It is Monday Tuesday..
In four three days we will be waiting to hear if we can or cannot go outside for basic things like walking around for fresh air, legally, I mean, without, turning around and checking over our shoulders to see if someone in a blue suit or a white suit in plastic, or a blue suit or a green suit is going to tell us ‘no.’ The thing that they call these official folks are ‘functional forces,’ I think that includes the healthcare, military and police officers together functionally fighting off the pandemic. Or?
We are waiting. I’ve been waiting since March 2020, but that’s a different story. (See: Solitude / Kismuth Books 2021.)
Will we get to go amble about freely and lawfully on Friday?
In the ‘news’ articles that are controlled by state media, we get to read about the government’s ‘plans’ to do something, or how a place ‘eyes’ or ‘mulls’ something to do soon, maybe, or, once, how ‘Ho Chi Minh City will not meet its target’ to end social distancing by 15 September.
Buckle in tight, kids. We’re not sure about anything until it’s announced and reconfirmed, which you can tell if it is the latter by sticking your head outside and seeing if anyone else is going around doing something that they can now do, because, you know. Herd mentality. Also: listening for what’s immediate, ask me about the local network of older ladies who are more in the know than ‘functional forces,’ at times, ahem, yes.
Many thanks to my neighbors in my alley for looking out for me, making sure I get the free food when it’s delivered sometimes and also giving me bread, noodles, home cooked meals at times, and, importantly, fresh Vietnamese coffee. I am so lucky.
Meantime, I am going through the things that happen when everything is uncertain and recognizing I have the capacity to create certainty in my week. Well, weekend. I am going to host an ‘N’. The whole entire point of ‘N’ in 2014 was to cope with the unnerving feeling around waiting and wondering about people, most of them not really very important to me, because who is important when you first meet them, anyway? You have to get to know people, over time, sit together, see if they are a good person, as a good person I’ve gotten to know through sitting together over time for more than a year now here in Vietnam has taught me…. and yeah. You want certainty that the first thing you decide to do together will actually happen.
I love things happening. I don’t really mind who is there, so long as it happens.
And not, like, lsat minute because everything else fell through. There is a difference. If you don’t know what that difference is, then the very point of someone designing an event to optimize for intentionality is probably not going to be something I can convey on a blog post through words. But if you do, and you’ve missed this, here it is. ‘N’. I love ‘N’.
Checkit.