#4: Brought to you by Quarantine Brain

Too much mystical bullshit, tbh

April 01, 2020

Actual Updates

Well, what is there to say? Like the rest of you, we’re staying at home; like many of you, I’m working at home. This is going surprisingly ok, now that Matt’s work has shut down for the duration - so he can be the parent during work hours, and I can allegedly get things done. My social life has actually never been busier (since having a kid, anyway… I used to go out, you know), since the idea of having a remote party and playing a game or doing trivia or just having a catch-up lunch with people you don’t see often, all over a tool like Zoom, is now not a wild idea but a necessity.

That said, I’m going slightly bonkers, because we’re right now at the midway point of our actual 14-day quarantine; Matt and Hap both had low fevers for a day or so, and cold symptoms, but they’re both fine now. Was it a mild case or just a regular old cold, I guess we’ll never know, but either way we’re staying inside our house and just going out into our own backyard to let the kid run around and to breathe some fresh air. I cannot wait until next Monday, when we’ll be clear to take a walk. Hap has been remarkably adaptable to this. He’s kind of more whiny than usual (although he is 2 and a half, so maybe this is just par for the course), but he’s accepted that we can’t go outside the yard, which I thought would be really tough for him. I’m trying not to make this newsletter too mybabymybabymybaby - Instagram exists for that - so that’s about as much kid content as I am going to bore you with!

Also, big thumbs down to Amazon both generally (due to its working conditions and permeating evilness) and specifically due to telling us our cat food order would be here on Monday and then telling us on Sunday night that - jk! - it’s postponed indefinitely. We had bought enough food to cover the gap we originally thought we’d have! Don’t tell us the night before we expected it that we aren’t getting it anymore! We can’t go out and buy more! Don’t worry, we scrambled and found an alternative, and they’ll just eat the supermarket food they usually get as a treat for the intervening couple of days, but this is FOOD, you can’t pull that rug out from under people! Or cats. Although pulling a rug out from under a cat does sound kind of entertaining.

Immediately before the staying-home started, at the beginning of this month, though, we were on the annual work ski trip, which is my favorite event of the year. The skiing was good, the friendship was better, and it was sort of a concentrated dose of togetherness before a whole lot of enforced apartness. I’ve carried some of it with me to try and keep me going, but honestly, it’s starting to run out. But one thing that came out of that was that I was still kind of high off the karaoke session of the ski trip (a very close second in importance to the actual skiing, for me) and wanted my friend to sing with me, so I started recording a Quarantine Song of the Day - just me singing, nothing special - until the point where daycare closed and then all the other businesses closed and I wasn’t alone at home while I worked anymore. But if you’d like, here’s one:

Note: did the said friend sing with me, i.e. record some songs back at me? HE DID NOT. So this was basically an exercise in ego for myself.

Time for some articles

I get so mad about how this country deals with pregnancy and birth. I had a midwife, for the record, but she worked within a clinic that was affiliated with a hospital, so not quite the same as what this is about. The Criminalization of the American Midwife

Ah, this is so good. Also, if you can swim, do you remember when you learned? Were you a tiny tot or an adult? Was it joyous or miserable? Or do you just not remember a time when you couldn’t swim? Learning to Swim Taught Me More Than I Bargained for

It just DELIGHTS me that this is what the internet is thinking about right now. Or was, a little while ago? I don’t know, time moves simultaneously fast and slowly, nothing is real, I haven’t left my house in over a week. Anyway: Is Britney Spears a Communist Kween? I hope so!

Since I am a smoking tire fire of a person, this beautiful love letter just made me think about how much I’d feel like I was being judged for being a mediocre and intermittent cook myself in the situation, even if I wasn’t. But also, imagine it!! What It’s Like to Self-Quarantine with a Michelin-Starred Chef

And now, into the “are we actually living in an overwrought novel/video game?” portion:

Some tunes I’ve been into lately

This was the closest I could find to the album version, although this is faster… it’s is also one of my Quarantine Songs of the Day, but obviously you should listen to the real thing and not me:

The chorus is good on its own merits but tell me it doesn’t especially resonate right now:

Literally just now when I went and got this link was when I learned that the chorus says “Lay my head down on your shoulder and run” and not “Lay my head down on your shoulder little one” but, in my defense, how do you run with your head on someone’s shoulder?

This month’s top 5: things The Donnas like

  1. Boys

  2. Getting drunk

  3. Getting high

  4. Turning the radio up real loud

  5. Snacks

My office, insofar as I’ll ever be out that way again, is near a Decatur St., and I always think of the “but there’s no cute boys in Decatur” line every time I see the street sign.

Well, that’s that for now; I hope you get to go outside tomorrow; I hope you’re safe wherever you are; I hope you’re getting by and that if you are, you’re helping struggling people get by; I hope absence is making your heart grow fonder of the people you’re absent from; and I hope we all get to see each other again soon.

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