I’ve seen this piece making the rounds today. It is worth reading.

Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting

After reading this, I started thinking about what I’ve experienced over the last month or so. I tried to decide if there was anything that I would want to keep in my life, and changes that I would want to make permanent, after things — “go back to normal.” It’s not so much about keeping, because everything right now is honestly pretty hideous; I don’t want to keep anything to do with this pandemic once the coronavirus goes back to lurking in the shadows. But the author makes the point that we have a unique opportunity now to step outside of our daily lives and regular routines, and observe,and make decisions about what we really want, what we need, what we want our new normal to look like. Everything will change, we all agree: so the question is, what do we want to keep in the new world after Covid-19, and what do we want to discard?

The first thing that came to mind is something I do not want to keep after the quarantine ends: teaching remotely. When it started, I joked that this was the dream: teaching without actually having to see and interact with students — and also, largely, teaching without grading. I’ve joked for years that teaching would be 1000% better if I just didn’t have any students. Well, now I sort of don’t have any; and since we can’t guarantee access to online material for all students, the school’s policy is that no grades can be applied that would lower the students’  grades from what they were before the quarantine started; so there’s not much grading to be done.

And I hate it. I miss my students. I miss talking to them personally, about their lives and their joys and sadnesses; I miss answering their random-ass questions; I miss being able to interact them while I teach them, because, it turns out, teaching people who aren’t there in front of you is not good. It’s hard enough to get teenagers to participate voluntarily; take them out of the room and put them at home behind a video camera, and participation essentially stops dead. I run a discussion class because that is both the most effective and the most interesting way to teach literature, and now I’m forced to do little more than lecture to a silent room. And it sucks. I miss being good at my job.

However: while I’ve been doing the distance learning online, I’ve been reading The God of Small Things to my AP Literature class; it’s an incredible novel  that I’ve written about before, and reading it to them has so far been worth the time. It works fairly well online, because they can relax and listen to me read; I like that it is helping them reduce stress while also helping them experience the story. It may be somewhat different in the classroom, but also, students need to reduce stress pretty much all the time; that’s not going to change by next spring. So I think I will do it again next year, when I have them in front of me. I think it will be worth it to shift other parts of the class to homework and independent study, and really use the time in class to understand and appreciate this work. So I guess I’ll — keep — that. Also, I am pretty happy to not be grading anything. Sadly, I won’t be allowed to keep that aspect. Ah, well. C’est la guerre.

I miss my coworkers, too. I talk to them pretty regularly through social media and texts, and we’ve been having weekly video chats; but it’s made me realize that I like having them around more than I thought I did. I’d like to spend a bit more time being a bit more social. I think I’ve probably focused too much on my introversion, using that as an excuse to not spend more time talking to people I like talking to; I should stop that. I am an introvert, and there are definitely days, especially as a teacher surrounded by teenagers who demand far more attention than I could give, let alone am willing to give, when I just want to go home and not talk to another human (My wife of course does not count: she is a goddess.); but most days, I think I should stop in to my friends’ classrooms and say Hi.

The dogs and I have been taking extra long morning walks, which I’d love to keep; but that’s more to do with the amount of time I have in the morning before work, rather than because of my preferences. I would like to keep longer, slower mornings; but, c’est la guerre. I’ve always done longer slower mornings on weekends, including extra long walks, so that will stay. I have also been taking short evening walks with my wife: that I would definitely like to keep, at least until the Tucson summer clamps down. It’s less fun to walk around the block in 100-degree heat. I’ve been seeing more of my neighbors out and about on the walks, both in the morning and the evening; I’d love to keep that even after we can all go back to driving everywhere all the time.

My wife and I have been good about doing our long-term meal planning, so we can minimize trips to the store (Don’t give me that look: Tucson has not been a hot spot, and once  I stopped going to school every day, back on March 13, we were entirely within the social distancing guidelines. So no, I have not been locking down and sheltering in place, I’ve been still buying groceries. If it helps, I need to buy fresh produce to feed my tortoise. So it’s not just for me.); we’ve gone up and down on this in the past, because in Oregon the grocery store was a pain to get to, so we shopped large once a week and then bought small items as needed, but here in Tucson shopping is much easier and so we have tended to decide what we want for dinner on the day of, and then do our shopping on the spot. But this is better. We’ve always known it, we just haven’t pushed it; I think we will keep that one.

I’m definitely keeping the podcast. I’m pleased with how it’s going, and how it’s been received; I like doing it and I think I do it well. I’m certainly at a stage in my life where I want to stop wasting time on idle pursuits and I want to be more productive; I don’t know that I can always find it in me to write serious fiction, so I think it will be good to keep different projects going, to use different skills and make different kinds of content. I’ve avoided doing things like this in the past because I think of it as taking time away from my main pursuits: the days I spend making podcasts are days I am not writing. But you know what? I don’t spend all of those days writing, anyway. I spend more of them just taking it easy. Which is good, but not the thing I think I need to do. I’d rather work a bit harder and be more proud of myself; that will be easier if I have more ways I can work, and more things to be proud of.

I think I may keep the daily blogging. I did it for a while last year, and it was great, though it was hard sometimes. It’s been the same this last week: sometimes I have no idea what to say, and sometimes it feels like I don’t have the time to dedicate to writing something serious, and sometimes when I have something to write it takes more time and energy than I thought it would, and so other things don’t get done; but it’s good for me to write. I don’t know how it is for you all to read my ramblings, but it seems like some of you like it, and the rest of you don’t do it, so. I will try. I will also not be too obsessive about doing it EVERY day.

That’s probably the big one. I’ve been working on forgiving myself for not being productive, for not always having the energy to do something “useful” or “valuable.” Because right now, the most important thing we can do with each day we have is — get through it. Stay alive, stay sane, stay ourselves: just keep going, every day, on to the next day. Because each day is a new chance to do something more than that — but if you don’t do that, then you won’t do anything. We have to keep our minds on the main goal, on the most important thing we do: keep going. I’ve learned that, and I’m being better to myself on the days when I don’t have the strength to do more than make it through: because I’m aware that that’s the only strength I really need to make sure of. Just enough to keep going. So long as I have that strength, the other strength will come back. I will be able to do more on another day, and I will still want to. I’ve never believed the conservative  argument that people on welfare want to stay on welfare because they’d rather be lazy; I don’t know why I thought it about myself, but I always have. It’s not true, though: I’ve been lazy, and I’ve been productive; I would rather be productive. So after I rest, I work.I want to work. I look forward to it.

But sometimes I need to rest. It’s okay to not be productive sometimes, even a lot of the time. When I can be, I will; and when I can’t, I don’t have to be mad at myself about it. I can relax about relaxing. I have been letting myself do that, and that one, I’m definitely going to keep.