In the days before we went into lockdown back in March, I remember having a feeling of gathering everything in and closing the shutters. We went to the grocery store two days in a row, and I felt like a squirrel in autumn. I went to Target, and there was no hand sanitizer and no hand soap, and I bought laundry detergent and shampoo and toilet paper and ibuprofen and Dayquil/Nyquil, and wondered what else I should bring into our burrow. We picked up one college student and then the other, and as I came up the driveway with the second one, I thought, “There. Now we are tucked in. We can lock the doors and hunker down.”

I am having that gather-in feeling again now. Instead of considering my grocery store’s month-long paper-towel shortage no big deal, I ordered some online—and, when they arrived this morning, I brought them into the house with that squirreling-away-acorns feeling. When I placed another order last night, I got an extra box of cereal, extra cans of fruit, extra peanuts and raisins. Not hoarding, but provisioning: buying the things we will need, and will use. Preparing.

Part of it is that I live in an area that gets a fair amount of snow, and so I am already in the category of person that memes make fun of for wanting to have adequate food in the house before we can’t get out safely for a couple of days, and that is apparently endlessly hilarious, NOT THAT I’M BITTER. And so even in normal times, fall gives me the feeling that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to get a few extra cans of soup, an extra pack of toilet paper, an extra jar of peanut butter. In pandemic times, and when our school system has reported their first confirmed case of Covid-19, and when we are just over a month from a presidential election in which one candidate is already calling fraud and encouraging his supporters to turn to violence if he doesn’t win, it feels like maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea to get TWO extra jars of peanut butter, by which I mean ten.

I had a very bad spirally sort of mood that started Friday afternoon when one of my feet started to hurt and swell. I was going to try to make this short, but that is evidently impossible, so I will at least bracket-summarize what can be bracket-summarized.

The gist is that all Friday evening and all Saturday, including a long session in the wee hours of Saturday morning when I should have been sleeping, I was thinking along these lines: “I can’t even take my morning walk, and that has been the ONE THING that I feel has been holding me together physically and emotionally, and I’d FINALLY gotten to the point where I didn’t have to practically force myself to do it. And in fact, maybe it was my morning walk that hurt my foot: maybe I am being thwarted by the very things I am doing to make myself better. And I can’t do my daily housecleaning chore today, either, and without those daily chores, the house falls apart, and even without this injury I can’t keep doing it, I just can’t, I can’t keep this house clean, we never should have moved to this house. [Short mournful thinking session about The Old House, fairly quickly squelched by (1) not liking to think about the old house and (2) the unavoidable benefits of this new larger house in a pandemic.] And no one else is doing their share of housework, except Elizabeth, the only other girl, and that is a sad, sad, sorry state of affairs. And why do I have to INCESSANTLY NAG for anyone (except Elizabeth) to do what they OUGHT to be doing completely on their own even if no one ever nagged them, just because it is Obviously The Right Thing that everyone who lives in a place should be helping to clean that place? Why are they ALL (except Elizabeth) turning out just like Paul on this issue? It is clear I am not an effective parent. And now they will all (except Elizabeth) go on to make their spouses/housemates miserable! whereas Elizabeth’s spouse/housemate(s) will make HER miserable.

“Maybe I should go to the doctor about my foot: the online stuff said that if it’s just one foot, and there was no known injury to the foot, that’s a reason to see a doctor. But there’s a pandemic. And I canceled my annual physical with the doctor because of the pandemic, and in the past her office has been salty about scheduling sick visits if you’re not up to date with your well visits, so [long imagined argument with receptionist] [reliving of another argument with a doctor’s receptionist over ten years ago, with rehearsals of how it could have gone instead]. I could go to Urgent Care. But some of the online sources said that one reason a foot might suddenly swell was “alcohol abuse.” So they will almost certainly ask me about alcohol, and I don’t want to tell them, because when my mom told her doctor she had one measured 5-ounce glass of wine daily with dinner, he wrote “Excessive Drinker of Alcohol” in her file, and that caused so many problems. [Imagined conversations with doctor in which I try out every way of declining to answer / lying / explaining what happened to my mom / etc.] [Long upset thinking session about how my doctor, when I told her I did drink alcohol, lectured me for far longer than she has ever addressed any of my medical issues, about how I should not drink, including telling me that if I drank alcohol, it would teach my children that drinking alcohol was okay. I DO THINK DRINKING ALCOHOL IS OKAY. THAT IS WHY I DRINK IT.] [Long upset thinking session about how doctors accuse patients of lying about alcohol use, but MAYBE YOU HAVE GIVEN US ABUNDANT GOOD REASON FOR THAT, DOCTORS.] And I have already given up coffee because my reflux apparently can’t handle it right now, and I have mostly given up sugar and bread and pasta and potatoes; if I have to ALSO give up alcohol, IN AN ELECTION YEAR, then I give up. I give up!

“Besides, my foot is just kind of swollen. It’s not a weird color, there are no weird streaky lines, it’s not hot and red, I’m not feverish, it doesn’t feel as if anything is broken—this is not a Doctor Situation yet. I would feel silly. And it’s a pandemic. But what if I wait, and it turns out I should have gone in RIGHT AWAY. Maybe this is happening because of a blood clot, and I will die in the night! [Brief thought of how nice it would be to bail on All This, quickly overwhelmed by thoughts of things I DON’T want to miss. Plus, I have to vote first.] Maybe it is the beginnings of a terrible infection, and If I Had Just Seen a Doctor Sooner, I Wouldn’t Have Lost the Foot. [Long upset thinking session about how badly I have plummeted into despair over This One Small Probably-Temporary Physical Thing, when people deal with MUCH MORE SERIOUS AND/OR LENGTHY things; and how I hope I would not be such a terrible baby if something long-term/permanent happened to me, as it so easily could, and how I hope I would RALLY rather than SINKING INTO DESPAIR FOREVER.] [Long upset thinking session about how many things would fall apart without me, since apparently no one in my family (except Elizabeth) can do a single damn thing without being nagged.] [Long agitated mental rehearsal of the things I would need to do/prepare if I knew I were dying.] [Long upset thinking session about how much I HATE to be helped and/or waited on when I am sick or injured, and how I may very well end up having to have it happen anyway—if not now, then when I am older. If I survive This Foot.] [Long resentful thinking session about how PAUL, on the other hand, LOVES to be waited on, and if HE were disabled permanently or long-term, he would REVEL in requiring my continual service, and that he and his ilk are THE VERY REASON for that part of the marriage vows, and that I should not have married him-in-particular under those terms.]”

Anyway, this morning my foot was noticeably less swollen, and almost normal to walk on; progress like that makes me think I won’t need to see a doctor. I have returned, relieved, to my relatively cheery baseline levels of This Current Administration despair.

If you, like me, are clutching at even tiny flickers of joy these days, may I recommend seasonal hand soaps? I know. But I have ordered Everspring’s Clove & Nutmeg, Black Pepper & Balsam, and Vanilla & Mulled Citrus; and, waiting for them to arrive, I have felt flickers of happy anticipation. I take those where I find them. I also ordered a bottle of Method Wild Meadow, because it is Limited Edition and has a cute bottle, and “Limited Edition” and “cute bottle” tick the same box as “Seasonal” for me. And because if we need one million hand soaps anyway, let them at least be INTERESTING TO TRY.

(image from Target.com)

And our grocery stores are still very low on hand soap, let alone fun ones. They had Arm & Hammer and the store brand, that’s it.

I went to the smaller, closer store option today, and they were also very low on vegetarian meat substitutes and they had no hand sanitizer. And no baking chocolate, which is making me a little nervous. But they seemed back to normal on flour, which was nice to see. I am buying ahead a bit for winter. Oh, and they had YEAST! Like, in jars! Also, they had a sign up saying they are allowing reusable bags again, so I will have to get back into that habit. I am so eager to be done with stupid disposable bags tipping and spilling and ripping, and digging their stupid handles into my hands.

Incidentally. Not to cause alarm. But it has been a month or so since my grocery store has had any paper towels—any at all. At first I was not very worried, because for a good number of months before THAT, my grocery store had had ABUNDANT paper towels, to the point that they were stacking them on shelves that used to have all the cleaning supplies that are still out of stock. There were so many, I almost felt I should buy some just as a favor to the store. But now the paper towel shelves have been full of packages of toilet paper for my last THREE trips to the store, and I am getting a little concerned. We have dramatically reduced our paper-towel usage, and dramatically increased our fabric washcloth usage, but I still use paper towels for (1) cleaning up cat barf, (2) cleaning toilets, and (3) anything I clean with bleach. I don’t know if they’ll still be in stock by the time you look, but last night Target had an 8-roll pack of Bounty in stock and available for shipping, so I ordered that along with the soaps.

I woke up to pee at 3:30, and then lay awake with agitating thoughts until I finally gave up at 5:30. I tried the whole “let the thoughts just wash over you while at least your body gets some rest” method, but I am not good at letting the thoughts wash over me. I keep grabbing them and wringing them until I’ve gotten out every last scrap of adrenaline; then I put them aside to let them plump back up so I can wring them afresh. I do a little better with the “write the thoughts down on a pad of paper by the side of the bed,” so now I have a nasty little list waiting for me to try to figure out my nighttime handwriting.

Some of my agitations were pretty dumb. I will give you some examples. A week or two ago, I ordered a bunch of Halloween candy from Target, remembering how the school supplies were available online/drive-up until suddenly they were in-store only, and wondering if the same thing might happen with the Halloween candy; and then yesterday Halloween candy went on 30% off. Without saying exactly how many pounds of Halloween candy I had purchased per person in our household in order to salvage what joy we could out of it, I will say I could have saved significant dollars, and I spent some time pointlessly doing the math again and again to make myself keep wincing. I also spent some time mentally composing emails to my high school boyfriend telling him all the ways in which he’s handling a particular situation with his grown daughter totally wrong, even though I already answered briefly and satisfyingly when he asked for advice and now I’m not doing any further answering, since “not having to hold his hand and walk him through situations he’s not smart enough to understand” is one of the best parts of not dating him. And then I spent some time reflecting how the Republican Party has become a party of lying cheating corrupted power weasels, but apparently there isn’t anything anyone can do about that now, nor apparently was there any way for anyone to prevent them from gerrymandering the hell out of the country so that they can’t be voted out even by a majority, and also now we can’t leave. And then I worried for awhile about how the high school sent an email asking us to submit school-photo-like photos of the twins for the yearbook, but they didn’t say when the deadline is, what the requirements are, or where to send them. Just a bunch of little things.

And now it’s DARK when I get up. I don’t like the weather where I live, it’s nearly always too hot or too cold, but one thing I am going to miss about the too-hot is that it was nice and LIGHT out. If I woke up early and couldn’t get back to sleep, generally the sky was ALREADY beginning to lighten, and by the time I gave up and got up it would be FULL SUNNY and I could go for an early walk if I wanted to. Now it is dark, and there is the pressing knowledge that it will be getting EVEN DARKER for the next FEW MONTHS, and will also be too cold. Well. At least this means we are getting into String Light Season.

I haven’t tried to chart it yet, but I am finding it is common for me to have, say, three or four days in a row where I am thinking, “Er, this isn’t good” about my state of mind, and then if I wait it out, I feel okay again. I would say it’s happening roughly once a month, which makes it seem worth charting to see, but so far there doesn’t seem to be any correlation with any OTHER cycles, if you catch my drift and I know that you do. I am finding it’s best on those days to make myself walk if I can, and I usually can, because NOT walking makes it Quite Worse, even though walking doesn’t feel like it makes it any better. Also SOMEtimes it feels like it makes it worse to, say, scroll Twitter, and it’s better to leave my computer and go play Candy Crush; but OTHER times it feels like it’s the perfect time for a good wallow in despair, so I play that by ear.

I would like to recommend a trilogy my brother recommended to me. I don’t think of my brother and me as having overlapping book tastes, but after the success of the 1.5 books I’ve read of this trilogy so far, I will need to reconsider. The books are by Ann Leckie, and they’re Ancillary Justice (Target link, Amazon link), Ancillary Sword (Amazon link), and Ancillary Mercy (Target link, Amazon link).

(image from Amazon.com)

I caution you that these are science fiction. I don’t generally like science fiction, for various reasons—but after reading these books, or rather the first 1.5 of these books, I am wondering if what I don’t like is Science Fiction Written By Middle-Aged Men in the 1970s. Because these books are written by a middle-aged woman, and I am not seeing a LOT of the stuff I dislike in science fiction, such as how the narrator is always a tough, cool, ruggedly handsome man who can handle with style and coolness and ruggedness anything thrown at him, sort of like an Indiana Jones / James Bond hybrid, and the ladies all love him and the men either respect him or learn to, and if there are robots there are also SEX robots, and if there are aliens there is a lot of ALIEN SEX, and everything is trying so deeply and cringingly hard to be Masculinely Cool, and there is a lot of failing of the Bechdel test.

There are still science-fiction things I dislike, even in these—such as the names. I am just always going to dislike the names for characters and places. Paul, describing it, says it’s “doubling all the A’s, and putting apostrophes in the middle of words.” Yes. That. And I would add: “making everything unpronounceable just on principle.” And of course there is the unavoidable “As everyone knows, the Rlaa’aa invaded in 3072 and, as everyone further knows, this led to a system of etc.” Combined with NOT doing that, and just letting the reader figure out what’s going on, which I ALSO hate, which means there is no way for science fiction authors to win with me, which is why I generally don’t read science fiction. And I was not sure, for the first few chapters, if I was going to be able to hang in there. But I DID, and now I LOVE what I am reading, and after I am done with the trilogy I am going to find more books by Ann Leckie and read those too.

I feel like what I’m reading in these books is what is MISSING in most science fiction I’ve read, and that’s EMPATHY and EMOTION and RELATIONSHIPS and DEPTH and SUBTLETY and GROWTH and CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT. It’s not just “What cool action scenes am I imagining playing out in the movie of this book, and what would the hot babes look like” (though there ARE cool action scenes and hot babes), it’s also “How does the character feel about this, what meaning does this have for them, what are their inner struggles, what surprising gradual ideas are forming,” etc.

I haven’t read enough science fiction to know how to explain what type of science fiction this is, overall, but I will say some of the things that SEEM like science fiction types. It is SPACE science fiction, and there is talk of life on space ships; and there are SOME aliens but not a LOT of aliens so far: there are some references to past encounters with aliens, and a brief description of one kind of alien, but not MUCH alien stuff. It is much more AI science fiction, and in fact the narrator is an AI. It is the kind of science fiction where human bodies are put into suspended animation (well, or some kind of storage, I don’t know if that’s the right term), to be used later by AIs, but the AIs have not taken over or anything…well, or I should say It’s Complicated. But it’s not (SO FAR) a series about Oh No The AIs Have Taken Over, Making Humans Their Slaves!! It’s more like how do AIs perceive the world, what are the complications that arise from having/using AIs, how do people treat AIs and how SHOULD they treat them. There is some war, and overtaking of planets, though that’s all in the past so we are hearing memories rather than reading about it as it happens; there is a fair amount of SPACE POLITICS, and talk of incorporating different cultures and how that turned out.

And there is the thing that made me want to try it even as I rolled my eyes a little, which is that the narrator’s language/culture doesn’t have words for different sexes/genders, so everyone is called she/her no matter what, and all parents are mothers and all children are daughters, and so on. It should be silly, but I found myself quite MOVED by it after awhile. What must it be like, to grow up with your sex considered the neutral default? WHAT INDEED. And it is surprising and interesting to be reading a book and often not know if the characters are male or female.

Anyway! I’m really enjoying it so far, and I recommend it. I also recommend it as a gift idea for someone else, if you have a science-fiction reader in your life: if my brother and I BOTH love the same books, that should cover pretty much anyone you know, unless they’ve already read them.