A couple of Tuesday . . . OK, yes, it's Tuesday . . . a couple of Tuesday morning observations. First, and you've heard this from me before, the "dew point," which is that temperature where, with the amount of moisture in the air, dew will form. You could think of it as a sort of saturation point. Right now the dew point here is 62, the temperature 63. 99% humidity, thank you very much.
I'm reading a book about time, written by the physicist Sean Carroll. It seems as though there is something called "the arrow of time." It just means that in physics, strictly, purely speaking, there is nothing to address the fact that the past is any different than the future. There is space-time, and one way to think about things is to say that at this moment, the past, present and future all exist. That doesn't sound too exciting, except that it may enable the idea that the future is all preset and no matter what we do, it's going to happen just that way. Or has happened, or exists at this moment just this way.
Oh yeah, there is entropy, which necessitates past and future being different.
My head now hurts.
Finally, people are talking about the Covid-19 isolation, that year, 2020, and how now it's over and we're all trying to figure out what to think of it. Like everything else, nowadays, with all the media telling us what is real/not-real, unless you actually got Covid, it was just an idea, and we all acted on that idea. Just like everything else. Now we've got a new idea, and as we move on, we will start to create the memory of 2020. It will be interesting to see just how many ways it was. Which all sounds very irreverent and for that I apologize. Things DO happen, for real, even though, not as much as we like to think. Life is sort of like a soap opera, where something happens only once every ten episodes or so, and the rest of the time people just talk about it.
I have a hard time remembering last year ~ it's a big blur. And that's common, I read, because we don't have event points in our minds. Like oh I went to this restaurant after that movie and that was the week we hired the new manager, etc. None of that happened. We just sat at home hoping to avoid cooties. I remember my daughter visiting in July, and then I drove up there at Thanksgiving, but that's about it. I do remember feeling kind of relieved in general I couldn't (or shouldn't) go anywhere, because honestly my fellow Americans scare me. Even out here. Just so many crazies everywhere...
ReplyDeleteIn a way, the Year of the Covid was kind of peaceful. I have to say it wasn't too traumatic for me, personally, but it would have been much different if I was living alone.
ReplyDeleteI struggle with how to characterize the coronavirus year. I had enviable circumstances and there were some objective good things that happened. In some ways, I didn't even give up all that much. And yet, I still would characterize the year as bad, however, it was bad for me in ways that are not easily understandable or relatable to other people.
ReplyDeleteThere was a certain surreal quality to the whole thing, I think. Kind of a negative cast to everything. The political landscape didn't help. I'm still more cynical now than I've ever been.
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