Calendar Alerts From An Alternate Universe
Admin note: My subscriber numbers are dropping with each newsletter. Do I need to go back to writing twelve of these a year to keep you sweet, overbooked people around? Or is it just super-easy to hit unsub when you want to read more? Any insights appreciated (Twitter -- @lschmeiser).
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The great things about writing nonfiction -- actual reportage or commentary -- is that there are a few bog-simple formats. There's the good ol' inverted pyramid format and then there's what I think of as the net argument, where you reel in your conclusion via the bait you set in the opening paragraph. Neither of these formats lends themselves well to fiction, and so I choose to blame those -- rather than the limitations of my own skill -- on why I have not been able to write the SFF story about the woman who sees calendar notifications for a life she doesn't lead and is able to discern what her alternate selves are doing in alternate universes.
I feel like I'm living in that story. Although I've deleted the repeating reminders from my calendar, the one-offs keep popping up: a matinee for Smuin Ballet's Dance Series 2, a member night at the aquarium, early-bird ticket sales for a recital I'm not sure we'll ever see. I have mixed feelings about deleting these things from the calendar. My calendar is most useful as the means for anticipating and fulfilling the demands on my time; there is no point in cluttering it with things that don't matter anymore. On the other hand, I refer to past calendars to anticipate future events and erasing things because of one exceptional year might hurt my ability to plan well in the future.
And thus we get to the meat of the calendar conundrum: Everyone's ability to plan in the future has become abruptly disabled. For decades, calendars and to-do lists have acted as the framework around which I built my life. They were a way to be helpful to Present Lisa and kind to Future Lisa. But we live in times where which we don't know much about the future except there will presumably be one. None of our baseline assumptions about reality in the United States are necessarily sound, so it's not wise to plan with any of them in mind.
Every year, I do a holiday countdown calendar where we do a new activity every day (here's the 2019 version, modified from the 2018 version). One of my favorite things to do the day after Christmas is to set up the next year's calendar, to include more of what we love and ease out that which was not so well-received, so of course, the Christmas 2020 countdown calendar is in beta, ready for confirmation of a few key dates before I print it out and put it in the little wooden house with its 24 drawers. However, I now have a calendar reminder to come up with a COVID Christmas Countdown 2020, because it's more than possible the calendar I planned last year won't be applicable to Future Lisa, but rather to an Alternate Lisa in a parallel universe.
I hope that when that COVID Christmas Countdown 2020 calendar reminder pops up, it has the faintly unreal quality of an Alternate Lisa's life, yet I am prepared to accept that it might be the one 2020 calendar notification that Present Lisa finds to be applicable. I'm sure whatever alternate Lisas are out there watching calendar notifications wink in and out of existence in other timelines are just as intrigued by what's next as I am.
FURTHER READING
I was curious as to how people who meticulously plan paper journal layouts and commit to paper are rolling with these times. A quick look at Reddit's Bujo community (bujo is short for "bullet journaling") was a wholesome way to answer my question.
"Embracing the Uncertainties" (New York Times, April 7, 2020) -- "Statistical science, Dr. Spiegelhalter said, 'is a machine, in a sense, to turn the variability that we see in the world — the unpredictability, the enormous amount of scatter and randomness that we see around us — into a tool that can quantify our uncertainty about facts and numbers and science.'"
"How to Build a Psychological First Aid Kit" (Outside, April 17, 2020) -- "During this pandemic, everyone is going to be stress impacted, but that they can prevent themselves from becoming stress injured by assessing their state of mind and taking steps to protect their mental health."
"So Much Cooking" (Clarksworld, November 2015) -- Naomi Kritzer's story has stuck with me since I first read it four years ago, and it has especial resonance now -- something she addresses in "Didn't I Write This Story Already? When Your Fictional Pandemic Becomes Reality."
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On the advice of some very wise friends who listened to me moan about my writers' block, then gently asked, "Do you want us to listen or do you want advice?" ... I'm just writing my way out of a block and toward whatever big writing goal will emerge after I've just kept writing for a while. As always, any feedback, questions or suggestions welcome either via email (reply to this) or via Twitter (@lschmeiser).