Welcome to the first one. So thrilled y’all chose to join from the get-go.
Lockdown has certainly been a mental odyssey. My wife and I put various plans, both concurrent and conflicting, definitively on-hold only to try them on again a couple of times a week. We unintentionally folded existential crises into our morning routines, and found them difficult to route out again, routines supposedly being key to mental health under normal circumstances and now essential to holding it together with weeks of the same punctuated only by trips to the grocery store. And we felt some internal edict to be productive. What a loathsome word.
It was a bit of a surprise to find how much I feel the lack of directly interacting with people. I miss the stray, chance, and cursory encounters. I was quite the little misanthrope as a teen, but adulthood proved to me I was more moody than contemptuous. Turns out I rather like people—though it would be easy to revise that statement after too much doomscrolling. The sudden lack of small interactions on the bus, polite conversation at the cafe, a chance to point out a funny meme to a coworker is a far greater loss than I might have thought. It’s funny in retrospect. Like many, I lament an ineffable loss of community that I’ve probably never experienced, but which we all feel in absence. Like everyone else, I've connected with friends on video chat and over Slack, organized with local efforts, and generally just thought of ways that might make me feel connected to others without being with them. None of it quite did the trick, and in the vacuum, the edict of productivity felt bigger still.
The pressure came from everywhere, exerting itself on everyone I spoke to. (I’m not sure why I use the past tense, except maybe to trick myself into thinking this feeling is a thing of the past.) What was equally as common, it seems, was a total lack of motivation to follow through with anything. The following is a list of projects I’ve started since March:
📝Screenwriting - this felt heavy and tiresome quickly, though I’ve always wanted to learn.
🍞🍺Baking and brewing - other than reading and biking, these have long constituted my main hobbies, but I’ve more or less continued them with the same frequency as ever.
🪓Woodcarving - Despite loving it as a child, it never feels better than a chore. It’s a welcome distraction at times, but never much more.
🎮Gaming - time enough at last to play complicated games I never give the time to, but I’ve mostly played familiar games, unable to take on something novel.
👨🏫Teaching - I started a program, quickly adapted for online instruction, and felt in no way was I being prepared to teach. I may have kept with this one, it didn’t feel such a waste of time and money, but who knows?
🏡Home buying - this one constitutes both a plan deferred, and a project we’ve tried to kick off again many times, but it always feels daunting given the state of the world, the economy, and all the associated uncertainty.
I’m sure I’m missing some, but you get the idea. Only yard work, reading, housekeeping, and listening to podcasts have served me, though the last can be a double-edged sword.
I’ve been a huge fan of podcasts for 15 years, and I listen to a lot of them. They aren’t always the best thing for my mental health, as I get perhaps a bit too much pessimism from my favorites. It isn’t hard to find evidence I could stand to change my information diet. Yet even the heavy ones can feel validating, as I listen to funny people and deep thinkers admit shortcomings alongside jokes and commentary about all that goes on beyond my cozy little bubble. At the end of July, San Diego ComicCon released all their programming via YouTube. I’ve never been to any comic-con (though I’ve enjoyed a few science fiction and fantasy conventions) but it seemed (and was) an encouraging mix of creativity, nostalgia, and comfort. Hearing part- or full-time creatives acknowledge their challenges—not to mention the shared wish to retreat into nostalgia—has been cathartic. Even those able to overcome do so stumbling and tripping and falling often. Their honesty makes it feel ok to want to be productive or not, to fail or not, and feel something a little less than alone.
So, long story short, I decided to start a newsletter. It’s a work in progress, but an outlet for writing on ephemera and personal challenges seems a good idea. And I’m committing to this on what seems an achievable cadence: this newsletter will hit your inbox monthly on the last Monday.
A big thank you to McKinley Valentine, both for her newsletter The Whippet and for her encouragement to start my own. I can’t recommend her newsletter enough, nor can I think of any other email that literally brings a smile to my face. Every. Time.
Making Dirt Something More
My wife and I have been looking into buying houses, driven by an interest (need?) to simplify our lives in the direction of homesteading. I grew up helping out on a family farm most summers, and renovating the house my dad, stepmother, and brothers have been in for the past 25 years. I didn’t always find that work rewarding, but I now leap at such opportunities. We’d like to do them for ourselves in a sustainable way, so of course, we came around to permaculture principles.
There is something so lovely about the idea of thinking and designing a life and environment to last even as you hold no illusions of permanence. Maybe it will all be there in 50 years, likely not, but there’s little reason I can see for not planning for it. A dear friend of mine shared her interest in permaculture as soon as she noticed my own, loaning me Paul Wheaton’s Building a Better World in Your Backyard. It’s a fantastic book, at once totally accessible and utterly packed with practical knowledge. I learned a ton, but some of my favorite takeaways were designs for mass rocket stoves and hügelkulturs.
A hügelkultur is a horticulture technique where you make a berm out of logs, decomposing twigs and grass, compost, and finally soil to be used for a raised planter bed (either immediately, or after allow for decomposition; opinions differ):
With purported benefits such as soil fertility improvement, water retention, soil warming, and carbon sequestration, these berms are said to be ideal for places with low-quality soil. I was initially hooked on the idea of carbon sequestration alone. Growing up, we paid a hefty price for trash pickup and often burned our excess trash, something I find pretty galling now but which felt utterly normal at the time. Burning down excess wood, not for warmth but rather to be rid of it, still feels as normal as burning trash once did, but this releases carbon that could easily be absorbed into soil, grown into food, consumed, and ultimately processed down the line.
Hügelkulturs have not been rigorously tested to affirm all the purported benefits, and they are not without criticism (such as water retention concerns including changing water flow patterns for the worse and potentially bursting in cases of flood, as well as having the potential for overfertilization of food and land), but I find them fascinating nonetheless. After accounting for any potential concerns, they still seem a great solution for making good soil where only dirt exists and keeping carbon in wood and other biomass sequestered.
I’m so excited to build one, to the point that building a permaculture garden is often the most exciting part about owning a home. Imagine my surprise when I asked my dad what he’d been up to during COVID, and he told me he’d recently taken to gardening and was building a hügelkultur. No doubt his reasons differ from mine (we don’t necessarily align on sustainability), but for a father and son who don’t talk enough, it was really lovely to learn of this random, overlapping interest.
No Passport Required
Until recently, the only European Union-specific metonym I knew was ‘Eurozone,’ referring to those 19 countries in the EU which share the Euro as currency. (OK, I suppose I was familiar with ‘Brussels’ as well, but that’s a more emergent metonym based on headquarters, whereas ‘Eurozone’ is portmanteau/neologism and that feels different somehow.) Despite traveling to Europe 4 times in the last 2.5 years, and moving almost exclusively through the region in question, I just learned the name for the ‘Schengen’ area. Named for the city in Luxembourg where the Schengen Agreement was signed in the ’80s, Schengen has become the name for EU states with abolished passport controls between, and thus free movement through, mutual borders.
After flying, driving, boating, etc across various national borders (not to mention living in the US all my life), crossing a border with passport controls (from Slovenia into Croatia) was startling. We felt suddenly as though we’d transgressed, felt something akin to the fear one feels when they see police while driving and run the mental checklist of all the laws they haven’t broken. Croatia is part of the EU and should be part of the Schengen area soon, but as of last year, we still had to hand over passports and ponder all the things we definitely didn’t do. Now I have a word for the invisible wall we broached, and I had to share it.
The Shape of a Place
Evidently, Colorado is a geospherical rectangle, it’s area bounded by lines of longitude and latitude.
Or is it.
Vsauce has long been one of my favorite vlogs, but I always struggle to concisely explain its premise. The host, Michael Stevens, presents esoteric topics generally connected to mathematics and the edge between individual perception and science, but even as I look at that description, it fails. It fails to capture how funny, odd, random, knowledgeable, and insightful Michael’s videos are.
He’s been at it for years, and now does premium content (another loathsome word, aye?) on Youtube Red, so his personal channel has been quiet for a while. In late July, he posted a video about the Odd Number Rule, a video which might just be nothing more than an elaborate justification for undermining 1997’s Airbud. It’s another great one, and I highly recommend it.
Anyway, back to Colorado. The then territory was defined using lines of longitude and latitude by the Compromise of 1850, but it wasn’t surveyed on the ground until sometime later in the century. While a competent job was done for the time and tools, this surveying left oddly jagged edges on the state that can be easily seen on a map. In 1925, the Supreme Court of the US ruled that the surveyed borders stand (my research stopped there), and the 75-year argument on the boundaries of the state was legally settled. Pretty nifty, aye?
If you enjoyed this, stick around and share with friends. I really didn’t mean to talk about two different map things, but I guess that’s where my brain was for at least part of August.
I’m so excited to share my writing with folks for the first time in ages…and I thank you.