Staying In
Journal days 22 and 23: Life in my little corner of NYC in the age of the Coronavirus, Sunday and Monday, April 12–13, 2020
I posted daily entries for this journal for 21 days straight (!) As much as I enjoy doing it, I think I need to free up some time for other things, so I probably won’t be posting quite as regularly from now on.
Except for my walks, a lot of my thoughts these days seem to revolve around food. Trying to find it, prepare it, and clean up after it seem to take up far more time than they used to back in the days when restaurants were open and I wasn’t afraid to go into grocery stores.
Yesterday, I went to my little neighborhood weekly farmer’s market. Most of the usual booths were still there.
In the pre-pandemic times, on a sunny day, the sidewalks would have been packed. There were far fewer people there yesterday, but it was still impossible to keep six feet away from everyone. I just tried to ignore that. I’m careful most of the time, but it’s hard to do this 100% perfectly, and I decided it was worth the risk to get some fresh veggies. And I was wearing my mask and gloves.
I’m hoping the viral load theory is true — that the danger is in prolonged or repeated contact, not in the occasional too-close encounter.
Later in the day, a friend who managed to snag a rare Instacart delivery gave me a wonderful care package, which was a very sweet thing to do. Now I’m set with enough food for a while.
Today, the weather was stormy, so for the first time in at least a month, I stayed in for the whole day. Without my daily walk to burn off nervous energy, I was feeling antsy. It didn’t help that I watched Trump’s press conference, which was one of the strangest ones yet.
First Dr. Fauci got up to the podium to say the White House always did what he recommended and, no, no one forced him to say that. Then Trump said he had no intention of firing Fauci even though this morning, he (Trump) had retweeted someone who said exactly that. Then Trump played a video of Democratic governors praising him. Later he said he had absolute authority over the state governors, and it was up to him, not the governors, to decide when the shutdowns would end.
Tonight, despite all the food I acquired yesterday, I ordered dinner delivered from Oba, a neighborhood Turkish restaurant. Maybe it’s because I was cooped up today, but I was craving something different. They gave me a lot of extra bread. I ate everything! LOL, now I can see how people are putting on weight during the shutdown. Until now, I had been losing weight — down about three pounds so far since the shutdown began.
Even though I’m still tracking my weight, it doesn’t seem to matter very much. I’ve mentioned before that I’ve found some guilty pleasures in this new way of life. One that I talked about before was how quiet it is in this usually noisy area. Another is that I feel like my perspective has shifted in some ways. Some of the things I used to think were so important don’t seem worth spending energy worrying about now.
So that’s good, but the guilty part comes because of how many people have died — as of today, almost 2,000 in Queens alone. It doesn’t feel right to use this as a learning moment.
