River: A Year Inside (COVID-19: Episode N+1)
I'm starting this post on March 6th, 2021 -- I expect to put it up in a week or so, but next week promises to be busy and I want to put some thought into it. I see that I posted "COVID-19: Episode 1 -- Household notes and links so far" exactly a year ago, so that makes it a particularly good day to start.
A week later, I wrote I'm 73 years old today. In the middle of a pandemic that disproportionally kills older people, in a country with a totally broken public health system. That was also the day that COVID-19 was officially declared to be a pandemic; I made Monday the 16th (Colleen's birthday) my last singing lesson and PT appointment, and the 17th my last in-person shopping day. We didn't go anywhere but medical appointments after that, until last week when (about three weeks after my second shot of Moderna vaccine) I started going into the drug store rather than arranging for curbside pickup.
At this point, with everyone else in the household having received their first doses, I could theoretically go back to being the one who does almost all the shopping, but I rather like having L' do the grocery shopping from a list. Much less expensive.
... and now it's March 24th, and I can no longer recall what I meant to say in this post. Something about how the year has gone, or what I feel about it. But feelings are not my strong point, and the year has mainly been more of my usual procrastination, not much different from the year before, and the year before that. See also, mdlbear | COVID-19: Planning and accountability revisited, from last November. For what it's worth, here's New Year's Day 2021. If I look sideways at the time I spend reading DW and so on, I suppose I can count it as self-care. And I've done a little organizing, though with the addition of the stuff from Mom's apartment it's been something like one step forward and one step back. Around here it takes all the running you can do just to stay in place.
They say that people procrastinate things that make them uncomfortable. That's part of a feedback loop, of course: I procrastinate things because thinking about how much I've procrastinated makes me even more uncomfortable. AARGH.
A couple of links that felt relevant when I started this post. Whether they still are is left as an exercise for the reader.
- What it felt like to live through a year of the coronavirus pandemic - Washington Post
- Coming of Age: Teens on Coping With a Pandemic Year - The New York Times
[Crossposted from mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, where it has
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