May 12, 2020
I wake up about 7:45 am. My wife is putting on makeup today. I think that’s the first time in about two months, but we shaved her head yesterday and she wants to do up the whole look. I spread out across the bed and ask her to start the coffee. Then I get up, take my blood pressure and morning meds and grab us both breakfast. Similar morning routine as always… my Internet use is a little different as I check news sites and not just social media. But I can’t focus on it and mostly read headlines. The cat curls up on me, and it’s tempting to stay here and go back to sleep, but I kick him off about 8:30 to give my wife her “heading to work” hug. We’ve kept that up even though neither of us are going anywhere. Then I finish the morning getting ready routine, shower, etc. She turns on the heat because it’s chilly this morning—and having a shaved head must be cold! I’m grumpy about the heat on in May.
I start my work day promptly at 9:00 am. I’m keeping myself to two hours of writing—or 4 Pomodoros—each weekday morning. I mostly ignore email except a little during breaks, and get a good amount of writing done on my book. I hope I can keep this up.
About 11, I decide to chill a bit. I’ve been playing a very basic game—Sim City: Build It. Basically it’s building chains. Get wood to make wood planks that make a chair that you pay to build a house—that kind of thing. I tried Animal Crossing, but this was more what I was looking for in terms of mindless games. I head upstairs and answer a few emails and mess around a bit more, and 11-12 just seems to vanish into the ether.
Around noon, my wife and I break for lunch. A PB&J is comfort food, but it’s really about the white cheddar Cheetos to go with it. We take a few for some lunchtime cuddling in bed, and then I end up falling asleep for about 30 minutes or so while she heads back to work.
I pull myself up around 1:30 and microwave the rest of the coffee from the coffee pot, which tastes surprisingly good, and spend about an hour sorting through emails and catching up. Then I delve into a video from a class that I’ve been meaning to watch. I usually observe teachers, but of course, I couldn’t after spring break. But one sent me a video of a couple of online class periods. So, I watch one of those, and end just as my wife is wanting a walk.
We try to walk every day, and we do most of them. Slipping on a mask is habit at this point. Our neighbor is still bringing up our packages—we live on the third floor of a building downtown. There’s one outside our door from Target with some over-the-counter medicine and some new lights for spring. My wife loves having lights around the house, especially in the bedroom, and the ones we have went out. We’re really not ordering a lot right now, but making our environment happier seems important. She’s excited they’re here. We take out the trash and walk around Canan Commons a few times. It is really nice out—around 60 after a cold morning. Thankfully not too many people are out. There’s one group taking some kind of pictures (senior pictures?) and another solo man walking. As usual, no one else is wearing masks. After a few laps, the wife has to get back to work, so we head back upstairs and immediately turn off the heat. We should have earlier… still can’t believe we put it on this morning!
The hand sanitizer stings with all the little cuts and cracks on my hands from endless washing, and I wonder why I didn’t just use soap and water again. It felts like a little variety, I guess.
I’m done all my “scheduled” work. An article to peer review is taunting me, but I don’t want to spend the brain power on it. So I chill in the recliner for a bit playing my game and checking social media. I watch a video of Dr. Fauci’s testimony where he responds to Rand Paul saying he’s not the “end all.” It’s both pretty great but also just so sad. I feel like I’ve had this conversation. Fauci’s like: I’m not giving you advice on the economy. I don’t do that. Cause my expertise is public health. And we don’t know everything, so we should be careful. After Rand Paul was all like: we don’t know. I don’t think rates will go up with re-opening. So, we should just say we don’t know and go forward. What’s with this high school literature mentality of “everyone has an opinion” crap? Can we move past the relativism and acknowledge expertise and that there if there isn’t a RIGHT answer, there are BETTER answers. Ugh.
After about 30 minutes of that, I go to do the dishes and put on some music on my phone with headphones. I’m listening to more music these days, in part because I’m blocking out my wife’s work calls, but also it’s just nice and helps the mood. I’m dishes dancing to this artist I found recently who is described as “electro swing” when the Bluetooth switches to Alexa. Thankfully my wife wasn’t on with a client or something. “Why would you do that?!?” I yell at her (Alexa not my wife). I have some déjà vu that this happened during the last diary day, but maybe it’s just the mundaneness of the moment.
My wedding ring sit on the ring stand near the sink where I took it off weeks ago, and I don’t really even think of putting it on after the dishes. I’m just not wearing jewelry right now.
After dishes and a little puttering around the house, I go back to chilling and reading news and social media for a bit while E’s finishing work. I’m thinking about something she said yesterday about how everyone sees different things on their feed—and that’s part of the problem with the pandemic and some people not believing it’s real or not thinking it’s bad. I feel like scrolling on social media isn’t something to record in these diaries because everyone does it—but how different are the things we see? My feed is about Fauci, concerns over re-opening, and racial tensions with the police shooting in Indianapolis. I feel like most of my friends see similar things, but what are you seeing?
I will say that Facebook absolutely knew to market some ridiculous lounge pants from a site that is—no kidding—called Letspants. Maybe it’s just the pandemic, but they are quite tempting and 100% something I would wear. While she’s cooking, I tell E. about it, who does social media marketing for a living, and she says that they’ve done studies that compare what people who know you think you’ll do with what the algorithms predict and aside from your spouse, algorithms were most correct. It’s like this season of Westworld.
Then it’s dinner of shrimp tacos and watching an episode of What We Do In the Shadows. I was feeling like this season wasn’t as good but this episode “Colin’s Promotion” is AMAZING. Colin is an addition to the TV show and he’s an energy vampire, and in this episode he gets a promotion at work and finds that when everyone has to listen to him give PowerPoints and make stupid jokes he gains power exponentially. Meanwhile, one of the more traditional vampires finds a painting that shows that her housemate vampire destroyed her village like 500 years before she was born or something like that, so she is pissed off and they are discussing it family meeting style when Colin, with his new found power, feeds off their negative energy and they are left on the couch hardly able to move and telling their human familiar he should get up and come over so they can feed off of him, except he’s drained and can’t get up either. Ridiculous situations like these are exactly what I love about the show, while E. likes the jokes, which this one also had. “He’s a wild card,” says one of the housemates about Colin. “No, he’s not. He’s like the card on top where you read all the instructions,” says the other, which has us LOLing.
D, the cat, is entirely curled up on my chest, so I don’t want to move, and we decide to play Diablo for a bit. It’s our third run through that we just restarted recently to have another thing to do together. We play for a while, past when either of us are enjoying it. And then get off the couch around 8:30 to feed the cats and pick-up after dinner and well, there’s not a lot else to do. We put up the new lights and then E. takes a bath while I’m writing this up.
About 9:30 I start to get ready for bed. E. is out of the bath and D. the cat loves laying on the towel. We spend some time together and then read before sleeping. Dinner was pretty small and I can’t help but get up and have few crackers with some cheese at 11, which I know I shouldn’t. I don’t bother to brush my teeth again.
I’m feeling a bit dissociative, for lack of a better word, just that sort of surreal feeling that creeps in at night with everything. Like my wife barely seems like another real person and not a figment of my imagination. Everything is entirely normal on the micro level with this underlying surreal quality to the surrounding world. I wonder how this is affecting us all psychologically and about traumas to society as a whole. I’m not in the thick of anything: I’m physically safe. I’m economically pretty safe. And yet, there it is, creeping around the edges of my mind, always there. I dream about being in a prison. The dreams have definitely been pandemic adjacent lately.