the ocean

The Olympics are over and the pandemic remains. I'll admit that, by the point in the year, I'd sort of envisioned that I'd be running all over town naked and freely coughing on people, but I also thought that people would get vaccinated. Because, you know, dying is oftentimes viewed as a negative. But I'm wrong on all kinds of things, frankly. I mean, I really thought Kathrine Heigl was poised to have a nice romantic comedy career after 21 Dresses...

Anyway, we soldier on. I'm still going in to the office occasionally, primarily to avoid having to make multilingual small talk with my cleaning lady, and I've even added a few lunches with friends into the mix. It seems weirdly transgressive to sit in Chipotle and eat our burrito bowls with our masks down. We're still watching a lot of television, but we've also worked to bring reading more into the mix. I finished the complete short stories of John Cheever, which I'm not even sure that John Cheever can say. I still haven't read Ulysses, though. That one will probably be evergreen for me -- it seems too heavy to even carry, frankly.

Oh, and I got a CPAP, did I mention that? Yeah, I went in for a sleep study and had a bunch of wires attached all over my body by a very sassy lady such that even relaxing, much less sleeping, seemed like an impossibility. Then I found out I have sleep apnea and spent months trying to convince the major sleep health companies (because that's a thing) to actually sell me their products, before finally getting the opportunity to strap myself into a mask every night, much like Hannibal Lecter. So yeah, no big deal. I do think I'm sleeping better now, though it hasn't done anything at all to prevent that recurring dream where I've been electrocuted by Shelley Long.