Cogito, Ergo Sumana for 2020 April

# 03 Apr 2020, 10:38AM: Still Here: Still here. Still okay.

# 12 Apr 2020, 07:20PM: And Still Here: Still here, still okay. Hoping you are too.

# 21 Apr 2020, 12:18PM: Persisting: Today is our wedding anniversary. Instead of going out for a nice dinner, we'll .... do something at home. Maybe we'll remember a bunch of nice memories from the last fourteen years. Maybe we'll go through the Anniversary Gifts bot output and see if there's something we can make at home.

I've now sewn three fabric facemasks. For fabric I used old tech company tee shirts. For ties: elastic from free airline eyemasks, shoelace-like handles from fancy shopping bags, and the hemmed bits of the tee shirts. All of them are serviceable. I'll be trying to improve and, if I can get better, give some away.

We used this approach to gather and grow yeast using raisins, sugar, and water in a jar on a windowsill. Today Leonard's using it to make bread. We have some powdered dried yeast but are trying to save it. And we've been growing green onions in some jars of water on another windowsill. Their stalks keep pushing out new green growth. The most successful watercolor painting I've done so far is a portrayal of one of those bunches.

The pip 20.1b1 beta release is out. And Python 2.7.18 is out marking the very last, final, release of Python 2.7 and the end of the 2.x era. My household contributed to both of these things. Here's Leonard's pull request that adds an informational banner to the 2.7 docs. When I can concentrate on work or exercise or media it's better. The news is awful. I try to only listen to or look at it a few minutes per day.

There is light through the windows, along with the rain and lightning, and I see the tree branches in the wind, falling and rising, falling and rising. Every night at 7pm I know it's 7 because people start clapping and ringing bells from our windows and balconies, a gesture of support for the health care workers and all the other essential workers who are trying to keep us all going. I do it too. The other night I got out a little temple bell and started using that. Someone has a tambourine. A few nights ago someone started chanting "USA! USA!" and I recoiled; as I joked to a few friends, better to chant "South! Korea!" or "Germany!" since they're actually doing it right. And someone else has, a few times, played a recording of "The Star-Spangled Banner". As I mentioned to friends: well, the thing that works about that song now is that it's a question. Does that banner still wave? We don't know!

I also have joked: And is this the land of the brave and the home of the free, or the land of the scared and the home of the at home? But it's all those things, of course. And the rhetoric of that joke, as though you cannot be both at home and free, plays into the hands of foolish, even malicious shouters who prefer to swan around shedding and catching viruses, and to mob streets while braying about government restrictions, and refuse to love their neighbors.

I'm glad of the rain. It feels natural to be inside when it's raining.

# 27 Apr 2020, 06:00PM: Remote Sprint Tips: Every year, many developers of Python (the language itself, not just stuff written in Python) get together for a sprint. This year it will probably be virtual. How should that work? I offered to share my experiences and tips, the folks in the core development group asked me to do so, and I listed some tips. My approach is less "top-down schedule" and more "here's how to adapt to and support the emergent ways people will act".

# 30 Apr 2020, 04:50PM: What We Subsume: Still here.

I've gotten a lot better at sewing pleats on face masks, and have found that -- if I cut the material ahead of time -- I can usually finish a mask, or nearly finish it, while watching a one-hour lecture, or while on the kind of conference call where I say very little.

I sometimes remember to do the things that will help set me up for a better day.

Sometimes I notice someone saying, about telecommuting and distributed/remote/virtual conferences and paperwork moving online because of the pandemic: So we could have been doing this all along?! And I notice the "all along" because it's subsuming or blurring a more specific claim about how long we've been wastefully delaying. If you joined your institution in January and they said no to remote work, and now they're allowing it, then yeah, they could have said yes all along, because "all along" means "since January" and there have been very few advances/innovations in bandwidth and installed connections, hardware, software platforms (such as operating systems and servers), relevant software applications, relevant professional skills, etc. since January. But at least in the US, I think that even five years ago, and certainly ten or twenty years ago, there were lots of kinds of infrastructure that would not have been up to the task of moving work online. Of course, we should have been properly investing in those things, at all levels, so really I'm just quibbling and "well-actually"ing with some wording in a way that might not look great. I will be turning off comments on this one.

Irritability. Fluffy fanfic. Peanut butter on celery or apples. A hollow ache inside my torso. The whirr of the sewing machine. Other people's faces via videocalls -- oh how great a solace that is, for I love my spouse but I need some variety in the faces I see. Light through the window, always through the window. Endless emails from every organization that has ever heard of me, earnestly telling me what they are doing, or importuning me to do something, because the sky is falling and we all need to hold it up. Using a video game to pretend I am outside, to pretend I can visit a friend or stand on a rocky shore. Trying to be there for my friends, my family -- Leonard suggested we compile a list of funny YouTube clips to send to our sick friend and so we did and maybe it will be a tiny comfort to her. Watching the National Theatre plays and Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals and concerts and music livestreams and being overcome with gratitude for the artists.

Yesterday was the 29th, which means it was one of the days of the month that I would let myself drink alcohol (days with a 9 in them, so, the 9th, 19th, and 29th) and I just realized today that -- as the wording in my head popped out -- I forgot to drink yesterday. I briefly thought about making up for that day, but I think the fact that my reflexive phrasing made it sound like an obligation rather than an option reinforces the stricter part of myself, which says, no, wait till the next window comes round again.

I've made some good work and volunteer progress in the last few weeks! I've had some great laughs with my spouse and my friends, and I'm glad I'm getting better at sewing, and not all is gloom. Especially when I have a chance to help someone else. But at this very moment, this afternoon on this Thursday, oh readers and oh future self, Sumana is hearing and feeling the gears grind as she bears up under the load.

Sometimes we talk about that impossibly distant past, The Before Times. Back in the Before Times, I thought I would .... we signed up for .... we had just started.... it seemed like ..... Fewer of us use the corresponding phrase for the future: The After Times. Perhaps judiciously and perhaps superstitiously and perhaps exhaustedly, we decline to make predictions and plans. But right now is The During Times. Right? That feels right. Duration, during, endure, endurance. We are enduring. I hope you are too.