5/30 This is not a fight between two candidates, where if the right one wins, the problem will go away. 

As the verdict came out, I texted J a screenshot of it, without comment, just like that, which is not something we’d normally do. Two hours later, after I had taken the train to Newburgh, and we sat in a restaurant, she randomly changed the subject of our conversation, and told me, because she just had to, about the verdict, which she’d not normally do, and she hadn’t seen my earlier message.

J seems fully disillusioned with everything politics, and the American charade of it in particular. It does not mean that she hasn’t, of course, ordered two hundred postcards which she’ll write by hand before the election and send to voters in Pennsylvania. Of course I will help with that.

5/29 When composing, I try to find solutions that I myself did not expect, and which yet please me. All of these parameters are up for change. In fact, I should change all of them all of the time. Very different from what I do when writing.

5/28 So unaware of what’s locked up inside of me, so much revealed by a random poke.

5/27 True moment of wonder as we lay in bed Sunday morning under the open window and at around six, I heard some birds chatter and decided to use Merlin for the first time, and saw it indeed draw spectrograms of what I was hearing and identified, one after another, with a blinking blue dot: Northern Mockingbird, Carolina Wren, and American Robin. It is particularly mysterious to me as I don’t know any of these birds, I did not go to an American elementary school where you supposedly learn about them. (We saw a Magpie the other day in Sweden and J had never seen one of those.)

5/26 A book about awe that does not mention anything about the fragility of awe, how it cannot be defended.

5/25 Dug up the backyard with a digging-up machine, might call it a plow. (No, it’s a “rototiller”.) Big adventure. Almost biblical.

5/24 Patches of fog high up in the trees, even though the day is already brightly lit.

Worker at the storage service knows we’ve come to pick up a window A/C that’s been sitting there through the winter months. Everybody is doing that right now, as the temperatures have suddenly and decisively gone up into the eighties.

5/23 The fact that there was heavy rain this morning, so heavy that for a few minutes, I could not even see across the street from my apartment, seems more important to me than anything I’ve thought today.

5/22 Did the quiz to check my alignment with parties in the upcoming EU election. The order of parties is the same as ever, but my agreement with their positions has gone down from about 90% to barely 75%. There it is, my creeping Americanization.

5/21 I was quite proud having finally managed to set up the telescope in a proper equatorial alignment, and realizing that you only have to point its axis north very roughly to reap a lot of the benefits, such as being able to follow the moon for minutes just by turning the knob of the right ascension. My son had not been very convinced of this approach, but realized its superiority quickly, and rewarded us with some quite stunning views of craters through a high magnification lens. They looked as if drawn by pencil, across several badly scratched centuries. When we put him to bed, and reviewed what each of us considered the best parts of the day, those views of the moon consistently ranked on first or second place.