Tales From the COVID-19 Life
I'm going to say something and I think that many people may be able to relate. I'm not sure how much longer I can hang out like this in quarantine. But I will stay home. I'm so committed at this point that I order everything to be delivered and haven't left my house in a long time.
I don't have a choice, do I? Do we? So perhaps the only thing we can do is wait, and pray, and cry and maybe even laugh.
I will not leave my house. But let me give you a window into my current world.
Just to give you a glimpse the ridiculous ways in which I’m passing the time during lockdown, in a previous post, I mentioned how my mom and I got into a fight about me allegedly ‘stealing’ tall drinking glasses from our kitchen and bringing them down to my basement apartment. I admit it, I did it. I’m guilty.
Now my mom has accused me of ‘stealing’ utensils. I will admit to the glasses, but I plead not guilty to the utensils and then she added coffee mugs. I have like four forks and two spoons in the basement, and literally one mug. I wash it and reuse it every day because I’m too lazy to bring any more downstairs.
So then my mom went into the basement and found some more tall glasses, however, she didn’t find any utensils or mugs. “She’s giving that friend of hers our forks!” she yelled when she came up.
“No, actually I’m selling them on eBay,” I replied.
“Probably,” but her voice quivered and I heard a little laugh there. And that was the moment, the moment that I recognized, and maybe she did too, that we are in fact, insane. This is what we are talking about. When the world falls apart all around us, it’s crazy to me how frivolous we are.
But let’s face the reality, it is something to do. Something to talk about. Sometimes we fight with each other because it’s easy to take our frustrations out on the people around us, especially since we are stuck inside with them for possibly months.
How much longer will this go on for? That’s the question on everyone’s mind.
And the horrible answer is that we have no idea. Will I be forced to wear a mask when I go back to work? I mean I hate to be vain, but I’m vain. I take pride in my appearance, I put on make-up, I’m not per se into the mask look yet. Can you imagine going on a date wearing a mask? Where will it end?
I’m pretty convinced masks will become an accessory soon, like Macy’s will be selling stylish masks at exorbitant prices. I told my mom this and she yelled that I was making fun of this situation. That’s because I am.
We have to laugh otherwise we will be crying all the time.
Like you have to laugh at what my dad is doing. In his mind, he is using his engineering skills to create a device that he says a person can breathe into and then heat goes into the respiratory system and kills the virus. Shockingly, I’m not a scientist, but I'm just going to throw this out there: I don’t think you can kill a bug once it enters your body with something like heat. But what do I know?
My dad said he wants to send the idea to the CDC. I suggested he send it to Bill Gates.
He literally said to me, “Bill Gates didn’t go to college.” I mean I know he’s a stickler for college, but there has to be a limit. Apparently there is no limit. “He dropped out of Harvard,” he continued. He got into Harvard!
Wow. Just wow.
I told my dad I was going for a walk. He told me to wear a jacket, “You don’t want to get a cold and then it turns into Coronavirus.”
I said, “That’s not how that works. You either get Corona from someone or you don’t, a cold doesn’t turn into Coronavirus. And you don’t get a cold from being cold outside. That is not how any of this works. You get Coronavirus from another human.” My dad has many times thought he was a doctor and actually diagnosed me with maladies, even though my mom is the real doctor.
My mom has told me to wear a mask when I’m taking a walk. I told her I would but I’m not going to. They think it is in the open air, they won’t let me open the windows. There has to be a limit. Apparently there isn’t.
My dad was worried last night about my sister who is a nurse practitioner. I told him that the chances of the average person dying from the virus are 2%, I said since she is young and healthy, her chances are more like .5%, so she has a 99.5% chance of surviving. “Oh, now you are the mathematician? I know what’s going on. Sanjay Gupta warned everyone…” he replied.
He's right I'm not a mathematician and he's not a doctor. And neither of us knows what our chances really are. TV isn't helping. My father is blind and he listens to CNN most of the day these days.
We had an argument about the Prime Minister of England, “He is in the ICU, he is Jessica’s age,” Dad said. I told him he is at least twenty years older than my sister, we had to google it, it was an issue. Boris Johnson is 55, he’s 16 years older than my sister. “Oh it’s the same thing, it can happen to her. She's my daughter, I cannot let her die,” Dad said.
But my sister was sick right before this all happened and we think she may have already had the virus and now has some immunity. This made my father think for a moment, but then he just started shouting, “Can’t she just take family leave and tell her boss that I’m sick?”
No, I told him. She won’t do that. “Wouldn’t you, if it was a matter of life and death, wouldn’t you try to save your life by getting out of this situation?” No, I told him. If I was in the medical profession I would do what my sister is doing. I would do my work. I would want to do something if I could. I would be honored.
Listen, my work is safe, I sit behind a computer and teach kids some English and then I have a side hustle where I make sarcastic commentary about my life. I don’t know what it means to risk my life for my work, although working in a school with all the mass shootings could actually be a risk if I really thought about it. And I have thought about that. But it hasn’t stopped me. As it probably would not stop you.
But in this Coronavirus situation, I’m relatively safe. But I have a lot of time on my hands. Is that really safe? For anyone?
You want to talk frivolous, I don’t know what to do with my nails. I got this thing called a The Dip. It’s kind of like acrylic nails, but kind of different. Well, the stuff they put on your nails is like stuck to my nails and I don’t know how to get it off. I could Google it...but I crave human contact.
The nail place I go to texted me and asked me if I want to buy a gift card, which I wanted to do anyways. I plan on calling the funny Vietnamese guy who owns the shop and asking him how I get this stuff off my nails. He is a riot. I asked him if he owned the place a while ago and he was like, “No, it’s my wife’s shop...you know how marriage is.” I literally miss that dude.
And when this is over, we will need each other to heal. We need each other now, but we cannot physically be together, so we must do it through virtual methods. But when we can all sit in a room together and have a conversation.
Oh, the stories we will tell.
nina