Centigrade Scale II
Coronavirus 100s
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CENTIGRADE SCALE II
This letter is another in the 100s format, originally credited to the University of Vermont English professor Emily Bernard. I have written 100s in past letters here and here, and have come to really rely on this form in times when a more coherent piece just does not feel accessible to my mind. I hope they offer some self-contained insights into my and my family’s time living within the confines of social distancing. Reply with your own coronavirus 100s if you’d like.
1. I start eating my anxiety. It is loud like roasted, salted almonds under my teeth. It burns like the salty residue on my lips. It leaves me smudged like dark chocolate, stained like too much coffee diluted with no sugar almond milk. It sticks to my soft upper palate like peanut butter, the expensive kind that has only two ingredients that mock my hunger. It runs down my chin like the sweet-and-sour juice of an apple, the kind that is green but also blushing. It dirties me on the outside, it coats me on the inside. I inhale it.
2. We walk to Coney Island. We like long walks on the beach now. It’s warm in the sun, and cold in the shade. Neither of us knows how many sweaters that should translate to. A bench on the boardwalk needs to be sun-soaked and isolated before we can sit down to watch every good dog out on a walk. Almost everyone else is trailed by one. We speculate; do they need the excuse to leave their home or the comfort of a pet’s unconditional love? When I share beach photos on Instagram, I see a friend adopted a puppy.
3. I wake up to the smell of bleach. My mother-in-law says to not climb the stairs, they are wet with dissolving disease. My feet are cold in the bathroom because she’s washing all rugs. I lean towards the sink to brush my teeth and the bleach overtakes the mint. Briefly, I feel nauseous. I remember the hospital – it smelled sweet, not harsh like this. But that sweetness was artificial, a cover-up. Before I cut an apple, I spray the kitchen counter with bleach, hold my breath, wipe it down, only inhale when the knife is firmly in my hand.
4. My mom is newly fascinated with her face. While she’s teaching, she notices the movement of all the small muscles on her computer screen. She had no idea she made so many faces. Will it get tiring, responding to being watched with so much vigor? My legs are tired because I feel like I have to run daily. My shoulders are tired too, I’m doing lots of push-ups. I examine my face in the morning, between witch hazel toner and vegan milk moisturizer. Has virtual teaching changed my face too? Above my eyebrows, three faint depressions are taking place.
5. I apply for a creative job, an organizing job, a teaching job. I talk to a high school teacher on the phone. I write “team player” in my LinkedIn profile. I write about how organized I am, how flexible, introspective, excited. One search is postponed, another seeks a more experienced candidate, another sadly informs me the position was very competitive. I put on a button-down and make-up for every Zoom, outline my schedule in a planner bound in fake leather. I tell my husband: “I don’t know where time is going. I don’t know what I’m doing at all.”
6. I call my dad and he’s not working. He re-painted his apartment. The color is like chocolate milk. He clarifies: like the good brand of chocolate milk. I ask for photos, but the light works against us. He worries that staying home will make us bigger, wider, pudgier. Later, my mother-in-law says she’s got no willpower while biting into a small, brightly yellow frosted, cartoon-like cupcake. She buys a chocolate cake mix, the kind that housewives only started to like once adding eggs made them feel like they were doing work. It’s milk chocolate so I can’t have any.
7. Friends complain about Zoom fatigue, screen migraines, bad email etiquette. An article tries to teach me when it is acceptable to snack in a video meeting. Some of my collaborators don’t know to mute their microphones before taking a big gulp of tea or coffee. I brace for the muffled gurgling noises whenever I see their mugs lifting. My students keep typing equations into chat-boxes instead of using their voices. I am reminded of my first ever cell phone and using parentheses and colons to compose a smile. Technology has changed, but the awkwardness of the adjustment has not.
8. We start playing games. I come home from a run and our living room is a Wii bowling alley. My mother-in-law tells me about her job while our kitchen table is a Jenga battlefield. Once a week, my husband morphs it into a poker table. Our living room already became our work room and now it is a game room as well. At each step of the transformation we move higher up the hierarchy of needs, shrink the pyramid of desires until it fits our space, can be safely wedged between cups of peppermint tea and academic journal printouts.
9. I cook every night: Indian rice, Thai curry, Turkish lentils, Chinese noodles, Japanese soup, Moroccan chickpeas. Around the world in a block of tofu. It’s tiring. My bao buns aren’t fluffy, garlic in my chile crisp burns. Why do I to think I can make all this? I Google “Chinese delivery”. Only a Mexican fusion place comes up, their American classics section as extensive as their noodle offerings. In the pantry there are dry beans purchased well before I met anyone who lives here. My mother-in-law asks: “Where should we go tonight?”. We stay in, make the beans Italian.
10. On weekend nights, we get pulled into Zooms with friends and their friends and their friends. After so many degrees of separation many are strangers, but now all our spaces are either deeply private and lonely or extensively public and digitally crowded anyway. We raise drinks for gallery view toasts. Once, we stumble into a black-tie Zoom and have to hurriedly change. Most often we are in sweats. Sometimes I feel like the ugliest girl on Zoom and it’s a lot like being the new girl in a fancy high school again. I’m not sure why I care now.
11. We learn how to play pinochle. It’s like trešeta except the cards are all wrong and there’s no knocking on the table. It’s the mirror-world version of Croatian summer nights. I keep score like my dad would. We turn the music up, also like my dad would. Soon, we are yelling at each other about strategy. It’s the kind of yelling that makes my heart jump instead of making my stomach turn. My husband counts his points in Croatian but forgets the word for eight. It’s “osam”. I round my lips around the O and realize I’m really homesick.
12. I explore neighborhood grocery stores. First, hot bars serving Russian fish salads, spicy pickled anythings, stuffed grape leaves. Then, freezers flanking the doors, reserved for pearly shells and moons of pelmeni and pierogis. I worry about exposure to other hands and the many foreign words for meat. I search for compressed, minced soybeans and wheat-meat among bricks of fatty Ukrainian cheese and packets of frozen yufka. I fall for carnelian apricots, jade pistachios peeking through half-cracked shells, date-sweetened eggplant relish. When other shoppers cut me in socially distant check-out lines I nervously smile, but my mask hides it well.
ABOUT ME LATELY
LEARNING: This past week I have mostly been working on a paper concerning vortices in Bose-Einstein condensates, my Zoom teaching of an introductory thermal and statistical physics course, some graduate labor organizing and mentoring projects, and a whole lot of writing. In other words, there was little magic coronavirus-induced free time in my schedule. I put on make-up every day, I snuck in one job application in-between other work, and I graded a ton of quizzes in one Sunday night burst. Maybe I should take some comfort and solace in how much this feels like many pre-pandemic weeks, but I am starting to worry that I am managing my time badly, and that I am not getting nearly enough done. That feeling is also familiar from life before quarantine. I want to say that this is helping me learn how to be more efficient while also being more kind to myself, but I have some doubts about that. My advisor has started charting out summer projects for the two of us, so it seems like I might get a break from teaching once this semester wraps-up in a few weeks. We want to pick up some of our work on quasiperiodicity which has always excited me despite the fact that I failed to contribute any substantial amount of original results to it. The math involved in this subject is pretty wild, all about fractals and self-similarity and structures within structures, so at least maybe I’ll learn to speak that language more fluently.
READING: Mostly poems that keep showing up in my inbox and providing a welcome punch of emotion in-between work sessions.
The Hermit: 75 by Lucy Ives. Pandemic by Lynn Ungar. A Note on the Body by Danez Smith. Two by Helen Hunt Jackson. This whole micro-issue of PERVERSE. Death is a Soldier by Ron Kolm. These two poems by Aaron Sandberg.
LISTENING: I haven’t listened to anything new this past week and barely caught up on the news from NPR. My husband put on one of my work playlists while deep into his dissertation writing and this pushed me back into Cult of Luna and Panopticon. While I was running, a few times I threw on some tracks from ANTI (I’m a late and unlikely Rihanna convert), more 80s jams from Yugoslavia along the lines of Igra Rokenrol Cela Jugoslavija and Užas je Moja Furka, and here and there some Creedence Clearwater Revival songs because of that one line about Illinois in Lookin’ Out My Back Door (I’m worried about my apartment back there). I’ve been all over the place really, and at least a little nostalgic for the times when I could focus on absorbing new albums or binging podcasts that go beyond fifteen-minute snippets of alarming information.
WATCHING: We’ve been watching Sex Education on Netflix, and I’ve generally been liking it a lot. Like probably many queer women out there (and probably many straight men) I have a huge crush on Gillian Anderson so checking this show out was something of an inevitability for me, but I have been pleasantly surprised by how much it has going for it past her really fun and relaxed performance. Sex Education features a cast diverse along pretty much all lines without it feeling forced, and it delivers some fairly progressive and “woke” messages about sex and relationships without coming off as overly preachy or didactic. A friend who happens to be a relationship researcher told me they approve of a lot of its messaging, so I guess that’s another endorsement of the scattered bits of wisdom embedded in what is essentially a typical high school love affair story between a couple of different couples of misfits. Sex Education is not perfect and does lean into some tropes that could be characterized as lazy or even harmful in its first season, but it is lighthearted and wholesome in a way I still found refreshing. And I do really hope that at least for some folks who are hitting teenagerhood right about now, discussing sex is as shame-free and self-reflective as it is in this series.
EATING: My un-fluffy bao buns were a result of this recipe from the Lazy Cat Kitchen blog (I also adapted the filling to include tofu and mushrooms and it was quite good though having hoisin sauce in the pantry is really essential for its success, less so than Chinese five spice that can be substituted with cinnamon after you cut down the recommended amount by at least four), and the chile crisp I almost got right was from Bon Appetit. I winged the Thai curry, but I trust this Cookie and Kate recipe (though you should probably use more curry paste than recommended). On Easter I made a lemon challah based on this Occasionally Eggs write-up, but with a little extra yeast and a little extra fat so it reminded me of breads my grandmothers would make for the holiday. I was also inspired by this Making Thyme for Health carrot banana bread recipe and made a small carrot cake, substituting applesauce for mashed bananas, topped with a cashew frosting. I experimented with the frosting a little more than usual and found that using powdered sugar instead of maple syrup produces a smoother texture (though it is less healthy) and that a little bit of apple cider vinegar (not more than ½ teaspoon to begin with) and a little less lemon (try more zest but less juice) gives it a nice tang. Generally, I would recommend adding all liquids to the (soaked, drained and rinsed) cashews a tablespoon or so at a time and tasting as you go along then adjusting both sweetness and acidity to suit your taste rather than blindly following any recipe.
Finally, I want to recommend making sheet pan meals when you’re fresh out of ideas for something more coherent or just have some random produce lying around. I don’t have a precise recipe for the pile-style sheet pan dinner we had last week but it started with a few large carrots, two small sweet potatoes and two gray squash tossed with about a teaspoon of olive oil and a good pinch of salt each, then roasted on sheet pans (two, lined with parchment, big enough so the veggies are not crowded) for 20 minutes at 420F. Then I topped them with a few cups of kale briefly massaged with olive oil and salt also, and roasted it all some more, for no longer than 12 minutes. The veggies caramelized and the kale got crunchy. Next, I mixed about ¼ cup of tahini with half a lemon’s worth of juice, a good sprinkle of dried dill and garlic powder a tablespoon of miso dissolved in a splash of water and more cold water, just so it could all be pourable. This added some creamy, indulgent feeling umami flavor. While I was making the tahini dressing and our veggies were in the oven, my husband chopped some cherry tomatoes and olives then tossed them with olive oil and vinegar so our meal could have some freshness, something to chew and a burst of salty brightness here and there. I topped it all off with walnuts toasted with dried rosemary, sea salt and chili oil to get a fatty, savory crunch with some kick. Ultimately, we each added smear of store-bought spicy red pepper hummus to our plates too and squeezed extra lemon wedges for squeezing on top of all the layers of textures and flavors we had going already. It was significantly tastier and more satisfying than I thought such an assembly approach could be.
Possible substitutions: yellow or summer squash or zucchini instead of grey squash, any potato or butternut or acorn squash or cauliflower florets instead of sweet potatoes, beets or parsnips instead of carrots, unsweetened yogurt or some sort of (sour, cashew) cream or a mashed avocado instead of tahini, almonds or pecans instead of walnuts. Serve over a bed of raw spinach or chopped up romaine or spring mix or arugula if you don’t have kale, or add broccoli cut into small bits or thin wedges of cabbage to the sheet pans instead. Leave out the miso if you don’t have it and add a pinch of salt or a bit of soy sauce. Use chopped or grated raw garlic if you’re out of powder and substitute dill for whatever fresh or dried herb you have or like. Use roasted red peppers or marinated artichoke hearts instead of olives. Add cubes of feta or similar cheese if you eat dairy or marinated tofu if you do not.
