A Journal of the Pandemic #35

Somehow, since the last time I wrote an entry in this series, the pandemic has kind of begun to rear its ugly head again.  As expected, its place in common conversation has vastly diminished, even as there are efforts to bring back things like mask mandates.  Hey!  I've literally been walking around every day with a mask in my back pocket since the original mandates were lifted last year.  It remains common for those who are infected to put masks back on at least for a little while, and I still have one coworker who never stopped wearing hers at all.

COVID still makes its periodic rounds.  Infections happen, and they ripple along, and there's still the newer urge to hide them as best as possible, and it's becoming ordinary to not even know if you do have it, since testing has greatly diminished as a response.  It does seem, if anything, this latest round is marked by a relatively brief lifespan, if that makes it seem any better.

This year I've gotten to spend time with my niece, the Burrito, and family, not once but twice, the first (and second!) time since the pandemic began, and neither time came with any infection entanglements (I was a tad under the weather the first one, but even that posed no difficulties).  The first was a trip to see them and the second my second-ever trip to DisneyWorld, and second trip to Hollywood Studios, which given the five year gap between visits gave the park ample opportunity to settle nicely into its Star Wars environment (there are other features, including the classic Tower of Terror, which I rode before they arrived, and is officially the only drop ride I will probably ever enjoy).  I snapped about a million pictures of the Millennium Falcon alone.  I cannot believe this thing exists in the real world (but flies in reality about as well as it did just before the events of The Force Awakens, although the flight simulator is somehow even better than Star Tours, which of course I enjoyed again).  It seemed like there were ordinary levels of park attendance.  

It's been a month since the second visit, and I can't believe it's already happened, much less that both visits happened, within a span of months.  I'm beyond grateful.  I opted to pause an opportunity that came up last year, even though I visited my other sister, my first post-pandemic adventure, so to have gotten both scheduled and to have already occurred is a huge relief and a significant step back forward.  I never want to take for granted having experienced so much of this relatively unscathed, since many, many people can't say the same, but I felt a considerable resentment about how it played out, initially, how it disrupted things, and while it's only been a few years, just back in March I was still disgruntled over it, and now I've had a few experiences that for really only a brief moment were impossible.  Sometimes you have to let a little perspective sink in.  Forget everything else.  The important things, as long as you hold onto them, aren't so easy to shake loose.  

For three years I've wondered when these little entries were going to stop, and I guess now they're a part of my story.  Originally I would try to include my writing journey, since this is a writing blog, and yet, now, I've begun to integrate this time into the regular workings of my life.  It's not quite background yet.  But it's getting there.

A Journal of the Pandemic #34

This month marks three years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, as it was widely experienced, that swept the entire globe and triggered a series of lockdowns and other measures that severely impacted normal life.  It's the first anniversary where those restrictions are all but completely over.  People still get sick.  People are no doubt still dying.  Some people are still wearing masks.

The mask thing really gets me.  It's become normal for some people, just an instinct they have when someone gets sick near them.  Or maybe it's when they've become aware of a specific, COVID-related infection.  I don't know.  I'm not really asking anymore.  Some people still drive in their cars, by themselves, with masks on.  Which never made sense in the first place, but that's humanity for you.

The state of the world's economy is still attempting to process all of this.  In the news recently are banking institutions running into considerable problems.  Are we seeing the end or only the very beginning of all that?  I would assume the latter.

I still consider the panic at the start of this to have been wildly misjudged.  But then, panic always is.  It's kind of the definition.  There will be the diehards who will never even consider reconsidering the initial response, the call for dire panic.  For three years I've watched this play out around me like everyone else.  No one in my immediate community of experience died from COVID-19.  That's three years.  Not one death.  No one from the workplace, not one direct family member.  There were a few very older members of the extended family.  

Of course it still infects people.  Because of the panic, there was an equally strong push, eventually, not to give in to the same measures.  The measures curtailed.  And then there were really no measures at all.  

Three years ago, things were disrupted that began a chain of events that cannot be undone.  In a little over a month, I'll see my niece in person for the first time since before the pandemic.  I'll meet her brother and sister for the first time, both born since the pandemic began.  Three years is a long time, even longer for a young child.  I've now basically missed half her life.  Phone conversations ended up not being nearly good enough.  I'm not a real part of her life.  There are other factors involved, sure, but for three years, I was not free to make decisions as I liked.  There were plenty of people who took to traveling as they pleased almost immediately.  As long as they said the right things, wore the right headgear, took the right medicine, no one batted an eye.  Tell me how that squares with the urgency, the panic that so many people pushed as the narrative we were supposed to accept three years ago?  

Some people are quick to pick up the thread left by others.  They're quick to condemn, to judge, to convict, and they call this justice.  They're perfectly happy to suffer the consequences, and the next minute they'll complain and say it's really the fault of the other guy, because they didn't do something, they didn't do enough.  Listen, the panic was a right and proper panic button.  It did what it was supposed to do.  Three years later we're really only beginning to pick up the pieces.  We still have no idea what this unprecedented event in human history hath wrought.  Never before has humanity united in such fashion.  Never before have we agreed to such measures.

Well, I'm sure there are people happy with all this.  And a very good day to them, too.

A Journal of the (Epidemic) #33

 Hey, so from what I understand, it's not a pandemic anymore.  

After more than two years, very close to three, maybe there will be slightly less quibbling when the statement can be suggested, we're just about done with this thing.

I know, I know, it's not gone.  It'll never be gone.  Calling it epidemic means it'll be with us for a while yet, like the flu.  I'd like to think we learned a few things from all of this.  Maybe that when you're sick, take it seriously, for one.  I don't know what else.  Take your own lessons.  

I can't get over that on the whole I've made it through the experience in a fairly privileged position, and that will have to be the dominant takeaway for me.  I had a job, I kept the job, got extra money for continuing to work that job, never had a diagnosis (even if somehow I caught it without knowing it, never in any kind of debilitating way), didn't lose any immediate family members or friends.  In fact, circling back around to the job itself, except for a few months, and one month sitting home, most of the time was business as usual.  I don't have a job where it was ever feasible to do it remotely.  I wore masks at work.  I got used to it.  I know this was difficult for a lot of people.  A lot of people who did wear them never figured out how to wear them.  Actually, I started out the pandemic wearing masks while also wearing glasses, and even figured that out without being driven insane.  I had this great set of masks that had different mustaches on them.  They became a part of my identity.  I didn't imagine that possibility when I bought my first masks in May 2020.  I'll actually miss wearing them, assuming the mandates don't somehow recur.  As it is, I haven't put one on again since the mandates dropped again, the second time this year, a few weeks ago.

This is to say, this might be the last time I update this journal.  Maybe just go back to, y'know, regular blogging about writing life, rather than life as it's been transformed over the past few years.  This blog was launched specifically as a writers record, but I thought it would be irresponsible to omit such a monumental and prolonged experience from that record.  I started it accidentally, and then I realized I had started a series, so I started numbering them, and then periodically updating as I thought I had something new to say.  Thirty-three entries is a decent number.  I've slowed my blogging dramatically since a decade ago, when I launched this blog, and the pace reduced even more during the pandemic, although probably writing about the pandemic here probably motivated me to write more than I might have otherwise.

It's been interesting.

A Journal of the Pandemic #32

Such are the times we live in (and maybe they all are, and sometimes it's just easier to tell) where the way we interpret those times ends up inherently polarized.  We're in the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic, and a little earlier in the year it seemed as if we had finally begun to emerge from it, at least in some sense, drifting back into previous versions of "normal."  The pandemic itself isn't over, and whatever progress we make back to "normal" can always suffer setbacks.

Which is to say, at work the pandemic has certainly been reasserting itself.

My job has been one of the rare experiences in this thing where "normal" was all but mandated to reassert itself as early as two years ago, which is also to say, the first year of the pandemic, 2020.  To quickly recap, I experienced the initial quarantine phase in the month of April that year, but as of May I was headed back to work, and while it was a slow restart, it was otherwise work as usual.  There's no such thing as teleworking my job, I assure you.  So for the past two years I have very much been existing in a weird world of knowing things are different but also a certain amount of extreme continuity with as they were before the pandemic.

When the virus strikes we shut directly affected rooms down.  For two years I was never actively in a room that faced this.  That streak ended on Wednesday.  I tested that same day, as I was admittedly sick, but the results came back negative; the same ol' sinus infection I always battle.

So I continued working.

A couple of weeks ago I was traveling for the first time during the pandemic.  I headed to Alabama to attend my nephew's high school graduation.  I will spare the details for those who feel particularly polarized, but suffice to say there were kids who were obviously sick I encountered along the way, and that's only what was obvious.  If I held my head because a situation was frustrating, people immediately suspected it was for some other reason (you can guess).

Among the books I packed for the trip, which I didn't end up reading during it but soon after, was the first one I've read to be written during and thus reflective of pandemic life.  As I've been saying, I fully expect this to be a regular feature of cultural life for many years to come.  It will be inescapable, and I actually look forward to it; out of the news, into the literature.  We've grown a little too comfortable looking at symptoms rather than the disease, as it were, so it'll be nice to see life reflected a little more directly, so in that way I'm actually thankful for getting to experience all of this.

A Journal of the Pandemic #31

I originally began composing this back in February.  Part of why I paused it was because I've been getting back into the swing of things, going out a lot more, and that's in large part because the pandemic is receding ever more gradually into the past.  I think there's little doubt about that at this point.  There are new surges happening, of course, and time will only tell how those develop, but the pandemic as it was for its first two years is effectively over.

Yeah!

At work, as of a few weeks ago, masks are no longer mandatory.  When the pandemic began I ended up working at a new building with a lot of new people who didn't know what my face looked like under the mask (I had a bunch I cycled through, although I had a whole set of ones with various fancy mustaches on them; I don't remember if I mentioned them here previously), and so it has been a different kind of introduction.  As it turns out, it's not easy to interpret what people actually look like just by their eyes!  I think all those superheroes have it backwards.  Keep the eyes!  Hide the mouth!  And I think everyone is getting used to this now.  Probably! 

I'm booking trips!  I've already booked one to attend my oldest nephew's high school graduation.  His birth back in 2004 was kind of the beginning of a whole journey for me, the first major event to occur post-college graduation for me, the first time I flew on a plane, the first time I visited the South (the first time I had Krispy Kreme! White Castle!), sort of the beginning of an extended new association with my other sister.  Whom I intend to visit a little later, after she's given birth to her third child.  And I will get to meet her second one, in person, for the first time!  And reunite with the Burrito. Just waiting for approval of the days off, then book the flights...

It's still astonishing that the pandemic swallowed two whole years.  Two years!  And of course there are people who will continue to argue that we shouldn't believe it's over, and it's not, but it is.  I'm plotting out what will probably be the last of the pandemic money, in conjunction with these trips.  Some people have talked about money for the high gas prices, but that's not gonna happen.  Yeah, Russia is busy trying desperately to start another world war, just as everyone else is trying desperately to avoid it, and that's caused gas prices to soar.  When I began this in February the invasion of Ukraine had just begun, and I worried about how it would proceed, and of course that's yet another thing to monitor, and nobody can really guess about that.

Two years ago I had a month off of work, was greatly irritated that my previous plans to visit family had been cancelled, and here on the other side, during two years of watching other people continue to travel, and enduring a previous surge at the end of 2021 that made it look like 2022 would be exactly like the previous two years, and now this, booking trips, and these are definitely going to happen, I really believe that.  I mean, Spider-Man: No Way Home made crazy money at the box office.  It's still making money, and here it's April, and movies are being blockbusters again, not just in China, but around the world, and right here in the US.  Those pesky gas prices have been making packages take longer than usual, but on the whole, things're lookin' pretty gooood.

I want to believe this is the last time I write about the pandemic while it's an active thing here.  Is that reasonable?  I think it's reasonable.  I hope things are looking good for you, too.

A Journal of the Pandemic #30

We are now in the third year of the pandemic.  I say this at the start of 2022, since we are in an apparent surge as the Omicron variant has once again forced the conversation back into the forefront.  I say this as my dad has recovered from his own bout with COVID-19, and in acknowledgment at the loss of Gene Pelletier, a close family friend who with his wife suffered through it at the same time.  I say this as my place of work has elevated its response level back to where it was, nominally, at the pandemic's peak.  I say this knowing that vaccines and boosters and masks remain sources of deep contention.  I say this knowing I had plans to travel this year.  I say this knowing, even though I've known many people who have traveled, as far back as 2020 (which indeed seems like a long time ago, somehow), that one of the clearest ways to combat the spread, as far I'm concerned, is not to travel.  I say this as someone who wants to travel, who wants to see family, in person, again...

Gene and his wife were key figures in my mom's battle with cancer.  When she died in 2015, they were certain sources of support.  When I spent my year with my niece, they were again pillars of my life.  Gene was the kind of person who I didn't know very well, but for whom it didn't matter.  He was my kind of guy.  He knew his way around a joke.  I'd known him, tangentially, before ending up living in the same park, when he was not only friend but neighbor.  

His memorial service was yesterday.  I wish I could have been there.  If I owe anyone that it would be Gene and his wife.  

I'm kind of sick of the pandemic.  I don't honestly know how anyone wouldn't be.  I'm sick of it.  I think even those morbidly fascinated with being "right about it" have lost steam.  They want to move on, too.  Obviously the American/global box office somehow managed to find enough people to make history with Spider-Man: No Way Home, so there may yet be an end in sight.  Hopefully.  

Hopefully.  And, again, we're nowhere close to a true reckoning with the experience.  It's barely begun.  There will be pandemic stories for the rest of our lives.  Fifty years from now there will be generations for whom it's only a matter of history, something they're forced to learn in school, and for most of whom it will barely register as real.  But for us, it's an everyday fact that will remain fact, something we are going to have to deal with, long after we've sorted out all the immediate fallout, the ramifications, and yeah, the virus itself.  Probably it's a shot we're going to get annually.  Probably?  Definitely.  It's the next flu shot.  Of course it is.  

In my blogging community, everyone seems to have remained pretty steadfastly silent on the subject.  I guarantee, in a few years even these bloggers will be talking endlessly about it.  In fifty years it might be the only thing anyone knows about this era.  Except those pesky students.  Doing whatever delinquent things kids will do in the (20)70s...

To get there, to see that, I would have to live into my nineties.  This is hardly impossible.  I've known a few people who did.  

I've already taken a stab at writing pandemic fiction.  I imagine I probably will again in the future.  But perhaps once life has decided normal looks like normal used to.  If that's even possible anymore...

A Journal of the Pandemic #29

Here we are at the end of 2021, and only a few months away from a full two years of the pandemic, and it's very, very safe to say that this is going to be a defining moment of recent history.

I'm not sure we've really gotten around to appreciating this fact.  I mean, yes, everyone knows it's happening.  Most of the discussion, though, long ago settled on the response, and not to the effect.  Nearly two years in, I just thought it would again be worth considering the latter.  In the run-up to Christmas a lot of chatter has been about the supply chain and how all those cargo ships bottlenecked out to sea.  That's just the tip of the iceberg!  We haven't even begun to appreciate what's happened during all of this, let alone what's going to continue happening as a result.  I do my shopping online every year because everyone on my list lives elsewhere.  It's just easier than buying it here and shipping it myself.  I've done that on occasion, sure.  I'm not averse to doing that.  But on the simple premise of online shopping, it was certainly recommended, if doing so, to do it early.  My older sister thought she had to do it so early I got her gifts...right after Thanksgiving.  I did my shopping at the end of last month.  That resulted in everything arriving well before Christmas, this year.  Last year there were a lot of real delays even with the same ordering pattern.  The difference, this time, was that I probably ordered a lot of things that were never going to be in those marooned containers.  I feel bad for those people.  

Companies are beginning to change the way they do business, what they're willing to spend money on versus the return they get from shoppers.  People like me, for instance, who are still buying physical media like DVDs/Blu-rays were in for a rude awakening this past Black Friday, since unlike all recent preceding years sales at traditional venues did not really feature those.  WWE just announced it's ceasing releasing material that way.  I know, I know, streaming is the thing.  I watch things on streaming.  I would not want to watch all the things on streaming.  I never even had cable.  I lived with cable, but never had it myself.  I certainly never had premium cable, and that's basically what everyone wants to provide, now, just so everyone can watch one service for one show.  I don't get that.  I mean, at the moment these services have crazy money to provide crazy material.  I mean, that's how we got the Snyder Cut, right?  It probably would never have happened otherwise.

One of the crazier things you may have noticed is the excuses people make because of the pandemic.  "Pandemic weight gain," for instance.  

Me, I can't believe it's still happening.  We got Omicron, now.  Omicron seems to have turned into a neutered version of COVID-19.  It's sort of the selling point for the booster shot, but even the booster shot isn't really selling very well, and no one is pushing it very hard, unlike the vaccines themselves.  At work the rash of illnesses have been traditional illnesses, lately.  And at work, because of the pandemic, what have traditionally been low attendance periods aren't looking that way in the two holiday weeks.  It looks like people are just trying to catch up with work.  That's what's going to be happening, and it's not going to look very pretty, in the months ahead.  

Me, at work I still have to wear a mask, but when I go out in public, even when it isn't called for, even though I'm vaccinated, I still wear a mask.  I'm really, really used to it at this point, and this seems especially weird, knowing I've been wearing a mask for so long.  I even reached the point, this week, of realizing that my mask was being mashed up with how long I'd let my beard grow, without me realizing it was the beard causing it, until I shaved it back down.  

I've been making tentative plans to visit family next year.  I really want to actually follow through, too, because I haven't seen family since 2019, and 2022 seems like it's going to finally be safe to do so without seeming selfish.  I mean, I know plenty of people who have been traveling since a long time ago in the pandemic era.  Across state lines, across the country.  

In the meantime, I'll just have to make do with what I've been doing.  I finally realized, this year, that even the pandemic funny money finally runs out, and I need to start being responsible again.  I was privileged to be in that position.  I say that again.  Now I just want money to be able to do the big things, like travel plans, even to be able to make a big move, like moving.  If I can figure out how to do that.  If there are other possibilities out there for me.  My job is the most fulfilling thing I have ever done for work, and yet it's an incredibly hard one to do with the certain knowledge that, like every other job I have ever had, there are others working alongside me who don't understand its responsibilities.  And that's every job.  That's people.  People, on the whole, are selfish.  You have to understand that. 

That's life.

A Journal of the Pandemic #28

 So, got some interesting news yesterday.

At work we've had our fair share of employees who've come down with COVID-19 since March 2020.  Until yesterday I had never had someone working in the same room as me get it.  Yeah.  So.

I'm already on vacation.  I was actually asked to consider coming in the rest of the week to help out while my coworker's out.  I have no interest in doing that.  I'm very content with how I'm spending this time, thank you, and how I intend the rest of the week to play out.  I'm feeling fine, by the way.  

How this is playing out is very interesting.  Yeah, we've been dealing with this pandemic for very close to two years now.  When the Delta variant hit, we came very close to dealing with it as we had at the height of the response last year.  Close, but in my experience, not that close.  As much as some people want to be extra cautious, things are slowly returning to normal.  I mean, other than the giant backlog of materials floating off the coast of California.  (Which, again, for those keeping score, is kind of ironic, as my first awareness of COVID-19 was the cruise ships held in quarantine off the coast of China.)  

The government passed a mandate, just before my previous vacation, for all federal employees to be vaccinated.  At work they just made that an official requirement of continued employment.  And, thanks again for asking, I am vaccinated, and would've been sooner if things had played out differently, but, and I don't know how it is for everyone, things have been progressing at a leisurely pace, the less the urgency of the whole thing has been felt.  

There are plenty of people who are still unvaccinated, and at this point we can probably assume it's people who have made deliberately decisions to be so, and this is beginning to be an issue.  Southwest Airlines just had a fairly dramatic showdown with the whole concept, at one point denying that a rash of flight cancellations had anything to do with it (it could also have been, I don't know, UFOs).  A lot of people have a lot to say about this sort of thing, but there is, surprisingly, a lot of different ways to view things, and even if I personally think a lot of it is stupid, it's still going to be that way, and there's no good reason to try and deny it from happening (that way lies tyranny).  So that's how things are.

I had no bad reaction to the shots, and anytime I've felt sick during this whole period, especially when I went to the effort of getting tested last December, I've had no doomsday effects.  Some people have been far less fortunate.  

The protocols keep changing.  Previously they would've shut down the room, at work, but they're either not going to or working slowly toward it.  So far they aren't, and the stated reason is that every member of the regular room staff has been vaccinated, and we still wear masks, as we have all day every day since returning to work in May 2020, and at this point that seems good enough.  (Except the one who contracted the virus.  They're out at least through Friday.  The previous standard was a two-week quarantine, or until they tested negative.)

There's a lot of people who want to remain as cautious as possible, but slowly, we're emerging from the various restraints.  Movies are routinely making $100 million and above at the US box office again.  We're not being bombarded with dire warnings about outbreaks, and for much of the year mass gatherings have been happening.  They recommend booster shots.  

I've begun wondering about life without masks again, but then, I'm at a library today where two days ago I wore one of my mustache masks for the first time, and the staff loved it.  These are certainly interesting times.  They won't be hard to remember.  

A Journal of the Pandemic #27

 You'd have to be living under a rock not to have heard of the Delta variant currently driving the pandemic era, and the increased push to get vaccinations widespread.

Things are definitively returning to normal.  The biggest complaints now are that jobs aren't being filled because people don't want to work, with the common explanation that they're getting too much money with unemployment benefits to bother with earning a paycheck.  Businesses are putting signs up explaining curtailed operations, offering huge signing bonuses...

Yeah, the pandemic is still happening.  At work, a slew of (vaccinated) coworkers have been wiped out recently, either because they actually caught COVID-19 or were exposed to those who did, and ended up taking time out either to get diagnosed or because it was confirmed. 

Combined with the hurricane that whipped through the region early in the month, I've been plagued by considerable uncertainty.  I had a project that ended up aborted because I ran into rights issues, but have since revamped it (and will talk more about that later), and others that I haven't been working on virtually at all, stuck in a holding pattern, and have struggled with feelings of inadequacy.  

On the other hand, the family front seems to be getting better, far better than it seemed at the start of the year, although now of course my dad is doubling down on his pandemic thoughts and even I am finding it hard to listen to it now.  But the calls continue, mostly every Sunday, and that means another tomorrow, regardless of how conversation flows.

I finally reconciled myself with all the pandemic spending I was doing, and am actively taking measures to be fiscally responsible again.  Strange to say, but for me that's how things played out.  I am well aware, again, how fortunate I've been in all this.  I'm grateful all over again that I had medical coverage two falls ago when I needed it for emergency optometrist visits, which I used again a few weeks ago, and have once again updated my contacts prescriptions after yet another emergency when one of the legs on my glasses inexplicably, randomly and suddenly broke off.  (I successfully glued it back on!  But have made the decision to switch back to regular contacts use, after depending on the glasses since I had those updated, two falls ago.)  

Life is strange; life continues.

A Journal of the Pandemic #26

 So, about an hour ago now, I got my second shot.  

I would've gotten done with this slightly sooner, I really would have.  I admit I hesitated when the shot was being offered at work earlier this year, but by the time I had second thoughts, the machine had ground in other directions, and sort of left me behind.  So I finally took matters into my own hands, and got it done with CVS.

Things are very slowly returning to a sense of normal.  At least for me, my tiny corner of the world.  Even the neighborhood library is technically open again, although for some reason all its lounging chairs went missing, or something.  I'll try again soon to see where that situation's at, but this one's a big deal because it was one of the last things to hammer down the lockdowns last year, and it was the singular change to my pre-pandemic routines, altering the regular course of my weekend activities (yes, going to the library; a regular social animal I yam).

At the box office, A Quiet Place Part II was the first domestic release to cross the hundred million mark in the pandemic era.  Godzilla vs. Kong came within a tiny, tiny hair of doing it first, but having one film, let alone two, at or near that mark had been impossible to conceive until this summer.  The major releases that tested the waters before this point didn't even come close.

UPDATE: I guess they let Godzilla/Kong back in theaters to cross the finish line. I checked in with Box Office Mojo a moment ago. So officially two!

People technically don't need to wear masks all the time anymore.  At work, we do, because there are tiny babies ("tiny" apparently the word of the day), who aren't eligible for the vaccine, so we've got to maintain the status.  I kind of like wearing my collection of mustache masks.  I imagine it's become a signature.  Anyway.

Quietly floated the idea of resuming the possibility of a family reunion with the siblings, for next year, but no one picked up on it.  There will need a lot of planning, completely different from the negotiations that resulted in the one that was cancelled last year.  Part of this was made easier a few months ago, when my sister and her family transplanted to New Jersey, which is a reasonable car trip's distance from Maine, which they're demonstrating on Thursday, so our dad can finally meet his new grandson.

And life goes on.

A Journal of the Pandemic #25

 

Baseball cards!

I didn’t think I was gonna talk about baseball cards during the pandemic, but here we are! Last year I thought, people maybe aren’t thinking baseball cards, and maybe that’ll make them more valuable than they have been since the glut of the ‘90s. It seems other people finally got around to thinking that, too.

I’ve only ever been a casual collector. Baseball cards are how I learned the classic “Bash Brothers” era Oakland A’s, which was my favorite team as a kid (and remains one I follow to this day), including Rickey Henderson, who I later learned played for about a million teams, about as many bases he stole in his career (and he hustled right to the very end in a bid to shore up his home run count).

When I was short of funds a decade ago I tried to sell baseball cards, but nobody wanted ‘em. They were worth nothing because there were so many cards, and collectors, from the time amply represented in my collection.

And I’ve bought baseball cards here an’ there ever since. Last year there was no trouble at all, as I said. You might not have been able to find toilet paper, but there were baseball cards! And I kept checking in, and then, a few months ago, I noticed there was none at all to be had, or found, at the local Target! I kept checking: no baseball cards.

Eventually I had a look online. Trading cards games apparently massively heated up, and whether or not this dragged in baseball cards, or if it’s a coincidence, I don’t know, but rabid collectors ruined it for everyone. 

Aside from desperation ten years back, I never really thought of baseball cards (or comic books) as a way to bring in money. There are plenty of people who flip these things for large sums of money, if they find themselves in possession of a valuable card (or comic) (or lunchbox! there’s a market for everything! apparently wrestler/actor/animal Dave Bautista collects lunchboxes) and know how to navigate the market. 

Dare I figure this out? Are baseball cards from last year as good as the new ones I haven’t seen from this year?

Hmmm…

A Journal of the Pandemic #24

A year ago today, I wrote about the pandemic for the first time.

A year ago, I was angry that a much-anticipated family reunion for my dad’s seventieth birthday had been cancelled. He turns seventy-one on Thursday, and there has been not one hint of a do-over, and in my conversation with him yesterday, he sounded disappointed that he will likely not receive even one visit, even from the son who lives forty minutes away.

And this is what’s wrong. This is what was stolen from us. 

A year ago, and now here a year later, we’re inches closer to resuming ordinary life. Inches, because while the vaccines roll out and states reopen, we have still yet to grasp the full impact of the shutdowns. Not even close.

Single parents have struggled with the realities of distance learning. Students have lacked structure in their education. And while everyone has hammered everyone else about “not taking this seriously enough,” adherence to basic protocols has varied greatly. You hear endless condemnation for large gatherings (unless it’s a protest), and yet family gatherings have continued, domestic interstate travel, with little concern for quarantine measures.

Those of us following the rules have lost the most, and we don’t even care.

In some ways, the pandemic has been exceptionally good for me. I’ve been able to refocus on my writing in ways I haven’t been able to for years. That’s great! But it comes with a terrible cost. It’s been a year and three months since I’ve spent time, in-person, with my niece. I haven’t even met my new nephew. And this is extremely unlikely to change soon. I currently have no idea when it might.

The family reunion was cancelled. We set up a series of family phone calls, but somehow I started to feel only alienated because of them, and as they continued, I enjoyed them less, and by Christmas the very idea of them ruined the entire day. I have never had worse relations with my entire family than in the past year.

Oh, and the pandemic itself! A year later and I still don’t personally know a single person who died directly because of it. Everything I’ve experienced has been a result of side-effects.

A Journal of the Pandemic #23

Well, I don’t know about you, but at this point it’s no longer a question: There are people who talk about COVID-19 numbers being purposely inflated, but at my workplace there has been a consistent, concerted effort to downplay infections.

Is this common? For everything that’s been said about the pandemic, I personally have seen very little chatter about what it’s like to actually experience it. There has certainly been plenty of talk about the effects on the job market, schooling, sports, but not much on what people have experienced in their everyday lives. Maybe glimpses into isolation, but, well, I don’t know. That’s a large part of why I’ve been writing this series. I wanted to document my thoughts along the way. This is as significant a moment in history as I have yet lived through, something that has extended to very close to a year at this point, and of course whatever the effects of vaccine rollout, will linger for probably much of 2021 at least.

The stimulus money, for me, has been a bonus. The second installment I decided to use in part to read comics, DC’s Future State slate, which is a repurposing of what was originally intended to be another line-wide revamp, akin to the Silver Age, a new generation of heroes inhabiting familiar roles. So far I’ve really enjoyed it. One month down, one to go. I’ve been ordering them from Midtown. I panicked this past week because I ran into a roadblock for a release for the first time. I thought speculators had spoiled the second issue of a Teen Titans story featuring the in-continuity debut of Red X, a character previously featured in the cartoons. But then it became available soon enough, and I made Midtown even happier by ordering even more...

I joined the first decade of the new millennium a few weeks back by actually getting a Blu-ray player.  By the end of this decade I might even have a Netflix account! 

My sister just retired from the Air Force after twenty years. The pandemic prevented me from even considering attending the ceremony (which I had been looking forward to ever since my brother-in-law’s). Well. She’s a full-time mom now, about six months into the life of her son (the Burrito’s baby brother). I sent her a card in which I tried to express how proud I am of everything she accomplished in her career.

The Super Bowl is in town! I’m not attending, and won’t really explore the attractions, but obviously this is not a normal Super Bowl and as such the economic and visitor rush is not going to happen, and really, the small sampling of neighborhoods I took this morning does not reveal an abundance of excitement (maybe elsewhere in town the Gasparilla faithful decked themselves out for this, too). At work there were a lot of jerseys. I made a deal with a coworker I can’t possibly lose concerning the outcome (because win or lose Tom Brady already makes further history just by being in the game). 

But it’s been nice to hear about all the healthcare workers getting tickets. Actual tickets were priced to highly discourage attendance, although there will be some of that, and another coworker will be moonlighting, so I will know someone there. As they say round here, “Raise the flag.”

I actually have been writing recently. This year will be a little interesting in at least one regard: I’ve got a project where I will write a new chapter once a month. Thankfully, before last month was over I even figured out how to write the thing. And of course Danab Cycle business, in a variety of ways, including a short story collection. I did a lot of small projects last year. This year the goal is larger scope. One being the first full-length manuscript in about seven years. My work schedule is (probably) changing in a few weeks. It might mean less reading. But if so, then more writing. Or maybe balancing both. 

We’ll see!

A Journal of the Pandemic #22

Hey, so I took a COVID-19 test this week.

Yeah. First time. Last weekend I was sick. It wasn’t a bad cold. It wasn’t even a particularly different one, for me. It actually seemed to be pretty easy to get over (except for this wonderful lingering cough I’ve got). 

But it was a cold, in the pandemic era. Of course I thought COVID-19. Actually, just before the pandemic blew up I had my other cold of the year. Didn’t get tested for that one, obviously.

This time I didn’t think there was much choice. The very strange thing I discovered is that it’s still hard to get tested. Here it is nearly 2021 and you’d think that after nearly a year of this it’d be, you know, easier to get tested.

Well, in my experience, it was not. Finally on Tuesday I got tested. I thought it was going to be one of the rapid results tests, but it wasn’t. I was told I might not hear results until, well, today. I didn’t expect to hear anything yesterday, but that’s actually when the computer system told me: negative. As great a Christmas present as there ever was, I suppose.

I did get a call today, by the way. 

I spent the week isolating at home, except that trip Tuesday to get tested. I mean, it’s not that hard for me, and even easier in pandemic time, with libraries closed or as good as. If nothing else I would’ve gone there, with extra time. Anyway, so that was my week. 

I got some writing done. I read. I watched stuff. Mostly, though, I thought about actually having COVID-19. Because my symptoms were minor, I mostly thought about anyone I might have potentially infected before last weekend. I mean, I’m good at wearing a mask at work. That’s when Mogo socializes (comic book reference). But you never know. That’s the whole point of isolating, once there’s doubt. 

I spent a lot of time during this pandemic not really thinking about actually being infected, and then I got sick, and it turns out it wasn’t COVID-19, but suddenly it was a very different experience. 

So yeah, that happened.

A Journal of the Pandemic #21

Hey, you may have heard of something called COVID-19? Kind of a thing that’s been happening this year?

I haven’t written an entry in this series since September. As I write this one, we’ve become entangled in the winter surge, that thing that was looming nebulously all year, and now it’s arrived. Or as HBO might have put it, “winter is coming.”

Obviously plenty has happened since September. Biden won the election. As a result, we’re scheduled for a shutdown early next year. I’m kind of looking forward to it. At work it seems as if in order to get any real response done management needs for someone else to make a decision about how seriously to take the pandemic.

And let me explain that. We lost a couple staff members mysteriously this week. Nobody knew what was happening. By the end of the week we learned unofficially that they of course were tangled up with COVID-19. Nothing was done except replacements brought in as necessary. And they were staff members who absolutely intersected with the whole facility. We had a whole class quarantine for two weeks without signage being hung explaining why. Measures were subsequently put in place to prevent cross-room contamination in playground areas...after it was totally ignored that the one class had absolutely interacted with other classes in playground areas before its quarantine.

(Here I’ll include a parenthetical update on my baby room. As I reviewed what was happening when last I wrote we had just gotten our first two new babies! We ended up getting two more regulars, although it was three until one went on reserve status, their dad sort of permanently out of work because pandemic time has made it difficult for him to be a barber. Three young wiggly babies making strides at tangible mobility, one older baby making strides to standing! Walking! Independently! For all the occasional hiccups, it’s, for me, an inexpressibly irresistibly magical age.)

And I get that the bottom line is always money, that it would be inconvenient to have made any other decisions than have been made.

But.

Here I will once again clarify that I never believed for a moment that draconian methods were ever necessary, but once the decision was made, nearly everywhere, globally, it became irresponsible for anyone to deliberately skirt them without justification, without a clear, honest, transparent method behind the reasoning. Which I’m certain I am not alone in experiencing.

Because of the heavy political polarization at least here in the States, we tend to assume that skirting mandates equates a conservative agenda. That’s the kind of useless simplistic reasoning that absolutely needs to end. I guarantee it isn’t that black and white, and never was. 

My private life continues apace. I published a collection of short stories a few weeks back, collecting material that had previously been earmarked for a friend’s anthology they decided against pursuing in favor of a movie website. (I still have no idea why they couldn’t do both, but apparently some people can’t multitask; I’ve been dwelling recently on the amount of blogging I used to do, and still trying to rationalize how none of it really made an impact so it’s just as well to not continue in that fashion.)

I also published my Christmas collection and sent it out to family. The past few years I was circulating it only to my niece, but figured this year of all years I could expand back outward.

Working on those two publications was a necessary culmination for the year I’ve been having. They were, in their finished forms, a response to the death of my previous computer. I had to totally rewrite the Christmas collection, but in a weird sort of way it was a good thing, therapeutic, as part of it allowed me to simultaneously resurrect the best of the lost Squire’s History of Oz material, the short story I’d written, now reworked as an original story, one I had been planning to write for a while.

I’ve also been plugging away at Space Corps, including replacing ideas that were eaten by the previous computer, which again turned out to be okay. One book I’ve been outlining I had the chance to completely rethink again, and plans for two more had chances for fresh perspectives as well, including the last one in the whole cycle, which took on a drastic new shape inspired in part by some genealogy work I did a few months ago, trying to figure out where exactly my roots lie.

I’ve been staying mostly home. No huge change from any other year, just more so, some by necessity (libraries here are only just beginning, cautiously, to reopen, so my weekends remain home bound, a stark contrast to what was happening a year ago). I did shop on Black Friday, at a comic book store, where I seemed to spend the bulk of my time away from where everyone else was, catching up with recent comics and seeing what I could find in the used collections (where I scored a copy of Steven Seagle’s It’s A Bird). Ironically, the generous back issue sale that enticed others I had already decided to stay away from, having read, perhaps, enough random old comics this year.

This week I kept being reminded how much I miss my niece. Last Sunday was a good call with dad, who hasn’t gotten to see his two Maine-based grandsons since March, partly because my brother has decided he can do without him. We had a rare phone conversation about that a few months back. I tried to make a case for dad, but it obviously left little enough impression. I wonder how many families are losing shape because of the pandemic, and how long, if mended at all, these altered states will endure.

Edgar Wright watched a lot of art movies. I watched a lot of movies, too, but not a lot of overlap there. Kenny Omega just made history. So things are interesting.

And maybe they’re going to be interesting in a positive way.

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.

A Journal of the Pandemic #19

I was kind of hoping that when I reached the nineteenth installment I would be able to say we were nearing some version of the end. But we are not.

It’s true that COVID-19 doesn’t fill the news anymore. We started reaching for other topics months ago, but the fact is the pandemic is still happening. We’re in a process of undoing measures that were put in place to help contain the spread, and whatever your feelings on those measures, your personal experiences with the virus, now we’re about to see everything in a whole new light.

Someone who used to work at my facility lost her mom to the pandemic recently. It rattled one of my coworkers. It’s actually been rare, given your geological location, to have first-or even secondhand experience with death as part of this thing. Knowing people who’ve gotten sick is one thing, but knowing people who have died from it is another thing entirely. You hear horror stories at certain epicenters about mass casualties and massive piles of bodies...but for the majority of us, that’s not what we’ve experienced. I didn’t work with this woman (at a previous job I ended up making friends with someone who’d been employed there before my time just because he visited frequently to see old coworkers, and he was a nice guy, so it was just natural), but my current colleague was obviously rattled by the news. We tend to limit ourselves either to our own experiences or blindly accept those of others. It’s difficult to find some middle ground (as in all things). So to say it’s easy to understand the pandemic just because it’s been inescapable is reductive and unhelpful. 

The reopening process will be more difficult than we might have imagined. My facility is actually actively hiding a diagnosis rather than address it as it might have been months ago. We always post a diagnosis (of anything, such as pinkeye) on the door of the affected room, so everyone is aware. To deliberately avoid doing so now can only mean it was determined, at this stage, that it would be counterproductive to the overall desire to bring operations back to normal. That’s been the big push for the past few months, slowed when numbers in-state started to surge, but never outright halted. We brought back most of the staff (less than a handful remain at home). Paycheck protection measures are ending. 

Based on the initial reactions to the pandemic, which the loudest voices insisted weren’t good enough even then, the assumption would necessarily be that we would handle new cases the same way as the old. The school year has begun. Even if most kids are distance learning, that still leaves a substantial new set of potential cases waiting to develop, as has already been the case. Schools here have been open for a few weeks already. 

If only. If only we had allowed ourselves to make reasoned decisions at the start. If only we had allowed ourselves to calculate what to keep in operation, not based on need alone but on a reasonable assessment of measures that could be employed, distancing possible within a given space. If only we had stopped for a moment to think about how this thing spreads in real terms. If only we had considered, in real terms, how our measures provoked reactions that led to more spreading rather than less. If only we had taken the time to do all this in April. 

It’s not a measure of how right you are to condemn someone for how they react. A reaction is a response, not a decision. You give someone a situation that totally disrupts everything they previously took for granted, and the result will be difficult to contain. You can be wrong by being too right. (This is an absolute proven by the fact that the reverse cannot be true: You can’t be right by being too wrong.)

I wish this were something that people could understand. But for some people, being righteous means the inability to question their thought process. It’s not merely a religious thing. You can be righteously wrong and have no concept of faith at all, except in your own misguided convictions.

Now we struggle to piece things back together. There will be missing pieces for a long time to come.

A Journal of the Pandemic #18

Reopening...! That's the hot topic now, right? Reopening schools, with the new year beginning or about to begin around the country. This involves two segments of the population who have kind of sat out the last few months of dramatic developments. The students, of course, who stayed home for a kind of regular summer vacation, and the teachers. 

These were also two of the most visible segments of the early pandemic, engaged in the strange new world of virtual learning. That’s how the school year ended. Optimistically, the next one might have had slightly less to worry about. We know, of course, now, that this will simply not be the case. 

The slow process of figuring out the (temporary?) new normal has been developing as people have tried to figure out how to open up the shutdowns. Here at my childcare facility we’re recalling staff that haven’t been active in months. Not everyone’s back yet, but it’s already provoking further complications of absorbing the extra staff from my original building; apparently we have a surplus of caregivers. For me, that means a lot of standing around waiting for something to do. The assistant director has remarked several times to me that with my degree I could take advantage of the circumstances and pursue a teaching career.

Which, for any number of reasons, I’m still hesitant to do. One of them, now, is the idea of swooping in and claiming a spot that’s empty mostly because someone else is feeling uncomfortable in this new environment, whether the concept of distance learning or not wanting potential exposure to the coronavirus. It’s not just kids, after all, who will be newly vulnerable to it, but the teachers, many of whom are alarmed about it. 

We’re at a point, though, where I think impatience is setting in, not in the ordinary folk everyone likes to blame for spikes, or the most visible politicians, but the decision-makers running the regular operations. Even those who tried to stick it out are starting to feel the pinch. DC Comics just announced massive changes to its internal structures, for instance, this after already months earlier upending the distribution process of the medium, all as a result of the pandemic. Change is always going to happen, but some change is absolutely attributable to the pandemic. DC has been confronting its future throughout the year anyway; before the pandemic it fired its longtime publisher Dan DiDio, accused of too much editorial meddling and continuity reshuffling. Now, who knows?

Last Friday I had a good phone conversation with my brother in Maine. It was actually about our dad. Like me he’s been struggling with how to perceive our dad, but he’s been having an even harder time of it. On Sunday I talked with my dad, as usual, and...I sort of realized all over again that there are things I don’t often think about in regards to him, how his sense of community is considerable, for instance. He’s involved in his community in ways that objectively put me to shame. His priorities are very different from mine. His life is very different from mine. This is part of why I try so hard to appreciate the differences, work with them, and maintain my relationship with him. Because the funny thing is, no matter how different we are, we can still have conversations, which isn’t always true, not for me, and maybe not for a lot of people. I consider it a very good thing that this whole thing has put such a spotlight, for me, on my dad, for good and otherwise. 

Yesterday I finally got to submit some stories to a comic book publisher I’ve been waiting on since the pandemic began. This publisher prides itself in stuffing its comics with bonus material, which means you can submit to them on this basis. They say they look at more than just microfiction, but that’s all I’ve personally seen them include, and all I’m currently interested in sending. They periodically open, and then close, the submission portal. It was supposed to open in March, but then of course the pandemic hit and threw everything into disarray, and comics were hit like everything else, and the portal remained closed until this month. That’s a long time to wait! I had written two stories for the company early in the year, and that’s exactly what I ended up submitting. I could have written more, and obviously I still can, but that’s two, and now I want to see if either is accepted. I like ‘em both, besides (but hopefully I do, right?), so I guess it was just hard to give them additional competition from my own material.

This week I read Ted Chiang for the first time. Chiang wrote “Story of Your Life,” on which the film Arrival was based. Arrival is one of those movies I loved instantly and somehow began to think even more highly of as time went on. So the story, and Chiang’s storytelling in general, had a tall order to follow. For me he isn’t really up to it. He’s more of an idea guy, who wants desperately to impress but kind of hopes the ideas alone will do it. As fate would have it, I’ve been working on a lot of ideas lately, and Chiang’s ended up feeding into that. That seems good enough.

Finally watched Josh Trank’s Capone, with Tom Hardy, one of the movies that managed to get released during the pandemic (and not as a Netflix release, or some other premium streaming platform). Hardy is Hardy (which perversely is harder and harder to impress with), and he portrays the famous mobster in his inglorious final year, in which his diminished mental abilities drastically affect his affairs. Too often we either glorify our famous figures, or vilify them. This is a rare instance to see something else.

And, today, as I have throughout the pandemic, I ordered Dominos. And as of a week ago yesterday, my niece is a big sister!

A Journal of the Pandemic #17

So, the pandemic is still happening.

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.)

A Journal of the Pandemic #16

It’s been a little while since I last wrote. Sort of in an indeterminate period here in Florida. Don’t want to rehash things I’ve already said. I think the early pandemic was botched, and because of that it’s more difficult to get things done. So the numbers are bad here and last week I had a ridiculously long conversation with my trainer at work, which  for me because of how ridiculously long it was I expressed my frustrations at how things have been handled.

Well, anyway, as I’ve said, my daycare center has three buildings. I worked at one for about the first two years of my employment here, and spent a few months working at another, some of it sort of lended out because I was actually transferred to the other one. This week I’ve been working at my new assignment, and they’ve sort of been seeing what I’m made of. Honestly, I’m writing a post today because as of today, I think I’m starting to really like it here, and I feel like I’m being noticed, and although I’m not an overly egocentric individual, it’s nice to feel acknowledged every now and then. 

And anyway, the week also finally saw the delivery of some stuff I ordered nearly a month ago. The whole process took a lot longer than this vendor has typically taken in the past, so that was another thing that’s been bugging me. I wanted to write about these frustrations before. I wanted to talk about the way my dad’s been handling the pandemic, but I guess I wasn’t feeling very motivated.

Concerning my dad, he’s taken a sharp turn toward outright dismissing the pandemic. He’s older, but the big problem (aside from the fact that he’s even saying, now, if he catches it and dies, then that’s just what happens to happen) is that so much of his life depended on his socializing that from an early point I noticed it was affecting his cognitive abilities. My two brothers haven’t helped in all this. The one who lives in Maine won’t let him visit (lots of people have gotten around this with even “car visits,” where they stay in the car, things like that), and the one in Colorado early on took the severe reaction that wasn’t needed for the whole country and only spoiled the ability to be strategic about it when and where and as necessary. And of course everyone my dad interacts with affirms his thought process, as is true for most people, regardless of their conclusions, and so the more he’s settled back into his routines, the more his reaction has been affirmed.

I wish this weren’t the case. I call him every week, and it’s sometimes hard, because I want him to know where we agree as well as where we diverge, and like a lot of people he’s just not interested in going far past his conclusions. It’s not like I’m advocating extreme thoughts contrary to his. I just want to talk with him. I just want to know he’s okay. 

Anyway, I finished up my latest writing project a few weeks ago, and I haven’t really gotten into another one yet. I poked around. I opened a lot of files. I could start something new, or work on old things. But this pandemic is starting to feel, well, interminable. For so much of it I immersed myself in projects, one after the other, when I wasn’t working, even when I went back. Hopefully as things begin to settle again, and hopefully happily, I’ll feel motivated again. 

I binged all six seasons of Lost recently! A lot of fans grew disenchanted along the way, mostly because they were disappointed with how the mysteries were being answered (which is why binge TV now has short seasons and few seasons), but I never lost (heh) interest. I think this might have been the first time I revisited the last few seasons! It remains the absolute pinnacle TV experience for me.