1. Everything feels a little too noisy right now, even if it’s the noise of a party you’re glad is happening. I haven’t written much in the past three weeks. This overwhelming parade of significant Wednesdays: insurrection, impeachment, inauguration. Bam bam bam. And now, the hum of relatively efficient government starting up. I want the world to come down from its precipice, step back from the ledge. I want it to remember that panic and rage are rarely places from which sustainable action can be taken, or where a person can be nourished. There’s that quote, or maybe it’s just a saying now, that if you’re not angry you’re not paying attention. Now, in the age of social media and a 24-hour news cycle, that has come to be taken horribly literally, with even momentary inattention seen as moral negligence, and nerve-bursting anger and despair a kind of righteous imperative. I’ve felt angry so much these past four years, and I’m trying to reevaluate the utility of it. To separate out the anger as a thought, a rejection of unacceptable situations, from the anger as adrenaline, that static which courses through me, a corrosive agent bathing all my mental pathways. There are people who feel galvanized by anger, who maybe don’t feel this sickening buzz in quite the same way, and can use anger like coffee to propel them to clear thinking and a checked-off to do list. But I’m not sure these people are real, and if they are I’m certainly not one of them.

2. I’ve missed the potted paperwhites, the narcissus, that are usually for sale in California supermarkets in December and January, in New York and probably other places too. They are like the chaste sister of the sultry summer tuberose. I remember their heady-pure fragrance, as clean as their name, like a blank page for the new year. I’ve seen them here in the Paris florists, though not presented in abundance in the same way that mimosas and peonies are when they’re in season, like a fire sale or a celebration. But the paperwhites are here now too, tied in vestal little bunches. I smelled some the other day as I was buying another fluffy yellow bouquet of mimosas. The mimosas smell of honey and of sun on the dirt, but the paperwhites didn’t smell very strongly, which was why I didn’t buy them. It might be like how standard florist and deli roses so often smell like nothing in the US, or like the cut green stems only. If there is sweetness to their smell it is muted and sharp like that of an unripe plum. These would not be recognized as roses in some parts of the world, I think. When I spent six months in Pakistan I went out one day to buy one of the garlands of vivid pink roses I always saw offered for sale on the roadsides, as a gift for a friend on his birthday. When we pulled the garland out of the water-misted plastic bag it had been stored in, the roses filled the room with a scent so powerful it was like an emotion, or a heat surge, or a flood of pink light. You could feel the molecules of your body change in response to it.

3. I didn’t make any resolutions this year, but I saw a video on the Internet somewhere that talked about adopting “themes'' for your life instead, and said to do them for a shorter duration, like a season. A theme of reading, a theme of health, a theme of discovery. You get the picture. I liked the broadness of it, and so I tried to quiet my mind a little and think of what would be the most beneficial theme for me, in all areas of my life, and to those around me, and the word I came up with was composure. To me this meant; taking a breath before responding; thinking more before I speak and act; deciding more consciously what I would let get to me, and what I wanted to expend my energy on. Some people thrive in chaos, the bless this mess types. I feel the most free and easy in a life where all the linens and clothes are clean, the dishes done, the floor swept, my hair newly washed and dried. So often it seems we’re forced to drag ourselves through our own lives by the scruff of the neck like a mother cat. I want to be more put together, more responsible, more able to take care of the things and the people around me. So this is my word, and so far it’s working okay. I’ve used it like a little bell that some part of me tries to remember to ring when another dish gets broken, or a person insults me on social media or simply scrawls something I hate onto the bathroom wall of the void we’re all shouting into. Composure. The bell brings me back.

4. Yesterday morning we awoke to a driving rain lashed against the windows. It was so loud that I got up to make sure water was not somehow pouring in. It rained all day and into the night, and is still raining now. We went out to register for Covid tests again (because of an upcoming medical thing, we have to get them) and on the way back the wind was blowing people’s umbrellas inside out and pushing scarves up against faces. When we came up the street on the way back towards the gates of the neighboring park, I noticed that the violet doors had been laterally struck by this blowing rain, too, and that the paint which I love so much was showing up strong and shiny as a redder and ruddier color. On the tops where the water had not reached, they were still the same matte violet, and I thought with delight that with their old paint they were indeed just like market plums after all, with that pale-pastel-velvet bloom on them that makes the deeper hues shine through all the richer.

5. I’d had something I wanted to tell you, but of course now I can’t remember it. Maybe something about the woman I saw in a navy beret on the Metro the other day, and how visiting foreigners never seem to wear berets correctly, or at least not like the French do, and how I wondered if the Parisians now felt more free to walk around carrying baguettes and wearing striped shirts and wool berets, without fearing that tourists will fall down in the street or point or take a picture. All of the Outfit People as I started calling them have been gone, since everyone is just trying to get through their weird hemmed-in lockdown lives, and no one is here to go around having fantasies about Paris. But I don’t think that was it. It might have been something I had wanted to recall from when I was growing up, something I’d forgotten about and wanted to be reminded of, but I can’t think of what it was.

In my mind now, there is this:

Lady Gaga, on a loop, reaching up towards the Capitol dome, her voice leaping an octave, climbing note by note into the bright January clouds, as she sang that our flag, was, still, there!

I don’t even like that song, all about bombs and war and not much about the things I find good in America, not America the Beautiful, which I sang with tears in my eyes in a Brooklyn synagogue in late November of 2016, when the rabbi put a sheet with the lyrics into all of our shaking hands. Still, I watched Gaga with her earnest theatrics and her golden bird, and felt it, like a knife or like a fragrance, that power of an idea.

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