Memories of the Plague: A Covid 19 Reminiscence thread

Late-February 2020, our daughter had bad croup (cough like a seal's bark) coupled with a high fever so we took her to the ER in Santa Clara County* and every worker was wearing full PPE and handed us masks to wear when we checked in. My wife had been getting alerts that things were getting more serious here but seeing a sea of healthcare workers and doctors in full PPE was unlike anything I'd ever experienced (and I was traveling overseas quite a bit during SARS & H1N1).

*Andy mentioned upthread that the first US COVID fatality might have been at this hospital.

trayce otm - this is me too

- I have never recovered from the hermitage/agorophobic headspace it put me in. I still rarely leave the house and have wasted 3 of my last 4 summer holidays sitting around at home doing nothing whatsoever.

it took me way way longer than anyone i know to go anywhere. like a restaurant. i was store/home/local market for seemingly ever.

I work at home and usually have the house to myself during the day, so the first thing I remember besides the general sense of alarm and surreality is having to adjust to everyone being home all the time, my wife and two teenage boys. And for a while anyway, most of my reporting was completely remote. Learning to Zoom, all of that.

I think my job helped me deal with it psychologically, because I was immersed in it every day as a reporter, and having to be kind of a dispassionate, observer and conveyor of information. Also, even though it was all remote, I was still talking to lots of people all the time. So I didn’t have the same sense of isolation as a lot of people. But domestically, we did a lot of the same stuff as everybody. Cooking, baking, taking long walks. We live in an old neighborhood, and it has alleys everywhere. So we made kind of a project of going up and down all the alleys in the neighborhood. That was fun.

But I don’t want to be rosy about it. It was all very stressful. And by the end of the summer, my older son started having anxiety attack attacks for the first time in his life.

Attack attacks are like attacks, but more attacky.

there’s an elderly lady on my street, she lives alone and always seemed a little agoraphobic before but COVID seems to have fully broken her & it is very sad

I remember reading in some American paper like the Atlantic or the New Yorker that the best thing you could do in early March 2020 was to stop going to your office, so I showed it to some coworkers and we all started working from home. We’d always done about two days from home and we felt autonomous as contractors so we just all decided to do this and nobody stopped us. That job seemed to sort of melt away as fairly soon after I was told I would be finishing in May, after a few years contracting there. My birthday was a few days after the UK went into lockdown, I remember stockpiling a lot of food and booze. It was really weird doing Zooms at the kitchen table back then. I remember reading the numbers rising one night and feeling my heart rate increasing, like a really sudden spike of physical anxiety that I'd never really known before, the sense of something completely out of control.

My friend’s restaurant had just opened and had to close immediately for lockdown and I went over there and bought a lot of stuff off him, wine and cheese and butter. While we were there he gave some duck confit which he put into an industrial mayonnaise bucket topped with clingfilm. I remember getting back to my apartment that night and thinking it was that sort of “board the door” feeling from a post-apocalypse movie, and also that I didn’t want my neighbours to see me entering my home with a bucket of duck. There was a strange sort of comforting feeling of having everything you need and knowing you won’t be leaving the house which has stayed with me and is still a part of my life, and isn’t always so good, a kind of increased need for safety as some others have mentioned. I can't really shake it, I guess because I still work from home every day.

After the first job ended, I began working a lot on covid services for the UK government website. The pages I was responsible for are some of the most-used in its history, and it was often manic and crazy, but also sort of demanded me to use everything I’ve ever learned about my work and to draw on a lot of my own personality and resilience. This is weird too in that although it was stressful and crazy and all happening during lockdown it’s probably the work I’m most proud of in my life, and all my other jobs since have felt easy and lacking. I have considered that maybe I have or had some small version of trauma after that work, and the fact it all happened while mostly alone at home.

There are a lot of strange conflicts with covid, things that felt better among things that felt worse, things that only seemed bad after the opening up, the inability to remember what you were doing or wanted to do before you were temporarily prevented from doing it. I feel like a lot of the sense of control and being able to control every part of life has exacerbated some tendencies in me to lean towards safety and carefulness. I go out more than say in the immediate aftermath but I still am worried by small unpredictable things. I check the weather when flying more. I've had chronic illness problems since long before covid and maybe there was something nice about a world in which they sort of disappeared as a problem, because most activities were at home. I still live half in that world because of working at home. I still think of things as a sort of before and after even though if you’d asked me before I couldn’t have honestly said my life was perfect, not at all, and in fact a lot of stuff has improved, I bought a flat during the pandemic, I started exercising daily. I guess it just somehow seems the before was more innocent in a way I still can’t really understand.

It's weird even writing this how non-linear the memories feel. Christmases were so odd. 2020 I didn't get to go home to Dublin for the first time in my life at Christmas. Phoning my mum to tell her was really sad. After that I assembled a lot of stuff and did Xmas dinner with two of my oldest friends in London, which is a day I'll never forget, just the strangeness of it and the funny thing of the three of us buying each other presents and watching the usual Xmas stuff on TV. Christmas 2021 I had to isolate for a few days but was able to leave my room by the day itself. That too was weird and there was a lot of family tension and factions around the situation that took a little while to go away, for me anyway.

Another really vivid memory, one that will stay with me forever, for some reason, is the day after getting the first shot of the vaccine, around June 2021 I guess. I had a feverish night, teeth chattering one minute, drenched in sweat the next, then woke up with that feeling of the storm having broken, temperature normal, body functioning. It was a really sunny morning and at about 6am I walked to a shop absolutely craving orange juice, which I never really drink. I then went to the park and sat on a bench and drank my orange juice. I just remember that day feeling incredibly optimistic but also like a realisation of how difficult some of the times before had been. I remember just the feeling of walking, feeling good, the sun on my skin, and somehow really conscious of my body and how it felt versus the night before. But also that seems like some kind of resolution to it, even if that wasn't the end.

(hi everyone prob won't delurk again but all the posts here made me want to share also)

- I have never recovered from the hermitage/agorophobic headspace it put me in. I still rarely leave the house and have wasted 3 of my last 4 summer holidays sitting around at home doing nothing whatsoever.

Has anyone had the opposite experience? I find it difficult to stay home. Even if it's to the local Starbucks I gotta be out all the time.

A few things I remember, "en vrac":
- Video of bulldozers building a hospital in China in record time (Feb 2020)
- Sitting at home with nothing to do during the extra month at the end of my internship, which they had to pay me a real competitive salary + benefits (March 2020)
- Awesome weather, easy access to the river and countryside, reading Gravity Rainbow (April 2020)
- Being so relieved to land my first real job during the pandemic (May 2020)
- First infection and fearful monitoring of syndromes (October 2020)
- Death of my grandfather, followed by my grandmother, attended both funerals (end 2020)
- My wife losing several loved ones, who were all ridiculously young, us losing a best friend who was 34
- Those videos of this woman lipsyncing Trump talking about injecting yourself chemicals
- Reading graphs every day, pro- versus anti-
- Being bored and frustrated for months of 100% remote working
- The nightmare of travelling for work during Covid, the worst being denied access on a plane (at the gate) because of confusion of regulations as countries were dropping regulations but information was not circulating
- Getting over it

Some of the positive memories:

-getting to wfh for the first & only time

-my wife being furloughed and spending all day in the garden

-watching way too much Bon Appetite Youtube content and both of us doing some really ridiculously good cooking and baking

-being in great shape due to Youtube yoga + the usual exercise

There was bad stuff too of course but I look back fondly on a lot of it. Obviously we were very lucky, these same circumstances (wfh, furlough) would have been much harder if we had kids, didn't have my job, etc.

One of my favorite pastimes was making weird faces behind my mask while walking around the grocery store - puckering up my lips, wrinkling my nose, baring my teeth, etc.

Which reminds me, there was something weirdly sexy about having to guess what people looked like from just the upper face.

I went to a wedding on Feb 29 2020 and came away with a dry cough that lasted precisely 1.5 days. Spent a few weeks fretting I'd caught it and spread it but also baffled over whether that could really have been all it was for me, if it was. In the final week before first lockdown I was wearing gloves in the office except at my desk.

I'll never forget the weeks of warm sunny weather which felt unusual even for late Spring in southern UK...while we could barely be out in it and we had no garden (but also knowing how fortunate we were with the ease of sudden WFH for both of us). The palpable collective euphoria in parks that Summer too after the initial wave seemed to have passed was something else even if premature. Rivalled maybe only by Trump's defeat later that year + the vaccine news in the same fucking week.

We had additional luck in that when our cat died that Summer by that point they were allowing people in to the vet to witness pets passing.

I doubt I'll ever have a year like that for So. Much. time for music listening and discovery too.

Wow, I never even thought about that. it's hard enough to lose a pet, I can't imagine just dropping them off and not being with them in their final moments.

I(hi everyone prob won't delurk again but all the posts here made me want to share also)

A weird net positive for a lot of academic libraries with deep archives was that being closed meant the chance to get a lot of material that had been scanned but hanging fire for metadata etc happened big time. In our case, since by default all the access team members like myself weren’t doing anything (though I had some other online duties at least) that meant we did a lot of that work in 2020 to assist our archives and industry documents folks in clearing out a backlog. It was good work getting so much stuff read through — one of the more moving things I did was help out on AIDS History Project material, not merely for the obvious resonances, but seeing letters and mentions of people like Fauci and all. A real sense of continuity.

I was lucky in that nobody particularly close to me died or got seriously ill, but it was still surreal that it was happening to random people you knew. Like all the sudden "you hear who's on a ventilator?" and it's one of your neighbors, or someone who owned a restaurant you like, or one of your co-workers you had regular meetings with. Some of them pulled through but some of them didn't. Also hearing from people you went to school with, saying stuff like "I had a mild case but that was 6 months ago and I still feel tired all the time". It was scary. Didn't seem like it was worth it to do anything. Real apocalyptic vibes too with the wildfires. And then Trump on TV every day saying the stupidest shit you ever heard. I'm surprised I didn't have any sort of mental breakdown.

My neighbours' kids came home from university and spent the very hot April partying in their garden, which made my working from home pretty difficult. When my office reopened in the summer I was one of the first to go back and would often be the only person there in a space for 200 people. Walking through deserted central London and seeing shops still closed with Mothers' Day displays in their windows was bizarre. Once I was entirely alone in Lincoln's Inn Fields and could hear only the sound of a horse's hooves in the distance.

I must admit I wish I could've spent more time in deserted London, or really anywhere that would normally be busy. I got particularly envious watching one guy filming his stroll around the empty streets of Venice although I have no sense any more of when that was, could've been well into 2021.

I remember being initially sceptical of the Coronovirus news and then sitting in the office on a Friday in early March we all received an email telling that we were closing the doors and should work from home from the following week. I was healthy and felt protected. I had a 2 year old daughter and a partner who works in a hospital. I was more concerned for them. I think I really adapted to working from home full time but my employer was difficult and wanted me to use annual leave for any days I would be (through no choice of my own) looking after my 2 year old. This contributed to me feeling anxious over that period in addition to the health risks and isolation.

I miss the time on my own, with my child, as a family. We would exercise early in the little square in east London near where we lived. I bought pints of lager from the window of the pub on my street. Planning meals, drunken friends on Zoom calls, the increase in wildlife, change in the city sounds (much quieter), and the glorious weather. I miss how neighbourly and caring the local community felt. I miss my 96 year old neighbour. I obsessed over the first 5 Sault albums, the Test Pressing playlists and a few other records but bought less music. I did support a local shop by ordering online and the owner handing me the records from the window for a while.

I think I was always waiting for Covid to be over but when it happened it wasn't the release I was kind of expecting. I was, and still am, angry at the social impact of Covid. It seemed so unfair that people where dying before they needed to and people were making money out of this terrible time. We moved to be nearer my partners job in June 2021. It was overdue. I remember asking the estate agent about market conditions
and telling me that Covid created winners and losers. I went out to a restaurant and bar for the first time in October 2021. People had taken their masks off and so did I after a while. I got ill 4 days later and an ambulance took me to hospital 9 days later for a week. I regret that a lot. In some ways I'm still recovering.

It was a strange time. It feels like a dream.

and HIM telling me

i was talking to a guy i know yesterday and he worked for a beer distro and he did events for them and he had just set up a big beer fest in new orleans that he was really excited about and then -boom- the place he worked for closed up shop and let everyone go. i had forgotten how fast everything was happening back then. and then i tried to extrapolate his situation with the thousands of events that were ready to happen that never happened. just so crazy. the entire calendar wiped out.
i think i had also just forgotten that there were lots of people who really liked their jobs! all i heard about was people being kinda relieved that they could get checks and stay home. i was very happy to be able to go to work. its all i really know how to do other than watch t.v. and read literary fiction and listen to records.

Yes, that May-June period was the most intensest creative period of my life.

― poppers fueled buttsex crescendo (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

that whole period, 2020-2022, that's when i learned to be a good writer. i started a blog the month before and i just kept going with it for the next three years. by the end of it i was a lot better of a writer. i wrote a memoir in early '21, the first three months of '21. first time i finished a book. i'm not going to do anything with it. it was the writing itself that was important.

i was really afraid to leave the house when covid started, not because of covid, i was just out and was still in that phase where i was convinced that i was going to be hate-crimed. people just yell slurs, they're not gonna be physically violent around here. but we had neighbors with trump yard signs and you never knew.

i remember going out and everything just being so quiet. it felt like i was living in a post-apocalyptic world, like everybody had died already.

I know you referred to a year later, but for me it was April-early-July '21, what I call the Post-Vax Honeymoon before Delta came along: the first time friends and I actually met in restaurants. I also had my first sex since March '20. I didn't retreat again when Delta hit, just pulled back for a bit, but it was the last time I thought, "Oh, COVID's GONE, man!"

― poppers fueled buttsex crescendo (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

in early april of '21 the hospital called me asking if i could do GRS (bottom surgery) the next week. no, of course i fucking couldn't, so then they were like "ok how about early june". that was my next couple of months. i missed that whole "false thaw" period. i was really conflicted about it. i was _incredibly_ fortunate to be able to get GRS as early into transition as I did... COVID worked in my favor in a lot of ways, I'm not gonna get into detail here about exactly how... I just wouldn't have been able to get that surgery as early as I did without COVID. Recovery time was three months, though. I kept thinking of that St. Vincent song "Surgeon", the opening line "I spent the summer on my back..." I was upset since I hadn't done Pride since coming out... I wanted to be part of in-person queer community. Then by the time I was better, Delta and then Omicron...

I found myself getting nostalgic for that couple of months after lockdown had fully lifted and people were just starting to feel comfortable with mingling again. It was a rare period when the world felt less cynical than it had before or would after. That year, 2022, just felt like the year when everyone was excited just to be alive and to be able to go out and see each other and enjoy life

― your mom goes to limgrave (dog latin)

When things lifted in late '22, I'd just moved out from the house I shared with my ex, we'd just sold it. I was seriously fucked up. The trans community helped me recognize that I had to leave, that the things my ex was doing were abusive, but I hated myself for leaving. It caused problems. I lit a lot of fires during that time. Other shit was going on but my shit didn't help with things.

I got COVID for the first time in late July, when I was moving out of the house my ex and I shared. My best friend was helping me move... she'd just flown back from a conference in Vegas. She was conscientious about it - said she had some early symptoms but had taken rapid tests for three days since coming back and they were all negative. So she came over to help and of course she had it. My ex-wife was livid. She had a particular... she viewed catching COVID as a deliberate, malicious act. She didn't actually catch it. I did. So I'd just moved in and I was sick with COVID and sick with grief, and I couldn't tell which was which. The day I moved into my new place, by coincidence my oldest brother called. I torched that relationship that day. We haven't talked since. The next week I remember screaming, crying at all hours, hallucinating. I don't think it was COVID. My COVID symptoms were actually very mild. It was mostly grief.

That week the hospital called again, asked if I could do the revision surgery next week. (The hospital's care is great; their scheduling is pretty structurally fucked, though.) This time I said "yes", but then they asked if I'd had COVID in the last three months and my answer was "well actually I had COVID now...". So it was another three months.

I didn't really start to repair the damage from those few months until mid-2023. I'm slowly reaching out again. Learning to trust. Learning to keep at arm's length from all of the fucked up shit I see all around me.

I never thought of COVID as the real pandemic. I still don't.

Has anyone had the opposite experience? I find it difficult to stay home. Even if it's to the local Starbucks I gotta be out all the time.

― poppers fueled buttsex crescendo (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

I did spend those first couple of months after the pandemic going out every night of the week, socializing fiercely and incessantly. It was one of the reasons it hit me so hard when shit fell apart around Christmas of '22. I socialize a few nights a week now. It's hard for me to spend so much time by myself. I live alone, and I get lonely. It's hard for me to motivate myself to do things without other people around. That's why I limit my social interactions... it's important for me to learn to take care of myself, get my basic needs met - laundry, showers, groceries, my day job, things like that - without needing other people to caretake me. I've never been in that situation before.

Which reminds me, there was something weirdly sexy about having to guess what people looked like from just the upper face.

― Nabozo

Masking also really helped a lot of trans people I knew pass.

-

I spent a lot of time wondering which of the people I knew were going to die. When it would hit someone I was close to. It hasn't yet. Not directly, at least. Someone in my life dies of suicide every couple months. Only one person I knew died of COVID - an ex-co-worker who I never really liked. I do remember reading a lot of the charts, trying to figure out what was going to happen, how bad it's going to be. I don't really care now. Whoever dies, dies. We're alive now.

I remember trying out bangs. I remember quitting makeup, and never really picking it back up. Letting my ear piercings heal. Having lots of wigs and not wearing them much.

-

I'm such a different person coming out than I was going in. I was just... I was telling my girlfriend yesterday, back in late '19, my life seemed like a wish fulfillment dream. It didn't seem real, how good I felt all the time all of a sudden. And then later on, I started looking at my old life as a nightmare... the way I was living seemed real and the way I had felt before, I couldn't imagine feeling that bad.

Nowadays everything seems... I don't feel like I'm the same person I was pre-COVID. I don't feel like I was the same person I was between '20 and '22, either. I was... incandescent during that time. I remember saying a lot during that time that I felt like I was on fire. Everything just overwhelmed me. I wanted to light myself on fire, literally, until I learned that a friend of a friend had done just that, and it didn't matter, it didn't change anything.

Now life seems like a dream in a different sense. Everything just seems terribly strange and nothing makes a whole lot of sense. One thing doesn't connect to another. I don't know what's going to happen next. Now I'm mostly... Curious. Curiouser and curiouser.

That wasn't all COVID, but COVID was a bigger part of that than people... might assume sometimes.

Which reminds me, there was something weirdly sexy about having to guess what people looked like from just the upper face.

― Nabozo, Wednesday, March 13, 2024 12:57 PM (seven hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I definitely thought "You have nice eyes!" more than I usually would do.

" I obsessed over the first 5 Sault albums"

― mmmm, Wednesday, March 13, 2024 3:36 PM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Not necessarily during lock downs but I listened to Microphones in 2020 everyday during a period I was WFH.

xp there's a fairly big percentage of the Asian population here in Oakland who have not given up on masking, and seemingly never will

xps I became more conscious of smiling with my eyes, something that I've carried beyond mask-wearing.

the pandemic was the beginning of the final stages of my mental collapse and I have on occasion re-read the threads where we document the onset of the pandemic and it just brings back memories. it was all of the things that happened afterward that completed it, but constantly living in a heightened state of fear, anger, and stress, as well as the negative affects isolation had on me for that first year, the rage at the conspiracy theorists and people who defied any and all public health initiatives, and me already having OCD was too much of a lethal combo. particularly what it did to my doomscrolling habit, which finally got so out of control in 2022 that my brain essentially fractured and stopped seeking out new news of any type.

I do have positive memories of participating in the COVID vaccine study for Moderna - at least being a part of that lead to some good. but I do not at all miss the days of getting ripped off my ass on Vodka and being on Stream playing Jackbox games each night with kids half my age and spending my weekends sobbing from loneliness. the few days I stayed w/ my folks while dad recovered from gallbladder surgery were a relief at the time, because I had someone to talk to. still drank way too much though.

*brings back bad memories

Stream = Twitch...see? brain still not working lol

Aww Neanderthal - I'm sure that there's quite a few folks who share similar memories, it was pretty isolating

I had a low point when I actually had the Cove... I followed the stated rules pretty closely and didn't even leave the house for a week, and then only to ride my scooter out to the port on a Sunday to walk on empty railroad tracks where I knew I wouldn't encounter anyone. Nowadays they're like 'Fuck it! Go to work, don't bother masking, who cares!!'

i think i had also just forgotten that there were lots of people who really liked their jobs!

i love my job and really, really missed it for the almost 2 years it was shut down. it was quite hard to deal with all the friends bragging about mastering baking sourdough bread and having more disposable income than they knew what do with.

I remember being in the break room at work and seeing a news clip about a COVID case in Illinois, which now feels like one of those moments in a zombie film where the news reports are running in the background, but the characters don't notice.

I was working at a ticket vendor at the time and remember the deluge of calls that started once it was announced that March Madness wasn't happening. Either that day or the next, the office started handing out laptops.

I met my partner a week before she moved out of state for grad school, and we started long-distance dating about a year before she graduated. She moved back to Chicago only a month before the pandemic. That was a stroke of luck, as I don't know if our relationship would have kept going if we'd been faced with an indefinite separation without even occasional visits.

Most of all, I remember the bitterness about how the government was handling it. All these proclamations about wearing a mask—but where were we going to get them? What was the purpose of our government if not to help us by providing such things, instead of putting the responsibility on us to find/make/buy them? (Obviously, these questions were rhetorical, as I knew all too well.) Despite who was leading our government, a small part of me still hoped this disaster--straight out of a film--would prompt some sort of Second World War-type push.

I work in health and so didn't get time off. But I'd forgotten (until pondering this thread) that there was a period when I was thinking about volunteering for one of the Nightingale hospitals.

I do have positive memories of participating in the COVID vaccine study for Moderna - at least being a part of that lead to some good.

Getting a booster today, I’ll raise a lemonade in your honor on this hot March day.

i had forgotten how fast everything was happening back then.

no kidding, the whole thing was so surreal. I'd really thought this was just another bird/swine flu thing (not that those weren't serious!) and the fact that only conservatives seemed to be freaking out was a sign that it was probably no big deal. and then entire countries started to shut down. I remember during my team meeting at work on Monday being like "uhhh folks what are we doing about this?" and my manager saying "I have no idea yet". then one or two days later I told her "hey I think I'm going to work from home tomorrow if that's okay, things are getting too weird", and that night as I was putting my kids to sleep I find out that Tom Hanks has it, and then the NBA shut down an hour later, and then an hour after that we all get an email and a text saying not to come into work tomorrow. one of the weirdest days of my life.

Remember this? Utah Jazz & OKC Thunder

At 8:39 p.m., just prior to tip-off, the league made the dramatic decision to announce to the crowd, and the nation, that the game had officially been suspended. The arena packed with fans would be forced to evacuate, with the look of uncertainty plastered across each and every one of the unsuspecting customers’ faces.

xp I took a couple of weeks’ annual leave before they finally locked down, my friend still makes out that I was some kind of Cassandra & I’m like no it was really really obvious at that point, everyone just had their head up their arse

I got really into running. Like a lot of people ITT, I got to just about the fittest I'd ever been.

It was strange running around these empty streets and fields, and then one day seeing the restaurants and bars open again.

I also decided to teach myself philosophy, and listened to a whole lot of philosophy lectures on Audible while I was out running. There was something very Zen about it all

Everyone got a text from the govt that said “stay home. Protect the nhs.” V surreal

(Esp cause the ppl who ostensibly sent the text were like “last one to the pub is a bum boy” days earlier”

)

I think my main memory looking back was the timing of everything. I retired in the spring of 2019, sold my house in Toronto that summer, then moved to a small town two hours away. As 2020 started, my financial health was taken care of for life, and I had moved from a densely populated city to a town of 7,000 that was largely case-free for the first six months. I was so incredibly lucky, and I've tried to pay that back in a variety of ways ever since.

Lots else, good and bad, and the longest walks of my life around town in March and April, through streets that were virtually deserted. (Mild weather, I think.) I do tend to see life through the prism of art, though--should be the other way around--so a couple of non-personal things I think about.

The seventh episode of The Leftovers, where you see life the day before the Departure. You can't do that with Covid, which developed over a few weeks and months--there was no official start, even if we tend to use that day when the NBA shut down as the beginning. If you could, I'd like to see what my life was like the last day where I'd never given a thought to Covid, which was probably some day in February. I think the world was so different in so many small ways. I'm old enough that I don't see the need to spend time trying to figure out and describe all those ways, but people younger than me might want to.

There's also a speech in Mad Men I think about, Don talking to Peggy about why she's so good as an ad person. I'd try to quote it exactly, but I'm not sure which episode--Don speechified a lot. Anyway, he says something to the effect that she understands that something happened which changed the way people feel about themselves; he's referring to, without naming it, the JFK assassination. And because she understands that, she knows how to reach those same people. Same thing with Covid: something changed with people that I'd have a hard time describing.

I feel profoundly sorry for kids in school who had to miss so much, and I see the long-term effects of that every day.

When Sydney got all locked down I had a work exemption and sometimes had to drive into the city. The sci-fi filme eeriness of the familiar streets empty will stay with me.

Generally I felt fear and concern for humans both known and unknown - but more than anything else I think I felt relief that "business as usual" had stopped, that is something I had been craving for a long time

Working from home and having two school-age kids was tough and particularly tough on our youngest - I still feel his mental health is a bit knocked around by that time

I bought my dream turntable from a ludicrously cheap Gumtree ad early in 2020 and "tending to my records" (cleaning, new sleeves, organising, buying more of the fuckers) was a very therapeutic pursuit

My music taste definitely skewed nostalgic - listened to largely 60s/70s/80s stuff and it is only now that I feel like I am properly engaging with new stuff again - albeit still in a spotty kind of way

I still feel his mental health is a bit knocked around by that time

That's what I meant--mental health, socialization, graduations, field trips, etc., much more than academics. That's a concern, but you can fix that gap over time. Other things were missed for good.

Hm, that reminds me that the 'Covid Coping' series I did on my Patreon was really helpful in a 'stay engaged' way, even if I was listening to things old as well as new. Having the chance and discipline to write in a little detail about something each day anchored around a song was a good way to process things in a removed fashion.

Not necessarily during lock downs but I listened to Microphones in 2020 everyday during a period I was WFH.

― djh

For the entirety of '22 and most of '23 I just had _Dots and Loops_ on repeat in my car. It was the last record I listened to in the car with my ex. I guess that would be a good way of delineating it. When I took Dots and Loops out of my car things started to get better.

I still really like Dots and Loops, funnily enough. I don't have any negative memories at all associated with it. I just kept it in there because it's a good album. I just kept waiting to see when I would get tired of listening to it, and I never did. Probably the highlight of my life during that whole time period was listening to Dots and Loops. I wouldn't want to leave the house and I'd say well, if I do, then I can listen to Dots and Loops, and that was about the only thing that got me out of the house. So, I mean, kudos to Stereolab. They put out an album that soundtracked one of the most depressing and traumatic parts of my life and I still fucking love it.

I remember seeing this thread title and being like, Christ, why would I want to remember this time at all? But reading the responses of others was really nice, so I thought about it.

I remember my husband was in Singapore & Indonesia right when there were cases popping up there. I think the first reference I have to this affecting our lives was a text from him, in February 2020, talking about how the hotel he was staying in beeped his forehead to check his temperature on entrance. (Remember when places did that? Hahahaha.)

I remember when we started working from home and it didn’t feel like it would be for that long, and then it was. Time sort of collapsed due to the sameness of the days and I find it hard to pick out individual happenings from that time.

The slack was a godsend; we did a Christmas present exchange, regular zooms, and stuff like everyone buying scampi fries from Amazon and it becoming a thing for a while. A while ago I was in a pub with my mother and I bought a packet of scampi fries for us, which she had never seen me do, and took a picture with them. Impossible to explain, but it made me smile.

I made two of my best friends on slack and we have a WhatsApp group and we talk pretty much every day. Of all the things I expected as an outcome for the pandemic, I didn’t expect that.

I found it almost easier to make new friends than keep existing friends during the initial period of the pandemic where nothing was happening, because there’s no news. Nothing’s happening. When you’re making friends with new people, everything is novel. But when things opened up again, I wanted to see everyone, because I really felt the wasted time not seeing people. I remember going to dinner with ten of my friends in February right before stuff got really serious really fast and for ages we joked about calling it the last supper. Even now writing this is a good reminder to make plans with people.

I missed my family terribly. The first Christmas we had, I can’t even remember what happened. The Christmas omicron was circulating we had to cancel our flights to Ireland and I was so upset. I remember going on an impromptu trip to see my parents in January the year of the pandemic, and I think about that bit of serendipity all the time. I didn’t end up seeing my family in person until a year and a half later. Voice notes were always a thing we did but they became very important to us. My mother was in hospital with covid at one stage and I was so frightened she was sick enough to be admitted to a covid ward. My sister said I made this horrendous sound when she told me. I listened to her voice notes she’d sent me while I waited for news. Look, this was the pandemic, too much time to think.

I’d love to say I developed a new skill or baked bread or something, but no. I ended up getting into baseball in 2022 which in retrospect I couldn’t really have done in the same way back then (And I would probably have hated players for being antivaxx).

I think I say yes to things more. I went to New York with my family literally just on a whim after decades of not going on holidays with them, and it was fun. I arrange things. As a result I get invited to things more.

I have had covid at least twice that I’m aware of. I didn’t actually get it until 2022! The weird dreams and lack of taste were the worst symptoms for me. Both times my husband got it far worse. (My mother: “That’s men for you.” Yes, her that was in hospital).

It’s bizarre how “normal” things seem now. In New York I would see people wearing masks constantly and I haven’t seen that in a long long time. Ireland was way better about wearing masks than the UK from when I went home during the vaccine rollout stage, but I haven’t really seen many people wearing masks in public for a while. I assume they have covid if they do.

Yeah, in Ireland last June I didn't see a single mask wearer (my mom and I were the only ones wearing them on the Galway-bound train). Memories associated with lockdowns way more serious than America's, I gathered.

I live near a high school, and it's amazing how many kids are still masking, even when walking outdoors alone. It was explained to me that masks are almost like safety blankets for some kids, a way to sort of hide out. Four years is a long time when you're fourteen, I can see where they'd be fully acclimated to it.

no kidding, the whole thing was so surreal. I'd really thought this was just another bird/swine flu thing (not that those weren't serious!) and the fact that only conservatives seemed to be freaking out was a sign that it was probably no big deal. and then entire countries started to shut down. I remember during my team meeting at work on Monday being like "uhhh folks what are we doing about this?" and my manager saying "I have no idea yet". then one or two days later I told her "hey I think I'm going to work from home tomorrow if that's okay, things are getting too weird", and that night as I was putting my kids to sleep I find out that Tom Hanks has it, and then the NBA shut down an hour later, and then an hour after that we all get an email and a text saying not to come into work tomorrow. one of the weirdest days of my life.

― frogbs, Wednesday, March 13, 2024 4:09 PM (six days ago)

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