CoronaQuarantine, Day 25
I am now well into my fourth week of self-quarantine, which makes it seem longer than it has actually been official: I've been working from home since the afternoon of Friday, March 13; that was two days before the announced closure of all restaurants and bars, although it was the same day as the announced closure of all schools in the state as of March 17. It was a day after schools were announced to be closed in King, Pierce and Snohomish Counties; as I recall, I had a phone conversation with Gabriel on the 13th—the same day I started working from home—and he told me about what that day at school was like, being their last day and how they truncated all their school periods and systematically told all the kids to go home for the foreseeable future. At the time schools were to be officially closed until late April, but Gabriel told me that very day that the general assumption was the rest of the school year would wind up just being written off for all students, until it started up again in the fall. That appears to be much closer to official as of today (scroll down to the 9:01 a.m. update).
The statewide "stay at home" mandate, though widely expected for days, did not come until Monday, March 23—fully ten days after I started working from home—and even that was not officially in effect until Wednesday, March 25. That was only two days short of two weeks after I started working from home. At the time, it was decreed to be through April 6 (today!); only four days ago that was extended to May 4.
Movie theaters did not even close until the week of March 16. I actually could have gone to see one or two movies the previous weekend, after my first day working from home, as even though they were only selling tickets to half capacity, they were still open. In the end I didn't, because even before the legal restrictions came down, I made the conscious decision to be responsible and not go out. I probably should have done that in regards to working home even earlier than I did. When you factor in the trip to Australia, I have only worked two full days at the office since Friday, February 21: they were on Wednesday, March 11, the first day back after vacation; and Thursday, March 12. I was sent home early for coughing on Friday, March 13. Now, I had my longstanding doctor's appointment on Thursday March 11, and Dr. Brandon strongly encouraged me to start working from home even then, but I went into the office anyway. That was still early enough I had a hard time gauging how necessary it was in comparison to how difficult it would be to shift me entire work station to home, which I had never done before. Well, it turned out to be quite a lot easier than I expected, really.
And still, I've been doing this longer than most, particularly most healthy people. (Kevin at work, who has diabetes to such a degree that a year or two ago he had to have a foot amputated, is clearly immunocompromised and was already working from home when I got back from Australia.) As of today, the whole stat being under its current social distancing restrictions has only been going on since March 25—12 days. But, for me this "quarantining" is on day 25.
I use the word "quarantine" very loosely, of course. I do still go grocery shopping at the very least once every two weeks, and still to at least three different stores when we do it; and I still go into the office to swap out receiver paperwork twice a week. But, that's it. I otherwise still go days at a time, sometimes as many as four days in a row, without leaving the Braeburn Condos premises, and even there only leave the condo to do things like check the mail. Yesterday I did finally take all our luggage back down to the storage locker in the garage. I never go out to see friends—in fact that has not specifically happened since before leaving for Australia, as lunch or dinner plans with both Karen and Laney were canceled within the week of my return—and we certainly never have friends to our place. Shobhit almost invited Sachin over the week after we got back, which I very much discouraged; Shobhit tried to argue that Sachin lived alone and was lonely, but that had no relevance at all. Sachin finally changed his mind when Shobhit told him he and I were still feeling "under the weather," as we were still experiencing effects of the colds we caught in Sydney. By the next week, the news had gotten intense enough that I said, "Now do you understand why it was important that Sachin not come over?" And Shobhit said yes.
And now, today, a small ray of hope: I read on the Seattle Times website that the University of Washington Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IMHE) projections show Washington State's "peak resource use" to have been April 2; the peak of deaths in the state is projected to be today, April 6. Note that this is largely due to Washington being one of the first states to put social distancing and stay at home restrictions in place; compare those numbers to the national ones, projecting peak resource use nationwide on April 15 (with a shortage of more than 36,000 hospital beds) and peak deaths projected for April 16. This is largely because of Republican-controlled states making seriously boneheaded and stupid decisions as they dragged their feet in responding, which is going to result in states like Florida and Louisiana being among the hardest hit in the end. Washington State was the epicenter at first; now we're barely in the top 10 of states with the most cases. (To be fair, New York State is Democratic controlled and currently the national epicenter; being the location of the city's largest and densest city by far also makes a difference, as does the President Fuckwit administration's craven and idiotic refusal to take this seriously as a national emergency for far too long, and being petty instead of helpful when it comes to New York specifically.)
Shobhit's prediction does appear it may come true, though: that Washington being hit hardest first might mean we will start coming out the other side first. The trouble with that is that, without a nationwide lockdown, travelers from states doing a far worse job at responding to the health crisis could come here later and just make our cases spike again. I'm sure that's a big reason we are remaining under lockdown until at least May 4; Governor Jay Inslee had spoken about not wanting to lift restrictions until we see the numbers going down consistently on a week to week basis. That, at least, prevents people from other states from being able to visit, if our hotels and restaurants and other entertainment businesses are closed.
That said, I would presume that even if Washington State is indeed among the first to begin easing restrictions, they'll have to do it gradually—all as part of keeping our health care system from being overwhelmed. The "stay-at-home" order may actually end on May 4 (we'll see), but perhaps the closure of restaurants, or certainly the banning of large public gatherings, will likely remain in effect for a while. It still hasn't been officially canceled, but I will be astonished if Seattle Pride actually still moves forward at the end of June. That said, even if it does, people will be so spooked by then it will be the least-attended Pride in decades. If it happens, I will almost certainly go. Maybe with a mask. I expect to see those for a long time to come, even well after the rest of society returns to "normal." I bet anything the sight of face masks will be as accepted and commonplace, pretty much permanently, after this as they already were in many Asian countries before the pandemic.
I just don't see how we can actually go back to a state without any kind of restrictions at all, until at the very least we have widely available testing. And beyond that, an actual vaccine, which won't happen until at least 2021.
I still have no clue whether our planned trip to see Mom and Bill in Idaho in July will actually happen.
May 4 alone still seems like such a long way away . . . but, I am settling into a mode of acceptance about it. I really vacillate day by day between being fine and being consumed with worry about everything. I seem to be fine at the moment, but a few nights ago I woke myself up three times coughing—never a particularly significant coughing fit, but still a couple of coughs that had that kind of "whooping" sound and feel to them; I had a terrible time then getting back to sleep because I was suddenly consumed with panic that maybe I was developing COVID-19 symptoms. I got up the next morning and took my temperature and it was normal as usual, though; I felt better after that—and, indeed, I take my temperature before bed every night and after getting up every morning, and have been since March 18: it's never once been above 97.87°. This morning it was a record low, at 95.78°.
I think it was this past Friday that I last spoke to Gabriel, and yet again we got into a bit of an argument. This time it was after he called me just to let me know that he was not going to play my little game of writing out a "state park rain check" for my Birth Week. Why he felt it necessary to do that, I don't know; you'd think he would understand I would only take it as a deliberate provocation. All I am trying to do here is come up with ways to cope with our radically life-disrupting, extraordinary circumstances in ways I can live with; his response is to do the same as he has done for many years when it comes to my celebrating my birthday for an entire week: to take every opportunity to shit on it.
I told him he's the only person who has ever had such a huge problem with how I approach my birthday; he countered that he has spoken to many people who are as incredulous about "the audacity" (that's his phrase for it) of my approach as he is. Obviously, we are both self-selecting on that front. Out of all the people I know, he's the only one who thinks what I do is preposterous. I tell people all the time about it who aren't even participants in it, and invariably they tell me it's awesome what I do, and countless times I've been told, "I wish I could do that" or "I should do that too." And I'm always like, you should!
I've tried to explain over and over again that the way I see it is I have come up with an approach that allows me to spend quality time with the people I care about most, instead of asking them all to assemble for a party together, at which I can't get quality time with any of them individually. (Granted, for many years I did both—but the separate days spent with only one or two people at a time were still a way to get the quality time I desired.) Gabriel's response is to tell me that not getting that quality time with each friend for my birthday, by just having a party or gathering on one day, is what everyone else has to do, so why should I get to be special? Well, why the fuck not! Also, since fucking when have I settled for doing things the way everyone else does? In fact, in most ways, even Gabriel would even support this notion of my not doing things a certain way just because everyone else does. Except when it comes to this, which for some reason he thinks is dumb as shit. The fact that for me it's a genuine expression of my affection for him makes no difference.
So I keep thinking about this. Is it really that important that he be part of my Birth Week every year? He has been every year since I started it, in 2004. But, if 2020 has taught us anything at all, it's that some things you just have to let go of. And I hate the idea that he just participates begrudgingly. You could argue that this is a false equivalency, but I keep thinking about my mom not coming to my wedding, and how I was happier for her not to be there—I had a wedding where all the guests were totally on board and happy for me. Why should I not take the same approach with my Birth Week? I need to let go of my obsession with Gabriel—one of my two best friends—being part of it every year, when I know he just thinks it's dumb as shit. Shouldn't I just do it with the people who are on board?
Of course, I am also convinced he also would not feel good about being the only person I'm suddenly deliberately excluding. I think he wants to have that cake and eat it too: I know from extensive experience he does not like being excluded in this way. But as long as I don't exclude him, he can still tell me every year after year how stupid he thinks the whole endeavor is. In short: I can't fucking win.
None of this is even important. Except it has to do with how I feel like I'm being treated. Whatever. I still don't know how I'll move forward with this. The only way Gabriel would be satisfied is if I stopped doing a "Birth Week" altogether. I told him I've been doing this for years, and his only response was to tell me how something being done for a long time is not a reason to keep doing it. We all know I'm never going to stop celebrating my Birth Week. That's just not going to happen. So I get to do what makes me happy, except that every year I have this one person going out of his way to tell me how stupid it is. It's like that aspect is just folded into the tradition.
All of this is to say, the conversation got pretty heated as a result. For me, it was crazy making. Gabriel commented on how I've been "on edge" lately, and "I get it." You fucking think? Most of us are lonely and scared right now, and I am no exception. So why call me up just as a provocation?
This was my biggest mistake, really: none of this would have happened had I not tagged him and Lea in that Facebook post. In retrospect, it was a moronic move on my part. I had tagged everyone I had Birth Week plans with; the only reason I did not exclude Gabriel was . . . well, literally: so he would not be excluded. But, I knew full well how he would react. He's the sole person who is the reason I even wrote in the post, "This next bit, at least some of you are going to think is dumb as hell." Would everyone else even have notice if he hadn't been among those tagged? Probably not. I guess from his perspective, I did an act of provocation first. And had I not tagged him (or Lea) in that post, we would never even have had this conversation.
We ended the conversation with him reiterating that he still gets together with me every Birth Week because he's my friend and because it's what I want and it makes me happy . . . but, that's sort of beside the point. I don't want it to be something he does begrudgingly. He replied that we all have to do things we don't like sometimes. Uh, sure, but not particularly in a context like this. So I have to deal with his bullshit because that's what "grownups" do, even though it's literally antithetical to the whole endeavor to begin with? All I want to do is have fun with the people I care about! He acts like he's so put out by having to participate in something he doesn't like, then tells me I have to suck it up and deal with him doing it with an attitude. So, why do it at all? With him, specifically.
Okay, I'll try to be fair. He never has an attitude about it on the day we actually get together to do, whatever, during my Birth Week. That's really never happened. Well, he's probably still made offhand, snide comments about it here and there on our "Birth Week day," but for the most part, we get together and we have a good time. He just takes every opportunity he can at other times to belittle the entire concept.
In a really bent way, from Gabriel's perspective, this is a good sign. He's clearly far happier in his relationship than he's been with any other woman in several years. He's not nearly in as deeply a depressive state as he's been before, when he was so emotionally beaten down he didn't have this kind of stupid fight in him. Now's he's all-in on these stupid fights, which means he's much closer to being back to his normal, healthy self. It's crazy-making, but at least it's not dispiriting. I'm calling it progress and a positive in the grand scheme of things. It means Gabriel is doing better. Instead of being deeply concerned about his emotional well-being, I'm back to constantly wishing I could slap him upside the head. Strange that this should be the case during a global health crisis, but Gabriel lives for crises. He's in his element now. I suppose I should focus on that instead of spending so much time bitching about him.
Too late!
Anyway. That incredibly frustrating conversation ended, having lasted a full half hour during my work hours, and then I worked for the last half hour of my work hours . . . only to have PriceStrat, the program I was using on my work computer, crash, without saving the previous hour's worth of work. I might as well have just called it a day on Friday at 3:00.
Friday was not a good day for me.
I took Shobhit's car and drove my receivers to the office to swap them out for my next stack. It did me a lot of good just to get out, spend some time alone driving, and slowly but steadily mellow out of the day's stack of compounding frustrations. I grabbed a bunch of chocolate bar samples from Scott's desk, came back home, and Shobhit and I had dinner and watched Deep Impact on Netflix. I kept thinking about how Morgan Freeman as the fake 1998 president in a dumb disaster movie was so much better than the real president we have now.
Shobhit and I watched an episode of season 2 of Elite on Netflix right after Deep Impact on Friday night, and that episode had a really sexy scene with three guys in bed in their underwear. Shobhit was all about that; it's really because of scenes like that, that Shobhit even stays interested in that show. Although we are both already speculating as to which character will wind up being the dead one in season 3.
I'm trying to remember now what I even did on Saturday. Oh! Right: I got paid on Friday, so that was the day we did our grocery shopping. I so much more easily lose track of what I did on what day anymore. But, Shobhit worked a four-hour shift from 4-8 that evening at Total Wine & More, and so earlier in the day we made our rounds to PCC Greenlake Village, where thankfully they had all we needed (which was not a lot); to Costco, where we had to wait in a pretty long line to get in as they are now limiting the number of people inside the store at a given time; and to MacPherson's Produce on Beacon Hill. We came home with six tote bags full of groceries. (Stores are not currently bagging personal tote bags for people. But at PCC, you can take your cart full of product after paying to a "bagging station," and similarly at Costco we could take our cart aside and fill our tote bags ourselves. I'm much happier with that than just being forced to go back to paper sacks again.)
So, that did take up at least a couple of hours on Saturday. Shobhit and I did watch one more episode of Elite that day, and while he was at work I rented the Maria Bamford comedy special Weakness Is the Brand on Amazon for 99 cents. It was hilarious and worth every penny. Then when he got home from work, we watched the 1995 movie Babe on HBO Go. I have long owned the 1998 sequel, Babe: Pig in the City on DVD, and have been looking for movies to watch that are unchallenging entertainment. I found both movies to be streaming on HBO Go, so sometime soon we'll also watch the sequel. Shobhit was not super excited about watching that movie but I knew it was exactlyt he kind of movie that would still completely hold his attention, and I was right.
So that, finally, brings us to yesterday! Shobhit had a shift from 11:15 to 7:45, and Danielle had the day off. I had suggested to her on Saturday maybe we should finally watch As Good As It Gets together (virtually) on Sunday and she said, "Sounds good." She got on FaceTime with me briefly late yesterday morning to tell her she had things to do around the house and would get back to me. I know she has a lot to catch up on while at home since she otherwise works a lot (and dangerously) with her nursing job, so when she still hadn't called me back by 7:00, I was basically regarding the idea as written off for the day.
But, when I had just sat down with the macaroni casserole I had made for dinner, she did call me, at 7:17, to ask if I was still up for the movie. This meant it would go well past when Shobhit got home from work, but I still said yes. So, we got her to open Chrome and add "Netflix Party" as an extension, and after a bit of difficulty but way quicker than it had taken Gabriel and me to figure it out, we got the Netflix Party going.
When the movie was about halfway over, I paused it when Gabriel came into the bedroom to ask Danielle some questions about his consistently high blood pressure. His conversation with Danielle basically convinced him to go ahead and tell our doctor he was going to try some high blood pressure medication. He's been taking his blood pressure multiple times daily and without exception it is always too high. Danielle liked that Shobhit was open to medicating for it: "Good for you for being proactive with your health," she said.
This evolved into a discussion between the three of us that took the better part of an hour, a lot of it having to do with Danielle's finances, and also what her job has been like working in a hospital with lots of COVID-19 patients. As long as she's working in areas where there are COVID patients, she has decided Rylee will have to keep staying with her dad. (Morgan already has been for some time.) Probably a prudent move.
Anyway, the long delay of playing the movie, which I had no idea was actually one of Danielle's favorites and she had seen it so many times she quoted a lot of the lines along with it, was kind of annoying. But! Being that it was about an hour and included Shobhit, he should be very happy to learn, it does mean he'll get a Social Review point for this right along with Danielle. Even though he didn't watch the movie with us, he did hang out with us on FaceTime for a long enough time.
By the time the movie was turned back on and finally ended, it was about 10:45. We had been on FaceTime for at least three and a half hours. And I was very grateful for it; it was nice to just have a friend to hang out with for the evening—conflict-free! I even texted her before going to sleep, to thank her again for that. She replied, Ya bro. U NVR ALONE
[posted 12:26 pm]