Yesterday I got my second injection of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine, which means that in about two weeks, when my immune system has had time to do all the processing work it has to do, I’ll be fully vaccinated against this fecking pathogen. Get your vaccinations, folks. The sooner we all get it done, the sooner this thing can be pushed to the area of “annoying problem” and not “all-consuming threat”.
My experience was pretty mild, compared to most. The first shot left me with a sore shoulder, and it wasn’t even sore all the time, just when I moved it in certain ways or exerted it. It felt roughly like the soreness that follows a tetanus shot (my memory of which was pretty fresh, having received that particular booster back in January). I had heard that the second shot tended to provoke stronger reactions in people, ranging from more persistent shoulder soreness to the body enduring what is essentially a simulated bout of influenza for a day or two.
Well, my shoulder did get more sore than last time. Last night, I could lift my left arm (where I got both shots) about this far before I got a nice stiff bolt of pain that made me wince:
I took today off from work (at work’s strong encouragement to do just that) just in case I had it rough. Luckily, I did not have it rough. The shoulder is still sore, though that is slowly fading, and as I write this I can lift my left arm without wincing, though not without a bit of pain. I didn’t suffer much by way of accompanying aches or pains, nor did I have any nausea or fever or other flu symptoms. What I did have can be described as a persistent fatigue that left me with not a great deal of enthusiasm for daily tasks. It was comparable to two feelings: one is the fatigue I feel two days later after a really bad night’s sleep. When I sleep really badly–say, only getting three hours of sleep in total–it doesn’t usually affect me much the next day, but the day after that is usually grim. If my sleep Sunday night into Monday is godawful, then I’ll get through Monday just fine, but Tuesday will be a brain-fog of a day, no matter how well I sleep Monday night into that Tuesday. That’s how it kind of feels today.
The other thing I’d compare this feeling to? A light hangover. Not a rip-snortin’ hangover where I want to wear sunglasses and massage my own temples all day someplace in the silence of a Buddhist monastery, but just that general sense, again, of brain-fog and lack of enthusiasm, focus, motivation, or anything like that.
As I write this, it’s mid-afternoon and that feeling is mostly gone, too. Yay!
Did I prepare for this whole ordeal at all? Well, a little. I made sure to sleep really well each day the last several nights, and yesterday I drank three cups of green tea and doubled up my daily doses of Vitamins C and D. I also doubled up my daily low-dose aspirin, but I did not take any ibuprofen or acetaminophen prior to the fact. I try to avoid those until I’m really hurting. Oh, and I drank more water than usual yesterday, and I generally am very good about staying hydrated.
I have no idea if those things helped, in all honesty, but here I am, coming out of the fog.
The feeling of a light hangover, though, had another effect: it hit my appetite in a big way. I expected this, too, so the other day I stocked up on my favorite salty soup of choice for such moments: Ramen noodles!
It’s funny how some people get through their Ramen-fed college years never wanting to touch Ramen again, while some, like me, never lose their taste for the stuff. I indulge my Ramen fondness relatively rarely (look at the sodium content on the label and you’ll see why), generally only having Ramen maybe three or four times in a year. But there’s just something about a really salty and hot soup that always helps me recover from the low-grade arse-kicking of a mild hangover.
And that brings me (in very long-winded fashion, I admit) to the “Soup Memories” part of the title of this post. The beef flavored Ramen was great! I’ve loved Ramen since I was very young, when my parents would serve it up with buttered rye crisp on the side. (And it had to be the rye crisp that came in big circles with a hole in the middle, from which you would break an uneven piece. The nice square stuff of today, in neat rectangular packages? I’m sorry, but it’s fine and it’s very not right.) And sometimes I’ll make chicken-flavored Ramen and add a fried egg to it. I was skeptical of that at first but then I tried it one day, and when you break the yolk into the soup, you get this wonderful creaminess that’s pretty great.
Yes, Ramen is good for the light hangover. But sadly, the greatest light hangover treatment in soup form is no longer available, because in 2010 the folks at Campbell’s discontinued it.
I’m talking about this:
Pepper Pot soup.
Ahhh, this stuff. Another flavor of my youth that’s likely gone forever, at least as I remember it. I should make my own sometime–recipes abound, you know!–and obviously, homemade will be better than some condensed canned soup. But, well…as Jeff Smith (I know, I know) told us many times, food and memory are inextricably bound together. I remember many a time, as a kid and later in college and beyond, opening the can and dumping the congealed contents into the sauce pan, adding the can of water, stirring the thing as it heated and the congealed contents…um…uncongealed.
Pepper Pot soup is a regional thing, in the Campbell’s incarnation based on a soup that was popular for many years in Philadelphia. As one of its main ingredients is beef tripe, I assume that it was basically a stew or soup that originally rose as a peasant dish whose main grace was using up bits of the cow that were generally last to be consumed. The local Philly lore has Pepper Pot soup having been a significant part of the diet that got General Washington’s soldiers through that winter at Valley Forge. Other food historians I’ve perused believe that Pepper Pot was the inevitable result of the mixing of cultures–including the slave cultures–in the original colonies. Note the branding in this old advertisement, with the tricorn-wearing men (I’m assuming women found Pepper Pot equally nourishing, but we couldn’t really advertise that back when, could we?):
What does it taste like? In the Campbell’s version, it was basically a beefy broth with some vegetables, little bits of tripe (usually cut very small, I didn’t even know what they were until many years into my regular eating of the stuff), a pleasing dose of salt, and a very pleasing–and warming–dose of pepper. It’s one of those soups that intensely satisfies, not just when you’re having soup because soup sounds good or because it’s one of the courses, but when you’re in that kind of place when your body is saying Give me SOUP.
By the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Philadelphia pepper pot fell out of favor, although it continued to be made by home cooks. Many institutions that had served it as a staple dish, such as the Four Seasons Hotel and the Union League of Philadelphia, removed it from their menus. Campbell’s and Old Original Bookbinder’s, a food division created by a restaurant of the same name in Philadelphia to sell packaged versions of their soups, condiments, and sauces, also stopped selling canned pepper pot by 2018.
This seems to me a pity. Food is memory, remember…and I’m going to have to figure out how to make it on my own, because I’m wanting to taste it again, and now it’s because I miss the flavor, and not because I’m getting hung over on any kind of regular basis!
One of my requests last Christmas was a new sweater or two, in a lighter color to counteract the general dark tone of my existing sweater collection (some of which are also getting a bit old). The Wife gave me a wonderful light-blue sweater with a neat pattern around the top, and a cowl neck that zips up. It’s similar to an Icelandic Lopapeysa sweater, but it’s not made of wool. This has quickly become one of my very favorite sweaters, and as a bonus, it seems to go really well with overalls!
Here’s a suitably dramatic pose, taken in an alley in Hamburg, NY. The Dee-oh-gee and I were killing time outside while The Wife went into our favorite local bakery to buy stuff. I like the color contrasts here, between the sweater, the overalls, the scarf, the doggo, and the wall behind us:
The color and pattern (apparently called a yoke design) go well with either solid blue overalls or with hickory stripes. I assume it will go well with the herringbone overalls as well, but I haven’t worn the sweater with those yet.
As always, I make few (if any) apologies for the fact that my main criteria for judging whether or not I want to add a top to my wardrobe is, “Do I think this will look good under a pair of overalls?” I mean, it’s my thing, y’know?
Oh, and the title of this post constitutes a little joke. I have no Icelandic roots at all.
On weekends I am awoken usually by the whimpering of the Dee-oh-gee, who usually gets to somewhere between 7:30 and 8:00am before he has to go out and relieve himself. Fine. Then I make coffee and usually try to sit and read a bit before getting on with the day.
This morning, however, Carla and Rosa (one of the two cats we adopted recently…huh, not sure I ever blogged about them!) decided they had other plans for me.
There’s a famous song from the Broadway show Rent, called “Seasons of Love”. The song talks about the measure of time, specifically, a year:
Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes
Five hundred twenty-five thousand moments so dear
Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes
How do you measure, measure a year?
In daylights, in sunsets
In midnights, in cups of coffee
In inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife
In five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes
How do you measure, a year in the life?
That’s how many minutes there are in one year: 525, 600.
As I write this (a few days before I’m publishing it), the COVID-19 death toll in the United States, according to the CDC website, is 519,064. We’re just under a death a minute from this disease, over the last year.
“How do you measure, measure a year.” Indeed.
I’m not sure when I consider the COVID-19 virus to have really “begun”, in terms of being a major concern in my personal world. Maybe it was when the World Health Organization declared it a pandemic (March 11, 2020). Maybe it was when Tom Hanks announced that he and his wife, Rita Wilson, had tested positive (March 12, 2020). Maybe it was when the National Basketball Association had to start canceling games because players were testing positive (the same day). I remember watching this segment on John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight, which aired on March 1, 2020, a few weeks before everything went haywire. The segment is worth watching again, because it’s astonishing how wrong everybody was at the beginning…but even given that proviso, note Larry Kudlow confidently saying, “We’ve got this thing contained already.”
What strikes me most about that video–and this was not only before vaccine development was even at a hopeful stage, but when our best science still hadn’t homed in on COVID-19’s respiratory nature and was still not really endorsing mask use and was instead focusing on rigorous hand-washing and avoiding face-touching–is what Oliver says at the 18:25 mark:
“At this point, you may be wondering, how scared should you be? And the answer is probably, a bit. A bit. I don’t want to be alarmist here, but I don’t want to minimize what we might be facing here.”
It turned out that we should have been a bit more than a bit scared, but then, we didn’t know then what was to come or how Americans would react to it all. Those first weeks, though? Those were…incredible.
It’s all a bit hazy right now, but as COVID-19 began to take hold in the US, and as we all realized that Mr. Kudlow’s lying aside, we most certainly did not have this contained, and as we all saw in the news stories of massive lockdowns in China and Italy and other places with soaring case and death counts, Americans started to panic. For those of us who work in grocery stores, that panic turned into something pretty epic. The run on cleaning supplies was obvious, as were the runs on a number of food staples. People were suddenly wondering: Are we about to be locked in our homes for weeks on end? Are we going to be forbidden to go outside? Will we not be able to buy food or other supplies?
By the end of those first days, the shelves at The Store looked like…well, I struggle to come up with a metaphor, but we’ve all seen the pictures from grocery stores in the South when the hurricane that’s on its way has been upgraded to Category Four. Our delivery schedules were thrown into serious awry as individual stores were suddenly ordering two, three, four times as much supply as they usually did; this surge got passed on to corporate warehouses and then to suppliers. Some brands disappeared from our shelves and have yet to show back up, even now. Buyers scrambled to get stocked with brands we’d never heard of (and if I may say so, Sugardale pepperoni is really tasty!), and of course there were the buying limits that seemed to go on forever. One can of beans. One jar of peanut butter. One package of toilet paper.
And oh, toilet paper. Somehow that one item became the “poster child” for the pandemic’s early run of panic shopping, didn’t it? I came in to work on Saturday morning for a sixth day, just to assist our overwhelmed Grocery department, and the first thing I did at 6:45 am was to pull a pallet of toilet paper out onto the sales floor. The entire pallet was emptied by eager customers in minutes. So was the second one. So was the third one.
At that point, no one had any real idea of how to best combat the virus. The best advice was to wash your hands constantly and avoid touching your face. My hands were absolutely raw after all that washing, and that’s when hand lotion became an indispensable part of my life. We didn’t know yet that the virus was mainly transmitting via respiratory droplets, but that became clear pretty quickly (I remember a horrifying story about a choir someplace in Washington that had a rehearsal that led to nearly all the choir members becoming infected), and then…masks were upon us.
I never liked wearing masks as a kid, not even as part of a Halloween costume, so this took me some time to get used to. It took me a bit of experimenting to realize that the best masks for me were the ones where the straps or cords go around the head and not around the ears, and I bought several masks online from makers who knew what they were doing (i.e., not cheaply-made single-ply thin cotton ones). A year later, I’ve mostly become accustomed to wearing the mask, though I do consider myself fortunate in that my job affords me ample opportunity to take the mask off when I’m alone in my own work room. But even so, I have to admit to being shocked and dismayed at the reaction to masks by an awful lot of Americans.
I’ve seen people wearing masks with anti-mask slogans printed right on them, which strikes me as deeply weird. One said “This mask is USELESS!”, and naturally, it was, given that its wearer had it below her nose. Another said “Worn by FORCE, not FEAR!!!”, which is just goofy. I do not for the life of me understand that macho American attitude toward “fear”, as if self-preservation is a non-manly thing to want. I periodically see snark online: Why would you wear your mask when you’re DRIVING BY YOURSELF, sheeple! Well, speaking just for myself, I’m making several stops in one trip and I don’t want to bother with putting the mask on, taking it off, putting it on, taking it off, each time I stop someplace or come outside. And don’t get me started on the people who will, upon exiting a store or office, rip their mask off and take in a giant deep breath as if they’ve just broken the surface after a deep dive in the sea beyond the limits of their lung capacity.
I’ve reached a point where much of the time I’m wearing a mask, I don’t even think about it and barely notice that I have it on, to the point that I’ve actually caught myself trying to do things like blow a bit of hair off my phone or take a sip of coffee while masked. I cannot understand the sheer levels of anger something so simple as a face mask has inspired. I am once again confronted by the degree to which a great many of my own fellow citizens hold beliefs with which I cannot even begin to remotely empathize…but this is not that post.
As crises go, it’s been very strange for me that this one has been fairly well tailored to suit my particular lifestyle. As an introvert who is quite happy to live a mostly inner life, this pandemic has not been that hard to live with. I miss eating out with The Wife, and the festivals that we love visiting were all canceled last year: no Nickel City Con, no Sterling Renaissance Festival, no Erie County Fair, no Ithaca Apple Harvest Festival. But I still got to go on nature walks with the dogs, and while eating in restaurants hasn’t been a thing in a very long time, we’ve had a lot of wonderful takeout meals. But we don’t find ourselves missing out on desperately-needed human contact; we don’t find ourselves starved for hugs and we don’t find ourselves aching for a return to “normal”. I would, in fact, be lying if I did not admit that some small part of me finds a bit of satisfaction in seeing the world’s extroverts, so many of whom act like introverts like me are somehow problematic, being forced into my way of living for a little while.
Still, though: it’s been a year, and it’s been a hard year, a bad year, a terrible year. It’s been a year that was always going to be bad, but didn’t have to be as bad as it was (and I have a lot more to say about that, whether or not I actually do decide to say any of it). But there were moments along the way, moments of light, moments of goodness, moments that made me think that maybe, just maybe, this entire experience would be a learning experience for enough of us–a critical mass, if you will–that maybe we can still build a future to come in which we put aside the notion that we’re all in this alone, that we’re all marked for our individual fates and that our purpose here is just to serve as our own tiny cogs in the great machine that we call The Economy.
As the light grows at the end of this tunnel, I hope and pray that we take the lesson with us that nothing had to be this way, and that our world can be better. If a crisis does nothing else, it affords us an opportunity to look deeply at our society and ask serious questions about why we do certain things the way that we do. A “return to normal” would be so incredibly disappointing, wouldn’t it? I don’t know about you, but I was never in love with my “normal”. I dare us to do better.
And I think that those 525,600 people–one for every minute, and counting–dare us to do better too.
It’s time for my annual wrap-up quiz. Warning: I’m writing about 2020 here. Trigger warnings galore! And some political bluntness, for which I’ll say, if you disagree with me, well…I do not care. For a taste of how I’ve been seeing the year just gone by, consider this tweet:
A lot of folks acting as if 2020 has just been a string of bewildering bad luck, rather than what it truly is: a concentration of widely and reliably predicted and interconnected disasters that advanced nations of the world could have mitigated or prevented but chose not to.
It’s been my view for some time that everything going wrong for America and for the world, all of it, consists of self-inflicted wounds, and I have seen nothing to make me think otherwise for even a second.
But now, on to the quiz.
Did you keep your New Years’ resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
My resolutions never change much: “Read a lot, write a lot, eat healthier, walk more, listen to more music.”
As these go, not bad! The toughest one is “eat healthier,” which is a back-end kind of thing: I have no problem finding newer healthier foods to like. It’s staying away from the less-than-healthy ones that tends to trip me up! This is something I need to work on big-time.
As for the rest, it was a decent year. I wrote a fair amount (though a lot of my writing time this year was spent on editing existing manuscripts, so drafting was on the backseat for a chunk of the year). Reading was a constant, and I really have made effort to listen to more music!
Did anyone close to you give birth?
Nope.
Did anyone close to you die?
I suppose it’s almost miraculous that in the Year of COVID, my answer to this is, No. But I know of people who have died, and people close who have suffered a lot of loss (and not all of it COVID driven, since the rest of Death didn’t exactly go on holiday because of the pandemic).
What countries did you visit?
In my mind? Tons.
What would you like to have in 2021 that you lacked in 2020?
A Federal government that isn’t led by a delusional authoritarian grifter whose appeal is distressingly wide.
What was your biggest achievement of the year?
It was 2020. I got to the end of it without having contracted COVID-19 as of this writing. This was not a year for grand accomplishments, I suspect…though I did get a book ready for release, and more! Detail to come in another post.
What was your biggest failure?
I took entirely too much random delight in chucking rocks at online trolls.
What was the best thing you bought?
I probably bought way too much stuff this year–adding to the overalls collection and purchasing books, of course–but the thing that’s brought the most direct happiness to my ongoing existence is the pair of Bluetooth ear buds I picked up in June. I had watched a YouTube video that was randomly recommended by that platform’s algorithm (why, I’m not sure, it was just someone’s “day in the life” video diary thing), in which a person put on earbuds that had hooks to go over the ear, and I thought, “Wait, they make those?” A bit of Googling turned up my Soundcore buds.
Whose behavior merited celebration?
Anyone who wore a mask and socially-distanced themselves, no matter how hard it may have been to do so.
Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
Not even my skills with the English language can convey my disappointment at how much farther the Republicans can descend in this country. As I write this, a bunch of them in Congress are gearing up to “object” to the certification of the Electoral College results, based on zero concrete evidence of any “fraud” whatsoever. It’s pure banana-republic dictator shit, this business of “We respect the election as long as the guy in charge wins” and it’s just appalling. Add to that the QAnon lunatics, the science deniers, and the ones who refuse to wear masks or maintain social distance because of “FREEDOM!”, and you’ve got a deeply dangerous state of affairs in this country. We can’t long survive this large a percentage of our citizenry being completely off its collective rocker.
I’m also disappointed in what I see as America’s rejection of collective thinking and its growing lack of imagination, but that will have to wait for another post.
Where did most of your money go?
Books, booze, food, gifts, and vintage overalls. And I paid down some debt, which was nice.
What did you get really excited about?
In 2020? Day trips to Ithaca and Letchworth and the Finger Lakes area. New flavors I’ve tried. I’ve made green tea a part of my daily routine of late, and I’m loving it! (I also discovered just this week, when the last of my Christmas gifts came in the mail, just how much tea is in a pound of the stuff. Note to self: order the stuff 8oz at a time, moving forward.)
Compared to this time last year, are you happier or sadder?
Oh, who the hell knows. On a personal level I’m pretty happy and doing fine. When I start thinking societally, though–ugh.
On a political note, I’m really increasingly disappointed by my country. Maybe I’ll write more about this later, but re-electing the Joni Ernst’s and the Susan Collinses and the Mitch McConnells of the world is a staggering failure of citizenship, and the fact that more than 70 million of my fellow Americans looked at the current state of affairs and decided that they were fine with it is horribly depressing.
Thinner or fatter?
A bit thinner! No idea about the poundage, but I own overalls for which I have never been able to fasten both sets of side buttons–and now I can. This amazes me. Now, my progress in that regard has probably taken a small beating the last few weeks, but I did develop some healthier eating habits in 2020 that won’t be hard to replicate. I can still do the “gluttony” thing on occasion, but I’ve finally reached a point where doing so is fun for a very short while, but then my brain goes, “Oooog, gimme salad and fiber and lean protein, please.”
Richer or poorer?
I’m doing better than a lot of Americans. And we all should be doing better, shouldn’t we? I really hope I live long enough to see this country finally start to pivot away from the trickle-down, “If we just let rich people have more and more money they’ll eventually rain it down upon us all” bullshit that’s been the economic wind in America’s wings since 1981.
I’ll say this for American conservatism: when it managed to convince most of America that the major factor holding them back was what government was taking out of their paychecks instead of what their employers were never putting in their paychecks in the first place, it won a rhetorical victory for the ages.
What do you wish you’d done more of?
As always, reading, writing, and walking. (Same as last year.)
What do you wish you’d done less of?
Chucking rocks at right-wing trolls online. Yeah, it’s fun to mute them and watch them reply anyway, but still…it’s not a terribly productive use of time!
How did you spend Christmas?
With family. We used FaceTime to include my sister, which was…well, obviously it’s not the same, but it was actually a fun way to manage to include someone who wasn’t able to be around due to circumstances and shit. Other than that, Christmas was what it always is for us: a quiet time spent with family. I don’t come from a large and close extended family, and The Wife’s family lives far away as well, so Christmas has never been about large gatherings and traveling around to multiple houses to put in appearances. It’s always been about home, and I expect it always will be. I hear people complaining about how their holidays were ruined by COVID, or how they were going to defy the Big Bad Government to go to their giant get-togethers, and I reflect anew on the degree to which this particular crisis has forced an awful lot of Americans into my lifestyle. I haven’t yet figured out to what degree their reactions to this amuses me or depresses me, but it’s definitely some of both.
Did you fall in love in 2020?
She’s from the Niagara Falls area, you don’t know her.
(Yes, that’s a quote from The Breakfast Club.)
How many one-night stands?
Come on. I never had one-night stands when they were an option.
What was your favorite TV program?
ABC canceled Bless This Mess, which was a hilarious fish-outta-water sitcom about two NYC liberal hippie-types who inherit farmland in Nebraska, so eff you, ABC. (The show was not about “Let’s make fun of the hicks!”, if you’re thinking along those lines. It was a collection of zany weirdos and full of character-driven comedy that was some of the funniest stuff I’ve seen in years. If you watch it, the short first season–only six episodes, if I recall correctly–is mildly amusing, but the show didn’t take off creatively until the second season, which was sadly the last.)
ABC also had a cool detective show called Stumptown, set in Portland, OR, that I liked a lot. They renewed it for a second season…and then when COVID shut down production, they ended up canceling it instead. Curse you, ABC!
CBS has a sitcom called The Unicorn which we like a lot. This follows a widower as he starts to emerge from grieving; he has two teenage daughters and a wonderful support system of friends around him. This show is in its second season and is worth checking out. It’s sometimes bittersweet, but it’s never depressing.
Oh, and we like The Mandalorian a great deal. We’re slowly watching Season Two now, rationing it out for maximum enjoyment. Of course, the Internet has already seen to it that I’m spoiled and know what happens at the end, so thanks, Internet. Sheesh.
Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?
I really don’t like hatred and I try to avoid it.
What was the best book you read?
I refer you to my Books Read in 2020 post from the other day, where my five-star reads are highlighted in bold.
What was your greatest musical discovery?
Oh, music! Music might have saved me this year, to the point where this blog was almost exclusively a music blog for a whole lot of the time. Aside from my year-long deep dive into Beethoven, I also did a lot of listening to the work of Black composers, which often featured in my semi-regular Tone Poem Tuesday posts. This was a partial response on my part to the Black Lives Matter movement, because surely one way we can start to acknowledge the importance of the Black lives that we whites have for so long completely marginalized and ignored is to engage with Black art. This will remain a focus of mine, moving forward.
As far as specific Black composers go, I’ve really become a fan of Florence Price, whose music I featured several times.
Non-classical? Well, none of these were “discoveries”, but I’m discovering a real fondness for ELO, which I am starting to consider one of the most underrated bands in history, and Taylor Swift, whom I am starting to consider simply a genius.
What did you want and get?
President-elect Joe Biden.
What did you want and not get?
A United States Senate not ruled by Mitch McConnell, whom I believe to be the single worst American of my lifetime. (Though, if Georgia voters manage to come through, I still may get this.)
What were your favorite films of this year?
2020 was the first year of my life that I never set foot in a movie theater, and I only watched a single movie new to me, courtesy of Netflix. That was Enola Holmes, which I enjoyed greatly.
I love film and I wish I had more time to watch them. I suspect my retirement, when it finally comes, is going to be a big film-fest.
What did you do on your birthday?
I don’t remember specifically what happened on my birthday, but my sister was in town and we did some antiquing and visiting comics stores. The next week was our annual trip to Ithaca and the Finger Lakes, which took on a very different tone given that the annual Apple Harvest Festival was canceled due to COVID.
How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2019?
It’s a struggle, every morning: “Which shirt do I want to wear with which overalls?”
What kept you sane?
Books and music and dogs and cats and overalls. Walks in the woods and by the water. I cope best when I’m allowed to focus my energies inward.
Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
I’ll give a shout-out to author and podcaster Dana Schwartz, who is a fine writer and the host of the wonderful podcast Noble Blood, which focuses on the sordid and grim side of history. There have been episodes on each one of Henry VIII’s wives (not all of whom were beheaded!), and a particularly effective episode about King Leopold II of Belgium and how he spearheaded some of the bloodiest acts of African colonialism. My favorite episode focused on one of my favorite stories from the history of science, the life of Tycho Brahe. Schwartz focuses that episode on Brahe’s life, instead of coming at it from the standpoint of Johannes Kepler, as most commentators do.
What political issue stirred you the most?
God, so many to choose from…but Black Lives Matter remains staggering to me. That a cop could just casually kneel with his knee on the throat of a black man until he died is one of the most appalling things I’ve ever seen, closely followed by the ability of so many white people to argue that there was really nothing at all wrong with this.
And there’s also my country’s response to COVID-19, a response so perfect in its malignant incompetence and rejection of science that it truly makes me believe that whatever greatness lies in store for humanity, America will no longer be much of a factor in driving it.
Who did you miss?
The geeky people who frequent the local cons! I was just starting to get comfortable with the idea of hanging out at local conventions and trying to market myself there (I was even going to release Book Four of The Song of Forgotten Stars at Nickel City Con in May), but that’s gone. I miss festivals–Ithaca’s Apple Harvest Festival, the Sterling Renaissance Festival, various others that we like to frequent. I miss some favorite local restaurants that we pray manage to hold on long enough for the vaccine to finally start beating back this virus.
Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2020:
The same ones as always:
Read a lot, write a lot. Listen to music. Go for walks and look at sunsets. Take all the pictures you want. Learn new things and try new stuff. If you have a dog, take him for walks. Buy books for your daughter, even when she complains that she likes to pick her own books (let her do that, too). Nothing fits your hand so well as your lover’s hand. Eating out is fine, but learn to cook things, too. Have a place to go where they know you and what you order. Don’t be afraid to revisit your childhood passions now and again; you weren’t always wrong back then. Overalls are awesome, it’s OK to wear double denim, and a pie in the face is a wonderful thing!
To all of this I would add something that wasn’t really a lesson I learned in 2020, but which I saw illustrated in events so stark as to have it all be writ large in the fiery letters in the sky: The United States of America desperately needs to re-embrace rational and collective thinking, and ditch its mythologies about rugged individualism and the eternal wisdom of “the Founders”.
I’d sum it up with a quote from the afore-mentioned Enola Holmes: “Our future is up to us.”
If you take selfies, post your six favorite ones:
Yeah, I’m doing eight, because I can.
Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:
Boy, have I been dreading this question. A song that sums up 2020? How could there possibly be a musical expression of how this awful year was and the effect it had…but maybe, just maybe, 2020 was sufficiently calamitous to provoke at least a beginning to a long-needed reassessment of the American paradigm of life, business, and profit?
This made me remember the last episode of House MD, which ended as Dr. House, having faked his own death, took off on a motorcycle trip with his best friend Dr. Wilson, who at this point was dying of cancer and had only months left. As they motor off into the hills, this song played out the end of the show, and if this is a bit morbid (and maybe sexist in one verse), well…these are the times in which we live.
So here’s Guy Lombardo.
You work and work for years and years, you’re always on the go You never take a minute off, too busy makin’ dough Someday you say, you’ll have your fun, when you’re a millionaire Imagine all the fun you’ll have in your old rockin’ chair
Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think Enjoy yourself, while you’re still in the pink The years go by, as quickly as a wink Enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think
You’re gonna take that ocean trip, no matter come what may You’ve got your reservations made, but you just can’t get away Next year for sure, you’ll see the world, you’ll really get around But how far can you travel when you’re six feet underground?
Your heart of hearts, your dream of dreams, your ravishing brunette She’s left you and she’s now become somebody else’s pet Lay down that gun, don’t try my friend to reach the great beyond You’ll have more fun by reaching for a redhead or a blond
Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think Enjoy yourself, while you’re still in the pink The years go by, as quickly as a wink Enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think
You never go to night clubs and you just don’t care to dance You don’t have time for silly things like moonlight and romance You only think of dollar bills tied neatly in a stack But when you kiss a dollar bill, it doesn’t kiss you back
Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think Enjoy yourself, while you’re still in the pink The years go by, as quickly as a wink Enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think
Let’s make 2021 better, shall we? I’d love to be able to post some optimistic and more cheerful answers to these questions in one year’s time. Remember Ms. Holmes’s quote above: Our future is up to us.
As I’m sure most people did, we enjoyed a quiet and socially-distanced Thanksgiving this year. But since Thanksgiving is always quiet and socially-distanced for us, it really wasn’t a big deal. Thanksgiving is always a small event for us, in terms of numbers of people; it sure isn’t small in terms of food!
Anyway, even though I had no intention of attempting any shopping, I also took Black Friday off as I always do these days; Thanksgiving Weekend has become over the years one of my favorite weekends of the year. It was pretty nice actually this year as well, even with COVID trying to ruin everything.
Here’s some photographic evidence of what transpired this weekend:
Fifteen years seems like a lot, and sometimes it feels like a lot.
Other times it feels like yesterday.
We miss you, Quinn, and we wonder what kind of life you might be living now. How much fighting would you have done? Where would you be? You should be sixteen, not forever frozen in my heart and mind at fifteen months and two days.
So, about that lack of updates in this space for something like nine days…this month has been rough, folks.
First, there was the final run-up to the election, which was nerve-wracking in itself. Then Election Night was its own category of annoying, as a hoped-for Democratic landslide resulting in the defeat of some of the more odious Republican voices in Congress failed to materialize. And then the results of the Presidential race just dragged on and on and on. Granted, we all knew that was going to be the case, given the giant emphasis on mailed-in ballots, but it would have been a lot less of a nailbiter if I wasn’t also disgusted that the likes of Lindsay Graham, Joni Ernst, and Susan Collins weren’t all going back for another six years of being singularly terrible people in the Senate.
Of course, the Presidential result looked more and more favorable as the week went on until finally all the news organizations concluded that yes, Joe Biden had won, and that yes, America had rejected another four years of Donald Trump. Good news, absolutely! That Trump won’t be the one setting the nation’s agenda is an unabashed good thing. But it definitely gives me pause to note that America seems to have said with this election not “We’re rejecting that guy and his agenda,” but rather “OK, we don’t like this guy, but we do like a lot of what he stands for.” Disappointing.
Through all this, The Wife had been suffering some increasingly obnoxious health issues, which finally led to her hospitalization this past Monday when her vitals got seriously out-of-whack. She’s home now, having only stayed two days, and doctors are homing in on treatment options moving forward, and none of it is life-threatening…but still, that was very difficult. And now, as I write this, COVID numbers are relentlessly climbing as millions of my fellow citizens seem to have basically thrown in the towel and embraced life whether they get sick or not, and my government has likewise thrown in the towel in favor of election-related court cases that are not likely to do anything other than get tossed out.
I’m ready for 2020 to be over, folks. This entire year has been ghastly, even as the current crisis seems tailor-made to someone with my particular lifestyle: we’re not particularly outgoing, and when we do go someplace it’s always by ourselves. But still, this level of world-induced anxiety is not something I’m remotely used to. I was reminded just the other day, on the anniversary of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald, that the final transmission from the doomed ship was the Captain saying, “We’re holding our own.”
It’s been…a week. I’ve had stuff to blog about, but frankly I didn’t want to start pushing Julio’s memorial post down the page just yet. I’ll start posting again in the next few days, but for now. here’s just a tiny taste of what’s been going on at Casa Jaquandor:
Yeah, more on them later.
(And early voting in NY starts tomorrow! Here I come, Democracy!)
