choco_frosh | Journal of the Plague Year: One Year

March 377, 2020 / Friday in Week ?54 of Lent
I didn't get enough time to post about this yesterday,* but yesterday was our one-year COVID-versary. As I wrote back then,
we got "strongly encouraged" to take our computers home on Wednesday [the 11th] and not come back if at all possible; I ended up doing whatever the reverse of playing hooky is, and spent Thursday afternoon and Friday at the office, because I find trying to work from home incredibly difficult.**

One or two of you have written about how life was originally scheduled to be disrupted for some at-that-time inconceivably, well, disruptive period; and that it's been a really really long two days out of school/three-week semi-quarantine. Similarly with us: we were implicitly expecting to go back after a week or so, once the dust and hammering - and the epidemic - was over. It's been a really long ten days.

For me, what it mostly feels like is a really long month of March. And even more like a really long Lent.
More Later: Work is crawling down my throat. And up my ass. (Both directions, Venkat!)

* For various reasons, some inevitable and some very avoidable, my workload exploded at the end of this week. Ah well, it's good news for the company?
** As I will probably expand upon later when I'm not ACTUALLY playing hooky from work, this is still really really true, and fml.

ETA:
To resume.
It felt, for a long time, like March never really ended. The spring was cool and hesitant; it snowed in May, which is rare even in the part of Maine where I grew up, though standard even in Boston for March. In the summer, the fiction became impossible to sustain, but on the other hand we were over the worst of the pandemic in Massachusetts by June--or so we thought at the time. [Making literal what all of us think when we look back on our thoughts and/or blogs from months ago: Oh you sweet summer child.] But even after the fiction became difficult to sustain, it's periodically been better, for various reasons of mental self-preservation, to think of ourselves as still being in March--most notably, though not solely, when E. observed March 300th.

What it's really felt like, though, is: endless Lent. No real Easter: I mean, there was SORTOF Easter, I got up at Ass-o'clock and did Zoom!Church with

tree_and_leaf...but then, every Sunday is a little Easter, theologically. But above all, continued fasting and self-denial. That's why, this Lent, I'm not giving up anything, except for my usual giving up most sweets, and even that I'm half-assing. But over this year, this extended Lent, I've had to pare down my life, again and again: such that at this point, I am fasting from...
dancing, bellringing practice, going to pubs ever, going to restaurants ever, most shopping, using public transit, having an office, parties (excl. ones with only three people), traveling, going to church except to ring for twelve minutes in the freezing cold and then leave again, getting coffee from Dunkies (much less anywhere better), even trying to date, conventions, hugs. Oh, and of course going anywhere without protective gear.

It is enough to be fasting from.
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But at last, there are signs of change. As of this writing, just short of one American in five has been at least partially vaccinated; in Massachusetts, that figure is 4% higher. And in the last couple of weeks, these figures have started to include my friends;† as of yesterday and today, respectively, this includes my roommates. The bad news is that E. now feels like she's been run over by a truck,†† which means M. will probably be in a similar state tomorrow. But as they will both tell you, it's so so worth it to be vaccinated.
And

teenybuffalo texted me this morning to tell me that Massachusetts has opened preregistration for EVERYBODY. Which means pretty much jack squat, since we're still not eligible; but it's the first step in that direction.
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What else was I going to talk about...Oh yeah, Akhetaten!

So when the Pharaoh Akhenaten did his whole religious revolution thing, back in the 14th c. BC, one of the things he did was create a new capitol (because of course he did) which he named after Aten (because of course he did.) Then when he died, the city still under construction, they moved the capitol back to Thebes, because of course they did. But apparently††† everyone who lived there thought that their move, at least, was only a temporary one: they left most of their stuff in their houses. It was only later that it became clear that the city was going to be abandoned, and hence that they went back to get their remaining possessions.
And that's what it was like in the office over the last year. We initially planned to be out for a week and a half, and so packed our stuff into moving crates, took our computers, and went home. Then gradually, over the past year, people have gone back to the office to pick up this and that: files, miscellaneous personal belongings; even their desk chairs, in some cases.
I'm the guy who's left all of his stuff in his ~~mud hut~~ cubicle for the archaeologists to find. (In my case, because my desk at home is tiny and sucky, and so my desk chair, standing desk and/or larger screen would be worse than useless.)

Anyway: PT time! Then sleep! And tomorrow, hot cross buns!

† The ones around here, that is. Can't speak for people elsewhere who I'm mostly only in touch with via FB; except Tree, whom I think already got vaccinated?
My parents, before you ask, have been fully vaccinated. Well, Dad has, and Mum's in the multi-million person trial on how effective the AstraZeneca vaccine is if the doses are twelve weeks apart.

†† I told her that she was busy building X-Wings, and then had to try to explain what the hell I was talking about.

††† I'm basing this on a popular book that I got as a kid, so take with the usual grain of salt.