Once in a generation
Where were you when COVID-19 hit your city? I was at my coworking space. It was Friday, and eerily warm, eerily quiet and eerily grey outside, a few girls walking around outside in masks. There were four people in the space, including the two people who ran the place, and we chuckled nervously to each other when we spoke about the looming crisis.
“We’re saying it’ll be business as unusual,” the founder responded in a sing-songy voice when asked if they were considering staying open. None of us really knew what was happening, we assumed it would be a weird couple of days and we’d look back on it with the same anecdotal incredulity of the ice storm and its cancelled Christmases, or the blackout of ‘03. I took the streetcar home early, with the aim of missing rush hour, careful not to touch anything with my hands, generously slathering hand sanitizer on anyway. I cancelled plans, wondering all the while if I was being too paranoid. We walked through the grocery store listlessly, noting the bare shelves of toilet paper and Clorox wipes, and the panic slowly started to build. We bought three Ristorante frozen pizzas, three bottles of wine, six beers, a giant wedge of pecorino cheese. On Saturday, with the words “asymptomatic infections” thrumming down on my brain like a backing track, I went to see my parents and my grandmother, likely for the last time in a long time.
Last week, for an assignment, I asked a few restaurant owners to take me through those few days. For them, it hit in the form of cancelled reservations and government announcements. I felt guilty about interviewing them at that moment; one restaurateur had just had to close her restaurant that very morning following the premier’s announcement of a state of emergency, it was like her brain was still catching up to her mouth as she was saying things like, “I think we’re going to try to do delivery” and “I have to pack up the food in the kitchen to distribute to our staff”. Last week, the mode of thought seemed to be, “Sure, they say it’s going to be months long, but how can that work?” This week, it’s clear to everyone that by the time it is over, we will emerge a quite different society altogether.
I am extremely lucky, in that I have a home, my health, sporadic work coming in, and a loving and patient partner who doesn’t mind too much if I interrupt his workday several times a day to ask what he wants for dinner. And because I am so lucky, this time feels like a gift. I can bake bread, do a foot peel mask, stream a barre workout in my living room, work on my novel. I can wax on about the opportunity for quiet, contemplative correction that this virus has given us in an era of excess and burnout. I fantasize about how, when we’re on the other side, we’ll be stronger, and kinder to each other and to our planet.
But it’s hard to square my privileged frame of mind with the real-world impacts felt all over the world: the homeless people who can’t find anywhere to go because of the lock downs, the healthcare workers running perilously low on supplies, the small business owners whose livelihoods are on the line, the maxed out delivery workers, the parents of young children who still have to work from home, the victims of domestic abuse who can’t leave their abusers, the newly unemployed, the elderly, the immunocompromised, the lonely. And when you zoom out: A looming global recession, communities all over the world waking up each day to decimated populations. It’s hard now; it’s going to be harder later, for everyone.
After Trump’s “Chinese virus” comment, I had to log out of Twitter for good. It was just getting too much. For the first few days of the virus in Toronto, I was compulsively panic-scrolling for hours on end trying to keep up; I felt like a citizen of chaos amidst the fury and the caustic replies and the perpetual outrage and the heartbreaking pleas for financial and social assistance from strangers in other countries. When I finally left the platform, I had to remind myself, hey, things are not so bad. And then I find myself having to remind myself again and again that, yes, they are.
Panic is normal. It happens when you realize the ground you thought was solid is actually gelatinous. We’re just flailing our arms to keep balanced.
I hope you’re all staying safe out there, and engaging in the world with equal measures of caution and care. I will try my best, if you do too.
An incomplete list of things that have helped get me through social distancing this week:
This challah recipe (After like two hours of kneading and numerous Youtube tutorials on taming wet dough, the dough was still too wet to braid so I plopped it in a greased loaf pan and it came out splendidly. The next day, we made cinnamon French toast with it and it was honestly the best. The best! 100% would do again.)
Barreworks Instagram Live classes (h/t to Jess Stasskewitch for the incredible tip)
You can keep your Zoom parties, but leave me the long phone calls. I hate videochats and thankfully don’t have to do them much for work. But phone calls are back in a big way.
For the Canto speakers in the room, this recipe for lap mei fan, and the channel for more Hong Kong comfort dishes.
The Radiolab-produced Dolly Parton’s America podcast
Followed by: the Jad Abumrad episode of Longform.
Sour cream and onion Crispy Minis, and those seemingly bottomless bags of Cha Cha Cheer spicy sunflower seeds
Revisiting Slings and Arrows on CBC Gem
Paid magazine and newspaper subscriptions. Instead of scrolling Twitter, I surf the home pages for the Toronto Star, the New York Times and the Vox Media Network (which includes The Cut, New York magazine and Grub Street) and it does actually feel better on my mental health. Plus - I love the peaceful sensation of not being paywalled.
The Stories feature on Duolingo for French makes me feel like a Parisian strolling the boulevards, getting into some droll affairs.
Lo-fi hip hop beats when the neighbour’s kid is out of control and I’m trying to write
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