I’m pretty much over this whole thing. I thought I was MADE for quarantine, as I am lazy. I routinely call off from work for ridiculous excuses that everyone knows are bullshit just so I can stay in bed. And now my dreams have finally come true, I can stay home in bed!. And it’s a freaking nightmare. Since I am by myself, I have no checks and balances, and occasionally all hell breaks loose. Some WEEKS (god…) I’m fine, but others, like this last week, have been complete insanity. I can’t keep a normal sleep schedule, so the other night I decided that rather than wake up in the late afternoon, I’d just sleep really long and wake up early. But then I woke up in the middle of the night after about 18 hours of sleep. So you would think I would then be actually tired after that day, and I was, but somehow I powered through it and here I am at 10:00 am. I am supposed to be “working” now, so I kind of have to be alive. If I go to sleep I’d never answer my phone. So I guess I am going with this. I’m not proud of it, and I do hope I don’t fuck anything up business wise and get fired. I have also had a fair number of beers.
I just responded to an email from a client and CC’d my boss though, and I have a feeling he saw that and was like “What on earth is she doing up at 10:00? That’s impossible. I bet she never went to sleep…”.
Thank god I’m still employed though. (for now???!). It’s dicey, and I know a lot of people don’t have that vague sense of security anymore. So god, counting my blessings while I have them.
As the country starts reopening I wonder how it will play out. I don’t think it will end well.
I wonder what NYC will be like more and more. What will happen to all of these buildings with office space? Nobody who has money will want to come back. My fancy boss that is sequestered in the Hamptons is already planning to put his Park Avenue apartment on the market and move his family to a suburb. My less fancy boss, but still fancy enough to have a home in ‘the country’ (upstate NY) is planning on riding this out up there until Labor Day. I am not sure how the office rent situation is going, I really should know, but I know it’s not being paid. I think a lot of people will move residences, and definitely the whole ‘go to the office’ thing is going to change.
Will all of these huge skyscrapers just be empty? What will that do to residential rents? It is kind of interesting…In a way I am thrilled that all of these greedy landlords will essentially be fucked now, but it’s also kind of sad. Will NY become some desolate zombie land? I doubt that, but I like entertaining versions of that. NYC was already becoming pretty horrific in it’s commercialism and greed. I’d like to see it return to more of a seedy, 80’s/90’s style NY. It could go that route, or it could just get worse, maybe.
I saw an article today that said the salad bars were over in NY, and I thought those were already killed off after the Rajneesh movement twenty or more years ago when they tried to poison a bunch of people in Oregon at the salad bar. I used to eat at a ‘by the pound’ buffet at a local deli in NY and my boss at the time told me they had caught a guy spritzing urine on the food, so they lost popularity, but still- up until this, fuckin’ Café 28 on 28th and 5th had the full salad bar and hot buffet, pay by the pound. Too expensive for me, but I appreciated that they had that to offer. I occasionally gave in to eating there, and I will miss places like that.
I wonder if automats will come back? I HOPE SO!!!!! I’m also loving that drive in theaters are experiencing a renaissance and drive up restaurants might become popular again. I used to love going to A&W and placing the order from the phone. And eating in the car. hilarious! Like eating in your car is a treat! But still, I dig it.. I’d love to see some of these things come back, and it’s funny that they may be.
Working for an Architect, I initially thought this would spell disaster – nobody wants to invest in construction or renovate a home in such financial uncertainty, etc. But it turns out one of our current clients is a healthcare provider who we have been designing offices for. And suddenly there is a very strong need for plexiglass shields and shit like that , so a weird niche market or need has developed and will require extensive redesigns of existing spaces, which will hopefully keep us employed.
It’s all interesting, and at the same time deeply horrific and terrifying, and an absolute, utter embarrassment to be an American right now.
I also bought a mask off a guy on the street today, and I am so much happier with it. I hate the masks, but I had just been using a sleep mask that Quatar Airlines had given me last year, and man, that thing sucked. The new one does as well, but, at least now I am pretending to try I guess. I have a reasonably “fashionable” mask. (And a lot more comfortable)
And finally, on a lighter note, my worst injury of all time:
I am proud to say I have never broken a single bone or been hospitalized, I simply suffered this.
Shortly before I dropped out of High School, I was sent to a shrink. I actually kind of liked the guy, but I only saw him once or MAYBE twice, and the only real thing out of it that I got (other than I should, in fact, drop out of school), was that “You have a terrible sense of time…..Your timelines don’t match up, and you just don’t have a grasp on time”…
And I agree. Anyway, that has nothing to do with the story, but I was reminded of it when I tried to determine my age for this one. I was living in Ontario, Oregon – a desert town in basically the middle of nowhere that got very hot in the summer. 100+ degrees would not be unusual in July or whatever.
My brother used to play tennis with my dad (so did I, but only really as a sideshow). My brother was very good and played tournaments in the nearest big city, Boise, Idaho. So I am confused by my age – I am going to say he was 10 years old, even though that was very young.
Which would put me at eight. Back then, I had long blonde hair, a deep dark tan, and I wore little sundresses and stuff. I peg my age at 8 at the latest because that is about when I stopped with the dresses. But up until then, I was all for them, the consummate lady. (okay, that sounds weird. It depends on your definition. I mean up until eight I loved wearing girly clothes . I was not consummating anything other than my love for dumb sundresses).
ANYWAY, perhaps because this was a traumatic event, I remember exactly what I was wearing. My mom had recently taken up sewing, and I was wearing this weird little dress she had made. It was very short, and it just had little ties on the shoulders, and a ruffle on the bottom. It was kind of like a sack dress. A beginner -at -sewing -attempt. The print was cats, in kind of a cartoon/newspaper style printed in little splotches throughout the fabric.
But what I really. REALLY, remember, was the underwear I was wearing. I have no idea where it came from. I would say my mom took a stab at sewing it herself, but I know she wasn’t that ambitious. It was my least favorite pair of underwear. They were white with kind of green polka dots or flecks, and were made of some kind of strange fabric, like polyester, that you would never associate with underwear. They weren’t comfortable, and just didn’t fit right. The elastic around the legs was shot. I remember on various occasions standing around with them on my bare legs and just kind of shaking my legs, and they would come right down. I knew I should just throw them away, but when I wasn’t pretending to be a stripper at eight years old, they would kind of hold in place, so whatever . Thinking back though, seriously WTF with those underwear????!!!
This day must have been a ‘gotta do laundry’ day for the parents, because that’s what I was wearing. The ugly handmade sack dress and the worst underwear in the world.
This was right in the heat of summer, at it’s absolute hottest and sunniest. My brother and my dad were playing tennis and I was along I guess because they might be arrested if they left me elsewhere. There were a few tennis “people” in town, and I remember one of the other abandoned girl siblings was hanging out with me on this shitty playground about a thousand feet from the courts. I want to say it was ‘Dumbo’, as my dad and I called her. Due to her enormous ears. She also had a mother who spoke in a really high pitched “kid voice” when talking to me, which I absolutely hated and felt super condescending, as though I were not aware that she had a normal voice she used for the average human.
God…….Now I don’t want it to be Dumbo that lured me into this unfortunate event! I can’t give those bitches the satisfaction! I am not 100% sure it was, but I’ll go 95%….
The shitty playground had a chintzy little slide and maybe a couple of swings. It was bad though. Like something you could buy at Sears. (or in modern times, Walmart!)
The slide had been baking in the sun for hours. And I’d love to believe I was too smart, but when Dumbo said “let’s go down the slide!”, I watched her go in her smart, modest shorts. And I was like “Fuck yeah!!!”, So I threw myself onto he slide, and that janky dress my mom made which barely covered my ass flew up, those underwear from hell suddenly just dropped, and my bare ass slid down that slide that had been reflecting 100+ degrees of sun.
Naturally, I screamed, and did not stop. Somehow, even from such a distance, my dad heard me and came running. In Ontario they do a lot of farming, so the sprinklers of choice are those kind of industrial looking things attached to long pipes, and the sprinkler heads themselves kind of rotate every second in a long, measured (yet powerful!) stream. like tchk…, tchk…, tchk..My dad grabbed me and stuck my ass literally right in front of one of those.
After that we went home, I was howling in pain. My entire ass over the course of an hour turned into one gigantic blister. And I am not exaggerating. An entire second skin formed.
I don’t really remember much of it, other than referring to it as my “ass burn”, and being at times in pain. But I do remember my dad, brother and I soon after went to the local swimming pool, and for some reason had to leave because I couldn’t swim with that condition. Maybe it just hurt, but I imagine it more like when a blister is popped and there is that bubble of dead skin trying to slough off.
In any case, I remember my dad spraying bactine on my ass.
So yeah, that was my worst injury to date.
The Quarantine Diaries 