One Year in Pandemia Part 1: Welcome to the Doldrums

Doldrums, CC-BY Rachel Kramer

In Spanish, the word for pandemic is pandemia. It sounds to me like academia or eudaimonia or even Portlandia: a state of mind, or a place, a world unto itself. In the Land of Pandemia we find ourselves in, time moves differently. For me, the days move slowly, but the weeks pass quickly. Months move like years, and the past year has felt like many more than 12 months. In Pandemia, we daydream, we nap, we dawdle and delay.

It reminds me of another place, the land of the Doldrums, from The Phantom Tollbooth, a book about a young boy, Milo, and his Alice-like misadventures in the fantastical world known as the Kingdom of Wisdom. Thus speak the Lethargians, the native inhabitants of the Doldrums:

There’s lots to do; we have a very busy schedule — —
At 8 o’clock we get up, and then we spend From 8 to 9 daydreaming.
From 9 to 9:30 we take our early midmorning nap.
From 9:30 to 10:30 we dawdle and delay.
From 10:30 to 11:30 we take our late early morning nap.
From 11:30 to 12:00 we bide our time and then eat lunch.
From 1:00 to 2:00 we linger and loiter.
From 2:00 to 2:30 we take our early afternoon nap.

…As you can see, that leaves almost no time for brooding, lagging, plodding, or procrastinating, and if we stopped to think or laugh, we’d never get nothing done.