Remember when all we wanted was a return to routine? When the pandemic, especially those unnerving weeks of lockdown, shut down our daily doings, infusing with complications, anxieties, and uncertainties such banal functions as getting groceries and toilet paper?
Remember masking up and trying to stay six feet away from others at the doctor’s office? Walking wistfully past a favorite bar and wondering when you would ever again sit at a sunny table with a drink and a few friends?
Back then, reminders of our lost or suspended routines could spark something like grief.
“I have these unexpected, brief, and fleeting moments of raw emotion,” Diarist A28 wrote on March 23, 2020. Most often, she wrote, “it is seemingly unremarkable things that set off this wave of emotion. Reminders that our regular routines have vanished. One day, I was putting away leftovers and had the fleeting thought that I should put some in my son’s lunchbox. Then came the realization that there are no more third grade lunches to pack. It brought me to tears. The irony is that I have always loathed packing lunches.”
As A28’s ironic realization shows, daily practices are ambiguous, their emotional charge (if any) contextual. As much as routine can comfort us—and its disruption can cause us to desire it intensely—it can also wear thin, become deadening, drive us to boredom or even desperation.
Everyday Life in Middletown diaries for October 4, 2023 suggest that—three-and-a-half years since lockdown—we’ve arrived at a place where we can be bored with everyday life again.
Maybe this has something to do with the day, October 4, itself—a Wednesday, a workday, set smack in between Monday—with its mix of possibility and the start of an endurance test—and the relief and release of Friday. Or maybe it’s connected with the time of year—summer’s pleasures fading from memory, a month to the next holiday, and almost three months until the year’s end brings its seasonal markers and rituals. Maybe a Wednesday in early October is one of the calendar’s especially “meh” moments.
In any case, several EDLM writers expressed boredom, or annoyance, or a feeling of meaninglessness in their ordinary activities for Wednesday, October 4, 2023.
Diarist A01 spent a day crowded with meetings and tasks in a distracted state, looking forward to watching a baseball game in the evening, experiencing his workday as something to be endured in the meantime. Moments of absorption and focus are rare enough to stand out: “…for a few minutes, I’m almost fully present,” he wrote, of a coffee conversation with an old friend. Otherwise:
“Maybe it’s lack of sleep; maybe its annoyance with some of the tasks on my plate that don’t seem very meaningful;…maybe it’s what seems like days in a row of hours of meetings, none of which pertain directly and specifically to what I’m working on and care about; but I am doing all of this in a slightly anxious, slightly vexed, cranky frame of mind.”
Eating his lunch, A01 recorded thinking “not for the first time today, I’m pretty sure, that I’m slammed today and just looking forward to the baseball game tonight, when I can sit down and be absorbed and have this landscape of annoyance drift away.”
Diarist B35 was not so much annoyed as, perhaps, understimulated. He woke with a long day ahead, with work and a class that ran until 10 o’clock: “The day will last longer than usual,” he wrote. And the prospects at work were not enticing; even a little annoyance or difficulty might have been welcome:
“the work day spread before me blandly, with no highlights, obstacles, or dark clouds to look forward to do. not that I have nothing to do, nothing to get done. i had time off next week which meant i needed to prepare for my absence by getting ahead at work a bit. but still, the thought of a loooong day stretching out amorphously burdened my soul. sorry for the hyperbole but feelings do not always match proportionally with the quotidian.”
If routine annoyances or the prospects of a dull day colored the routines of A01 and B35, profound and persistent grief over the loss of his partner weighed down Diarist A29, leaching the savor and the meaning out of the day’s tasks and errands.
“The day’s activities seem irrelevant in the larger picture,” he wrote. “I’m in my three years plus some months of grieving and still activities are just something to take up the time of getting through the day. There’s day-time and night-time. Getting to the night-time, when sleep overcomes, is the most welcome time. It’s then that the yearning, missing, tears, loneliness, and angst is on-hold.”
Nothing so profound for Diarist A34, a machinist who had an ordinarily challenging day in his job making precision parts. He made progress on a complex and varied set of jobs, work he describes as “internally rewarding but also very stressful to know there is risk in the process.” He does not complain about his work, but stoically notes as his diary begins: “I woke up today with work on my mind. Being a machinist is the path I have chosen to provide for my family, so I have taken the good with the bad.”
A34’s evening was taken up with activities for social organizations he belongs to, including strategizing by phone about a conflict between local chapters. He concludes: “Anyways it’s a short journal but a long day so I will end it here and say: ‘we made it through the day.’”
Some days, making it through is enough.