#30 / Don't Forget To Vote
Hey y’all,
I’m sure everyone is already aware of this, but I can confirm, once again, that vacations go by fast.
Friday was the last day of our two weeks of PTO. We got back into Chicago on Monday, having survived our first trip out of town together in *checks calendar* almost ten months. That’s unusual for us, but yeah, shit’s kind of unusual right now.
The area where we stayed in Northern Minnesota (near the town of Biwabik) is about a ten-hour drive from home, so to break things up, we stayed over for a night in Minneapolis. This allowed us to visit with Ashley’s family, who cooked us a lovely dinner and brought it to us at our Airbnb, which had a unique custom-built backyard area complete with pizza oven and koi pond (which, while cool, is actually a safety hazard).
Our last out-of-town trip, ten months ago, was also to Minneapolis, which means that we haven’t seen my family in even longer. So that’s the next order of business. The problem is that for months now, Chicago has had an emergency travel order that requires anyone coming into the city from a Covid “hot spot,” defined as any state with 15 or more cases per 100,000 population, to self-quarantine for 14 days. And the reason that’s a problem is that Ashley still has to physically go to work.
Nebraska is on the list, which has been the main obstacle to us making any plans to go visit.
The whole thing is a little Kafkaesque, because if Chicago wasn’t in Illinois, Illinois would also be on the list. If we really followed the logic of this, we’d have to quarantine after every time we leave the house. But none of this is really logical, so who cares about that? I think the best way to do it would be by county, rather than by state. States are large; there’s a lot of variance in which parts of a state have the highest exposure risks.
Case in point: a few days into our trip, we found out that Minnesota was being placed on the quarantine list. So, you know, that sucked. They had been doing so well! And we were in the sparsely-populated Iron Range, basically sitting in our cabin and hiking on trails all day. We did go to some restaurants for takeout and patio dining, and it’s true that most people up there are pretty conservative politically and—shall I put this delicately?—not the most adherent mask-wearers and social-distancers we’ve ever seen. But it’s not like we were bar-hopping in Minneapolis. The travel order is a crude instrument, is what I’m saying. It's true, though, that Nebraska as a whole has been doing markedly worse than Minnesota or Illinois, which is part of our concern.
Long story short, it turns out that in this unique situation, Ashley’s work is approving her return to the pharmacy on condition of receiving negative Covid test results, which we have now both received. So maybe we can do the same thing if we go to Nebraska. It has been almost a year since I’ve been in Nebraska, which I think is the longest amount of time I can say that about in my life. It’s also a completely normal and unremarkable thing to say, unless you are from Nebraska.
Minnesota Northwoods Trip, Days 1-2
It’s a bit overwhelming to think about doing a photo essay for the entire trip, because it was a week long, and because we took a lot of photos. So I’m making it into its own section, and doing it in stages over the next few weeks.
We’ll start with that Airbnb backyard in Minneapolis. You can see that it would be very easy to fall into the (quite deep) koi pond if you’re not paying attention, or are not in full possession of your faculties.
The next day, we headed north. Duluth, a city we adore, wasn’t far off the route to our cabin, so we decided to stop there for lunch. Right before you enter the city, there is a scenic overlook that provides incredible vistas of Lake Superior, the harbor, and the city at the base of the hill. These photos won’t do it justice, but we tried.
We ate lunch on the deck at Va Bene, overlooking the lake and the Aerial Lift Gate, which allows the gigantic lakers to steam into the inner harbor and collect loads of taconite from the Iron Range for delivery all over the globe via the St. Lawrence Seaway.
Then we drove another hour and a half north via the Old Vermilion Trail road to reach our cabin, the exterior of which was hand-hewn in the 1890s, and the interior of which was very recently renovated into a tiny house (and was thus quite modern and well thought out). We built a fire, and pretty much stared at it for the rest of the night.
A Perspective on Procrastination
One of my favorite topics so far in this newsletter. I'm leafing through a short little booklet I bought from The School of Life (which, check it out if you don't know) called "Procrastination: How To Do It Well," which, like the Lichtenbergianism I detailed a couple weeks ago, takes an admirably fatalist approach to time-wasting (it's going to happen; the question is how to manage it).
A favorite section is, of course, "A Brief History of Procrastination" (because history). This is so comforting, in a perverse way. While we "have history against us" for having been born in a terrible time for procrastinators, the history also proves that it doesn't have to be this way.
- 10,000 BC: Procrastination is rare and distraction barely exists; you don't need to think, and you only have to work a few hours per day
- The Roman empire, 100 AD: Idleness is prized; everyone is assumed to hate working; the goal of life is put off anything difficult forever (only possible for an elite few)
- York, England, thirteenth century: Work is dictated by a master, or the realities of being a peasant or a noble; ritual and tradition are paramount and every action has its allotted time, across society; nobody is expected to be original and projects proceed very slowly
- London, mid-nineteenth century: Work has become sacred, idleness is a vice, and the pursuit of money is a virtue; society begins to feel frenetic and people begin to complain of not having any time
And I wanted to transcribe the section on the contemporary world in full. It's kinda depressing, but remember that a lot of this pressure derives from norms and customs that we're not really bound to (although privilege plays a major role in the extent to which one can "break the rules").
Work is our new religion. We are the sum total of our achievements. We could always be doing something more. At the same time, possibilities for distraction have increased exponentially. The internet is necessary for almost every activity but is—by a tragic error—the richest source of distraction ever invented. The most ambitious, insightful minds on the planet strive ceaselessly to entice us towards novel ways of amusing ourselves when we should be working—opportunities for procrastination are massively multiplied and pushed widely and deeply into our lives. Employment is insecure, any failure can be fatal. There is pressure to justify our existence every day. Procrastination becomes a central secular sin, the intimate revelation of a lack of fitness for life; yet the inducements to, and opportunities for, procrastination are at an all-time high. Dentistry and plumbing are excellent, but with respect to work, we deserve genuine pity and tenderness for having the misfortune to be born into this phase of world history.
Mood
After posting last week’s list of the music we’d listened to up to that point on the trip, I realized that it contained exclusively white artists. So we chose to rectify that on the way back to Chicago:
- Benjamin Booker
- Blackalicious
- Janelle Monáe
- Noname
- TV on the Radio
https://open.spotify.com/track/7qk0JiIuL72IDeADaj1nSY?si=WwzjzZ8BRQisjxbIzI6NBg
https://open.spotify.com/track/4z5L0qDduw3w1apQ4Qa6KV?si=lwhH60tmTJGgP4aDg67j2Q
https://open.spotify.com/track/2EznBGrlmx9wBeYgyDojsA?si=0hG8Lpm1TcWubZu6XshPVw
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Thanks for reading. Please take care, and write back if you can!
Love,
Aaron