So how many of us are seeing variations on this theme over and over again throughout the day?
(Honestly, I’m of a generation where my preferred metaphor would be The Hollywood Squares. But I couldn’t find an openly licensed picture from there, so the Bradys will have to suffice.)
Alternately, if you are of my generation, you might have a certain theme song running through your head whenever you log onto a now-ubiquitous teleconferencing software package.
I haven’t left the house or yard for 2 weeks now.
Well, that’s a bit of an overstatement. I did help with the pre-social-distancing grocery shopping back on Sunday March 15th.
So, more truthfully: I’ve been mostly in lockdown mode for 2 weeks, and I haven’t left the house at all for 11 days.
To a large degree, very little on the surface of my life has changed. I’m fortunate that I can still do my work from home, so my weekdays are as busy as they’ve ever been. It isn’t even that much of an adjustment for shifting to working from home all week—since I had to do exactly that during November when my elbow was broken and I wasn’t legally allowed to drive anywhere.
Matt has been a telecommuter ever since we moved here to Boston, so him working from home is a complete nothing-burger. We don’t have kids, so we don’t have to cope with the side effects of school closures. And I’m mostly a homebody, so these quiet evenings reading and writing and watching bad TV aren’t really all that different from my quiet evenings pre-COVID.
In many ways, little has changed. And yet everything feels so different.
Call it the change in perspective.
I stopped watching the White House pressers after I saw part of my first one by accident. The days have blurred together enough that I can’t even tell you which day I stumbled across. I do remember that I was hoping to get caught up on things from the actual noontime news whilst making lunch, but instead of the WCVB news crew, I was watching Trump & co. in the White House press room.
Dear reader, I lasted maybe 15 minutes until the self-aggrandizement and deception got to me.
I’ve eschewed the live pressers since then, opting instead to get caught up after-the-fact from written sources. At my most kindest moments, I’m with Rachel Maddow in seeing these press briefings as irresponsible and dangerous.
In my more cynical moments*, I see these pressers as propaganda-theatre. As exercises in immorality.
Okay, before the jump, how about a peppy tune:
You’re welcome.
Yeah, about 10 days ago, I said I was gonna have a lot to say about COVID-19 and then I got quiet instead.
Part of that was my general sense of it being fruitless to post. You see, two Fridays ago, I was feeling super-frustrated. I don’t pretend to be a huge expert or anything, but I know enough about epidemiology that I was already clocked in (right around the start of March) to understand how serious this all was.
But I wasn’t seeing a similar awareness in my surroundings—not at the local, regional, or national level.
So I was feeling increasingly tense and stressed and frustrated at my Cassandra-like status and I was in the mood for a big ol’ superiority rant. I was probably gonna link to every data scientist’s analysis I’d been reading* and yell and scream to the effect of:
Don’t you people get it!?!? This shit is REAL!
But right after my last post is when things began to sink in: locally, regionally, and federally.** And now here we are.
