Wandering Around Listless in a Primal Scream State at the One-Year Anniversary of Pandemic

I snuck in one last flight last year around this time for an out-and-back trip to Los Angeles for a meeting. It was sunny and gorgeous in LA and dark and dreary in Portland. The flights were already basically empty. 

And that was it. 

I am now wandering around listlessly in a pandemic purgatory dream state.

***

I do not care about the history of Daylight Savings Time. I just want it to stop. That’s never been more clear than at the one year anniversary of pandemic. I’m sad for seemingly no reason, and I’ve been talking with friends who are feeling the same way. 

My internet was acting up yesterday right before a video call. I texted my kick-ass client Sarah to ask if she might be able to run the meeting if I disappeared into the nothingness of physical life. She responded with what will become my motto for 2021: “I can assert that I’m not in a mental headspace to lead this ship.”

***

Some days are too much. And some days are too much and they also steal an hour from you. It’s not that anything catastrophic happened on Sunday after the construct of Daylight Savings Time snatched away 60 minutes, it’s that each thing piled up to leave me crying in the kitchen at 9:00pm wondering how to dry dishes. 

It started this way.

My grandmother, who shall never know that her existence has been mentioned here on the blog because we are never going to tell her because she hates the idea of things on the internet, has been getting hundreds of spam text messages. She is 87-years-young and she’s a voracious texter, and she loves it when we text her photos of the great-grandchildren. She doesn’t know not to respond to stupid spam texts. So she says things like “Stop” or “Your grandma loves you,” which encourages more texts and now she’s being invited by the dozen to view sites like findamilf.com and raunchysingles.com. Sites she would totally love, of course, it’s just that now it’s hard to find the family members she likes to text amidst all these delightful invitations. And she accidentally pinned all the spam numbers to her favorites in what ostensibly was a fit of frustrated right swiping. 

So the Fairy Pig and I swung by with a box of Girl Scout cookies and an invitation to walk over to get a cappuccino, where we could all sit outside, socially distanced in the rain, to try to solve this phone situation. Spoiler alert: just get the TextKiller or SMS Filter apps. Verizon can’t do anything. But after a very long time which included me taking a five-year-old to the bathroom in a strange place while chatting with the phone company, my customer service helper did suggest those. Totally worth the hour on the phone to freeze your poor grandma’s bones off in the rain. 

And then the series of little things just piled on…

I got home to cook, and as I washed my rice before cooking, bunches of little weevil bodies floated to the top.

I googled, “my rice has bugs can I eat it.” Yes, just wash them out. So then I washed my rice like 100 more times and then looked through the pantry to figure out if the weevils had friends.

Then I remembered it was jury duty for me on Monday, and I was supposed to call to find out if I needed to report. The automated system told me it couldn’t recognize me or find my number. I decided Captcha has been right all along. I probably am a robot. 

Then we put the kids down after tons of little fights–the kind of fights where people say cutting things to each other but it never really comes to full-out meltdowns, your sanity just dies slowly over the course of a few hours.

Then I stubbed my toe on the wave board that had been left in the middle of the kitchen and suddenly it was 9:00pm, because an hour had been snatched out of my little hands.

***

Here we are on Friday. Jury duty, it turns out, had been canceled. Monday, I got to go for a long drive, which allowed me to ponder whether my own screams could give me a headache–cars being basically soundproof isolation chambers, when you have the chance to be in one by yourself.

The week just kept coming with its slow churn of sadness. Not deep, dark sadness, just rainy and mundane sadness and emotional fatigue. 

So if you all are feeling it, I see you. And for those of you who have already shared or affirmed your own grief or sadness that seems to have sort of come out of nowhere, thank you.