Nothing slows a person down like a global pandemic. I got home from NC late Tuesday night and within 48 hours, the rest of my March gigs were canceled or postponed. I suspect that will reach into early April since many university campuses are shutting down. It all makes sense and I’m fortunate that I won’t struggle financially as a result of these cancellations. I will probably leave my house hunt for another month or two; interest rates were dropping last week but uncertainty is destabilizing every market so better to wait than rush in. I filed my taxes yesterday, which gave me a migraine. Once I recovered, I picked up some essentials at the store, read for a while, and then watched a sad movie about Jane Austen dying young and poor before turning in. I wasn’t sure the citizenship office in York would be open, but I was first in line and left twenty minutes after my 8am appointment with this handy study guide. My Lyft driver was sniffling and I tried to be discreet about applying hand sanitizer in the back seat. There was a meme on Facebook about the need to take measures now that *seem* like overreacting—social distancing isn’t hard for me and after a full five days in NC, I’m ready for some silence and solitude. But I can’t say my anxiety hasn’t been triggered by all the news reports and articles I’ve been reading. I’m thinking about going to the market and then walking over to the movie theater for a matinee. There’s a new adaptation of Emma and even though my author friends at the Whirlikids festival panned it, it might be a good distraction. The film I watched last night was called Jane Austen Regrets and it focused on the choices she made in her personal life: setting up a household with her mother and sister in order to write rather than becoming some man’s wife and mother to a dozen kids. She was judged and blamed for her family’s financial misfortune but at the end of her life, she claimed she had no regrets. Not an uplifting film but fairly honest about the sacrifices women still have to make in order to put their art first. 2019 was a good year for me, though as a freelancer I now owe the government a sizable chunk of that income. One good thing about having anxiety is that it makes you plan for any and every eventuality; I saved enough to pay my taxes and I saved for a downpayment for a home of my own, and so I think I can weather the coronavirus storm. We were bumping elbows in NC—no hugs, no handshakes—but that didn’t stop us from connecting in a meaningful way. I presented for Prof. Erin Miller’s grad students on Monday evening; three lovely students then took me out to dinner and advised me as we walked not to “split the pole.” The next day in Prof. Miller’s undergraduate class, I asked students to share some customs or folktales specific to their state. They mentioned sweet tea but insisted that ghost stories were more common in SC, yet when I asked about splitting the pole, all their heads started nodding. We then developed a fantasy story about an immigrant child who was new to NC and so didn’t understand or follow the custom; after walking around the opposite side of a tree, the child found herself in another dimension, separated from her friend. My head’s been full of story ideas lately…I think a baby phoenix will be added to my next dragon book! But now that I’ve got two weeks off, I need to get back to writing poetry for my Afro-Puerto Rican kid version of Basquiat. The sun just came out…will get out and do my off-peak shopping so I don’t have to brave the stores this weekend. Take care out there!