Monday, March 30, 2020

Perspective and Peeps in the time of Pandemic (In the Category of Want What You Have)

Tragic news. Coronavirus has halted the production of Easter Peeps®, the sugar-covered marshmallow cavities-in-waiting that adorn Easter baskets and trendy dinner party table centerpieces that obstruct line-of-sight conversations.
Is this a waste or a proper use of bunny-shaped Peeps? (Photo Source)
Depending on your perspective, this news is either a prayer answered or the Devil's work. In my experience, no sugary treat causes greater debate among us sweet-tooth inclined than the eternally resurrected spring candy question: Peeps — Crap or Crave-able? (Unless it's maybe Chocolate and Mint — Ambrosia or Trash?)

As coronavirus spreads, our world diminishes, and all the places, people and opportunities we once took for granted are made precious by their absence now. It makes me sad even though I was not going to buy any Peeps in the first place.

Don't misunderstand me; I am team Peeps all the way. Their stretchy sweet (cloying, really) presence in my childhood Easter basket is a happy, distant memory. Emphasis on the word distant. The Easter Bunny who packed my baskets would take the yellow or pink Peeps out of their large cardboard sleeve, break down the long rows of chicks (you couldn't buy three-packs back then; such nonsense did not exist), and arrange them around the basket intermingled with hand-dyed hard-boiled Easter eggs, jellybeans, foil-wrapped chocolate eggs and a hollow chocolate bunny. The plastic "grass" that lined the basket inevitably became stuck in the gooey marshmallow spot, a sort of oozing wound where the Peeps had been pulled apart. Eating the Peeps required pulling the grass off, which created marshmallow-covered strands of Easter basket grass, which stuck to my hands until I managed to spread it to the carpets of every room in the house before we had even left for church.

I hate that children might be deprived of that happy memory in their own lives.

While the article regarding the cessation of Peep hatching concludes that the Just Born Candy Company feels pretty confident that they have a sufficient stock of Easter Peeps, I cannot help but wonder if this news will trigger a panic-buying spree causing cardboard sleeves of Peeps in all sizes to disappear from store shelves, the next toilet paper of our age.

Stay At Home order or rational and healthy fear of catching COVID-19 keeping you out of the stores? No worries. The Just Born Candy Company ships from their on-line store. I confess, the chocolate pudding Bunny Peeps tempt me.

Wash your hands. Prevent the spread of sticky Easter basket grass.

Friday, March 27, 2020

Interesting Times — Blogging My Way Through the Pandemic

(In the category of Be Where You Are.)

I get it now, why the ancients cursed their adversaries with, "May you live in interesting times."

Times are a little too interesting these days, if you ask me. Not in the usual way of interesting, the "hey let's go check out this new___" type of interesting. (Insert favorite new thing to check out. For me it would be a new restaurant or a new movie or a new art installation or a new winery or microbrewery...)

No, it's "will I ever be able to buy toilet paper again" interesting, and "will all my friends in the food and beverage service sector survive the complete closure of their entire industry" interesting.

It's "will all my friends in healthcare — God bless them, and I have a fair few  — stay safe" interesting, and "will my family, my friends or my co-workers get sick" interesting.

Will I or my husband get sick?

Will any of us die?

I could go down a dark rabbit hole of apocalyptic hellscape hand-wringing, screw myself into a state of panic so severe I cripple myself, and obsess over the minute-by-minute news reporting about the mushroom cloud of increased cases, deaths, and the utter collapse of a once robust global economy.

So could you. As it turns out, that is easy to do in a pandemic. Who knew?

Let's not.

Let's look for the silver lining instead. Let's make metaphorical lemonade from the giant lemon known as the Novel Coronavirus Pandemic of 2020 (because three years under Comrade Cheeto's corrupt and inept leadership has not been interesting enough).

Instead, let's start blogging again!

Let's ask ourselves: What would the great humor columnists of our (well, my) generation write if they had been cursed to live in interesting times? (Think Erma Bombeck and Dave Barry.) They would take the mundane tedium of Shelter In Place and transform it into hilarity accessible to all on some level or another.

(As paid writers, they would also be used to working from home every day, alone in their study, typing their essays or conducting phone meetings with editors. The isolation would be normal for them. They could still go out to check out a new movie or restaurant, or whatever.)

I lack their perspective and their success. I am not Erma Bombeck (may she rest in peace). I am not Dave Barry (may he live forever). I'm just a writer who wishes I was either of them or their bastard love child.

I live in the paradoxical world where I now have to use 100% of my own toilet paper having no idea of when I can restock. Details such as this never mattered to me before. I feel for my coffee-drinking co-workers also working from home for the foreseeable. Our company provides coffee for free. What they are now saving in gasoline without the commute, they are probably making up for having to finance their own coffee habits. For a few of them, this is significant. I bring my own green tea, so no changes here on the caffeine front.

On the other hand, my employer is progressive enough to send us home to work and do whatever is needed to help slow the spread of COVID-19, and in all honesty, I am grateful for this opportunity to experience the "writer's life" of staying at home all day working from my new writer's desk (that took me 3.5 hours to build, and I only cried twice).

I am an extrovert by nature, and all this "me" time is a new challenge to work through and learn from.

Seems like the perfect time to start blogging again. We should all be journaling our thoughts during this period of history that we happen to have been cursed enough to experience in real time. It's not every day you get to live in interesting times.

I hope it all goes back to boring soon. In the meantime, I need to login for my Zoom Friday Happy Hour that one of my friends organized...should be fun. I'll let you know how it goes in my next post. This is the New Normal, kids...here we go.

Stay home. Wash your hands. Meet you back here at a safe social distance soon.