How We Live in Interesting Times

She curled up under the gray kitchen table. Her legs alternately stretching and contracting. Her face a mess of tears. "I DON'T UNDERSTAND," she screamed, sobbing. The laptop open across the room, streaming a dance class, full of little windows of other girls, pointing their toes and arcing arms.
"You don't have to participate. The video is off. The computer is on mute. You can just watch and dance only if you want."
"BUT I DON'T UNDERSTAND," she screamed again. "WHY NOW?"

Later, when the tears were dry and our breaths normal, we lay next to each other, warm in a bed.
"I'm sorry," She said.
"It's OK. I'm sure this feels so weird to you. Nothing is the way it usually is, and you don't like it when you don't understand changes."
"It's just the virus, and we aren't in school, I do school on the computer, and earthquakes, and all of the above! Nothing is normal!" she said, letting all her big feelings escape into the space between us.

No one counted on a pandemic.

It's been two weeks since we've all be inside. Schools closed. Stores closed. People in their homes. We casually call it quarantine, even though we are not sick. It feels like quarantine describes what we feel. This isn't distance, it's sequester. It's barricade. Keeping EG away from friends and hanging out feels like a futile battle we must fight. In a time where phones and Playstations allow for virtual hanging, the edit of distance makes him resent us and the circumstance.

We work from home now. J and I at our white desks that float in the middle of the room. Facing each other. Monitors blocking the view. We take turns having the room on conference calls and teaching lectures. We prioritize in the mornings who will have the room when. It's a nice room. It's a warm room.

I sit close to the window. I can see more people than ever walking on the street, spaced to keep distance. The crabapple trees are so close to erupting; I anticipate their blossoms. The lawn grows and greens every day. This is the time when our cabin fever breaks and we tumble out to find parks and playgrounds. Braving cold days and a bright sun. But now, when every trip outside needs to be considered, and we work all day, spread out from the office, to the table, the island, the smaller table in the living room, in our beds, glad of the internal distance, but still in reach.

We have enough to eat. The Nest thermostat doesn't know yet that we don't leave, we stay, so it drops after the morning warm up. I walk past the sensor, triggering the display. Turn it up to habitable. I consider slippers, a needless accessory in times past. But now, when I don't wear shoes all day, I suddenly want warmer feet.

I cycle through playlists. They don't seem right. I want smarter algorithms to deliver dance beats when I want them and cycle down to calming flows when my heart ticks too much.

At night I lay in bed. It seems like my heart beats louder and faster. My normally low blood pressure doesn't feel low. My baseline heartbeat at midnight is 60. It feels faster. It feels louder. I wonder what a heart attack feels like. I know what losing my job feels like. I worry a lot.

Years ago, six weeks after an abdominal surgery, I moved rocks. A friend needed help landscaping. I took medium and large rocks across the dirt, piling them in corners of the yard. I arranged and moved. It felt good. But it tore my internal stitches. In the weeks and months that followed, my organs would squeeze through the small hole in my abdomen, arresting me where I stood. Another surgery resulted. I have not moved rocks since.

But now there are rocks where my stomach should be.

I studied history once. Knowing what happened before doesn't help now. It just makes me upset to see the things that happened before happen now. I thought it would be different if we just knew. We could stop the worst of it. But there are enough people who don't know and don't care, who feed the growl inside, who love the base nationalism, driven by greed and latent racism. I don't know what to do about them. They put us in this position. A venal, narcissistic monster in the highest office in the land. Will this be the time when their delusion will dissipate or will they keep choosing that horror, even as more of us die to feed his ego? I don't know anything anymore.

Richard Rorty the philosopher wrote a book called Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Contingency centers on the idea that the end of the story isn’t written yet. Everything could have happened one way or another. Nothing is certain, not progress, not regression, everything is contingent. The arc of the universe doesn't bend to justice unless we choose to make it bend. This may seem simple, but it's also contrary to the idea that things eventually get better. Because progress doesn’t work itself out. History is not a march of progress. There is no natural course of history. It has to be decided.


I once read that progress breaks down along ideological lines: conservatives, in large, often believe that progress is inevitable, that it will happen no matter what; progressives do not believe that progress in inevitable, that "progress" requires action. The break is now a schism between people who think that agitation and action are unnecessary—and possibly distasteful—since the world would have gotten better anyway, and those who see agitation and action as necessary to create a better world. Contingency philosophy says that both things can be true: things can get better, things can get worse, it will just depend on a thousand small actions and either will be true.


Perhaps I was too conservative once, carrying with me the belief that we are on our way to a better world, but that belief was just a rock to tear my stitches.


So this is how we live in interesting times: up late, dishes all the time, the shoes are everywhere, emotions at the surface, days bleeding into days, spring around us but not emergent, everything contingent.