Inflationary Epoch
A record of a COVID-19 infection
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INFLATIONARY EPOCH*
On Day -9, on my way to work, I am typing a poem about Prince and COVID-19 testing lines into the Notes app on a crowded L train. I am filled with anxiety and the anxiety has to be put somewhere, shoved into a little digital box, before I enter the classroom.
The only poems I have written in the last ten years have been love poems for Valentine’s days, seasonal gifts for my partner. This too, I guess, is a seasonal urge, just not one I can take pride in.
***
On Day -3, I am making off-color jokes about our small apartment being a plague household when my mom, visiting all the way from Croatia, runs a small fever, and my husband, typically quite indestructible, stays in bed with a seemingly apocalyptic stomach ache. We all test negative and pile onto each other as a part of the healing process.
***
On Day 0, I yell at my mom about her faulty wearing of a faulty mask minutes before she also tests positive.
Our kitchen table is adorned with a festive white and red and green tablecloth and covered in at-home testing kit debris. She reads off her results during a break in a particularly heated grocery list making session (before the masking issue arises I am yelling about raw cashews). I have already posted a picture on my Instagram story captioned “a portrait of a family in the age of COVID”, a grainy filter adding artificial nostalgia to the sight of two people self-testing while the third - me, already fully aware that I am positive - watches from six feet away.
I realize a profound difference between us: she always thinks she is the one-in-the-million that will get lucky and get away with whatever dubious decision she may have made, and I remain convinced that I am just average enough to contract every ill that the middle of the Bell curve puts me at the mercy of.
Day 0 turns into Day +1 with a televised ball drop, a champagne and gin drink I would have passed up on on most other nights and nothing even remotely resembling a midnight kiss. I find myself reluctantly missing our last quarantine New Years Eve, the one when neither of us was sick, but almost no-one was vaccinated yet and all outings meant danger. I had made an indulgent pasta dinner and a boozy bundt cake topped with macerated strawberries and coconut whipped cream, a facsimile of movie-like romance to top off a year filled with quiet, private, comforting and affirming moments of togetherness in our then very new home. That year, we had snuck out for a few drinks and made it back to our couch just in time for that same corny, garish, overplayed ball drop. It all felt sweeter then. And more hopeful. Now, the countdown is on for my illness much more than the new year and my partner has to spend the night alone, away from me and the virus that has beaten us in the last hours of a year filled with dread.
***
On Day +1, I write a recommendation letter for a student that I really admire. I read through their old report cards, savoring comments from past teachers that saw the same greatness that I think I am seeing. This is the last letter of recommendation that I write for anyone in the class of 2022 and having this particular record of my involvement with students end on such a high note fills me with more joy than I expect. I write about the student’s love of mathematics, their tendency to daydream about a science-filled future, their genuine curiosity and kindness. At some point I start to worry that I am crossing too far into a gushing confessional rather than a measured evaluation of a college advisor. I pull back some, but not too much, in the hope that authenticity still matters.
During dinner on Day 0 I had played Krista Tippet’s interview with Jeff Chu on the On Being podcast and clunkily tried to explain to my husband and my mother why I care for this soft-voiced preacher’s take on religion and religiosity when I had worked out that faith really was not for me so long ago. It’s actually quite simple, I tried to say - I just like that he speaks of God and faith in the language of love. I tried to say that he identifies the potentiality of grand goodness and sprawling and genuine care in all of us more than he identifies a singular being pulling the strings behind our existence just right on the condition that we also worship it just right. Based on their faces, I may have been less articulate in the moment. The next day, sitting with this recommendation letter on the first day of the new year while feeling emotionally down much more than physically sick feels like adding my own small stitch to this tapestry of care that I sometimes do believe covers us all.
***
On Day +2, I wake up tasting sickness. As I open my eyes, my tongue brushes against a bitter film coating the roof of my mouth, a familiar sensation from a childhood spent fighting bronchitis, faulty sinuses, seasonal allergies, dust allergies and whatever else makes little kids sticky and stuffy for years on end. Briefly, I am afraid of getting sicker. I push an old memory of not being able to breath on my own to the back of my mind, then push my heavy body out from under the covers and put my feet on the cold floor. We have been keeping all the windows open at all times so the apartment is freezing.
In the morning, I interview a scientist for an article. They start the conversation by wishing me a COVID-free new year. I have to squint my eyes, upturn my lips, go through all the motions of arranging facial muscles into a smile, then let them know that I have already failed their wishes. “But I’m so grateful for my booster shot, I fully believe that getting it helped me stay mostly well even after testing positive,” I add, like I think a good scientist would. We proceed to have a very nice discussion about complex numbers and the nature of physical reality.
Before dinner, I spend a little over an hour revisiting a workout routine I had first adopted in the early days of the first year of the pandemic. My mom, the only person I can share the room with as we are the same kind of sick, shakes her head and periodically raises her eyebrows as I go through a series of jump squats, burpees, bicycles and push-ups. Later she asks me to explain jumping from kneeling into a low squat and my breathy, sweaty attempt to talk about how much to bend or not bend your toes in executing the move has an echo of normalcy to it. It’s a loose deja vu of attending a portion of mom’s pole dancing class this past summer and of boxing classes I have grown so fond of this winter. Then, I remember that all of my favorite boxing instructors tested positive at least once in recent months, that I had been staying up to date on their sweating-through-mild-infection posts on social media more than attending their classes. After the workout, I take a wastefully warm and long shower.
***
On Day +3, school starts. The night before, I draft an email for all of my students, cautiously informing them of my situation. I schedule the email for 8:30 AM.
At 9:00 AM students’ own emails start pouring in. Some are staying home because they are also sick with COVID, some are being cautious because they have been exposed to the virus during the break, some are being kept away from school by parents weary of the virus, some are stuck in airports because their flights have been cancelled. Patiently, I write back, offer extra time, extra understanding, forgo explaining my own situation again. I tell everyone to take as much time as they need to get well. I tell myself that encouraging kids to come to class sick is a first step in converting them to workers that prioritize work beyond all and not doing that is more important than keeping up with my syllabus. In the spreadsheet that tabulates all my lesson plans, I start rearranging and shuffling cells while ignoring my own feelings of guilt and shame. Later, in a faculty meeting, I am infomed that I can return to the classroom on Day 6, without ever having to show a negative test, even if I still have mild symptoms.
For the rest of the day, as I work on asynchronous lessons, grade old assignments, do research for writing pitches and put finalize writing I was doing already, I am mentally running through my usual school routine:
Riding the often busy 7:40 AM L train for the minimum number of stops? A chance to infect someone.
Getting coffee in the morning in the coffee shop I frequent so often that they know my name, my order and who I am on Instagram? A chance to infect someone.
Having a sip of water while I get ready for my first period class in the Science Department office? A chance to infect someone.
Looking over a student’s shoulder as they work or squatting to be at eye level while I discuss a problem with a small group? A chance to infect someone.
Eating lunch in the teacher’s lounge? A chance to infect someone.
Sneaking a few sips of coffee in my eight period class to stave off the afternoon slump? A chance to infect someone.
Riding the train home with my best effort to beat rush hour? A chance to infect someone.
At night, my husband and I watch The Mandalorian and the Book of Boba Fett from opposite sides of our living room, faces covered in black KN95s, both in blankets and two sweaters because good air circulation in early January means always being cold. It feels like we are quipping about sand people in between takes of some sort of a Chernobyl-style show. When we have to spend another night sleeping in separate beds, I feel so much more lonely than I have any right to be.
***
On Day +4, I learn that my brother in Croatia has also contracted COVID-19. He got fewer vaccine shots than I so the disease has hit him harder. He’s running a fever and he’s hurting all over. My dad and I video-chat about it. We both speak very positively and very reassuringly. I am reminded of how scared of getting ill we all were in the early days of the pandemic and that we were not silly to be that scared. Back then, we’d have these discussions about the “next normal” as opposed to a more fixed and resounding “new normal”. Suddenly, I am overcome with gratitude for how deceitfully easy the most recent iteration of “next” had actually been.
Then, more guilt. My most recent “normal” had been decent, filled with friends and weekly date nights, even a few music shows and a photoshoot. My current “normal” has been as not-deadly as it could be as a function of my privilege as an educated New Yorker that moves in vaccinated circles and could score all the shots relatively quickly and relatively easily. The “normal” for people who are unlike me, in conviction or circumstance, was not guaranteed to be as fear-free.
In the evening, my mom makes a really ugly bundt cake. It has a tender chocolate crumb and smells divine. Cutting into it reveals it to be so pillowy that you could probably sleep on it, were you only just small enough. She smothers it in a mix of applesauce and chunky lemon preserves, however, so the whole thing starts to remind me of whatever awful show it was where Gordon Ramsey kept comparing others’ food to “dog sick”. To salvage the situation, I add a thin ring of rainbow sprinkles. My mom laughs through her surgical mask until I am also laughing so much that little bits of rainbow fall out of my fingers before they reach the cake. Later, an ex-student reaches out on social media to take me up on my offer to bake a birthday cake for anyone in Brooklyn that wants one. A sense of sweetness settles in my chest while we discuss flavors.
The next day, one of my parents mentions that as a symptom of COVID-9, my brother has temporarily lost his sense of taste and smell
***
On Day +5, I test positive again. Administrators at my school, reassure me that as long as my symptoms are mild or waning, putting a KN95 between me and my students will keep them healthy when I return to work in the next 24 hours.
I agonize over whether I should lie and say that I have suddenly developed a fever. I agonize over whether a systemic policy failure can be ameliorated by individuals like me grasping for something like ethical decision making. I prepare my lessons feeling defeated - and extra vigilant for even the slightest change of feeling in the back of my throat or behind my eyes (where many of my headaches reside) or inside my nose. I stress cook a lunch consisting of five different components and my mom is amazed by the ambidextrous fury with which I make it all come together. When I drink my liberally spiced kabocha squash miso soup and my whole body feels warmer for a second, but I know that that feeling is for sure not a fever. I remain in the moral ambiguity limbo.
In-between discussing whether I should find a way to not return to school and working on materials I will need when I do return to school, I check the shipping status of some rapid at-home tests that have been in transit since before Christmas. Delivery is expected by 9 pm. At 8:26 pm they still have not been delivered. I go back to the kitchen and start a loaf of bread.
On Day +6 I go to work.
I dress in a denim button down and a knit cardigan and a pair of black slacks that I deem most resistant to the cold. All windows in all of my classrooms will have to be wide open, regardless of the weather, to keep the air circulating. If some amount of virus escapes my double mask, I have to do whatever I can to prevent it from lingering over the heads of my students. In my first period class we talk about skydivers moving through air and how air particles can interact with objects that try to move through them. When we revisit the topic in my last class of the day, a student already bundled up in a beige sherpa-lined corduroy jacket and a cerulean blue puffer complains that the air in the room is too cold for any sort of serious thinking.
I go to a cafe for lunch for the first time since the summer because I am afraid to take my mask off inside the school. I carry my water bottle to class but only sneak in sips of water when I go to the bathroom in between classes because I am afraid to take my mask off inside the school. I decide against my morning coffee and against my afternoon coffee because I am afraid to take my mask off inside the school (and I am not ready to chug espresso in the cold courtyard where students play basketball.) Small, habitual comforts feel like a luxury now. The prospect of keeping myself comfortable directly conflicts with the prospect of keeping others safe.
Colleagues come to my desk or catch up with me in the hallway to ask how I’m doing and I’m not sure what to say. I know they’d like me to say that I feel physically fine and that my illness was never as bad as what we all learned to fear in the last two years, but my attempts to reassure them make me sound either very sad or very angry. One colleague calls me silly for thinking I could possibly be responsible for their health. “I work in a petri dish!” they adamantly exclaim while we walk down a hallway teeming with students. Another reminds me that they recently had COVID too, so they’re a safe person for me to chat with, to linger as if leisure and connection were now only reserved for those of us that had at some point failed at staying safe. “We’re all probably still testing positive,” they note with a shrug.
Before the day is over I learn of two more of my students testing positive and yet another colleague comes to check-in, this time on the whole class, and distributes at-home testing kits. Previously sleepy students start raising hands to ask when or under which circumstances the school might end up shutting down. I can’t tell whether they’re worried or just bleakly accepting of another possible disruption to their already disrupted 9th grade experience. I am worried about every second we stay in the room together longer than we have to. I am worried about some of them using their kits tonight and starting their own quarantine tomorrow because of me.
In the evening, my mom tests negative. Both lines on the small plastic rectangle that now determines whether I can sleep with my husband, see his unmasked face again or go to work with slightly less fear show up fairly sharply on mine. I throw it out into regular household trash, as the directions suggest, and grade some Quizzes that I have to hand out the next day.
***
On Day +7, the first thing we see in the morning is snow. It’s not the frozen apocalypse that everyone had been predicting in the days prior, but it is cold and slippery and at least a little pretty. On my way to work, I see a stocky dog in a red puffer vest zooming through the still pristine layer of fluff in Tompkins Square Park and this makes me happy. In a teacher group chat that has been overflowing with pandemic anxiety for days, everyone shares pictures of snowy scenes that made them happy as well. At school, the mood is more muted and classrooms are more empty than usual - between the heavy Friday morning snow and the virus, most of our students traded school desks for a few extra hours in their warm beds.
I enter the building early with ice in my overdrawn eyebrows and a small eyeliner smudge in the corner of my left eye. Two layers of masks, one KN95, one a printed cloth version from Target that matches my outfit, and a wind that carries snow have conspired to make me tear up. I’m reminded of my teenage years, both with regards to entering school teary-eyed and being smudgy. I used to worry that everyone would look at me and judge me unless my face was perfectly drawn on. As an adult I’ve come to realize that it’s often more bleak than that: most of the time no one is looking at you intently enough to notice. While I’m sharpening my left eyeliner wing in the bathroom, I see that the forceful push of the masks against my cheeks has created permanent smile-like lines underneath my eyes.
After third period, I am starving. It is too cold to eat outside so I resign myself to fearfully inhaling leftovers from a family dinner two nights ago at my desk. I surprise myself by how normal I feel in-between bites. I have already grown so much more numb to the fear of infecting my colleagues than the day before. It feels wrong to feel calm.
When I come home, mom shows me pictures of a snowy park she explored during the workday and the “New York chic” booties that she bought when the edge of the park led her to a mall. We talk about how exhausting big stores are and why benches in the park went so hard on Walt Whitman quotes while I take another test. Insert, turn, swirl, tap, drop, wait. The line next to the ever-so-imposing “T” on my test is very faint, but clearly still there. “This must mean there is very little virus left in your body,” mom says in a notable digression from tourist talk. Having COVID is like going through the stages of grief, I realize. At first you distrust the tests and want to fight them by means of taking more tests. After some time passes, you trust the tests, but want to bargain with them, haggle for a report of semi-health instead of a full on sickness.
We order a small feast from an Ethiopian restaurant because mom had never had this kind of food before and I eat way too much. While I am putting big handfuls of spongy injera and earthy, oily, fragrant lentils into my mouth, I can already feel my stomach expanding uncomfortably against the slacks I wore to work. The prospect of pain doesn’t stop me from getting seconds and thirds. Mom says I should just unbutton my pants and keep eating, that not being able to stop is just what “we” do when we really get into something and this food is something she really could get into. I resolve myself to discomfort. Anxiously isolating then returning to work with even more anxiety nested in my chest and in-between my shoulder blades has made my body suspicious of anything that touches it and my mind starved for any quick hit of pleasure.
Earlier, at school, a student had complained to me about never having a chance to make a weeknight or a weekend fully free of schoolwork. I nodded my head as empathetically as I could and assured them that it’s just been a really tough semester for everyone. “If you ever get really overwhelmed and need an urgent break, however, email me and I can give you some small homework extensions here and there, “ I cautiously offered in-between cleaning the whiteboard and bubbling-in all the absent students on my attendance sheet. Hours later, when my mom and husband insist that it’s Friday so I should also take a night off, when they put a Star Wars movie on our TV and a gin and tonic in my hand, I relent. By the time Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan make it out of the underwater vintage CGI chaos, I am solemnly passed out, KN95 still strapped on securely.
***
Day +8 is mom’s last day in Brooklyn. We wake up early and take her to the farmer’s market to pick out apple varieties that don’t grow in Croatia, to look at fuzzy mushrooms that Croatians don’t eat, and to ogle the snowy dog park while we wait in line for Japanese sweet potatoes and nearly frozen bok choy still speckled with grains of dirt. It’s Saturday so we stick to our idiosyncratic tradition of picking up bagels with vegan cream cheese and eating them in lieu of a lazy, minimalist brunch. In the afternoon, we quest for gifts that easily convey a sense of American culture. Mom buys a few packs of Reese’s cups, some limited edition M&Ms and a junior-sized American football. At-home testing kits, something mom brought us from Croatia as an odd but necessary Christmas gift at a time when they were impossible to find in New York City pharmacies, are in stock again so I grab as many as I am allowed while standing in the checkout line. Mom is rummaging through her backpack, looking for a plastic bag she stashed at its bottom a whole continent ago, unbothered by the 40$ of flimsy yet so influential cardboard and plastic in my hands.
I pull together another dinner with too many moving parts, including a recipe an Instagram friend has written based on their own mom’s cooking. Mom says it’s the best tofu she’s ever had. This is an uncomplicated sentiment that can cut through the fog of sadness of her leaving and the next workweek fast approaching that is starting to settle over me. The mom-to-child-to-friend-to-mom loop offers some additional grounding. We will both be fine, I tentatively reassure myself as we eat. We have not always been this friendly and we have at times drifted apart. Sometimes that drift was painful and deliberate. Sometimes it required that we later pull each other back into our respective orbits with clear intention and cautious optimism. It all sort of comes back to that grand goodness and sprawling and genuine care at work again, to a belief in an expansive love that sometimes gives you the courage to invite people in even when a somewhat dangerous precedent has already been set. I am not good at this yet, but I want to be. A meme at the top of my Instagram feed either mocks or affirms me in this: “I have a friendly face and a great ass and a sick personality. I’m on this planet to love and connect and eat.”
In the evening of Day +8, a test finally deems me negative for the virus again. I tell my husband we can sleep together that night and it feels silly to underscore this as if it were a novelty. I put away all the KN95s I had designated for at-home wear and my face instantly feels empty. In my mind, I am sifting through the overflowing, sloppily arranged compartment where I have tried to store pandemic information. Is it rational to drop these precautions before a full ten days has gone by? I have read more about this on social media than I have in statements issued by the government and this makes me nervous. I come up with nothing more than an awareness that I am not as good at risk evaluation and management as someone who is a “real scientist” probably should be.
After mom leaves, while he is putting on a fresh set of bedsheets for our nighttime reunion, my husband uncovers an envelope on my pillow. The amount of crisp dollar bills within it, the kind you can only get at an exchange office in a country where dollars are barely ever used, surprises me. Then, gratitude and guilt clash in my chest, and my breath and heartbeat undergo a little stir. When I read mom’s card, the stir moves to my eyes, those teary corners acting up again even though the wind has long stopped and the snow mostly melted. “I love your freedom,” mom writes in the first line. And then, further down the pink patterned page: “Thank you for inviting me to be a part of your life for these 10 days.”
I pin the card on the small cork board above our dining table, the one that still holds syllabi from when I was teaching remotely and the dinning room became my makeshift office, and where all of my masks now hang, ready for Monday’s schoolwork and Day +10.
* In cosmology, the inflationary epoch is the part of our universe’s early history when it was expanding extremely rapidly. During this time, the universe became ten trillion squared times larger than it was just an impossibly small fraction of a second before. While experimental evidence for this occurrence is still actively being gathered by scientists, if correct, it would mean that a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second was enough to take our universe from one dense, warm point, to a structure much more similar to what we see today.
ABOUT ME LATELY
WRITING
My first article of the year ran in Physics World during the second week of January. I reported on two exciting recent experiments that confirmed that complex numbers absolutely do belong in a correct description of the physical world. Though complex numbers can include counterintuitive ideas like square roots of negative values, these experiments used ideas from quantum computing to show that they are more important than just a quirk of mathematics. One experiment used a superconducting quantum computer while the other was based on manipulations of quantum light and they both resoundingly concluded that complex numbers are here to stay. I reported and wrote most of this article in late December, but kicking off the new year with putting finishing touches on a story about the fundamentals of quantum mechanics and the inherent strangeness of some of our most successful physics theories still felt really good.
LEARNING
As I am wrapping up my third semester of full-time, professional teaching - and my third semester doing so during a global pandemic - I am focused on trying to consciously learn where the limits of my influence as an educator and the limits of my emotional and physical stamina as a person are. In many ways the circumstances in which we have been teaching in these past two years have left many of my colleagues feeling like beginners, but that feeling has been much more reflective of objective facts for me. It has added another layer of learning to my own struggle with our collective, now not so recent, reality. Living in a pandemic has made many of us more tired and more tender than before and I am most aware of my triggers and my defense mechanisms when I’m in the classroom. While so many of my youngest students are barely learning how to be in-school students and deal with all the norms and responsibilities that that entails, I continue trying to learn how to be flexible and patient and weigh out just enough discipline and reprimand for them to respect me, but not find me unapproachable. Monitoring everyone closely, including myself, in order to divine where the correct approach may lie has been harder than explaining what a vector cross product is or why gravity sometimes slows objects down and sometimes speeds them up instead. I am lucky in that my students often have things to teach me too. It’s corny to say this, but it’s true - especially when they can teach me that not everything is as bleak as it sometimes seems filtered through adult eyes.
On a more technical note, one of the big ideas I have tried to embrace this semester in particular is giving students a chance to show me what they learned on their own terms, in modalities that work best for them, instead of forcing my idea of rigid expertise onto them just yet. It has been interesting to watch them choose among possible exam problems and be somewhat confused by having been given a choice to begin with, and it has been interesting to catch glimpses of self-reflection when they realize that slacking off on a presentation means they can’t answer an exam question they’ve chosen. I’ve always been likely to claim that I want to run classes where students take charge of their own education, but the more time I spend intentionally implementing mechanisms for that takeover, the more I am learning about how complicated anything similar to empowerment really is.
On the writing front, my learning is skewing to self-reflection and self-regulation as well. While I am always aiming to be a technically more skilled writer, I am primarily trying to learn to be courageous and cold-pitch more people more widely with more ideas. I want to be a real cheerleader for the writer in me this year, and I hope some of that will become evident soon.
LISTENING
I’m late to this one, but the 2021 album that Chelsea Wolfe and Converge recorded called Bloodmoon I is really great. Converge have rarely worked for me by themselves, but their music and Wolfe’s capture a similar chaotic, insidious type of yearning and sadness while also complementing each other in terms of loudness and harshness very well.
At this point I have played Minced Oath’s Superstrate as problem-solving music in most of my classes at least once and though most students’ reviews categorized it as horror movie music, I have found it to be rather enjoyable and texturally rich. It was recommended in the year-end round-up newsletter by Sasha Frere-Jones and definitely delivers on what he identifies as “ghostly cords”.
Finally, the Elton John, Dua Lipa and Pnau song Cold Heart in which she sings an updated version of the Rocketman chorus over dancy, 90s-in-Europe beats and he is mostly serving as a stand in for himself has been in my head on loop for days. It is not that this song is good as much as it is, as is most of Dua Lipa’s music, engineered to be equal parts inoffensive and familiar which by default makes it extremely catchy and perfect as work or running music. In this instance, because the song is mostly a mash-up of John’s past singing, the song is quite literally engineered which only adds to its slightly uncomfortable allure. Someone cast Lipa in the next season of Altered Carbon stat.
READING
I started reading Hanif Abdurraqib’s A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance and it has so far been as impressive as all other of his writings that I have inhaled in the past few years. The book mixes poetry, cultural criticism and snippets of memoir to create powerful commentary that transcends both the political and the personal. Abdurraqib, who’s podcast Object of Sound I also really enjoyed, continues to be a bit of an idol.
This poem by Carmen Gimenez Smith which made me bittersweetly remember the many years when my partner and I lived in very different parts of the country and this one by Hala Alyan that tenderly yet without reservations describes the small moments of madness that certain ages and certain times of year briefly induce. Read this poem by Kim Addonizio as a slightly reassuring companion.
This issue of Jessica Dore’s tarot-centric newsletter Offerings. I am not very knowledgeable about tarot nor do I put all that much stock in it, but Dore here uses it as a jumping off point for a very insightful essay about how we create our own narratives about ourselves and how letting go of them can be essential for personal progress.
WATCHING
We re-watched the original Matrix movie so that we could watch the new Matrix movie with some sense of being informed and both made for an interesting watching experience. The 1999 movie definitely made a strong impression on me when I saw it as a pre-teen and then thought about it more and more as the years went on. Back then, I remembered the leather and the fights and the intro-to-philosophy storyline more than the fine details of the mythology the Wachowskis were getting ready to assemble. I hadn’t thought about the movie much since except the occasional notion that making a new one would be impossible in a world where Black Mirror is a cultural staple and “red-pilling” has been fully claimed by bad actors on the Internet. The Internet was different and certainly it was less in 1999 which made for a very different backdrop for Matrix, one that diverted viewer’s eyes from it actually being a science fiction epic with a love story at its center. I’m not sure I understood this until I saw the new film, Matrix: Resurrections, which absolutely does indulge in all trappings of meandering fantasy and science fiction epics that, ironically, I also loved as a preteen and teen. I’m not saying that this film could show up in a series of books inspired by a DnD type game, but I am saying that it is at its essence a corny hero’s journey with lost of love, magic masquerading as tech, and some odd racial politics. To be fair, I did not dislike the new film and the meta-ness of it clicked for me more often than not. Lana Wachowski clearly had things to say to folks that misread the first movie as a destructive political statement and I was happy to hear it. The very queer cast of villains that really delivered, Jonathan Groff in particular seemed to have been having the best time, a clear sense of humor, Morpheus’s suits and Neo’s unabashed agedness also helped carry me through moments where the plot just didn’t make sense at all. This movie probably wasn’t necessary, but I’m ok with it existing.
While I was in COVID isolation, we got on a pretty big Star Wars kick and watched all of season 2 of the Mandalorian and as much of the Book of Boba Fett as has been currently released. I quite like these shows for how visually good they look and for how unassuming they are in their storytelling. Both series have something like video-game story mechanics where a main character is on a quest, but talking to other characters launches side-quests and there’s always one battle you have to get through to level up to the next. This is not prestige TV, but it is fun and nostalgic in just the right proportion and requires so much less intense emotional and intellectual buy-in than any prestige TV proper. It’s honestly been great to be allowed to watch something almost mindlessly and spend under an hour just talking about Tusken raiders or frog lady screaming in frog without overthinking everything.
On the opposite end of the TV watching spectrum, we are about halfway through Station Eleven which is certainly a prestige show that wants to be a prestige show, and the fact that it’s about a global pandemic and its gory aftermath certainly makes the case for it not being a mindlessly easy watch. Though this show seems to have some fans among critics and cultural commentators, I’ve so far been appreciative of it and what it’s trying to do but not all that emotionally invested. Station Eleven looks good, casts great actors (Mackenzie Davis is at her most haunted and feral, a sort of a maximized version of her Halt and Catch Fire Character at her worst) and has them deliver well-written dialogue, but the stakes of the plot that meanders in both space and time just never seem that important. Partly, I get it, we get snippets from different times before, during and after a catclysmic event and why would we need stakes higher than that? At the same time, the characters whole small dramas allow us to zoom out and contextualize the big drama of it all, have just seemed a little too flat so far, and a little to predictable. I’m ready to keep watching this show because I am curious about how it will wrap up all its messily interwoven strands, but I also hope it will surprise me soon.
EATING
Notably, I made my own birthday cake. Though the omicron surge made it unsafe to host a party, I wanted at least my partner, my mom and me to have something festive to gather around together on the day itself and a cake felt most appropriate. Because I turned 30, and numbers have a way of getting to me, I let myself be over-the-top symbolic cake and decided to flavor each cake layer according to a place where I’ve lived in the past. The middle of the cake, its filling, was inspired by my grandma’s apple strudel and consisted of grated apples slightly cooked down with cinnamon, coconut sugar and just a bit of vegan butter. The cake, the sponge, itself was a callback to all my time in Illinois and especially my graduate school years in Urbana Champaign by being studded with cornmeal, for texture and a bit of extra flavor. It was more of an echo of the sweet corn festival than a full on cousin of chewy cornbread, and turned out quite tender and delicate. For the frosting of the cake I settled on a small homage to New York, the place I had been visiting for years and now get to call home and a place that has given me an unprecedented sense of freedom and independence. New York has also given me a family that comes with their own roots in the city and traditions that come with that, including talk of older relatives’ cheesecakes from back in the day. The buttercream I made was cream cheese and ricotta flavored, heavy on fragrant lemon, a little salty, and the kind of fatty and tangy that I’ve always felt a cheesecake should be. The three flavors worked surprisingly well together and the three of us definitely feasted on it. I hope next year I’ll get to share an equally exciting cake (it was very fun to plan for it and then make it) with more loved ones.