1. As well as a well-fitting N95, it will be considered gauche to go out in public without a small rectangular mirror glued to your forehead, so that anyone you interact with can surreptitiously adjust their posture and facial expression to be maximally flattering.
2. Pass codes will be required in order to prevent racist amateur pornography trolls from crashing family dinners.
3. An enterprising tech-savvy school teacher will make a fortune with an app that allows teachers to instantly "mute all participants" in a real life classroom; meanwhile students will have to paint their palms blue in order for the teacher to notice them when they raise their hands.
4. 'Business casual' will be redefined as wearing pyjamas rather than nothing at all.
5. When get-togethers become boring, it will be acceptable to entertain yourself by picking people up and arranging them all just the way you like them on your wall. Also, if you're the host, you can swap out their real names and assign your guests more amusing names at your discretion. 'Peanutbutter Dragon' is good.
6. If you need to go to the loo during a work meeting, it'll be totally normal to just squat down in the middle of the conference room and go, as long as you turn the lights out first and don't make any noise while you do it.
7. Six-foot distancing will be automatically maintained by the portable green screens which everyone will walk around with strapped to their backs. The curated background images being continually projected onto these screens will give the subtle impression that everyone else is way cooler than you, and probably spent their SIP time training for marathons and writing devastatingly well-researched & intensely clever nonfiction, and definitely did not bother with inane blogs or YouTube videos of Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee (start at 2:45 if you're going to watch the Obama episode, which will make you nostalgic for the days when we had a sane person with a sense of humour and humility in the Oval Office).
8. If you go out to a restaurant with a group of three or more, you will be kicked out after 40 minutes and will have to come back in again to finish your food, unless it's a fancy restaurant that charges more than $15 per entree.
9. Children will be flabbergasted at the ease with which their parents are able to maintain ongoing conversations without tech support.
10. Your sex life will -------- and the---- n----- rhinocer------- --sn't ------- ---- --- - Anderson Cooper's vacation home------- ---- ----- several million yen ---- ------ back of the sofa --- and that of course will be the definitive solution to climate chan-- ---- -------- ----- ---- sorry, I appear to be cut--------- ----- --- think I'm ---- connection problems ----
Tuesday 14 April 2020
Thursday 2 April 2020
Day 19: dragon table completed (except for varnish)
We invented a whole series of new words to be extra posh yesterday which consist of adding the ending 'aviar' (as in caviar) to the end of whatever you are talking about, which at the time happened to be dingoes and the song "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious;" I am more than a little worried that after 12 days straight with no one but each other for company that our language will drift so far from standard English that we will actually lose contact with the mainland and our loved ones will have to send in a team of crack forensic linguists to help decipher the squeaks, grunts, giggles, and references to dingoviars if they want to be able to communicate. Linear B's got nothing on us.
Wednesday 1 April 2020
Day 17-18: oy.
The shelter in place order just got extended until May 3rd in Alameda County, with tighter restrictions than the previous one; I have been advised to keep my work badge with me so that I can prove I am 'essential' if I get stopped by the police while on my way to work... so it is getting serious down here. Luckily, the Daiso store in El Cerrito Plaza is still open, presumably so that the brave and overworked ICU staff who need to keep their hair off their faces as they perform bronchoscopies on COVID patients will have access to crucial life-saving plastic sushi- and cat-shaped barrettes; JoAnn Fabrics likewise has a sign on the door saying that they decided to stay open "in order to help with the grassroots effort to donate home-made face masks to hospitals." (If you don't know anyone who sews this might sound convincing, but please trust me that anyone capable of sewing a facemask also has a gigantic fabric stash which they should have gotten rid of a long time ago, and needs JoAnn's like an addict needs their dealer, i.e. like a hole in the head.)
Meanwhile, I worked a positively sepulchral Urgent Care shift on Monday; I was scheduled to work a second shift on Tuesday, but it got cancelled because they can't justify paying two doctors to be there, so instead I spent the day in a mighty orgy of semi-productive procrastination. I am scheduled to teach an art class for three weeks in July to fifteen 10-11 year olds, a job which I got on the strength of a conversation with the director of the UW Early Entrance Program at a Bay Area fundraising mixer (which truthfully I only went to because it was at a really nice tapas restaurant in SF), and I have been putting off finishing the syllabus for the class (due April 1st) for weeks 'n' weeks 'n' weeks, initially because I thought, whatevs, I have weeks to do it! and then more recently because the world has been getting cancelled and it seemed unlikely that art classes would be any exception. I talked to Trophy BF in the morning and we both agreed we were going to get right down to our various plans for the day, and then we both engaged in what can most kindly be described as meta-faffing. I successfully nailed everything in the bottom two squares of my Eisenhower box (walking to a closed hardware store to attempt to buy varnish for the dining room table, e.g., which is how I know that Daiso & JoAnn's are still open), but did not actually get down to syllabus-writing until (squirm) nine o'clock at night; meanwhile Trophy BF put together a binder of his planned schedule for the next few weeks of staying at home in which he actually scheduled his daily shits.
I got to have a long chat with my delicious one and a half year old godson, who doesn't so much chat as provide performance art pieces (live motion-sickness-inducing tours of the lowest two feet of the cabin in the woods where his family is holed up, with particular detail to the cabinetry in the kitchen and occasional random glimpses of the ceiling; the soundtrack is not-hugely-comprehensible-but-impressively-polyglot squeals), and had virtual dinner with a friend who is considering 'going on retreat' during this time, which means upping her usual meditation practice of 1.5 hours a day to six hours a day. I have tried meditating for fifteen minutes at a time for the last couple of days and both times was ready to crawl out of my brain by about minute six; I think probably safest for the world if I stick to painting dragons and playing Lego with p'tite. We have one more day of 'distance learning, and then twelve days of 'extended spring break', just her 'n' me; watch this space to see if I'm still standing by the end of it.
Meanwhile, I worked a positively sepulchral Urgent Care shift on Monday; I was scheduled to work a second shift on Tuesday, but it got cancelled because they can't justify paying two doctors to be there, so instead I spent the day in a mighty orgy of semi-productive procrastination. I am scheduled to teach an art class for three weeks in July to fifteen 10-11 year olds, a job which I got on the strength of a conversation with the director of the UW Early Entrance Program at a Bay Area fundraising mixer (which truthfully I only went to because it was at a really nice tapas restaurant in SF), and I have been putting off finishing the syllabus for the class (due April 1st) for weeks 'n' weeks 'n' weeks, initially because I thought, whatevs, I have weeks to do it! and then more recently because the world has been getting cancelled and it seemed unlikely that art classes would be any exception. I talked to Trophy BF in the morning and we both agreed we were going to get right down to our various plans for the day, and then we both engaged in what can most kindly be described as meta-faffing. I successfully nailed everything in the bottom two squares of my Eisenhower box (walking to a closed hardware store to attempt to buy varnish for the dining room table, e.g., which is how I know that Daiso & JoAnn's are still open), but did not actually get down to syllabus-writing until (squirm) nine o'clock at night; meanwhile Trophy BF put together a binder of his planned schedule for the next few weeks of staying at home in which he actually scheduled his daily shits.
I got to have a long chat with my delicious one and a half year old godson, who doesn't so much chat as provide performance art pieces (live motion-sickness-inducing tours of the lowest two feet of the cabin in the woods where his family is holed up, with particular detail to the cabinetry in the kitchen and occasional random glimpses of the ceiling; the soundtrack is not-hugely-comprehensible-but-impressively-polyglot squeals), and had virtual dinner with a friend who is considering 'going on retreat' during this time, which means upping her usual meditation practice of 1.5 hours a day to six hours a day. I have tried meditating for fifteen minutes at a time for the last couple of days and both times was ready to crawl out of my brain by about minute six; I think probably safest for the world if I stick to painting dragons and playing Lego with p'tite. We have one more day of 'distance learning, and then twelve days of 'extended spring break', just her 'n' me; watch this space to see if I'm still standing by the end of it.
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