I've been sick, mostly. Got walloped for three days. Luckily it was three days of rain, so dozing on different sofas surrounded by wadded up toilet paper felt like the right thing to be doing.
I've been meeting with students, one after another. Yesterday I think I worked with two dozen students. Five or six in face-to-face meetings, measured out by our gentle friend the hourglass. Then another three or four with email questions or requests, and then a presentation and Q&A session about going to law school with fourteen or fifteen last night. It's the work I was meant to do, I think, but it leaves me quiet, wanting to read or listen, not so much to talk or write.
I've been carpooling, too, which takes away a slice of time where I used to zone out, or listen to the news, and fills it with the chatter of acquaintances. I am glad to carpool, oh yes I am, but I don't think I knew how much I valued that empty downtime of my solo commute until it disappeared.
I've been meeting contractors to get estimates about work on this house, and looking at different houses we might buy.
I've been worried, pretty deeply, about what's going on in the world. From time to time I daydream about what we would do if the economy stops: do we have enough land to grow our own food? Combined with fishing off the bridge and gathering mussels, could we get enough calories to live? The other day I got even more embattled, and thought about where we would go if it got brutal in the city, if folks without land decided they needed to share ours. There's an island I'm thinking of, and I know a place on the island where the shelter would be good. Five or six of us could live okay there, I think, and I spent some time thinking about how we would do it: what we would need to bring, how we would get there, etc. It sure would be cold. I shrug these odd thoughts off and think, well, that's not going to happen, but then I wonder how I know. I think, too, about what skills will still be in demand if the economy stops. What have people been doing for thousands of years? We'll still need farmers and cooks, teachers and doctors, carpenters and fishermen. I actually think maybe I could be okay if we go back to bartering: we've had storytellers around longer than we've had hedge fund managers, and then of course there's the fallback of being pretty handy on boats.
I don't understand enough of the details to know whether this bill everyone's fighting about is a good idea, or a bad idea but better than the alternative, or a bad idea that won't work and will make things worse than if we did nothing and took the bitter medicine straight. I don't know how to learn, because I don't particularly trust the folks making statements on either side. Instead I worry and fret and when I pull into my garage I think about which of the objects might come in handy if things get very, very bad.
Anyway, that all makes me sound like a crazy person, I suppose, but there it is. I've been reading, too -- nonfiction for a change. Read Everything Bad is Good for You, and wish I could write like Steven Johnson or Peter Kramer, whose Against Depression I'm also reading. And I'm reading the book you sent me, and another Johnson book, Mind Wide Open. I'm not sure, from talking to neuroscience students, that it's fair to draw so many psychological conclusions from MRI tests, but I still find hypotheses about how brain structure connects to the feelings we experience pretty interesting.