Pandemic Journal Entry for 3-10-21

Question: How has the corona virus pandemic impacted my life in the past week.  Tell them about my experiences, feelings, and thoughts.  

My Reply

My life under Covid has continued much as it has before in the last week.  I’m still working from home most of the time.  I still do a company required health check using an app before I go to the office.  I still wear masks before going out to take my walks or go to the store.  I still give people distance whenever I encounter them in the market or on the street.  

But the news has been encouraging.  My parents got their second vaccination last week.  My best friend from college and his wife got their first.  The new vaccination from Johnson & Johnson was approved and is being shipped out.  The number of infections and hospitalizations has flattened and is going down.  

This week, I put in two requests for PTO (Paid Time Off) at work.  One was for two weeks in October.  A rescheduling of a trip to Japan that was cancelled last year because of the virus.  The other was a week in Washington, DC at the end of August, to go to a Science Fiction convention called WorldCon, which I couldn’t go to last year for the same reason.  I also told my nephew that I would try to honor the promise I made to him last year, to take pay for a baseball game at some stadium we hadn’t been to before, as well as his hotel room and meals, if he can get to the city on the dates he choses.  

I’m trying to control my anticipation.  I know there is still a ways to go before we get to whatever “normal” we can establish.  I believe that even after that normal time is reached, things will change.  We won’t go back to what we were before completely.  And there may be relapses.  

But, I am starting to feel hopeful that I can do some of the things I’ve given up for the last year.  Like travel.  See my family.  Things like that.  I can’t help but look forward to doing them.  I will do my best to keep a level head and not break the habits that have kept me healthy so far until we’re really in the clear.  Getting my own shot will be the next big signpost that the light at the end of the tunnel is real.  

Question: Some people are feeling intense feelings right now.  Is anything making you especially sad right now, or especially angry?  If so, what is on your mind? 

My Reply

This is a hard question because the answer is everything and nothing.  

During the pandemic, I’ve noticed an increasing tendency to react strongly to things happening.  Returning home from shopping and discovering that I forgot the item that prompted me to go in the first place has caused me to curse loudly at the waste of time.  Hearing something on the news, especially if it is about someone spreading obvious misinformation or conspiracy theories about things happening around us, has filled me with a rage and hatred toward that person or the individuals that support and propagate such nonsense.  Sometimes, during my walks, I’ll find myself imagining encountering such people, facing them and their nonsense directly, and doing violent things to shut them up once and for all.  

Once I noticed this trend in me, I started to do my best to stop and find out where it was coming from.  This overreaction.  This desire to have superpowers and use them to wipe “them” from the face of the planet.  I’ve asked myself what it was that was scaring me so much about them, because I think that ‘Fear’ is the flip side of ‘Anger,’ that both emotions are part of the flight of fight response of living creatures.  

The answer I’ve come closest to finding is that it relates to control.  Specifically, what if thoughts like that, and people like that, become the norm.  What if they take control and gain the ability to spread such lies unchecked, and suppress the truth to ensure that their ideas, and by extension the way of life and the shape of society they want, is the norm.  

I am not afraid of ideas, per se.  As long as they can be evaluated fairly and honestly.  But there are those that only care about getting what they want at any cost, and they’ll believe, or at least promote, any concept that gets them that.

Staying Focused on Using the Chances I Get

Last week I had an experience that touches on the heart of what I’m yearning for these days.  

I was taking my afternoon walk.  After I get done working, I usually walk for about an hour, making a big loop around the chunk of Pasadena I live in, ease to Lake Avenue, down to California, loop around the Trader Joe’s on Arroyo Parkway, then back up Marengo toward where I live.  

I was on the last leg of this route the other day when it happened.  During my walks I’ll listing to some of my audio files and practice one of the languages I’m learning and trying to improve.  This day, I was listening to and repeating a chapter from a Korean audiobook.  The chapter on numbers and counting.  I was reciting the two counting systems the Koreans use, one based on their own numbering system and another based on Chinese, just like the Japanese do.  

I was about halfway up Marengo, counting to ten using the Sino-Korean numbers when I caught sight of someone out of the corner of my eye.  A woman, walking in the bike lane on Marengo.  She had probably stepped off the sidewalk as she came up behind me to give me so social distance.  I’d done the same time numerous times during my walks.  She she had on gray sweatpants with a matching gray zip-up sweat-jacket.  She had on a gray baseball came that also matched.  She had on a white surgical mask.  

I was about to look forward again when I noticed she was looking back at me.  I could see her mouth working under the mask.  She raised her hand to waive at me.  

“Yes?”  I replied in reaction to her gesture, then fumbled with my phone to stop the audiobook’s playback to hear her reply. 

“Yes?”  

“You’re learning Korean?”  

“What?”  I shook my head.  I delayed because I wondered how she knew that then realized immediately that she must have heard me because I was repeating the lesson out loud.  “Uh, yeah…. I’m….”

“I could hear you.  You were counting, right?”  She patted herself on her chest.  “I’m Korean.  I heard you counting.”  

“Uh….”  I was nodding.  I was trying to remember how to say, “Yes.  I’m learning Korean” in Korean.  Having a Korean person to speak to suddenly made all the phrases I’d memorized up to now run and hide in the darkest corners of my mind.  

Before I could figure out what to say, she started counting.  She was picking up where I left off.  Counting in Korean.  

“Yeolhana…. Yeoldul…. Yeolset….”  Eleven…. Twelve…. Thirteen…. 

I joined her, counting along with her.  “Yeolnet…. Yeoltasot…. Yeolyasot….”  Fourteen…. Fifteen…. Sixteen….  We were marching in time at our socially distant separation, calling out the numbers as we walked.  “Yeolilgup…. Yeolyadol….  Yeolahop….  Sumul….”  Seventeen…. Eighteen….  Nineteen…. Twenty!

By the time we reached twenty, she had picked up the pace.  She was ahead of me now, maybe ten feet.  I thought that she was just a faster walker than I was.  She then turned in front of me, gave me a wave as she cut across the sidewalk, then stepped into the walking leading into a group of bungalow apartments I was walking by.  I caught sight of her walking further into the complex as I walked by.  

I put my earphones back in my ears and turned my lesson back on.  I then remembered what it was I wanted to say.  “Ne.  Chonun Hankukeuru baewayo.”  Yes.  I’m learning Korean.  I repeated the phrase until I reached the end of the block to make sure I could remember it next time.

This was a fun experience for me.  A delightful one.  The first of its kind, interacting with someone new, in months.  It’s the type of thing I’d been missing.  The type of encounter that I didn’t experience enough even before the pandemic.  One that had been entirely absent since the pandemic started up until that moment.  

I turned sixty years old last week.  A couple of days before this had happened.  I had not been looking forward to this birthday.  I had come to regard it as something of a deadline.  Don’t like that phrase.  Hmm…. How about an expiration date?  A “Best if Used By” date?  That’s a better one.  Not entirely bad.  Still usable.  Maybe even still enjoyable.  Just no longer at the peak of freshness.  

The pandemic has emphasized this ambivalence toward my continued survival by reducing opportunity to experience this type of interaction.  In recent tweet, I likened myself to being in the sixth inning of a baseball game, a bit behind, needing to put in a pinch-hitter to move runners on the base-path and score some runs.  Sticking with the sports analogy, the pandemic has been like getting injured and being forced to sit out a good part of the season.  Or having to take your best hitter out of the line-up because of an injury.  Something along those lines.  

At sixty years and one week, I’m feeling a little bit better about things.  My standard answer to wishes for a happy birthday has been, “Thanks.  It beats the alternative.”  Which is true, especially since the alternative entails having no more opportunities to find things, do things, meet people, become better, become happier, do ANYTHING whatsoever.  

BUT…. Though may be late in the game, I am still IN the Game.  And I’ll keep working on getting more chances like this, and do more with them when I do. 

Participating in the UConn Pandemic Journaling Project

I heard about a project at the University of Connecticut to invite people to write and include journal entries of their life during the pandemic.  I heard about the project on "The Takeaway," an NPR news show.  

I decided to join and participate.  Every week they send a question for you to answer in your journal.  When you sign up, they ask you a standard question as well as your first week's question.  I've decided to repost my entries on my own blog.  To find out about the project and see other people's entries you can follow this link: 

https://www.pandemicjournalingproject.org/archive/featured

Sign-up Question: How is the coronavirus pandemic affecting your life right now? Tell us about your experiences, feelings, and thoughts. This is a space to share what's on your mind, and save it for the future.

When I look at my situation objectively, I have to admit that I have been spared the worst impacts of the virus.  

Because of work I was doing with our company’s West Regional Order Entry department before the virus hit to develop a paperless system of taking and processing client orders, we were able to work remotely once the first stay at home orders were announced.  This allowed our region, the busiest in the country for our division, to continue working even though no one was in the office.  At a recent online town hall meeting, the president of our division cited our work in this regard as the reason the company could stay open for business.  If I had to choose one positive experience during the virus, it would have to be this.    

But it’s been hard.  The unit’s staff is about half the size it was last year, when we were in the midst of a hiring campaign.  I’ve seen a number of good people, good employees, and office-friends lose their jobs due to furloughs and layoffs because the volume of work went down or because they didn’t have the means to work remotely.  With each announcement of a staff reduction I couldn’t help but wonder if my time would be next and what I would do if that were to happen.  

My personal life has paralleled my work life.  Keeping my job has meant I’ve not had to worry about making rent, having food on the table, or paying bills.  Having most of my expenses reduced, such as not having to drive an hour each day into the office, has allowed me to put more money aside, pay off my car, increase my contributions to my retirement account, and making myself more financially secure as I’ve ever been as a result.  

But the strain, the worry, has been bad.  I liken it to being a character in a movie about a zombie apocalypse.  I stay in my safe-space, not going outside except when I have to go find food, avoiding everyone I see to avoid being infected.  I have not been able to travel at all during the past year, something I enjoy doing.  Not to see my family back east during holidays.  Not to go to a baseball game, the first year I’ve not seen at least one live ballgame in over a decade, since 2009.  I’ve not had a chance to meet anyone new, face to face, at all.  

It’s the sameness that is hard to take.  The feeling that every day is the same as the one before it.  I get up, do my morning routine, sit at my writing desk to work, exercise, eat, sleep, and repeat.  It feels like my life is fast forwarding because nothing is happening.  It feels like I’m missing opportunities to meet new people, find someone to love, experience something different.  This is what people in retirement or assisted living homes must feel like when they become too infirm to leave.  They sit there, watching the days go by, waiting for their lives to end.  It’s horrible.  At least they have the people that live at the home with them to keep them company, even if sitting at a safe distance.  Living alone, I don’t even have that.  

I’ve tried to fight this negativity.  Before the pandemic hit I was already in the practice of writing in a journal daily.  I’ve continued that practice and resurrected my desire to write and publish science fiction short-stories and novels.  I’ve focused on my health, walking 15,000 steps daily and using an app to count calories, and have lost about 20 pounds during the year and lowered my A-1C numbers to near normal levels (I have been diagnosed with Type-2 diabetes).  I use Zoom to meet with people online and practice Japanese, talking with people living in Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia, and other parts of the United States.  Every day, since last March of 2020, I’ve ended my journal entry for the morning repeating part of the creed of Optimists International.

“I will be strong so nothing will disturb my Peace of Mind.  I will be as enthusiastic about the success of others as I am my own.  I will be too large for worry, too noble for anger, to strong for fear, and too happy to permit the presence of trouble.  I will create opportunities for making progress in life.”  

The last line, about making progress in life, is a line I added of my own.  Sometime during the summer, when I came to understand my fear that I was just waiting for time to pass, feeling unknown and unrealized opportunities flow by in a dark, unknown river of time, never to be seen or experienced again.  

This is what living under Covid is for me.  A constant struggle to resist the negativity and apprehension that it brings.  I am probably a much more positive person than I was before.  I just can’t tell because the bar of adverse circumstances is so much higher. 

This Week’s Question: Many of us are living with restrictions on movement and social contact.  Talk about any restrictions that have affected you and your ability to go about your life.

I recall a meme I saw online, on Twitter or Facebook, can’t remember which.  It went something like this.

“I stay at home, not seeing people, working, eating, sleeping, repeating.  Since the virus, it’s called ‘social distancing.’  Before the virus, I called it ‘my life.’”  

Because I’ve been able to keep my job and work, I’ve escaped the most severe impacts of the virus and the restrictions that have come with it.  I chuckled at the meme when I first saw it, because there was truth to it.  I live alone.  I’m not married.  Never have been.  No children.  My family all lives far from me in other states.  I would see them once a twice a year on holidays or vacation.  The initial impact on my daily life was minimal.  

Or so I thought.  Over time, I’ve become more aware of how important the ability to move about freely and be with others was to me.  

It started with eating out.  Every Friday, I would treat myself to a meal out.  It was often take-out.  I would sometimes go to a restaurant.  It was my reward for getting through the week “in one piece.”  

Then the restrictions came.  No more dining in.  Only take out.  Then some of my favorite restaurants closed down.  Which limited my choices even further.  Work arounds were found.  But it was less a reward and more of a chore.  Something I felt more obligated to continue doing because not doing it could mean others would lose their jobs.  

Same with the gym.  I used to go about three to four times a week.  I didn’t socialize much with others there.  In fact, before the virus, I would often wish that there were fewer people there so I could have more opportunity to use the machines I wanted.  First my gym closed down, then opened with restrictions, then closed again.  It’s been closed for months now.  I talk a walk past it every day, looking into the rows of machines and equipment no one is using.  I’d gladly wait in line now to use one of the machines just to be inside doing something for my health.  

For me, the virus’s impact on my life is to reduce it to its most basic form.  I live.  I work.  I eat.  I do what I can on my own to stay in shape.  But only that.  I’m glad to have that much, knowing that others have it worse.  I do want to have…. More.  At least the chance to do more if I wanted to.  

And I really, really want to have more chances to do more things now.