On having nothing to say

Maybe it’s time to listen to my mother

Could the Zoom platform we are all relying on day after day really be malware? How do humans protect against the unintended consequences of AI?  Can there really be more Kennedy family members missing at sea?

It’s Friday night and I’m sitting on the couch in our dark living room. Janyce is sitting on the other end of the couch and our feet are touching. She has her laptop. I have mine.  

“What are you doing?” I say, as I see her shift her computer to open. Only moments ago, I heard her talking to the dog. “Not yet,” she said. “It’s too early to go to bed.”

“I’m going to watch my show,” she says.

“Keeping me company?” I say, and then, “I have nothing to write about.”

“Oh boy,” she says. 

But it’s true this time. Nothing. When I woke up this morning to the sunlamp in the room, to WGBH on the radio, to the rain coming down sideways and hitting the window, I didn’t feel my pulse quicken and I didn’t call out to Google to turn up the volume so I could listen intently to the news. It felt like an average morning. I still had hours to make the oatmeal, drink the coffee, and put on something presentable from the waist up. Shirt, earrings, eyeliner.  

By late afternoon I found myself wandering back to the dining table during a lull in my daily meetings, setting my laptop down and scanning the news headlines for the latest shock. But the latest just felt like more of the same. Turns out the pandemic on week four is numbing. I’ve now possibly consumed too many first-person accounts of horror for my system to register them anymore: a pregnant nurse’s daily routine in the emergency room; a single mother, sick and with a positive test result, trying to entertain her toddler all day in quarantine; a 33-year-old perfectly healthy young man succumbing to the illness for no apparent reason. Still there are questions that have my brain on edge today from perusing the latest spate of articles on the BBC website.  Could the Zoom platform we are all relying on day after day really be malware? How do humans protect against the unintended consequences of AI?  Can there really be more Kennedy family members missing at sea?

“I’m calling to find out if you are making pizza for pick up and how does this work now?” I said into the phone at 3:45, while Janyce was starting a fire in the woodstove. Outside the rain was unrelenting but now more like a heavy mist hanging in the air, dripping from the bare branches, reminding me of what community spread of the virus might actually look like outside if we could see it.

“Good news” I said to Janyce. “Turns out they are handling the take-out the same way the wine store is handling it. You order and pay over the phone and call the restaurant from the car and then they will bring it out to you. We’ll just pop the trunk.”

We ate the pizza on the couch while watching a new Netflix program and drinking another nightly glass of wine, the rain a constant metronome, the soundtrack of monotony to another night of screen viewing.  

“You never heard from Celia?” I say.

“I did actually,” says Janyce, nodding in the dark, and looking up from her screen. “She said bless you and your family.”

We both made the decision weeks ago that the least we could do with our good fortune, our safe haven in our comfortable house and with our steady salaries, at least for now, was to pay it forward. I’d send my colorist the money I had put aside for my hair that month, we’d pay our dog walker who we told not to come any more and we’d make a sizable donation to the food pantry in our town. We’d also take turns paying Celia twice a month to no longer clean our house, even as I walk past the dust under the table in the bedroom and frown at the soap smears running down the inside of the shower in my bathroom. 

The other day, when I was complaining about the boredom and anxiety of my life in lockdown to my mother in a text she typed back only one word.  

Adapt.

There are a million things I could be doing with my extra time. Cleaning the house is one of them, or taking many online yoga classes, or trying to beat my walking time every day, maybe even starting to jog again. I could read all the dense books in my bookcase over for a second time. I could finish cleaning my garden. I could rake the entire yard.

I read an article in the New York Times the other day that made me feel a little better about doing nothing and having nothing to say.

In “Stop Trying to Be Productive,” the tagline reads: “The internet wants you to believe you aren’t doing enough with all that “extra time” you have now. But staying inside and attending to basic needs is plenty.”

Is it?   

After staring at a blank computer screen for an hour or more since Janyce and the dog have left the room and gone to bed, I shut off the computer finally, too. 

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It’s Saturday morning and we’re sitting up in bed in the dark room with only the light from the window on yet another rainy day. I’m listening to the windchimes, the birdsong, and less cars than usual passing on the street. 

“I like their forsythia,” says Janyce looking over to the neighbors’ yard. “I hope they leave it wild like that, it’s nice to look out the window and see the yellow.”

“I agree,” I say, and take another sip of my coffee.

The coffee is good.  It’s 7:00 am and my laptop is open again. The heat in the house kicks on.

“What are you going to do today?” I say. 

“I’m going to do a little work, get a workout in, clean the house,” she says. “What about you? Is it almost time for me to do my editing?” 

“No,” I say, “I’ve got nothing. But wait, never mind, yes, I think I’m done.”  

“Okay, give me a minute to refill the coffee,” she says.  

“And, I think you’re going to have to dig a little deeper going forward.” She leans over to me, stretching out to kiss me on my shoulder while simultaneously reaching for my empty coffee mug.  “Because this is it.”