One year ago, I posted about celebrating my birthday under the strange new conditions of pandemic life. By then, it was apparent the situation wasn't as temporary as we might have believed at first, but it's just as well I couldn't imagine that life would be similarly constrained a year later.
I marked turning 46 the same way as 45, with delicious treats at home with my household. But I did also get my Santa Cruz afternoon, complete with ice cream by the ocean, a few weeks in advance. And the best early birthday present was that two days before, I received my first vaccine shot!
A year ago, the outlook was grim and so unknown. Now I'm embracing a growing sense of hope as more Americans get vaccinated and cases decline. However, grim uncertainty remains when I look beyond the US to places where the pandemic still rages, particularly the horrifying crisis in India. (Donate at GiveIndia.)
A lot of life, for those as lucky as I've been, involves navigating the balance between personal joys and awareness of other people's suffering. I'm another year older now, and after a year that made those contrasts especially stark, I recognize this even more.
Good Stuff Out There:
→ At Literary Hub, Catriona Silvey ponders the Counterintuitive Appeal of the Literary Time Loop: "Why do we seek out narratives that not only repeat themselves, but feature repetition as an anchoring principle of their structure? As a linguist and novelist, I believe that the answer lies in the process by which readers construct meaning from texts. Time loops, it turns out, are perfect for hacking this process to deliver a hefty intellectual and emotional impact within a tight narrative framework."
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