{"id":973,"date":"2020-03-16T21:15:09","date_gmt":"2020-03-17T01:15:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/?p=973"},"modified":"2020-03-16T21:20:02","modified_gmt":"2020-03-17T01:20:02","slug":"life-during-coronavirus-going-the-social-distance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/life-during-coronavirus-going-the-social-distance\/","title":{"rendered":"Life During Coronavirus: Going the Social Distance"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Image by Pete Linforth<\/a> from Pixabay<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

So what do you do when you\u2019re a horror writer and real life suddenly starts resembling the Stephen King novels you grew up reading?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

If you\u2019re me, you thank whoever\u2019s listening that you married a man\u00a0with some foresight.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

About a month\u00a0ago, while Bill and I were preparing for a grocery shopping trip, he spoke up.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe need to start buying some extra stuff this week. We should have enough on hand\u00a0that if there were some reason we couldn\u2019t get groceries\u2014if supply lines got disrupted, or if we were put under a quarantine\u2014we\u2019d be OK for at least a month. Because this virus? It’s going to make things really<\/em> bad.\u201d<\/p>\n

Let me tell you something about Bill: He doesn\u2019t freak out. He\u2019s the one who keeps his head when the media\u2019s threatening imminent death by Ebola. He\u2019s level-headed and practical.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

So when he said that<\/em>, you better believe I listened.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

At no point did we clear store shelves of anything, but we stocked up on our usual staples like dried beans, brown rice, and pasta. And whenever Bill had to make a quick stop to grab bananas or something, he\u2019d pick up another pack of toilet paper.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

A little over a week ago, we went to Wegmans for some weekend dinner ingredients, and the section\u00a0where all their toilet paper is\u00a0normally stocked was bare. We didn\u2019t (and still don\u2019t) need any, but it was a jarring sight.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Eagle-eyed viewers will notice that there was still plenty of booze in the next aisle. I wonder if that’s changed.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

All the honey bears were gone too. I couldn\u2019t figure that one out until it occurred to me that maybe people were worried about sore throats and thought extra honey would help.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But aside from the absence of TP and honey, there was plenty of food available that night. From what I\u2019m hearing, that is increasingly not the case for people who\u2019ve gone food shopping in the last couple of days. Not for the first time and (hopefully) not for the last, I’m\u00a0very glad I listened to Bill.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

I\u2019m a loner who is very well-suited to self-isolation, which is good because I haven\u2019t been in the office since last Wednesday and have refused to go out on the weekends. As someone with an autoimmune disease who is also in the age group at which COVID-19 statistically starts hitting harder, I don\u2019t want to screw around with this.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve always been really solitary. Babysitters loved me when I was a kid because I\u2019d just go up to my room and read. I confounded my fellow college students by brazenly eating meals alone because I wanted to. Avoiding crowds? Being a hermit? My time to shine! Watch me disappear.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But there\u2019s a dismal knowledge buzzing at the back of my brain: I might not survive this, and if I do, the world will be a fundamentally different place from what it was before this happened. People I love might be gone. Places we love might be out of business, unable to handle the sustained hit to their revenue.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

My job was coming to a close at the end of March anyhow, so there\u2019s uncertainty piled up on top of mystery there. My\u00a0entire company has been told to telecommute until further notice, and I wonder if I\u2019ve already seen my office building and all my coworkers there for the last time.\u00a0<\/span>Financially, we\u2019ll be fine. But back when we got the word about our jobs in November, this is so<\/em> not how I pictured the last couple of weeks at the job playing out.<\/p>\n

And there is very little I can do other than shelter in place and hope that neither Bill nor I cross paths with one of the reckless idiots in life (and in our utterly useless executive branch, argh) who believe the virus is no worse than a cold and will go away if we just ignore it like it\u2019s the uncool kid in the school cafeteria or something, because America. Sigh. “Getting coronavirus to own the libs” is the most 2020 thing that’s ever 2020ed.<\/p>\n

So I stay home. I read. I telecommute. I\u2019m trying to write some new things, but my brain doesn\u2019t want to focus and it\u2019s hard. Parliament House sent me my first round of edits for Tidepool<\/em>, so that’s been a bright spot in a dark time. I\u2019m playing lots of video games. Doom 64<\/em> is being re-released on the Nintendo Switch this Friday and I am irrationally excited about that because apparently I didn\u2019t waste enough of the 90s parked in front of it. Maybe I just wish it was the 90s again.<\/p>\n

And I try not to start freaking out every time my throat hurts a little. And I take my temperature every day.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And we wait. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So what do you do when you\u2019re a horror writer and real life suddenly starts resembling the Stephen King novels…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44],"tags":[45,47,46],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/973"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=973"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/973\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":978,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/973\/revisions\/978"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=973"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=973"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=973"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}