Down in the Dumps
The Omicron came for us (Thanks, Obama; kidding, it was Daycare), and it did exactly as it’s been advertised to do. It started with Roman and then jumped into the rest of us. Leen was the one who got the sickest. The boys prospered and enjoyed never leaving their pajamas. I had a few bouts of extreme fatigue and very runny nostrils. Since I am going to spend a lot of time using words, how about I break down Omicron with numbers:
Covid+ Face
Statistics about the Hasler Omicron Quarantine
10 days of quarantine (not the 40 the original Italian suggests)
2 positive PCR tests
1 positive at-home test
3 negative at-home tests
102.3F temp
3 family members sans fever
7 boxes of tissues
3 deliveries by friends (1 bottle of Prosecco)
2 delivery meals
5ML of toddler cough syrup at bedtime
19.7F average outdoor temp during 10 days
3.5mL infant Motrin for teething pain
4 long drives
1 botched haircut
1 pancake baking session that almost resulted in a finger burn
2 attempts at downloading and using TikTok
60-90 days of immunity
If I spend more than ten minutes thinking about other numerals associated with our time inside, I am confident I could get some more digits for you, but we will leave it there.
Everyone seems to be mainly through the worst of it now. All that’s left is hundreds of tissues, trillions of germs, dozens of things to be cleaned, and a reminder that 2022 is off to a brilliant start. Granted, I just read about Stealth-Omicron, so, cool. But seriously, we’re fine. Our boosters worked. The youth didn’t anything too bad and now we have some immunity. Huzzah.
How about you? How was the end of your 2021? How is the start of your 2022? We are nearly 1/12th of the way through it; way to go!
Who Needs Friends?
My Man Camp
This morning around 5:50 am, after I completed my daily Wordle, but before Roman woke up, I read the New York Times and saw an article about mothers in Boston heading to a field to scream. Later in the day, I read a story in the Atlantic about how difficult it is to make friends in your 30s and 40s. Finally, I read this story about Man Camps from Vice. Isolation links all these pieces together, and while I am only sharing a link to one, they all dredge up the same thoughts for me. It centers around happiness and purpose.
The Man Camp story features men who pay north of $10,000 to be treated like garbage, hoping it shocks their senses back to life. Through waterboarding and other forms of physical and mental abuse, these men find some sort of relief that helps them regain their sense of purpose and meaning. The moms in Boston paid nothing to gather in a field and scream atop their lungs. The woman looking for friends in the Atlantic piece realized that she could download Bumble and do the work (researchers estimate it takes 200 hours to move from acquaintance to friend). All of this is to say it seems like no one knows how to find happiness, but many people are trying lots of things to get there.
One researcher called the thirties the decade that friendship goes to die. I will not be attending Man Camp in my quest for friends (one exercise features digging your own grave and laying in a body bag while others bury you alive). However, screaming in a field with other stressed-out people is something I could probably get behind. If you are in the same boat as me or just want to hang out in the field and do some yelling, my kids go to bed around 7. I can meet you nearby for a scream anytime after that.
Foodie
Drinks
It should come as no surprise that I like words. If brevity is the soul of wit, then I am downright moronic. My coworker tells me to cut at least 40% of what I write. Sure, maybe I need to trim things down to make them a little more readable, but where’s the fun in that? One of the words that I have definitely used but never overthought about is foodie. First coined in 1980 by a critic writing about zippy moderne French cuisine, foodie became synonymous with discussing the hobby, admiration, and passion surrounding food. Why then has the foodie equivalent for drink never surfaced? Drinking, I contend, is more straightforward than both cooking and eating. I will gladly watch people make cocktails the same way I’ll watch someone make a dish. Yet no word for fans of drinking exists. Why not?
Award-winning journalist Danny Chau followed this question down its rabbit hole and produced a few theories on the topic. The one I find most compelling is tied to history and the puritanical nature of so many of our liquor laws in America. The debate about to-go cocktails should indicate what I mean here, but if you aren’t sure what I mean, then a quick digression. Basically, Chau posits that socially, it’s acceptable to make and post a meal on Instagram for likes, pretty much any time, day or night. However, drinking is confined to certain hours of the day, and more typically, specific days of the week. Making a French Gin and Tonic at 2pm on a Tuesday? Unacceptable! Making a cheesy, spicy black bean bake at 11am on a Friday? Brilliant. The purveyors of Foodie culture took special care never to get in bed with the drinking establishment. Foodies always centered all food, whereas drinkers tend to be more siloed. Foodie culture encompasses seafood, vegetarian, pasta, soups, et al. l. However, beer connoisseurs are distinct from wine savants. Same for coffee and tea. Why? I guess that’s for you to consider. So what are you drinking these days? Maybe you’re nearing the end of Dry January? Perhaps you’re elbows deep into distilling bathtub rye? Let me know. Let’s talk drinks. Read here.
Cawthorn
Sure
There are a few politicians whose influence and coverage far outpaces their actual impact. This is the effect of the nationalization of local politics. Madison Cawthorn, a marginal representative from North Carolina, seems to make as many headlines as any other member of the House. It rarely is it for any of his legislative accomplishments. Personally, I haven’t looked up his legislative accomplishments, but I bet if I did, it would be a shortlist.
Nevertheless, some people are just fun to follow, even if you sort of hate knowing anything about their life. One direction I could take this is to focus on coverage about the legal challenge to Cawthorn, which asks him to prove he is not an insurrectionist; otherwise, he loses his seat in Congress. However, I’m less interested in esoteric legal challenges; instead, let’s get personal.
Cawthorn, it seems, is getting divorced after seven months of marriage. I am relatively sure we could find quotes from him about the sanctity of marriage or opposition to gay marriage and myriad other things that would point to reasons this story is noteworthy, politically speaking. But I am not here to besmirch anyone for getting divorced. Shit happens. Maybe it didn’t work out. Maybe his wife realized the dude sucked and decided to leave before it got too serious (read: kids). All that may be true or speculation. Also interesting is that he met his wife through an American Army Captain in a Russian casino. The Army captain lured Cawthorn to Miami some months later to participate in a CrossFit event, which turned out to be fake. When Cawthorn showed up to compete, he met his soon-to-be wife; they fell in love, wed, and divorced seven months later.
Is there a story here? I dunno. We all remember that Matt Gaetz adopted a Cuban boy many suspects is his lover, but we haven’t really heard much of that either. As I said, some of these stories are simply too weird to not talk about, but whether there is any there there… remains to be seen. Stay tuned. Or don’t. Probably nothing to see here.
Rejected Stories
Here are the keywords to things I read, drafted some words on, and then cut because it ultimately either was untimely or not bringing anything good to the table. So if you’d like to talk to me about these topics, let’s go.
Wordle
Djokovic
Van Life
The Role of TV
One of the texts I used to teach was Oedipus Rex by Sophocles. You may be most familiar with this tale from pop-psychologist Sigeumund Freud’s work and his co-opting of the term Oedipus Complex. A true joy for my students was always when they realized they could correctly identify Oedipus as a Motherfucker, and I could only sort of be mad about it. But I digress.
The actual literary device I want to talk about here is called catharsis. Tragedies in Ancient Greece were the stars of many a festival because the people wanted to be exposed to intense emotions — loss, betrayal, grief, etc.— without having to experience them themselves.
When Oedipus’s wife/mother realizes what is happening, she hangs herself. When Oedipus realizes he was, in fact, the murderer he sought, and thus, the son of his wife/mother, he’s pretty shaken up about the whole thing and stabs his eyes out. The audience was able to look on in terror, cast judgment on Oedipus, debate what they would have done if they were in his shoes, and then watch the rest of the play. Finally, as the curtain fell on an ancient Greek drama festival, the audience was able to go home, maybe saying to a neighbor along the way: Pretty wild what happened with Oedipus, huh?
Hopefully, you’ve identified where I am going with this. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Enter three tv shows that are having a moment in early 2022. Euphoria, Yellowjackets, and Station Eleven.
I saw this week that DARE is upset with Euphoria and its depiction of drugs. My guess is that the people from DARE aren’t actually watching Euphoria. Yes, many people (kids) do drugs in that show, but wow, none of them are happy about it. This is not a rosy depiction of drug use or drug abuse. So why are we watching shows that feature characters stranded in the woods and struggling for survival? Why are critics praising a show set in a post-pandemic world where most of humanity has died of an airborne virus? And why did 2 million people tune into a show about teenagers doing drugs in California?
The Greeks knew what was up. Catharsis, loosely translated as “cleansing” and defined by literarydevices.net as, emotional discharge through which one can achieve a state of moral or spiritual renewal or liberation from anxiety and stress.
I am saying that we are watching these shows to watch Zendaya go through pain and withdrawal, so we don’t have to go through as much pain and withdrawal. We’re fascinated by survivors of trauma so that we can be assured that we too can survive trauma in the event we face it or are in the midst of it. TV used to be escapist (Sex in the City, ER, Gossip Girl), but now, we want it to reflect something more. Of course, there are still opportunities for light shows (Abbott Elementary is pleasant). Still, there’s a reason Squid Game was the number 1 show in 2021, and it wasn’t the subtitles. Read more about why we like dark tv here.
Podcasts
Probably watching something
We let Eliot watch more TV than perhaps we would have liked during the quarantine. Parent internet is awash with people being like: I used to believe in screentime rules, then, lol, COVID. We’re basically on the same boat with all those parents. Norms we had need to be reestablished, but it’s a process. In the meantime, the one norm I am most focused on reestablishing is my Youtube algorithm. I keep asking people for good youtube recommendations to reclaim some of my personality back from the learn-to-count, let’s talk about color videos that Eliot loves, but it’s been an uphill battle.
One place I’ve been able to reassert some control is my Spotify algo. So on that note, let’s talk about podcasts. It’s been a slog for me to get into reading, let alone into audio storytelling. I simply don’t have any place to go, and without commutes or long walks, I have a tough time listening to anything narrative. But maybe that will change. I just read about The Trojan Horse Affair, hosted by the guy who did S-Town, which seems like it will be a thing, and if that doesn’t get you, maybe one of these 82 other podcasts will tickle your fancy.
