Life in the Time of Corona

I just sent an email to 10,000 people in the hopes that a few of them need the info we sent. For whatever reason, the IRS decided to give people literally 60 hours notice that they needed to submit additional paperwork or they won't get the stimulus money for the kids they care for. We don't send a lot of direct assistance info on our list, so I paused before writing it (which I should have saved for later, since I just sent it rather than scheduling it, a personal failure to pause and do it right). And maybe I sent it because it makes me so mad. The group of people who are impacted are people who are on social security income and take care of kids. I don't know who the universe of those people are really. Although, there are some qualifying conditions of getting these benefits - they are old and/or low income and/or have a disability. And in this situation, all take care of kids. What I know are the people in my life who fall into this category. And it makes me so ...

One of the weirdest parts for me is when I'm feeling anti social.  Normally, a Friday night in with too much tv is a stark contrast to the days in the office, biking to meetings, a meet up or two with friends which feels like too much, but worth it cuz I love my people. (prime example: me in the recent bad moves video. I was so tired that night, I used my weird still role to try to learn how to meditate without quite looking dead).   Part of it is the the virtual - especially screen-based - interaction is exhausting. If I have too many video meetings in a day, I literally have to go stare into space outside. On Wednesday I walked to the rec center park, sat on a concrete step, and stared into the middle distance.  (Until the staffer shooed away, even tho there was literally no one else in like a 4-block sized park. I know they're trying to prevent people from recreating, but I wasn't really doing that). In the first week or two, I started a fire in the back ya...

Goddamn, y'all. I haven't looked at this blog in like 10 days, and it's really good to see what everyone is experiencing, feeling, processing. This shit is rough. (And Falcon I too am so sad about John Prine!) Last week one of my neighbors killed himself. He lived two floors up from us, with his parents. He was a young man, in his 20s, who had been experiencing some pretty serious mental illness over the past few years. His parents had called the cops on him a number of times. He would get taken away, given some sort of injection, kept in some sort of holding tank for 24 or 48 hours, and then come home. He never got the treatment he needed. His father has just lost his job. His mother, horribly, is away, in their home country. I can't imagine what they're going through. We've been trying to raise some money for the family in our co-op. What trauma. This morning I did story-time with my nieces in Philly. I read them my favorite feminist anti-racist commie ch...

I've noticed that I call this "the disaster". It reminds me of my first disaster, Hurricane Katrina. My Katrina time comes up for me in weird ways right now. There's this knowledge that I had forgotten I had that SBA was efficient when FEMA was not in getting cash out the door. There's the FEMA Check song that I was finding stuck in my head 15 years later last week as I fought for cash assistance. It's a disaster because I feel myself doing disaster relief. Get people food, security, whatever that new need is. When I was in Mississippi, I knew that we were not sufficient. People deserved social workers, they deserved master electricians, and people across the country deserved to be paid to meet the needs. We were kids. We were figuring it out. We tried. But people deserved better than us. Faster than us. More skilled and more experienced and better resourced than us. I learned a lot and thought a lot about accountability. Our government owed them more th...

this blog ended up being useful, because i looked back recently to the post about having some chest pain and realized it was a month ago. i mean besides the utility in spouting out all my feelings somewhere and knowing that people i care about are reading. i had been feeling better, healing from whatever was going on with me, but then this weekend i started feeling a little rough again. on monday i called my doctor because getting better then getting worse seems like something to check in about (and once i realized you can do free video consults on the app for my doctor, all bets were off). they told me to go to urgent care and get an x-ray and said they'd been seeing patients have a viral infection and then a bacterial one afterward. i was really reluctant. the news says to steer clear of medical facilities, in new york there aren't enough beds for people etc. but the urgent care i went to was super empty, they had masks for patients and hand sanitizer (though one was dona...

Everyday feels so long. Riley wakes me up around 6:30am and goes to sleep by 8ish (7:30 when I’m lucky, 9 on a bad day), and then I get 2 or 3 hours to cook and eat dinner, hang out with Jon, and watch a little tv.   Sometimes he’ll nap for an hour or two and I get a little time in the middle of the day to either cram in some work or cook something. Everyday there are so many small joyful moments, where Riley does something adorable, says a ridiculous thing, gives me a hug or kiss out of nowhere, makes up a song, or finds games and things to explore in the yard. Sometimes we’ll be walking in the neighborhood and the sun is shining and flowers are blooming and we collect dandelions and things feel okay. There are also a collection of terrible moments everyday, where Riley has a tantrum or does things he knows he shouldn’t and I lose my cool, or I read a particularly devastating piece of news and just can’t function. Everyday is both lovely and terrible, and by the afternoon, th...

My new household chore is to handwash a cotton facewash in the bathroom sink. My new comfort food is ramen with fresh vegetables and ribeye in it. My new routine is to take off my shoes and coat at the door, wash my hands, and then wipe every doorknob and my phone, keys and wallet down with a clorox wipe and stash everything in a box near the door. My new problem is that some of my houseplants are dying of being overdoted on because I'm home and watering them too often. Now I wash my hands and my dishes so much at home that my skin is raw, so I ordered some dishwashing gloves. I went a few weeks without ordering anything but here are a few of my other quarantine buys to reflect my new lifestyle: soft jersey house dresses, hair-cutting scissors, ceramic ramekins to reheat food in my toaster oven since I don't have a microwave, a bread tin because I'm a basic bitch who is probably gonna at least make some banana bread, some of these japanese arare rice crackers that I...