By Any Other Nerd

Estimated Reading Time: 4.5 minutes Welcome to  stranger days--my blog series  exploring daily life, challenges in times of the COVID-19 pandemic, and just sharing insights or thoughts about how to make it through these days.   Today is day three of a new activity that my partner and I decided to pursue. Readers here (and friends in general) know that I'm a runner and like running.  But I've been trying o do more body work since just running isn't probably ideal. I've been doing some weight exercises with reasonable results (at least in terms of reps and even some muscle development).  But my partner too was looking some type of exercise that she could use because we're both sitting and staring a lot at screens--not ideal for our backs or bodies in general. Our current yoga studio She proposed the idea of doing yoga in the morning and since this week, my schedule opened up even more, I decided to start.  But for those familiar with yoga know, ...

Estimated Reading Time: 4.5 minutes Welcome to  stranger days--my blog series  exploring daily life, challenges in times of the COVID-19 pandemic, and just sharing insights or thoughts about how to make it through these days.   When leaving a job, of your own volition, there is a weird dance that happens. I aim to give them ample time to prepare for the absence because I care about the folks that I work with but I'm also making a definitive decision to leave the day-to-day work life I've established with folks for years. In many ways, it's the classic "It's not you; it's me." (And sometimes, it is the reverse).    But leaving a job in the middle of a pandemic and encroaching economic turmoil is its own stranger dance. So what is all this reflecting about?  Well, today is my last day at Brandeis University. I am leaving for a new position at another institution and while I'll have much to say about that in a future post, I wanted to focus this one...

Estimated Reading Time: minutes Welcome to  stranger days--my blog series  exploring daily life, challenges in times of the COVID-19 pandemic, and just sharing insights or thoughts about how to make it through these days.   My mug of choice My path to coffee is not a straightforward one--I didn't really like it or drink it until I started doing overnight work in my mid-20s. And even then, it was a half-coffee/half-chocolate mix that the Barnes & Noble cafe got me hooked on.  However, I eventually moved from expensive store-bought to doing cold-brew coffee in my fridge so that I always have a  gallon ready and a gallon brewing (I don't drink a gallon a day--to be clear; those I've definitely done half that on occasion).  But for the last 15 years, I have been firmly in #TeamCoffee.   It doesn't mean I wouldn't drink tea but it was often a second choice beverage or my replacement for a diet soda when eating out in the last year....

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes Welcome to  stranger days--my blog series  exploring daily life, challenges in times of the COVID-19 pandemic, and just sharing insights or thoughts about how to make it through these days.   For those of us lucky enough to be homebound during this month, I've seen such a surge of creativity from friends, colleagues, and strangers on the internet. I generally think of my friends as creative and interesting but it's great to see the projects they are working on from knitting to art to poetry to video and audio projects and so much more.   I am grateful that folks are both finding ways to cope as well as opportunities and bandwidth to embrace their creativity.  It's so great to see and enjoy during these times.   I, too, have also experienced this creativity flowing in terms of my writing.  Beyond now writing some 30 days of posts (a feat not usually performed on this blog unless I am doing a 365 p...

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes Welcome to  stranger days--my blog series  exploring daily life, challenges in times of the COVID-19 pandemic, and just sharing insights or thoughts about how to make it through these days.   Since starting this series, I've taken a few opportunities to post about books that I am reading ( Here and here ).  And while I've continued to read since I last posted, it's mostly been books that I'm reviewing for elsewhere so I haven't been able to share them or they have been books that I couldn't quite relate to this series.   I have no doubt that I will have more books to recommend in the days to come but I also wanted to highlight the abundance of places for you to enjoy, whether your interests are finding fantastic fiction, enjoyable audiobooks, comic books, or more academic and nonfiction work.   First up, I have already mentioned The Internet Archive's National Emergency Library which has about 1.2...

Estimated Reading Time: 5.5 minutes Welcome to  stranger days--my blog series  exploring daily life, challenges in times of the COVID-19 pandemic, and just sharing insights or thoughts about how to make it through these days.   I've heard it said that much about addiction is about chasing the elation of the first experience.  Trying to recreate the dopamine payout but never quite getting there. This description also reminds me of how memory works. We are often not remembering the event itself but recalling the last recollection of it; a reflection of a reflection that may be endowed with many flaws.  In both cases, it's a sense of trying to get to something one simply cannot get to.   I've been thinking about that for the past week as it relates to my experience with eating.  I've always had a struggle with it and being homebound for four weeks with an abundant fridge, ample stress, and a range of emotion (the last two being big trigg...

Estimated Reading Time: minutes Welcome to  stranger days--my blog series  exploring daily life, challenges in times of the COVID-19 pandemic, and just sharing insights or thoughts about how to make it through these days.   So it's been a month--at least I think it's been a month. It's definitely been a long time now that I've been working from home.  And while I've talked about the ways we have rearranged the apartment during this time , what we've been doing in the yard , and what Arlington is looking like these days , I thought I would focus this post on sharing the different headphones that I'm using throughout this.   Let me first state, I know how entitled and American this may sound--having no less than 4 of the same type of equipment. There's no real justification for this but there are some relevant reasons for having 4 different items.   The primary reason is that listening conduits like headphones are important to me becaus...

Wasteland: The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror by W. Scott Poole My rating: 5 of 5 stars Poole's work is a fascinating study of modern horror as part byproduct of World War I. Drawing upon a host of creators in Europe and the Americas, he explores how so much of their work in horror, directly and indirectly, was derived from the devastation, destruction, and violence that came with the war. He links much of the body horror (Phantom of the Opera, Frankenstein, Nosferatu) with the returning of soldiers from war with missing body parts and scarred bodies; kept alive when they might previously have died, they brought constant reminders of the war for decades to come. Poole's work is quite convincing as he draws on people such as H.P. Lovecraft, Fritz Lang, F. W. Mirnau, Max Ernst, Andre Breton, James Whales, Lon Chaney, Arthur Machen, T.S. Eliot and many others, showing their connections to the war or the ways in which their works channeled the fears...

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes Welcome to  stranger days--my blog series  exploring daily life, challenges in times of the COVID-19 pandemic, and just sharing insights or thoughts about how to make it through these days.   On Sunday, my partner and I were going for a long walk. It was a nice day in terms of weather and we needed just to get out.  We took a route that we figured would be little trafficked.  We live near a bike-path and know that on days like this, it gets lots of folks. While that's a problem during the pandemic, it also frees up other sidewalks all around because folks can't seem to resist it. So we traversed our neighborhood and discovered some interesting things. We knew it was Easter but weren't thinking much about it until we passed by this house on our walk with its yard display.  We wondered if it was akin to the Bear Hunts that seems to have died out (or maybe Bear-Hunting season passed?) that happened a few weeks ago. ...

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes Welcome to  stranger days--my blog series  exploring daily life, challenges in times of the COVID-19 pandemic, and just sharing insights or thoughts about how to make it through these days.   I intended this post to be about the Easter Bunny--no really--but it will have to wait until tomorrow.  Instead, I awoke and accessed the internet and immediately had "THOUGHTS" that needed expressing.   For a couple days now, I've noticed my feed fill up with a series of mentioning or posting of senior photos from high school by folks like me who have spent more of their life out of high school than in.   The commentary accompanied by it is usually something along the lines of "show your support for seniors by posting your senior photo". On one level, it's a kind gesture of solidarity but scratch the surface a little bit and it largely falls apart .  So here are my thoughts about it: 1.  It's u...