On a family Zoom last week, I found myself blurting “When the pandemic is over, everyone will forget what it was like, what we all went through. They’ll just ask, ‘Well, what have you accomplished in the last years?’”

I was speaking about professional, educational, or artistic accomplishments. I had a hunch that the kind of people who judge us for those things would forget the larger drama of these years, the weight and stress and loneliness and mourning that we all are going through. (And I write this with gratitude for everything I’ve been spared.)

Still, my blurt was probably harsh. I may only have put more stress on my family, being the voice of paranoia and excessive diligence.

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Today I’m threading some sounds that have reached me recently.

It started with birds, what sounded like a hundred tiny beaks chirping as fast as they could on my window sill, about an hour before I needed to wake up. Under the lead of an assertive, entrepreneurial leader, they discovered warm air leaking from the side panels of my air conditioner and decided to pile themselves like a pyramid of cannon balls and celebrate with monosyllabic bursts that tested what’s left of my high frequency hearing. The urgency of each cheep – cross-talking each other like a row of machine guns firing at once – suggested they expected some reward of food, maybe a million tiny worms dangling from the beak of their overlord.

At least, that’s what I imagined.

After fifteen minutes or so, once they were sure I was awake, they either moved on to murder someone else’s morning or decided to go silent. I haven’t heard them since.

More often, since last October, we’ve been awakened by an end of days sound that makes our hundred-year-old house in Brooklyn vibrate like a centenarian on four shots of espresso.

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Today I’m threading time. (That is, I’m realizing as I write this that these things can be connected.)

First, I saw Catherine Clifford’s piece on CNBC.com: “Why billionaire VC Marc Andreessen schedules every second of his day, including ‘critical’ free time.” Since the 90s, I’ve known Marc Andreessen is one of the smartest people in any room. I wondered if it would help me to schedule every day by the second, the way Marc (or his assistant) reportedly does, with healthy allowances for sleep, movies, and meditation. This weekend, I’ll try it. I already make appointments with myself at work, to force myself to move projects forward, on a much smaller, non-billionaire way. I doubt my schedule needs such a refined precision, though – no need to calibrate my shifts between scheduled activities in seconds.

Next, my brother and sister texted about the Lunar New Year of the ox. (Apparently it’s a Metal Ox – cool band name!) My wife is an ox. The description rings true: “Oxes are known for diligence, dependability, strength and determination.”

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