restaurant to Another World which turns the isekai genre on its head, kind of. Different characters from a fantasy world discover a portal that leads to a restaurant in our world, and it’s so endearing because they come in and they order fucking spaghetti and they’re like holy shit we don’t have hot sauce and free bread in our little medieval town!
A community pantry master list. Find the one nearest you and give what you can!
I hope you'll get a negative result same as the others tested. I'll pray for your Mom. ✨ I know how it feels.