275

Although I have a big ole soft buboe in my heart for the Plague Doctor (so much so that I bought a figurine ornament for my dork Christmas tree this year) I think the most enduring symbol for the Long Pandemic Year of Twenty-Twenty may be this:

But then again that may just be particular to my family.

I mentioned a while back that the early lockdown days reminded me of snow days but another specific overlap element was the stocking up on non-perishable food, which is one of those things I (usually) only think about in the winter. It's a great privilege to live in a time when we can pop out to the store at the drop of a hat for whatever notion grabs us in the moment. Except of course when it snows, as the inclement weather does not care about your sudden craving for Sweet Chili PopCorners. Nor does it even care about your legitimate need for household staples such as bread and milk and soap and (sigh) toilet paper. Toiletries will keep indefintely, bread can be frozen, but milk, that's the tricky one. All the moreso in a house with several children who eat lots of breakfast cereal and drink milk by the glass, not to mention adults with robust lifelong coffee addictions.

Enter: shelf-stable milk!

Of course the difference between the pandemic and a blizzard is that blizzards come and go. You never know if the blizzard is going to live up to the hype until it actually arrives, so sometimes you overprepare for it, and sometimes under. If you get caught underprepared, the worst case scenario is that you suffer a few days without some basic necessity, then the roads get cleared and the stores reopen and you restock and you think "I'll never let that happen again!" and then you promptly forget all about it until it does. Unless maybe, maybe, right after the blizzard you buy a few shelf-stable milks just in case. Whereas the pandemic has been an ongoing concern for, let me see, somewhere between nine months and an eternity, by this point. Which is plenty of time to really think things through and make adjustments to the actualities of life-as-she-is-lived. Some people are over it, but my nuclear unit is still taking reasonable precautions, staying home, wearing masks when we do go out, but really minimizing the amount of going out at all, including popping out to the store. And given the aforementioned ongoingness, we've had plenty of time to realize that we can just about stock up on a week's worth of groceries at a time, except for the milk, which means it's a good idea to always have some shelf-stable boxes on hand, in the all-too-frequent case of running through last week's fridge milk before it's time for the next run to the grocery store. Not only have we had time to realize this, we've had time to implement it as a standard operating procedure. So this has been a very Parmalat-heavy year.

The twist, of course, the punchline (because of course there's a twist and a punchline, isn't there always?) is this: 2020 has also been a year that has really brought home how hard it is to keep two adults and three kids happy with the same limited at-home options. There are a few very basic foods and meals which everyone in our family genuinely likes. Beyond that, we generally have to content ourselves with two-out-of-three. That is, two out of the three kids will eat a dinner, as prepared, and be reasonably content. The third kid will require serious cajoling just to eat the mandatory single bite ofe every element, and then will eat something else entirely. Occasionally there' something which only one kid likes, with two dissenters, probably about as often as something that gets approval from everyone. By and large, it's two-out-of-three.

AND APPARENTLY THIS EXTENDS TO THE MILK! I personally can't tell the difference between the shelf-stable milk and fridge milk, especially once the s-s gets opened and, you know, put in the fridge. Cold, it all tastes the same. But try telling that to my kids. To be brutally honest I have stopped dedicating brainspace to cataloging each and every predilection. I think it goes something like this: the eldest refuses to drink the shelf-stable milk, or use it in cereal, or anything. The little girl will use the s-s milk, grudgingly, if we are out of fridge milk. And the bino LOVES the s-s milk, will ask for it by name and prefers it over the fridge milk, so sometimes we have both open fridge milk and open shelf-stable milk taking up space in the refrigerator at the same time. Not a state of affairs I ever expected to have to contend with, but again, that's pretty much the most apt descriptor of 2020, anyway.

A radio drama in two acts

ACT I

(Interior of family car, night. En route to martial arts class.)

ME: Rock and roll for the road, boys?

LITTLE GUY AND BINO: Sure.

(I turn on the radio, already dialed in to the modern rock station. "Meant to Live" by Switchfoot is playing, halfway through.)

BINO: Dad, this is not rock.

ME: What? Yes it is.

BINO: Nope.

ME: Fine.

(I switch to the dinosaur rock station, just as "Wayward Son" by Kansas begins.)

ME: Is this rock and roll?

BINO: (with unshakable conviction) Yes.

ACT II

(Interior of family car, later the same night, after martial arts.)

(I turn the radio on, the dinosaur rock station is playing commercials, so I switch back to the modern rock. "Hey Ya" by Outkast is playing, halfway through.)

ME: Is this rock?

BINO: No.

ME: What is it, then?

BINO: (same unshakable conviction as earlier) Funk.

ME: Do ... do you just put all music in the five categories from Trolls World Tour?

BINO: Pretty much.

ME: (under my breath) He's not wrong, though.

CURTAIN

232

Two hundred and thirty-two days is not nothing. The U.S. has been dealing with all of the primary, secondary, etc. effects of a pandemic for seven or eight or nine months, and some things we've gotten accustomed to (some of which might even weirdly be changes for the better) and some things we haven't. Most things that were going to happen have happened, all at once in a confusing jumble at the beginning, and the passage and repetitions of time merely allow realizations to come clear. But every once in a while there's a new first, and yesterday, I had one.

I am in no way shape or form a fashion-forward individual. I tend to conform to expectations, and am quite content to clear the lowest possible bar of socially acceptable attire for a given situation. I can get dressed up for a wedding or a job interview and know what I'm about. I can do casual-but-nice for family gatherings where there might be photos taken. But left to my own devices I go for comfort over all. I am 100% that guy with a vast t-shirt collection who wears cargo shorts for 2/3 of the year and blue jeans the other 1/3.

Recently it has been brought to my attention that some people do not find blue jeans comfortable, as they are too restrictive. Compared to pajama bottoms or yoga pants, I agree they are certainly more restrictive (and, Gender Injustice Alert, it goes without saying that women are instructed by society to wear jeans that flatter and accentuate their curve, as opposed to the baggy-ass broken-in denim I prefer). But whether it's hardwired into my proprioceptors or just the result of years of habituation to my go-to pants, jeans are in my maximum comfort zone.

After the first few months of my office being closed for social distancing, I hit upon a pretty standard routine: I wake up in the morning and get things rolling in my pajamas. I help the kids with their breakfast and start my workday, unshowered and not yet dressed. If I have any meetings, I leave my camera off. Around lunchtime I exercise (the treadmill in the basement feel more and more like one of the best investments my wife and I ever made) and then, finally, take a shower and put on grown-up clothes. Which, again, means cargo shorts and a t-shirt, or maybe a polo shirt if I have any afternoon meetings with people I want to project bare-minimum professionalism at. This worked pretty well through the summer and early fall, and I certainly had plenty of pairs of cargo shorts to rotate through (tbh, I rotated them on a weekly or fortnightly basis, not daily, but still).

Yesterday was pretty chilly, which would normally be my cue for the switch from cargo shorts to blue jeans. But for the first time in longer than I can remember, I just didn't want to put on jeans. Didn't have it in me to deal with a zipper, I guess? Instead, after my midday ablutions, I put on a gray polo shirt and black sweatpants. Because why not, right? Comfy, cozy, and no one is going to see my from the waist down anyways, right?

What I had forgotten was that I do not wear sweatpants in public, unless there is some kind of medical reason, and have not done so since probably fifth grade. OK, no, I hadn't forgotten that, but I had forgotten that on Monday nights my boys have martial arts class and I drive them and sit in the school while they train, which meant I was going to either wear sweatpants in public (which, again, I Do Not Do) or else change out of the sweatpants after dinner (which, ugh). A strange situation in which to find myself, but then again, this is a strange year, an unending string of stranger and stranger days.

So yeah, yesterday, I had a personal COVID first: I left the house and spent time in a public place while wearing sweatpants. And lived to tell the tale! Who knows what other uncharted territories I may explore before this whole thing goes away?

228

Last night I was finishing up the kitchen cleaning before bed, which mostly consists of doing the dishes. (My wife had already done most of the task, so emphasis on "finishing".) The dishwasher was full, with no way to fit anything else in, even if I had undertaken some aggressively Teris-style rearranging, so I was handwashing. And I imagine that happens on a regular basis to everyone, especially with the larger pots and pans. But in this particular case it was pots, pans, a bowl, some measuring cups, some drinking cups, a bit of Tupperware ... if not another full load for the dishwasher, at least a good start of one. And you may ask yourself why I didn't just leave it all in the sink, and in fact allow it all to be said good start on the next dishwasher load the following day. To which I would answer, that's what I'd been doing all week. Dinner last night hadn't been crazy elaborate, generating more dirty dishes than usual. We're just (and this is the minor revelation that prompted me to compose this post) constantly dirtying dishes these days. I wanted to record, for posterity, that one of the stand-out attributes of this whole coronavirus quarantine lockdown office closure school closure gauntlet we're running is the feeling that I'm constantly either folding laundry or doing dishes. All. The. Time.

First world problems, as always, I know, I know. And not all of it is directly attributable to the pandemic. The little guy is not so little anymore, he's 12+, a tween, growing and eating constantly like a teen. His younger siblings aren't that far behind. But on the other hand, they are at home every day eating lunch at the kitchen table and using plenty of plates and silverware to do it (the little girl especially has a fondness for Chicken and Stars soup). And I'm home too, no longer a growing pre- or mid-adolescent but certainly prone to stress-eating. I try to do as much of that off paper towels as possible, but there are always some contributions to the dish pile from my quarter. Meanwhile my wife is trying to be conscientious about packing lunch when she goes to work, and there's no excuse not to have plenty of groceries in the house, so that's the Tupperware in high usage.

Meanwhile, I've been (humblebrag alert) exercising more since I'm stuck at home, and I sweat like a pig at Bacon-Fest, so that's several extra outfits a week going into the laundry. My wife has been working at a barn in exchange for horse-riding lessons once or twice a week, so she also has dedicated outfits for that which require laundering after each use. The kids, as far as I can tell, just wear the same amount of clothing as pre-shutdown beforetimes ... oh except that the bino has recently started taking martial arts classes, so that's another uniform in the wash, too.

That's it, random observation about how spending way more time confined to the house leads to more housework. More deep insights coming soon!

197

This is a very minor thing but I suppose not everything in the COVID diary can (or even should) be epic and earth-shatterng.

I haven't gotten a haircut since the lockdowns began back in March. At first it was because the salons and barbershops were all closed, and I wasn't really due for one. A couple of months in my wife borrowed hair clippers from a neighbor and buzzed the boys' heads, since the weather was getting warmer. I did not go under the blades myself, mainly because it seemed like one more task in the crazy new way of things that I didn't want to burden my wife with. This was also somewhat ironic because for the last few years I've enjoyed and looked forward to buzzing my hair low-maintenance short for the summer, and the only debatable bit is how close to Memorial Day it needs to be for me to go ahead and get my "summer cut". Whereas the little guy, now that he's just old enough to have the beginnings of a sense of personal style, prefers his hair a little longer and messier and hates getting haircuts. But, y'know, he's 12 and when his mother says it's haircut time, it is. And I figured I would get my own ... eventually.

Also around this time, my shaving mirorr fell off the shower wall. I started shaving in the shower almost twenty years ago, because in all that time I've always had a van dyke or a full beard, and only needed to shave some or all of my cheeks and a bit of my neck, all of which takes a trivial amount of time and a minimal amount of soap lather rather than shaving cream. It's much less cleanup to just do it while showering. In any case, I buy cheap shaving mirrors that attach to the shower tiles with a suction cup, and every so often the cup loses suction and the mirror falls, and when it falls just rght it cracks and I buy a new one, but most of the time I just reaffix it next time I shave. However, given the pandemic and my lack of exposure to pretty much anyone beyond my household (low-res video conference calls notwithstanding) I stopped shaving altogether. My beard scraggled up my cheeks and down my neck a bit, but who cares. So when the mirror fell in May(?) I didn't bother putting it back up. I still haven't as of this post.

And when summer started and I still hadn't gotten my seasonal buzz, it seemed like I might as well wait until right before we went to the beach, to make the most of combining low maintenance and vacation. We did in fact buy our own set of hair clippers for that express purpose. But then I never found time in the lead up to beach week. Also, the early summer was right around the time when people started actually protesting the lockdowns. Make no mistake, I thought these people were selfish idiots and I still do. It boggles my mind that the extraordinary measures taken by governments during a once-in-a-century virus outbreak could be politicized. I didn't choose to politicize it, but some people apparently did. And so the images of entitled jackasses holding signs that said "I NEED A HAIRCUT" as if they were demanding civil rights and equitable justice were burned into my brain. Which of course caused me to reflexively dig my heels in and say, "Hey, guess what? Nobody needs a haircut." And so the locks continued to grow.

So here we are, six months and counting into the surreal gauntlet the world has become, my beard is woolly, my hair is long enough to cover my eyes in the front and doing a ridiculous upflip in the back, and I don't know when or if any of that is going to change. It's become almost talismanic, like if I can hang in there until we turn the corner, then the corner must be getting closer, but if I cave now and go through the grooming rituals I'm just accepting that things will be the way they are for a long, long time that I can't just wait out. So we shall see how long this impasse holds.

(For the record I do still trim my nails. To neglect that would just be gross.)

193

It's Friday and I'm working from home. Been months since I specifically did a "COVID-19 Diary" post but we are still very much living through it. (In case it wasn't self-evident, the numbers-as-titles for the COVID blog entries are the number of days since my office closed.) It's still surreal, just the endless sense of waiting, for things to get better, or worse, or go back to normal, and somehow none of those things ever do happen. It's just weird and different and we're all habituating to it, and sometimes I feel like I can actively feel it happening and sometimes not. I don't really know if I'm up to the task of making sense of any of it.

But I can certainly record random little bits and impressions for posterity's sake. And since it's the cusp of the weekend, I'll keep it light. At some point I'll go back and document the bad parts, of which there have been no shortage, but I acknowledge fully and freely that as far as these things go, my family has been extremely lucky. None of us have actually contracted the disease, which is honestly part of the whole large-numbers weirdness of this whole pandemic. It is a pandemic, it's real, and it's affecting our country in an outsize way because of a dearth of competent leadership, but I haven't gotten sick, no one in my household has gotten sick, and no one I know personally has gotten sick (that I know of; it's complicated.) and maybe that's because I live in a bubble of educated, rational people who take all the recommended precautions and therefore minimize risk, maybe(?), but whatever the underlying logic orlack thereof, it's something to be grateful for. And I still have a job, and can do it from the safety and comfort of my home, and my wife also still has a job, and although she still has to go to campus and that's not ideal and she's not thrilled about it, it's only three days a week on campus and at least her employer provides some PPE. My kids' schools opted for 100% distance learning and even provided laptops for every child, and from what I can tell so far (school started about three weeks ago) the teacher spent a great deal of time and effort over summer vacation preparing for the new model so it's going well from an educational perspective, even if my kids do miss their friends, their little slices of independence like riding the school bus alone, and so on.

However! Keeping things light! So like a lot of privileged, advantaged, fortunate least-vulnerables the big problem has been sheer boredom. One of the first things I turned to back in the spring was music. I'd dabbled previously in online music streaming services but never very much because at heart I am a CDs'n'mixtapes'n'FM-radio 80's/90's kid. But we are two decades into the 21st century after all, so fine, I signed up for Spotify and started making some playlists. This was a vaguely social activity at first, as well, as my college friends and I traded track listings via email in an effort to define the ultimate "quarantine playlist". (I will put mine at the end of this post.)

Reconnecting with the solace of pop music might, in and of itself, be a silver lining but the real bright spot was the fact that my kids noticed me playing with Spotify and asked if they could to. Of course! And that's been an absolute delight, not gonna lie. I should specify the little guy (recently turned 12(!!!)) was not among the 'my kids' here, but the little girl (9 and a half) and the 'bino (7 and a half) were all over it. When I was a kid, my dad worked in Manhattan and would often visit J&R Records and come home with 45 rpm singles, then pla them on the stereo turntable while recording them onto blank cassettes. Yes, I learned the art of miztapes from my father. And he would pick up singles for me, too, if I paid for them out of my allowance (they were literally 99 cents a pop back then, I believe) and I would make my own mixtapes accordingly. Spotify, even better, is free, so the kids could go crazy compiling their own playlists. In the case of the 'bino, this meant snagging most but not all (not the sad parts) of the Hamilton soundtrack, a few songs he knows from the radio, a Bad Lip Reading Star Wars song from the internet, and the song that plays over the closing credits for Into the Spider-Verse.

For my little girl, it's a bit more all-over-the-map: radio pop, Disney music (Descendants, Frozen, and the Aristocats of all things), more Spider-Verse tracks and ... several Christmas songs. I am downright awed by the fact that she is so non-compartmentalized. Why have two separate playlists, one for everyday and one for Christmas songs, when she loves Do You Hear What I Hear just as much as she loves Old Town Road?

At any rate, the intermittent "Dad, can I add something to my Spotify?" requests have been a bright spot as we've been hunkered down and missing out on a lot of other things that used to be regular diversions.

As promised, my quarantine playlist follows. Of course, as is my wont, I had to build a story arc into it, which is roughly thus: emergence of the virus (tracks 1 through 4); attempted social distancing and self-isolation (tracks 5 through 7); obligatory medical song (track 8); shut-downs, misinformation and their effects (tracks 9 through 13); mental deterioration and the collapse of civilization (tracks 14 through 23); eventually coming out on the other side (tracks 24 through 29).

1. The Stand - Prophecy (The Alarm)
2. Come on Eileen (Dexys Midnight Runners)
3. Laid (James)
4. Mr. Brightside (The Killers)
5. I Think I'm Paranoid (Garbage)
6. Suspicious Minds (Elvis)
7. YOLO (The Lonely Island)
8. Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out (The Replacements)
9. My Old School (Steely Dan)
10. Run-Around (Blues Traveler)
11. Crazy (Gnarls Barkley)
12. Spreading the Disease (Queensryche)
13. Among the Living (Anthrax)
14. Panic Switch (Silversun Pickups)
15. Godzilla (Blue Oyster Cult)
16. Crazy Train (Ozzy Osbourne)
17. It Falls Apart (Odds)
18. Everything Sucks (Reel Big Fish)
19. Lonely Boy (Black Keys)
20. Nobody Told Me (John Lennon)
21. Freakin Out (Death)
22. It's the End of the World as We Know It (R.E.M.)
23. (Nothing But) Flowers (Talking Heads)
24. Recovery (Frank Turner)
25. This Year (Mountain Goats)
26. Keep On Keeping On (Curtis Mayfield)
27. I'll Be Back Up on My Feet (The Monkees)
28. Tubthumping (Chumbawumba)
29. Top of the World (Van Halen)

Fiend Financial Folio

Random bit of free association today. I was looking at my online bank statement and saw a recent charge for an online takeout food delivery service. After a matter of seconds of staring at it I was able to parse the name of the service and the name of the restaurant from the unbroken string of characters, but for those first couple beats I genuinely thought GRUBHUBKABULKABOBHOUS must be the name of a minor demon from Dungeons & Dragons or something.

I'd like to say that denizens of the infernal planes of a roleplaying setting leapt to mind so readily because I've been running a campaign for my wife and kids for the past year and a half, but let's be honest here. It's mainly because I'm a geek down to the very core of my being, and I've always got one foot in the fantasy world, mentally at the very least.

GRUBHUBKABULKABOBHOUS!!!

Dead Trees and Fermented Grains

Non-COVID post! Well, mostly. A couple of weeks ago the extended fam (on my wife's side) and I went on vacation, renting a beach house as we usually do. We did it in as circumspect a way as possible, minimizing stops on the way down and back, ordering groceries for curbside pickup, eschewing our usual dinner date nights with grandparent-provided babysitting, and of course wearing masks in public and washing hands and all that. Because COVID. But it was still nice to get away! A week of no work, morning walks to the beach to take a dip in the ocean, afternoons lounging in and around the pool, family board games at night ... good times.

In fact, above and beyond the appealing features listed immediately above, I always look forward to a beach vacation primarily as an opportunity to indulge in two of my great loves: books and beers. And indeed, every single day we were there, I spent some time reading, and enjoyed a variety of cold ones. I could actually cite exactly how many books I read (finished a novel I was in the middle of, read an entire novel, and started a third one, plus two comics trade paperbacks) and how many different beers I sampled (six) because ... I am a giant nerd and I track these things via apps.

I reserved this post for a Social Media Tuesday because it was specifically the involvement of apps that tickled my amusement and made me think "yeah if I were still blogging regularly this would definitely be a post." Because, on the one hand, remember in the olden days of the early 00's, before the supremacy of Facebook, when lots and lots of websites and apps were trying to be "social media for NICHE INTEREST GOES HERE"? I do, because I was very late to Facebook, like 2014 or something, but before that I got into GoodReads and I definitely said, out loud, at some point, that that was "basically the same thing". If people wanted to connect with me and see what I was up to, they could do so on GoodReads! I read all the time (commuting via mass transit) and posted detailed reviews of every book I read, sometimes directly on the site, and sometimes by linking from my GoodReads entries back to this very blog here, where of course I would use book reviews as autobiographical jumping off points for reflections on this crazy modern world we live in (yes, ha ha, 2007-me thought that moment in history was so-o-o-o cra-a-a-a-a-zy). Anyway, obviously Facebook now is what it is, and I got onboard for good or ill (both, most days) and yet I have remained a devoted GoodReads user because I am a completist and once I start something I don't want to stop. I got much more slack about posting reviews but I do enjoy tracking which books I read, and how many I read per year, and so on.

I got into Untapped, the beer-tracking app, much later and not at all as a substitute, close-enough kind of social networking. Again, I just like cataloguing and tracking and measuring things, and Untapped does the job. And, okay, every once in a while I will get a "toast" from one of my friends on the app, and "toast" them back, which is always a nice bit of pleasant, low-stakes, virtual interaction, even moreso now that we're all quarantining and isloating and whatnot (sorry, everything comes back to COVID, dammit).

The other hand I wanted to acknowledge for sheer ridiculousness has to do with the metrics and numbers games, because as it happened I got to see two different ends of the spectrum playing out in the respective apps over the course of the beach week. Within GoodReads, I had set a goal for myself of reading 52 books this year, which seemed moderately achievable and also would have the effect of finally getting the total number of books I had read and tracked in the app up over 1000. Anyone who loves tracking numbers especially loves big round numbers, and I am no exception. Of course I've fallen a bit behind pace this year because I haven't been commuting, and thus haven't been listening to audiobooks as fast (DAMMIT, COVID) so it was nice to get a chance to play catch-up a bit and see the grand total tick up from 971 to 972 to 973 etc. Meanwhile over on Untapped, I've been using the app for three or four years and managed to try a little over 300 different beers. The app itself automatically subdivides things, tracking the individual beer style families (e.g. porters, stouts, brown ales, IPAs, wheat beers, etc.) in a way I probably wouldn't bother to do myself. Although, I have discovered that since I like what I like and tend to drink beers within the same styles, it sometimes gets hard to try new-to-me beers just because the options within my preferences are limited. Beach week, in particular sharing a house with other adults who have different tastes in beer, provides an opportunity for me to freely (in all sense of the word) expose my palate to beers I would never buy for myself.

And thus Beach Week is a real prime time for pumping up my numbers! But it did make me laugh, as I'm working my way towards a thousand recorded books and plowing into my fourth century of beers, that I tried one of the IPAs that my brother-in-law brought to the beach, and dutifully recorded it in Untapped, and got a little notification ding for earning a badge. A completely meaningless but nevertheless unironic electronic attaboy which basically said, "Good for you! You've now tried FIVE different IPAs! If you make it to TEN, you'll get another badge!" A bit of newbie encouragement, delivered to me because I'm just so finicky, apparently. I thought that was hilarious.

79

So the Covid-19 lockdown happened and I found myself working from home, with my wife and kids in the house, and it was on the one hand a very strange, arguably historic/era-defining/watershed moment, but on the other hand it was ... familiar? I was in my own house, with my family, and as I've mentioned before, working from home was not new to me. In fact it was often an option I took advantage of specifically because one or all of the kids were home, too sick for school or off for a teacher workday or the like.

On top of the circumstantial similarities, it felt like I was someplace I had been before, on a visceral level. It felt like Snowmageddon: No school! Office closed! People freaking out about toilet paper! (Which - seriously? I lived through it and I still can hardly believe I typed that. The whole TP situation will probably merit it's own post down the road.)

One of the things I think I will always remember about those early days (but I'm recording it here nonetheless, just in case) is sitting on the loveseat in our front room, laptop on my knees, doing my job remotely, and frequently glancing out the window. As if I were going to see snow. Or something like it, some visible indicator that the very atmosphere outside my house had changed, become somehow hostile. In a sense, that was true, after all, except for the whole visible part. And that was the irony, because not only could I not see thunderheads or hurricane gusts or dumping rain or snow or hail, I saw beautiful clear blue skies more often than not. After so many years that it felt like forever where we went from brutal winters with mid-March snows straight into equally brutal summers with April heatwaves, 2020 offered up one of the most picture-perfect springs weather-wise. Sunshine and pleasant temperatures, weirdly commingled with pervasive dread due to the undetectable plague creeping everywhere. Bizarre.

Over time, the feeling of familiarity would fade, because even super-blizzards only shut the region down for a couple of weeks, not a couple of months. And of course when two feet of snow cover the ground, nobody denies that it's happening or downplays the dangers of driving through it. So the metaphor falls apart. But I do, even on day 79, find myself glancing out the window often. Now, though, it's because on some subconscious level I'm looking for a sign that it's safe, that it's over, that we can get back to normal. But I know I'm not going to see that, either.

77

I was berating myself the other day for not blogging regularly throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, because someday a quarantine journal might be interesting (to me and mine, at least). Today it hit me again, mainly because it is Memorial Day. My kids have the day off from school, but then again, they haven't been to school in two and a half months. My wife has the day off, but then again, her semester ended a couple of weeks ago. I am working, albeit working from home, but then again, all I do anymore is work from home. Although I used to work from home now and then in the Before Time. Although I used to get holidays off. And the reason why there is so much work for me to do is directly because of Covid-19, and school closures, and so on. It is a strange national long weekend, to be sure, and almost certainly moreso for other people than me, but as far as chronological markers to finally jump in with my usual better-late-than-never verve? Sure, why not?

So clearly this is a multi-post project, wherein I can both report in real time on Life in Historic Times, and also belatedly fill in the backstory as best I can reconstruct it. The subject of this post refers to the fact that, for me personally, it's the 77th day of lockdown. Eleven weeks. I'll take a stab now at sketching out how it all started.

Which of course means I have to provide some current context, because this here blog has lain in disuse for so long. I have been working for an education non-profit for a little over four years now. My wife has been teaching full-time at the local community college for two years. The little guy is in sixth grade, the little girl is in third grade, and the 'bino is in first grade. We still live in the same house we have for almost the entire existence of the blog. And lots of life stuff has happened but that probably gives you enough for now!

So my actual quarantine experience began on Tuesday, March 10, 2020. I remember that the week before, coronavirus was very big in the news. My company does work internationally and the novel coronavirus outbreak in China was impacting some of our projects. My boss said, "What's going to be crazy is if we get a similar outbreak here in the U.S." and I ... scoffed? I really did, I admit it. I thought it wouldn't happen. Not that it couldn't, just that it wouldn't. I don't know why I was so convinced of that, other than my usual cock-eyed optimistic belief that everything will work out fine, but I was very wrong, and I admit it.

On Monday the 9th, there was one reported case of Covid-19 in the NYC skyscraper where my company has its home office. Not in my company's office, not anyone who works for my company, but someone else at a different company on a different floor. Still, in an abundance of caution, my company closed our office, sending everyone to work at home. Including everyone at all the other satellite offices, which of course included me. So we packed up on a Monday, and on Tuesday, I was working from home, while my kids went to school, and my wife happened to be on spring break. Things escalated quickly that week, as my company announced we would stay closed for at least a month, my wife's campus decided not to re-open after spring break, and my kids ... continued to go to school, through Friday, which was a half-day for them anyway. By then, at least, the governor had closed schools state-wide. So I worked from home for four days in a row, and as I mentioned above, working from home was nothing new for me. I did it one day a week with regularity, and sometimes twice a week if the need arose. Four straight days was a bit of a novelty, but then it became apparent that it was going to be five days in a row the following week, and the week after that, and ... question mark? Of course at the beginning no one knew how or when it would all end, and two and a half, nearly three months later, we still don't know.

So that's the intro! I will add to this as often as I can, hopefully. Stay safe and well.

Narrative Rules by the Numbers (The Rise of Skywalker)

If I were to do my usual pop-culture-critique-by-way-of-autobiography thing vis-a-vis Star Wars: Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker it would probably run on for like twenty thousand words, and that sheer quantity of verbiage is not the "numbers" to which the post's title refers. So let me just jump to the bottom line: I liked it, on balance. It had flaws, and it had bright spots. I reacted to it very emotionally, which I mean in a good way. And I could also dissect what worked and what didn't and what was perfect and what should have been done differently or not at all for another ten thousand words, minimum, but in the interest of finishing a blog post for once, let me just offer an illustrative compare'n'contrast. SPOILERS ABOUND. I mean, come on, people.

The Rule of Three versus The Rule of Two

I never really shipped Kylo Ren and Rey, but by the end of TROS I bought into it. I think the movie did a good job handling Ben Solo's redemption arc (so much so that it makes me want to go back and rewatch Episodes VII and VIII to see how the whole thing hangs together knowing how it ends). And the thing I genuinely appreciated the most was the bittersweet ending, with Ben willingly giving his life to save Rey's, via magic Force/Life(Love) transfusion. It might have struck some people as a deus ex machina, especially inelegant given that never before in the saga have we ever seen a Jedi use this particular Cure Critical Wounds spell Force power. (Unless you count Baby Yoda in The Mandalorian. Which of course we are supposed to; Disney's not stupid and the timing of the Mando episode where this is a thing compared to the release date for TROS is the furthest thing in the galaxy from a coincidence.) BUT, at least I can give the screenwriter credit for correctly employing the Rule of Three, wherein we don't just see the healing Force power come out of nowhere at the very end. We see it three times; once when it doesn't matter, once when it does matter, and once when it means everything.

• First, Rey uses it to heal the serpent on Pasana. It's a nice character moment, showing that Rey is a gifted Force adept capable of doing new things no one taught her to do. And it further underlines that she's a noble soul who finds non-violent solutions to problems, is at one with nature, can do more than just destroy, etc. etc. All of which is legit great storytelling. I merely classify it as "doesn't matter" because there were other ways to get out of that plot obstacle. Between herself, Chewbacca, Poe, Finn and BB-8, they doubtless could have fought their way past one giant angry snake. The fact that the characters had other options makes it seem like less of a violation of narrative logic, the whole "since when can Jedi do that?" question notwithstanding.
• Then during the duel on the wreckage of the second Death Star, Rey impales Kylo Ren on his own lightsaber, which is more good character work, showing how Rey is more than just a vessel for fairytale nobility, though of course she immediately regrets it and therefore her very next action is to heal her enemy. This time it's much more consequential; the story goes in a wildly different direction if Rey just leaves Kylo Ren there to die. This is how the Rule of Three is supposed to work. The new idea gets introduced lightly, which feels like a set-up for something later, and then there's a callback, which feels like a payoff. BUT THEN ...
• ... Rey expends all her energy besting Palpatine in Force combat and burns herself out and dies. Ben Solo reappears and finds her lifeless body and grieves for a moment before making a last-ditch attempt to save her. So now it becomes clear that it didn't just matter that Rey saved Kylo Ren, so that he could come back and help her fight Palpatine, but also she taught this cool new Force trick to him so that he could use it later, and also also by showing him mercy and the healing power of love she kickstarted his ultimate redemption which climaxes in his own self-sacrifice to bring her back. And that, of course, means everything because in the end Rey is the hero who survives and Ben is the reclaimed villain who dies, every archetype aligning with the pattern.

Also, Kylo Ren/Ben Solo's arc is better than Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker's. Come at me!

So that was great. The Rule of Three is solid. As opposed to the Rule of Two, which is the utter worst and one of my biggest storytelling pet peeves (which is saying something). And to be clear, I'm not just talking about the first two-thirds of the Rule of Three here. It can be perfectly well and good, depending on the story and its scope, to have a set-up and a payoff and no additional third layer after that, to introduce something in a slightly misdirectional way and then return to it later more emphatically and then be done with it. I'm ranting here about a specific usage of the Rule of Two, which I'll highlight in the movie and then rant about some more.

• When we first see Rey in TROS she is meditating and trying to contact the spirits of Jedis past. Her mantra is "be with me." But it isn't working, and she's beginning to doubt it will ever work. Given that she is floating in lotus position and creating intricate orbiting patterns of large rocks, the problem does not seem to be her level of power of degree of control or amount of training she has received. What could the underlying issue be ...?
• ... welp, guess we'll never know! Because on Exegol, when she tries again to get the Jedis past to be with her, this time they respond. She hears their voices, their platitudes of encouragement, and finds the inner strength to rise and face Palpatine again. Super-duper amped-up-with-the-power-of-all-the-Jedis Rey turns Palpatine's own dark power back on him and he lightning-flays himself to nothingness, Which, don't get me wrong, was cool. But bafflingly unexplained.

This is not showing a thing once in a smallish way so the audience accepts it as a viable thing, then bringing it back again later having already obviated the need to pause to introduce it so it can just be a rad element in the moment. In TROS's good Rule of Three, the first time we see the healing trick Rey can definitely do the healing trick. How she learned it, how she's able to do it, how she knows how it works, all of that is irrelevant. Here's a thing she can do, and this may be important again later on. In the bad Rule of Two, the first time we see the "be with me" we're actually seeing its absence. Rey definitely cannot do it. In any human understanding of narrative, of how stories work, this implies a journey of discovery; if she can't do it now, she has to learn how to do it, or figure out why she can't do it, or build herself up to be able to say she's earned it, or something. But TROS doesn't give us that journey. Like, at all. Why does the thing that didn't work on Ajan Kloss work on Exegol? There's really only one answer that holds any water, and it's "because that's when the story needs it to work" which is always the WORST possible way to justify something in a narrative.

There's a not-at-all uncommon trope in the pulpy kind of stories I like which goes like this: a two-fisted hero brawls his way through adventure after adventure. Then he encounters a villain who doesn't go down for the count with one punch. So the hero punches the villain again, but the villain still doesn't go down. In fact, the villain hits the hero and for once, the hero gets knocked down. So the hero has to shake his head, collect himself, and then ... punch the villain one more time! Really hard this time, and down he goes! And that is the end of the villain, phew. It is deeply, deeply dumb. It is literally the old chestnut about trying the same thing over and over and expecting different results, but actually getting the desired outcome. It is a brain-dead variation on the Rule of Three which makes it kind of feel like a story is supposed to go, and in very select circumstances it can totally work, while in others it works if you don't pick at it, but it always sticks in my craw as lazy and unsatisfying. I vastly prefer a story where the ending hinges on some element of surprise or discovery, by all means put the hero in peril by having the old reliable approach not work but then have the hero improvise or realize a new approach! Show me something clever, or thematically resonant, or ideally both at once, please and thank you.

Clearly TROS failed to fulfill this humble request. And I'll just go ahead and play Monday-morning quarterback and say it wouldn't even have been that hard for the story to follow basically the same outline but not fall prey to the bad Rule of Two. Most of the ingredients were right there. At the beginning of the movie there's clearly a tension between Rey and Poe about whether the Resistance or her Jedi training is more important. She agrees to go on the mission to locate a Sith Wayfinder for the Resistance, but really that is an extension of her training, too. The whole crew of heroes override her wishes to go alone. But over the course of the story she's always going off on her own anyway, in the weird astral battles with Kylo Ren, aboard the star destroyer when she ends up in his trophy room, on the ocean moon when she takes a skimmer to the wreck by herself, on Ahch-To where she tries to exile herself, and in the Sith temple right up until Ben Solo shows up. Ben is of course a fellow Jedi, as are the spirits that ultimately give her the strength to overcome her adversary.

But imagine how much cooler it could have been if after all of that Rey had realized that compartmentalizing her Jedi life to one side and her Resistance life to the other was wrong. That the Jedi have always been a bit wrong, holding themselves separate from others, not allowing themselves to love and form families, isolated inside their Temple (just like the Sith), inducting children into their ranks with no meaningful consent (just like the First Order). If Rey had realized that connections with real flesh and blood people all around you from all different backgrounds was far more important than connecting with ancient traditions held by the dead. Not that all traditions are bad! Not the honoring the past is meaningless at best or evil at worst! But just imagine if Rey had had one moment of clarity that bridged point A and point B in her bad Rule of Two. If at her lowest point she had tried again to reach out to the dead Jedis, and failed again, and then tearfully reached out again to the sky above, to Finn, to Poe, and reached out further, to Maz Kanata and Rose Tico, to the random Aki-Aki on Pasana and the old junkscrubber lady on Jakku, to all the living rather than the dead, not to ask for their power or wisdom or secrets, just to acknowledge commonality and love and life. AND THEN that could have been the gateway, to truly being one with the Force, and being able to hear the voices of the elders who had gone before. The fact is, if we look at the whole nine episode saga, that when Palpatine revealed himself, Mace Windu couldn't destroy him. Yoda couldn't destroy him. Anakin fell under his sway. Obi-wan didn't have a clue how to stop him. Luke managed not to be seduced, but still couldn't defeat him. Vader dealt him a setback at best. And even the dyad of Rey and Ben Solo couldn't stand up to him (well, him and, as we learned, all the souls of all the Sith for all time). The idea that Rey could finally, ultimately destroy Palpatine with the help of the other Jedi - who had all individually failed up to that point! - is a bit underwhelming. It's just punching the Emperor again, but really hard this time. Oh but what could have been if, instead of pitting the light religion and its adherents against the dark religion and its devotees, the lasting victory was achieved by Rey drawing strength from the common people, the non-Sith and non-Jedi which both Palpatine and the other Jedi had always dismissed as relatively unimportant. That could have been something really special.

And then, if I had my druthers, when our hero got to the point of rechristening herself, she wouldn't have chosen a name that hearkened back to prophecies about the Balance of the Force, that was inextricably linked to both Jedi and Sith, but rather a name that reflected (dare I say it?) multiple generations of public service for the greater good, from serving in the Senate to adopting orphans to fighting in the Rebellion and the Resistance. Keep all the imagery in the epilogue the same, exactly the same, show the force ghosts of Luke and Leia smiling beatifically in the desert sunset. Just change one word.

"I'm Rey."

"Rey who?"

"Rey Organa."