The COVID-19 crisis has sent a lot of people to their homes who would otherwise not spend so much time there. We all know this. But the result of this extended working staycation on me has been different than I anticipated.
Here's one unexpected thing: I thought I would have more free time to write. Now, it's true that my schedule has opened up in unexpected ways. I no longer have to worry about ward- or neighborhood gatherings, after school activities, or running errands. Because of my son's status as a high-risk person, we're making sure that we do not go anywhere unless it's absolutely necessary. I dropped off some garbage at the dump last week--that was the last time I drove my car. We're taking the "Stay home, stay safe" order really seriously. According to the internet (the most reliable source of information) and social media (the most accurate source of what people are doing), people are learning new skills, finishing projects, and generally improving themselves in the ways most convenient to them. I am saving over an hour a day in commute, to say nothing of the fact that I get my school work done during my work time, which means I should have ample time to write a lot. Yet, as of yesterday, I only had about 21,000 words written this month. Grand total for the year is just over 130,000. That may sound impressive, but it isn't. At least, for me. In comparison, I had over 173,000 words written by the end of March 2018. And March 2019 saw 152,000 words. While I've been on a downhill trend for output over the past long stretch, I was hoping to see a change in my writing life this year. It hasn't happened. At all. Yes, I've managed to log over 30,000 words per month (which is my soft goal for the year), but that's in large part due to LTUE conference (which gives me 17,000 words over three days) and a winter writing retreat in March (which added 13,000 words over a weekend). A couple of unusual experiences are carrying my total word count. That isn't to say I'm writing nothing these days. A lot of words have made it into my reading journal (I'm almost finished with the one I started back in October 2019). I've done a lot of world building and a bit of outlining of different projects, which is good. I've started what I think will be another fantasy novel (its shape in my mind is still vague), with an eye toward a different style of writing. I have a comic I'm working on--I've projects, in other words. This should be what keeps me going… …but I have the same problem now as I did when I felt like a real teacher: By the time I finish with my job, my mental energies are depleted to the point that I just want to read a book, smash the drums, or play a video game. I don't feel like my extra "free" time is going into anything except slightly extended uses of what I previously did with my life. For example, I used to practice drums for half an hour or so when I got home from school. Now, I practice them for almost an hour, sometimes longer. I used to read a little bit; now I get upwards of an hour in a book. I'm not complaining about any of this. These are things that I can do for longer because of the quarantine. It's the writing thing that's really driving me crazy. After four weeks of being at home, shouldn't I have a bit more to show for it? Maybe not. I mean, writing is hard*. It takes a certain amount of mental preparation and willingness, of energy and ability. It used to be that I could go somewhere else and that would help kickstart my brain into writing-readiness. That is no longer an option (for obvious reasons), though maybe if the weather would cooperate, I could start writing in my hammock in the backyard or find a bench at an abandoned park where I could work. Anyway, the point is, just because I'm at home now doesn't mean my brain is ready to write. This has been a wake up call to me. I've always dreamed of supporting my family via my words. (I always expected that to be through writing; instead, it's been my oratory in teaching that has helped provide.) In that dream, I sit at my desk for hours each day, opening the veins of my imagination and letting the words flow forth. But that isn't happening. I should have known that would be the case, though: I have plenty of downtime in the summer, when I'm not expending energy on other projects. What do I do then? Well, historically, summers have yielded a lot (in 2019 I had 134,000 words in June and July; 162,000 in 2018), but those are all thanks to the writing retreats. Day by day, I get about the same, maybe a few hundred more words, than I do during the school year. I know, I know: It's a hobby. It's a passion, yes, but it isn't a job. If my ability to help pay for food were contingent on fingers on the keyboard, then I'd probably do things differently. That's fair: I know that I would think about writing differently if that were the case. The hard part with all of this is that I don't have a way of really knowing how well I could do it, as, in the back of my mind, procrastinating my writing now doesn't make me slightly edgy. Dinner will still be served even if I don't put another word into my current story. There's not much to say else: I write about this often (because it's something that preoccupies me, which I then turn into writing). It's a worry that I have--a useless worry (as most worries are), but a persistent one. Part of what's so silly about these ruminations is that, unless I get an agent and sell a book, it's all entirely moot. I keep gnawing on the bone when the animal itself has yet to even be taken down. Well, perhaps this will be the last confession I need to write. Maybe this will exorcise the demon of "I don't have the mindset to be a full-time writer" and I'll be able to find other ways of wasting my readers' five- to six minutes of reading time. Maybe. --- * If you don't believe me, I encourage you to sit down and write a short story of at least three thousand words, but only after you've done all of your other chores and responsibilities. If it was easy for you…well, I'm kind of jealous, honestly. You should let me read your story. If it was hard, well, yeah, that's my point. At the end of February, I decided to do something that was a greater sacrifice for Lent than I normally do: I gave up being on Twitter. I didn't delete my account (though I did ditch the app on my phone), and I had a couple of visits there (sometimes a link from a news article took me to Twitter; I watched a Dave Matthews livestream from his home and tweeted how much I liked it; my website automatically shares a link whenever I publish a new essay), but for the most part, I did exactly what I said.
Here's the thing: I'm not Catholic. I have a few acquaintances, mostly from my quidditch days, who are Catholic. That isn't to say that I've a lot of claim to the tradition. Like much of my understanding of Mormonism and the culture of the Church, I recognize that Protestant--and, sometimes, even Puritan--influences have dictated what my religious experience encapsulates. My choice to participate in Lent had more to do with a desire for a kind of religious solidarity within my own tradition: The safest sort of religious experimentation that a person could do. The impetus is actually years old: I was talking to Dan Harmon, one of my quidditch buddies, who was came to my school to talk to my creative writing students about screenwriting (which he had studied in college). I took him out for lunch once the school day was over, and he readily agreed to eating pizza, which he'd given up for Lent. In subsequent conversations, it turned out that Dan wasn't Catholic, he just liked participating in these sorts of religious traditions. (I don't know what his current stance is on any of this, as I've lost contact with almost every vestige of my quidditch life.) That inspired me to try the same thing, using my Mormonic upbringing to conceptualize it in a way that made sense to me. To that end, I decided that, if I was going to do something for Lent, I would need to give up something that I would genuinely miss. For Dan, he gave up pizza; for me, I gave up Twitter. See, I have a hate/tolerate relationship with Facebook, but Twitter is a different animal. In Twitter, I feel as though I'm getting glimpses of other parts of the world. Yes, there's the center of a Venn diagram there: I follow certain people because of mutual interest. Authors, book agents, fellow teachers, dinosaur lovers, and comic book geeks inhabit my Twitter feed. (I also, quite begrudgingly, follow all of my representative legislators, though none really uses the platform for much of substance.) I also have made it a point to include LGBTQ+ and people of color in my timeline to give me an additional dose of "I didn't know that". In other words, Twitter helps broaden my view of life and living, with a lot of interesting things going on. And, boy, there are a lot of things going on right now. COVID-19's ravaging of the world is worth talking about, and the solidarity and commiseration that happens on social media is definitely one of the best parts about this crisis happening when it has. We've all had a good laugh at a post that was shared by a friend, neighbor, or whoever that perfectly recreates our own feelings. It's times like this when social media is at its best. Giving up Twitter, then, was a really hard decision. I made it before the crisis escalated to the point that our country's leadership could no longer deny it, and I think that was a good thing. It meant that I had already made the decision, so I didn't have to try to rationalize whether or not to commit. I'd done so; only thing left was to keep the course. At first, it was pretty difficult. I'm quite used to Twitter and would jump on during loading screens of video games, when I had a random thought to share, or just because I was bored with the conversation happening around me. Its ubiquity brought me comfort and I definitely dealt with a type of withdrawal. What helped--and what, I think, is the point of Lent--was that, during those first few days off the platform, every time I considered what I wanted to do and had to reject the "Go on Twitter" impulse, I had to think why I was missing it. End result? Participating in Lent meant that I thought about Jesus a lot more than usual. I'm convinced this is the intent of Lent, as it was a more authentic sacrifice than almost anything else at that moment in my life. I could have given up wearing a man-bun for Lent, but that wouldn't have mattered at all because I don't normally wear--or even much care for--the man-bun look. And though Twitter can have great value, its largest contribution in my life was to burn time trying to learn something new amid the constant stream of thoughts and words, 280 characters at a time, scrolling across my screen. Losing that but replacing it with the thought of "Hey, this reminds me of Jesus and His sacrifice that's coming up" made a difference in my life. The downside of this, however, is two-fold: One, I learned that I still need/want to scroll through social media. Two, that itch wasn't lost as much as transferred…to Facebook. I'm not a fan of Facebook. At all. Yes, there are some positive things about the website, and it could even be a good tool for improving the world. And, of course, the vast majority of people who read this essay will have become aware of its existence via Facebook. (I get the irony, folks.) Anyway, Facebook (as an entity; not individuals utilizing it) is not really improving the world, and it likely never will, but hey, at least there was potential at some point. As it stands, I don't like the platform for a number of reasons. Some are petty and nitpicky (I hate the fact that it doesn't automatically post the most recent posts--the fact that you can switch things around, only to have it change depending on the device you're using only makes it worse), while others are larger (Facebook is better at ads, especially the way it culls posted information to sell more stuff that I don't really need…and, yes, Twitter does this, too; they're just not as good at it). But there's one thing about Facebook that really grinds my gears: I know (almost) all of these people. That may sound counter-intuitive, as that's the entire point of Facebook. But Facebook is like dancing in a car at a red light: You think that you're pretty much doing your dance by yourself, only to realize that everyone you went to high school with is sitting in the car next to you, watching you with mixtures of embarrassment and interest. If a person on Twitter dislikes my hottake on something, I can block them and move on with my life. Detritus is as detritus does. But on Facebook, many of the responses to posts come from "friends" that I've accumulated over the years. Blocking or unfriending them comes with strings; there's a diplomacy, a politics involved with no longer being a part of someone's Facebook life that isn't as apparent in Twitter. If I don't like following a celebrity or an author because she says something stupid, then there's no real loss there. Facebook, however, changes the dynamic. If someone I know says something stupid, then it's in my face, again and again (because of that idiotic "Top Stories" default). Under normal circumstances, I can roll my eyes and choose not to engage with Facebook at all. I get my itch to scroll scratched elsewhere. But this year's timing between Lent and the COVID-19 crisis has meant that I couldn't scroll through Twitter whilst waiting for my video games to load. Instead, I was on Facebook a lot more, which meant that I was exposed to bad ideas more frequently. (And why is it that the worst ideas of your friends are the ones that show up the most often?) When it finally got too much and my distaste for the platform reached its zenith was when a friend from my mission posted memes and comments criticizing, downplaying, or entirely dismissing the quarantine. Now, I am no defender of America's response to the pandemic: We had a lot of warning that was ignored from the top down, and we still have a false-hope narrative that disregards science and history to try to mollify people. Until a vaccine that is tested, proven safe and effective, and ubiquitous, my family--with our half-hearted son--will be endangered by any premature "return to normal". Choosing to let our son out of the house is actually a life-and-death decision that we will have to formulate going forward. America has lost over 20,000 people at the time I'm writing this, and it's probably higher due to underreporting of numbers. Our lives permanently changed when 9/11 saw a tenth that number die--COVID-19 is going to radically alter America and the world. So when friends--not internet strangers or possible troll/bot accounts, but people I've broken bread with, been in their homes, took classes with in high school or college--spread idiocy like, well, a virus, it gets beyond tiresome. It gets dangerous. And it isn't just that someone else might read their meme and think, Hey, the quarantine is stupid! Sure, that might happen, but the danger comes from the further spreading of disinformation that is too easily shared. For example, I heard someone talking about a handful of different COVID-19 related stories: Almost all of them were either false or unproven. It's as if people are unaware that Snopes exists. Being exposed to that is damaging to my mental health, because the message I hear from falsely optimistic people, or those who don't actually maintain appropriate distances, or who go to the airport to welcome home missionaries in direct defiance of Church and state requests is a simple one: The life of your family is irrelevant. Living with an at-risk member of the populace means that I can't, in good conscience, head to the store with a mask on and think all will be fine and dandy. Living with an at-risk member of the populace means that I could be a vector of disease. As I told my students, half-hearted people don't get to survive pandemics. The only way to save my son's life--again--is to lockdown my home and take every precaution that I can. And as much as I recognize the heartache and sadness that comes from not celebrating Easter as a large, rowdy extended family dinner, it also means that we don't have to miss going to the funeral of someone we could have otherwise protected. So, yeah. I'm not a fan of Facebook. That's where I see the most frequent eye-rolls and yeah-rights of the whole pandemic issue. Is Twitter a better place than its competitor? I honestly have no idea. I haven't been on Twitter in multiple fortnights. I will say this, though: The only way I get through this potentially months-long tragedy-in-waiting is through the help of my friends. And Facebook gives me a view of many of them that tells me that may be a false hope. I hate seeing that. I hate feeling and thinking that. Yet I can't shake the sentiment. I learned that, while giving up Twitter for Jesus was good for my soul, Facebook certainly wasn't. The hard thing is, there's still something that I desire from social media. I want…something that social media provides. If I can find a way to scratch that itch a different way, I'd probably be less stressed and worried. Maybe I should start an Instagram account… It has been two full weeks since I last saw all of my students. I said goodbye to them, expecting to see them again the following Tuesday, with some tentative ideas and plans for what to do if the COVID-19 community isolation were to go into effect.
It very well could be the last time that I get to see them all as their teacher. It has been almost two full weeks of online teaching and learning. On the parenting side, it's going…well enough. Since I have three boys, all of whom are in school, and both my wife and I are teachers--meaning we are online throughout a good chunk of the day--I'm not able to say that it's going flawlessly. We created a specific "bell schedule" that the kids follow pretty well (there are slip ups every day, but nothing like outright rejection of it), complete with wakeup times, family meals, and segments of the day set aside for practicing their respective instruments. I, too, make sure to put some time into drumming and guitaring. Our evenings are what they ever were, though there isn't really homework per se; the school work is, for the most part, worked on during our "school hours". So we're still working through the Marvel Cinematic Universe and I'm still playing video games and watching anime with my wife as the sky darkens. What's been hardest for me has, most definitely, been the online teaching. It isn't about generating lesson plans--I think (I hope? Maybe I'm deluding myself) that my familiarity with the content, the way I organized everything, and the way I've paced the unit on World War I has worked pretty well. If students are diligent and actually do what I provide for them when I sent it out, they probably spend about an hour--maximum--of work for me each day. But there are plenty of students who haven't even looked at their assignments--at least, from what I can tell. Some of them have dropped in for a history lecture (where I discuss some of what I would have told them in person, save I do it on the computer and they video-conference in); most of them are pretty much AWOL. This is frustrating to me because I do still care about my students and their well-being, but I have no tools for learning these things unless I see/interact with them somehow. I recognize that there's a lot going on; I also know that simply dropping everything will make it that much harder to pick everything up again later. And, let's be honest: That "later" is what makes this so difficult. We surely would all feel better if this had a deadline. Holding out until "when it's better" is much harder than "Holding out until June 15". The first one is so nebulous, and there are enough predictions and projections leading out for multiple months that it becomes overwhelming. At least if we had a deadline… Alas, that's not the case. In many ways, that's why I want my students engaging with the content. There are due dates, things to do, stuff that--in my opinion--matters and can help take their minds off of the weirdness of being inside for so long. And for me? Well, since 2008, I've never felt less like a teacher than I do now. In fact, when I was first interviewed for the job that I'm still going with, I told the group of people who were deciding my fate that I didn't want to be a "teaching vending machine, where kids can just get information from." My purpose has always been to use history and literature to get kids to think more deeply about what they think, how they see the world, and the correct way to behave in different situations. And while writing and reading work really well for me personally, fifteen- and sixteen year-olds tend to need a different approach. The in-class, in-person experience is really crucial to how I teach (which is not a surprise; I've believed that basically from the beginning), and it's the component of my job that is most damaged by the current crisis. I have, thanks to a necessary public health move, turned into a teaching vending machine. I enjoy the video conferences with my students that I have almost every day, but it doesn't really compare to what I'm used to. It lacks the dynamism of an in-class experience, if only because the students' microphones are muted or their cameras are off, so how can I hear and see them laugh at my comments and jokes? I can't have them converse with a neighbor, stand up and investigate something with their hands, or play some of the games that students enjoy. In other words, I'm not teaching how I want to--and best am able to--teach. There's little fulfillment in this, and without fulfillment, a job like teaching is not really worth the effort. I'm not alone in this. I would argue that the vast majority of teachers feel the same way. Yes, there are a handful for whom this is a break--they send out an assignment once a week or once a day or whatever and let it be while they binge Netflix and lounge about. I know this, because that's the at-home equivalent of how they run their classes. (None of the teachers with whom I work are that way, I believe; they do exist, however.) For the most part, however, teachers didn't sign up as online-content-coordinators. I'm grateful we have this much--I don't know what we'd do without the digital tools we have--but I'm also keen on not doing this for any longer than is necessary. So, how am I doing? In terms of productivity and work, I think I'm doing well. I feel I've struck a worthwhile balance on that front. But my own mental health and well-being? Not so much. No, I don't miss my commute. I don't miss wearing a tie. I don't miss having to bellow at students to get in uniform or to get to class. I don't miss the cramped hallways and the slaloming of middleschoolers down the stairs. But I do miss school. I miss doing my job. And I wish I knew when it would end. In response to the COVID-19 outbreak and the dismissal of schools, I've been working at home this past week. It's been quite a strain to figure out how to create a viable and valuable experience for my students with events moving so quickly. One area that I'm trying to keep going is my Shakespeare class, which is an elective and isn't really designed for circumstances like this. One of my students, however, passed on a suggestion from her dad: Write about how Shakespeare responded to the plague. It was partly in jest, but it sent me down a rabbit-hole of research and made me think more about how lucky we are to have Shakespeare at all. So, without further ado (and a special welcome to my students whom I've sent here as this week's assignment), here are some of my thoughts on Shakespeare and disease. Shakespeare Shouldn't Have Lived The bubonic plague was one of two major plagues that ravaged Europe throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance. This plague has been studied a lot, with many different hypotheses about its source, its transmission, and much more. Rather than wade into the controversy, it's clear that bubonic plague came from bacteria, probably thanks to ticks that lived on rats and thereby spread. (Hygiene is important, folks; wash your hands and don't keep pet ticks, I guess.) Bubonic plague caused a swelling of the lymph nodes (buboes is the word used to describe this process; hence the name) that led to harsh, darkly colored splotches on the skin. Sometimes the buboes would get so large that treatment involved lancing and draining the swollen areas. Needless to say (but I'll say it anyway), this often led to a painful death. Pneumonic plague was highly contagious from person to person via sputum (y'know, what one expels during a cough or sneeze) and tended to be highly contagious for the same reasons that we're concerned about the novel coronavirus. In both cases, people didn't know what was the cause of the diseases, nor how to combat it. They did find that keeping their windows closed and fires stoked seemed to reduce the risk--probably because the homes were too hot for the rats to visit and so they left more people uninfected. The Shakespeare home on Henley Street in Stratford-upon-Avon (which still stands to this day, is cared for by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, and, humble bragging here, I've visited twice) was near an outbreak of bubonic plague in 1564--the year that William Shakespeare was born. Park Honan, a biographer of the Bard, imagines a terrified Mary Arden Shakespeare doing everything she could to keep her first-born son, William, safe from an invisible, insidious disease. Having buried children already, it's safe to assume that Honan isn't too far off. In all honesty, William should have died in his cradle and been buried in the graveyard of the Holy Trinity Church. With plague being essentially everywhere, it's a miracle that he survived long enough to write anything at all. Outbreaks of plague varied in intensity and lethality (the worst, of course, was the Black Death between 1347 and 1351 where approximately one-third of Europe ended up dead…maybe as many as 200 million by the end of it, though the numbers are disputable), but was always an issue. There's a reason that mortality rates are often quoted as being so low in the past: Infant mortality was incredibly high, which drags down the overall mortality rate. In the case of John and Mary Shakespeare, their family would eventually number eight, though only one of their four daughters (the second Joan) survived to adulthood. (If you care to know, the birth order was Joan, Margaret, William, Gilbert, Joan, Anne, Richard, and Edmund. There are more details in Park Honan's Shakespeare: A Life if you're interested.) A Plague on Both Your Houses Shakespeare's adult life was predominantly spent in London. Countless hours of his life were spent on the boards of different theaters, mostly the Globe, where he enacted his own plays while writing new dramas that would fundamentally change the Western Canon. However, plague continued to, well, plague the City, which meant that there were major disruptions to his life because of the disease. On an almost week-to-week basis, the theaters could be closed if plague-deaths rose too sharply--say, thirty or forty deaths in the previous seven days--the playhouses would be closed. While there wasn't anything like advanced ticket sales to worry about reimbursing, Shakespeare and his troupe definitely lost money during times of public health emergencies. There were three different times when he had to close up the theater for a protracted amount of time, though: once in 1592, again in 1603 (with an outbreak so bad that the newly-crowned James I was unable to greet his English subjects), and lastly in 1607. The last one happened shortly after Lent, which was the only time that Shakespeare was steadily away from the theater anyway. So following a forced religious vacation, he then had a forced health hiatus. How long were these? Well, they varied: the Elizabethan closure saw him away from the stage for nearly twenty months, though there were a couple of brief seasons there. He spent almost a full year out of London in the 1603 outbreak, and something like sixteen months for the one four years later. Now, Shakespeare didn't rest during this time. Much like our shifting of habitual gears during our voluntary quarantine, there was still plenty to do. He just needed a place to do it. Many troupes would use this time as an excuse to get out of the packed city and out into the midlands of England, and Shakespeare's was no exception. In a way, it was a type of social distancing--rather than remaining in the cramped quarters of London, they would travel out into the countryside where they could tour from village to village, gaining a few shillings or so at each stop. For Shakespeare, he believed with the rest of the people of his time that it was the air--a miasma--that caused the sicknesses. Country air, it was believed, was more healthful and beneficial to the body. That fewer people were close together, a natural social distancing, is the more likely explanation as to why the country was, overall, less likely to be plague-afflicted. To go from place to place required money, of course, but it also required special permissions. A group of people couldn't simply travel through Yorkshire and put on plays at every town. If they tried, they could get in huge trouble. Not only that, but more puritanically-minded city-, town-, or village councils could reject the players before they even set up their portable stage. To overcome that, a troupe would need a patron. In the days of Queen Elizabeth, the players at the Globe were called the Lord Chamberlain's Men--they had the permission of the nobility to perform. This was a pass, as it were, to showcase their stories in many places throughout the realm. It was not, however, carte blanche, and there were ways of being overruled if a person of power took a disliking to them. With the advent of the Stuart king, the Lord Chamberlain's Men became the King's Men, with a royal dispensation to be allowed to perform. This allowed the company to continue on, despite the health problems besetting the country. Lessons Learned? As I researched and refreshed myself on this aspect of Shakespeare's life, I'm surprised by some of the things that are similar--and different--between our experience now and his. The social distancing was a natural consequence of being an agrarian society, one that we're far removed from. However, the government frequently took away the free exercise of market-behaviors from its people whenever the threat to the public's overall health was high. We haven't seen a lot of rebellion against this quarantine yet, and though it could very much be considered legal, there's always a possibility that the police powers that are being lightly used in our situation may turn into some nasty lawsuits later on. America isn't England--for obvious reasons--but we still have a tendency to do what we're asked when an existential threat like a disease threatens us. I'm also struck by the ingenuity of Shakespeare's work. He took the time to write additional plays--indeed, this may be one ingredient into why he was able to produce the staggering number of plays that he crafted--and diversified his skills by selling his pen to write some of his 154 sonnets. Like us, he surely got to spend more time at home and get to know his family a bit better. And, like us, that probably was a double-edged sword. I would be remiss if I didn't point out that disease stole away his only son, Hamnet, in 1596. There's not a lot to go on--a burial registry--but it's a stark reminder of the fragility of youth in the face of an invisible invader. Hamnet was 11; my second child turns 10 today. The idea that he would only have one year remaining him is too painful to entertain. I have no proof of this--after all, King John was written sometime in the 1590s, and perhaps even in 1596--but this speech given by Constance, a grieving mother, strikes me as reverberating with a greater depth of emotion than an imagination (even one as prodigious as Shakespeare's) would be unable to convey. I feel that these lines speak from experience: Grief fills the room up of my absent child, And there's also this to consider: Despite the dangers of living through these plague years, Shakespeare did survive. He gifted us the unparalleled endowment of his writing--another miracle, as is the fact that the writing was preserved--and changed the world as a result. Maybe, in a smaller way surely, we, too, will get through this difficult time with great gifts for the future.
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