Words (about nothing) In The Time of Coronavirus

I am not propped on a lumpy pillow in a questionable little hostel room, tapping out this entry with my two thumbs on a warm phone screen. There are no palm trees outside. I’m not in Ecuador or Colombia or Mexico or anywhere remotely interesting. I write voraciously and volubly when traveling, when glorious adventure and new observations shove me to description almost without my own volition. 

But can I write when the opposite is happening? Can I take the near reverse of exotic adventure—sheltering in place at home—and somehow make it readable, palatable, dare I say even, interesting? 

Let’s find out. 

Hereunto I will cover the dubiously enticing topics of waffles, Zoom meetings, hair growth, and mayonnaise. 

Out my Mansard apartment window I’m watched the crosswalk sign blink redly for nobody. I’m sheltering in place in this third-floor, three-room apartment, just a block from where concerts and bars and bustling and gathering are now venerated history. It may be three-room, but now that I’m working from home there are offices all over the place. Also with me are the wonderful company of a cat shaped like a box, my love Matthew, and 40+ houseplants. That may sound like an overpopulated jungle, but I love it, and some of that population are Matthew’s household which he brought for our combined sheltering. We’re now a combined-household multi-species plant family. I like this.

I wander around the Mansard multiple times a day, peering into foliage, turning pots, exclaiming over a new compressed leaf packet soon to open. I wave Matthew over, “babe! There’s a LEAF!” and he comes over like this is perfectly normal and coos too. For a couple years now I have felt the delight of caring for plants, but this delight is even richer now, something alive and green and growing and changing right in my newly-shrunken world. When there is grey most days in Ithaca between October and May (aka, winter) I consider plants to be physical manifestations of light. They can feast from my happy light and purple grow light, even while days go by with just clammy shrouds of soul-sucking grey weighing heavily from the sky. Ithaca is more miserly about sunshine than Seattle herself. The result is that when a sunny day does occur, unfettered jubilation sweeps around our souls and we go outside and smile at everyone and wear fewer layers than we should and feel motivated and make time for walking like we wouldn’t. 

I have been taking an unreasonable delight in making waffles. I can be found most days, bent over my wretched, overworked, $5-thrift-store waffle iron, picking wads of burnt bean from between it’s teeth, the counter a scene of crumbs and massacre. I routinely create chaotic and ill-fated waffles, pushing the laws of kitchen science and sensibility, and I love it. Follow a recipe and make a basic white wheat waffle for syrup and butter? How pleasing and un-messy and reasonable that would be! But me? Nope. I want more protein, more flavors, more experiment. Let’s be honest: more legumes. I am going for the peanut-butter-swirled-chocolate-black-bean-brownie waffle, or the green-pea-and-ramp-pesto waffle—all green and moist and would traumatize a child off waffles for life—or a bean-and-cottage-cheese-and-red-pepper-and-flax-waffle. For that last one, I learned that cottage cheese wants me to believe it’s a helpful protein-adding binding agent, but once encountering the hot iron it fizzles and faints and dribbles in a ring onto the counter. That flaxmeal serves as glue, so you not only have that muddy ring on your counter, but a waffle iron pasted shut, and, once pried open, two delicious savory umami crisps adhered to both top and bottom jaws. Matthew informed me that it smelled like I was grilling meat, so I guess something was sufficiently compelling and carnal about that waffle. 

In addition to waffles, this is the time of Zoom. I spent Wednesday morning negotiating with Zoom’s Microsoft plug-in, the Microsoft add-on (why both a plug-in AND an add-on?), and just the plain Jane online interface. My simple goal was to host a group lab meeting for Friday afternoon. I added and deleted an abundance of Friday afternoon meetings, and given Zoom’s automatic emailing service which helpfully alerts one to every meeting created and deleted, my inbox preview read “ZOOM ZOOM ZOOM.” Like a baby moving her arms around experimentally and whacking herself in the face, I felt I was inadvertently spamming my dear colleagues with a bunch of these automatically created emails and calendar invites any time I did an action. “Sandra Wayman has invited you to a Zoom Meeting.” “Sandra Wayman has cancelled a Zoom Meeting.” “Sandra Wayman has created a Zoom Meeting uselessly for yesterday.” 

Forget the plug-ins and add-ons. I tried the Zoom website directly: schedule a meeting for 2pm Friday, a very reasonable time, even though the system decided that 8am right now was better. I finally scheduled a meeting for the correct time, but now the box for “invite attendees” was greyed out. What? A Zoom meeting with just myself? I might as well wash all my dishes (if my office happens to be in the kitchen) or fold all the laundry (when my office is in the bedroom) or water the plants (office is anywhere). And I wanted a recurring meeting… Good, so now I had 10 meetings every Friday until the foreseeable future with just myself. I went to delete the 10-meeting series. A pop-up message: “the meeting might have been deleted already.” MIGHT HAVE? Since when is software subjectively questioning in this way? “Let’s not be too concrete”, “Let’s stay flexible and open to other’s interpretations.” Finally, after I thought I’d successfully created a meeting for people other than myself that was slated for the future, I was notified: “Meeting ID is not valid.” 

I gave up. Time for a radical change of scenery. I walked the 10 feet to the parlor office, where my love was tapping away diligently on his laptop, writing about tree phloem to basal area ratios and radially symmetric climate-mitigated assessment profiles. I vowed to stay quietly on the rug, do some hamstring stretches, not interact with this beautiful forest ecology man who was obviously trying to focus. This lasted about 25 seconds. “I have an idea for LUNCH,” I decreed with enormous relish. “Would you want to try a black-bean-and-wild-ramps WAFFLE?” Oh damn. So much for my staying quiet and respectful.   

Thursday I stared mutely into my happy light and fantasized about clippers, shears, scissors, buzzers, razors. Fantasizing about the vibrations near my ear, the wind in my face from a hairdryer fluffing clippings from my shoulders. If only I could be finding itchy hairs in my collar. The feeling of someone’s fingers carefully working my cowlick. My hair on the side of my head has grown out enough that I look like a little hedgehog. A little puffy hedgehog that’s put on a few pounds. Hairs grasp over the top of my ears like adventitious roots trying to gain a hold. The pride and pleasure I usually take in my appearance has evaporated. Now when passing my mirror I’m rolling my eyes and looking away. Maybe it’s time to deploy The Hats.   

Or maybe I should cover the mirrors with scarves and order some nice perfume of nutmeg or vanilla from online. Turn up the other pleasurable senses and turn down the ones that aren’t serving me. 

Instead I wheedled Matthew into helping trim my hedgehog. After calibrating himself by trimming his beard, he carefully took his little mower to the side of my head as I folded my ears down. “Does it look good to you?” I asked hopefully when we finished. “It looks good to me,” he responded.

“Everything looks good to you.”

He countered, “It looks good to me because if it didn’t, then I would have to deal with it and then I would mess it up.”

A conclusion was reached by him informing me, “I feel like your head is just uneven.” He swept the stray hairs from my neck, hurrying them down inside my collar

I was ecstatic when, a couple days later, someone told me over Zoom that my hair looked good.   

Maybe getting out of the Mansard, and away from hair-reflecting mirrors, to go make a trillion sandwiches would be a good idea? I wanted to help combat local food insecurity, which is becoming even more stressful because the world is ending these days. My dear-dearest Grannie used to volunteer at Loaves & Fishes, a delicious soup kitchen downtown, and in her honor and because of the times, I signed up to volunteer too.   

My task for my shift was to help make approximately a trillion sub sandwiches. There was a huge 5-story jar of sunshine yellow mustard with a little (aka plentiful) mustard sheltering in place in its basement and a sabre spatula with which to coax it out. I was also assigned a large-batch mixing bowl of mayonnaise, with its refill jar standing duty nearby; “Extra Heavy Mayonnaise” it read and I shuddered. Lordy, how could mayonnaise be heavier? I gathered some out with a long-handled spoon, drawing it across an expectant slice of bread. The mayonnaise huddled in the curved crux of the spoon, unyielding even as the spoon contacted bread. The bread stayed pure and the mayonnaise wouldn’t budge. Awful emulsified white clot. But I was not to be out-clabbered! I used the back of the spoon and whacked a white wad onto each slice: splat, splat, splat. Then spread it out like acrylic paint. I used as few strokes as I could; I had a trillion sandwiches to make here people. Raised by two engineers, to me efficiency was as instinctive as breath. Then squares of cheese, then circles of turkey, and then shuffle that sandwich into the most feeble of tiny sandwich bags. Other volunteers, also in masks and handling obscene sizes of condiment containers, made sandwiches too. 

On this sandwich project, I felt I was part of a biological reaction. We were all enzymes (I was mayonnaise-ase) making storage-organ carbohydrates from sunshine and water, the reactants and products, the soup kitchen equivalent of bright happy lights and plants. 

Another young woman was there, drapey of hair and slow of hand. Though I was new and of zero authority, I offered she should go source a hairnet or hat. Upon return, she took a sandwich from the enzymatic assembly line, tentatively worked it into a bag, daintily wiped her gloved fingers off on a paper towel, and then walked around behind me to place the sandwich in a box. Oh no you don’t honey I thought, and indicated the box I had put next to her feet, “Would you like to put your sandwiches in there?” No one is going to be walking around in this reaction. We have a trillion sandwiches to make. Folks gotta EAT. Let’s go. 

Did my Grannie feel pain in her back from working at a table at the wrong height? Did she wear her classy cat-eye glasses? Did she feel secretly annoyed at someone being inefficient? Was she graceful and funny and loving? I can’t imagine she ever had a bad haircut. I wish I knew more of what her time was like here. It felt such a new context from little kiddo me (“Grannie can’t play with you because Grannie’s at Loaves and Fishes this afternoon”) to adult me ("wow my back hurts and that’s a lot of mayo"). 

But that packing box of sandwiches, growing marginally heavier with each one, was incredibly satisfying to view. I felt so good contributing to something greater than myself, and it was incredibly humbling (coaxing sandwiches into bags is not easy) and how ever do food service people manage work like this day after day??

Friday morning. I plunked back down into my office chair at the dining table office. Having just spent time at the standing desk in the kitchen office working in R, I was ready for a rest. Immediately I popped back up to grab a single fig out of a jar I suddenly saw. And I wanted the fig on a plate so I could feel dignified and savor it. (Here’s to retaining that drop of dopamine for longer than a moment.) But the stack of cupboard plates was non-existent, so I opened the clean dishwasher and started methodically unloading it. Until I realized I was supposed to be writing that R code. I moved back to the dining table office. Then Matthew left the couch office to riotously mix it all up, and set his computer in the kitchen office. 

Lost in a world of R nonlinear regression and my single fig, I moaned grouchily.
Matthew: “What’s wrong?”
Me: “R lost my block object.”
Matthew: “I’m sorry R lost your block object. Dang klutz if you ask me.” 

I am so incredibly grateful that this positive kind sweetheart is sharing this space with me during this time. There is no one with whom I’d rather pass a pandemic. At one point mid-afternoon on some grey quiet day, he circled his arms around me in defiant protest of physical distancing, “We can hug each other any time we want.” The simple delicious truth of this struck me. Let me not ever take this for granted.