Last week at work was kind of a grind. A few people were on vacation, so I worked more hours. I still don’t get why the first and loudest response to COVID-19 wasn’t to shut down nonessential interstate travel. I’ve had multiple coworkers travel out of state in the past three months, and none of them has had to quarantine upon returning. This is literally how it spreads, folks. It’s pointless to try and contain it from person to person six feet apart when someone from, I don’t know, Boise can take their filthy Idaho potatoes to Maine (we grow them, too!) just because they want to visit someone there, and bring COVID-19 along with them, completely asymptotic. But, and not to keep making the same point over and over again, but the political points some people are determined to make over this (it doesn’t matter which side) keep hammering the same points but ignoring the greater problems.
This is all kind of ironic because at the beginning of the pandemic I was pretty mad about having to cancel the birthday party reunion. Apparently we can’t have anything nice. If we could have been bothered to put in place reasonable restrictions with reasonable measures and reasonable demonstrations on how to actually pull them off, instead of what we actually got, all of this would have been a lot easier.
On Thursday I had my first Zoom experience. Since it wasn’t a cast reunion thing it did not make the news cycle, although that would have been a lot more fun. (The cast of Competition Piece back together! Although sadly would’ve been incomplete with the death of the lead actor earlier this year.) It was the annual suicide prevention course. But it kind of reminded me all over again how everyone in my life has taken for granted that the one dude living alone is just sort of busting it out. I’m okay on my own, I really am. Most of the time. But last week was another rough patch. I wish being social weren’t seen as inherently reciprocal.
On the other hand, I had a great phone call with my dad last Sunday. It involved a lot of reminiscing. I don’t know if he had a particular need for it at the time or if that’s just the way the conversation went. As with any family stories I’d heard a lot of it before. Some of it seemed new! I liked that. At one point, though, he talked about one of the dogs in his past without mentioning the name, where in the past he’d always used it. It was a momentary hiccup, and maybe didn’t mean anything. The weird thing is that I’ve always had a hard time remembering the dog’s name, but am pretty sure I have it (Duke, which became easier to remember when I made the connection to John Wayne, who was my dad’s favorite actor) locked in now, so it was, I guess, disappointing, if anything, not to get that affirmation that I’m right about that.
Anyway, my WriteClubCo buddy last night said he was scrapping the anthology I sent him seven stories over the course of the last few months for inclusion. (Sending those stories provoked me into leaving my pandemic comfort zone, which has otherwise shrank back some things I’ve been doing that theoretically have nothing to do with socializing. Far less blogging, recently, for instance.) It’s the most I’d sent him in the three anthologies he worked on putting together. It’s disappointing, because I hate submitting my material. I don’t have a great track record of publication outside doing it myself due to feeling, well, rejected by rejection, so I saw the guy as a reliable outlet. He instead is moving forward with another project. I have to fight the instinct to question why he’s abandoning the project outright, but then small market publishers implode randomly all the time. They have far less incentive to be professional. I was a part of it once myself. Someone decides they want to walk away and the whole thing collapses.
Part of why last week was hard was exactly because not only did I work more hours, but just when I was getting around to feeling motivated to write again, and even settled on a new project, I suddenly had to readjust all over again. Recently I’ve had a lot of free time that felt almost embarrassing, and it was consistently in the morning, and then I went back to an early shift, and that required adjusting, and...
So I guess this stupid pandemic experience has begun to be sort of consistently frustrating at this point. Not in a medical capacity, or in being caught up in one of the many tangential crises (unless you’re still participating in protests, there really wasn’t something new last month, which was a first; but of course those protesters somehow provoked a federal response, which surprised them, but probably no one who was surprised their protests were somehow still happening despite no one talking about them until the federal response), but in the act of just trying to figure out “the new normal.”
So perhaps as a result, I ordered a bunch of stuff, again, recently, just like old pandemic times...
(I don’t actually have a grudge against Idaho and their filthy, filthy potatoes. But yeah, Maine has better potatoes.)
Michigan potatoes are better.
ReplyDeleteAll of the irresponsibility and half-measures are why this has dragged on nearly 5 months and is actually getting worse while most of the world is in recovery.
My sister is supposed to get married next month but my brother and I recently said we're not going if things are still like this. We're both diabetic and we know her future in-laws are the type who don't social distance or wear masks because they think it's a hoax or whatever. Spending hours around them, even outside, is not a good idea.
Potatoes are great and I'm not connoisseur enough to taste the difference between the different states. I felt happy reading about your conversation with your dad. Good job.
ReplyDeleteWhat if we'd distanced and worn masks starting late February? Bet we wouldn't have even shut down half of what we did and been in a much better place.
ReplyDeleteGlad you had a good talk with your dad.
Sorry about the anthology. Have you looked into the IWSG's anthology contest this year? Still a month to enter.