Draining
How pandemics end, smashing guitars and a white lady alignment chart
Over the last week I saw so many of my friends’ kids on Instagram heading back to in-person school. Warnings about Super Bowl Super Spreading parties. A notification from the local college that a frat party basically forced the school to shut down in-person learning just weeks into the spring semester.
The pandemic is tiring and this is likely how it ends: everyone moving at their own pace, with those holding the most privilege racing towards the finish line while those most impacted by the pandemic and systemic racism in general bear the brunt.
I read this article last spring about how pandemics end. There’s the medical ending, it explained, where there’s a vaccine or a cure. And then there’s the social ending, when things return to normal because we’ve learned to live with the disease. Even with the bubonic plague there were people who just got…bored.
In Florence, wrote Giovanni Boccaccio, “No more respect was accorded to dead people than would nowadays be accorded to dead goats.” Some hid in their homes. Others refused to accept the threat. Their way of coping, Boccaccio wrote, was to “drink heavily, enjoy life to the full, go round singing and merrymaking, and gratify all of one’s cravings when the opportunity emerged, and shrug the whole thing off as one enormous joke.”
Meanwhile in 2021:
Shouts to Naomi for reminding us that just being a feminist doesn’t make you smart.
I’m tired of all of this and I’m sure you are too. The globe is exhausted. It’s draining to have to balance public health, mental health, risk management, friendships, and social norms in the middle of a pandemic that’s been dragging on for a year with no real leadership. The rage is hard to keep down.
But my grandmother and mother-in-law both got their vaccine appointments. My daughter keeps talking about all the things we will do in the summer when “the virus is over.” So I’ll order seeds and keep pounding through episodes of Grey’s Anatomy.
The Weekly Round-Up:
A section to dump all of my favorite and most curious things from the last seven days.
Winner of the Internet: Zoos shouldn’t exist but I can’t lie and say that I didn’t watch this video twelve times in a row. I also didn’t spend as much time as usual on the internet this week so please write to me and tell me what I missed.
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I Can’t Even: No clue why I am working on this post instead of watching this.
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On Repeat my musical explorations haven’t broken much further out of where they have been for the last two weeks, but I did get pretty into this track from Caroline Polachek. It could be fully mistaken for a HAIM song — especially in the chorus — but most of the rest of the album this track is from sounds like Sarah McLaughlin spent some time at an artist retreat with Enya. Not really my thing but this song is tops.
Honorable Mention: I’m writing this on Sunday morning and according to Twitter Phoebe Bridgers smashed her guitar on SNL last night but I am an old and always watch this show on Sunday nights. Rumor has it there are plenty of think pieces ahead on this? Something about men vs women smashing guitars? IDK y’all…I’ve never smashed a guitar but one time I did come pretty close and bled all over it the night I found out a friend had committed suicide while we were on tour and that’s the closest I have ever felt to whatever motivates this desire.
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Why Am I Like This? Why yes I did turn this Axios article about the “Craziest Meeting of the Trump Presidency” into a script so that you can re-enact it with your friends over Zoom no need to thank me not all heroes wear capes.
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Thing I Learned: Next time you are hanging out in the woods in the snow and you notice tiny little black dots inside your footprints or other depressions in the snow, hang back a minute and see if they are moving because they might be snowfleas. Also called Springtails, these tiny little bugs can apparently jump up to 300 body lengths away. Nature is wild.
The White Lady Alignment Chart
DM me for my Grey’s Anatomy chart if you wanna see it.
Okay, that’s it for this week. Lemme know what you think about how this is going. Want more or less of anything? How are the jokes? Sick of me yet? I’m sick of myself. TTYL.
I almost messaged you about the Phoebe Bridgers performance because I loved it so much. She is the zeitgeist.
Candace! It's like you read my mind. But much more clearly and wittily. 😄