Quarantined-ish Day 18
Saturday, April 4, 2020 - OKC, OK

4:38am
Spent an hour in the dark, my mind lit up by memories past and daydreams new. I love early mornings more than any other time of day. <— Also, this line is leftover from yesterday, but it applies today, so I’m leaving it. Efficiency. We’ll roll with that.

7:49am
Opened my email to check today’s YTT schedule and got distracted by today’s isolation journal prompt. The gist: write about your awkwardness (I can TOTALLY do that), and the idea holder of this one: a jazz musician. That wouldn’t ordinarily be noteworthy, but just ten hours ago, I was all but drooling over this blog post Contagion wrote… about flipping jazz! I’ll save the link here for posterity… and in the event that I do ever publicize this because if you’ve made it to day 18 with me, you’ll want this as a refreshing change of pace. Plus it’s fucking brilliant.

9:45am
YTT weekend has me back on Zoom. It’s good to see my trainees again, even if through a screen, and the conversation is fascinating. And funny. And connective. And lots of talk about the vagus nerve.

2:18pm
bluff.

4:04pm
I stand in the line to get into Whole Foods. Six feet apart, accurately marked by the blue tape. Everyone but me is wearing a mask. I didn’t think about it. I literally just read the recommendation this morning, but it never occurred to me. He files us in in twos, reminiscent of most scenes in the Handmaids Tale. I’ve said multiple times that it feels like I’m walking around in a novel. Today was the most walking-around-in-a-novel I’ve ever felt. It’s both fascinating and unnerving. I run into Lisa, and, excited for three dimensional human connection, we spend twenty-five minutes in the condiment aisle, trying to remember to position ourselves six feet apart as we move over for people to snag mustard.

5:06pm
I shared a very personal post with Contagion in a moment of bravery. I blame Lisa for that. Or Whole Foods. Or the mustard.

8:12pm
Can I make myself watch one more YTT video?

8:54pm
Just, in this moment, as started to transfer this from my phone notes to my laptop, I read the 5:06 entry. I reread it quickly, to assure myself that it wasn’t too soul revealing, when I realized that I was describing my BEDROOM! What?! At this point, I forget that we just became friends. I didn’t think about the fact that he doesn’t know me well enough to know that I could’ve been writing this isolation piece about any room in my house. I was just IN my bedroom. Why can’t Squarespace have a face palm emoji. Also, why do we suddenly need emojis to properly communicate? We’ve already done that with hieroglyphics. I guess if you wait long enough, everything really does come back into style.