Level(s) setting

So I haven't posted in a while, sorry. As you may have noticed, the posts this year were mostly coming in two flavors: the ongoing saga of Marvel Comics: My Untold Story, and the numbered COVID-19 diary installments. I reckon I kind of burned out on both of them.

Let's start with the pandemic, which around the last time I posted about it kinda felt like it was on its last legs! Oh how blissful that ignorance was. I think that at a certain point I felt like I was in the lowest-risk group and therefore lowest-priority for getting vaccinated at all, and I made my peace with that. I was working from home, not socializing in person, social distancing, masking in public, fine, fine, fine. Then I did get vaccinated and it felt like, well if I'm vaccinated they must be getting down to the lowest-priority round of vaccinations so we're almost done, right? They also opened up the vaccine for ages 12 and up so the little guy got jabbed, too, so more than half the family was innoculated. Surely lowering the approved age range to 5 and up, or all ages, or whatever, was right around the corner? It's kind of hard for me to believe it, but in May I took the little guy and the little girl out to the movie theater to see Black Widow on the big screen. We wore masks, and I was relying somewhat (for the little girl's sake especially) on the idea that most people in the theater would be vaccinated, but it felt like a manageable risk, like flying on an airplane; sure you might crash but probably not.

And then the Delta variant, and the surge in cases and deaths, and the inability to get the irrationally vax-hesitant to get over themselves, and here we are four months later and things are not OK. Maybe they were never going to be OK, maybe we were fooling ourselves, but they definitely aren't now. And it sucks, and it's exhausting, and I feel like I had committed to riding things out and was relaxing with the sense that the ride was nearly at its terminus and then, surprise MFers, once more around the bend, this time diverting onto a completely new track. Lousy disjointed metaphor, I know, but that'show everything feels, lousy and disjointed and I can't be bothered to make better sense of it. To be clear, I'm not being nihilistic and advocating abject surrender. I am once again (after never really stopping?) working from home, not socializing in person, social distancing, masking in public, and all that. So is my family. And we're waiting for the ages 5 and up approval of the vaccine, but even after that we'll keep following the recommended guidelines. And a lot of other people won't follow them, because they are selfish idiots and ... I can do what I'm asked to do, but I can't be bothered to, on top of all that, make sense of how we got here and why some people have made this way harder than it needs to be.

All three of our kids have gone back to school, masked, in person, five days a week, which is good for them in terms of their social and emotional health, at least. They actually started on August 12 so we are coming up on a solid month and so far, so good. I've gotten multiple messages from the schools (each of them goes to a different building now, elementary intermediate and middle school) saying there was a COVID-19 case in the building, which is less than ideal, but on the other hand those letter have all said "individuals who were in direct contact with the diagnosed case have been notified separately" and I haven't gotten any of those messages, so praise be for small blessings. It's just dumb luck, though. We do what we can and take what precautions can be taken but there's no way to exert any real control over the situation. The big question is, will there continue to be one-off cases here and there (one a week or so?) which are caught quickly and then quarantined, with children's natural resilience keeping things from exploding, OR will things balloon until they get to the point where the schools have no choice but to shut down, send everyone home with laptops, and do what they did throughout 2020-21? I am fervently hoping that it is the former, but again, no way of knowing, and no way to control the outcome. We're strapped in for the ride and there's no way off.

So a few steps forward, a few steps backward - now Shang Chi is the MCU joint in theaters and I have NOT taken my kids to see it. I want to, sure, but it feels like a bigger risk than it did in May, and not worth it, not as any slight against the movie itself, just the whole ... gestures broadly at everything going to hell in a handbasket.

So yeah, I don't really feel like blogging about life as we live it in month 19 of COVID-19, because it's a huge bummer, so that's the macro-level. But, hey, this blog has always been just as much (if not moreso (definitely moreso)) about the minutiae of pop culture I'm into, so maybe I could post about that, micro-level? Clearly I'm not in a great place right now because I honestly started to feel a little burnt out on Marvel Comics: My Untold Story in specific and also on pop culture in general because ... it's all kind of same-y?

Don't get me wrong, I love superhero comics and I always will, I will never be part of the chorus of voices lamenting that "everything is a Marvel movie these days" first and foremost because I know that's not actually true. And secondmost because I love the Marvel movies so I feel no particular contrarian urge to rail against them. They make me happy like a Five Guys hamburger, sure I know you can't live on burgers all the time but a good one sure does hit the spot more often than not. Still, as I turn to my most comforting brainfood in this time of public health crisis, I not only indulge I outright gorge. It occurred to me recently that for a while now I have been:

• watching every episode of What If...? as they come out on Disney+ (after having done the same with WandaVision, Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and Loki)
• reading a Spider-Man graphic novel my brother loaned me
• watching Legends of Tomorrow right up until Constantine showed up, at which point I wanted to start watching it with my wife, so I switched my alone-time viewing to alternating between the Boys (based on a superhero comic) on Amazon Prime and The Umbrella Academy (based on a superhero comic) on Netflix
• listening to not one but two different weekly podcasts that retrace the early output of Marvel Comics in the 60's month-by-month

And maybe some other comics-adjacent stuff? Again, not complaining about being spoiled for choice (my buddies will tell you I sigh and chuckle and say "what a time to be alive" with great frequency) but I suppose the facts of my (in)actons speak for themselves. At a certain point, blogging about Marvel superheroes and other comics-adjacent stuff became too much on top of the consumption and enjoyment of it all, and there really wasn't a lot else to dig into. I haven't been cleansing my palate all that much, I guess.

Anyway, as always ever since the heyday of near-daily posting on this here blog, these things are cyclical. Hopefully there will be more posts sooner than later as I get inspired to talk about things and keep this old relic alive.

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I didn't want to jinx it, so I waited until today to post that, two weeks ago, I got my second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. So since they say it takes fourteen days after the second injection to be considered fully, effectively vaccinated ... that's me, as of today.

And thus my household is as protected as we can be. My wife and I are fully vaccinated, and my kids are, well, kids. I read about a methodology of risk analysis that basically says being vaccinated reduces your chances of catching COVID-19 AND suffering serious complications/death as a result to less than 10%. And kids seem to be naturally resistant to both the coronavirus and advanced health complications associated with it, such that any given child's chances of catching sick and needing hospitalization are ... less than 10%. So from a statistical risk point of view my children are as safe as I am, none of us 100% but hey, ain't that life for ya.

Please indulge me for a moment as I express my gratitude for the continuing health of my loved ones. In many profound ways, I remain immeasurably fortunate. No one in my family, immediate or extended, so much as contracted COVID-19, let alone died from it (knock on wood, we as a species are not out of the woods yet). Is that partly because the vast majority of my family is in the lower-risk categories? And partly because we were all willing to take the precautions recommended by the medical and scientific experts as they evolved over the course of the pandemic? And partly pure dumb luck? Yes, yes and yes. But although I happen to live in the upper-middle class bubble and I'm surrounded by and related to people with white collar jobs in blue states where they kept the offices and schools closed and nobody succumbed to paranoid conspiracy theories about their liberties being egregously infringed by mask mandates, I know it's not that cut and dried! COVID has proven time and again that is does not discriminate, and can cut across the larger trends at any time. I do know a few people who caught it, people who are a little younger than me, and smarter than me, who literally work in the medical research field and definitely understood and practiced every protocol! It's not just the very old, the very poor, and total fucking morons like Donald Trump who proved susceptible. Maybe in the end it just comes down to luck, period.

A further irony is the fact that, while my household dodged the bullet of the pandemic itself, the past year-and-change has seen its share of, shall we say, health challenges. It is as true for us as for anyone that the fall of 2020 and winter of 2021 saw none of come down with mild flu or even a cold, thanks to masks and social distancing and general hermit-like behavior. But on the other hand, at the very beginning of the pandemic somehow the whole family had lice, somehow! And just last week the bino had to have surgery to repair his ruptured eardrums that never healed after some savage ear infections. Also, did I mention that I almost killed him with diabetes?

Perhaps I should unpack that last one a little bit. There are of course many things which this sporadic pandemic blog series has failed to capture, but one of those (which maybe could only have been addressed in hindsight) is the strange contradiction between the subjective feeling that life went on pause for a while, time ceased to have any meaning, and we kind of lost a whole year, versus the fact that all of the above is objectively untrue, and I live with three reminders of that fact. The little guy has grown like four inches, the little girl has begun edging into puberty (even though she just turned ten last month, which is a whole 'nother post) and the 'bino has just changed a lot, because he's at the tail end of that stage where the development comes fast and furious, mental and emotional and physical. And he's always been big for his age, which usually just meant "tall" but this past twelve months somehow went to, um, "in a distressingly high percentile for weight"?

One thing that I have learned in the past year-and-change about myself is that, unequivocally, food is my love language. When I think about my loved ones, whether it's on the needs level of physically taking care of them or on the wants level of making them happy or demonstrating that they matter to me, my go-to domain is feeding people. I do over-the-top cakes for the kids' birthdays, and always let them pick what's on the menu for family dinner that night. I happily work the grill at house parties, I love taking my wife out to dinner to celebrate milestones and I will run to the 7-11 for a pint of Ben and Jerry's if she's had a rough day. Thanksgiving and Christmas are literal feast days in our house. Etc. etc. etc.

And it's possible, in fact entirely likely, that at some point during the pandemic I have bitched about nowadays it seems like all I ever do is shop for groceries, cook, and clean, and that is true enough and utterly explicable because we are all stuck in the house all the time and no one eats at school or work so it all settles out as increased domestic workload, but while I bitch about it I also absolutely cling to it, I admit. As long as I have been making sure my nearest and dearest have been getting three squares a day, I feel a tiny bit of control and safety in this perilous year, and that has kept me sane. I bitch about it but I'm also so grateful for it (do I contradict myself, very well I contradict myself).

Of course I never do anything halfway, either, and abve and beyond providing for my family I want to make them happy, or in the case of 2020, at least distract them a little from the pervasive awfulness. Kids ate all the granola bars? No problem I'll just buy more. They want Doritos for a snack? OK, we can designate Fridays as Doritos days. A bag of Oreos makes everyone happy? That is a bargain by any measure. So yeah, for a while there when it came to food I just wasn't saying no to the kids all that much. Yes we bought fresh fruit and yes we made them eat their vegetables at dinner, but they are a couple of elementary schoolers and a pre-teen, the food that makes them happy is McDonald's and pizza and soda and sweet tea and ice cream and candy and junkity junk junk galore. (And don't think for one minute I was merely an ascetic enabler through all of this. I may have singlehandedly kept a couple of the Mix industries, namely Chex and Trail, afloat during the pandemic.) The point being I was well aware that none of this stuff was super ultra healthy for them but I weighed the pros and cons and the trade-off for mental stability and just went ahead and spoiled them with processed high fructose corn syrup on demand.

And sure enough, the 'bino packed it away and started to pack it on. At first we (I) thought it was one of those early childhood things where they get a little belly fat but it's just storing up for an imminent growth spurt and goes away as quickly as it came. Then it didn't go away and I thought, well, I was a chunky kid too and he does arguably look the most like me out of all three of them, maybe that's the way it goes. Then one day at a routine wellness check the doctor says they want to run some blood tests on the kid for diabetes, like that's a literal possibility, and suddenly it's nothing but GUILT and you feel like a failure as a parent. Or worse than a failure who committed sins of omission, but a monster who committed active harm against your own child. Which sucks.

Of course I started this tangent by saying "almost" so let's reel it in a little here. The 'bino is not, as of this writing, diabetic, the blood tests were negative. But he is tipping the scales inthe 99th percentile. And we've talked to him about it, and cut back on the Doritos, and emphasized the importance of exercise and activity in general. And he gets it, he really does, he's a super-smart and conscientious kid. We caught a troubling trend on his growth chart early enough that he will hopefully turn out just fine. But man, you know it's been a doozy of a year(-and-change) when your best coping mechanisms so spectacularly backfire.

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Just an extremely quick note here in the pandemic diary to commemorate that, after a year-plus of so much online purchasing (school supplies for distance learning, groceries, takeout, etc. etc. for almost everything we used to just run out to the store for in person before that activity became a plgue vector), tonight's pizza night order marked the first time that I was able to enter all 16 digits of my debit card, the expiration date, and the CCV, entirely from memory. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I really don't know but it just happened.

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So I got my first dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine tonight.

My wife got vaccinated a while ago because she is a community college professor, and therefor both a state employee and an educator, both high-priority categories. Our kids are all too young to be vaccinated (so far, as things stand, who knows what the rules will be a few months from now) but I read something recently that basically said the vaccine is good and necessary protection but not 100%, more like 80-90% resistance, whereas kids (non-immunocompromised kids, and we are very lucky to have an inherently healthy brood) just seem to have natural immunity of about ... 80 - 90% resistance. So an unvaccinated low-risk child is in about as good shape as a vaccinated low-risk adult. So, yay?

It feels like a turning point in this whole saga. I mean, duh, of course, but at the risk of sounding solipsistic it feels like we collectively have reached a turning point in this entire saga, as I'm seeing lots and lots of people posting their vaccine status updates every day. Conceivably, the natonal vaccination effort could be complete by the Fourth of July, they say. So it seems appropriate, in this pandemic-diary-within-a-blog, to specifically call out the day I got the shot.

There's so many things I haven't yet documented about the past year-plus, and partly that's because there were long stretches where things just looked and felt so dire and draining and I couldn't bring myself to play amateur first-draft historian. But now that there's a light at the end of the tunnel, perhaps I'll go back and fill in some standout moments.

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Well, let's see if the WiFi works a little better today with decreased demand. Today the bino and the little girl went back to school in person. It's the first day since way back on Friday the 13th of March, 2020 that this has been an option. Our fair city's schools have adopted a hybrid model for this home stretch of the school year, so my little ones will be attending class in the school building on Tuesdays and Thursdays (and continuing virtual distance learning on M/W/F) from now until the end of May. Assuming this all works and doesn't result in massive case spikes and another emergency shutdown. Fingers crossed.

The little guy is still doing fulltime at-home school-via-Zoom because, well, he's really not so little anymore. He's 12, he's in seventh grade which means he should be at the middle school, and the city only agreed to resume in-person instruction in the elementary schools. Which makes sense, it really does, I think it was the correct and responsible decision. Elementary school is designed to keep the same cohort of kids together all day in the same room, limiting the chances for exposure cross-contamination etc. Whereas middle and high schoolers all jumble together in the hallways every 45 minutes as they constantly change classes throughout the day. I get it, I do. It just sucks for the little guy, who's sick of being stuck at home and misses his friends.

I'mma take him out to McDonald's for lunch and then maybe buy him some new books. Hopefully that will make up for the unfairness of it all, somewhat.

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I believe I've been reasonably faithful, so far, in my counting of the days for the post titles in this COVID-19 series. But at this moment, since it's coming up on one year of Living Through It, I find myself trying to remember where I chose to start counting. Theoretically it should be easier at this juncture to count backwards from the anniversary, whenever that may be.

As my kids never fail to remind me, they woke up as per normal and went to school as per normal on a Friday the 13th in March of 2020, and came home at the end of the school day like any other school day, but that turned out to be the last time any of them had a normal in-school day. I don't think that's where I started counting, though. For me the last partially normal day was Monday March 9, when I went into the office but was sent home about halfway through the day after our home office decided to shut down out of an abundance of caution - not because anyone who worked for my company had gotten sick, but because there was one reported case of COVID-19 in an employee at a different company on a different floor in the NYC skyscraper where our home office is located. Therefore, Tuesday March 10 was Day One of me working from home, and the beginning of what I variously referred to as 'quarantine', 'lockdown', 'shutdown', 'WFH 4eva', 'I feel like there aren't any rules anymore', 'what are discrete units of time anyway', etc. At least I'm pretty sure that was the beginning. It's easy to lose track of things.

The bino's birthday happens to fall just past the middle of March, and his birthday party in 2020 was one of the first casualties of the upheaval. We were supposed to take him, his sibs and a handful of his friends to the local indoor trampoline place to celebrate him turning seven, but we opted to cancel it. Actually if memory serves we optimistically believed we were going to 'reschedule' it. Surely the panic over this novel coronavirus was a tad overblown by the media. Surely we weren't on the cusp of a once-in-a-century historically bad pandemic. Surely we could follow the guidance of leaders and health experts and flatten the curve. Surely the worst thing we'd be dealing with come summer was trying to explain to people that maybe we did overreact in the spring and maybe we reacted appropriately and it worked, but we'll never know for certain, and better safe than sorry, right? Surely?

Yeah, no, as it turned out. Little girl also didn't have much in the way of a birthday celebration in April. We did get some friends together for my wife's birthday in July, at an outdoor venue with almost nobody else around. Nothing much for the little guy in September (though he's not into big birthday parties anyway) and I insisted on nothing more than some nice takeout for my birthday in October.

So all of this is top of mind right now because, as I said, the one year anniversary is imminent, but also because this Friday, two days hence, we are going out to celebrate the bino's eighth birthday. Not at the trampoline place! We know the pandemic isn't over, it's not like it had a one-year expiration date. (Weirdly the trampoline place is still open for business, which on the one hand makes me happy, because venues going out of business due to the pandemic sucks. But on the other hand, just doesn't seem like the kind of place I want to take my kids to just yet. Other people obviously feel differently.)

Instead what we are doing Friday night is going to a drive-in movie. Should be fun! My wife took two of the kids to the drive-in a few months ago, and they had a good time. The food delivery to the car (because this is at the Alamo, of course, a theater I am entirely thrilled to support financially) was excellent, and the bino is probably looking forward to that more than the flick itself (Raya and the Last Dragon). His actual birthday isn't for another couple weeks, and that's when he'll get cake and his presents, so the celebration is taking over a goodly chunk of the month of March. But after missing out last year, and enduring the entire 360-some days since, he's entitled to a bit of that, I reckon.

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Although I have a big ole soft buboe in my heart for the Plague Doctor (so much so that I bought a figurine ornament for my dork Christmas tree this year) I think the most enduring symbol for the Long Pandemic Year of Twenty-Twenty may be this:

But then again that may just be particular to my family.

I mentioned a while back that the early lockdown days reminded me of snow days but another specific overlap element was the stocking up on non-perishable food, which is one of those things I (usually) only think about in the winter. It's a great privilege to live in a time when we can pop out to the store at the drop of a hat for whatever notion grabs us in the moment. Except of course when it snows, as the inclement weather does not care about your sudden craving for Sweet Chili PopCorners. Nor does it even care about your legitimate need for household staples such as bread and milk and soap and (sigh) toilet paper. Toiletries will keep indefintely, bread can be frozen, but milk, that's the tricky one. All the moreso in a house with several children who eat lots of breakfast cereal and drink milk by the glass, not to mention adults with robust lifelong coffee addictions.

Enter: shelf-stable milk!

Of course the difference between the pandemic and a blizzard is that blizzards come and go. You never know if the blizzard is going to live up to the hype until it actually arrives, so sometimes you overprepare for it, and sometimes under. If you get caught underprepared, the worst case scenario is that you suffer a few days without some basic necessity, then the roads get cleared and the stores reopen and you restock and you think "I'll never let that happen again!" and then you promptly forget all about it until it does. Unless maybe, maybe, right after the blizzard you buy a few shelf-stable milks just in case. Whereas the pandemic has been an ongoing concern for, let me see, somewhere between nine months and an eternity, by this point. Which is plenty of time to really think things through and make adjustments to the actualities of life-as-she-is-lived. Some people are over it, but my nuclear unit is still taking reasonable precautions, staying home, wearing masks when we do go out, but really minimizing the amount of going out at all, including popping out to the store. And given the aforementioned ongoingness, we've had plenty of time to realize that we can just about stock up on a week's worth of groceries at a time, except for the milk, which means it's a good idea to always have some shelf-stable boxes on hand, in the all-too-frequent case of running through last week's fridge milk before it's time for the next run to the grocery store. Not only have we had time to realize this, we've had time to implement it as a standard operating procedure. So this has been a very Parmalat-heavy year.

The twist, of course, the punchline (because of course there's a twist and a punchline, isn't there always?) is this: 2020 has also been a year that has really brought home how hard it is to keep two adults and three kids happy with the same limited at-home options. There are a few very basic foods and meals which everyone in our family genuinely likes. Beyond that, we generally have to content ourselves with two-out-of-three. That is, two out of the three kids will eat a dinner, as prepared, and be reasonably content. The third kid will require serious cajoling just to eat the mandatory single bite ofe every element, and then will eat something else entirely. Occasionally there' something which only one kid likes, with two dissenters, probably about as often as something that gets approval from everyone. By and large, it's two-out-of-three.

AND APPARENTLY THIS EXTENDS TO THE MILK! I personally can't tell the difference between the shelf-stable milk and fridge milk, especially once the s-s gets opened and, you know, put in the fridge. Cold, it all tastes the same. But try telling that to my kids. To be brutally honest I have stopped dedicating brainspace to cataloging each and every predilection. I think it goes something like this: the eldest refuses to drink the shelf-stable milk, or use it in cereal, or anything. The little girl will use the s-s milk, grudgingly, if we are out of fridge milk. And the bino LOVES the s-s milk, will ask for it by name and prefers it over the fridge milk, so sometimes we have both open fridge milk and open shelf-stable milk taking up space in the refrigerator at the same time. Not a state of affairs I ever expected to have to contend with, but again, that's pretty much the most apt descriptor of 2020, anyway.

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Two hundred and thirty-two days is not nothing. The U.S. has been dealing with all of the primary, secondary, etc. effects of a pandemic for seven or eight or nine months, and some things we've gotten accustomed to (some of which might even weirdly be changes for the better) and some things we haven't. Most things that were going to happen have happened, all at once in a confusing jumble at the beginning, and the passage and repetitions of time merely allow realizations to come clear. But every once in a while there's a new first, and yesterday, I had one.

I am in no way shape or form a fashion-forward individual. I tend to conform to expectations, and am quite content to clear the lowest possible bar of socially acceptable attire for a given situation. I can get dressed up for a wedding or a job interview and know what I'm about. I can do casual-but-nice for family gatherings where there might be photos taken. But left to my own devices I go for comfort over all. I am 100% that guy with a vast t-shirt collection who wears cargo shorts for 2/3 of the year and blue jeans the other 1/3.

Recently it has been brought to my attention that some people do not find blue jeans comfortable, as they are too restrictive. Compared to pajama bottoms or yoga pants, I agree they are certainly more restrictive (and, Gender Injustice Alert, it goes without saying that women are instructed by society to wear jeans that flatter and accentuate their curve, as opposed to the baggy-ass broken-in denim I prefer). But whether it's hardwired into my proprioceptors or just the result of years of habituation to my go-to pants, jeans are in my maximum comfort zone.

After the first few months of my office being closed for social distancing, I hit upon a pretty standard routine: I wake up in the morning and get things rolling in my pajamas. I help the kids with their breakfast and start my workday, unshowered and not yet dressed. If I have any meetings, I leave my camera off. Around lunchtime I exercise (the treadmill in the basement feel more and more like one of the best investments my wife and I ever made) and then, finally, take a shower and put on grown-up clothes. Which, again, means cargo shorts and a t-shirt, or maybe a polo shirt if I have any afternoon meetings with people I want to project bare-minimum professionalism at. This worked pretty well through the summer and early fall, and I certainly had plenty of pairs of cargo shorts to rotate through (tbh, I rotated them on a weekly or fortnightly basis, not daily, but still).

Yesterday was pretty chilly, which would normally be my cue for the switch from cargo shorts to blue jeans. But for the first time in longer than I can remember, I just didn't want to put on jeans. Didn't have it in me to deal with a zipper, I guess? Instead, after my midday ablutions, I put on a gray polo shirt and black sweatpants. Because why not, right? Comfy, cozy, and no one is going to see my from the waist down anyways, right?

What I had forgotten was that I do not wear sweatpants in public, unless there is some kind of medical reason, and have not done so since probably fifth grade. OK, no, I hadn't forgotten that, but I had forgotten that on Monday nights my boys have martial arts class and I drive them and sit in the school while they train, which meant I was going to either wear sweatpants in public (which, again, I Do Not Do) or else change out of the sweatpants after dinner (which, ugh). A strange situation in which to find myself, but then again, this is a strange year, an unending string of stranger and stranger days.

So yeah, yesterday, I had a personal COVID first: I left the house and spent time in a public place while wearing sweatpants. And lived to tell the tale! Who knows what other uncharted territories I may explore before this whole thing goes away?

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Last night I was finishing up the kitchen cleaning before bed, which mostly consists of doing the dishes. (My wife had already done most of the task, so emphasis on "finishing".) The dishwasher was full, with no way to fit anything else in, even if I had undertaken some aggressively Teris-style rearranging, so I was handwashing. And I imagine that happens on a regular basis to everyone, especially with the larger pots and pans. But in this particular case it was pots, pans, a bowl, some measuring cups, some drinking cups, a bit of Tupperware ... if not another full load for the dishwasher, at least a good start of one. And you may ask yourself why I didn't just leave it all in the sink, and in fact allow it all to be said good start on the next dishwasher load the following day. To which I would answer, that's what I'd been doing all week. Dinner last night hadn't been crazy elaborate, generating more dirty dishes than usual. We're just (and this is the minor revelation that prompted me to compose this post) constantly dirtying dishes these days. I wanted to record, for posterity, that one of the stand-out attributes of this whole coronavirus quarantine lockdown office closure school closure gauntlet we're running is the feeling that I'm constantly either folding laundry or doing dishes. All. The. Time.

First world problems, as always, I know, I know. And not all of it is directly attributable to the pandemic. The little guy is not so little anymore, he's 12+, a tween, growing and eating constantly like a teen. His younger siblings aren't that far behind. But on the other hand, they are at home every day eating lunch at the kitchen table and using plenty of plates and silverware to do it (the little girl especially has a fondness for Chicken and Stars soup). And I'm home too, no longer a growing pre- or mid-adolescent but certainly prone to stress-eating. I try to do as much of that off paper towels as possible, but there are always some contributions to the dish pile from my quarter. Meanwhile my wife is trying to be conscientious about packing lunch when she goes to work, and there's no excuse not to have plenty of groceries in the house, so that's the Tupperware in high usage.

Meanwhile, I've been (humblebrag alert) exercising more since I'm stuck at home, and I sweat like a pig at Bacon-Fest, so that's several extra outfits a week going into the laundry. My wife has been working at a barn in exchange for horse-riding lessons once or twice a week, so she also has dedicated outfits for that which require laundering after each use. The kids, as far as I can tell, just wear the same amount of clothing as pre-shutdown beforetimes ... oh except that the bino has recently started taking martial arts classes, so that's another uniform in the wash, too.

That's it, random observation about how spending way more time confined to the house leads to more housework. More deep insights coming soon!

197

This is a very minor thing but I suppose not everything in the COVID diary can (or even should) be epic and earth-shatterng.

I haven't gotten a haircut since the lockdowns began back in March. At first it was because the salons and barbershops were all closed, and I wasn't really due for one. A couple of months in my wife borrowed hair clippers from a neighbor and buzzed the boys' heads, since the weather was getting warmer. I did not go under the blades myself, mainly because it seemed like one more task in the crazy new way of things that I didn't want to burden my wife with. This was also somewhat ironic because for the last few years I've enjoyed and looked forward to buzzing my hair low-maintenance short for the summer, and the only debatable bit is how close to Memorial Day it needs to be for me to go ahead and get my "summer cut". Whereas the little guy, now that he's just old enough to have the beginnings of a sense of personal style, prefers his hair a little longer and messier and hates getting haircuts. But, y'know, he's 12 and when his mother says it's haircut time, it is. And I figured I would get my own ... eventually.

Also around this time, my shaving mirorr fell off the shower wall. I started shaving in the shower almost twenty years ago, because in all that time I've always had a van dyke or a full beard, and only needed to shave some or all of my cheeks and a bit of my neck, all of which takes a trivial amount of time and a minimal amount of soap lather rather than shaving cream. It's much less cleanup to just do it while showering. In any case, I buy cheap shaving mirrors that attach to the shower tiles with a suction cup, and every so often the cup loses suction and the mirror falls, and when it falls just rght it cracks and I buy a new one, but most of the time I just reaffix it next time I shave. However, given the pandemic and my lack of exposure to pretty much anyone beyond my household (low-res video conference calls notwithstanding) I stopped shaving altogether. My beard scraggled up my cheeks and down my neck a bit, but who cares. So when the mirror fell in May(?) I didn't bother putting it back up. I still haven't as of this post.

And when summer started and I still hadn't gotten my seasonal buzz, it seemed like I might as well wait until right before we went to the beach, to make the most of combining low maintenance and vacation. We did in fact buy our own set of hair clippers for that express purpose. But then I never found time in the lead up to beach week. Also, the early summer was right around the time when people started actually protesting the lockdowns. Make no mistake, I thought these people were selfish idiots and I still do. It boggles my mind that the extraordinary measures taken by governments during a once-in-a-century virus outbreak could be politicized. I didn't choose to politicize it, but some people apparently did. And so the images of entitled jackasses holding signs that said "I NEED A HAIRCUT" as if they were demanding civil rights and equitable justice were burned into my brain. Which of course caused me to reflexively dig my heels in and say, "Hey, guess what? Nobody needs a haircut." And so the locks continued to grow.

So here we are, six months and counting into the surreal gauntlet the world has become, my beard is woolly, my hair is long enough to cover my eyes in the front and doing a ridiculous upflip in the back, and I don't know when or if any of that is going to change. It's become almost talismanic, like if I can hang in there until we turn the corner, then the corner must be getting closer, but if I cave now and go through the grooming rituals I'm just accepting that things will be the way they are for a long, long time that I can't just wait out. So we shall see how long this impasse holds.

(For the record I do still trim my nails. To neglect that would just be gross.)

193

It's Friday and I'm working from home. Been months since I specifically did a "COVID-19 Diary" post but we are still very much living through it. (In case it wasn't self-evident, the numbers-as-titles for the COVID blog entries are the number of days since my office closed.) It's still surreal, just the endless sense of waiting, for things to get better, or worse, or go back to normal, and somehow none of those things ever do happen. It's just weird and different and we're all habituating to it, and sometimes I feel like I can actively feel it happening and sometimes not. I don't really know if I'm up to the task of making sense of any of it.

But I can certainly record random little bits and impressions for posterity's sake. And since it's the cusp of the weekend, I'll keep it light. At some point I'll go back and document the bad parts, of which there have been no shortage, but I acknowledge fully and freely that as far as these things go, my family has been extremely lucky. None of us have actually contracted the disease, which is honestly part of the whole large-numbers weirdness of this whole pandemic. It is a pandemic, it's real, and it's affecting our country in an outsize way because of a dearth of competent leadership, but I haven't gotten sick, no one in my household has gotten sick, and no one I know personally has gotten sick (that I know of; it's complicated.) and maybe that's because I live in a bubble of educated, rational people who take all the recommended precautions and therefore minimize risk, maybe(?), but whatever the underlying logic orlack thereof, it's something to be grateful for. And I still have a job, and can do it from the safety and comfort of my home, and my wife also still has a job, and although she still has to go to campus and that's not ideal and she's not thrilled about it, it's only three days a week on campus and at least her employer provides some PPE. My kids' schools opted for 100% distance learning and even provided laptops for every child, and from what I can tell so far (school started about three weeks ago) the teacher spent a great deal of time and effort over summer vacation preparing for the new model so it's going well from an educational perspective, even if my kids do miss their friends, their little slices of independence like riding the school bus alone, and so on.

However! Keeping things light! So like a lot of privileged, advantaged, fortunate least-vulnerables the big problem has been sheer boredom. One of the first things I turned to back in the spring was music. I'd dabbled previously in online music streaming services but never very much because at heart I am a CDs'n'mixtapes'n'FM-radio 80's/90's kid. But we are two decades into the 21st century after all, so fine, I signed up for Spotify and started making some playlists. This was a vaguely social activity at first, as well, as my college friends and I traded track listings via email in an effort to define the ultimate "quarantine playlist". (I will put mine at the end of this post.)

Reconnecting with the solace of pop music might, in and of itself, be a silver lining but the real bright spot was the fact that my kids noticed me playing with Spotify and asked if they could to. Of course! And that's been an absolute delight, not gonna lie. I should specify the little guy (recently turned 12(!!!)) was not among the 'my kids' here, but the little girl (9 and a half) and the 'bino (7 and a half) were all over it. When I was a kid, my dad worked in Manhattan and would often visit J&R Records and come home with 45 rpm singles, then pla them on the stereo turntable while recording them onto blank cassettes. Yes, I learned the art of miztapes from my father. And he would pick up singles for me, too, if I paid for them out of my allowance (they were literally 99 cents a pop back then, I believe) and I would make my own mixtapes accordingly. Spotify, even better, is free, so the kids could go crazy compiling their own playlists. In the case of the 'bino, this meant snagging most but not all (not the sad parts) of the Hamilton soundtrack, a few songs he knows from the radio, a Bad Lip Reading Star Wars song from the internet, and the song that plays over the closing credits for Into the Spider-Verse.

For my little girl, it's a bit more all-over-the-map: radio pop, Disney music (Descendants, Frozen, and the Aristocats of all things), more Spider-Verse tracks and ... several Christmas songs. I am downright awed by the fact that she is so non-compartmentalized. Why have two separate playlists, one for everyday and one for Christmas songs, when she loves Do You Hear What I Hear just as much as she loves Old Town Road?

At any rate, the intermittent "Dad, can I add something to my Spotify?" requests have been a bright spot as we've been hunkered down and missing out on a lot of other things that used to be regular diversions.

As promised, my quarantine playlist follows. Of course, as is my wont, I had to build a story arc into it, which is roughly thus: emergence of the virus (tracks 1 through 4); attempted social distancing and self-isolation (tracks 5 through 7); obligatory medical song (track 8); shut-downs, misinformation and their effects (tracks 9 through 13); mental deterioration and the collapse of civilization (tracks 14 through 23); eventually coming out on the other side (tracks 24 through 29).

1. The Stand - Prophecy (The Alarm)
2. Come on Eileen (Dexys Midnight Runners)
3. Laid (James)
4. Mr. Brightside (The Killers)
5. I Think I'm Paranoid (Garbage)
6. Suspicious Minds (Elvis)
7. YOLO (The Lonely Island)
8. Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out (The Replacements)
9. My Old School (Steely Dan)
10. Run-Around (Blues Traveler)
11. Crazy (Gnarls Barkley)
12. Spreading the Disease (Queensryche)
13. Among the Living (Anthrax)
14. Panic Switch (Silversun Pickups)
15. Godzilla (Blue Oyster Cult)
16. Crazy Train (Ozzy Osbourne)
17. It Falls Apart (Odds)
18. Everything Sucks (Reel Big Fish)
19. Lonely Boy (Black Keys)
20. Nobody Told Me (John Lennon)
21. Freakin Out (Death)
22. It's the End of the World as We Know It (R.E.M.)
23. (Nothing But) Flowers (Talking Heads)
24. Recovery (Frank Turner)
25. This Year (Mountain Goats)
26. Keep On Keeping On (Curtis Mayfield)
27. I'll Be Back Up on My Feet (The Monkees)
28. Tubthumping (Chumbawumba)
29. Top of the World (Van Halen)

Dead Trees and Fermented Grains

Non-COVID post! Well, mostly. A couple of weeks ago the extended fam (on my wife's side) and I went on vacation, renting a beach house as we usually do. We did it in as circumspect a way as possible, minimizing stops on the way down and back, ordering groceries for curbside pickup, eschewing our usual dinner date nights with grandparent-provided babysitting, and of course wearing masks in public and washing hands and all that. Because COVID. But it was still nice to get away! A week of no work, morning walks to the beach to take a dip in the ocean, afternoons lounging in and around the pool, family board games at night ... good times.

In fact, above and beyond the appealing features listed immediately above, I always look forward to a beach vacation primarily as an opportunity to indulge in two of my great loves: books and beers. And indeed, every single day we were there, I spent some time reading, and enjoyed a variety of cold ones. I could actually cite exactly how many books I read (finished a novel I was in the middle of, read an entire novel, and started a third one, plus two comics trade paperbacks) and how many different beers I sampled (six) because ... I am a giant nerd and I track these things via apps.

I reserved this post for a Social Media Tuesday because it was specifically the involvement of apps that tickled my amusement and made me think "yeah if I were still blogging regularly this would definitely be a post." Because, on the one hand, remember in the olden days of the early 00's, before the supremacy of Facebook, when lots and lots of websites and apps were trying to be "social media for NICHE INTEREST GOES HERE"? I do, because I was very late to Facebook, like 2014 or something, but before that I got into GoodReads and I definitely said, out loud, at some point, that that was "basically the same thing". If people wanted to connect with me and see what I was up to, they could do so on GoodReads! I read all the time (commuting via mass transit) and posted detailed reviews of every book I read, sometimes directly on the site, and sometimes by linking from my GoodReads entries back to this very blog here, where of course I would use book reviews as autobiographical jumping off points for reflections on this crazy modern world we live in (yes, ha ha, 2007-me thought that moment in history was so-o-o-o cra-a-a-a-a-zy). Anyway, obviously Facebook now is what it is, and I got onboard for good or ill (both, most days) and yet I have remained a devoted GoodReads user because I am a completist and once I start something I don't want to stop. I got much more slack about posting reviews but I do enjoy tracking which books I read, and how many I read per year, and so on.

I got into Untapped, the beer-tracking app, much later and not at all as a substitute, close-enough kind of social networking. Again, I just like cataloguing and tracking and measuring things, and Untapped does the job. And, okay, every once in a while I will get a "toast" from one of my friends on the app, and "toast" them back, which is always a nice bit of pleasant, low-stakes, virtual interaction, even moreso now that we're all quarantining and isloating and whatnot (sorry, everything comes back to COVID, dammit).

The other hand I wanted to acknowledge for sheer ridiculousness has to do with the metrics and numbers games, because as it happened I got to see two different ends of the spectrum playing out in the respective apps over the course of the beach week. Within GoodReads, I had set a goal for myself of reading 52 books this year, which seemed moderately achievable and also would have the effect of finally getting the total number of books I had read and tracked in the app up over 1000. Anyone who loves tracking numbers especially loves big round numbers, and I am no exception. Of course I've fallen a bit behind pace this year because I haven't been commuting, and thus haven't been listening to audiobooks as fast (DAMMIT, COVID) so it was nice to get a chance to play catch-up a bit and see the grand total tick up from 971 to 972 to 973 etc. Meanwhile over on Untapped, I've been using the app for three or four years and managed to try a little over 300 different beers. The app itself automatically subdivides things, tracking the individual beer style families (e.g. porters, stouts, brown ales, IPAs, wheat beers, etc.) in a way I probably wouldn't bother to do myself. Although, I have discovered that since I like what I like and tend to drink beers within the same styles, it sometimes gets hard to try new-to-me beers just because the options within my preferences are limited. Beach week, in particular sharing a house with other adults who have different tastes in beer, provides an opportunity for me to freely (in all sense of the word) expose my palate to beers I would never buy for myself.

And thus Beach Week is a real prime time for pumping up my numbers! But it did make me laugh, as I'm working my way towards a thousand recorded books and plowing into my fourth century of beers, that I tried one of the IPAs that my brother-in-law brought to the beach, and dutifully recorded it in Untapped, and got a little notification ding for earning a badge. A completely meaningless but nevertheless unironic electronic attaboy which basically said, "Good for you! You've now tried FIVE different IPAs! If you make it to TEN, you'll get another badge!" A bit of newbie encouragement, delivered to me because I'm just so finicky, apparently. I thought that was hilarious.

79

So the Covid-19 lockdown happened and I found myself working from home, with my wife and kids in the house, and it was on the one hand a very strange, arguably historic/era-defining/watershed moment, but on the other hand it was ... familiar? I was in my own house, with my family, and as I've mentioned before, working from home was not new to me. In fact it was often an option I took advantage of specifically because one or all of the kids were home, too sick for school or off for a teacher workday or the like.

On top of the circumstantial similarities, it felt like I was someplace I had been before, on a visceral level. It felt like Snowmageddon: No school! Office closed! People freaking out about toilet paper! (Which - seriously? I lived through it and I still can hardly believe I typed that. The whole TP situation will probably merit it's own post down the road.)

One of the things I think I will always remember about those early days (but I'm recording it here nonetheless, just in case) is sitting on the loveseat in our front room, laptop on my knees, doing my job remotely, and frequently glancing out the window. As if I were going to see snow. Or something like it, some visible indicator that the very atmosphere outside my house had changed, become somehow hostile. In a sense, that was true, after all, except for the whole visible part. And that was the irony, because not only could I not see thunderheads or hurricane gusts or dumping rain or snow or hail, I saw beautiful clear blue skies more often than not. After so many years that it felt like forever where we went from brutal winters with mid-March snows straight into equally brutal summers with April heatwaves, 2020 offered up one of the most picture-perfect springs weather-wise. Sunshine and pleasant temperatures, weirdly commingled with pervasive dread due to the undetectable plague creeping everywhere. Bizarre.

Over time, the feeling of familiarity would fade, because even super-blizzards only shut the region down for a couple of weeks, not a couple of months. And of course when two feet of snow cover the ground, nobody denies that it's happening or downplays the dangers of driving through it. So the metaphor falls apart. But I do, even on day 79, find myself glancing out the window often. Now, though, it's because on some subconscious level I'm looking for a sign that it's safe, that it's over, that we can get back to normal. But I know I'm not going to see that, either.

77

I was berating myself the other day for not blogging regularly throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, because someday a quarantine journal might be interesting (to me and mine, at least). Today it hit me again, mainly because it is Memorial Day. My kids have the day off from school, but then again, they haven't been to school in two and a half months. My wife has the day off, but then again, her semester ended a couple of weeks ago. I am working, albeit working from home, but then again, all I do anymore is work from home. Although I used to work from home now and then in the Before Time. Although I used to get holidays off. And the reason why there is so much work for me to do is directly because of Covid-19, and school closures, and so on. It is a strange national long weekend, to be sure, and almost certainly moreso for other people than me, but as far as chronological markers to finally jump in with my usual better-late-than-never verve? Sure, why not?

So clearly this is a multi-post project, wherein I can both report in real time on Life in Historic Times, and also belatedly fill in the backstory as best I can reconstruct it. The subject of this post refers to the fact that, for me personally, it's the 77th day of lockdown. Eleven weeks. I'll take a stab now at sketching out how it all started.

Which of course means I have to provide some current context, because this here blog has lain in disuse for so long. I have been working for an education non-profit for a little over four years now. My wife has been teaching full-time at the local community college for two years. The little guy is in sixth grade, the little girl is in third grade, and the 'bino is in first grade. We still live in the same house we have for almost the entire existence of the blog. And lots of life stuff has happened but that probably gives you enough for now!

So my actual quarantine experience began on Tuesday, March 10, 2020. I remember that the week before, coronavirus was very big in the news. My company does work internationally and the novel coronavirus outbreak in China was impacting some of our projects. My boss said, "What's going to be crazy is if we get a similar outbreak here in the U.S." and I ... scoffed? I really did, I admit it. I thought it wouldn't happen. Not that it couldn't, just that it wouldn't. I don't know why I was so convinced of that, other than my usual cock-eyed optimistic belief that everything will work out fine, but I was very wrong, and I admit it.

On Monday the 9th, there was one reported case of Covid-19 in the NYC skyscraper where my company has its home office. Not in my company's office, not anyone who works for my company, but someone else at a different company on a different floor. Still, in an abundance of caution, my company closed our office, sending everyone to work at home. Including everyone at all the other satellite offices, which of course included me. So we packed up on a Monday, and on Tuesday, I was working from home, while my kids went to school, and my wife happened to be on spring break. Things escalated quickly that week, as my company announced we would stay closed for at least a month, my wife's campus decided not to re-open after spring break, and my kids ... continued to go to school, through Friday, which was a half-day for them anyway. By then, at least, the governor had closed schools state-wide. So I worked from home for four days in a row, and as I mentioned above, working from home was nothing new for me. I did it one day a week with regularity, and sometimes twice a week if the need arose. Four straight days was a bit of a novelty, but then it became apparent that it was going to be five days in a row the following week, and the week after that, and ... question mark? Of course at the beginning no one knew how or when it would all end, and two and a half, nearly three months later, we still don't know.

So that's the intro! I will add to this as often as I can, hopefully. Stay safe and well.