I think I intended to title a post “28 Days Later” (original, I know) but time is so stretchy that 28 days came and went and I didn’t have this tab open, so I forgot.
Then I started it again on day 30.
Now it’s day…37?
30 days. That’s a whole unlimited metro card. My brain is not moving seamlessly anymore, but thinking only in discrete units of time. One month. How many more?
We are of course lucky. We’re not sick, we’re not driving each other nuts, we still have much of our previous employment. I miss the springtime, which feels far from here. I miss smelling things (I haven’t lost my sense of smell – there just isn’t anything of note to smell in here). I miss my parents. I wish we had the Olympics to look forward to. Of course these are petty complaints.
When we have to go out – to Rite Aide, when we can’t get groceries delivered – we go out at 1 am, wearing masks and sunglasses and looking like bug people. Our one-block journey takes us directly past a police station, where there are nearly always at least a dozen officers gathered, laughing and talking, so close to one another, no masks in sight. It’s like we’re inhabiting two different planets.
Back in Manhattan, 250 square feet. We go to Rite Aide wearing masks and scarfs, goggles or sunglasses even though it’s 1:30 am (we’re trying to go when no one else is there). It turns out the Rite Aide cleans their floors at that time, which is generally good but specifically bad because it’s kicking up mist and we have a fear of aerosols (I know about the floor-cleaning Zamboni only secondhand, because my role was to wait outside of the store – not too close to the entrance – to help carry things home, so that only one of us would be around (hypothetical) people. So I have no mask on, just a winter hat with earflaps into which all of my hair is tucked, which would look incongruous for this early spring night if there were anyone to see it. We can only see the police officers at the nearby station and hear a group of people in the parking lot across from it. A group of people? Surely they’re not actually in a physical group – maybe they’re at their windows? I try to peer into the lot as we pass and think I see people gathered around a car, but I don’t pause to be sure.
I don’t remember if it was before we ventured out or after we came back empty-handed that the fireworks started. It sounded like they were coming from the backyard, but I didn’t see any light when I went to the window. Who is setting off fireworks? There are enough frightening loud noises as it is.
About the backyard: this is a small building, and most of the tenants seem to have left the city. The backyard used to be easily accessed, and now there’s a sign that forbids residents from entering or from touching the door that leads out there. This is not because of the virus. It is, actually, because of us. When the building smelled of gas one night, we called Con Edison, and when they arrived they determined that what we were smelling was spilled gasoline…but then they found an unrelated gas leak, called the superintendent to come unlock the door to the building’s basement, quickly grew annoyed by his stalling, and had the fire department come break down the door. The super and the landlord were not thrilled by this and told us as much, but we did not find their argument (“you should have called us and we would have told you it was just spilled gasoline”) compelling, given that there was an actual gas leak that we wouldn’t have known about otherwise.
That evening, back in January, COVID was known but not yet looming; a gas leak was far more frightening. The Con Ed workers stayed – in the backyard and basement – until after 1 am, jackhammering and doing who knows what else. Our private suspicion was that they found illegal construction and that the new “no tenants allowed” signs are to prevent something like that from happening again. As such, since it doesn’t seem like they want people to stay away because of danger but because of nosiness, we decided that the yard might be the safest outdoor space we can access for the next…period of our lives.
But the person who really deserves to have use of the yard is a woman who lives two floors up, who’s lived in the building for decades and generally takes care of it and makes sure things are okay even though she’s not affiliated with building management or ownership. This afternoon, when I looked out the window, I saw her gardening there. Humans in the natural world! It was the best sight of the day.
We walked from the East Village over the Manhattan bridge back to my apartment in Brooklyn on Tuesday. It was heartening to see most people doing as we were – moving to the side of the road/sidewalk when other people were approaching, avoiding stopping to wait for traffic lights in the same spot as others, etc. We managed to frogger our way through downtown Brooklyn pretty easily, though there was one woman who walked directly at us while crossing the street and proclaiming into her phone, “I’m not going to get it! I’m a young, vigorous woman!” upon which we skittered away like bugs, less afraid of cars than human vectors.
I lost my sweatshirt jacket somewhere between Manhattan and Brooklyn, or more likely when we stopped to rest at a bench on the Brooklyn end of the bridge. I had been wearing it draped over my head to provide some modicum of sun protection – even in these times we still found ourselves thinking, “Oh no, I forgot to put on sunblock!” and “I didn’t bring earplugs to protect against the screeching of the subway,” these quaint, tiny measures to protect our health that we used to follow with such vigilance. So I was wearing my sweatshirt over my head and trying to stuff the fabric into my ears when the train passed. And now it’s…somewhere on the ground, c’est la vie.
Last night was the first time NYC applauded for health care providers and grocery store workers and sanitation departments and post officers, etc., (or it was the first time we heard it?), and even though I’ve seen tweets to the effect of “my doctor friend doesn’t care if you cheer for her, she cares if you elect responsible politicians” (which I agree is more important!), both things can happen simultaneously, and I admit to feeling a mix of “now I’m going to cry” crossed with the old, weird, classroom/choir anxiety of “is it too late to join in now? Have I missed it? Will people be able to hear (gasp, horror) my voice?” and a touch of the anticipation one gets before fireworks (granted, it also sounded like someone in the neighborhood was setting off firecrackers, which…is this really the time?)
City-mandated social distancing is technically only three days old, although we’ve been doing it for more than a week now since we were fortunate enough to be able to work from home starting then.
To stay spirited, we’ve developed series of actions that functions both as a routine to “keep us sane” and a way to measure just how much that sanity has slipped. A coded system that doesn’t rely on colors or numbers. Roughly in order of plot-based to losing-the-plot:
Reach out to friends
Continue doing some form of physical activity. A gallon of water weighs more than 8 pounds! (This is…not useful to me personally)
Dust bust!
Bed karaoke
Gather family and in-laws online at www.wordsplay.com (is it Word Splay or Words Play? Intrigue!) and then figure out how to play Drawful remotely.
Procure a table so that the bed is not the only place from which to work or Skype
Discover that tolerance level for wine has followed the same trajectory as the US stock market: that is, after half of a glass, my ears turn bright red and hot, just like they did the first time I had several inches of a wine cooler when I was 18.
Fold all of the clothes and putting them in the closet, instead of allowing them to continue their typical migration pattern of washer/dryer –> floor between washer/dryer and refrigerator, sometimes draped across two table-less chairs –> drawers under the bed if they’re lucky –> thrown onto the single easy chair until its shape is completely obscured –> getting picked up and examined to see if dirty, and thrown into the empty laundry machine if yes.
Armpit farts vs. back-of-the-knee farts: a battle royale
A definitive and exhaustive examination into all of our possible misconceptions about the world. Is it really bad to microwave plastic even if it’s a frozen food item that TELLS you to microwave it? (We haven’t looked into this one yet but the answer is YES, YES IT IS BAD, never give me anything that has been sopping up plastic particles in a dinner food sauna for 90 seconds). Does the heel of the bread loaf REALLY contain more nutrients, or was that just a statement parents everywhere devised to get out of having to eat the end piece themselves?
Are those stomach noises hunger, digestion, or did you eat something particularly weird while I wasn’t looking?
Detailed descriptions of what the woman who lives in the apartment above ours is likely wearing, based on her footsteps
Trying to plug your computer charger into your phone and not understanding why it won’t fit
Holding a wedding for our pair of Line Friends stuffed animals, who are either dressed as each other/wearing each other’s skins, because “one of them is already wearing white and the other is wearing a (skin) suit” (we have a number of these stuffed creatures – these two from Line Friends and the others from BT21)
How many times can we listen to/watch “My Stick” and “Seagulls (Stop It Now)” before tiring of them? (There’s a reason this item is last. The reason is: we are still listening to them.)
Why no, I have not done reams of writing and editing this weekend, but I have probably read several fathoms of Twitter feed.
I’m working on a short story that takes place during the August 2017 eclipse, and what I wouldn’t give for that to be the collective event everyone’s talking about right now!
And growing salad greens.
And trying to keep up with exercising; I was so proud that my resting heart rate had dropped as low as 67 for the first time ever (since getting a FitBit, but realistically…ever), and now that I haven’t been in two weeks and have been reappropriating my former elliptical time for More Anxiety, my rhr is at 75. It fluctuates, but I was on a good streak of staying below 73.
And practicing all of the songs from Zelda: Ocarina of Time on the harp.
I still do pilates on a yoga mat that fits between my bed and my door, and for which I only occasionally have to open my closet door to spread my arms out adequately, infrequently bang a foot against my dust buster, sometimes have to scoot nearly under the bed.
Grocery stores and pharmacies in my neighborhood all have ample toilet paper. The cold/cough aisles are fairly picked over, but Charmin is stacked in pyramids.
Every time I see an image of the pandemic curves, I want to reach out and physically squish them into the shape we’re after, as if they were made of modeling clay. And from relative lack of use – the walking to and from the subway, or the coffee shop, or the library, is no small thing in aggregate – my body is starting to feel less human and more like clay. And really less like clay and more like one of the gummy erasers you can stretch apart and then force back together, until what started out pliable and clean has the consistency and grayness of old gum.
I was supposed to go to Philadelphia yesterday to visit my cousin, and even yesterday morning I thought for sure I would still go. I’d be taking the train, not flying; my cousin is my age, not older, and not high risk; I was still working and taking the subway as of Tuesday, so it wouldn’t be much different; it would be easy to come back to NYC if needed. Also, I was only going for 48 hours and it was looking like it might be my last trip anywhere for a long time.
I didn’t go because by yesterday afternoon things felt so different from how they felt 48 hours earlier that I could imagine everything would feel that much or more different (the exponential growth of a collective feeling of dread, if you will) by the time I got back to NYC on Saturday. There was a definite shift towards buying groceries, staying away from the subways, and working from home. I’m not super worried about getting coronavirus myself – though I’d prefer not to – but if it’s easy for me to stay in, not get infected, and not potentially infect higher risk people around me, well, obviously I should do those things.
I have students who are taking the ACT in April and are wondering if it’s going to be canceled. It’s hard for me to resist cracking a joke about how keeping students six feet apart from one another is just good anti-cheating practice, regardless of what state or stage of pandemic we’re in (and why is it that high school and college cheating is so frequently referred to as “epidemic”? That’s a rhetorical question).
I’d much rather do these things now and have people look back and say “we overreacted” (note: I do not think we’re remotely overreacting) – if the worst thing that comes from overreacting is a surplus of rice and cliff bars and a little less vitamin D, why not overreact, when the worst that could come from failing to act is so dire? The situations in Italy and Iran are dire and we have the benefit of being a few weeks behind them during the course of this. Preparation and proactivity don’t necessitate panic. They prevent future panic.
Covid sounds close to co-morbid. Co-morvid? What are the afflictions that come, hand in (thoroughly washed) hand, with Coronavirus? Malaise, both physical (quarantine, avoidance of gyms as petrie dishes even in the healthiest of times, lack of movement beyond a certain safe-feeling radius) and mental: we’re in a holding pattern, as if the entire globe is a single plane circling above its destination indefinitely, uncertain of when we’ll land, what the landing will feel like, or if we’ll run out of fuel first. A terrible snow day that doesn’t have an end in sight.
The event that marked my first year of college was 9/11 – it didn’t affect me in the same way it affected students who had just moved to NYC, or my classmates who were from NYC, but it defined our year and especially our fall. Classes weren’t canceled immediately (and, obviously, the tenor of the tragedy made cancelations a step taken for emotional reasons rather than physical ones), and students without direct connections to New York wandered around Providence – the city we’d lived in for just two weeks – speculating abstractly about the event, until they ran into a friend or unit-mate from New York and suddenly nothing was theoretical anymore.
Many of the students I teach now weren’t born in 2001. Some of those who were (barely) are now in their first year of college, not yet sure if they’ll be going back to finish second semester. They’ve spent their entire lives online to one degree or another, and either because of this or in spite of this they’re desperate to go back, physically, to the places they’ve only recently begun to think of as their own.
There’s is something poetic about the measures we take to minimize risk and exposure. I envision the standard protocols – wash your hands, don’t touch your face, avoid groups, no hugs or handshakes – as a series of face masks, each filtering out smaller and smaller particles. None is a guarantee of continued health, but each reduction builds on your percent chance of not getting sick. On its own each might be minimally effective, a wet piece of tissue struggling to sustain a heavy burden, but as the layers increase so does the strength.
I keep wanting to not post this until I’ve revised it or thought about it SUPER carefully to make sure I’m saying what I mean, but everything is changing so fast that if I do that, everything I’ve said will be out of date.
“The other day I heard someone ask a friend, “So are you really worried about the Wuhan virus?” The reply of “No, I haven’t been a hypochondriac in at least a decade,” made me laugh with recognition. I was the child terrified by the movie Outbreak and the real-life Ebola outbreak, the child who was constantly afraid of contracting HIV even though there were virtually no ways in which I risked doing so, the child so anxious about Brazilian purpuric fever that she seemingly (and nonsensically) willed herself into not getting pinkeye for a decade. Everyone who knew me before college assumes that news about SARS or MERS or coronavirus will send me into high alert.
But as devastating as any virus that causes increased mortality is, I’m no longer a child hypochondriac; those who have known me as an adult know I’m more of an armchair epidemiologist, and that public health would be my alternate career if my life had gone slightly differently. So my roommate was correct when he asked me if I was following the developments because it seemed like something that would interest me.
It is fascinating that the Netflix documentary Pandemic came out right before/as the Wuhan outbreak came to light. Or not – the whole premise of the miniseries is that an animal-to-human flu or respiratory virus like SARS or H1N1 is overdue, and that it’s only a matter of time. Scientists have been working on a universal flu vaccine for years precisely because they know that something like this virus will appear or reappear and eventually one won’t be able to be contained as effectively as SARS and MERS were. But even in the absence of a vaccine, that’s not a cause for panic. This isn’t a hemorrhagic fever with an 80% mortality rate; it’s a heightened version of seasonal flu. I don’t say that to downplay the deaths that have occurred or the care that needs to be taken to attempt containment, but to counter the run on hospital masks and the crashing of the stock market that have resulted from overreaction and fear. “
Now:
Even as a non-hypochondriac adult with well-managed OCD, over the weekend I determined that it was time to be worried. Not panic, but worry. It seems like the combination of Covid (I thought they would go with WORS(E) or WARS, but I know they aim to stay away from place names – even in acronyms – now) being less deadly than SARS/MERS and it having a long, infectious incubation period will combine to make it impossible to contain. So…of course that on its own could be hugely devastating, if the published case fatality rates are accurate (they range from .2% for healthy people under forty – but again, that’s a lot of people if the entire population ends up getting it – to 10% in those over 80; 1918 flu pandemic was about 2.5%) – but then the seasonal flu is devastating in terms of lives lost, and many things are devastating, so while I don’t want to minimize case fatality rate of COVID, what concerns me more is that no immunity is conferred by catching/surviving COVID. (There isn’t hard data yet to confirm this, but there are reports of people catching COVID, recovering, and then contracting it again a few weeks later). What? Is that normal for all coronaviruses? Was the the case with SARS? I was operating, for the past six weeks, under the assumption that if you caught COVID and lived through it, as you’re likely to, you never had to worry about it again.
So then I got worried.
There are also unsubstantiated reports of people with reinfections having much worse cases or even permanent organ damage…but again, unsubstantiated. But I can see why people have latched onto it; it’s one thing to go through an ordeal – a serious disease in this case – make it through it, and then regardless of whether you’re unscathed or not, assess the damage. You’re able to know, in most cases, and the diseases that cause silent internal damage (Chagas, eg), aren’t tested for, and take you by surprise are the most frightening to me. And without immunity conferred (if that’s the case, or if the immunity is short-lived)…is the world going to turn into one huge petri dish with everyone passing COVID back and forth, no one permanently immune, until there’s a vaccine?
And then I worry about the election, and whether Trump will try to use this as a means of further dismantling democracy…and then I try to return to a state of alert-but-not-panicked. It’s a work in progress.
The Nickel Boys, by Colson Whitehead: I’ve read two Whitehead novels before – Underground Railroad, which was tremendous, and Zone One, which was disappointing – but my first encounter with his name seems like it was decades ago. It may have been decades ago, because it was in a print magazine and I’m pretty sure I remember the caption “Next up for Whitehead: a novel set in a Band-Aide factory” or something along those lines, and that points to his 2006 novel Apex Hides the Hurt – so the feature in Entertainment Weekly or People or whichever it was would have been after publication of either John Henry Days (2001) or Colossus of New York (2003, but it doesn’t seem as likely as a novel to be featured in a magazine). So…almost two decades, cripes. Anyway, the interviewer asked him about “write what you know” and his response was, “Write what you know? Half the fun is making shit up!” which I appreciated. And now, looking at the descriptions for Apex Hides the Hurt and his first novel, The Illusionists…why haven’t I read those?? My guess is that because Zone One was the first Whitehead novel I read and I was underwhelmed (I remember it garnering a fair amount of praise for being a “literary” zombie novel, but I found it to be the most mediocre/lukewarm of both worlds), I didn’t pick up another one until Underground Railroad. Now the scales are thoroughly tipped and I need to go back through his oeuvre. The ending of The Nickel Boys is pretty much perfect. Many brilliant books have mediocre endings, or endings that are good, but this one is really perfect.
Midnight in Chernobyl, by Adam Higginbottom: See here.
The Memory Police, by Yoko Ogawa: There was something strange about the tone of this, and I couldn’t tell if it was an intentional flatness (it was very Kafka-esque, so in that sense it paired with the story) or if it was related to the translation. The conceit is compelling and the second half of the novel grew more and more engaging, but I felt a remoteness from the narrator (I also realized that, inexplicably, I was picturing the island where the story takes place not off the coast of Japan – where it would be – but somewhere in the Atlantic between Greenland and Iceland if you were looking at the “standard” western map of the world). I did love the novel within the novel – the main character is a writer – and the interplay between that world and the world of The Memory Police. By the end of the book, I was sold.
How to Change Your Mind, by Michael Pollan: The second book about microdosing I’ve read in the past year (in addition to an almost unbelievable number of articles – I think Medium’s algorithm for “what you’ll enjoy” is broken, or people are repeating themselves – and the Reply All episode where PJ and Phia microdose). The last Pollan (the only?) I’d read was The Omnivore’s Dilemma, so it had been a while. I’ve always (okay, not always, but for a long time) been curious about microdosing but equally afraid of it.
Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison: I read The Bluest Eye, Beloved, and Sula in high school and Jazz in college – I’m not sure how I’d not read this until now, though I’m aware of wanting to mete out my Morrison over time (that’s probably not necessary; her work is eminently re-readable, and high school was…a long time ago). It’s incredible, of course. It’s perfect.
I love them a little less in this post. The salient difference is that I love LOOKING at gross things. I prefer to keep it confined to sight.
What’s the grossest thing you can imagine finding in your coffee? Don’t tell me a spider, because that’s at least edible, and don’t tell me hair – that’s not even particularly unsanitary. Spare me an answer of “curdled milk” because while that’s gross, it’s something that was…at least edible at one time. And is still edible, it’s just farther along on the spectrum of edibility. And if you are grossed out by finding coffee grounds or grinds in your coffee, I don’t know how to address you.
The grossest thing you can find in your coffee is something that is not only disgusting but also unidentifiable. If you read I Love Gross Things, Part 1 you know that I tend to take pictures of all things gross as I encounter them, so this is your warning to stop scrolling if you don’t want to see for yourself what was in my coffee (and perhaps help me identify it):
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This was after I glimpsed something at the bottom of the cup – AFTER DRINKING 2/3 OF THE COFFEE THAT WAS SWIMMING AROUND THIS – and used a pen to investigate further. Then I sent this image to my parents with lots of profanity and asked if they could 1) sympathize and 2) guess at what this could be.
(My dad has not yet responded and my mom said “yuck” so many times it started autocorrecting into gibberish.)
WHAT IS THAT
WHY WAS IT IN MY COFFEE
Okay, it’s clearly not either of the two things most likely to be found at the bottom of your coffee (sugar sludge or grounds), and it’s not milk-related. Did someone pour my coffee over a discarded muffin half, now partially dissolved back into its batter state? Is this a rogue brown napkin or a coffee filter? And WHO CAN I SHOW THIS TO?
For someone with obsessive compulsive disorder and a long history of disease-related fears, I have a surprisingly robust tolerance for food-adjacent incidents of disgust. Usually I’ll shrug off an unexplained fleck, or a hair, or a weird film on the surface of something. But there are limits!
After sending this to my parents I took my coffee cup and whatever its inhabitant was and went back to the bagel place from whence it had come – the bagel place I’ve been patronizing for almost ten years, which is why I felt comfortable walking in and showing both the picture and the coffee to every single guy behind the counter (they did not have customers at the time; I’m not trying to harm their business, just to identify a new species of sludge creature/assess my risk of mutating into a new creature myself).
They were perplexed. One said, “I made it, you know I would never do something to you!” which, YES, I do know that; I’m not worried about malice, just contamination.
So we couldn’t figure it out.
And…they gave me another coffee.
I drank it. Was that not the right move? I made sure to go home and pour the coffee very slowly into a mug first, to make sure nothing was lurking in its depths. But now I don’t know if I can go back there. I might have to find a new bagel place.
Does anyone know what on earth the monstrosity from my original cup was?? Please, I am begging you. I have to have a conclusion here.
