Today was supposed to be the end of the shelter in place order. Instead, it’s going to be the first week of May sometime. Because it’s working – the curve is bending, lives are being saved, and California has enough medical resources to spare some for New York and elsewhere. While the rest of the country is fixated on dueling press conferences between Andrew Cuomo and the orange dingleberry in the White House, Gavin Newsom has quickly and decisively saved the Golden State from a far greater nightmare.
Because…I’ve kind of adapted to the new normal. Thanks to Zoom, I’ve seen distant friends in other time zones more than I likely would have in years. I never make it out of bed before 7:45 AM and I’m never late to work. I can do 100% of everything I would be doing otherwise. I don’t have to leave the house (because I mostly can’t leave the house) but I’ve been fortunate enough to take advantage of curbside pickup of pizza, of beer, of a full Irish breakfast. We’ve knocked out chores that’ve needed doing, the podcasts and DVR are mostly caught up, and I even cooked us an anniversary dinner of scrambled eggs and oatmeal all by myself (okay, someone else insisted on wilting spinach into the eggs and slicing up a kiwi to go with it).
The irony is…I’m having the time of my life. Kinda. For what I want out of life at age 48, I’ve got it – the wider world largely shut out, the timeframe and horizon changed. I’m not worrying about the election anymore – that’s far too far out, and with the primaries settled, I don’t really feel like I need to care about the news at this point. Everyone is mostly healthy, locked down in relative safety, we don’t have to worry about having anyone in a nursing home or hospital at this point. Our travel is all on hold, but the stressful bits of it aren’t happening either, and we’re able to video-chat with the people we would have missed out on seeing. There’s no sports – but Vanderbilt’s still the defending national champion of baseball, and I can tailgate with Vandy fans without the hassle and inconvenience of travel or chancing a loss. Even the weather has conspired to feel like we moved to the coast – gray, overcast, actual rain to fall asleep to some nights.
Which begs the question…how am I going to go back? Back to schlepping it into the office when I plainly don’t need to sit at a desk on-site to be ignored by our management and left out of the planning? Back to having to actually book flights and deal with people in other states I don’t want to visit? Back to trying to find real-world social outlets instead of astral projection via Zoom that lets me drink in Nashville or Virginia as easily as in the living room? What happens when the world isn’t wiling to constrain itself to something I can live with any longer?
I’ll worry about that in May. For now, I’m just trying to be present in a world that I can live with, despite everything.