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This is actually relatively predictable under the circumstances in these extraordinary times, but I have no socializing of any sort to report on from the weekend—not even virtual. No "Netflix Party," no FaceTime anything. My weekend was pretty much marked by TV watching and working on captioning Australia photos.

In that sense, the days are all kind of running together now. It was never uncommon for it to be a challenge for me on Monday to recall what I did on Friday evening . . . it is especially so now. What the fuck did I do on Friday? Shobhit worked until 7:45 that day, so he would have been home a few hours after I stopped working. I'm pretty sure I just spent time writing photo captions on Australia photos.

Oh, right! I also watched an episode of Tiger King on Netflix: episode 3 of 7. Shobhit wrote it off after only the first episode earlier last week but I wanted to continue, so I have watched the rest of it on my own, largely in tandem with Ivan where he is locked down in New Zealand; we have exchanged many increasingly astonished texts about it via Facebook Messenger as we have gone alone. I watched all four of the last four episodes of it yesterday while Shobhit was working.

The only other thing Shobhit and I have watched on Netflix was the original 1993 miniseries of Tales of the City, which he was interested in after we watched the rebooted season they released last year. We watched the first episode on Saturday evening, and then episodes 2-4 last night. We'll probably watch the final two episodes tonight, although we also have an episode of Westworld to watch, the release of which I totally spaced last night while we were watching Tales of the City.

Shobhit had no work on Saturday but he did work yesterday 9:45 to 5:45, and after having slept in unusually late (I got out of bed at 7:43 a.m., having slept over nine hours after being incredibly tired for no discernible reason the night before, which had come after being curiously alert until after 1 a.m. the previous night), I spent much of that time just watching Tiger King for nearly four hours. I also did laundry and I did a kind of light once-over of vacuuming, so I still felt pretty productive. Especially since laundry included four separate loads, including one of towers and bathrobes, and another of the linens from the bed.

I actually thought about taking a long walk to Lake Washington and back (it's about the same distance as to the waterfront and back in the opposite direction, but would have encountered fewer other people), but when I went outside to take pictures of teddy bears I had turned around in my windows for teddy bear hunts, it was rather chilly. So I decided, fuck it, I may wish I could get out but I don't want to be cold for two hours.

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— चार हजार सात सौ ग्यारह —

That said, I am starting to feel a bit of a sort of melancholic cabin fever. Yesterday the president finally did what health experts had been already urging for some time (but he was resisting, because he's a fucking moron) and officially extended social distancing guidelines to April 30. That's for the nation, much of the rest of which is now worse off than Washington State; the New York Times just yesterday published a story about how, although the data is still evolving every day, our early adoption of strict restrictions appear to be working in slowly the spread of the virus. And that's fantastic news, but one thing stressed over and over in all that was how irresponsible it would be to ease up on those restrictions just yet.

It seems pretty clear now that I should just write off my Birth Week this year. Or at least, it won't happen during the week of my actual birthday. Dad actually texted me this morning: Matthew I canceled long beach. Hope we can do this some other time. Love you

So I hopped onto my Hotels.com account and went ahead and canceled my hotel reservation in Long Beach, WA, which had been for Tuesday, April 28. And it was necessary and absolutely the right thing to do, but that didn't make it any less of a bummer. No one has officially canceled Easter Dinner in Olympia on April 12 either, but considering that's right at the time experts now say they expect the peak in deaths of COVID-19, there is no way that's happening either. We had a better chance of salvaging my Birth Week, and you see how that's going already.

Same goes for the Pride Parade in June. What are the odds that will go forward? Fuck, it's all just so depressing. And we haven't even been truly hit with the peak number of deaths from this thing yet. So I just sit here, continuing to work from home, indefinitely. I'm grateful I still gave a job and work to do, but even for a generally positive person like me, everything is just putting a damper on any kind of attitude I can muster. Frankly once we can work at our offices again, that alone will make me feel better.

I'm not even bored, like a lot of people are. I just . . . miss everybody. And here's a sobering thought from the Washington Post: Meanwhile, confirmed cases of coronavirus worldwide passed 700,000 on Sunday, as countries warned the virus could disrupt lives for months, if not years.

If not years. Ugh! The way people on the news in the U.S. talk, we probably can't expect any real return to normalcy until we've got widespread vaccinations, and that won't happen until next year at the earliest. Or at least widespread testing, which is itself a disaster in the U.S. and won't be available for months. The one cling to hope I have right now is that Washington is—or appears to be—ahead of the curve in most states, which hopefully means at least some loosening of restrictions sooner here than elsewhere. But, who the fuck knows. At the moment, if nothing else, we still plan to visit Mom and Bill in July. But we know so little about what things will look like by then, we might as well be talking about possible travel plans in 2030.

It's been two and a half weeks for me, and I really miss being able to hug anybody. Shobhit and I are still sleeping in the same bed, but right now we don't even kiss each other. It sucks.

I did get a phone call from Danielle this morning, technically while I was working but whatever. It was nice to hear from her, and we talked for about twenty minutes. I do worry about her more than most, as she's working at a hospital. We kind of commiserated on how fucked everything is right now. We had considered a virtual movie-watch yesterday but apparently she got "in the zone" getting stuff done around the house so it never happened. I watched Tiger King instead. Then Shobhit came home and we made a huge salad for dinner, leftovers of which I just finished eating for lunch.

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[posted 12:31 pm]