april 27
My nephew turned 21 today. This is crazy because he was the world’s tiniest ring bearer at our wedding, which feels like yesterday. And what a bummer to miss all the fanfare of your 21st birthday. He is hunkering down with my sister and family so their neighborhood friends prepared a socially distant “pub crawl” from house to house. I love it.
In fact, I truly appreciate all of the weird ways we are compensating for the “losses” of our old life. The virtual happy hours, porch drop-off potlucks, birthday drive-by parades – people are awesome.
I’m mostly not dumb, so I mostly understand how to read data with critical thinking. But more than ever, it feels like we are bombarded with mixed messages about where we are in the midst of this pandemic. Is it time for safe, measured reopening? Or do we keep up with the social distancing guidelines and minimize vectors for transmission?
Sweden is doing COVID very differently, but apparently with great success. Basically, they’re going all in for herd immunity instead of mass unemployment. Should we re-evaluate our approach?
I’ve long supported creative thinking about how to tackle some of these reopenings, like public schools, the beauty industry, golf, tennis, THE DMV!! Why in the world can we go to QFC, but we cannot go to a small window at the DMV and get a drivers permit? (Ok, in Washington state they call it the DOL. You can take the girl out of California, but….) How about customers and clerks wear masks, surfaces are disinfected, a limited number of customers are permitted inside – wouldn’t that significantly reduce the insane backlog we will be faced with?
There must be 200 more examples of safe ways we could have maintained operational efficiencies across many industries and avoided the inevitable waitlists of 2020 and 2021. Anyway, here we are. Depressed, fat, and drunk.
april 28
Listen, I’ve been meaning to support all the local businesses, and we have supported many! But there’s one divey bar (previously mentioned in this blog for their professionally amateur handmade paper signs) and we just hadn’t prioritized greasy burgers. But in the last week, they’ve papered the neighborhood with flyers stapled to telephone poles. The first iteration was pretty basic: we’ve been in this neighborhood forever, please support us, a burger a week from our takeout menu will keep us afloat.
The second flyer pleaded a bit for the flyer thief to please support local business. Why are they sabotaging efforts for a longtime neighborhood business to survive this shutdown?
The final flyer was desperation: Why are you tearing down our flyers?? This is our last-ditch effort to stay in business!
So, we ordered burgers tonight and they were magically delicious.
I could not have dreamed up this crazy movie we’re living. You know what other crazy movie I could never have imagined and just finished watching? Good Time. It’s the 127th movie we’ve watched in the last 6 weeks and it was good… a good time, if you will.
april 29
Today, one of my kids had a socially distant rendezvous with a friend. His first since quarantining! I felt a smidge of shame, but it was at a big park, they mostly kept their distance, and his mental state was infinitely improved. I guess it’s the optics that trouble me. We’re being careful, we’re washing hands, we’re not licking each other and coughing on each other. Nobody has a fever. Does it sound like I’m rationalizing?
diary of coronavirus 