4:00 p.m.: I stop work to make dinner for tomorrow night. I like to prepare meals in advance. I also make batches of chicken stock. This is one of my favorite things to do. I find cooking meditative, and I especially love making stock because it appeals to my sense of thrift (I’m the child of immigrants): all these odds and ends, transformed into something so useful. Remember at the start of quarantine, when everyone was sprouting their scallions in cups of water? I think it’s the same impulse, some small contribution to an imagined greater good.
8:00 p.m.: I know I’m fortunate to be locked up with my family, but the truth is I’m lonely. We probably all are—for the coworkers, the acquaintances, the familiar barista, even—the bit players in the theater of life. I call my friend Lynn [Steger Strong]; she’s about to publish an amazing book and I’m going to publish one that I hope is amazing later this year, so we like to pass our anxieties back and forth like kids with a soccer ball. It’s better than pestering our spouses. We talk for a long time, and I feel better without even realizing how bad I’d been feeling when I dialed her number.
Friday, June 19
5:30 a.m.: Even by my family’s standards, this is an early morning. I slept terribly for some dumb reason—the constant fireworks in my neck of Brooklyn, the humidity, a sense of unease from the novel I’m reading (Ali Smith‘s Winter). I look at my to-do list, which I keep in the Clear app. I find it very soothing to use and often add tasks just for the satisfaction of crossing them off. This morning, I add “LAUNDRY,” then strip the beds, remake them, and feel like I’ve accomplished something. This feels like cheating at productivity, but I don’t care.
8:30 a.m.: I take the boys out on their bikes. I think getting them out the door first thing helps replicate the familiar-ish rhythm of commuting to school. Quarantine has done something to my sense of propriety; I don’t even bother showering. In my mask, I feel invisible anyway. The morning air is restorative, and maybe I need it more than the kids. I bring a cup of iced coffee rather than buying one—again, I find thrift very satisfying.
11:30 a.m.: I’m in charge of lunch today. I repurpose leftovers into a quesadilla for the kids, then make salads for the grownups. It tastes like nothing, as salads tend to, but I feel virtuous, as I do whenever I force myself to eat one. I eat a pretty good nectarine for dessert.
1:30 p.m.: My husband takes the boys all afternoon so I can report this story I’m working on. I spend a lot of time looking at Instagram, but it’s for work. Still, prolonged exposure to Instagram is not good for you. I eat a One Bar and pretend that it’s a candy bar. It’s the only sweet thing we have in the house besides blueberry Cheerios, which taste terrible.
9:20 p.m.: It’s Friday night! I’m working, because deadlines loom and I’d rather spend the weekend at the beach than in my office. I’m not in the mood, crabby and irritated, but I have a lot to get done and being a writer is such easy work it seems absurd to complain. I play some music to calm me, or get me into a rhythm, or keep me company, almost as a pet might. I play the opera Norma for a while, then change it to John Adams’s The Dharma at Big Sur, and it’s stirring enough that I have a productive hour. I don’t know much but I know that—sometimes art really helps.
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