Did-Do List

Years back, in the Before, Noah came up with a hypothetical: would you rather have to eat the same soup for breakfast lunch and dinner and be free to travel the world, or be able to eat whatever you want, but never leave Brooklyn?

We appear to be living both sides of the hypothetical.
 
The soup is this, doubled, so lunchtime is not an ordeal. With limited Seamless and no childcare, in the past month I have very often thought, Ah, so this is why housewives were always sticking their heads in ovens.
 
But there have been bright spots. We got our bikes tuned up and a baby seat installed. Theo thrills to ride around town. Yesterday while he was being pedaled about, he kind of pantsed Scott, which gave me a good chuckle.

I spite googled one of my neighbors, who, after three years of small talk, recently beheld me with her eyebrows knit and asked if I lived in the building. For a moment I was channeling Yovanna from Real Housewives of Atlanta (“You KNOW ME! I was THAT BITCH!")

My google results revealed her to be a clown. A bowling-pin-juggling, Penny-farthing-riding, stilts-walking-clown. The image was the exact thing you crave to see when doing this kind of search: your petty nemesis dressed in full clown regalia. So gratifying.
 
Everyday bleeds into another, and at the end (exhausted, limping across the finish line of snoozing through a Bravo show before lights out at 9:30) I have a hard time figuring out what actually happened. This is another casualty of the great plague—my memory. It hasn’t been all that hot since Theo was born, but right now is at an all-time low. I’ll be brushing my teeth, plotting my next move, will walk into the bedroom and poof it’s gone, sometimes not retrievable til much later, sometimes vanished as if it never was. It has got to be a stress response to the current moment but wow it’s pretty frustrating. Perhaps my clown nemesis is experiencing something similar but come on now 1. I am quite memorable and 2. You’re not Oliver Sacks with the face blindness
 
[OLIVER SACKS ANECDOTE INTERLUDE: I took a class with him on medical narrative in grad school, just a few years before he died. Why he had any desire left to teach I have no idea plus (bless him) at that point he was kind of cobbled together by modern science like a genius Frankenstein creation. He was all but deaf and had a giant magnifying glass he squinted through to see us. He would occasionally drop it and there would be a solid fifteen minutes of him fumbling to regain his composure. I am not speaking ill of the dead, that is just what happened! Anyway, he had two lady assistants who essentially taught the class, one was The Brain, who graded our papers, corralled him back to the point, etc. and the other was The Brawn, who carried his bag and coffee cup. We had to sit in the same seats every class because of the face blindness. For the first session we had been assigned the incredible Darkness Visible by William Styron, a memoir of depression. By way of an ice breaker, Sacks kicked off with his very first question: “Has anyone here ever been depressed?” This was in a nonfiction MFA program, so, uh, yes. A few awkward mumbles and nods of affirmation. But since Prof Sacks couldn’t hear or see anything, he shouted WHAT??? Beseeching the class to speak up, a few good sports announced stentorianly YES I HAVE BEEN DEPRESSED! to a silent room. What a semester it was. Ok, back to what I was talking about]
 
I’m talking about remembering day-to-day stuff, the person I was going to text, the next thing I was supposed to do.
 
So I have come up with an accounting system for what actually happened all day. It’s part memory gym and part spiritual practice. It’s the opposite of a to-do list.
 
I recommend: a Did-Do list.
 
A To-Do list suggests a debt. A Did-Do list is a pleasing accumulation. On my Notes app, I will list the things I did (the things I remember, at least). Instead of feeling like a big nothing, this exercise shows it was a something. Here’s my list for April 7 (with helpful annotations):
 
Read [half a New Yorker article before Theo started cawing]
Meditated [lied on floor for ten minutes while he was napping before falling asleep myself]
Journaled [a litany of complaints, could be called Liz’s Burn Book]
Three loads of laundry [barf]
Tweezed eyebrows [and mustache]
Made tuna salad [not soup!]
Minded Fudge [we call our son The Fudge because he is sweet and dense, in other words I kept him alive all day when his only will in life right now seems to be to maim himself]
Dropped a book at friend’s house [at a safe six-foot distance, of course]
Went to park [looked at my phone while Theo tried to do the aforementioned maiming]
Went on a bike ride [glorious, best part of day]
Wrote a letter on behalf of a prisoner [and so should you, if you feel so compelled, it’s a travesty]
Made dinner [ugh]
Took a bath without distraction [I sometimes listen to a podcast but lately my phone feels like a devil machine, so I just stared into space]
 
I also have an addendum to the list called Didn’t-Do, which includes:
 
Click New York Times app on several occasions
Check email before noon
Burn house down
 
It’s not much, but it’s something, and something really is something these days.
 
Here’s what else I can recommend:
 
Emily Gould’s Perfect Tunes, out April 14
 
This amazing article about truth and fact, my favorite things
 
Taika Waititi’s first film Boy (this is basically a Taika Waititi fan blog now)
 
The documentary Maiden about the first women’s around the world sailing team
 
This episode of This American Life for silly escapism
 
Also, I turned in my manuscript. I had long fantasized about this day, because even in very recent history, finishing this beast felt very far away. I celebrated by writing a letter to myself. To remember.
 
What are you trying to remember (or not) these days?