“I used the last of the miso paste... how irresponsible of me,” I said, to the extended family—aunts, uncles, colleagues, grandparents, TAs, partners, and gurus—gathered before me in our vacation home in a farflung part of Maine.
And what a waste it was! The communal bowl of soup I planned to make for my beautiful community, that sojourned with us to this REMOTE and SAFE part of the country, was ruined. For reader, you should know I dallied and let the miso soup come to a boil. And if you're in the know, a connoisseur perhaps, you'd be sanguine as I am at this very moment. Whatever health benefits (probiotics and healthy gut bacteria) this enormous carafe of soup might have has vanished. It was just a salt bomb in waiting, one I was going to drop on my entire community. I am ashamed. But we still have movie night, and we have agreed to watch a marathon of Goddard’s most Marxist films. It's in times like these—so confusing and chaotic—that you really feel the political spirit boiling. At least the crisis lays bare for me and my family that things have to change! Till then, we'll be on the lookout for miso paste in the co-op market a close drive away.
* * *
This, I imagine, is the demented diary entry a tenured professor of political theory is cooking up in their brain right now, getting ready to send to their editor at a tony literary journal, maybe a review of books or something more obtuse, like a magazine called “The Tip.”
A whole genre of the quarantine dispatch has emerged in the last few weeks, one that is of little news value. It's what you might call the self-consciously bougie quar-diary. These little personal essays are distinctly materialist, obsessively cataloging the objects and places (all owned, never rented) that sustain the life of of people not dealing with what's happening right now very well. They often involve food and the making of food (bread, noodles, soup, the artisanal version of anything). They bemoan the loss of creature comforts. They are thankful for their “communities” and families who've been able to gather around them, usually in their second or third home.
Even in their attempts at self-deprecation and introspection, I think these musings from the upper crust reveal how secretly or not-so-secretly callow people are as others suffer to keep their daily life mostly safe. (A PRIME EXAMPLE IS THIS RECENT TWEET: “Something people aren’t really talking about that is pretty serious if/when it happens: cracking your Iphone screen under confinement while all repair shops are indefinitely shuttered!”)
It's galling, especially now, when a form of solidarity in social distancing can be something as simple redistributing your wealth to first responders and the ill. (And maybe people writing these dispatches are doing that. But it doesn't seem to be the first thing on their mind...)
I miss my comforts, too, and have terrible thoughts all the time about what this all means. But I also know complaining and kvetching about what you miss is a way to make what's happening right now a personal abstraction at best and selfishly taking space at worst. I can tell you from firsthand knowledge that everything changes when you know someone in danger. No one should have to go through that, but maybe think first before you post your next bougie dispatch. Not everything is fit for print, or even worth blogging about.
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