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stevemoffett · 3 years

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A Hard Nap, The Fall of Math, The Star Wars Holiday Special, Disco Point, and There You Are

In January last year, I noticed a sign in myself of the same cancer my dad had back in 2008. Unlike the usual symptoms that set off my paranoia, it wasn’t some vague feeling, it wasn’t an intermittent pain, and it wasn’t a general ill feeling—it was clear and unambiguous, out of the ordinary and one of those symptoms that, if you google it, is under the list of “call your doctor if you experience any of the following.”

It was also nonspecific: this symptom could mean cancer, but it could also mean about five other cancer-unrelated conditions. I called for an appointment that morning with my general practitioner, who said that the earliest available date was about two weeks later.

I knew that the only way my fear would be effectively relieved was with the one sure-fire diagnostic tool for this type of cancer, one that’s recommended for everyone, but not until about age 50: a colonoscopy.

For the two weeks before my GP appointment, I mentally prepared for death. For the record, I do this every time I interpret my body’s signals as cancerous, but the mental preparation usually stops after a few days when the symptom either goes away or when a clear alternative cause presents itself. This time, I didn’t get that kind of relief and, in fact, the symptom repeated more than once between setting the appointment and going to it. Each time, it was like an intrusive thought come to life: you’re going to die. You’re going to go through surgery and chemotherapy like Dad and you’re either going to die early, or find out like he did that the cure is worse than the disease, or maybe you’ll hang on just long enough to experience both.

Winter mornings in Texas can sometimes be surprisingly cold. While stepping out the door on a midsummer morning is like walking into someone’s hot exhale, as you might expect, a 33-degree morning is more like a slap in the face. When I packed everything I figured I’d need to move here a couple of years ago, I threw away my winter coat, thinking, I won’t be needing this anymore. (The coat was also about ten years old at that point.)

My first winter in Texas, I layered a bunch of shirts underneath a light jacket and wore a scarf on freezing days. The second winter, I decided that I’d had enough of being cold. After all, I rationalized, here in Texas it was monetarily possible to never have to feel cold again if you really don’t want to. So I bought the warmest coat I could find, an unstylish, bulky parka made by Caterpillar, the company that makes construction vehicles. No more layering, no more checking the weather before leaving in the morning. I could just put this coat on and not worry about it.

But now, under the shadow of a cancer scare these January mornings, wearing the big coat made me feel less like I was smarter than the weather and more like I was trying to smuggle a terminal disease wherever I went. Under my coat, tie, button-down shirt, undershirt, skin, fat, and muscle, something was growing silently in the dark. While maybe it had slipped up and showed some of its handiwork to me, it was already too late to do much about it now.

Since it has affected my life several times before, and since it is such an exquisite mixture of dread and uncertainty, cancer is one of my mind’s biggest bogeymen. I feel personally insulted by the idea of it. I treat you so well, body—why would you betray me? Was I not nice enough? Is this poetic justice for my vanity? Is it, as the old anecdotal saying goes, due to my worrying?

Not only did I feel like I was smuggling cancer under the big coat, I was also warming it up by drinking my coffee. I was feeding it directly when I ate something too sugary. And I was probably even giving it an evil sense of satisfaction when I got stressed out about it. If I was able to keep my mind off it by working in the lab, mixing and pipetting, using kits, and doing arithmetic in my head, it would come crashing back into focus when I was pulling my gloves off to wash my hands.

I pulled up incognito mode on my phone’s browser during my breaks, googling “5-year survival rate colon cancer age 35.” “Cancer staging colon prognosis.” “Colon cancer smoking.” “Colon cancer smoke one pack in college.” “Colon cancer smoke one pack 18 years ago.” “Colon cancer smoke one pack after seeing Luke Wilson smoking in The Royal Tenenbaums.”

At home, I suddenly started noticing the expiration dates on my nonperishables. What will last longer, I thought, the freshness of this baking soda, or me.

I knew I wasn’t going to be comforted by the first GP visit. After all, they’re usually the first stop to a specialist, unless you have a PPO insurance plan, which I don’t. The doctor listened to my symptoms and family history. “Well,” he said, “Given your history, it’s a good idea to refer you to a GI. But, you seem like you lead a healthy lifestyle otherwise, with none of the other risk factors, so we’ll see what he says.”

I made the GI appointment and had to wait two more weeks for it, with the same circular worrying and googling. At the GI appointment, I sat in the waiting room, the youngest patient there by a few decades, and I felt a little bit ridiculous. On the other hand, I’d also just read a harrowing story about a woman in her late 20s who had colon cancer and died from it. That was a real person, I thought, who at the first phase of it probably went through all the same feelings I was now, the I’m-being-ridiculous and is-this-worth-the-time-and-vacation-days, all the way up until her diagnosis. Not just because I was scared, I felt a pang of sympathy. A disease of the old picking a victim from the young is terrible luck.

And I figured, if it could be her, it could be anyone. But most of all, it could be me.

That last bit, I think, is one of—one of—my greatest flaws, the vanity of always thinking that the worst things will happen to you, in spite of the odds. It’s a way of making yourself feel special, but it has no upside. You don’t feel confidence with this type of special-feeling. In fact, you’re more likely to be timid and self-centered, and you just come across as weird to the outside observer. They might think, There’s only a few steps between that guy and Howard Hughes. Somewhere, deep in your mind, they think: Wires are crossed.

Shortly before I went in, another patient arrived, a man around my age or maybe younger who, despite a dozen or so free seats, declined to sit down. My name was called, and I passed a sign on the way to the back that said, “If you have recently traveled to China and have a fever you must let our staff know.”

This doctor’s exam rooms had floor-to-ceiling windows, the kind you’d see in a movie, instead of the usual dull and bulby, off-white plastic exam room interior. A Spanish medical student came in to give a pre-appointment questionnaire and to take my vitals. He asked, in much better English than I could have mustered in Spanish, “So. There is some blood in they crep?”

When he came in, the GI repeated what my GP had said, and since he was also the person who would be performing a colonoscopy, he said I should set an appointment for one with him. I managed to get a date three weeks later.

From other people’s stories, I knew two things about colonoscopies: they are no fun, especially the night before, but the general anesthesia on the day of the procedure, on the other hand, is fun. I was nervous enough on the day before that I actually asked someone at the pharmacy for help finding the items I was looking for: Polyethylene Glycol (or PEG, which we use all the time for lab experiments, and which I was going to have to drink 2 liters of), Gatorade, and laxative pills. I had to take about 800% of their recommended dosages, each.

The bodily effect of those chemicals was dramatic, and I will spare the details. The worst parts of it, I found, were the generally exhausting physical toll it took, and the feeling by the end that I had some kind of dangerous sodium imbalance: I was sweating between my fingers, for example, but the rest of me felt as dry as paper. At 10PM, I was too tired to do anything, but too nervous to sleep for more than a few hours.

One smaller worry that I felt the next morning, as I took a selfie in my hospital gown to send to a friend back home, making a backward peace sign to show off the IV sticking into my hand and also how brave I was being, was that I might just die right there on the table from the general anesthesia. Part of my grad school research was on Propofol, the most-used general anesthesia nowadays (which, incidentally, also killed Michael Jackson). This was the same drug I was to be given.

I’d never been fully put under anesthesia before. It was astronomically improbable that I’d have an adverse reaction to it and die (and by the way, Michael Jackson abused it, using it far outside of medical praxis—if you’re afraid to get a colonoscopy yourself, don’t be, it could save your life), but keep in mind what I said about my vanity.

“Hey, I’m really scared,” I told the anesthesiologist. He said something, muffled by his mask, that sounded like, “It’ll be all right.” Then he busied himself with a syringe, connecting it to my IV. He depressed it about a third of the way. “This should help you,” he said.

The last thing I said was, “Whoa…I feel it.”

After what felt like a hard, late-afternoon nap, I said, “Hello?”

My head was wrapped with something. When I touched my face, I could feel that there were cotton pads underneath the wrapping, holding my eyes shut. I guess that at some point either mid-procedure or after, my eyes had opened, unseeing, and they’d done this to keep them from drying out. “Hang on, sir,” I heard a nurse say, and my head was unwrapped.

“It’s over?” I asked.

“You’re all done,” he said.

“Gimme a minute, please,” I said, my South Jersey accent peeking out. “I feel a little weird.”

Eventually, I sat up. Two of the nurses helped me stand, and I pumped my arms like I was lifting light, invisible dumbbells. As I put my glasses on and looked around, I thought that they all seemed like they were fighting to not smirk. What did I say while I was blacked out? I wondered, with a twinge of panic, before deciding that it would be worthless to speculate. It could have been anything. There are literally millions of possibilities. Again—it would be worthless to speculate, I told myself, firmly.

An Uber driver, I had been told by hospital staff during a consultation, was not a legally strong enough party to take responsibility for me at discharge. Someone I knew would have to escort me to my apartment. Also, they said, they really would do that thing where you’re back in your own clothes, and they push you to the exit in a wheelchair when you’re all finished. After my procedure, my co-worker stood waiting in the discharge zone with his car as an orderly wheeled me out of the hospital exit. I stood up from the wheelchair and got into the passenger seat of his car, for some reason more aware than usual of the heat coming from the vent and the smell of the car’s leather upholstery. “I still feel weird from the anesthesia,” I said to my friend.

“I’ll bet you do,” he replied.

It was about lunch time, and I had taken the rest of the day off from work. When I got home, I ordered a pizza and lay on my bed. I ate the pizza and watched Star Wars. I had not felt any euphoria when I woke up, I thought hollowly. And my first solid meal in almost forty hours tasted unremarkable. I was still groggy, but not in a pleasant way. I felt cheated.

The hospital staff had put a manilla envelope into my hands as I left. It contained sheets of images the doctor had taken during the procedure. Once lucid, I leafed through them and compared the thumbnail-sized images on printer paper with googled images of cancerous tumors viewed through a colonoscope, trying to diagnose myself.

A couple of the images on the papers had shapes that looked weird, with what seemed like variations in the texture or color of my colon wall that to me, at least, appeared one hundred percent fatal. It was another two weeks before I had a follow-up appointment to go over them with the surgeon.

“See this?” The GI said, two weeks later, pointing to one of the images that had seemed completely normal to me, unlike other ones I had thought were much more scary and unusual-looking. “That’s a low-risk polyp. Of course, now it’s a no-risk polyp, ‘cause it’s gone.”

This medical episode ended only three or so weeks before the whole world changed, but I was all the more grateful for that. If I’d waited to be checked out, then I would have been weighing whether it was worth getting tested against the possibility of being infected with COVID.

The doctor recommended that I get a colonoscopy every five years from now on, but added, “If you want, you can go earlier than that.” I told him thanks, but once every five years sounded fine.

I wrote about the first seven weeks of the pandemic in my last entry. After that, May and June passed in the same way as March and April had. I went back to work in mid-June for two weeks before the first summer COVID spike closed things back up. I continued to play Quake, and I continued to fret about my family.

I had a job interview for a position in northern Maryland in April. I didn’t get it, but I had a good idea why I’d been turned down: the position wanted people with proven math skills. Which makes sense—for the last few years I’d said repeatedly that I wanted to have a job that involves less lab work and more data analysis. This was one of those jobs.

My graduate program gave me a degree in “Computational and Integrative Biology.” Sometimes I shorten it to “Integrative Biology,” or “Computational Biology,” but I always feel sort of dishonest when I tell people my degree. (Apparently this feeling is common among grad students). My own reason for feeling dishonest was because, in any other college, the work I was doing would probably just fall under normal old “Biology.” While it was true I had done course work that reflected “Computational and Integrative” Biology, they were courses taught in a remedial way.

When I say remedial, I mean that they were courses designed to get biologists up to speed on how to do higher-level data analyses with their experiments. For instance, in my “Biomath” course, we went over ordinary differential equations and graph theory. Those are both intermediate-level math types, ones you’d encounter in the later part of an undergraduate math degree program. Throughout that course, there was a lot of handwaving whenever I asked questions.

“Eh…,” the professor might have responded to something I had asked, “that requires a lot of background explanation we don’t need right now to handle the problem here. Just take it as a given for what we’re working on.”

In grad school, it’s common to be well-versed in only your narrow little research tunnel that leads outward to the edge of “known” biology. But a few times each month, several of us students would head to the bar down at the city’s waterfront after work to talk about our research. It usually began with a complaint—“This is the third time this kit wouldn’t work this week and it takes twelve fucking hours to run it each time,”—but to give us a more context for their problem, whoever was griping would have to go back and start at the beginning, recounting all the steps leading to their experiment’s failure.

This was a useful exercise, since a pair of new eyes on your work meant that at least you could get feedback on how to better relate the subject matter when you talked to a non-science audience, and at most, you might get a real solution for the problem you were bumping up against.

But I would sometimes get privately upset, as I sipped my beer and glanced out the window at the river, when a math-centered Computational and Integrative Biology student would start talking about their research. As someone who feels an unpleasant, TV static-like anxiety in my chest the moment I see letters in italics, or one of those big, orphan sorority sigmas following an equal sign during a math seminar, this upset feeling was directed at myself. Because, as a result of my insecurity, I would start listening to the beginning of the math student’s explanation of their research, trip over the first unfamiliar term I heard, lose the thread of what they were talking about, give up, and zone out. The math students, overall, just seemed light years ahead of me.

A critical vocabulary word that I began to mentally tie to the situation—slumming, these math types were slumming when talking to us biologists—was the grain of sand to my insecurity’s oyster. By the time I got my diploma a few years later, it had developed into a little pearl; now I had the feeling that I was, relative to those who’d come from a math background, a fake computational biologist.

Unhelpfully, the people in charge of hiring for the jobs I want nowadays seemed to agree. All the job listings I was interested in applying for made me feel the same panic that advanced math symbols on powerpoint slides did. The subjects they wanted their applicants to have experience in—machine learning, deep learning, regression analyses—were all frightening, impregnable terms, reminding me either of some kind of giant machine made up of endless tubes and valves, all spitting dangerously hot steam, or of a highly secure, underground bomb shelter that requires fingerprints or eyeball scans to get into. I knew from my previous learning experiences that if I didn’t understand the fundamentals and learned only the higher-level, applied stuff, it was just going to make me feel unworthy, and I’d forget it at once.

But summer had come—it was midsummer now, in fact. The pandemic wasn’t going anywhere, so what was I going to do if I didn’t start learning something? I ended up registering for three classes at a community college back home, which offered their fall semester online. For two thousand dollars, including textbooks, I got a spot in Introductory Statistics, Linear Algebra, and Calculus III.

Calculus III was a risk. I’d taken Calc I and II in undergrad, now about seventeen years ago, and I had earned Bs back then. I didn’t remember much of the material from either class. I’d tried watching Khan Academy videos at various points in the meantime, but could never stick with it. I’d watch several videos in a row, feel like I understood things, try a practice problem, get it wrong, and forget about it after a day or two. But now, I had put actual money into it and, in a few months, a grade would be spit back out, so this time I had real skin in the game.

But I had misgivings that I was too old to learn new stuff, or that I would be one of those students I remember when I was in undergrad, the older students who would grind class to a halt with their endless questions. Or maybe I would get worse grades than I had in undergrad, despite taking things more seriously now.

Two of the classes were taught asynchronously, meaning each lecture was a video that you could pause or replay at your leisure, and all tests were take-home, but the other class, Statistics, was done over Zoom. You might think a Zoom class could be a better way to learn—clarifying questions can be asked immediately, for instance—but for me, at least, it was not. Instead of focusing on the material being taught, the whole time I’d be thinking, “They can see me. Everyone here can see me. I can see me, and I have a dumbass expression on my face. Can they tell that I have a bedsheet instead of a curtain over my window blinds?”

My mind wandered during class just as much as it had while sitting in a lecture hall when I was eighteen, but now, these classes were held later at night, after I’d been working all day and had eaten dinner. As a result of this, and the fact that I find Statistics to be boring when it’s taught as a series of don’t-worry-about-how-we-derived-it formulas to plug numbers into, I did the worst in Statistics.

But Calc and Linear Algebra were more interesting. When I watched the class videos, I got familiar with the disembodied voices of the teachers, who each seemed to be trying to do an impression of Khan Academy videos. My Calc teacher, with his strong Vietnamese accent, would punctuate every few lines of derivation or proof with, “So what does that mean then?” Every time—new topic, new chapter, new problem, exactly the same tone of voice: “So what does that mean then?”

Eventually, in my head, his cadence merged with the tones of Woody Woodpecker’s laugh, and I began saying it to myself as I did chores around my apartment. “So what does that mean, then?” I’d half-sing at my garbage can liner as I cinched it shut. “So what does that mean, then?” I’d say to a wrinkled button-down shirt, enjoying the pepper shaker-y smell of my iron when it’s turned up to its hottest setting. “So what does that mean, then?” I’d say to the window blinds, when considering whether I should replace the bedsheet I’d hung there with an actual curtain, before answering myself that No, this apartment is too temporary for something as tony as curtains.

Sometimes I’d say it three times in a row, like Woody Woodpecker himself:

“So what does that mean, then?”

I kept a Google Sheet of how much time I spent doing work for each class, and found that I averaged about 20 hours a week total. That broke down to approximately an hour and a half each weekday, and on Saturday and Sunday I would go for about six or seven hours each. I’d get up at 7:30 those weekend mornings and brew a pot of coffee, then sit taking notes and working through every part of each assigned homework, not moving on from a problem until I understood everything about it.

I think that those Saturday and Sunday mornings may have been the happiest I felt during the year 2020. In the middle of a difficult Calc problem, not having the answer yet but certain I was on the right track, while also buzzing on caffeine, as a beam of early horizontal sunlight hit my kitchen backsplash and filled the apartment with more brightness than all my lightbulbs put together, I for once did not feel worried. I was unworried about my parents, my sisters, my brother, my sister-in-law, my niece and nephew, and all the pets. Unworried about COVID, or cancer, or the work stresses of the week. Unworried about getting older, about being alone still, or about enjoying being alone too much; unworried about letting all of this time go by and still feeling like real life hasn’t started; unworried about my dad having another stroke, or about my mom just suddenly up and dying out of nowhere, or cancer, or whether my hairline is changing, or the fact that my heart has been skipping a beat sometimes lately, or whether my friends who I speak to on the phone were getting sick of me, or whether I am too graphic when I describe symptoms I am afraid mean I might have cancer, or whether my apartment neighbors will keep me up with their noise again tonight, or whether the tooth sensitivity I feel drinking cold water lately means I need to risk a dentist visit during a pandemic, or whether I will be able to have healthier boundaries with my parents whenever I return to the northeast, or whether I’ll ever feel truly satisfied and content, or whether I’ll ever feel actual joy some day, or whether my hang-ups, and anxieties, and fears, and regrets about my personal and professional choices will end up all ganging up on me at once, or, of course, whether at any given moment, I might have cancer.

My attitude going into the classes was that I would disregard whatever grades I got and simply aim for as much comprehension as possible. But about halfway through the semester, I lost my nerve and began to think of my grades as a direct indicator of my level of understanding. So I started fretting about my grades, and on days of Calc III exams during the second half of the semester, I took vacation time so I could spend the whole day working on them.

It got a little crazy toward the end, but finally, it was over, and I managed to get all As. That made me happy, even if I knew that that kind of satisfaction is a bit immature. But I felt like I was making up for some of the sins I had committed as a college student, my laziness and my previous lack of appreciation for education finally, in a small way, absolved.

I spent Christmas here in Texas. When I think back on Christmases from previous years I find that I can remember the past two years very well because I flew home and packed a lot of family and friend time into a few short days. Before 2018, though, I can’t remember any specific Christmas well enough to recount anything that happened on the day.

But when I was a little kid, I remembered each Christmas perfectly, mainly due to the gifts I got and the room where we put the Christmas tree—where “Christmas happened”: in 1990, it was in the back room and we got a magic set, and also my brother pretended to faint when he saw he’d gotten Reebok Pumps. In 1991, it was in the family room, and my brother and I got the Nintendo game “Base Wars.” In 1992, it was in the living room and we got a Sega Genesis along with the game “Sonic 2.” In 1993, it was in the family room again, and I got a Hot Wheels Key Force car, and my brother got the Genesis game “Hard Ball 3 With Al Michaels.”

In 1994, my grandfather died a few weeks before Christmas, and we got a Sega CD. That was the year I became aware that the Christmas spirit was vulnerable to external forces, one’s first experience with death being the most offensive of those forces, and after a few months I also became aware that a hot new gaming console like the Sega CD could “fail,” slipping into obscurity with a small and unremarkable library of games. As a result, the indestructible-seeming sheen of Christmas fell away, leaving behind a better idea of what Christmas really is: a bare, thin-glassed lightbulb plugged into the middle of the year’s darkest period. After 1994, I can’t really remember what happened each Christmas.

This past Christmas will always be memorable, though, because I spent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day pretty much doing one of three things: playing Quake (yes, that hobby still refuses to die), watching something Star Wars-related, or video chatting with my family. At any time when I wasn’t speaking to family, I had Christmas music playing in the background, including while Star Wars was on. I turned the heat up in my apartment to 75 degrees and enjoyed how money-wastingly hot it was getting, until my nose started to bleed from the dry air.

I want to take this opportunity to say that I much prefer Christmas Eve to Christmas Day. Christmas Eve is generally all anticipation and guest arrivals, buoying the mood long into the falling night. From the viewpoint of Christmas Eve, any miracle might happen the following morning. But then after a late, over-buttered breakfast on Christmas Day, there’s nothing much else to do except think about cleaning up and regret how much you’ve eaten. The “anything could happen” feeling is now all gone, collapsed from a dazzling infinity’s worth of possibilities down to one homely outcome.

I hadn’t put up any decorations for my apartment, unless the Christmas music can be considered a decoration. This ended up being a good thing, though, since I didn’t have to take anything down once the holiday was over.

I started taking walks pretty early in the pandemic, my first walk happening after about one week of lockdown. That day there was a surprisingly large amount of people also walking. We all stayed far away from one another, since none of us were wearing masks—the width of even a modest suburban Texas street is still impressively wide, so there was no safety issue. I always took the initiative to be the one who crossed the street if I saw someone, exaggeratedly swinging my arms as I crossed so the person walking toward me could see my intentions even from far away. I did this because I figured it would be harder for the dog-walkers to wrangle their dog across the street and get out of my way, and the people without dogs were either old or were walking in a group.

In the beginning I was walking maybe twice a week, which then became three times, which became five. It held at five times a week during the fall semester because I’d have to be on Zoom from 6:30-8:30 PM Tuesdays and Thursdays, which took up the whole span of time in which I would usually walk. Nowadays, no longer taking classes, I walk every night.

For a while, I tried to get home before sunset, because I’m afraid of being hit by a car in the dark. After the clocks shifted back, I had to choose between walking earlier, during rush hour when everyone was arriving back at their houses from work, or waiting to walk until after the sun has set. I ended up buying one of those reflective construction worker’s vests for $8 on Amazon and waiting for nighttime. I feel like a dork when I wear the vest, but most of the people walking at night who I see are also wearing reflective clothes. Theirs are more chic than my vest, though, looking like they were ordered through an expensive fitness-wear catalogue. I’d buy the same type, but to me, walking is a meditative, solitary act, and I don’t want to feel that I’m catering to externalities like looking stylish while I’m trying to feel solitary. It also acts as a tacit acknowledgement that I’m not a criminal: “I’m making myself as visible as possible! I’m not casing your houses to break into them later on!”

Even though the focus of COVID is on the transmission of disease through shared, respired air, I still pay a lot of attention to contaminated surfaces. When I go out anywhere, I have a routine: first, I put on my going-out clothes (newly clean), then my shoes, which are possibly dirty, since I have to re-tie them sometimes with unwashed hands, so before I touch anything else after tying my shoes, I wash my hands. Then, I put on a mask, turn off all the lights except the one at the front door, pick up my keys with my right hand, slip my phone into my left pocket, and walk to the door. I put my keys in my right pocket (my wallet is already there), open the door with my right hand, turn out the light, step out the door, and take the keys out of my pocket to lock the door with, again, only my right hand.

I use my right hand pretty much everywhere outside—to push or pull open doors, to open my car to retrieve something from it, to open my mailbox and carry my mail in—because I know that if I use my left hand, my phone-operating hand, I’m going to have to put the phone into a little UV light phone-sterilizing box that I bought when I get home. And for some reason, I feel like it’s a small moral failure to have to use that UV box, so I try to keep my left hand from touching anything except for the phone. But I know that if I drive anywhere, all bets are off—both my hands touch the steering wheel, my left hand touches the car door handle while getting out, and I push open doors with both hands whenever I get somewhere. I’m sure that my left hand ends up touching something that may have SARS-CoV-2 on it as I carry out an errand, and therefore into the UV box my phone must go when I get home. But, when I go out to walk, there’s a good chance that I won’t need to touch anything with my left hand between leaving the apartment and coming back. If that’s the case, I can use my phone freely while walking if I want to, but when I get home, I can still just take it from my pocket and place it on my desk, no ultraviolet sterilizing waves needed. But of course then I still have to wash my right hand.

The walk is the same route every night now. It’s a vaguely circular, level 2.7 miles, starting northbound, bearing west, south, then east. It takes about forty minutes for me to walk the whole thing, plus or minus four minutes, depending on how warmed up I get while walking. My heart rate generally goes up to about 115 beats per minute for most of the walk, according to my watch, then spikes to 135 as I climb the stairs to my fourth floor apartment at the end.

Insulated by the sound of music or an audiobook on my headphones, and with my hands stuck in my pockets, actually holding onto the cloth pocket linings themselves, I feel less like a person on a walk and more like someone steering a large, inertia-filled thing—a sailboat that I have to tack against an unfavorable wind, or a bobsled whose blades I have to turn out of deep ruts on the ice. But despite feeling bodily awkward, I find suburbia to be a soothing place to move through. I really don’t understand how some people think of the suburbs as some kind of dystopia, to be honest. My neighborhood has wide streets, as I mentioned, and the houses are almost all ranch-style. The trees, like the houses, are shorter than they are in the northeast. Some of the trees look more like very tall shrubbery. As for the ground, the blades of grass are wider, and the soil is just a bit sandier. Sometimes, I see two-inch-long cockroaches, what people back home would call “water bugs,” creeping across the sidewalks.

I can’t remember the names of the streets on the walk, except for Forrest Street, which I noticed once when I saw the street sign while I was running and it made me think of “Run, Forrest, run!” and Kenilworth Street, which has the same name as a street back at home. Other than those, I only know points along the route by the informal names I’ve assigned to them. There’s a road where it changes direction from heading north to heading east, and it looks over a little park. The lack of houses there gives an unobstructed view of the western horizon. For that reason, I call that part of the route “Sunset Bend.” At another point on the route there is a house where, in the beginning of lockdown last spring, a family was always outside, the parents sitting motionless in Adirondack chairs while their kids all went nuts on the front lawn, playing with the sprinkler, or doing hopscotch, or sitting at one of those tiny plastic picnic tables, playing some board game. That part of the walk I called “Kidville.”

There were other houses that were always so inactive, so abandoned-seeming—the blinds were always closed and there wasn’t a car in the driveway—that I started to wonder if anyone lived there at all, and whether maybe the neighborhood association was mowing its lawn to stave off the shabbiness. But after the switch from walking in daylight to nighttime, I saw that some of those houses, while still shut up and silent, had lights on inside in rooms not facing the street. Looking at those houses is like staring into the vents of a space heater in a dark room.

Eventually I started thinking about how the walk is exactly 2.7 miles. Then, idly, I realized that if you multiply 2.7 by 30, you get 81. That number of years, eighty-one, seems like a decent amount of years to hope to live—it’s not greedy, you’re not asking for a hundred years, for example—but also, maybe when I get closer to 81, there will be better medical treatments and 81 will seem younger. Assuming that doesn’t happen, though, I think of 81 years as more or less “a complete life.” It is very sad, but not exactly a tragedy, to die at 81.

With this in mind, I started translating the distance along my walk to human ages. For instance, 1.0 miles into the walk, times 30, would equal 30 years. And 1.2 miles times 30 would equal 36 years, which is how old I am now. Since by the time I’d discovered this “conversion formula,” the walk was already so familiar to me that I had a very good perspective on how far into the walk any given point felt—the precise moment when I sense that I’m transitioning from the middle to the end phase of the walk, for example. So when I came up with the multiply-by-30 conversion formula, I was interested to see exactly what part of the walk 1.2 miles, or 36 years old, corresponded to.

The answer is that it was later in the walk than I’d hoped. The moment I reach 1.2 miles is long past the most scenic parts of the route; it’s just after a left turn that puts me on a long straightaway of modest houses leading to an arterial road, known to me as the hook-around part of the circuit where in past walks, I had thought, “Now I’m on my way back home.”

Over the next few evenings, I noted other points, ones that had come before the 1.2 mile marker, and compared them to parts of my already-lived life: I graduated high school at 0.6 miles into the walk, which was the beginning of Sunset Bend. I got my master’s degree in a spot where, at nighttime, a streetlight shines through the leaves on a tree, giving the street a dance hall, disco-ball kind of lighting (hence, “Disco Point”). That friendly, lighted patch of street, with a jaunty-looking house standing next to it, makes it my favorite part of the walk. As for points I have not yet reached: still ahead of my current age distance, at around 1.5 miles, is Kidville, but I haven’t seen anyone in the front yard there in months now.

Toward the end, almost back home, there’s a large school property. I’ve never seen anyone on the grounds, except for the occasional person who sneaks onto the running track to jog it. Along one of the fences that borders the school, in springtime last year, someone started zip-tying laminated sheets of paper with jokes written on them to the chain links. The jokes are all clean, and pretty lame—these days it seems like almost all kid-friendly jokes are just puns, like “How did the farmer find his wife? He tractor down!”

One time, I saw a kid about ten years old on his bike, riding along the sidewalk and stopping to read each joke. The fence ends at a small park for toddlers. There’s a big plastic sign at the entrance of the park, faded but still legible, that has a boy’s name displayed on it. Below his name is written a tragically short span of years, and below that, a message: “This park is dedicated to the memory of (the boy’s name), and to all of the little tykes of (the neighborhood).” Whoever it was putting up jokes on the schoolyard fence stopped replacing them with new ones some time during the fall, and I walk too late to ever see anyone playing at the playground. Well, that’s not quite true: very rarely, around 9 PM on warm nights, I might see what appears to be a young mother scrutinizing her phone as her kid swings in the dark.

I haven’t been to the gym to lift any weights since lockdown started. I’ve been able to do cardio in my apartment, but the result of all the cardio and all the walking is that I’ve lost a decent amount of lifting strength, as well as about ten pounds. This is consistent with how life in general has evolved: I have also reduced the list of spaces I travel to, leaving my apartment only to go to work, to pick up groceries, and to walk through my neighborhood. My body, and the edges of my life, have gone through a great miniaturization, but my perspective has adapted with it—each feature within this smaller space seems more detailed, and the day’s moments are of a finer grain. Inside my apartment, I have realized how much the lighting affects the atmosphere, and as a result the mood, so I can change which lights are on when to reflect the mood of each time of day. When I walk at night, sometimes I have the same feeling I did the week before I moved here from New Jersey, a sort of farewell feeling. That feeling started in the fall as a dessert-like flipside to my happy mornings spent doing math homework. Those evenings, I also felt like I was saying goodbye, to a more insecure, more ignorant version of myself, I guess. Nowadays, I get the feeling that I’m saying goodbye to the person who had, until now, always feared that he was missing out on things.

There will be a time, closer to now than now is to the beginning of the pandemic, when I will leave Texas. I will be happy and relieved to return home, whenever that is. But at the same time, there’s a new feeling that is starting to take root, and it’s a weird one: for all the hardship that the pandemic has presented to me, the anxiety for my family and the limitations it’s put on my mobility, social life, and career, for more than ten months now, its most memorable effect, unless I’m affected by the illness itself, will be that it made me love my neighborhood. I have walked more than 500 miles of it over the months, and scores of miles remain to be walked before I move away. I’ve walked during steaming afternoons, during cloudy sunsets, in pre-dawn twilight on cool mornings, and during soft, breezy evenings. It’s always picturesque, pleasant, very green. The houses look inviting, and the dog-walkers wave to me. I listen to music that suits my mood and do the geographical equivalent of palm reading. That’s all, really.

Can a person love a place? Feel gratitude toward landscaping, houses, parked cars, and people viewed only from a distance? Can someone feel affinity to a fox seen in a churchyard and streetlights shining through leaves in the night? Affection for lawn mower exhaust, for the noise of an approaching SUV slowly carving out a bend? Love for landmarks that correspond to moments in one’s past, or to moments that one might encounter in the future?

There will be a time, I hope, when my years in Texas are far in the past. But some day, I will hear a song, or see a house with a certain architecture, or smell a variety of grass, and Texas will return to me. At the same time, I also hope that it isn’t too overwhelming. I’ve found that I can never tell how potent a memory of a particular time or place will be until there’s a lot of distance between me and it. Sometimes, a memory will come gently, settling on me like a haze, ready to be indulged, even laughed at. In such cases I turn up the music that brought the memory, or take a luxuriating whiff of the scent, and I think back on the time, feeling only a little bit sad.

But other memories swoop down like some kind of predatory bird, and in those cases, the nostalgia feels more like the punch of the bird’s talons in the back of my neck. The sense of missing is so strong that it feels less like nostalgia and more like a distilled, portable homesickness. Ridiculously, I’ll even want to return to the memory’s time and place, despite knowing that in reality it had been fraught with pain or unease. Which makes the sneaking feeling growing during this time, at this place, all the more uncanny. I mean, all that this span of time has been, is me, and some terrain, and the wind, and the light of the sun or the moon. No one else. My nostalgia for anything before this was always about times and places with other people. So who will I be missing?

Someone once said, Wherever you go, there you are. But now, I wonder: is that really true?

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stevemoffett · 4 years

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Pandemics Don’t Get a Cute Pun

Being Afraid

It’s been twenty-one days since I’ve spoken to another person in the flesh. Before that, I had gone for seventeen days. And before that, a week.

The first week of no contact began when I said goodbye-for-now to my co-workers. I decided to wait to go to the grocery store until that first wave of people had passed before I tried going. On my last grocery trip, I had decided to “stock up” in case I had to isolate for a little while, and so, having no idea how disruptive the situation would become, I bought a whopping three boxes of spaghetti and one big jar of sauce.

My all-spaghetti diet ran out by Monday, March 23rd, and I had nothing else edible in the apartment. So, even though it wasn’t cold, I put on my jacket (to limit my skin-to-air exposure), a baseball cap (to stop myself from scratching my head, a nervous habit), and my glasses (I stopped wearing contacts to avoid touching my eyes). By March 23rd, the CDC and WHO had not yet recommended wearing gloves or masks in public. But I already had gloves at home (you never know when you’ll need nitrile gloves), and I had two masks that I had to wear when I was around someone who was immunocompromised earlier this year, so I put one of the masks and a pair of gloves on. Then I drove to the store.

The local store was letting about twenty people in at a time. There was already a line forming, just five minutes past opening. I walked to the end and we all stood waiting about six or so feet apart from one another.

Nobody made conversation. In people-watching moments like these, I associate whatever behavior I see with the general attitude of wherever I am, even if there is no such stereotype: Ah yes, that reserved Texas stoicism I’ve heard so much about.

When I got into the store I pulled out a cart and walked stiffly. The night before, I had gone on the store’s website and written a list of the items I needed, grouping them by what aisle they were in. I was going to snake my way through the store one time, get in line, and leave.

A complicating factor of doing it live was that there were lots of people to avoid. During an ordinary cold season, I usually watch out for people near me who might be sick. If they look like they may possibly be sniffling or flushed, I take a breath, hold it, and let it out through my nose slowly as I pass them. Here in the grocery store, I did this every time I walked past people in the aisles, and for extra protection, I scrunched my eyes shut.

There were signs posted limiting the amount of each product you could buy. No more than four boxes of pasta at once, for example. The pasta shelf was totally cleared out except for whole wheat pasta, so I took four boxes of that. I bought three eight-pound bags of dried pinto beans, a couple of bags of rice (I’d heard that beans and rice together make some kind of magical combination where you can avoid protein deficiencies even if you don’t have any meat), a big bottle of canola oil, butter, four big jars of spaghetti sauce, a bunch of hot sauce, ketchup, tofu, and frozen vegetables. The meat aisle was almost completely picked over—I managed to get two pounds of ground turkey from there, though. I didn’t get any eggs because I enjoy them too much; I knew that it would be better to make a clean break from them until after things got back to normal than to agonize over eating the last of them.

In line, I had an extremely full cart. By contrast, an old man in shorts behind me had about four things in his, and he wasn’t wearing gloves or a mask.

I heard him say, in a very low voice, “Stupid motherfucker.” Maybe he said, “Stupid motherfuckers,” plural, but I felt like it had to be at least be partially directed at me.

The teenager who rang me up seemed relaxed. I felt demographically exposed. Now that I am middle-aged, I am very aware of my interactions with teenagers. If movies are any lesson, there are about six million ways that I can make an encounter with one of them a) awkward, b) creepy, or c) both.

“Have you seen many other insane people dressed like me?” I asked, cringing behind the mask since I had already failed point a).

“Not many,” she replied.

“Well, thanks for being here,” I said. “Thanks for your help.”

“No problem! I’m getting paid a lot to be here!” She said.

When I got home, I decided to take everything up to my place in multiple trips. Climbing up and down the stairs for each trip, though, I started to sweat. When I came in with the last of the bags, I set them on the floor and took my gloves off. I could feel a bead of sweat dripping down my forehead. If it got past my eyebrow and went into my eye, then maybe some of the virus that had landed on me from contaminated grocery store air would be carried into my eye, and that would be Game Over.

I hurried to the sink, tossing the gloves into the trash and ripping a paper towel off the roll. I crumpled it and pressed the part of the wadded-up towel that hadn’t touched either hand over my closed eye.

As the sweat was wicked away from my eyebrow, I felt my fingers moisten and I thought, Could any germs from my hand travel back through this sweat bridge and into my eye? It was true that I had been wearing gloves, but maybe I hadn’t taken them off carefully enough and I’d touched my wrist, or the outside of one of the gloves, and not noticed. I had also grasped the side of the roll to rip the paper towel off. Had I contaminated the edges of a bunch of sheets farther into the roll, too? Could I even be sure I’d properly bunched the paper towel I was holding to my eye without having touched the eye-facing part?

I decided to text all of this uncertainty in a big run-on paragraph to my brother. He responded, “I think you’re fine.”

After blotting the sweat, I got the bright idea to sanitize the frozen vegetable bags I’d bought before putting them in the freezer by spraying them with bleach. I brought them out to my balcony so that I could spray everything down indiscriminately. I sprayed all the bags, waited a couple of minutes, then started wiping them off with a fresh paper towel.

As I wiped the bags, I noticed that they were not airtight; there was a series of little pinholes all over the bags in what seemed like regular intervals. I assume that this was a design feature of the bags. But I could see that the bleach spray was disappearing into the holes, which meant the cauliflower and broccoli inside were absorbing it.

I realized then that I had inadvertently poisoned all of my vegetables. I tossed them in the garbage and thought again of what the old man behind me in line had said.

Now I had no source of vitamin C. I’d thought that there might be vitamin C in meat, but there is not. You get it mostly from leafy greens, a few fortified foods, and citrus fruits. I checked online and found that if I got zero vitamin C, I had at least four weeks until I got scurvy. This meant that I couldn’t go longer than four weeks before my next grocery trip. It was a relief to know that I had a date where re-stocking was mandatory, because if there wasn’t one, I might have felt overly cautious, enough to start rationing my food so that it lasted as long as humanly possible, and I’d lose an unhealthy amount of weight by cutting my calorie intake down to the minimum 1200 a day.

But without a vitamin C source, that wasn’t necessary. I certainly had enough food to last me for four weeks, as long as I was strict. I wouldn’t be able to have any cheat nights, but I also wouldn’t go hungry.

I sprayed the bleach on the faucet handle and the soap dispenser, and left the non-perishable food—Sriracha sauce, ketchup bottles, mustard, oatmeal, spaghetti sauce, and boxes of spaghetti, all standing upright—out on the floor between my refrigerator and the front door. I’d wait another 72 hours before handling them, and even after that, I would wash them with soap before use (except for the cardboard spaghetti package).

Those first few days were extra paranoid because I knew that it was possible I had already been infected. A few nights, I woke up around 3 to use the bathroom, and as I passed my upward-pointing non-perishables there on the floor, they looked less like food items and more like a bed of nails, or like stalagmites deep in a cave: hostile, and waiting for me to trip.

If I cleared my throat several times within a couple of minutes during the day, I got worried. If I sneezed or felt congestion when I woke up, the anxiety would percolate in the background until the symptom went away. I began sniffing my toothpaste to make sure I could still detect mint, since the news had come that smell loss was a common symptom.

But all of this was a distraction from the real sources of my dread: my parents and sister. My parents are old and my younger sister is frail. Each of them has at least one comorbidity waiting to gang up on them if they were infected. They all live together, and my sister requires enough close monitoring that if one of them gets it, they will all get it.

My father has had a particularly distressing habit that he likes to trot out from time to time over the last decade, but since his stroke, he’s doubled his efforts. What he does is personify the small voice in my mind that prevents me from getting back to sleep at 3 AM.

He called me the other day, just to talk. And mostly, the conversation went as normal: I tore my hair out at his and my mother’s relative (to me) disregard for proper exposure limiting, and he gave me his latest movie or TV show recommendations.

After I tut-tutted over another unnecessary trip somewhere both he and my mother had taken recently, he responded, “Yeah, that’s true, it is a risk. Well, you know, if one of us gets this, then all of us will. And we might all die.”

He let the words hang there until I responded, with as little emotion as possible to show him that he wasn’t winding me up, “Sounds like it’s a good idea to be even more careful, then.”

As I said, he’s made a habit of nihilistic portending for the last ten years. The problem is that I am always trying to banish those thoughts when they’re still merely thoughts, but then he just blurts them out, which makes them real. Does he not understand after almost forty years that no matter how irrational, uninformed, or biased a father’s words can be, they are still taken to heart by the son?

And he says these things, but then he doesn’t change his actions in kind. If he believed that the situation were that serious, wouldn’t he be battening down the hatches instead of making flimsy excuses to go to the grocery store? Does he really need to get that steak because he has a coupon? Does he really have to go there for Kandy Kakes because they’re buy two, get one free? Is it really worth rolling the dice each time?

I did ask him this directly, and he replied, “Well, we have to live.”

He meant “live” figuratively—I knew that they had enough bland food there to last them a long time. I asked him, “So the difference between ‘living’ and ‘not living’ is going to the grocery store?”

The frustrating contradiction is that for a generation so insistent on austerity being the “tough love” that the world requires, my parents sure don’t want to be austere. When I had trouble getting a job just out of undergrad, I was told to “pound the pavement,” carrying my resume with a suit on and applying to places in person, because it would be “more impressive” than applying online. The most frequent criticism of theirs was that people my age are lazy softies who can’t do anything for themselves. My dad, who had been a mechanic in his adolescence, liked to repeat a joke about my and my brother’s lack of mechanical knowledge: “If Steve had a nut, and [my brother] had a bolt, the two of ‘em wouldn’t be able to figure out how to get them together.”

Yet, if anything ever has been, this is the time for austerity: you shouldn’t make any unnecessary trips for indulgent foods. Instead, stick with the bland, nutritious diet that will last a long time, and stay away from public places. You can truly turn the risk almost down to zero that way, by being austere.

I think that my parents (I can’t speak for their entire generation, just them) have two aversions to properly responding to the virus. The first is that hiding inside one’s house is not what courage looks like. Courage is going out and showing the virus that they won’t be cowed so easily! Staying in, by contrast, is living in fear and surrendering. But it’s not true. The virus can’t be “shown” anything because it is a cell-invading machine. It isn’t trying to cow them, or “try” anything at all, for that matter. It is only spreading. It’s also confusing because the other great fear of our time is terrorism, and in cases of terrorism, that is the right attitude to react with.

To explain their second aversion to responding prudently to the virus, I believe that at a certain age, you just feel entitled. If you’ve had a life like most people’s then you’ve had your share of happy times, but you’ve also had your share of awful ones. And at this point, almost seventy years in, you probably think, the painful parts ought to be mostly over. You don’t deserve to be cooped up in the house right when retirement, really the only good part of senior citizenship, is beginning. Therefore, you deserve to be able to go out and do things. Unlike the timid young, you simply don’t have the time to waste inside.

While I can understand both aversions (as well as a younger person is able to, that is), I can still disagree with them. And I can still get extremely angry when my parents show this behavior.

For that reason, I am not without my own nastiness. I’m sure my mother didn’t appreciate the time I said to her on the phone, “I want you to remember you said that when they’re hooking you up to a ventilator,” after she told me she’d gone to the Starbucks drive-thru that morning. I mean, yes, what I said was truly ghoulish, but I said it out of love. And, desperation.

Because the 3 AM nightmare that I have lately is the one where I send my usual text to my mom asking how they’re all doing, and she texts me back, “Well, [my younger sister] woke up with a little fever, but she’s fine, she’s fine…”

I hear the horror stories. Funerals that have to be attended via the Zoom app. Final goodbyes said over Skype or FaceTime. People dying at the hospital, all alone. I know that it is naive to hope for this, but I still want to be one of those families that just dodges it entirely, you know? Just completely lucks out.

Even though I know those horror stories I keep reading are a textbook case of selection bias (you don’t hear about the vast majority of cases, where a person gets kind of sick but then recovers and is fine), if I want to do some simple panic math, here are the numbers.

-A reasonable infection rate over the whole US population, based on the R0 value: 50%.

-The chances that if one of the three vulnerable people in my family gets it, all three will end up infected: nearly 100%.

-The chances of them dying, given their ages/comorbidities (I’ll be more optimistic with this statistic): 15%, for each person.

Here are the likelihoods for the optimistic scenarios:

-None of them get it. That’s 50% x 50% x 50%, which equals 12.5%.

-They all get it, but they all survive: ~87.5% x 85% x 85% x 85%, which equals about 53%.

That doesn’t represent complete coverage of the probability space, since there are minor variations in what could happen, like each of them could theoretically be infected from an outside source and then give it to only one of the others. But as an estimation, it covers the most major scenarios decently.

So then, to get the probability of the “bad scenarios,” in which at least one person dies, you take the complementary percentage: 100% - (53% + 12.5%) = 34.5%.

Am I really looking at about a one in three chance that one of my immediate family members will die, to say nothing of my grandmother, sister, brother, sister-in-law, niece, and nephew? Hopefully not. The more time that goes by with them not getting infected, the more information healthcare workers and scientists can get about proper treatment courses and possible new medications. And if we go long enough (over a year) without getting infected, we might be able to be vaccinated.

In addition to the nasty pictures I paint for them over the phone if they don’t properly isolate themselves, I have also tried to exploit the older generation’s defensiveness. With a relish that was all part of the act, I told them that there was an alternate name for the disease floating around online, “The Boomer Remover.”

The other term I’d heard, The Boomer Doomer, I refrained from telling them about. My reasoning was this: while The Boomer Doomer is flippant and insensitive, the word “doom” is still scary. So, the phrase “Boomer Doomer” admits some of the disease’s weight and suggests a small amount of seriousness in the mentality of millennial-and-younger generations. That wasn’t good enough.

No, The Boomer Remover was the one I told them about because in addition to being disrespectful, it is downright adversarial. “The Boomer Remover” sounds like a cleaning product. It casts the virus as part of the young’s artillery in the culture war. And it casts the boomer generation as vermin. The name brings to mind fears that older generations must all share since the beginning of time: you will soon be gone, and your absence will be celebrated. Maybe, I thought, their defensive attitudes could be redirected to something more constructive, like making the effort to keep themselves healthy.

It seemed to do the trick. They were more conscious of avoiding exposure to infection after I said it. I don’t know if they really were persuaded by The Boomer Remover—it’s possible that they just got more information from the news around the same time—but they did cut out more unnecessary trips, which relieved me. Not down to zero, but fewer than before. I still don’t accept the unnecessary trips they take, though, and I spare no opportunity to remind them of that.

Coping, Sub-Optimally

I am lucky in my personal situation. To some extent, I can work from home. I have joined the legions of Zoom users. Keeping rigidly to a telework schedule, I have made sure that my sleep schedule hasn’t changed by more than a half hour, and I still look forward to the weekend, even though I don’t go anywhere Saturday or Sunday. The library is closed, and most of my attendees don’t have the Internet, so I can’t run my book club. I can exercise, but after hearing my downstairs neighbors furiously pound on their ceiling during one of my workouts, I’ve had to figure out how to do silent cardio so I don’t have to run through the neighborhood every other day.

One thing that I’m experiencing seems to be something that a lot of others are, too: an unfortunate confrontation with my previous excuse-making. If I had an hour extra in the day, I used to say, I would cultivate a new skill and get really good at it.

After a reliable isolation routine had been set here in my apartment, I found that I did have an extra hour each day, since I didn’t have to commute. I could wake up a half hour later because I didn’t have to drive to work, and when I stopped working for the day, all I had to do was sign out. I could still exercise, still make dinner, and still unwind before bed, so my post-work day was similar, but I gained one more hour I could use as I pleased. What have I done with it?

I am not a gamer. After about six years of not playing any games at all, I bought myself a Nintendo Switch and the newest Zelda game when I graduated in 2018 as a self-gift. I played Zelda over eighteen months. It’s a long game, but the average time you’d have to spend per day to finish the game with only moderate quest completion over that many months is low.

Playing Zelda was like a being able to eat a filling meal whenever I happened to crave it. In-game, I found the environment to be so pleasant that when people in real life asked me if I’d done any hiking lately, I’d almost respond, “Well, no, but I have done a fair bit of hiking and mountain climbing in Zelda.” If I went a couple of weeks without playing, it would take only a minute or two to remember what I’d been doing when I turned it on again. Overall, it might be the best game I have ever played. And it seems like it would be the perfect game for these times, if I were playing it anew.

But lately, the game-playing I’ve been doing over the past few weeks shows a much different mindset—one I haven’t really experienced since I was an undergrad student.

When I was in college, the adjustment to living away from home took a long time, and as a result, freshman year was sort of a wash. I didn’t do well in my classes, my suitemates were all upperclassmen I couldn’t really relate to, and it was hard to make friends in the huge introductory lectures with no assigned seating. I spent nearly the whole year playing video games in my room every evening, ordering pizza after pizza after pizza.

The game I remember playing most was a first-person shooter called Quake 2. I had tried the original Quake when it came out in 1996, but at that time it was too graphics-intensive for the family computer to run. Now, though, Quake 2 was the cooler-looking game, and my new laptop could have run either one easily, so I got Quake 2.

If I could sum up the highlight of freshman year, 2003, it would be: It is 10 PM. It is Friday night. There is a pizza on my desk, only two slices eaten so far. There is me, twenty-five pounds heavier than I am now. I am listening to Zwan, the short-lived Smashing Pumpkins-led supergroup. Quake 2 is blasting on my laptop. Somewhere far away, my future wife shivers for seemingly no reason.

After freshman year, I made a bunch of friends, and some of them became my closest friends, and from that happy vantage point, freshman year looked even more bleak. I resolved that I wouldn’t play Quake 2 ever again. In fact, I decided that from then on, I would think of the intense urge to game, especially first-person shooter games, as a kind of emotional canary in the coal mine.

But now in 2020, stuck in the relative comfort of my nice apartment and isolated from my family, and with the extra time that isolation was granting me, I started looking online for a new game to play.

My computer is fine but is also nothing impressive, processor-wise, so I can’t run a modern game on it. I felt too intimidated to play one anyway, having been out of the loop for so long. So, I searched for “retro FPS games,” and found a game called Dusk. Dusk, the game’s description said, was made in 2018, but was “meant to look like a shooter from 1996.”

I bought it and did nothing else outside of work except eat, squeeze in workouts, and play the game. It only took four evenings, but I finished it. And after that, the gaming urge from freshman year was fully back.

Similar circumstances, similar results. If I didn’t dig up Quake 2, it was only out of a pitiful sense of pride; re-downloading it would mean that symbolically, I hadn’t changed at all since freshman year. So instead, I bought Quake 1, and I’ve been playing that ever since I finished Dusk.

It turns out that since 1996, there has been an online Quake 1 fan community that regularly cranks out game modifications, so there are literally thousands of user-made levels to play in addition to the original game. And the mod levels are all free, as long as you’ve paid for the original game, which costs only five dollars. As a result, nearly every night after work, exercise, and dinner, I turn on a 24-year-old video game (with a fan-made mod that sleekens those chunky graphics up a little bit) and play it until bedtime.

First, I played through the game at normal difficulty, saving after every tough set of enemies (this practice is called “save scumming,” and is frowned upon in the Quake community). Not wanting to be bogus, after I finished it that way, I immediately started replaying the game, this time on Hard difficulty and only saving one time per level. I haven’t made it through the entire game again this way yet, but I’ve also played a bunch of fan-made levels to see what the tinkerers have come up with in the last couple of decades.

Have you ever been so completely uninterested while listening to someone explain their hobby to you that you felt a little bit guilty, but you also felt bad for the person, for being so lame? That’s how I feel right now, re-reading what I’ve just written. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t one of those I-am-quitting-my-addiction-through-the-healing-power-of-writing entries—in fact, I stopped writing this several times to play Quake, even looking up strategy videos on YouTube when I got stuck—but I acknowledge that this is not a good use of my time.

Right now, I could finally be getting those guitar skill fundamentals I’ve always wanted. I could be (getting closer to) finishing all songs I’ve written, or writing new ones. I could be working on an actual short story, or a novel, or something, to point to as a positive thing that came out of this whole crisis, and yet, all of those roads end up in the same place: worry town.

In another way, my laser-focus on playing a game like Quake makes perfect sense. It is similar to a game I already know how to play—it’s not one of the new shooters my computer couldn’t run and I probably couldn’t understand. And it lacks any need for deep thinking. Your goal in Quake is to get to the other end of the level, and if you could try to kill everything you see on your way there, that would be cool too.

If I were playing Zelda, I’d be all the way inside my head thinking about my family as my character’s horse galloped past waterfalls, sunsets, and windblown grassy fields. But in Quake, I don’t have to keep track of my inventory, my life meter, my resources, experience points, magic spells, stamina, side-quests—anything. If I’m still shooting and moving, I can still win. There’s no time for my mind to wander because there are monsters around every corner. And at the end of the level, nothing needs to be committed to memory.

Is it weird that I can’t remember anything about the actual game Quake 2, which I spent months playing as a freshman, except for how it felt to play it? Well, that, and the sparse game dialogue: some enemies would call you “trespasser” or “intruder” just before they tried to stab or shoot you, and there’s a level about midway into the game where you make your way through an elaborate torture factory and you see your comrades all being sawed to pieces, but the only thing they cry out is “It hurts,” “Let me out,” “Make it stop,” or “Kill me now.”

The time I spent playing Quake 2 and the time I’m now spending playing Quake 1 almost seem like one of those cheesy explanations of wormholes you see in science fiction movies. What’s the shortest way between these two points on this piece of paper? someone asks. A straight line, someone answers, and the person who asked the question shakes their head and folds the paper so the two points meet.

Life at thirty-five still feels young—I don’t have that fear of replacement yet. But I do have a new awareness of how dangerous it is to get stuck in a rut. Talking with my family over the phone in the past few weeks, I said that I was afraid that I had become “complacent enough that I could wake up one day and realize that I’m forty-five, with nothing new to show for it.” There are plenty of things I know I’m now too old for, ways of acting, ways of dressing. And my life so far is starting to have a true feeling of accumulation to it. Thinking back on it is like looking down a mountain hiking trail, with confusing turns, switchbacks, and even blind offshoots. Some of it is obscured by the trees, lost from memory. It all seems impressively far. Looking forward again, the mountaintop is still in the distance, but now it looms.

In between the previous paragraph and the one before it, I found out that my high school film teacher, Mr. Truitt, passed away. I had mentioned him in my entry about starting a book club, and in it I’d said that I’d modeled my method of discussion on the one from his film class. I now seriously regret that after all of this time since high school, I never used the very small amount of time it would have taken to tell him how much his class and influence meant to me. And, it is an embarrassing kind of regret—an obnoxious feeling, having taken him so much for granted. I’d always meant to contact him some day, but ordinary life took the foreground, and if I spent twenty minutes thinking of what I would write in a letter to him, I’d forget about it twenty minutes after that.

Just as indecent is my poring over his obituary with the obvious question on my mind that anyone has about any death in the past two months.

If something can be drawn from this entry, I hope it would be this: don’t forget to let people know how much you appreciate them. Life is long, but it never feels long enough. And the absoluteness of death is one of the scariest things about it.

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stevemoffett · 4 years

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Chittering

Instead of a normal entry, I feel like putting in a bunch of random things that are too stupid or pointless to tweet:

I dislike the word “hangry.” I think that it normalizes acting like a jerk when you haven’t eaten and excuses it. It’s not an excuse.

I still think a lot about my cat who died in 2012.

Traumatic brain injuries scare me. And the lax attitude that people still have about “getting your bell rung” makes it worse.

Here are a few of my favorite tropes: an innocent person wrongly accused, and where, in a moment of intense crisis, they finally prove their innocence to someone. Any impassioned speech where a character says they’re not going to take something anymore.

Not until well into adulthood did I realize that I really enjoy watching modern dance. Also, I wish I could dance and move more gracefully.

When I was a kid I always wanted those BluBlocker sunglasses I saw infomercials for. Well, guess what: I’ve arrived. I just bought the deluxe, polarized version.

My book club is still going, but I haven’t made any friends from it. At least the conversation is good.

On a related note, reading a Stephen King novel is like being hugged by an old friend.

Any time the word “muscle” shows up in a song’s lyrics, I like it.

Podcasts/audiobooks require too much attention to listen to while weightlifting. Cardio, however, is fine for them.

I am so tired of reflexively becoming a digital/social media forensic detective when it comes to past romantic interests and partners.

I am still waiting for my real life to begin, and I know just how exhausted that sentiment is.

Very often, I think about how thankful I am that I have never been depressed, except by external circumstances.

It makes me a grammar jerk, but I do resent the fact that “literally” no longer means literally.

I usually have no problem getting to sleep. But I often wake up several hours too early. If I wake up in the middle of the night, the only way I have a chance of getting back to sleep is to immediately use the restroom, drink a glass of water, and put a sleep mask on.

The best part of any wedding is at the reception, after all the introductions and speeches, but before the cake gets cut.

I think I might have sleep apnea, but I’m too afraid to get it checked out, because a CPAP machine will turn me into an old person, and my eventual wife will watch me sleeping and resent my weak soft palate.

I’m getting really scared that I’ll never find someone I want to marry, who wants to marry me back. But it’s so easy to be alone.

I think that my best talent might be surrounding myself with excellent people.

I start a lot of personal hobbies/goals that I never finish. Some of those things I give up on when I’m 90% of the way there.

I often fantasize that I’ll see someone whose podcast I listen to in real life and become their friend and then, one day, I am a guest on their podcast.

I also fantasize that I go on Conan O’Brien and we have a really great and funny conversation.

I also fantasize that I host SNL. That would be so neat.

I also fantasize that I am a songwriter and a bunch of pop artists have bought and used my songs. But I am not famous.

I’d rather just stay hungry than eat a salad.

It’s a dream of mine to go on a three or four-week hike all by myself, but that also seems really risky.

The most interesting parts of my life are the ones too private to talk about.

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stevemoffett · 5 years

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Putting yourself out there

Living near Philly, I would tell close friends and family that the places in which I felt most comfortable were: my apartment, whatever gym I was currently using, my parents’s house/childhood home, and my brother/sister-in-law’s house.

Nowadays, being far from my family and most of my friends, it’s easy to be very solitary. My comfortable places out here are: my apartment, and my apartment’s gym. End of list. It makes sense, but it doesn’t leave too much potential for socializing, making new friends, or trying new experiences.

I had a small epiphany when I went to a “pizza party” that my apartment complex threw, with beer and board games and, obviously, pizza.

I spoke to a couple of guys who, like me, generally kept to themselves. They had their own hobbies, which didn’t really jive with my own, so during my conversation with them I realized that it would probably be our last. But, I mentally acknowledged the similarity in our general ways of being, if not in our specific interests.

Then I wondered: am I a shut-in? Am I losing social skills by atrophy?

Later on, over a game of Jenga with two girls, meaning to make a self-deprecating joke, I said, “I came here partially because I realized I’m not talking to anyone over the weekends! Sometimes Monday morning comes and I realize I didn’t say a word since Friday!”

Not that I was looking for a date, but the room dropped a couple of degrees after that. Later, as I walked back to my apartment in the button-up shirt that I’d chosen carefully for the evening, I started thinking that the encounter might have been one of those critical moments, the beginning of a slippery slope to becoming a total reclusive weirdo. (You’ll notice that lately I’ve been worried about getting stuck in the rut of certain character flaws as I get older).

But the mid/late 30s memes are true: I revel in the not-my-fault canceling of plans. “A night downtown” to me is broken up into the choice whether to use Uber to get there, and whether wherever I end up will be loud enough to merit wearing ear plugs (a real social magnet, those ear plugs are), and whether I have enough cash to avoid starting a bar tab, and deciding what time is the absolute latest I will tolerate being out (and usually exceeding that time by an hour at least), and determining how many drinks I am willing to drink if I’m not driving (1-2: no effect, slight headache next morning; 3-4: pleasantly buzzed tonight, but after peak buzz, the drunkenness “breaks” into an unpleasant what-is-it-all-for mood until I get home, and ibuprofen will definitely be needed the next morning; 5+: full-body hangover with about 8 hours of acute clinical depression upon waking).

I also know, though, that nights alone tend to not be worth remembering. I can have an enjoyable night by myself at home in front of my computer or sitting at my electric piano, but I can’t remember any of them more than three days later. On the other hand, I’ll never forget a random moment one night in 2012 when I watched a bartender break a sleeve of quarters on the corner of the bar and felt the vibration go through the wood and into my knee. Whatever the rule is that determines why I keep some memories and let others fade to nothing except a vague sense of recognition is beyond me.

What I think I mean with all this is that I still have a social impulse, but I’m starting to feel weighted down by my growing urge to sit still. At home, I don’t watch and re-watch TV shows, or play video games--I usually just screw around and let the non-political Youtube algorithm serve stuff up. As a result, I’m mildly revolted by my machine-learned Youtube homepage/echo chamber.

A video that the algorithm decided I would like: STRANGER THINGS SEASON TWO WAS A POORLY WRITTEN MESS (49:53).

I don’t know guys, I thought Stranger Things season 2 was fine. Lately if I start a video and there’s narration over muted clips of a TV show or movie, especially if the narrator is a man with an English accent, I just X the tab out.

Sometimes, in my florist-refrigerated, table-for-none apartment, I’ll think up some melody or story idea that I like and try to develop, but those nights are few and far between, and lately, the ideas have not developed into much.

A friend at work invited me to join a social/soccer club with him. I said “yes,” following my head rather than my heart, which was screaming “no.” I paid the $60 fee for a team shirt and a 7-game season.

Now, in my signup survey that served to distribute people onto teams, I put a check next to the option that read, “I’m here to have a good game and make new friends!” I think a lot of others chose the same option but I also think, in this case, that the devil is in the details.

In the language of that survey option, what, to you, constitutes a “good game”? To me, non-soccer player who trips over my own feet that I am, a good game involves plenty of running, nobody getting hurt, nobody shouting in anger, and high fives all around at the end. As a result, I did not thrive in the league, on my team, the Kickstars.

Since the games all had to be played after work, this being an adult league, they were played on one of two fields reserved from 6PM-11PM. Due to some a-hole in the schedule making department, five out of our seven games began at 9:30PM.

The soccer field had giant stadium-style lights, which at 9:30PM blaze down on everything so brightly that they wash everything out into a monochrome, cinematic mood, like sports movie shorthand for The Big Game, where it all. Comes down. To this. As a result, at the first match, those lights primed me to try hard and dig it out on every run, but remember that I trip over my own feet.

During the game, I sucked. There’s no other way to describe it. Pass the ball to me? It’s as good as stripped. Get open, while I have the ball? The ball’s going to go somewhere, but not toward you. Somebody’s driving toward the goal, and I’m the only one close enough to defend?

The score is gonna be whatever-plus-1 to 0 in about three seconds.

But I did all this sucking while running like my life depended on it, and at 10:15PM, when the last whistle blew, I felt like I was going to pass out. My kicking leg cramped up as I was prying my shin guards off. As soon as I got home I showered the sweat and bug spray off, but my heart didn’t calm down enough to let me sleep until around 1AM. I woke up at 6 like usual and limped around at work the next day feeling generally like a human joke.

This brings me back to how the devil is in the details. To the others who joined the soccer/social club, I think that a “good game” meant, “To get another taste of the victory high I got when I played on the varsity team in high school/college.”

Their yelled advice--”Pressure! PRESSURE!”, “TRAP IT!”--fell on ignorant ears; I had to sheepishly ask a girl or guy next to me when I subbed out, “Uh, excuse me...so, when Jeffrey was screaming at me to, uh, ‘clear, for the love of God, CLEAR!’...what did he mean by ‘clear’?”

They were all nice before the game. And they were charitable after the game. But during the games, they mustered a spirit of competition that I simply could not. They were skilled players of the sport, and I was not even a soccer enthusiast--”I came here to make friends!” I could imagine myself shouting indignantly, if it were a reality show.

I still ran hard for the ball, still tried hard to block passes and shots on the goal, but I decided that I was never going to dive into what I knew would be a gallery of ankle sprains and jammed fingers.

I didn’t get hurt during the season, but several people did, enough to put them out for the next few games. At the end of the 7 weeks, I was given an option to renew for another 7-game season, a prospect I simply laughed at. I had gone to every game save one, when I flew home for a week, knowing that I shouldn’t quit because that would mean there would be one less person to sub out, which would make it harder for everyone else on the team. But with that one commitment satisfied, my soccer career was over.

Final scores: Games lost: 6 (we won the last one). Lessons learned: 1. Friends made: 0.

Even at that first game, I saw the writing on the wall. This was not going to be the venue where I would make deep and lasting friendships. Aside from what I’ve already mentioned, nearly everyone else on the team was a spry 23-27 years old. They were all at different stages of life from me: when, at 10:20PM, someone suggested we all go congregate at a bar, I groaned under my breath and said aloud that I had to go home and sleep.

After the next game, I went to the bar. Only two others showed up, one of whom was my friend from work.

I could almost hear: “Aaaand the waitress is practicing politics...”

There is a library near my apartment. Libraries are great: if you have a library card, you might not need to buy books from Amazon or Audible if you just use the Libby app. And libraries sometimes have classes, or workshops, for cool things. I suggest you look the closest one to you up, because you might be missing out on something neat.

I decided that I wanted to join a book club.

So, I looked into it, and found out that the library near my apartment has a monthly book club. They meet on Thursdays at 10:30 AM, right around the time that I’m buzzing on my second cup of coffee and heading back into the lab.

I decided that I wanted to start a book club.

Surprisingly, the library had to do an official background check before they’d let me start one. In all, it took 4 months before I could even have my first general-interest meeting. A nice older lady came--a former librarian who moved here from a nearby city--and she kindly gave me some advice on how to run a book club (this was my first experience with one).

The next month, I decided I would have the club discuss Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, because it’s my favorite book. I know that it’s not a perfect novel--in fact, it has plenty of flaws--but no book has made me feel as connected to it as this one did. Close second, Jerry Spinelli’s Space Station Seventh Grade.

The day rolled around and when I arrived, two septuagenarians were sat at the table in the meeting room, arms crossed.

They had not finished the book, they said. They had read only the first 100 pages, they said. Those 100 pages were “bizarrely sexual,” one of them said. They “wanted to get a look at the person who’d had us read this book.”

But an hour’s an hour, a hundred pages is an honest try at a long book, and I knew The Corrections very well, so I was able to drag an entire hour of conversation about those 100 pages out of them. I truly did not mind their disliking what they read, as long as they would elaborate on why.

It was frustrating at times (”Chip was obsessed with sex,” one of them said, which made me want to respond like an old-timey comedian: “Lady? If you think that’s obsessed...”), but overall, it was a good conversation. I still left the library feeling guilty that they had not been entertained by what they read, and pessimistic about either of them returning.

But this month’s book club came, and one of them returned! And a different other lady came! And they’d both read the whole book!

As I stalked through the aisles at the library just after the last meeting, embarrassed, I had been thinking, “All right, you want a short book? I’m going to have us read the shortest friggin book I can find,” which ended up being the 200-page On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwan. I opened the cover and read, on the inner flap, the words “Newlywed virgins” and “sex-averse” and I figured, well, all right.

When I told the librarian to have the other library branches send their copies of On Chesil Beach for next month’s meeting, I thought that the book flap was advertising a story that would mostly feature two people in cable knit sweaters, standing on a jetty addressing the issue indirectly, like, “Darling, I feel a bit fretful when you rest your hand on the small of my back.”

But I was so, so wrong. At least 66 of its 200 pages explicitly describe all of the details of the wedding night of the two main characters, with at least as many utterances of the word “penis” as in an article from a journal of urology.

It was the opposite of an erotic story. It was graphic and clinical and, at times, difficult. But the story was good. The characters were well-drawn, and I cared about them a lot. It was a breath of fresh air after having read a lot of sci-fi on my own in the meantime, but I dreaded the next meeting--I figured I was going to be labeled the library’s resident pervert, the lord of the porn-watching bums in the computer section.

A wedding night of excruciatingly-detailed sexual misadventure is apparently not beyond the pale for the little old ladies in my book club. And this time, the hour went quickly. I used my old high school film appreciation teacher, Mr. Truitt, as a role model on how to keep the conversation going--he used to pepper in the usual literary theory type stuff along with other questions that took the story at face value, as if it had really happened, and wasn’t an intimidating puzzle of symbols and motifs and vocabulary. “Do you believe X when she says she loves Y?” “If you were there, would you have intervened when Z lunged for W?” “Is this a normal way two people in this kind of relationship treat each other?”

I left the library whistling, fortified by the approval of both ladies. I had brought cookies to the meeting, but there were a bunch left over, so I brought the rest into work on Monday and told everyone how it went.

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stevemoffett · 5 years

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Memory cues

It gets harder to journal about anything personal, the more jealous I become of my privacy. But I still have the impulse to share things about my life with the proverbial curious party.

Some guy was walking by as I left the bathroom at work today, and he saw me try to throw a paper towel out into a hallway trashcan from about two inches away and still miss, and he laughed at me. As I bent to pick up the paper towel, he must have seen what I guess was a vaguely wounded look on my face because he turned away and said, “...Almost got it,” not breaking stride.

Then again, I was on a very crowded, cliff-face grate bridge in the Capilano Suspension Bridge Park in Vancouver last month, and I heard a lady behind me say to her companion, “I’m not looking down. I’m just trying not to have a panic attack,” and I said, unsolicited, “Just remember that you’re stuck, and you couldn’t get off this bridge even if you wanted to.”

At that moment of my existence, turning 35 years old was imminent. Was this kind of little rat-fuck joke a sign of things to come? I hope not. I reflexively shriveled up inside and turned around and said “Ma’am, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you more nervous, that was a bad joke.” She laughed, and her husband, I, and my lab partner chatted amiably for the rest of the walk.

I’d never been to the Pacific Northwest before then, but it put sort of a spell on me while I was there, and the next time I go up to that region (Seattle), I suspect I will enjoy that, too. The Capilano Suspension Bridge Park looks like the forest moon of Endor, and the coffee in Vancouver tastes very good (this is coming from a certified non-connoisseur who says “this tastes like dirt” to most cups).

The busiest and fanciest area of the city comes to a halt on its northern end at Vancouver Harbour, which sports green mountains behind a large, clearly too-far-to-swim-across inlet. In the harbor, chubby seaplanes take off and land, their motion dictated as if by cartoon physics.

I stayed at a hotel embedded in a residential neighborhood a few miles south of “downtown,” so I had to take buses and trains to get into and around the city each day. At first I was annoyed, but then I felt like I was getting a better view of what it would be like to live there, which was neat. On public transport at commuter hours I felt both uncoolly older and obscenely whiter than I do at home. Late at night, on the same modes of transportation, I felt doubly old and doubly square.

Life at 35 is like life at 25, except you’ve been around for ten years more, your cultural touchstones are outdated, and you feel more tired spiritually, if not physically. Professionally, you feel more focused; you’ve crossed more items off the list of things that you enjoy doing, and you don’t have the nervous energy you did a decade ago that prevented you from buckling down.

The separation between 35 and adolescence also means that the memories of the old days are more distinct than they were at 25. I think of memories now like opening a fresh can of tennis balls: the smell seems to enter your nose and occupy your brain all the way back to your ears and then it’s gone. For me, the easiest way to access memories is by listening to music.

The abridged version of the music important to me: before I “liked music,” I enjoyed the song “Good Vibrations” and I learned to love the Smashing Pumpkins album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness because my older brother played it constantly. Beck was the first artist who made an impression on me, so seventh through ninth grade was mostly Beck’s Odelay and Mutations. Sophomore year of high school Kid A came out, which led me back through Radiohead for the rest of high school and the beginning of college, with Beck’s Sea Change nestled in there, too. Zwan formed (and mostly disbanded) in 2003, but now it’s forever joined to the endless nights in my dorm freshman year playing Quake II and eating Gerlanda’s pizza by myself. The blistering winter winds waiting for campus buses are inseparable from “When You Smile” by The Flaming Lips, and with the spring came Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. Sophomore through senior year of college I zoomed through lots of splashy indie bands, faithfully sticking with the discography of only a small fraction of them (Silver Jews, now Purple Mountains, and Pedro the Lion). During that time, I also learned I disliked Bob Dylan and Conor Oberst (sorry Joe).

After college, Andrew Bird soundtracked the purposeless days of professional indecision pretty well. I walked through my new apartment neighborhood during the soft end-of-summer evenings of 2008 to You & Me by The Walkmen. Beach House came along during Stair-master sessions at my local gym when I was starting out at grad school, as did the ultimately disposable Girl Talk mashup albums. Kanye West made Christmas 2008 feel like looking at a photo negative, but afterward Fleet Foxes and Grizzly Bear/Department of Eagles blew the naturalness back into feeling. Fall of 2009 was David Bazan’s Curse Your Branches and, later, Embryonic by The Flaming Lips.

I was in a relationship from 2012-2015 and got really into Tame Impala during that time. From the relationship, I picked up a few others--Abba, some newer indie bands that didn’t hit my ear as keenly as the ones in undergrad, and Paul McCartney. In 2016 I clung for dear life (personal, not political reasons) to Mac DeMarco’s insouciant vibe, 1970s McCartney, and Lord Huron’s death anxiety. In 2017 things came to an anxious head with Aesop Rock’s The Impossible Kid. 2018 was the beginning of an as-yet undefinable mix of old and new stuff making up the “present period.” Those are the milestones, anyway.

Recently I was reminded of memories from 2004-2006, which was during the splashy indie band phase. I made a mix on Spotify that was as close as I could get to one of the mixes I made for myself at the time, when the city surrounding my college took on a kind of permanent cold, permanent night-world texture. I guess it’s because most of the important stuff during that period happened at nighttime and in the fall or winter. I spent a whole weekend in a bittersweet reverie.

Memory can be a mournful thing, but sometimes its vividness makes you feel like there may still be great things within you yet. At least, I hope so!

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stevemoffett · 5 years

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Today, ten years on, hopefully 23-year-old Jeffrey has it all figured out and is living his best life.

Today was hilariouser than expected

Because of some kind of Rutgers outreach thing, I had to teach a bunch of middle schoolers about experimental scientific method today.

For the experiment we had a respiration and pulse monitor.

So with that, we checked the average difference between boys’ and girls’ heart and breathing rates.

Then I mentioned that what we had was basically a lie detector.

They had me hook somebody up to it, some girl.

The first question they asked was “Is Jeffrey a fag?”

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stevemoffett · 5 years

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Writing

Lately writing has been more difficult. Usually it takes a couple of weeks letting a piece rest before I come back to it and think, “Well, this is garbage.” Now it’s happening before I finish writing a full sentence and continues for the full hour.

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stevemoffett · 5 years

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Trying to get back into the story-writing game. It’s not going great.

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stevemoffett · 5 years

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Cheat nights

They say the best diet is the healthiest one you can stick to long-term. In 2015, after an end-of-relationship, stress-induced, 15-pound weight loss, I decided to stay at that weight after the first wave of relationship-ending feelings let up. (There are multiple waves).

What ended up being the right diet for me, which has allowed me to keep my weight precisely where I wanted it since then, is the following: 2200 calories a day, emphasizing proteins and fats over carbs (nowhere near a “low-carb diet,” though).

A little over two thousand calories a day, you will find, is not a very large amount of food when you look at every nutrition panel and add things up. For instance: a bowl of cereal, in general, is around 200 calories. Not much, right?

That’s what the cereal box says, anyway. But, consider it more carefully: are you really only having one serving size, according to their definition? One serving size is 1 cup of cereal. Try measuring out 1 cup exactly, and pour it into your cereal bowl. Does that look like how much you normally pour?

Now, the milk. Cereal companies assume everyone uses a half-cup of skim milk.

Do you use skim milk? Do you pour a half-cup in exactly? Again, measure a half cup of milk if you’re curious and pour it into your 1-cup cereal bowl.

Does that look familiar? Do you measure it every time? If you do, are you a maniac?

Or, do you eyeball both the amount of cereal and the amount of milk you pour in like a normal person?

I do not ask these questions to shame you. If anything, I believe that nutrition facts are unrealistically-portioned. Consider the commercial for Oreo O’s, one of the most popular cereals in America. At the end of the 15-second clip, does that look to you like one cup of cereal and one half cup of milk? I mean--maybe it is, but the bowl is cupcake-sized, the spoon is for infants, and the camera lens is some kind of wide-angle deal, but...does that look like one cup? Do you suppose the Cream Team might have deliberately made it look bigger, so when you pour yourself a bowl where the Oreo O’s levitate all the way to the rim when you put in the milk, you sort of just assume that’s around 200 calories?

Now consider Oreo cookies themselves. One serving is 3 cookies (160 calories, no milk). When you buy one of those sleeves of 6 do you eat three, then...I don’t know...tear off half of that paper tray thing and then twist the plastic wrapper closed so you can eat the rest later? Or do you eat all 6 of them, eating the cream-less sides first, then eating the other sides with the cream puck facing your tongue? Because that’s what I do.

Small digression: the other part of this equation is the sugar. In one serving of Oreo cereal or cookies, there are 14 grams of sugar. I would invite you to find a sensitive enough scale, and pour out 14 grams of sugar. It looks like a lot. Would you consider eating that much sugar straight? Would you consider pouring it into a glass of water and drinking it? Incidentally, one can of Coca Cola has 39 grams of sugar. In that case, you are drinking that amount of sugar dissolved in carbonated water.

Reader, I love cereal. My favorite brand is Frosted Mini-Wheats. Until I stopped eating them (to cut down on sugar), I scrupulously counted one serving size’s worth (21 biscuits) whenever I ate a bowl. I eyeballed the amount of milk, but only after measuring it the first time to see how it appeared.

My favorite way to have it was with whole milk and a big scoop (2 tablespoons) of peanut butter. One serving size of the Mini-Wheats with skim milk is 230 calories. Using whole milk puts it up to 270. Two tablespoons of peanut butter is 200 calories, so that’s 470 calories total. Again--I invite you to measure those amounts out and see what it looks like.

It will look paltry, I assure you. It looked paltry all 1000 evenings I ate it, too, but it tasted great. And, afterward, if I waited about 20 minutes, I could resist pouring myself another bowl, because at the end of the day, I was never full--I was only just full enough not to feel hunger pangs.

For me, this was unsustainable. And what I will tell you next, to some, would border on describing an eating disorder, so if you don’t want to expose yourself to that kind of thing, consider stopping reading here.

The key to happiness, I have come to find, relies in big part on having something to look forward to--assuming the lack of another source of regret or guilt or fear or sadness or dread. So two times a week, I would be able to look forward to a cheat night during which, starting at dinner time, I could eat whatever I wanted, bar nothing.

One of my absolute favorite things to eat is Vito’s Pizza near where I used to live. They make a pizza with perfect crust, and if you ask for it “light done,” you can get it so that the dough is soft with a paper-thin crisp layer. Additionally, the sauce and cheeses are unmatched.

I’d share this with my brother and sister-in-law (my sister-in-law is generous and would eat fewer slices than my brother and I). My sister-in-law would also make brownies for us with peanut butter chips mixed in, perfectly baked so the middle was still slightly goopy. Arguably, in my opinion, it is one of the most delicious dinner/dessert combos you could eat.

And yet, my gluttony would bide its time since the previous cheat night, growing more perverted in the meantime. In addition to my idiosyncratic way of eating pizza (tear off the crust and eat it first, then dip each bite of pizza into a bowl of vinegar), I would blur the line between dinner and dessert. It quickly got to the point where I would take a bite of vinegar-y pizza, and then immediately take a bite of the brownie.

I estimate that given each of the pizza slices being around 600 calories, and the amount of brownies I’d have, the cheat night would be at least 3100 or so calories in that meal alone. And then, frequently, I would eat more afterward. A few times, I drove from their house at 10 PM and got McDonald’s drive-thru on the way back to my apartment.

If you’re curious, no, I have never purged. The idea of that frightens me. I would describe my attitude about the consequences of overeating as decidedly Catholic: you get what you deserve, and that usually means feeling bad.

In my case, that usually meant a night of feeling completely disgusting, occasionally breaking out into sweats as I slept no matter how cool my bedroom was, and still feeling full the following morning, only getting relatively back to normal after an intense exercise bike ride before work, and even then, my stomach still was rumbly until lunch.

Remember, I said I gave myself two cheat nights a week. On the other cheat night, I went to my parents’ house, where my dad usually made one of about 4 or 5 staple meals: turkey meat loaf (my favorite), shish kabob, eggplant parmesan, chicken, or sandwiches.

I’d eat the main course and then plunder whatever snacks and cookies they had in the house, most often cheese curls or Oreos. Again, the calorie count would probably get over 3000, but since unlike the limitations of the amount of pizza on pizza cheat night, there was always a surplus of food at my parents’ house, so I wouldn’t eat any more once I got home.

And that’s how it went for over 3 years. The cheat nights were two days away from each other, so since I’ve moved away, I spaced the nights to split the week more evenly (Saturday and Wednesday).

But now it’s up to me to feed myself, and things have become weirder.

Where I live now has good food, but good pizza is hard to find. The best place I’ve found is about 20 minutes away, whereas there’s a Domino’s down the street. Do you think I regularly drive 40 minutes after work to get the good pizza, or do you think I now have the Domino’s app on my phone?

And on the other cheat night, I just go to the grocery store and pick up random things. One week I ate an entire box of Cheez-Its, a large package of hummus, a whole DiGiorno’s pizza (WHY???), and an entire container of glazed donut holes. Last night, I still had some celery from Thanksgiving, so I made stuffing from scratch, ate a flatbread from the grocery store with it, a couple of pancakes with eggs, and, again, a whole package of glazed donut holes, this time with peanut butter spread on them. (By the way, the donut holes package has only 60 grams of sugar in it total--about 1.5 cans of Coke’s worth).

I sit here this morning feeling like I always do post-cheat, which is crappy. I always resolve to eat less the following cheat night, and I almost never do.

Meanwhile, the menu has continued to get less stable. I am convinced that if things continue like this, there will be a night where I just eat a stick of butter like it’s a candy bar. Or I’ll hire someone to throw a fistful of Fruity Pebbles at my open mouth and put a cigarette out on my arm.

My weight’s still fine. I increased my daily non-cheat day intake to around 2600 calories and increased my time in the gym to try to see what that does to my lifting regimen. I weigh 165 pounds at the moment, which is a 5-pound gain over my 2015-2018 weight (there was always a fluctuation of around +/- 8 pounds, but the average was always 160).

I also feel like I should change because I’m getting older. To document this, there is now a gray stripe in my beard, from the bottom of my chin to my neck on my left side. I’m not sure if I’m paying more attention to feeling crappy after cheats because I’m more paranoid being alone out here, or because it’s actually taking a harsher toll on my aging body. And eventually, eating a ton and then lying down to sleep shortly afterward is going to give me some kind of reflux issue, I am positive.

The real lesson here is probably in the math, and moderation is probably the answer. Let’s say each cheat night is 3600 calories. Each day before the cheat I eat around 1000 calories, making it 4600 calories in that day. That means I could dispense with the cheat nights and just spread the total excess calories (2400+2400=4800) over the other 7 days, which makes an additional 686 calories a day.

Dieting is hard, but the health benefits, hard as they are to get, will turn out to be worth it.

Eh, maybe not. But if you’re making things difficult for yourself, it’s probably going to end up being good for you. Another decidedly Catholic attitude.

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stevemoffett · 6 years

Text

Quick haiku

based on a description from a friend’s old job:

I watch the pool boy.

My rum’s ice cuts the hum of

air conditioning.

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stevemoffett · 6 years

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Movies, 2017 (TV and music too)

I didn’t have time to see too many movies this year, but I saw enough to be generally satisfied. Here they are below, in roughly chronological order. Ones I saw in the theater are marked with an asterisk.

Split John Wick: Chapter 2* Get Out* I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore Logan Kong: Skull Island T2 Trainspotting Ghost in the Shell The Discovery Graduation (Bacalaureat)* Alien: Covenant* Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 Baby Driver* Okja Dunkirk* Kidnap It* mother!* Kingsman: The Golden Circle* Blade Runner 2049* The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) Star Wars: The Last Jedi* The Trip to Spain American Made Bright

I’ve just grouped them into a general positive or negative feeling. Many of the negative feelings were just a result of my expectations: if I expect a movie is going to be good, and it turns out to be just okay, then I tend to like it even less. On the other hand, there’s Kidnap.

Generally negative takeaway:

Split (Spoilers):

Oddly enough, it was M. Night Shyamalan himself who spoiled this movie for me on Twitter--well, the very end of it. Anyway, as with this and “The Visit,” I was surprised with Shyamalan’s gall in storytelling, how he implied some unspeakable acts, and killing at least as many people as would be necessary to make it scary, and then some. On the other hand, the whole split-personalities conceit was a little bit stupid. Especially the little kid one. What little kid acts like that? Little kid actors, that’s who.

John Wick: Chapter 2:

John Wick 1 I liked because it was a good action movie that didn’t have filler, not because of the all the “world building” it did. Personally, I could not care less about a bunch of assassins and their version of chivalry. This movie leaned into the world building part and sacrificed the urgency.

Kong: Skull Island:

The part liked the most was its blend of end-of-war Vietnam blue balls with something incredibly silly. Like most modern big action movies, though, aside from a few clever moments, it was pretty run-of-the-mill.

Ghost in the Shell:

I’ve never seen the original, but this movie seemed like it had parts cut out of it, and maybe the original was just so influential that this movie seems old because everything made after it has tread the same ground.

The Discovery (spoilers):

Big disappointment. It started with one of the best setups I’ve heard in the past few years (a scientist proves empirically that some kind of afterlife exists, and millions commit suicide when they hear about it), and then the whole thing devolves into a rip-off of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, without the convincing romance. I didn’t care much about any of the characters--they seemed like maybe the least interesting people the movie could have followed given the setup.

Okja:

Another disappointment, only because 1) it was too long, and 2) knowing Bong Joon-ho’s earlier movies made me ready for this movie to be truly biting, and it did not deliver. At times it was silly to the point of “why am I watching this,” and at other parts, it seemed to pull back when it could have really gotten dark.

It:

The kid-drama stuff was good, the actors were good, but it might have been the least scary movie I’ve ever seen.

Generally positive takeaway:

Get Out:

This movie’s been analyzed to death, and for good reason, so let it just be known that I thought it was one of the best of the year and that the movie kept me completely at unease the entire time. It had great script economy, by which I mean all setups led to satisfying but non-obvious payoffs. That’s one of the great pleasures of storytelling--when you get to look back on earlier parts of the story and realize that you’d read things completely wrong, but the correct reading seems obvious, even inevitable, when you look again. If I had one small criticism (and this is more critical of the online reaction to the movie than it is to the movie itself), it’d be that it wasn’t quite as astonishingly original as it’s purported to be since it had so many parallels to The Stepford Wives.

I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore:

This movie was made by a guy who works with Jeremy Saulnier (Blue Ruin, Green Room), and it was sort of a cross between Saulnier’s stuff and the Coen brothers’ movies. A well-timed sense of humor and well-earned anxiety about meaninglessness made it interesting.

Logan:

Yeah, Wolverine + realism + lots of F-words + no inter-dimensional cataclysm at the end = a better superhero movie than usual.

T2 Trainspotting:

I thought this was going to be some kind of sad revisiting of the consequences of the first one but it turned out to be much better: it was a sad revisiting of the consequences of the first one, wrapped up in a sleazy and funny story. It kind of made Begbie into a cartoon character, though.

Graduation (Bacalaureat):

I saw this movie because I wanted to appear sophisticated and cosmopolitan to the person I saw it with, but it was still pretty good. It seemed to be realistic about corruption--specifically, about the banality of that particular kind of evil. We had a long conversation about what makes a good or bad parent afterward.

Alien: Covenant (spoilers):

Some stuff was telegraphed too obviously so the “twists” weren’t surprising, and occasionally it went into the realm of the schlocky slasher movie, and there was a 20 minute part of the movie that seemed to have no purpose, but at the movie’s best, it was frightening and disturbing and had some big ideas. There’s a reason that when I have good nightmares (i.e., nightmares that don’t involve family sickness/death, or taking a final in a math class I forgot I’d registered for), the alien xenomorph is usually the thing that is after me.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2:

Cool movie.

Baby Driver:

I saw this on my birthday, and I was in a great mood, so I might remember it as better than it was, but I think in retrospect, 1) it was a better-than-average action movie, and 2) it was extremely well choreographed and edited.

Dunkirk (a big spoiler):

One cool thing I realized after getting out of the movie is that aside from one or two shots at the very end, you never actually see the enemy. I think that’s partially what made it effectively claustrophobic. It’s kind of miraculous that this movie was made--it was so spare that it seemed like a gigantically-budgeted art film.

Kidnap:

This one-long-chase thriller I was prepared to groan at, but it was like another movie I saw and loved called Breakdown with Kurt Russell. There were plenty of “why doesn’t she just...?” moments, but there were also a lot of moments where I was thinking “Yeah, do that, exactly! Yes!” Critically, I thought it was unfairly trashed.

mother! (spoilers):

I generally like Aronofsky’s movies, but this one I might like the least of the ones I’ve seen. In the beginning, by the moviemaking craft alone I was totally rapt, up until a little before the halfway point, when I suddenly figured out what was going on. It was like pulling the correct piece of string from a huge knot. The rest of the movie became meaningless when I realized that there was no logical progression to the story.

Kingsman: The Golden Circle:

This movie was of the same quality as the last movie, but it didn’t do anything as surprising as the original one did, either. I was entertained the whole time, but never really caught off guard.

Blade Runner 2049 (spoilers):

I think if I had to choose I’d say this was my favorite of the year. I hope that it gets a nomination for best cinematography. K’s character was great, the setting was great, and the mystery was actually involving (unlike in the first one!). One thing that bothered me, though, is how the most disturbing murders in the movie were of women. One of the murders seemed almost gratuitous. I guess it was meant to push my buttons, in which case mission accomplished. A huge success in atmosphere and acting, though.

The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected):

This movie could almost be a sequel to The Squid and the Whale, but I liked it more. It was more schmaltzy but also more realistic and prosaic (in a good way; lately I have less patience for Lou Reed and the final two shots from The Squid and the Whale).

Star Wars: The Last Jedi (huge spoilers):

Even though I wasn’t as over the moon for this movie as for The Force Awakens (this year, it comes in at second after Blade Runner), I’d say that it was almost assuredly because I had ultra high expectations for it to meet. Since it’s not doing that great at the box office (for a Star Wars movie), I hope they don’t get rid of Rian Johnson for his standalone SW trilogy. In this movie he got the tone right (in my opinion), and he made some weird choices, most of which I really liked. They were different and unexpected, and that is really valuable, even if they don’t succeed. The problems I had with the movie are problems I would have with any movie (e.g. why don’t they just make hyperdrive missiles?, where did that romance come from?...).

The Trip to Spain:

This is the third movie in the series and the first one that feels like a retread. While the first two were able to mine ennui out of the landscapes and the men’s reactions to it, this one felt more like someone decided they needed to add plot in. The result is no ennui drawn from the surroundings, and more like the emotional turns could have happened anywhere.

American Made:

After I saw the movie I looked up the real story of the main guy and the movie is almost a total fabrication. That said, it was well-paced, scripted, acted, and edited. Somehow it made a U.S. citizen’s and the U.S. government’s enormously unethical actions entertaining (while also giving reminders of how awful they were, without having to resort to scenes that viscerally demonstrate their consequences).

Bright:

This movie and Star Wars have made me a little bit uneasy about my relationship with critical reviews. Star Wars got 86 on Metacritic, and while I really enjoyed it, almost none of the critical reviews I read had any of the problems I had with the movie. On the other side of it, Bright got a 29 on Metacritic, with critics calling it dull, awkward, tone-deaf, poorly plotted, et cetera. I found myself entertained all the way through. I think that other than “dull,” those criticisms are valid, though. Maybe it’s just like I said at the beginning--my expectations heavily color the experience I end up having. I’d say that Star Wars was a better movie, but I don’t think I’d be able to easily point out exactly where Star Wars zigged and Bright zagged. Bright reminded me of something I’d channel surf to in 1997 on a Sunday afternoon and stick with. I’m actually thinking specifically of a movie I barely remember called Alien Nation.

Ok--now, for TV:

Master of None season 2:

I liked this season a lot more than season 1. I think the main reason was because it was a lot less didactic this time around.

Love season 2:

Not as good as season 1. I don’t think I’d want to be spend any time with either of the main characters if they were real people. It got a little too convoluted towards the end.

Stranger Things season 2 (BIG spoilers):

The first few “slow” episodes were the best ones, I thought. I didn’t like the X-Men-style episode. Joe Keery’s character was probably the most entertaining (I know I’m jumping on the internet bandwagon with this opinion). I didn’t like the interdimensional cataclysm at the end, as usual, but there was no dropoff in quality compared to season 1 (though, like with Kingsman, the lack of novelty was inevitable. And the X-Men episode wasn’t so much something innovative within the universe but instead hopping into another, extremely well-tread universe).

Mindhunter:

I have read that some people say this show is disturbing. I don’t think it’s disturbing at all, but it’s really interesting and the atmosphere is totally unique.

The Leftovers:

Oh, damn! How could I have forgotten this? The final season was truly great, and it’s one of my favorite shows of all time as a whole. In only a fraction of the episodes, all my anger at the mishandling of Lost is gone.

American Vandal:

The mystery was excellent. I haven’t been in high school for 15 years, but it certainly seems to be an accurate portrayal. Highly recommended.

Black Mirror:

Still my favorite show, but now I’m trying so hard to anticipate the twists that it’s not quite as mind-blowing as it was in its first two seasons. It really is very similar to the Twilight Zone (my favorite episodes of which were “The Lonely” [except for the end] and “A Nice Place to Visit”). I haven’t finished this season yet, but I’ve enjoyed the five that I’ve watched (episodes 2-6).

Whoa, those are all Netflix shows. Aside from that, all I’ve watched was Ninja Warrior (in a group) and Saturday Night Live (I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned this, but I’ve watched almost every episode of SNL since around...1999 or 2000?).

Music:

I generally don’t listen to music that I dislike, so here are the albums I liked the most this past year, in decreasing order of enjoyment (each one links to a track on the album I liked):

Fleet Foxes - Crack-Up

Father John Misty - Pure Comedy

LCD Soundsystem - American Dream

Mac DeMarco - This Old Dog

The Flaming Lips - Oczy Mlody

Aesop Rock - The Impossible Kid (actually came out in 2016)

Run the Jewels - Run the Jewels 3 (came out on Christmas 2016)

Beck - Colors

St. Vincent - Masseduction

Foxygen - Hang

Beck’s new one was a little disappointing, considering that he’s one of my all-time favorites. I liked the new Arcade Fire album fine, but I got sick of it after about a week.

My friend Dan got me into the hip hop albums. I almost never listen to hip hop (except the newer Kanye West stuff), but these albums were a really big help when I was a bundle of nerves at the lab.

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