Month: March 2020

yesterday lovely and i took a drive up the pacific coast highway to malibu. no specific destination in mind, just a moment to look up and not find ceiling. i had almost forgotten about joyrides.

we all know what they are, but how often do we do them? i’ve only lived in places where the mere mention of living there triggers whomever i’m talking with to groan from the belly, ughhhhh the traffic tho. the bay, nyc, beijing, dc, and now la. in traffic towns, cars are spaces of chore, necessary evils that people don’t think to get inside just to be inside them.

but having been without a car for the past seven years, i’ve bewildered my fellow angelinos by eagerly choosing the back roads everywhere i go. i glide under canopies of palm trees, past homes i’ll never entertain the notion of affording, bodegas and dispensaries, fresh murals of kobe and nipsey, people taking long walks and carrying heavy things (usually wearing bubble jackets no matter how hot it is outside). these routes clock in at an average of 10 minutes longer per commute, but offer much more interesting scenery than the highways that are splayed out, impossibly tangled like curdling spaghetti.

but still, not a joyride. joyrides aren’t about getting anywhere, because once there’s a point b it immediately becomes a commute. with a joyride, you’ve already reached your destination once the keys are in the ignition. i was introduced to joyrides by anida and masa in phnom penh, where the march sky carries a sun dripping with heat so thick that people nap as soon as they wake up in the morning. when the sunset coaxes the temperature down and invites a breeze, people with cabin fever from their over/under air conditioned rooms suddenly fill the streets with skooters on a mission for aimlessness. near the royal palace, lovers squeezed into a single bike seat will do donuts for ten or twenty minutes. i once saw a family of five, siblings stacked on top of each other like tupperware containers, i once saw a guy sitting backseat, gripping himself in place with his flip-flopped feet while he slurped a bowl of noodle soup. joy.

i’ve been raised with too much immigrant frugality and woke guilt to take joyrides often. what a waste of gas, how terrible for the environment. with so many vehicles already infesting the roads, who am i, in these times, to blow a quarter tank just for the fuck of it? these are the kinds of concerns that greet me at the door when i return, when i’m left to my own thoughts, until the next time i get into my car just to roll the windows down.

if yesterday was about waking up with a vivid resolve to pursue all the things that i want to do but have been putting off, today is about liberating myself from all the things that i’ve been putting off because i’m actually never going to do them. like, let’s stop kidding ourselves. i’m never going to learn turkish.

this isn’t turkey’s fault, and it’s not mine. but given that i’ve also set myself up to learn ASL, spanish, french, arabic, mandarin, and austrian german, yet still can’t even speak canto as fluently as i did when i was 5, it’s safe to say i’ll never effectively haggle for saffron in istanbul.

over the years, i’ve accumulated so many aspirations, most of them motivated by a mental snapshot of a future-me who is a polyglot aquaponics carpenter who moonlights as a DJ yet still rises with the sun. this future-me also keeps in touch with everybody i’ve ever had a vaguely interesting conversation with, in between disappearing into month-long silent retreats.

so today i’m focusing on moving things from my bucket list to my fuckit list, as in “i know i told myself i’d learn how to surf, but fuckit.” or “i know i intended to rekindle my bond with my best friend from third grade, but fuckit.” for each thing i add to my fuckit list, there is a voice (that sounds like someone else but who is actually me) saying “so you’re NOT going to read every single toni morrison novel? i thought you were cultured!” but this voice comes from a guilt that appears every time i chill for even a moment, that nags me for not using that time to finally learn C++ or capoeira. my wild curiosity has led me to some of my most cherished skills, rewarding experiences, and deepest friendships, but it also keeps me restless with countless goals that i never ran through a filter, but that now appear as failures because i never reached them.

today i am admitting that i’m surrounded by goals with no intention attached to them. adriel: you’re never going to join a dragon boat team or learn how to forage and then dry roast your own seaweed. it’s fine.

one of the terms i’ve been hearing a lot lately is new normal. it describes how things may never be like what it once was, or that at least the status quo has been disrupted. it is often delivered in an apocalyptic tone, as if it automatically applies only to a darkening of days – a blockage of only the good and the entrance of only the bad.

there’s no denying that we are living in trying times, that the net outcome of a global pandemic is loss. but ruminating on things at home has also ushered in new norms that i hope, when all of this is over, i take with me back into the world.

to keep my spirits up, i’ve found it helpful to list these: writing everyday / texting and calling family more often / reconnecting with distant friends / more consistent sleeping patterns / creating less garbage / consuming food more healthfully and with less waste / a decreasing sense of work-related burnout

these (re)new(ed) norms are habits that i’ve aspired for or lost along the way, and they’ve helped me look forward to each day under shelter as an opportunity as opposed to a sentence. i’m recognizing that being “grounded” can either have a positive or negative connotation, even if the motions of the dual meaning are similar. i’m also recognizing that they are modes of coping that have emerged without much effort on my part, and maybe they’ve always been elements integral to my life that i just hadn’t prioritized enough to cultivate. when these truly become normal, i’m excited to start inviting more truly new norms proactively. what is all the low-hanging fruit that i’ve never even looked up to notice are within reach?

and then once things in the world finally go “back to normal,” will it be a complete triumph? will i go back to tending to my inbox instead of tending to my family? will i eat more junk and junk more of what i eat? will go about life as if resources and energy are less precious?

and what about us? will we fill the streets with cars and the skies with planes all the same? will we stop caring for the elderly and under-heralded? will we be less resilient about maintaining social connections and settle for relationships of convenience? will we be less mindful about every step and every breath? will we treat our health as if it’s only our own? the jaded parts of me say that we will. the fact that we have so much more to learn from this experience might be the only silver lining to the fact that we are only in the beginning.

i woke up this morning with the same kind of overwhelm that has come to plague my mondays, except exponentially heavier. this overwhelm is a symptom of my workaholic nature – the fact that i actually took a real weekend off (rain and a global pandemic will do that to you) meant that i feel like i’ve been utterly useless for 48 whole hours.

online, i see people in my network motivating to produce online concerts, exhibitions, meditation sessions, and screenings. it’s been at once incredibly inspiring but has also induced guilt on my end – guilt that i call myself a community organizer but in the past few days have spent more time pruning my new house plants and repairing my vacuum cleaner than i have thinking about how to contribute to the many things my village needs right now. during these times, i try to remind myself that tending to oneself is not a cousin of laziness. that maybe i would’ve been able to pivot more quickly had i not spent the past few years burning myself out. and even if i hadn’t, that it’s still okay to have a late start, or take time to process before acting, or to even take the bench now and then.

i continue to feel hypersensitive to the various ways that people are reacting to this outbreak. i shrivel when i ask how a friend is doing and they respond with projections on death tolls. there is so much anxiety that comes with having an open spigot of information paired with a recognition that the best way to respond is not to take to the streets, but to stay in – not to band together but to practice social distancing – not to resist an enemy but to honor forces of nature beyond us.

today i’m learning that it’s not my burden to smooth out every crease in an unfolding universe.

an element that is common in all declarations of emergency is a directive for everyone to remain calm. it is as self-defeating as a lifeguard shouting at someone being carried away by the current to stop drowning. when we enter a state of emergency, an authoritative figure will spell out all the things that have gone wrong, are going wrong, and that may go wrong, then offer a meager statement that there are distant, anonymous experts working on it, and finally some patronizing instructions to stay calm, don’t panic.

but when do we ever practice calm, together? calm has been marketed in our culture as a solo affair, a personal act of mindfulness that is achieved simply by closing one’s eyes and focusing on one’s own breath. but how dare you ask me to close my eyes after showing me something i can’t unsee? how dare you tell me to focus on my breath after telling me that my exhale might be a biological hazard? in moments like this, once we sift past the immediate and visceral question of mere survival, we arrive at underlying threats that we’ve already been exposed to – isolation, uncertainty, anxiety.

how do we practice collective calm when there is no emergency at hand? what would it look like to have something that’s the opposite of a fire drill, a preparation to drop whatever we’re doing to fall into a communal state of relaxation?

over the past couple of days, i’ve been trying to tune out as much of the panic, anger, snark, doomsday statements, and pontifications about what all this means in the face of late-capitalism, in order to keep a steady hand. i can’t even yet say that i’m doing this for a collective good, because right now it’s just for my own piece of mind. but in time, once everyone’s voices have gone coarse from instructions about social distancing and how long to wash your hands, i hope we are still able to see this as an opportunity to see what it means for a critical mass of the human population to chill the fuck out.

what do i do with this ailment that courses through my system, this condition called uncertainty? how can i know what to do with the unknown? what does it mean to befriend mystery, to be at ease with anxiousness?

when i am able to escape my mental loops, i realize that short answers are a placebo at best, but is usually snake oil. there is no pill for the unfolding of the universe, no elixir for nature’s chaos. and even if there was, it sure the fuck wouldn’t be on nytimes.com.