from the grand companions weekly email

he got adopted!!!!

in vein news

before i got laid off, we were super short staffed due to corona quarantines, so i had to help out in laundry (!). while i was transferring laundry from the washer to the dryer, i looked down and my arm veins were straight poppin, NOT in a good way (if there is a good way?). staring at it too long made me feel woozy so i had to keep moving and eventually they settled down but why did this happen? was the vein angry about the layoff?

WE’LL NEVER KNOW

this came in the mail yesterday

PERFECT TIMING
(courtesy of my mom)

good things

• the peach tree we planted is blooming!!!! (see above)
• frankie’s deer-like tail
• i think my new gummi vitamins may be “working”?
• this cool comic about wuhan
• listening to the kinks’s sleepwalker, thanks to jonah
• this arbor foundation email (“Right outside your window, trees are (quite literally) budding with expectation and hope — ready to unfurl their leaves and bloom once more after a winter of quiet. Let us find strength in this idea.”)

this break is weird as hell but maybe it’s a strange time to slow down and recenter and reconnect. it kind of feels that way to me. i’m excited to catch up on school, do yoga, do arm exercises, kind of sleep in, watch some TV, catch up on junky novels, maybe listen to the harry potter audio book?

that’s how fast it happens

and all of a sudden, i’m getting laid off tomorrow. WHOOSH. corona hits and it’s the absolute end of the hospitality sector, just that fast. we still are at 95% occupancy but the cliff is coming (i tried to find a cliff gif, but “dramatic descent gif” turned up nothing???? maybe a duckduckgo problem). have had a lot of hollowed-out-scared feelings this week but now strangely at peace. because i can at least concentrate on school for a hot second and catch up and maybe even take an extra summer school class (doubtful but maybe)? also wouldn’t it be a miracle if that new marfa library job — the one for which i had already filled out the application and was just awaiting the job posting — still panned out?! but the library is now closed indefinitely, and with fewer tourists — will the city even have the funds for the position? looks unlikely. more devastation coming, look how fast it came for me. even so, i’m grateful for the year with el cosmico and i guess — here we go.

strange days

some comfort from the ny times coronavirus newsletter (i subscribed???? i dunno — just feel like — better to know than not know) — what folks are doing in these uncertain times:

and this one, too

i keep thinking about this dog

we’re all in this together

an interview with Frank M. Snowden, a professor emeritus of history and the history of medicine at Yale, in “how pandemics change history”:

I want to start with a big question, which is: What, broadly speaking, are the major ways in which epidemics have shaped the modern world?
One way of approaching this is to examine how I got interested in the topic, which was a realization—I think a double one. Epidemics are a category of disease that seem to hold up the mirror to human beings as to who we really are. That is to say, they obviously have everything to do with our relationship to our mortality, to death, to our lives. They also reflect our relationships with the environment—the built environment that we create and the natural environment that responds. They show the moral relationships that we have toward each other as people, and we’re seeing that today.

That’s one of the great messages that the World Health Organization keeps discussing. The main part of preparedness to face these events is that we need as human beings to realize that we’re all in this together, that what affects one person anywhere affects everyone everywhere, that we are therefore inevitably part of a species, and we need to think in that way rather than about divisions of race and ethnicity, economic status, and all the rest of it.

cherise was right

this IS a great song

ps i was avoiding school + taxes and watched hulu’s high fidelity — it’s kind of sweet, in its way