1/12 It’s so funny, and a little embarassing, when J tells me just how anti-social I am towards my co-workers, even though I really don’t want to be. Except I don’t know what to talk about.

1/11 Florida bizarre the moment you land. The gigantic parks and resorts do not actually seem to be parks and resorts because there is nothing that is not a park or a resort, or a road between them.

1/10 Team offsite in Orlando. After that, Europe. My anxiety before long trips like that is undeniable, surprising, and increasing. It’s unnecessary. I should develop ways to tame it.

1/9 Made the wheelchair essay available. The death of Twitter makes it feel like I’m thrown back all the way to 2009, when there were months between likes and people would show up and start following me maybe once a week or less. I love being back in that time.

1/8 This is unexpectedly beautiful: No matter how much I mess up the menuet, no matter how far I get lost, she’ll be able to find me with her violin instantly and get us both back on track.

1/7 Spent half an hour shoveling out J’s car in front of her house so we could drive to the diner. The snow was about two feet high, all around the car, and for much of it I had to walk across the street with each shovel to empty it on the other side. When we got back from the diner, another car was parked in that spot. Technically legal, oh yes, it’s a public sidewalk, and yet, anyone can see that it’s the spot of whoever lives in that house. What a dick move. We fantasized how that car would get accidentally scratched by a key sticking out of someone’s bag, or somebody pouring hot water over the windshield to make it crack. As a more pedagogical approach, I was about to shovel a big heap of snow onto that car’s windshield.

We were lucky to realize our pettiness. It’s the stuff that sows animosity in a neighborhood forever. We could park across the street in the snow, using the downhill slope to help us get out of it if necessary. If we had been in need of a parking spot in a neighborhood that was fully snowed in, we would have done the same as that driver.

1/6 Watched Biden’s speech at Valley Forge. Not once, actually, but twice: in the evening shortly after he gave it, and then again in the middle of the night in my usual cannot-sleep period. Nobody else here would do that, not J, not her brother. I feel I have a naive kind of sincerity to myself which makes me watch and care for something like this, very different from just about anybody I know. But it turns out that not too long ago, J would also watch, for example, a State of the Union, but not anymore, she feels too disillusioned now, she says.

1/5 As I drove to the pool this morning – which would turn out to be closed for repairs –, I had this brief moment of checking the flashing turn signal indicator in the dark dashboard which felt just like it had when I drove my first car – actually my mother’s – as an eighteen-year-old. I am stunned by how incredibly far away that time feels, almost as if it could not have been my own life, but the story of someone else of which I have a strangely vivid memory. I also wonder if for those who live in the same town all their lives it somehow feels closer, and less long ago.

¼ Spending a lot of time on the menuet. I have only thirteen days left and my progress seems far too slow, far too insecure. Trying to find out what is the most effective length of my practice sessions and how much time I should leave in between so my brain can do its work. This is all new to me. I really don’t like this brute force approach with looking at nothing but the keyboard, but it’s my only option right now.

1/3 The more technology we have, the more helpless we are without that technology. That is: more helpless than even before that technology was introduced. (cf. the passage in David Gramm’s The Wager saying the shipwrecked English sailors are way more helpless than the indigenous people who find them, and that is not just because they don’t know the environment. They are dependent on a far larger network of civilization.)