#i just mass applied to other jobs again... i miss my old walmart one so much i was so good at it

[technomanticsystem]

Turns out that the constant pain in my hands and trying to deal with it (on top of depression) has left me exhausted

[rylredrants]

Early COVID Life (another from the vaults: 04/26/2020)

Excerpt from a personal history about 2020

March 15th was my last time in a restaurant as of April 26th. (ETA- as of November 15th, I’ve still not been to a restaurant in the US.)

The pandemic had been a conversation topic with both of the dates I’d been on the previous week. The screenings in some airports had begun in January and the first confirmed case in the US had been noted on January 21st. Back then it was still being called the “Wuhan Virus” because of its origins in the Wuhan province of China. Italy had gone on full lock-down back on February 23rd. 

The ‘national emergency’ in the US was announced on March 13th- the same day as my first “first date” with a border patrol agent. 

The panic buying, specifically toilet paper hoarding, began that week as well. My brunch date told me that he had hired someone to do some work for him that morning. He had offered $300 and the guy said he would take $250 and a pack of toilet paper. 

Basketball was the first sport to be cancelled on March 11th.. the Utah Jazz had 2 positive cases. Baseball, hockey, soccer, and the Olympic Games followed. For me, it was learning that the WWE had shut down that made it feel real. Not because I’m an avid fan these days but because they were the first to hold a major event after 9-11 when other people were still afraid to gather in crowds for fear of more attacks. 

Utah was hit with a series of earthquakes in the midst of it all with the biggest one on March 18th.Oh, and there were 2 meteors that came, in relative terms, closer to hitting the earth than any others in decades. Can we say, end of the world feeling much?

The first ‘stay at home’ order was in California on March 19th. Blue states were still scoffing at it as ‘liberal fake news’ in the wake of tweets like this from 45: 

By March 23rd several other states issued similar orders.

Here in AZ it wasn’t official until March 31st.  

On April 3rd CDC guidelines were released recommending cloth face coverings when in public in addition to the ‘social distance’ recommendation of staying 6’ or more from other people. An old friend in CA was making masks so I ordered 2 from her.

Monday, April 13th was the first trip into the grocery store since the pandemic began. My best friend picked me up at 6:45am and I gave her one of the two masks that arrived from California a couple days before. We pulled up to Walmart and saw a line of people outside waiting for the 7am opening. By this point, stores had begun limiting hours in order to properly sanitize things each night and some places started giving senior citizens an extra hour before general opening 1-2 times each week.

Our face masks were made of cotton on the inside and denim on the outside. I made the mistake of not taking my gum out of my mouth before putting mine on which only added to the difficulty breathing. On top of that, my glasses fogged up over and over again. It was awful.

The store itself didn’t seem too bad. The toilet paper aisle was about 10% stocked. The usual brands weren’t there and signs hung on empty shelves that said it was limited to one package per household. I got myself a pack of the Great Value brand, even though I had several rolls still at home. I also bought 2 two-packs of my dish gloves because they were another item that had become hard to come by. 

My basket was filled with frozen tater tots, steak fries and jalapeno poppers... junk food that I normally wouldn’t keep in the house, along with 2 packs of my favorite cookies, tuna, shampoo (2 big bottles) and deodorant even though I wasn’t out of either, command strips for hanging the 2 puzzles I’d recently completed, Kleenex because they had them in stock and had been hard to come by, mini loaf pans because I was baking banana bread before it was trendy, and instant coffee because I wanted to try the whipped coffee thing I kept seeing online.

I spent $100 and got $40 in cash that I would later turn into quarters for laundry and water bottle refills.

It has felt like Groundhog’s Day… work, dinner, couch, bed, stare at the darkness, and eventually fall asleep and do it again. 

I’ve had even more trouble than usual concentrating at work and instead find myself scrolling Facebook incessantly. Earlier this month, my department fired 3 people and transferred another out to her previous position which has made me that much more nervous about my job. Despite that, I’ve still struggled to get motivated to do the work I’ve just been assigned including a new course to create and an article talking about what my company is doing for our customers “during this time.”

I began watching the daily ‘Coronavirus Briefings’ from the White House as often as possible just because I’ve found that words really can’t capture just how awful the scene is. One day they showed a video that was all about the administration’s “terrific” response to the virus. Reporters described the video as a campaign video and when questioned about a missing chunk of time in it between the end of January when the Commander-in-Tweet said he had ‘bought time’ for the country and early March when they officially announced a national emergency 45 had his now-standard tantrum including, calling reporters “fake news” and attacking their credibility rather than giving any kind of answer.

Another day last week 45 started rambling on about possible cures including injecting UV light or disinfectants into patients. I immediately messaged the co-worker who has been posting about this kind of thing daily and told her that the next big episode would be about people injecting household disinfectants. 

Within 24 hours Lysol, Clorox and other household cleaning companies released statements telling people NOT to consume or inject their products. This is the world we live in.

Also last week, the governor of Nevada broke CNN’s Anderson Cooper with her lack of reasoning about how and why Las Vegas should re-open. There have been protests in several states as people who have been unemployed for weeks with only a single $1200 check from the government to help are demanding the economy re-open now. These protests have included masked (white) men holding guns and people with signs such as the one that read “My body, my choice” with an image of a face mask. All the while, other states have used the pandemic as a way of further restricting abortion access calling them ‘non-emergency medical procedures.’

People have applied for unemployment en masse while 2 trillion dollars in federal funds, grants, and loans “designed to help small businesses” (The CARES Act) were snatched up almost immediately. Some funds were granted to large publicly traded companies including as Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse ($20M) and Potbellies’ ($10M). They are among a handful of these companies who are returning the money only after public outcry.

I’m scared. 

Not of the virus necessarily, my county has just passed 30 cases which pales in comparison to a lot of other places, but I’m scared for how this is changing “normal” in terms of social interactions that would have typically lead to deeper bonds and eventually, hopefully, a new relationship for me.

A couple weeks ago, I loaned my sewing machine to a friend. She’s been notoriously anti-social and when I came by she invited me to hang out at a “social distance” for a bit. We ended up sitting on the concrete outside her front door about 5’ apart for about an hour just chatting. For her to feel the need for socializing is big. It’s on par with me having the urge to exercise (which hasn’t happened… yet).

I’m scared for my friend in Baltimore whose partner is a nurse in New York where the bodies have been piling up for weeks. He works for the Smithsonian and has been able to work from home for all but one day/week. Coping with the isolation for him has included turning meals into art that he posts along with the daily videos of his strongman feats and the occasional live shows with other performers who are struggling financially.

I’m scared for the New Jersey firefighter who told me about the increase in kitchen fires because people who never cooked are having to do so for the first time. He then told me about a friend that lost both her parents to COVID. She was unable to be with them in their final hours and their bodies were put into refrigerated trucks because there isn’t enough room in the morgues now. 

 If something happens to him, I’ll never know. He’s not on social media and we don’t have any friends in common who could tell me about it. He could just disappear one day. Or he could just appear. He’s talked about running away from his life for the last 5 years and I think this is really showing him that it’s time to make a change.

I’m scared for the friend in WA working 80+ hours a week between his two jobs. His health was shaky before his daughter’s murder in November 2018 and he lived in his car for months during the trial. He is finally working and has a roof over his head but is in contact with people daily who could potentially get him sick. Again. Because he was one of the people whose blood was being tested for antibodies, assuming he had already had COVID and survived.

I’m scared for my ex-husband who retired from the Army and moved to DC for his dream job right before the lock-downs started. The start date for his dream job was pushed back, and his last Army paycheck was getting closer and closer. Fortunately his resume is one that allowed him to start another job rather quickly and he just got an official start date at the dream job. But he is alone with the dogs, trying to rebuild himself and his life much in the way I am right now. 

We had friends in the area from the 3 years we lived there, but the virus means that all of the parties he wanted to go to that I wasn’t comfortable with… those parties may never return. They don’t have the grocery pick up options I have here, and his health has been an issue of concern for a long time. 

His girlfriend in the quad was a nurse who said that he had the ‘trifecta for a heart attack’ with diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol. We are still legally married on paper so I have health insurance and am the primary beneficiary on his life insurance, but money can’t replace him. 

We may be separated but he is my family… and the only family I’ve really got.  And money wouldn’t make it any easier for me to have to re-arrange my life again and somehow go get the dogs if, Gods forbid, something were to happen to him.

It’s all a mess. It shouldn’t be such a big decision to go grocery shopping. 

Seeing people in movies and TV just casually touching one another and hugging shouldn’t seem so foreign already… but it is and it does. I know that we will never got back to the way it was. Masks are going to be part of my wardrobe for the foreseeable future. 

Just meeting a new person for coffee will feel riskier than unprotected sex, which makes dating a completely different experience… assuming I bite the bullet and reactivate my OkCupid account at all. And rather than calling my best friend and going out for lunch right now, I’m going to go stare at my stocked pantry with ‘nothing to eat’ and end up having leftover biscuits and gravy before putting on something resembling clothes, even if it’s just so I can take the trash out.

This is my life right now. This is the world we live in.