Routines Gives Covid Days Structure and Builds Anticipation

by
Scott D. Parker

It’s not often when the day job and the fiction job intersect, but they did this week.

On the day job front, we had our weekly team meeting yesterday. We’ve got a team of about 25 folks and, ever since 16 March, we’ve been working from home. Fridays are our Zoom calls and we get to see each other’s faces and enjoy an hour of camaraderie.

Yesterday, the grandboss asked how we were doing. And not in a flippant way, but an honest deep dive into how we were coping with the new paradigm of remote working. How were we feeling? How are we getting along with our families? The discussion was good with a few of my team members relating the sameness of our day-to-day lives. One of us commented that she sometimes realized that she needed to just get up out of her chair and walk outside to break up the monotony of her home office.

On the internet and Facebook this week, a few of my fellow writers voiced their frustration with the inability to write ever since the Coronavirus descended over all of us. When we’re all stuck at home with few prospects of getting out to typical places like movie theaters, theme parks, or seemingly every other summer tradition, how the heck can we harness the creativity to write?

I can’t answer these questions, but I can answer them with techniques I use that gets me through each day and each week.

Routine and Built-in Anticipation

Some of y’all will read this and chuckle. You may even give me a hard time. Don’t worry about it: my family gives me a hard time about it, too, but I still carry on.

Maybe it’s a sign of my age (51) but I seek out routine and thrive in it.

On the creative side of things, I hold one rule steadfast: write first thing in the morning. No internet. No email. Nothing other than a cup of coffee, a Bible reading, and the immediate opening of the laptop to work on a story. For the past month, it’s been edits and revision to my next book. Soon it’ll be a return to new stories, but, above all else, I carve out the time to be creative when the world is still dark and I’m the only one in the house awake. It was a routine I needed to create, but now that I have, it’s one of my favorite parts of the day.

This routine paid for itself on Monday of this week when, after I had a productive session, I logged into my bank to pay bills and discovered one of our checks had been stolen and forged. Yes, money had also been stolen. It’s resolved now, but the point is this: had I not already done my creative work, I did not have the mindset to be creative after that discovery. So, write in the morning before the day gets to you.

Building Anticipation

How good is a tuna fish sandwich? How valuable is movie night? How do these things relate to each other?

I love tuna fish sandwiches. It’s one of my favorite things to each for lunch. I branch out and try different recipes, often with salads, but the good, old-fashioned tuna fish sandwich is one of my favorite comfort foods.

But ever since I started working from home, I limit the traditional tuna fish sandwich to my Friday lunches. Why? To build anticipation. I’ll admit I look forward to lunches everyday because not only does my entire family of three eat together, but my wife and I play three games each of backgammon and Yahtzee. But I only eat tuna fish sandwiches on Fridays. Now, my family gently ribs me about this, but I can’t tell you how good that tuna sandwich tastes after a week of anticipation. Yesterday’s sandwich was particularly good. It’s something I look forward to all week long.

Ditto the Friday Night Movies. In the summer of 2020 when Covid has robbed us of a typical summer movie blockbuster season, I invented one. I’ve been revisiting summer movies from the past with even-numbered anniversaries (i.e., years ending in 0 or 5) and it’s been fun. But my point is that Fridays are movie nights. The other six days, sure we can watch a movie (we rarely do; the wife and I watch TV shows every night), but the special day is Friday.

Just like the tuna fish sandwich, I look forward to movie nights all week long. I build the anticipation, and that makes the sometimes monotonous days go by faster. And it makes Fridays all the more special.

Saturday mornings are do-nuts from Shipley’s, a cartoon (currently Scooby Doo: Mystery Incorporated) and every episode of The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. Saturday nights feature the Texas Music Scene TV show. Sunday mornings are online church. Every night at 9pm is our TV show time (about to start season 6 of Bosch). Friday night (lots of Friday things) is also cocktail night. Thursday is often take-out food night.

Yes, there are times when the wife makes tuna fish on a Tuesday and I’ll opt out. Yeah, really. It’s to keep those Friday lunches special. It’s to build anticipation.

So that’s a glimpse into how I’m coping with working from home and maintaining my creativity.

How are you doing?
 

Needed: Humanity

By Claire Booth

I’ve been thinking a lot lately, about how much we need one another. And how much the two big current issues have proven that.

Coronavirus has cut off everybody’s contact with everybody else. No get-togethers, no taking my laptop and working at the coffee shop, no school, no anything. Necessary, absolutely. For me, it’s driven home how much even small, everyday, in-person interactions matter for mental health. And then there are the normal markers of time that have excruciatingly evaporated—Easter egg hunts in April, baseball in May, swimming in June. Right now, my God, I just want to have a barbecue.

Our second need for one another comes with Black Lives Matter. The need to look through a lens that is not your own, to see the world as it affects others, and then to affect change. It’s not a new problem, that’s for sure, but right now we absolutely need one another to push this forward, to keep the momentum going.

So there we go. Humanity in contact, humanity in connection, humanity in equality. And as I write this on the Fourth of July, a hope that the future brings all three.

Ordinary and Loving It

By Claire Booth

I went to a bookstore yesterday. Such an ordinary sentence. Once. Such an ordinary act. Before.

Now it was like a rock concert, a hug from a friend and dinner in a restaurant, all rolled into one. Hopefully we’ll get back to those three someday, too. For now, though, I’ll take my bookstore and be damn grateful for it.

California is slowly loosening its coronavirus restrictions, and retail businesses are now allowed to open their doors to limited numbers of people at a time. My happy place, Face in a Book bookstore in El Dorado Hills, Calif., decided on a maximum of four customers at a time. They’d been offering free local delivery for a while, which was great—but not a lot of browse-able fun. So yesterday, I was there, my masked nose pressed eagerly against the glass as I waited my turn to get in.

Once inside, two other customers and I kept our distance and soaked in everything on the shelves. Cookbooks, gardening, the new Mary Kubecka, a biography of Billy the Kid, the Hunger Games prequel, so much more. After restraining myself from actually touching every book in the store, I was rewarded by getting to talk to a friend. She works there and we were able to catch up. What would have pre-Covid been a nice chat became, now, a meaningful, wonderful conversation.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve been places since the pandemic started. I’ve gone to the grocery store and the hardware store. I’ve gone into work a few times when I couldn’t do an office task from home. But this … this was a place I wanted to be. Those other outings were getting on with living; this was getting on with life.

The Clampdown

By David Nemeth

I'd like to say I have some witty hot takes about the pandemic and subsequent quarantine – actually, I probably do have a couple, but I won't be sharing them here. The internet overflows with posts like that.

I could write about this is not the time introverts have been waiting for. It's not. Introverts do not want to be trapped in a dwelling with other people.

Do something or do nothing.

Have I found some magical process that helps me discipline my time better? No. Binging and surfing still have a strong pull.

There's the dread that fills the empty spaces.

Guinness on draught, dinner with friends, and watching soccer in the stands are some of the things I miss.

I think of my wife's Aunt who passed away several weeks ago, and I wish I could drink some bourbon with a friend who's grandmother recently died.

I wait.

I read.

An Unprecedented Mother's Day

By Claire Booth

This is not going to be an eloquent essay on motherhood. This is not an eloquent time. This is a hanging-off-a-cliff-by-your-fingernails time. So this Mother’s Day you deserve to be lauded for surviving:

- lockdown,

- quarantine,

- toilet paper rationing,

- The Tiger King on Netflix,

- working from home,

- pointing out that you’ve always worked from home because motherhood is work, and isn’t it nice that everybody else is getting a dose of it right now,

- trying to sew a face mask that someone would actually agree to wear outside,

- homeschooling,

- having to cook actual legit dinners because everyone is home at 6 p.m. and staring at you like they’re members of the Donner Party,

- Zoom meetings,

- homeschooling,

- really, really wanting a happy hour with your friends to take place in person,

- the complete absence of sporting events and the corresponding sad, aimless wandering of certain family members through the house,

- caring for sick relatives,

- Common Core math classes,

- guilt over totally giving up on screen time limitations,

- cleaning up the leftover mess from craft projects and wondering where they got glitter because you could swear there was none in the house,

- cats who can’t stand you by now and dogs who are starting to feel the same way,

- antsy kids who just want to go outside and play,

- “unprecedented” everything,

- being reminded even more than usual that you have no idea what you’re doing,

- taking grim satisfaction in the fact that no one else knows what they’re doing either.

If moms are heroes every Mother’s Day, think about what they are this year. Send them your love, and your congratulations that they’ve survived it all. Because we’re moms, and that’s what we do.

Happy Mother’s Day.