mallorys_camera | The Definitive Word on Human Kindness

Ichabod’s mood vastly improved.

Office political situation mostly resolved. The solution was neither what he most hoped for or what he most feared. Plus, the CDC sez you can leave quarantine with a positive test provided you haven’t run a fever in X amount of time. (Some people do test positive for months following a bout with COVID.)

This meant it was okay for my mood to improve, too.

This whole thing with feeling your children’s pain is very weird.

Is it a boundary issues thing?

Or one of those unexpected side effects of reproduction that all parents feel?

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Temp this morning a decidedly unbalmy zero degrees when I awoke.

But as you can see, it’s warming up!

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Tried to work on the Work in Progress yesterday. My heart wasn’t in it, though. Stumbling block was a call and response: “So-and-so was kind,” I wrote about a minor character, “but kindness is a—”

And here my mind went utterly blank.

What clever thing could I write about kindness?

In situations like this, a disciplined writer drops the problematic construction and plows a detour route through the storyline.

Not me, though.

No, I was determined to make the definitive comment on kindness, the money quote that centuries after I’m dead, the sentient cockroaches will remember.

You really oughta eat that book, one sentient cockroach will say to another—I figure that’s how the sentient cockroaches will absorb their info about the vanished human civilization, by eating print books and instruction manuals. She really had the last word on human kindness.

Let it go, let it go, chided the disciplined parts of my mind.

But I couldn’t.

So instead, I went for a tromp.

I didn’t enjoy the tromp. Temps were well below freezing.

But just think of how good it will feel when you go inside again! the small, still voice inside my mind lectured the mutinous brain cells.

And then I thought, This is really fucking pathetic. You are now defining wellbeing as mere absence of discomfort.

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Drove off to do some food shopping that I probably didn’t need to do, but snowpocalypse is scheduled for Sunday/Monday, so you know—there’s some possibility it will presage the collapse of human civilization, and I wanted to give my housemates a 10-day window before they start eyeing my cat and thinking, Hmmm. Tasty.

As you can tell, the collapse of human civilization is much on my mind.

The supermarket was out of milk, and out of spinach, and out of most kinds of bread, but who needs milk or spinach or bread when you can have this?