CoronaQuaratine, Day 5
Today is a very different day from both Friday and yesterday in terms of work day, and the start of what I am going to have to hunker down and get used to: Shobhit has a work shift at Big 5 from 9 to 6, so I'll actually be home alone pretty much all day. Honestly, yesterday I was looking at his being home all day as a potentially frustrating distraction, and really it was nice just having another human around. It's very early stages in all this and already I am struggling with the feeling of isolation. Why couldn't all this "social distancing" have been all the rage when I was fifteen and spending all of my time alone in my bedroom anyway? I am not that person anymore!
Anyway. I was working alone at home when Darrell sent me home from the office on Friday, but that was hardly half a day. Yesterday was a full work-from-home day but Shobhit did not work—his brief shift he had been scheduled for in the evening at Total Wine even wound up getting scrapped, it sounded like mostly because the cough from his cold has persisted. He had his regular doctor's appointment yesterday and Dr. Brandon also gave him a yellow face mask, which thankfully finally seemed to have made him regard the taking of such precautions more seriously. I still don’t think he has COVID-19 (yet), but we're getting to a point where I am afraid of how freaked out people out in the world are going to get about his coughing. If he puts on the mask, it will at least offer that much of an obvious barrier. He went downtown yesterday to his bank to deposit the check I wrote for him to cover all the Australia expenses we had long already been budgeting for me to cover with my own earnings (but after he used his Costco Visa card because that account waives all international transaction fees, unlike my Visa card), and also to transfer some funds in his stock portfolio while the market is in freefall, and he took the mask with him. Whew.
One of many ironies swirling around all of this is that, much as I have joked about how I've fantasized about murdering him, having Shobhit around has been a life saver. And I don't even mean that in terms of all that much effort on his part—having a husband, or someone around to keep me company, is making all the difference in the world, while I cannot do so much as even go out to see a movie. I almost did on Sunday when the movie theaters were still open, but then I decided against it, literally just for the greater good. No one should be going out for anything inessential right now.
I remain a little stuck on the comment to my Facebook post about that, left by Elden, Evan's boyfriend: he said he was going to see a movie on Thursday (no longer possible, thankfully), and "I ain't afraid a'no bug." This attitude of his has clearly persisted even beyond my response that this is not so much about protecting ourselves but protecting others who are far more vulnerable: Evan shared the news yesterday that Regal Cinemas had announced the closure of their theaters, and still Elden responded with, "Lame!!" The problem is, it's the people with defiant attitudes like that who are the very reason these drastic measures have to be taken—people won't do the right thing just because they're told they should. They have to be forced to. Even I really should have started working from home as soon as it was first recommended; Dr. Brandon pretty strongly encouraged it at my appointment with him on Thursday. Still, I went from that appointment to work, and then back to work Friday—only to get kicked out of the office because my coughing was freaking people out.
And now, with Shobhit being ever the news junkie, when he is home, I'm around a pretty constant stream of MSNBC and other news shows on which I hear nothing but what a spectacularly botched job the U.S. federal government is doing in response to this (thanks, President Fuckwit), and how bad the situation really is, and how much worse it is likely to get, and how long it is likely to last. By the end of the evening, a quite unusual bout of anxiety began to overtake me, and suddenly Shobhit and I switched roles and he was the one who had the greater amount of optimism: I have my doubts that we'll even manage our planned trip to visit Mom and Bill in July; for some reason he thinks things will be better by then. His rationale is that it got worst in Washington first, so we'll be ahead of other states. (Well, uh . . . Mom and Bill are in another state. Also, they are in the higher-risk group, and I certainly don't want to feel like I had any part in getting them sick.)
Rachel Maddow had a doctor guest on who quite strongly believed that the entire country should follow the San Francisco Bay Area's "shelter in place" for three weeks policy, and Shobhit agreed. In all likelihood, that would mean Shobhit would have to stop working for that long. Or maybe he wouldn't? I don't know whether Big 5 falls under the category of "hardware stores," but I kind of doubt it; it’s a sporting goods store. Shobhit is already half-expecting them to start shortening hours, as has already been done at many stores, including Trader Joe's. (I have not yet heard about any such plans at PCC stores; and at the very least, as a grocery store we qualify as "essential business.")
In any case, the news shows just have this constant stream of the same basic message: do not expect this to last for only weeks, but for months, and basically the entire year to some degree or another: There is a moderate expectation of new infections tapering off over the warmer summer months, but they could then come back with a vengeance in the fall.
I did go to the office very briefly late yesterday afternoon. I would not have otherwise, but Craig in Accounting initiated a chain of emails about creating a "universal" standard for how reconciling receiver reports should be done for people working remotely. He said the approved documents in our system should be returned to the office no later than one day after they are approved. Well, fuck: I had already worked through 3/4 of a stack already backlogged after being unable to get to it last week, and they were already approved. And waiting to "approve" really means being forced not to process them at all until one day before they get taken back to the office. So, at about 4:45, I took what I had done of the thick stack and drove Shobhit's car back down to the office.
After Justine's email yesterday about how sparse the office staff was, there was actually a lot more people down there than I expected, especially just after 5:00. Earlier in the day, in Merchandising, Darrell had already told anyone who had the capability of working from home to do so, and so Catherine left, later emailing me a spectacular photo of her view of the Seattle skyline out her window from what appeared to be West Seattle. Steven, who just a couple months ago moved with his husband and two stepchildren to Vashon Island, has already been telecommuting since at least last week. When Justine said in her email that they had had a meeting with the few people still in the office, they had all made sure to stand six feet apart. The whole thing made it sound like the office had become a ghost town . . . so far at least, apparently only the Merchandising Department has.
Now conditioned to be paranoid about it, I did my best not to get to close to anyone. And again, not out of fear for myself, but to keep everyone safe . . . or as safe as we can be under the circumstances, I guess. I did have to ask Craig a question about one of the invoices and it made me nervous just to stand near enough to him to show him what I was talking about. While I was filing all my invoices into their respective stores' folders, Scott noticed me and waved from his desk: "Hi Matthew!" he called out, almost sing-songy. I called "Hi" back to him but did not walk over. I then took some of the hand sanitizer from the front desk and then took my next stack of fresh receivers back to the car and drove home.
Shobhit and I watched last week's episode of Will & Grace, and then the final five episodes of the entire series of Cheers on Netflix. That was how we spent the rest of our evening. I must say, there is something about watching shows about characters with truly trivial problems that feels a lot different in the midst of a global health crisis. Two different times—once during Will & Grace and once on one of the Cheers episode—characters made references to "going on a cruise." They both had their own punch lines but in neither case was it about them being the very kind of death traps that quite directly exacerbated the current situation. Hindsight can really change things.
I could not stop thinking about this whole situation while we were watching Cheers, and it was finally during a brief bathroom break before watching the very last episode that I confessed to Shobhit, "I'm starting to feel really anxious." He said, "That's not good!" And of course, it isn't—stress only makes you more vulnerable to sickness, for fuck's sake! At first he was assuming I was stressing about getting sick, and really I'm not. I'm anxious about the whole, big-picture lot of it: the vastness of the pandemic; the expected duration of all this shit; the long-term ramifications, particularly on the global economy, which is pretty much well and truly fucked at this point. And again, this is just the beginning! This was where, somehow, Shobhit actually had optimistic things to say. His reassurances only made a minor impact (and his greatest desire is that all this just secures an election victory for Democrats in November), but honestly, I felt better after just unloading all my worries. Still, as I told him, even as we know President Fuckwit isn't even capable of it, he's such a narcissistic shitbag, this country really needs someone at the level of national leadership that is a voice of calm and reassurance. Even if it's conditional, and we're told it's going to be long and hard—but we will get through it. This country has no such voice right now, and it’s because this country elected that stupid moron fuck stick of a man.
I assumed I would have trouble getting to sleep after that, and I was right. At least Shanti came to bed with me immediately, as if knowing I needed comfort. And again, what a difference it makes just having pets. I really do need to keep in mind what a comparative position of privilege I remain in: I have a husband; I have cats; I have a job that is, for now at least, far more secure than most. I feel terrible for anyone who is forced to endure this indefinite self-isolation completely alone.
[posted 12:25 pm]