something like a future
Sometime around 2018, I decided that I was no longer doing work on the weekends. Sometimes this meant that I worked furiously on Fridays to get things done; more often, it meant that I pushed things to Mondays and just ignored my usual anxiety about being caught up. What the fuck does caught up mean, anyway? I’m in my thirties and I own a house. I will never be caught up. Things will be either fine, deteriorating, or freshly repaired until I die. Realizing this made it much easier to declare that Saturdays and Sundays were newly sacred.
In quarantine, weekends don’t actually mean anything, except that we definitely don’t go to the store, preferring to wait until Mondays. Saturdays and Sundays exist only as syllables on a calendar that we don’t need to look at. But as all of us have learned, it’s the charade of a routine that keeps the weeks grinding on, keep time passing, keep us thinking that there’s something like a future.
On this Saturday, I made us buttermilk pancakes, since buttermilk is now A Thing I keep on hand. I keep lots of things in the fridge and pantry I normally never would: not just buttermilk, but harissa, and everything bagel seasoning, and thirty-six eggs, and grass-fed local beef. Part of it is stockpiling, of course; my twice-weekly trips to the grocery store now happen half as frequently and cost three times as much. But also because cooking gives me something to do, some way to portion the days into hours, makes me feel like I am preparing for something, and finally, some small way to celebrate another day that we have passed. Things that we used to go out for—fish tacos, burgers, grilled pizza—we make at home now, and we drink them with craft beer and pretend that it’s the same.
That pretending stretches into the weekends, as we pretend that weekends mean anything to two academics not teaching in a summer during a pandemic. We make pancakes with blueberries, and watch movies during the day, and read books, as if we need two days of rest from our previous five days of rest. Quarantine is teaching us new things, and reinforcing old things: that much of survival is grounded in routine, that each meal can be a celebration, that it’s okay to draw curtains against the sun and put on a movie in which cities are still bustling and people hug each other and eat at restaurants. It is not normal, not even close, but it is just not-normal enough that it feels normal, and if I don’t think too hard about it, it could almost be.