The Last Word On Nothing

Material mirth: It has a nice ring to it. And there’s nothing wrong with buying new cork placemats or ridiculously overpriced hiking socks because new placemats or new socks make you smile. In fact, sometimes buying things you don’t really need is super rewarding. Like, if I could buy a tiny tropical white-sand island with a beach cottage and a friendly resident dolphin, I’d be happier than I am now, during this COVID-gray February in Maryland. Studies have shown that shopping actually can ease sadness–by giving us some control when we may feel we have none.

On the other hand, as a long-term strategy, shoving stuff you bought on a whim into the hole where dread and self-loathing dwell is bound to disappoint.

During the pandemic, I have not gone whole hog on online shopping to fill my own personal hole of discontent (okay, that’s a terrible way to put that), but I haven’t done none of it, either. So, to make it seem like I was shopping for scientific reasons, I thought I’d look for patterns in my purchases to try to explain my behavior–thus elucidating something essential about myself and about our species as a whole. *

What I found isn’t terribly surprising: Almost everything “extra” I’ve bought since lockdown began is related to beauty, to eating, or to cleaning, which makes sense for someone who is stuck at home with a Zoom camera, an inner hunger that only pasta can fill, and dog hair by the skein. (There’s also a smaller but still substantial “comfort” category that I’d submit needs no explanation.) It must be the sight of my pale, puffy face and tired eyes staring back at me daily, the messy desk flanked by stacked mail and laundry, the dog in the background giving off what can only be described as a “poopie” smell, that drives me to seek products that promise a healthy glow in the foreground and a sparkling clean setting (and dog) in the back.

That said, I’ve been known to fall into the ridiculous notion that having a certain thing will make everything that’s wrong suddenly okay. My pandemic purchases, then, have tried to serve two purposes–the one they were designed for and the anti-depressant, fix-what’s-broken, fill-all-voids one.

Some of the items are trying hard to at least fulfill that first part, with mixed results. The second part, not so much.

Here’s what I got:

Beauty/fashion-related:

Jade facial roller
Phytopolleine scalp elixer

Full skin-care line by Mad Hippie
Collagen supplements

Black cohosh supplements (for hot flashes, because nobody looks pretty during a hot flash)

Octopus tentacle earrings

Two sweaters I may never receive from a sketchy company advertising on FB (why, why do I do this??)

Overnight anti-wrinkle patches**

Tub of activated charcoal (for teeth plus)

This bag

(For the record: I did not purchase the cheek-lifting leggings that keep showing up in my “you might be interested in this” cue. And I take offense at Facebook’s suggestion, damn it.)

Food-related:

Two styles of garlic press, because it’s good to have a spare

Chef’s knife

Egg-bite mold, for Instant Pot

New rubber seal that doesn’t smell like aged chicken, for Instant Pot

Vat of tahini (pack of two) because of roasted cauliflower recipe seen on TikTok

Fancy pink Himalayan salt
Case of red wine, through a friend who sells (gotta support my friends!)

Food processor (thankfully I already had a Vitamix and an Instant Pot or I would have bought those, too)

Actual old-timey silver plated silverware (in its own wooden box) to replace embarrassing hodgepodge from college, in case we ever have guests again

Cleaning-related:

Two different mop/bucket “systems” (when did mops reach the $50 mark?)

Magic Eraser (pack of six) for wall smears

Rug rake for loosening dog hair before vacuuming

Dog mouthwash

Cloths for dry dog “bath” (see a pattern here?)

“Green” laundry detergent pods, the subscription

Comfort-related:

Eucalyptus sheets

The Comfy wearable blanket (which, actually, HAS been transformative)

A plant (mentally comforting, somehow)

Misc:
Covid mask with Bob Ross silhouette and happy little trees

Gardening containers (they were thankfully free, left by the curb, and it’s too soon to tell…they may still be the keystone in the arc of my happiness, to borrow a phrase)

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Okay, now it’s your turn. What have you bought on a whim since last March? Is it giving your life meaning? Is it at least making your hair curl or your rugs smell fresh? If yes, where can I get it?

*I got nothing

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I’ve reached the stage of pandemic isolation, anxiety, hope, despair, faith, exhaustion, general twitchiness and sheer endurance — as have we all — where a nice alternate reality might help. I don’t mean a fantasy. I mean a reality that exists somewhere else — but no, that won’t work, the pandemic is everywhere. So I mean a reality that existed at some other time. The picture up there is where Ballykilcline used to be. Before it vanished in the Famine, Ballykilcline and in general, the pre-Famine Irish lived in a way that was fairly dreadful and in another way, was so sweet and so fundamentally human. This post first ran June 20, 2016.

I’m having trouble with a story.  First I went down one rabbit hole (the effects, on both sides of the Atlantic, of the Irish Potato Famine) until it branched into two (now-dead towns, one in Maryland, one in Ireland), and then I went down both.  You can picture me heading down one, scrambling back up, heading down the other one, a happy little rabbit.  My behavior so far is appropriate for a science writer.

Then the editor says, “Those two towns, the one in Maryland and the one in Ireland, they’re the wrong towns.”  Given the story she assigned, she’s right.  “But I’m already down here,” I say.  She gives me a pitying look.

I didn’t have the heart to tell her the whole truth:  one of those rabbit holes sprung a branch, and then that branch branched, and I’m now so deep I’ll never see the sky again.  This is definitely not appropriate for a science writer. My trouble started when an archeologist told me about a man who had lived on both sides of the Atlantic in both towns. 

The man was listed as “a middling farmer” in the Irish town of Ballykilcline, in the late 1840’s when the potato blight hit.  When he couldn’t pay rent, he was evicted and with his family, put on a ship leaving Liverpool for New York City.  A few years later, he shows up in Texas, Maryland as the owner of a manor house. Maybe he came over with more money than I thought? Rabbit hole!  I found every mention of him in every piece of literature; I found his family tree.  Back in Ballykilcline, he’d even helped lead a rebellion, a farmers’ rent strike. Ah.  Why were Irish farmers on a rent strike?  Didn’t they own their farms?  

No, they didn’t — the middling farmer of Ballykilcline was a hungry rent-payer — and the people they paid rent to didn’t own them either, and the people those people paid rent to didn’t own them either, and it was non-owners all the way down.  The English Crown owned the farms in Ireland and roughly a zillion layers of middlemen collected rents.  Whole towns-worth of farms owned by another country altogether?  If no one local had a stake in the farms and towns, then what held, say, Ballykilcline, together? Why was it a coherent town at all? 

Rabbit hole! I found a book by a notable historian.  Writing a feature, I never read books as background – they take too long for too small a return in current and useful information – so this rabbit hole is now at an unprecedented depth.  Most Ballykilcline-type farmers lived in what the best travel writer of all time, Alexis de Tocqueville, said were “wretched” houses made of “sun-dried mud,” walls only the height of a person, some of them “semi-underground” with thatched roofs that melded with the grass surrounding, “giving the whole thing the look of a molehill on which a passer-by has trod.”  The houses  looked temporary, says the book, as though they could be left behind easily.

The houses were in small groups, called clachans; a clachan was surrounded by farmland arranged into fields, called rundales.  The whole affair together was called a townland; Ballykilcline was a townland.  The townlands weren’t like English villages or American small towns, says the book: no main street, no stores, no pubs, no churches (the priest used a house), no schools (the schoolteacher used a house too).  Townlands were just clachans and rundales.  Every year, the people of a townland got together and threw lots for individual fields in the rundale.  A given farmer’s fields weren’t necessarily contiguous – one here, one there – and in any case, they’d be the farmer’s responsibility only for the year.

Towns with no centers? Houses that could be abandoned easily? Fields that you’d farm for only a year?  All owned by an entity nobody saw?  And Ballykilcline remained Ballykilcline because?

The book’s answer:  over this incoherent infrastructure was a sort of human net.  The townland was essentially the shared histories of the people who’d always lived in one place.  People lived near each other, married each other, had kin in the next townland, told the same stories, had the same memories, were all trying to feed themselves with their farms.  They identified with their own townlands and knew the names of the townlands nearby, knew the other townlands’ families and histories and who argued with whom.

Ballykilcline was held together by a web of history and memory.  “It was an extremely fragile form of social organization,” says the book.  And yes, between the famine and the mass evictions for nonpayment of rent, Ballykilcline pretty well cleared out for good.  Google Maps shows no place there at all.

But a townland made mostly of minds and connections? a middling farmer going from famine to manor house?  Down here in this rabbit hole, I’m in such lovely company.

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Photo courtesy of MacDermot.com:  Ballykilcline is out there somewhere.