Not good. Bad, one might say, if one is not in a room with my partner, who is struggling more than I am and therefore I am struggling-but-mostly-okay if she asks because I need to be here for her and she doesn’t have the spoons to deal with her stuff and my stuff right now.
Let’s get the good news out of the way first: March 17th I went into self-isolation at the recommendation of the Canadian Government, which was advising everyone who had the capacity to stay home to do exactly that. The government created a program called “CERB” (COVID Emergency Relief Benefit), which granted anyone unable to return to work a reasonable weekly salary ($500/week). This worked out to be almost, to the dollar, the same amount I was making at my paying job (board game specialist at a game store), so the net impact on my wallet was actually quite a significant gain: I wasn’t spending nearly as much on games and impulse purchases, but was still making the same amount.
In the first three weeks I finished a novel and began writing my next one.
Late May, my boss from the game store contacts me about returning to work. I’m not excited to go: the 60 days I had spent in isolation were among the best days of my life. I was writing up a storm, I was relaxed, eating much better, baking, spending time with my partner… but he was insistent, and so June 3rd I returned to work at the game store. Nobody else at the store wore a mask (it wasn’t mandated until almost a month later), but they had curbside pickup practices in place.
I wore a mask and a faceshield. Almost nobody else was wearing even a mask, including customers who kept trying to sneak into the obviously closed store and were always surprised that we weren’t allowing the public inside.
The next result was a plummeting of my writing productivity, a sharp incline in my stress, and the realization that nobody else was nearly as worried about this pandemic as I was.
Now, I will say my bosses have done a really solid job taking better-than-average steps to protect their employees: we have plexiglass completely around the cashier areas (no protection for me since I am in my aisle most of the time helping customers), they disinfect common surfaces very frequently (except not in the board game aisle where the games would be damaged by disinfecting them), they limit the number of customers in the store to 6 people per aisle (although frequently customers will go from other aisles into the board game aisle “just to look”, so I often have 10-15 people in the aisle, including kids)… you get the idea. And I want to stress this isn’t my boss’s fault. They’re doing a good job, and a helluva lot more than many places.
My lunch procedure is: go to the staff room, wash hands, remove mask, wash hands, put food in microwave, wash hands, fill water bottle and coffee, remove food from microwave, wash hands, eat and consume the 2L of liquid I will get to drink for the entire work-day, go to the bathroom, wash hands, put mask back on, wash hands. I probably disinfect my hands… 10 times an hour? More some hours, less others. I get twitchy any time a customer asks me to hand them a book or product that I know they’re going to paw through and then want me to put away again. I have about 3-4 rat-lickers (people who refuse to wear masks) in a week, and the boss won’t deny them service but he does let me avoid them when they come into the store… except they still touch and breath on everything and I still have to do my job with other customers and I know I’m being unreasonable but fuck I can’t take this.
deep breath
So yeah. Not great. But it’s worse than that because those 60+ days of isolation were amazing. I missed my friends, but I got to live the life I’ve always wanted to live. Went for runs in the morning, wrote all day, took breaks to paint or assemble LEGO, played video games at night, slept like a baby. My partner has had a much harder time of things, and so I couldn’t really lean into how much I enjoyed it, but gods, it was so good. And knowing that has made all of this harder.
There were downsides to isolation (grocery shopping was a special kind of hell… I’ve managed to get it down to 1 trip a month, with almost half of my monthly income spent on food on those trips, but again, what else aside from editing costs was I going to spend that money on anyway?). But if tomorrow COVID magically went away and I could do anything I wanted, I would’ve been doing exactly the same things I was doing during that isolation with the addition of maybe one weekly board game night.
And that’s hard. And having to drag my ass to work and deal with saying “I’m sorry, but if you wouldn’t mind just pulling your mask over your nose we’d really appreciate it” five times a day and panicking every time I touch anything because that’s going to be the thing that makes you sick… did I mention there are like, a dozen cases in my entire half-million-people city? All in nursing homes. I completely lack the ability to have proper scope and scale to this, and I can’t stop. I wear my mask on my bike ride into work. What are the odds that I’m going to get sick while biking outside just because I pass somebody!? I’m a scientist, I know the odds are basically zero… and yet. Mask on when I leave home, it does not come off until lunch (we covered the lunch procedure already), and then it doesn’t come off until I am home, and have washed my hands (open door, remove phone and earbud onto disinfecting station, wash hands, remove mask, wash masks, wash hands, disinfect phone and earbud).
And I still haven’t finished that novel I started back in April. Between April and June I finished 40k words, more or less. Between June and July I did less than a thousand. Between July and now I’ve gotten the total up to 55k… but it’s like pulling teeth.
Anyway. /rant. Not good, and I know it’s all in my own head and that doesn’t help.
I feel it’s well stocked when I have 2kg of rice, and maybe 1kg of risotto rice and maybe some brown rice and… and lentils and dried beans. On the other hand as a regular bread baker I easily keep 10-15kg flour right inside the kitchen (edit: 15 types at current count, though there are 3-4 exotics in there I am expecting to use up soon and probably not restocking).
. But I got through it.
Most of programming is a lot of practice and having seen a problem before. Knowing how to debug is such a valuable skill. I learned it late and it could have saved me so much time and stress.
But don’t worry. If we ever meet, I am not a RL hugger. Just virtual hugs to everyone and thank you for putting into words how you are doing.