As anyone will tell you, the past year has been a blur. For me, this is because each day was pretty indistinguishable from the next. Working from home with nowhere to go, my scenery rarely changed. In late March 2020, when the lockdowns started, I became intimately familiar with every nook of the house and all possible walking routes from our front steps. As we accepted the reality of social distancing, I mourned the loss of time with friends and loved ones, but I also lost something else - the events that help me mark the passage of time. My favorite springtime art exhibit, summer concerts, movie screenings, holiday plans, vacations... All of these special occasions are fun in the moment, but they also serve as vital memory milestones distinguishing one season to the next.
It's already month 11 of "coronatimes", and the timewarp is as strong as ever. It's a very privileged problem to have. My life has been quite stable, and that means one day is as unremarkable as the next. As someone without children, I do not have the added stress of 24/7 childcare and distance learning. That also means I do not have the ever-evolving skillset of my offspring to mark time by (Would you believe that Johnny's walking now?). I also don't have the school calendar to differentiate time by (Just 2 more weeks till midterms, then spring break!).
So instead, I started thinking about the other ways I have differentiated time during the past 11 months. For instance, our pets and their many ailments provide one mental calendar to go by. The month our dog tore his second ACL, and the weekly waves of seeming recovery and relapse that followed. The month my parakeet was on the brink of death with an undiagnosable respiratory illness... a period distinguished by the emotional pain of watching her suffer coupled with the financial pain of specialist vet visits. That was soon followed by two intensive weeks of parakeet oral medication administration (a nightmare for all involved... it's amazing the disdain that can be communicated with one tiny, beady eye). As much as I'd prefer to forget those two weeks, in particular, they are some of the most noteworthy in my memory of the past year. And don't worry, my little bird cheated death and is once again squawking up a storm.
But there is one time-tracking methodology that stands out as the most consistent and illustrative of my mental state during the past year... the television calendar.
It all started with Tiger King. The virus was still new to us, as was the "new normal". Everything felt upside down... so why shouldn't our nightly TV viewing reflect that? Looking back, it feels like a lifetime ago we watched that series. The late-night debates over whether Carole Baskin was to blame for her husband's death was easier conversation fodder than the reality before us... Would we ever leave the house again? How likely were we to succumb to this virus? Why were some people we loved acting so carelessly, and others so irrationally? Or... were we the ones handling it all wrong?
After the drama of Tiger King, it was time to settle into something more comforting and sustainable. Enter the Great British Baking Show. Countless seasons of feel-good, friendly competition carried me through the next few months. I needed the beauty of colorful confections to escape the gray misery of my current mental state. My obsession wasn't strictly TV-based, either. My baking show viewing coincided with the phase of quarantine when everyone was experimenting with their ovens. I know this because I had to visit three different grocery stores to buy yeast for my own at-home baking adventures. The show itself wasn't a sufficient escape, so I took to downloading GBBS podcasts and listening to episodes on my long after-work walks. The days were lengthening. I had hours of free time to kill and incessant mental chatter to drown out.
But all good things must come to an end, and as suddenly as my baking show obsession began, it ceased. Where to next? The past. As I continued to use media as my escapist realm of choice, I sought something simpler and more predictable. This period was nostalgic and numbing. We watched all four Indiana Jones movies interspersed with the Back to the Future films. I revisited the Office and 30 Rock, often falling asleep with my laptop propped open on the bed. Fall was here and nothing had changed. My hope for a virus-free world dwindled. Election stress was high. Best to try and not think about the realities of this world and retreat to something known.
And then, something shifted. The election was finally over and vaccine testing gave us glimmers of hope. Even my nostalgia viewing was shifting. I traded the plots of Scranton I could recite from memory for new-to-me seasons of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt... Kimmy's emergence from the bunker a not-so-subtle metaphor for my willingness to rejoin the greater world around me. And re-join I have. We may not be out of the woods, but I think I've finally accepted our reality in the past few months. By the final episode, when Kimmy and crew say goodbye to the tugboat they once called home, I was ready for something different, too. Ready to see things clearly as they are, right now. Ready to focus more on creating and connecting in the world I inhabit, just as it is.
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