Sometime in March, there’s a viral tweet that gets pushed into my timeline. Something to the effect of, “Ugh, I got my period in quarantine. Can you imagine?” I’m not working from home yet, but I will be soon. I laugh and click on the heart to favorite it, then scroll past more quarantine tweets, some that make me smile, but most that instill a blind panic.
In April I get my period, think of the tweet, which seems years away at that point, and I realize that we’re all going to get our period in quarantine. Of course we are. Someone could made a script that replaced every instance of “quarantine” on a website with “my life,” and it would be more accurate.
I searched for the tweet to share it here, but there have been so many tweets about quarantine periods since then that I can’t even find it anymore.
In mid-April, someone shares “Our Pandemic Summer” on Twitter and I add it to my Instapaper queue but don’t read it. It joins dozens of other corona-reads that I feel I should consume but can’t quite bring myself to. The stories I manage to finish get filed to my “Disasters” folder, which before March was full of long reads about plane crashes and intense weather events.
The featured image in the tweet is people in black and white, swimwear-clad atop pool floats. Underneath them is the ubiquitous microscopic-level photo of the virus, red tinted, the one you’ve definitely seen, the one that would go on its About the Author page.
At work, we are still considering holding our in-person summer camp for K-12 students. Maybe it can be pushed back a month, or two months.
By May, all summer programming is canceled. We make a plan to move the camp to a virtual format. Personally, I remain skeptical that parents will want to pay hundreds of dollars for their kids to take a summer camp that doesn’t get them out of the house, no matter how great the programming is.
One of the reasons that I struggle to quit Twitter is that often it’s a group of people who are skilled at being playful with form. In late March, I start seeing “Quarantine: Day X,” tweets in my feed. At first, it seems like a joke. I make one, too. But the longer they keep rolling in, they lose the shine of irony and seem to become sincere notes on time spent at home. At some point, maybe April, maybe May, I stop seeing them entirely. We stop counting the days.
People start to talk about grief, about the feeling of waking up in the morning and remembering how things are now. I am depressed. I can’t focus. I’m angry with my children and overwhelmed by their needs and my husband and I have a huge fight and I have a hard time finding the thread again. A pre-scheduled appointment with my psychiatrist is converted to a video chat. She offers to prescribe me a supplementary medication. She wants to follow up in six weeks and tells me not to hold my breath about it being an office visit.
People start cutting their hair. People watch Tiger King. People show their at-home podcast studios, mics in closets and under dining room tables. People start coordinating the production, collection, and distribution of personal protective equipment for hospitals. Leslie Jordan drops a video.
It is not yet April. Fetch The Bolt Cutters won’t be released for seventeen more days.
Another form takes off: March 1/April 1. My favorite is a before of Gwyneth Paltrow in the movie Seven and an after photo of a box. Ina makes a giganitc cosmo. Everyone is making banana bread. I can’t seem to make banana bread? No one will shut up about Shakespeare writing King Lear during the plague. Then no one will shut up about how people should shut up about Shakespeare writing King Lear during the plague.
People start sharing stories about the loved ones they’re losing to the virus. Someone I know in real life confides that they are recovering from it and describes how debilitating is is. That person is one of the healthiest people I know. Thin, outdoorsy. Smart enough to be careful.
People are making masks. I use a tutorial to fold one out of a bandana that my mother-in-law won at a Whole Foods opening months ago and has been sitting in the laundry room untouched since. I see a tweet that says that graduate schools are waiving their GRE requirements and decide to apply. Every parent I know, both on Twitter and off, are not all right. This tweet makes me laugh, hard:
April 8: Biden. April 17: Fiona. Thank god for Fiona. Listening to the album, reading other people’s reactions to it, feels like the first time I’ve been able to breathe in weeks. For some reason, the thought occurs to me that I should shave my head. In that moment I understand quarantine beards a little better. I do not shave my head.
Even after weeks of depleting our Netflix and Amazon queues, no one watches Quibi. The social media editor for the LA Times thinks its okay that you’re wearing sweatpants. Someone asks fuck/marry/kill the men on Sex and the City and a lot of people have very detailed opinions. Someone asks if you still get to fuck who you marry, and a lot of people have very detailed opinions.
Samin Nosrat says we’re all going to cook lasagna. I do not cook the lasagna. It makes me happy anyway. Raquel D’Apice starts putting googly eyes on things. Soon there will be the breathless breaking news about Amanda Palmer’s divorce, then Alison Roman’s overly-candid interview. That already feels years away, too.