Okay, okay, I want to jot this down.

I’m writing this on the 25th of March. Scheduling means this isn’t going up until May. But cast your mind back to those days, we were so innocent, so youthful, everything was different back in March and oh god I hope that’s not true. Point is though, this is the first time this blog has needed a timely post and not been able to just bump things for it. Wild, huh?

Thing is, this week has been rainy. In fact, in my area, it’s been raining for two weeks, and specifically it’s been raining nonstop for ten days up until yesterday. From me, now, the 25th, not uh, whenever you’re reading this.

If it’s raining, there’s stuff that doesn’t happen. People aren’t going places as much. If I go to the store, it’s because I’m getting a lift with a friend or getting the bus, and getting the bus in the rain sucks. Still, things need to be done because they need to be done so they get done but some things you can’t do.

Like laundry.

Today, it was sunny. It was bright. It was twenty eight degrees. So if you were like any normal person, like, say, us, you did a load of laundry, first thing in the morning and you bolted out to get it up, on the line, in the blazing morning sun. You got your stuff drying as fast as possible after almost two weeks of not being able to get a load of underwear clean. And it’s Australia, so it’s sunny as hell when it’s sunny, and that means that you wind up, right, with a nice, reassuring warmth that says yes: The laundry will get done.

And at like, noon, today, suddenly, a peal of thunder

The heavens opened.

And for twenty solid minutes there was just a vertical river of a rain that as far as I can tell, served no greater narrative purpose than to ruin the day of every single neighbour we have who was sensible enough to do the clever thing and put their laundry out to dry during this blessed wellspring of warm sunlight. And the thing is, the thing is, it’s not just that your laundry got rained on for twenty minutes – it’s worse. It’s worse, because when it was raining you had no idea it would pass.

If you saw this rain, you’d look at the sheet of water out of the sky and your struggling t-shirts and go: well, fuck, I guess I need to get out there and rescue whatever dryness they have. You bolt out in the water and splash around in the water that’s puddling in the backyard under the line, or the mud, and you’re not dressed for this rain, because it’s a hot day up until exactly this point. And it sheets down over you and you get the laundry in off the line and bolt inside and then you look at the laundry and

let’s face it

It’s soaking wet.

You didn’t save shit.

And then, like, maybe two minutes after that? The rain stops. The sun comes out. And the rest of the day is warm and sunny.

But can you trust that?

I did not get caught in this storm, mind you.

I’d forgotten to do the laundry in the morning.

I feel like I haven’t been very productive today.

Or this week, really.

I mean as I write this the government just announced a rule saying that travellers coming to Australia need to be quarantined for a fortnight. I also spent three hours on the phone today talking to my supervisor about teaching, and then another hour going over my readings. Then I spent another hour getting discord game running technology going.

I have done stuff today.

Last night, I recorded an hour of a podcast, with research and tasks and all that stuff. It was hard and it is going to be hard to edit. It’s going to go up soon. By the time you read this, this podcast is probably out.

But I haven’t written much.

I think there’s a lot of good reasons to think that I shouldn’t be producing right now. Undeniably, as someone who doesn’t handle apocalypses well after the ones I already survived, it’s going to be hard to handle this one. I could just stop writing and nobody would judge me for it. Maybe patreon numbers would slacken, but you’re all so nice I don’t think that’s the case.

What I’m going to do is put this thought down here, and throw it into the future. Months from now, this time in March, when things were, I bet, ‘not so bad.’

Writing every day is hard and some days what you write isn’t that great. But we’ll look at this again, in a few months, and see what we think of it as a little time capsule.

EDIT: I wrote this like, four months ago, I think and boy I did not expect how long this week was going to feel.

I can’t believe what a boring bastard of a thought this is.

It is at the time I am writing this, quite late. It’s late not just in the time of night, but also late in the cycle that our house runs on. There’s basically a fortnightly track, and it all orients around the single event of our recycling being done.

We don’t generate much in the way of typical garbage. Most of our waste in this house is paper and plastic, and since we do that, we buy recycleable whenever we can. In our area, in order to encourage recycling, the non-recycleable waste bin is half the size of the recycling bin, which, you know what, whatever.

If you just organically throw things into the recycling as they need it, though, they pack up and fill a lot of space. When things are being delivered in hard cardboard boxes, if you just stick those boxes in, their basic shape exerts force around them. When people give you paper bags instead of plastic ones, and you just ball them up and throw them away like that, they’ll occupy a lot more space than they would otherwise.

This space is at a premium then.

Fox and I basically have to plan throwing out our recycling.

And what’s more, she’s really good at it.

A box has all these points of stress, it creates empty space and it resists being pressured out of that shape. That’s kind of the point of a box. Same is true of plastic containers, though they often deform a little less easily. This means that the most efficient way to put a box in the recycling is to break it down into panels. Larger boxes get cut into matching shapes, then get stacked at the bottom, then soft paper atop that, then crushed plastic and cans, then anything that’s last minute atop it.

The most amazing thing about this is this means that my living room table, where I would normally sit or set up board games, is, amazingly, given over to the task to organising the recycling as we approach the fortnight end, when it will get taken out and go elsewhere. I am trying to make sure that the food I eat now is the stuff from recycleable containers so we don’t have two jars of the same thing in the fridge or cupboard, don’t have doubles of a type of can.

It is an enormous amount of work, and constant mental effort, dedicated to just making sure I don’t have to sheepishly ask our neighbour if I can put some boxes in their recycling (because they’re managing theirs too).

I write about this not because you should feel sorry for me, or even care that much. I’m writing about it to reflect on how something so mundane as ‘chucking things in the recycling’ is now consuming material space and effort to be done in a manageable way in this time of heighened awareness.

As I write this, I am recovering from having hurt my foot.

I hurt my foot a few days ago. It’s not a particularly big deal but it is a deal. I didn’t drive a nail through it, didn’t need medical attention, didn’t have to cut a portion of it off, didn’t have to walk a long distance on the already-injured foot, I didn’t have to unfold one of my toes and I didn’t have have a piece of earthmoving equipment roll over it, all of which are things that have, previously, happened to my foot.

My response to it the first day was to not really pay attention to it, and then it became unbearable and impossible to sleep with; the result was the next day, I had to stay at home and not do a grocery shop because my foot was hurt so badly and the pain had been exacerbated by my inattention. I sat on the sofa and watched Netflix and generally felt like a bit of a lump. Nothing in the queue got done that day. I was desperate to recover, because the next day (today, as I write this) I had to teach and I didn’t want to let my students down.

This worked, I got a full night’s sleep, I taught all day, and then, because my foot felt so much better, I thoughtlessly flicked it out to stretch it, and immediately regretted my actions.

Now, through all this, I made my situation worse by consistently forgetting that painkillers are a thing; what’s more, these painkillers are anti-inflammatory, which means I forgot things that wouldn’t just help me immediately but also makes the process of recovery better and easier.

It’s just a bit of friction. I need to remember how long it’s been since I had one, then I need to negotiate with myself if I really need it, if the immediate pain is that bad.

This isn’t an interesting blog post, and as it goes up, I’ll probably be fine?

But I kinda use this blog for diary notes, and during the pandemic, being aware of my own dumbass behaviour that makes it harder to do things is important. Productivity is being diminished by every form of friction imaginable, after all.

There are two categories of people I try not to make blog posts about. One is my students, the other is my family. They never signed up to be made into Hashtag Internet Hashtag Content, I don’t want to make the storytelling practice that seems to have been inherited from my father (that he called ‘preaching’) into something that exploits the people around me who are themselves living, breathing people who do do not want to be, nor deserve to be, pinned to this page as a moment that will live on in my mind and in the minds of others. Hannah Gadsby talks about this, how her own mother’s homophobic comments are effectively preserved in amber, as part of her show, meaning that even though her mother may have grown past those comments, Gadsby repeated them to herself and others endlessly for years.

(Gosh, I like Gadsby’s work)

Anyway, because of this I have had something repeatedly run into me in the past few weeks that I have resisted writing about, because again: I don’t want to write about these people in my life who didn’t sign up for it, even though they are overwhelmingly common and repeated experiences, which is usually a sure sign for me that it’s time to put some words down.

The good news is that after contemplating the difficulty of writing about this, I had the realisation that this isn’t something that’s bugging me when students and family do it, I’m just being bothered by everyone doing it, and that got me thinking about modes of communication.

Now, I am a fan of the work of Marshall Rosenberg, not because he was right about everything or because I’m an advocate for the fulltime adoption of nonviolent communication, but because he was very good at correctly recognising that our conventional communication model is about victory and it will get that through oppression or manipulation if we can. And as a direct result, I will ask someone the question, in my day to day, what do you want, and the people over whom I have some degree of power – be it infrastructural or social or familial – will seek to find ways to give me the right answer.

Here’s a base example, which in this case I use because the person it would otherwise be with is Fox, and Fox does not have this problem at all, so, if you’re reading this and trying to extrapolate, or if you are Fox and you’re going ‘hang on, I would never,’ I am using this as an example because you’re basically bulletproof. Nyeh. Anyway:

“What do you want?”

“Well, I was thinking that if we did the laundry on Tuesdays, it would get the drying done over the week rather than weekend mornings.”

This frames the answer not in terms of the want of the person saying it, but instead about a shared, perceived value of the result. It’s not that it’s bad to have this kind of plan, it’s that it’s not addressing the question. It might even be that this answer has the answer in it: I want the laundry drying during the week. That’d be enough! It’s the way that when the question is asked, the want is ignored in favour of the result.

It seems like such a small rhetorical thing, but it’s important. It’s important because if I ask you what you want and you respond with what you think I want to hear, I’m not hearing what you want, I’m hearing what you think of me. It’s a fundamentally passive position, and it means I don’t get to know you.

How’s this come up in fandom stuff?

It comes up in fandom stuff when people are unwilling to centre themselves, and their wants, and their responses to things, in the discourse about media.

It can’t be I want this scene. It can’t be I like this pairing. It can’t be I dislike that story trope.

It has to be this scene is necessary. It has to be here is how this pairing is a moral ill. It has to be here’s how my identity legitimises my writing.

This creates extremely weird behaviours. There’s a bit of a canard about the Hamilton fandom being what I will now in a comically understated way refer to as a bit lively when it comes to this. Oh, there’s Miku Binders and Fake HIV and the cannibal mermaids and all that stuff, but I tend to look at it in terms of a kind of pressure cooker. Hamilton takes something that’s very bad (the formation of America by a bunch of extremely terrible people), connects it to something undeniably good (kickass musical theatre), and then leaves this audience in this complex space, unable to grapple with the most important element of their interpretation, themselves.

If you can recognise yourself, if you can recognise your own wants, it will help you realise that you don’t need to prove the value of your loves. You don’t need to approach playing games as if every game is meant to become a career. You don’t need to watch anime because it will make you more cultured.

You can just want things.

I went to sleep at two.

up late trying to make sure I could get that text done, checking and double checking that everything I’d done had been done up to scratch, some last minute surveying of tomorrow’s notes about the PhD writing ugh got to make the road map got to make sure I’m productive

I woke up at nine.

head hurts but that’s normal how it goes really who doesn’t feel like ass right now but I’ll make sure I can sniff something or taste something because it’s very important, if I can taste things that means I’m probably not sick with covid

I couldn’t see things by ten.

this I understand, this is how I get at cons when I’ve been sleep deprived for a few days in a row, when I can’t sleep due to stress and anxiety, so I start noticing these black patches in my vision the nI have difficulty processing visual information like text, can usually hold it together but hang on why do I need to –

I went to bed.

whumph

I woke up at six.

still felt a bit bad

I had dinner, I talked with Fox, I watched Youtube with her.

we had mcdonalds and watched Overly Sarcastic Productions

I sat here in the dark, feeling warm and comfortable and happy.

I met obligations today, even though I wasn’t feeling well, and even if I hadn’t it’d still be okay, it’d be okay to not be productive; but I was able to be, and I should be proud of that, because it was above what I needed to do

And now I’m going to try get some sleep.

it’s okay to have bad days and I need to tell myself that until I can believe it