I feel like I’ve been having a nice run of near-perfect Sundays lately, so I thought I’d blog about that a little. Since at least 2020, I’ve been organizing my weekends so that I generally get all of my chores done on Saturday, and I can spend Sunday relaxing. And I’ve developed some habits that work well for me.
I started reading the Sunday Routine articles in the NY Times around 2020, and enjoyed a lot of those. I haven’t kept up with them, but I think I may have taken some inspiration from them, without really meaning to. A lot of them are easy to make fun of. But many of them are also inspirational and interesting.
Anyway, here’s my Sunday routine: I generally get up at 6, because I’m old and I can’t really sleep late anymore. But Sunday is the one day I don’t need to get up at 6, so sometimes I’ll sleep in until 7, if my body lets me do that. I almost always make a variation on the same breakfast: two eggs, one slice of pork roll, and two slices of toast. And I make coffee with my Moka pot. At some point after breakfast, I go for a walk. Generally for 20-25 minutes, just around the neighborhood. When I come back, I read a few chapters of whichever Wheel of Time book I’m currently reading. At 10 AM, I walk over to the Somerville Farmers Market and buy some stuff. I’ve been going to that consistently enough this year that a lot of the vendors know me now, and I can have some little chats with them. So that’s quite nice. After that, I might go back to reading my Wheel of Time book. For the afternoon, I might make a sandwich and watch a movie on TV, or a football game. There’s usually an afternoon nap in there somewhere.
So there’s not much of a point in writing all of that out, but I like thinking about it. And it’s good to recognize the nice things in your life and be thankful for them.
And all of that is leading me up to thinking about the election results from last week. I have to admit that it all kind of broke me. (I was going to link to a news article about the results here, but browsing through them now is only making me angry again…) I’m trying to think back now to how I felt in 2016. And, because I have a blog, I can check on that! Here’s a post from (coincidentally) today in 2016. It’s kind of funny to see that I embedded a bunch of Twitter posts into that blog entry. I would never do that now; Twitter is worse than useless at this point.
There was a lot of reaction to the election on the social networks I now follow (Mastodon and Bluesky, mostly), but nothing I feel like I need to share. In fact, I avoided social media for the day after the election, except for a couple of quick check-ins to see if there was anything I needed to know about. I’m starting to rethink my media diet again. I’ve found that I’m not ready for stuff like Colbert or other typical last-night humor again. So I might lay off all of that for the rest of the year. I will probably keep watching NJ Spotlight News, but I might be fast-forwarding through parts of it now. (That’s what I was doing last week. I just couldn’t bear to watch anything related to the election results.)
One thing I did see on social media today was a post from Michiko Kakutani on Instagram quoting W. H. Auden’s poem September 1, 1939, which I’ve mentioned on this blog before. I was going to stick a quote from it in here, but you’re better off reading the whole thing. (It’s not long.)
And there have been a lot of blog posts and essays and think pieces written about these election results. (Of course.) I’ve looked at a few of them, but haven’t read many, past the first paragraph or two. (That’s probably healthy. Reading too much of this stuff would only make my state of mind worse, and probably wouldn’t result in any useful action on my part.) I’ll like to one piece though: And Yet It Moves, by Ken White.
OK, that’s it for now. Back to relaxing.