A Journal of the Pandemic #20

 Here we are reaching an eighth month of the worldwide response to COVID-19. Somehow! Pandemic time is otherwise immeasurable. Well, in some ways it is, and some it isn’t.

Absences are measurable. Reunions are measurable! At work it’s been a season of reunions. Some of my colleagues who’ve been out since this started have finally returned. Some of the kids who’ve been out have started trickling back. I’ve seen a couple kids I haven’t seen in forever! One of them I had to forcibly remind myself I last saw before our shutdown, because that crazy time has actually begun to blur, because in some ways what I was doing immediately before and immediately after was so similar I wasn’t really distinguishing anymore. But of course recent months have been all about acclimating to my new building, and that’s been a whole new era.

Speaking of which! I got a plush room assignment a while back, in a baby room, after it seemed I would exist in floater purgatory indefinitely...but then we had no babies. The one who had been showing up transitioned to a one-year-old room, and the other babies nominally assigned to us weren’t coming in at all. I mean, one did! For a single day! But then none. For what seemed forever! Then finally we got some new babies enrolled, and one starts on Monday (baby brother to a preschooler we have in another room) and our second a week later (daughter of a former coworker!). 

Lots of parents are still teleworking. Obviously the whole country has been working toward reopening. Infection numbers are sort of ticking up again as we anticipate a full-blown second wave (which is already happening in Europe)...But the thing is, what’s that even going to look like? The panic is over. There are still many people taking this very seriously, but...Another shutdown is highly unlikely to occur. What we’re going to see is an abundance of caution. My job is going to have a slow trickle back to what things were like at the start of the year. Most of our rooms are still single ratio (previously every room was routinely double ratio, which basically means we really only need one teacher per room instead of two, although of course at the moment we’ll have two or three teachers around at times just because we have that many and we’ve been in the process of at least operating somewhere close to normal, which is why all the teachers have been coming back). 

I went to the movies last Friday. Friday, and out of two movies I watched, a total attendance of...three. And that was for the second, later movie. (I had planned on seeing three movies. Doubt very much there would have been anymore viewers even then.) I mean, movie attendance has been ticking downward for years anyway. The huge box office numbers we’ve seen for Avengers movies, for instance, have still been a relative drop in the bucket historically. That’s inflation talking, not attendance. Mass popularity has taken a hit with the extreme proliferation of avenues across all mediums. It’s not just movies, it’s everything. And the pandemic is going to make it that much harder to find common experiences. Except the pandemic.

Just think of how much your own life was disrupted, how your experiences have diverged from your typical social circles this year. Personal narratives have taken on new meanings. That might become an obsession in nonfiction in the years to come. 

I got my new computer this morning (and a case! and a generous flash drive!)...But I’m hesitant to crack it open. To get back to work. It was just about a month ago that I was finishing the last work I did on the old one, before it died its horrible death. I’ve been processing what I can do with the stuff I lost, that I have to tackle again. But it really feels as if there’s a mourning process that still needs to play out. 

Anyway, this is pandemic time. Nothing makes sense like it used to. I’ll keep you posted.