Lockdown started on March 11, but I think the last day I had that was close to “normal” last year was on March 13– naturally, a Friday. I got a haircut at Arcade Barbers, which was crowded with waiting and largely maskless customers. The state closed down barbershops and hair salons until at least May a day or two later. I went to Meijer, trying to stock up (shortages had already begun on weird things, though we always have plenty of toilet paper), saw a few masks and kept my social distance. Will was back home for his spring break, though he cut his trip short because the University of Michigan sent all of their students home (and so he didn’t have any old friends to hang around with), and also because he was worried about potential travel restrictions as the number of cases and deaths climbed.
But at the time, it didn’t seem like this would last that long. The predictions that we’d all be back to normal by Easter seemed a little optimistic to me at the time, but I didn’t think this would last through summer. We had planned on going on a cruise with Annette’s parents in May and then on a trip out to Seattle in June. Those things started to seem less likely to happen after other academic conferences cancelled, and especially after the NBA and the NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament canceled. Maybe this would last longer than we thought, but hey, we’d still all be getting together again at Thanksgiving and Christmas. How could this last that long?
So, here we are. It’s mostly boring.
My family (near and extended) are physically healthy. Annette and I have been careful, and our biology PhD student son is careful and gets tested all the time. At least one of my sisters (and probably two of them) and several college-aged nieces and nephews had mild cases of Covid. My parents, clearly in the demographic most at risk for hospitalization or death, did more going to restaurants and socializing with friends and traveling than I would have preferred, but they’re fine and now vaccinated.
The impact of all of this on my mental health has been more significant, and that was especially true in late May and early June. There was (and is) the anxiety about a mysterious disease where the outcomes range from you never know you have it to death. It’s also of course been everything else– George Floyd’s murder, the insanity of the Trump administration, the election, the closing of everything, the many cancelled plans. I’m better than I was and working on getting better still, and Biden’s win and Democrats being able to (kind of) take control of the Senate definitely helped.
As far as my work and finances go, Covid has not been a problem; if anything, it’s been a slight positive because I feel like the new research I’ve been trying to get off the ground this year about teaching online will have some relevance for the next few years and beyond. Granted, Annette and I are dependent on EMU’s finances and future and higher education was in a difficult state before all this, so there’s definitely still time for us to feel some pain. The faculty contract is up for renegotiation this summer and that could be bad. Or, given that part of Biden’s Covid bill is some money for higher ed, it could be fine. And of course, because this is not my first online teaching rodeo, moving everything online hasn’t been too hard for me– certainly not relative to a lot of my colleagues, that’s for sure.
As far as I can tell, all of my family and friends are in the same boat: that is, Covid has forced us all to work remotely, which isn’t always easy obviously, and there has been plenty of complaining about all that on social media, much of it justified. But the fact that my family, friends, and I are complaining about this and not complaining about being laid off is clearly a mark of privilege. This past weekend, The New York Times published this interesting and helpful series of infographics to demonstrate how unfair and uneven life has been during Covid. Reading over this data and reflecting on my own experiences, I’ve never felt more white and well-off.
I have experienced some of the darker parts of Covid tangentially through some of my students. I’ve written about this a few times before, notably in what has become the most popular post on my blog in the last few years, “No One Should Fail a Class Because of a Fucking Pandemic.” Many of my students have had relatives die from Covid, have had Covid themselves, have lost jobs, have had to move (in some cases these moves have been to completely different states) because they lost their homes/apartments. I always have students who have mental health issues, but those numbers have increased a lot. I try to help as much as I can (that’s kind of what that blog post was about) and it’s not enough. The disparity between many of my students’ Covid experiences and my own both amplify my guilt regarding my privilege and simultaneously make me feel very lucky indeed.
So while my life has changed since before Covid, it hasn’t actually changed radically or even become that much “worse,” if that makes sense. We haven’t eaten at any restaurant, inside or out, in over a year. No going out to see movies, shows, festivals, events. No gym– I try to make up for it by walking in the neighborhood and doing some exercise in the basement. Instead of grocery shopping several times a week to just pick up what we need for the next day or two, I try to keep it to once a week. We’ve been able to travel a bit to a couple of VRBO rentals for a few nights, but that’s mostly been about going from keeping to ourselves at home to keeping to ourselves at a vacation home with some nice views and a hot tub. I talk to my parents once a week, and it’s been mostly the same phone call every time: after an exchange of news regarding Covid and the vaccine (I avoid discussing “everything else” with them), we tell each other what we haven’t been doing lately, which is usually “nothing.”
Mostly, Covid is boring, and it’s a bad boring. Boring can be useful; think of the romance of the artist alone in their studio or in front of their keyboard or whatever with no worldly distractions, bored, ready for inspiration to strike. I’ve found myself writing in a lot in boring times in the past. The problem with this boringness is it was happening during a terrifying time. I remember posting on Twitter something like “for those of you who are too young to remember what it was like right after 9/11, it was like this,” and at least for me, that meant it was impossible to get it out of my head, impossible not to watch the horrific images on cable news, just impossible to not be constantly thinking of it all. Plus everyone I know who had to shift everything to working at home and online were completely overwhelmed and swamped.
Being bored, terrified, and depressed at the same time is not a good way to get things done or to be creative.
But it’s getting better, and it has been getting better for a while now. Trump and his crazies are still out there, but lurking in the shadows– for now. Going out and about doesn’t worry me much (at least around here) because people wear masks and keep their distance, and it turns out we probably never needed to wash our groceries in the first place. The number of cases are starting to fall steadily, the vaccines are rolling out. Annette and I will almost certainly be vaccinated by the end of this month. I’m looking forward to starting to do some of the little normal things soon– go to a restaurant, see a movie in a theater, hang around a coffee shop. I suspect it will be more difficult to reflect on the date when everything went back to normal (or “close enough” to normal) than it has been to remember the date when this all started, but it does feel like it’s coming soon.