3/18/20
I ate all of my Cheddar Kangaroos. It is my second day working from home during the COVID-19 outbreak. I have enough food to last a couple of weeks , but I still shouldn’t have eaten all the kangaroos yet. My only other snack option now is beet crackers, and I definitely should have bought cookies instead of those. In a moment of impulse and maybe panic, I did buy some pepperoni. I’m not sure why. All of that is gone too.
I have never worked from home before. The fact that the company I work for made this drastic choice (which required me to take my desktop, two monitors, keyboard, mouse, and headset home from the office) is definitely worrisome. I have no idea if my job will survive this pandemic. Nothing like this has ever happened before.
I think as of today there are over 6000 confirmed cases, and speculation that there are actually many more cases because we haven’t been testing people.
3/19/20
I think the cases of the virus in the US have exceeded 10,000 today.
Every little thing in my body has the potential to scare me. Am I hot because I have a fever? I don’t want to check. Does my throat feel weird because of the virus? Is my body aching because symptoms are starting, or because I’ve been moving into a new apartment and I’m sore?
3/21/20
More cities are telling people to “shelter in place.” I have no idea how any businesses or jobs will survive. It seems cruel to lay people off right now. Then they/we will be without health insurance while a virus is infecting people. Predictions are that up to 70% of americans will get infected if we don’t take any measures (like social distancing). There are a lot of numbers floating around. There’s a lot of info floating around.
My sister showed me an article that says people with type O blood are more resistant to the virus or severe problems, and people with type A fare worse. She has asthma and has type A blood, so I am worried about her. But at the end of the day, no one really knows anything about this virus. How it spreads, why it spreads, how to make it stop – it’s all a mystery.
I went to the grocery store today. There is still no toilet paper. I haven’t seen any in over a week. I have some right now, but will probably need more on my next trip.
Everything is weird.
3/22/20
Nashville’s mayor put a “shelter in place” rule into effect for 14 days. But he said we could still go outside, so fool that I am, I decided to.
I started down a walking path, and immediately twisted my ankle. And had to walk 10 minutes back to my apartment. This is why I go to the gym. It never attacks me like nature does.
3/26/20
The US has the most cases in the world now, at about 82k the last time I heard, and over 1k deaths.
3/27/20
[Redacted]
4/7/20
Excerpts from my SisterGroupText today
Me: I am trying to go to the store less. Because it’s annoying with gloves, and now a mask.
Emily: Where did you even get gloves from?
Me: I actually have gloves for handling raw meat since I had salmonella once. I have a whole routine for the store. One hand only touches the cart, and the other only grabs things. And then at the register the things hand pays. And then I go outside, unload with things hand, take the cart back with cart hand. And then remove the gloves, and use hand sanitizer. There is no cross contamination.
Emily: Very methodical.
Me: The cart seems dirtiest to me because dozens of people touch it, but things are touched by an employee and maybe a few other people. Cart hand also opens freezer doors. At the end of this, I will obviously have OCD.
Emily: Won’t we all. We’ll never be the same.
Sarah: I feel like I already do. Or at least I did until I found out how you grocery shop.
Me: I have never disinfected my keys, but I think about it.
Sarah: I went to Sonic earlier and got ice cream, and immediately wiped every cup and spoon (in plastic) down with hand sanitizer, then came home and wiped them all down with soap and water, and used the sanitizer twice on my hands and washed them and also put the spoons in the cups using my teeth because my hands were contaminated from the plastic whence they came
Me: I would have used my own spoons, but you do you.
4/15/20
I woke up at 6am today, so I could drive to a walmart to try to buy toilet paper. I only have a couple rolls left. It just so happened that Nashville had some kind of freeze last night, in the middle of April, so I also had to scrape ice off my car – my least favorite activity.
I went straight to the TP aisle and there were only about 5-6 packs of walmart brand toilet paper. That stuff is like tissue paper, but I had no choice.
I had created a scarf mask by cutting up one of my scarves that I don’t like, and using hair ties to attach it to my ears. It is not easy to breath through. Every breath fogs up my glasses.
The experience was unpleasant so I also bought some mozzarella sticks.
I used to go to the store a few times a week. I would be like, “I want an apple” and just go buy one. What unadulterated bliss.
I also placed an order online with Milk Bar for a tin of 6 cookies, 3 truffles, and one slice of pie that cost $50. With shipping it costs $65. It’s a stupid amount of money for cookies, but I regret nothing.
4/21/20
The financial crisis in 2008 really messed my entire life up. I had graduated about 18 months before, so the job market for me as a recent grad was a disaster. I ended up working at a daycare for three years.
Part of the problem was that I don’t make good first impressions, and job interviews are entirely about impressions. It takes time for people to like me. It is sort of like that frog in boiling water scenario. Except I am the boiling water, slowly turning up my personality. And other people are the frog, but instead of being dead at the end, they…like me. Yeah. It’s exactly like that.
Why am I talking about slowly killing frogs/winning people over? I had gone back to school in 2018/2019 for a new degree, and wouldn’t you know it: I graduated right before an economic crisis again. I have to try and make good impressions in a competitive and desperate environment again. I applied for a job at my current company back in February. I’ve done a lot of Zoom interviews since then, but wasn’t sure if they would have to freeze hiring right now.
The hiring manager called me tonight and said…I got the job. Which is actually a promotion. The pandemic could still steal it out from under me at any moment, but at least for today, I got the job. I went to school, studied the things, applied for a job, and got it. Finally.
4/24/20
A thing happened last night and today that I feel perfectly captures the tone of politics and the pandemic.
I watched a video, with my own eyes, of Trump starting his daily briefing about the virus. He walked to the podium, and immediately started rambling about weird things. He wondered if we could somehow get UV light/sunlight inside of our bodies to kill the virus, because it works outside the body. He also wondered if maybe we could figure out how to inject disinfectant into our bodies. He said we’d have to ask medical doctors, but it sounds like an interesting idea to him.
There were four types of reactions to this:
1) People made many many many jokes about how insane he is.
2) People made very serious remarks about how unsafe it is to drink bleach.
3) People got very annoyed and said “Trump never said to drink bleach.”
4) Trump said he was being sarcastic, and his press secretary said the media took his comments out of context and needs to stop running such negative headlines.
The problem with the jokes is that there are unfortunately some people who listen to the president, and do what he says. He had recommended a somewhat random drug a few weeks ago, people took it, and it killed them.
The problem with #2 is that the very predictable response is #3. He never used the word “bleach.” He never told anyone to drink anything. It makes it too easy for his supporters to call democrats unfair when they misquote him. And then that gives them a reason to talk about something other than how ridiculous the actual remarks were. Instead, we’re arguing about whether or not the word “bleach” was used instead of just how absurd his actual words were.
And Trump always, always, always tries to blame the media. Anytime they repeat his actual words, he says they’re negative and unfair.
This is how every single discussion about Trump goes. Every issue. Every time.
5/1/20
Last night I nightmared that everyone went back out in public, and I had to go to a church service. I was too anxious to sit in the auditorium, so I sat outside on a chair and hoped to watch the sermon on a screen. But then a group of children sat right in front of me to play, and I thought, “Oh no. Children carry the virus!”
In real life, my a/c broke a couple of days ago. I submitted a maintenance request. They said that because of the virus they’re only handling emergency requests, and a/c isn’t an emergency until it’s over 80 degrees outside. The forecast for the next two days is a high of 85ish. But it’s the weekend, and I have no idea if they fix things on the weekend. It’s my first maintenance request in this apartment. So like, do I have to wear pants all weekend while I wait for him? With no a/c?
The United States has more than a million cases of the virus, and more than 65k deaths now. Some new information: people in their 30s and 40s appear to develop blood clots and have strokes. Isn’t it so weird how I’m having virus nightmares?
sayingthingsoutloud 