Documenting the Quarantine ed. 2: Population Control

It’s true that all elective procedures are being canceled at hospitals, but Loverpants was able to meet the snippers that would render him a father no more this week. We feel this was a necessary measure taken for the public health of all. Because if there’s anything we should be minding during a pandemic, it’s population control. ::winks and points::

His recovery has been smooth so far, thanks for asking. ;)

Speaking of population control, I’m wondering if boarding school campus will be closed for the rest of the year. I will lament if the dining hall upon which I so mightily depend won’t resume until September. I will cry fat salty tears for the dining hall staff who are the bright sun of my every day.

It’s a Vanilla Sky kind of feeling on campus and I’m super bummed for all the 11th graders who were just beginning the kind of romances where knees grazing the bare fleshy knees of another person are major electric events that the body never ever forgets. I know the Zoomers are busy zooming their lives and flirtations now on all the platforms that live in their pocket computers, but man, sharing physical space with one’s peers when they are your whole world is everything when you’re 16.

Meanwhile at homebase, Lady M. and Little Man T. are actually being all-stars and occupying selves with ease. Lady M. had her guitar lesson via Zoom and she decreed that the sound of the guitar via online software was “very wack” and this gives me hope. Hope that just because something can be facilitated online that it’s not better or even easier.

I’m working really hard to bring my classes online, one assignment at a time. I’m grateful for the very realistic people who run my institution of higher learning because if they lived on another planet where classes should march forth like business as usual, I’d be super frustrated. Some of my students, who are being thrust into caretaking roles and forced to go without pay from hourly jobs, would probably just give up. And who could blame them? I’m taking deep breaths and long walks with Dog and trying to learn as much about composting via YouTube when I’m not syllabizzling.

We did order dinner via UberEats yesterday. I did this ostensibly because Little Man T. got a great report card, but it really came down to the fact that I had a taste for wings. They came from a place called “Wings and Tings.” If there’s anything I want to remember about quarantining, that’s got to be chief among them: that using our handheld clickity lookity box, we were able to send for the fried wings of wee chickens from a place whose very name is Jamaican phonemics.

Documenting the Quarantine ed. 1

I have nothing patently interesting to say about life and love in the time of #coronavirus, but I am nothing if not a journalist so I am going to scribble some bloggy thoughts here and again.

We are all four plus the dog on quarantine in Massachusetts. I have glimpsed line graphs and spiked plottings and the confirmed cases and odds do not look favorable, even though numbers are colors to me. Generally whenever asked for statistical analyses or precision of any kind, my answers are usually a resistant lot of, “I mean, probably like so many or whatever” or “A baker’s dozen” or “A butt-ton.” I question most modes and customs, resisting them because I am a pain in the astronaut, but eventually I listen to the authorities who Know Things and I simmer down. Right now I am simmering down and it looks like this:

My e-mail inbox has been chock full o’ corporate branded messages that use phrases such as “We have been monitoring the situation closely” and “taking every precaution” but I did see Chipotle began offering free delivery and this was big news. I mean, what’s next, no charge for extra guacamole?! Let’s not get covidcraycray….

I have spoken to various friends and family on the phone lately and mostly I am in a state of irritation when they lament their cruise cancellations and the hassles of their work going online. So basically my disposition is the same. I have no capacity as usual for complainsgivings. I have tolerance only for great feats of human courage and radical acts that amuse me. I’m the same taciturn gal, just wearing yoga pants with more frequency.

Yesterday we took the offspring and dog to the DeCordova Sculpture Garden. Our dog freaked out at all of the sculptures and regarded them all with great suspicion, because you know what’s scarier than a whole case of resin sculptures that look exactly like multiple tiers of Jell-O molds? I know! The horror. HOLLLLD MEEEEE.

It was a lovely day in the sun, though, breathing the air that was free for breathing, before we made our way home to entertain ideas of doing Little House on the Prairie-type things. Wouldn’t that be charming and quaint? Playing board games and calling each other Maw and Paw and hustling up some supper? We fancied that for a moment and then I promptly took a QuarantiNap and Lovey Loverpants and I watched “Atlanta” on Hulu and ate whatever tortilla chips were lying around.

I think this is the chief difference between being a family with older kids and wee babes: there’s a lovely laissez fair spirit now, but I also miss the times of order and routines from the days when they—ahem, mostly I—needed structure and command. I long for days outlined by stickered calendars and behavior charts, snack packs and felt loveys all in a row. Now that we are a family with tweens, a.k.a. kids who can be interrupted from FaceTiming 18 hours a day to walk the dog, the quarantine presents a weird limbo. We’re all drumming up our little projects and social channels but it’s difficult to lasso us all into one solid collective of human life. We normally do this by leaving our home, but now that the quarantine is in full effect, we will have to find ways to come together without developing homicidal tendencies.

I am working to bring all of my classes online, and by working I mean that I have contemplated two minute dance parties for all of my courses and have not explored any other modalities that will empower my students to be good and competent citizens. I have one more week to figure this all out. Today I have a glistening stovetop to show for my efforts. Because you know what they say about teaching English composition. You can’t do it with a clear head if your stovetop is in disarray.

Alanis has made amends with us about "Ironic"

My manlove and I got to see “Jagged Little Pill” last weekend on Broadway. Shoutiest of shout-outs to Nana Red for watching the offspring over the weekend that we ran away from home.

Microreview: the show is very, very good. The talent on stage overfloweth, from choreography to song arrangement to the book, which was written by Diablo Cody. I wouldn’t say the musical is a timeless work of unparalleled brilliance, but the songs and dialogue hang together pretty seamlessly, the character portraits are interesting, and you leave feeling hopeful, with a whole new appreciation for the Alanis Morissette canon.

Oh, Alanis. You really cannot say the name “Alanis,” even 25 years after “Jagged Little Pill” dropped, without asking the rhetorical, “Isn’t it ironic?” And you would not be the first to crucify Canada’s songstress for what amounts to a variety of cliched couplets that completely misunderstand the very concept of irony, conflating these supposedly inconvenient and upsetting things that happen with something that is so tragically coordinated it, well, figurrrrrres.

The song was an instant banger when I was in high school in Ohio where on any given Friday night, my friends and I would be doing our very best white girl howls along to “Ironic” and “You Oughta Know” as if we had any kind of romantic history that even came close to meriting that brand of bitterness. It was such a big moment to own CDs that you played nonstop and shared and left in other people’s cars by accident because they had jimmied their portable CD player to their car stereo and weren’t we all just living that high tech lifestyle on wheels?

Since that time, CD players are practically obsolete in cars, and I no longer think LLBean barn coats are the height of fashion per the contract of every Catholic high schoolie in 1996. But I still think “ironic” is a banger even if the irony is ill-conceived.

And I think we should all treat it as “Jagged Little Pill” the musical does: as a miscalculation by a young writer. Just like people should stop asking Ali MacGraw what she meant when she said “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.“ She’s sorry, all right? And Rebecca Black would like to forget she knows anything about any day of the week.

Perhaps I’ve become some kind of apologist for white women who make regrettable art in their youth. Maybe I need to examine deeper the implications of that. But I’m here as a writer showing up to do my utmost to synthesize my best ideas with my best dedication to the page. Just don’t show me the unadulterated copy from ten years ago. Or five months ago. Or last week. We’re all works in progress but our art evolves. I’d like to think I give as much passage and permission for other women to groove on with their bad, evolving, artistic selves—as much as I would hope the same is granted for myself.