(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.
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