In January I wrote 48 hours in 26 working days, and some of that is carryover from JT’s thing and some of that is not being in the semester and some of that is not caring about preparing for my just two classes and some of that is new years’s stuff–but some of that is also the resolution of a slew of steps forward, of getting the job applications out the door and getting that whole process under control, on autopilot. 

And some of it is just reminding myself not to give a fuck.

May 25 2019

There’s a reason I’ve skipped out of time and back a year, but that reason is private, and heartbreaking. I also think the sentiment of that entry, of late May two years ago, is coming early this semester, as if the running-out-of-intellectual-gas is an academic’s equivalent of Punxsutawney Phil. End-of-semester is just around the corner.

To not give a fuck is really to differently give a fuck, that is to say, to transfer the fuck-giving from obligations to others to obligations to myself. It’s a reminder that if I don’t get what I need I’m a truly unpleasant person to be around, I can’t access what is good about me and all that surfaces are my flaws and warts.

Last night at dinner, Tune did a hilarious and accurate impression of me. He actually split it into three dads: “I’m working Dad”, in which I’m at an invisible laptop typing; “Happy dad,” where I’m smiling and say ‘I got things done this morning, let’s go outside and play,’ and “Grumpy dad,” where I apparently say, ‘Go to bed, right now.’ (In this scenario, he explained, it is 6am).

S and I sometimes worry lately that the stress of pandemic is catching up to all of us. That our lack of patience and the imposed chaos the never-ending changes to structure and rhythm have indelibly shaped his perception of the world in particular. (Hers, too, of course, but the outcomes are less obviously impactful; she’s a dandelion, he’s an orchid, such as it’s put in a parenting book I haven’t read. If there were an equivalent one for parents, I’d be the orchid, S the dandelion: she can grow anywhere.)

And yet, that’s all bullshit: here I think again of the heartbreaking news I’m not ready to talk about, news that involves a kid, the child of someone I love, getting very, very sick with something other than COVID, something just as bad as what I’d been sick with as a kid.

I’m not and was not then so sensitive that I couldn’t thrive in rough terrain; I’m not and never have been fragile in such a way where I needed special care to survive. The opposite, I think. I adapted to the conditions I was in, and that’s the thing I’ve carried with me into the present. The ability to evolve, to want to grow toward the sun but to know when and how to sink one’s roots deeper in search of, say, groundwater when that sunlight is obscured. Getting nutrition however one can–that’s a skill I learned in hospitals.

And I think that–the learning of how to find water when there’s no sun–is what both of them have done all pandemic. They did it in the first COVID months (the ‘Do your slides’ period), the long summer (the fireworks weeks), in the anxious fall of hybrid learning (“what day is it again?”), and then in the Texas months (when we “flew south for the winter” for something a parent in the K class called a “vacation” and which I nearly took her head off for, but responded politely, “A long visit, really, with their grandparents.”)

Then the minute we got back to ‘normal’ here, his classroom shut down, and we all just collapsed emotionally, taking turns being together enough to cook meals and take showers and log on to Zoom for whatever life required. Yesterday, we spent the day assembling a bed and listening to an audiobook. It’s this task, of constructing a home, and this place, where we have our dear friends around the block and others just a mile up the street, where we’re actually seeing people we love a lot of days, this gets us closer than we’ve been to that: to normal, no not normal, but to once again moving a “slew” of steps unremarkably forward, as close as we’ve been in months to having “the whole process under control, on autopilot.”

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