pandemic living – MOIRARTS

Ice Cream

It’s hot here. I wish I had a better reason for months of radio silence, but all I have is heat and pandemic fatigue. The briefest of updates: the last couple of months of school were awful, the first couple of months of summer were bearable, and now we wait (again) to see where it all goes from here. This time of year is hard for we of low heat tolerance every year, with the water at the local pool becoming more like a warm bath and the noise from our window a/c units turning us into Poe characters. Typically we hunker down and wait for fall, but on top of 16 months of hunkering down and waiting for vaccines for children, our grasp on that plan is tenuous at best.

There are positives. The puppy is delightful. Exhausting, an early riser, tricksy and muleheaded, as much work as a particularly recalcitrant toddler. Also soft, friendly, playful, and adorable. Our math is wonky but we are pretty sure it’s coming up in the dog’s favor. Another year of swim team is in the books, with some private lessons from our child’s original swim instructor helping make the leap to dives and flip turns. There is nothing quite like seeing the person who taught your baby to love the water and be proud of doing underwater “sea lion swimming” now help them lose their fear of belly flops and water up their nose a full decade later. Thanks to our location in a regional hub of medical research, two of our child’s friends have been vaccinated early through participation in vaccine trials which opens up small windows of opportunity for unmasked indoor play and a general diminishment of our worry around socializing.

What more is there to say about the dog days of summer. It’s Leo season. I’ve known so many thickheaded, big-hearted, hilarious, aggravating, sociable, intense people born in this month over the years. Fire signs stick together, so while this time of year is exhausting and flattening for me, it also gave the world some of the people I’ve loved the most in my life. I wish your love really were ice cream, though. It’s hot here.

Video of Sarah McLachlan performing “Ice Cream” live at a 90s concert.

If You Wanna

Fully. Vaccinated.

Seeing our closest friends again, in the house, without masks. Eating a meal with more than the same three faces around our table. Holding the people I love, whom I’ve had to cross my arms over my chest to keep myself from reaching for, for a year.

Nothing much more will change in our behavior beyond that. We are riding out the rest of the school year at home, unwilling to take on the additional risk of group interaction and expend the energy to make such a major change in routine this close to the last stage of both this pandemic and the summer. We won’t be doing anything unmasked indoors nor spending any length of time in groups, masked or not, indoors or out. We might get takeout. We might visit more or different stores.

What will change is the level of stress and worry we feel while we continue the best practices for keeping ourselves and others safe. Our child will ride bikes and play with kids whose parents are also fully vaccinated, and they will still wear masks and I will not worry about how close they get to each other. I will walk with my fully vaccinated friends and we won’t wear masks and I won’t worry about how close we veer to each other. We will sit in the yard and enjoy a distanced meal with fully vaccinated friends, and we might pull our chairs closer so we don’t have to boom quite as much. We will walk our new puppy and not worry about how close our masked neighbors get when they bend in to experience his excitable softness.

We will begin to shake off the dust of anxiety, grief, and feral introversion and begin to live together again. We will laugh together and forgive our wide and varied weirdnesses.

If you wanna come back, it’s alright.

Day 365

We knew this day would come. One year ago, I was so anxious. I was a ball of tension waiting to collect my child and bring them home that Friday, knowing that schools and workplaces were closing all around us and having resisted the urge all of that week to keep us all at home ahead of the decision we knew was coming. Parents were distancing, we weren’t hugging, we were using hand sanitizer. My friends who are microbiologists were emphasizing all of this as absolutely necessary; I was closely following what had happened in Italy and stocking our pantry and freezer well ahead of our area’s shutdown.

This year, I learned the ways in which anxiety has served me and pushed back against the ways it has not. I have struggled to relax out of hypervigilance for decades; I felt a degree of relief when my nervous system’s level of alertness aligned with the events going on around me, even if only through the early part of the summer. Once my child and partner were both working and schooling from home, I was much less anxious. This was an actual full-blown crisis, and my body is calm in a crisis. It’s a state of being in which it expects to exist at all times, an expectation that causes so many problems for me when there is not a global pandemic during a rise of fascism threatening all our lives. Last year, my nervous system was like, look, see, I was right all along. There is a lot to be said for not being right sometimes.

It is not my desire to recap the entire year we all just lived through. It was awful. Many people died. Many people became and are now ill. From COVID, from isolation, from stress, from an inability to access necessary care for ongoing health conditions. It remains awful.

Somehow, we are all going to have to learn to live again. Newly. Now, in this post-2020 state. With our survivors’ guilt, with our grief, with the health impacts we don’t yet know the full extent of. I have been thinking a lot about the AIDS survivors I knew the 90s, mostly gay men who had either dodged HIV entirely or had lived long enough with HIV to arrive at the state where the drugs began to keep people alive for good. In 1997, a longtime survivor was someone who had lived with HIV for 10 years. We don’t even use that language anymore, but believe me when I say that survivors’ guilt around HIV endures among older LGBTQ people. Why me, why not me. All of us who are here now, still, will have to grapple with this, in ways we have likely been skirting the edges of throughout. Why me (with/out a job), why me (with/out an infection), why me (with/out a home), why my loved one, why a stranger.

I will say what activists and scholars have said for decades now about HIV/AIDS: there is no moral message in a virus. Who gets it, who does not. Who dies, who does not. There is no morality here, no good or bad. There are odds and chances, near misses and sudden deaths. We have survived. Others have not. It is not because of what any of us individually did or did not do, although it is true that systems and policies failed many of us in profound ways. We did our best in a situation largely beyond our control, made choices within frameworks presented to us, frameworks that are uneven and unequal. We can spend the rest of our days shrinking ourselves down to fit into a place of guilt or we can find a way to grieve and live.

Today, I dropped off a piece of art at a local art center, for consideration as part of a show of community work that will go up in a local coffee shop, a collage I made in an online class I took through them this fall. I am wearing a t-shirt commemorating an online concert by one of my favorite bands, streamed in the early month of the pandemic as a fundraiser for the food banks in their home state. I am typing this on the new computer I had to buy when it became clear that my old computer would not rise to the needs of the situation when we were all online all the time. Next to me is the new phone I eventually caved and purchased once I accepted that no one got my texts on time and I was largely unintelligible on my old phone, which had become the way I connected even with my friends on the next block. Farther into this room is my child’s work desk, with a school-issued computer; the repurposed train table now covered with LEGOs; a stack of books waiting to be read by authors I’ve supported through online book talks; my trusty paper planner that’s filled largely with notes about when I cooked what so that we don’t go through all of this only to die of food poisoning in the end.

There is nowhere to rest my eyes that doesn’t reflect some adaptation to what we faced last year. The question is: what situation do we find ourselves in now? Not just where do we go from here, but how. Just yesterday I talked to a friend on the phone and we vowed to embrace each other’s weird, awkward, un/inhibited behaviors when we see each other again. That’s what I wish for all of us, as we emerge blinking into the light of 2021. The pandemic is not over yet, but we can start to learn a new way of living, together.

Temptation

The past couple of months have been chaotic, to say the least. Chaotic good? Maybe, but we won’t know until the next few weeks play out. We sold our second car, which required a lot of trips and phone calls to many different offices. We got our first vaccine shots, but my paperwork is lost in the county health system. We seem to have finally sorted out the aftershocks of refinancing our house last fall. We have not been told that we definitely don’t have a puppy, but we have not received any firm confirmation about the puppy we have been told we might have. I finally did some medical testing for my doctor, part of which got lost by FedEx. Every single meeting and appointment got rescheduled at least once for weeks on end. You get the idea.

Today the sun came out, it warmed up, and it might be spring. (It might not. Like I said: chaotic.) I had a telehealth appointment with my doctor, which was both bad (enduring health problem endures) and good (we are not out of treatment options and my doctor is a stubborn mule in the way you want in a doctor treating your chronic health condition). We received a package from our friends in Germany that took 3 1/2 months to arrive, but we didn’t know it was coming so were able to be wholly and pleasantly surprised and delighted when it arrived. I found myself feeling weirdly optimistic. Like, in a few weeks, things could be very different. We could both of be fully vaccinated. We could have a puppy. I could be through another round of treatment for what ails me. Of course, none of that could come to pass; Mercury retrograde during February in a pandemic really lets you know that nothing can be relied on beyond right this very minute.

When I am in a good mood, my mental radio gets turned up to 11. All day this tune has been blasting through my brain. If you were to try to characterize my wide-ranging taste in music under one sweeping label, it would be peppy morose. It has to all be there: lyrics, guitars, beat. Usually the weirder the better. (Yes New Order, no Depeche Mode. Yes REM, no U2. Yes Cure, no Smiths. Yes Modest Mouse, no National. Yes Pink Floyd, no other 70s bands. Yes punk rock.) I recently tried to read Peter Hook’s book about New Order. I couldn’t, but from skimming 700 pages, I learned that they all did an excessive amount of coke and Peter and Barney couldn’t stand each other. You can see that in their live performances, but they still made all this amazing music together. “Temptation,” which wasn’t originally on an album but has so many versions and releases you could mail order vinyl for your whole entire life and not collect them all, is possibly my favorite New Order song. As a bridge out of Joy Division and from the pain of losing Ian, it’s all there. I’m devastated and alone, I’m upbeat. I’m obsessed with you, I don’t know what color your eyes are. I miss you, I don’t need you. It’s the first time, it’s the last time.

As we emerge from the hostage situation that was 2020 and continue to grieve our innumerable losses, let’s remember together how to live.

She’s Out of Her Mind

Would I normally have had a party for an unremarkable birthday in my mid-40s? Highly unlikely. This year, when all the parties were cancelled, we needed them more than ever.

Thirty years ago, I accidentally threw a great party for my 16th birthday. It was meant to be a low key “sit around and talk about nerd stuff under the unwelcome eagle eye of your parents while being gifted the entire discography of the Cure dubbed on cassette by the drummer of your boyfriend’s band who probably had a secret crush on you” kind of event. But then my skater friends turned up, and since we all traveled with music on us at all times back then, they threw the punk on the stereo and turned our dining room into a mosh pit and that was that. Nineteen years ago, I accidentally threw another great party for the last birthday I’d celebrate in Ann Arbor, which started off in the same “sit around the living room drinking too much whiskey and gossiping about your grad school professors” vibe, and ended up with my brother and a local illusionist called SuperWayne, whom I’d met at our bar earlier that year, juggling flaming torches out in the snow in the front yard while we all cheered like we were teenagers in an 80s movie watching someone do their first keg stand.

It’s not that I never try to throw great parties, they just tend to be for other occasions and they usually happen because we invite literally everyone we know to attend them and that ends up being an extremely eclectic mix. Our Halloween parties in grad school, our holiday parties here. I’m missing them like crazy this year, when both Halloween and Boxing Day are on Saturdays and they were going to be a helluva lot of fun.

Instead of all that, I convinced the DJ whose sanity-saving music streams I’ve been listening to for the past few months to let me sponsor a NIN-themed industrial and dark wave night for my birthday, complete with a mostly-all-punk hour long set of my favorites in the middle, starting with “Burn” and continuing on with “Burn.” It was more fun than I imagined I’d be able to have in the midst of all this, particularly the part where everyone fielded wild guesses about what would be in my birthday set. “These guesses are cracking me up,” said my old friend from high school. “They’re going to be really disappointed when they find out it’s Blink-182.” “I never know when you’re kidding.” “THAT’S WHAT’S SO GREAT ABOUT ME,” said I, a Sagittarius.

It wasn’t them, but it could have been! Happy pandemic birthday to me. She’s got a black shirt, black skirt, and Bauhaus stuck in her head.

Day 287

School started in earnest. Autumn came. Autumn went. I got completely overwhelmed by the horror playing out across the country. There was a hellish election that went on for ages as a cap to a hellish campaign cycle that went on for ages. Half the country thinks the results mean everything will be fine! great! normal! in a month and the other half think we’re now in a civil war. We adopted a dog. We had to give the dog back because it only tolerated one family member and charged and snarled at the other two. We agreed to get a puppy instead. There are no puppies. Every time I thought about returning to writing I could only focus on how long it had been and how little anything had changed except for the worse.

This week it’s been nine months since we started staying home and I’m starting to lose my shit. I hurt my back (neck? shoulder?) and it’s grinding at me. I forgot what it’s like to be in constant acute pain, forgot how irritable I am. Forgot how tender my child is when I’m irritable. I might be taking too much onto myself, but it did seem like we were doing okay until this rough patch. Which coincided with having to return a dog, the onset of gray winter days, and the complete lack of the usual holiday festivities at school, in the neighborhood, or with our families. Okay, so maybe it’s not all me. Still. We all failed to appreciate how much better I’d gotten until I got bad again.

I don’t have anything good to say about anything. My friends are teachers and they’re afraid of getting sick and deathly afraid of getting a family member sick. Same for my friends are who are doctors, nurses, social workers, restaurant workers, hairdressers. Same for all of us with chronic illnesses, disabilities, health risks that were typical but are now potentially deadly. It’s all terrible.

Here is something good: it snowed one half of an inch and my child was delighted and played outside for hours. Another thing: we successfully executed an allergen-free snickerdoodle. (Not a cookie I ever ate or made growing up, but I hear they’re popular among certain crowds.) One more: tomorrow I’m going in to get my neck patched up, the tree people are coming to take down the leaning cherry that’s been looming ever lower over the yard since we moved in, and as of noon we will have watched a virtual holiday show and be on winter break for the next 18 days. During which time we will eat cookies, read books, build Legos, watch for snow, and sleep as much as we can get away with.

Dig deep, winter ones. There’s no other way but through.

Day 200

Two hundred days. I don’t know why increments of ten are compelling here, as they don’t align with the weeks, months, or (I suspect) years that we will be doing this. Still, two hundred days seems like a long time, even more in light of the way the days and weeks are slipping by. We have acclimated to living in a pandemic even while thousands of people die each day, to a degree that is a bit mind-boggling. It seems like just last month that I was writing about Day 100, that I was marveling at how the weeks were running into one another. Blink, another 100 days. Blink, another 150,000 dead.

This week I’m thinking about what’s coming. For months, I’ve lived as much in the present as possible, trying to neither wallow in yearning for the past nor fear of the future. Foot in front of foot, day by day, sleep when I can, cook what I have to, read as much genre fiction as I need to numb my racing thoughts. Repeat repeat repeat. However, the seasons are changing, school is in session, winter is coming. All of it demands an assessment of where we are and where we’re going, a recommitment to principles, a recalibration of the machine.

First day of autumn. It feels significant, probably only to me and my addled sentimental brain, that the first day of this delightfully cool season aligns with our two hundredth day of pandemic distancing. This is when I would be taking stock of what needs to be done before winter, getting the cars repaired and the house battened down, calculating how much time in the weeks I have for my work now and determining what I want to do with that time. All of that is happening, but I was jolted into a realization that I need to take stock of our pandemic planning as well.

Winter is coming (har har, yeah) and it’s not going to be good. There is no way for it to be good. There is no vaccine coming to save us; the virus travels better (farther, faster, longer) in cooler drier air; indoor spaces become more dangerous; outdoor spaces become less available; and all of us want more than anything else to start being with other humans again in close contact. (Don’t we? I know I do.) I am looking at our plan to pod (bubble, quaranteam, whatever cute phrase we’re using) with another family like ours–one kid, two parents based at home, no family in the area, similar protocols for shopping–that seemed very reasonable over the past three months we’ve been discussing it and wondering if maybe I’m being completely stupid and we’ve lost our ever-loving minds. We undertook these UN-level negotiations out of a desire to have someone for our child to play with in the winter, to have other adults to converse with in the dark months, to have people other than the three of us to share a meal or a board game with as this drags on, et cetera. The lovely cool weather that I’m reveling in this week will ultimately mean we can’t all lounge in the yard for much longer.

I know that all of our choices are about managing risk, balancing the chance of dire health consequences down the line with the reality of negative health consequences accumulating every day this goes on. I’m not good at trusting other people, and even though I believe I’ve found another family as paranoid and mistrustful as I am (just kidding, but really), there’s no guarantee. No sure thing. Our brains and our moods are going to start urging us to take more risks because this has gone on so long and we’re struggling. Maybe that restaurant is okay (it’s not) or that BBQ will be fine (it won’t) or church will be good if we sit apart (nope again). Not that I’m planning to do any of these things, but the things we are doing–biking outdoors with other families, relying on distancing but not also masks for yard chats, bubbling up–seem reasonable to me. Maybe they’re just as ill-advised. Basically, my brain is locked in a cage match between I’m sure this one thing will be fine and WILL THIS BE HOW WE ALL DIE.

I have no answers. There is no conclusion. When I make it to the check-ins that are still a saving grace of this whole situation, many of us like to end with be safe, stay strong. Hold the line. Distance, mask, don’t hang out indoors. But as winter approaches, I really want to know that people living alone have a plan to get through it. I don’t want to advocate for podding, because who the hell knows if it’s safe, but I do want to hope that everyone has someone they’ll be able to hug this winter, some way, somehow. Please don’t crack and go to a bar and then the movies because you just can’t take it anymore. I really don’t want you to do that. We’re looking at another year, though, which is a long time. I really want us all to live through this, hearts and brains intact.

Be safe, stay strong.

Six Months

Today marks six months of pandemic living. Weeks of full quarantine, months longer of modified quarantine with masks. Truthfully, our family is still as isolated as we can be while balancing the risk of contracting a deadly virus and the strain on our mental, emotional, and physical health. What’s the old pop punk line? I’m not sick but I’m not well. We grocery shop, we work from corners of our home, we read, we write, we walk, we bike, we see our friends at a distance, in masks. We grieve, we worry, we overeat, we undersleep, we bicker, we grouse.

In the last six months, we have spent more time together as a family of three than ever before. I have been based at home since my child was born, first as a parenting choice in the early years and then as a necessity in recent ones, when my aches and pains became first a chronic illness and then a disabling condition. Never in those years, beyond the initial weeks when my partner was on parental leave, has our child spent so much time with both parents present. Never has my partner been available for eating and walking or biking over lunch. Never have we been able to rise, eat, and prepare for the day at our own pace. Never have we had dinner together so regularly (and when I think of my partner coming home from work and eating meals alone late at night all those years because I fed our child hours earlier, the loneliness breaks my heart). There is no commute for any of us.

We are all here together in a structure that is the most relaxed it has ever been for our family and we are under strain we never could have imagined bearing and surviving. All day, every day, we function in the face of unrelenting stress. The stress of keeping a job, making decisions at that job that impact the lives of other people who are similarly trying to keep a job while making decisions that impact the lives of other people. The stress of monitoring local, county, state, national, and international events, to know what is mandated and what is recommended, to find the path where we survive a deadly pandemic and determine if and how we can walk it. The stress of worrying about every single person we know and love, and every single person they know and love, all around the country and the world. The stress of managing how much we know about wildfires and police brutality and neo-Nazi violence and voter suppression and poverty and hunger and homelessness and refugees and abuses of power and relentless deadly racism. The stress of determining how much of that is necessary for our child to know, in what ways and to which degrees, before or after they hear garbled versions of current events from classmates and friends. The stress of not crying, of finding somewhere private to cry, of getting out of bed each day while wanting to not get out of bed again until it’s over. The stress of knowing that it will never be over.

Six months. I will keep counting the days, weeks, and months since this began. Since we came home and stayed. I will do this partly because I am a nerd and making notations soothes me, and partly because I have always been attuned to dates and the passage of time, to anniversaries and the arrival of days where I feel off for no reason and then remember, ah, yes, that, then. I know that many more people have been at work and in school, in and out on different timelines throughout this year. I know that things will get worse before they get better, if they ever get better at all. I know that the day we came home from work and school and stayed was not the beginning, and I know that the day we line up to be vaccinated and return to our school and office buildings will not be the end.

Six months, ten years, a lifetime. Whatever the meaningful increments are: we’re still here.

Day 147

Yesterday, I told my physical therapist that it feels like there’s nowhere to rest my eyes. Locals, news, obligations inside our family, even the blue light from the screen that gives me eye strain while I’m trying to relax and watch what turned out to be an uninspiring Pump Up The Volume knock-off. Nature was the answer I got, look to nature. Everything else is a dumpster fire.

I peer into the overgrown corner of the garden from the window by my desk. Watching the grapevine grow ever higher was stressing me out until last week when a medium small rabbit popped out from that section of the yard. Just yesterday, I spotted a house wren in the branches, staking out its territory from the more aggressive and ubiquitous Carolina wrens who live here. Years of time, money, and labor invested in the native gardens surrounding the house and bordering the yard are showing their value this year. While we’ve been low on butterflies, we’ve had more types of birds nesting (or bringing the young ones here to feed) than I can remember in past years. We were the regular hunting ground of the block’s mama fox and we have a rabbit who’s claimed the clover patch and is a nightly visitor. With the successful relocation of the overcrowded winterberries, I hold out hope that this fall will give the birds a bumper crop of berries.

Nature isn’t enough, though. While I’ve deleted Twitter from my phone, I can’t bring myself to turn fully away. There is human tragedy, policy failure, and societal collapse playing out in real time all around me. I feel it even when I’m not looking. I don’t need to witness all the things, every minute of every day, but I can’t ignore it all. Too many friends are teachers around the country being ordered to risk their lives; too many people I know are losing family members or being permanently incapacitated by this virus; too much is at stake. Also: I can do nothing about it except make the best choices for our family and community. All we can ask of each other is to survive.

Because nature isn’t enough, I have also been attending as many book talks as I can online. Crowdcast has become a lifeline for me, connecting me to writers and thinkers around the country who are having conversations about important things that are not always this wildness we find ourselves in the midst of. My favorite bookstores are still hosting readings, and I am able to attend more of them virtually than I ever did in person.

This is a low energy time of year. I remind myself. Every year we hit an August slump. Also, we are living in conditions of chronic stress, experiencing increased depression and spikes of anxiety. This is not the time to expect much. Just survive. If you can, find a place to rest your eyes.

Day 130

Thirty more days. Blink and a month went by. It got hot here, ushering in the time of year when I always start losing days to the fog of achy joints, migraines, and a generally sluggish pace of life. We’re still here, it’s just summer.

As the country goes off the rails, we have small bits of light. Our garden is home to young birds of many varieties: cardinals, robins, song sparrows, catbirds, wrens, woodpeckers, grackles, starlings, crows, a towhee. We watch them flop their way around the shrubbery as they grow wings; they catch moths and beetles in the grass and then, startled by their success, fly back to their parents to learn what to do next. Young rabbits slide under the gate and lounge in the clover, munching on flowers and then wriggling in the dust patch. A chipmunk appears inconsistently, darting so many places that it’s impossible to tell where it lives. There is so little to do, so we watch nature in real time, calling each other to the window to see the unremarkable yet always exciting appearance of one small creature or another.

My partner is still working from home, keeping us all in shelter, food, and books. The child and I fill our days with summer things, reading and watching cartoons, rousing ourselves reluctantly to cook dinner. (About which I regularly think, Every day? Really? Still?) Even before the pandemic arrived, we had decided to try a camp-free summer, after a school year that included, for the first time, evening swimming and after-school chorus. Then, after a spring of online meetings and homework submissions, the idea of online camp didn’t appeal at all. Instead, we lounge.

In the spring, we worked hard week after week to weed, edge, and prune the yard into something resembling a purposeful garden. We left a bit of wildness in the country style, plants spilling into each other whenever the crowding doesn’t create issues with mildew and rot. (It is, after all, a southern swamp here, no matter how much I’m striving to create a bucolic northern copse.) Now, we have only one patch of garden that didn’t get attended to before the temperatures rose above 90F and therefore won’t until they drop again. Now, we water the shrubs from the rain barrels and keep the birdbath filled with fresh cool water. We venture out as little as possible.

It seems irresponsible that a month has passed in this way, but what else could we do? We have also cautiously participated in swim team four mornings a week. I have gone to the store twice. We acquired frozen lemonade from the local coffee shop once, yesterday. I have attended online book talks, taken a writing course, participated in a scholarship committee. All of that is only as much as I would do in a typical month of summer, so I suppose it is enough. Throughout, we give to bail funds. We give to protest groups. We give to immigrant advocates. We give to support neighbors who have lost houses, jobs, family members.

We carry on.

won’t you celebrate with me

won’t you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.

–Lucille Clifton