Corona Letters #59 - Monday Musings - (no politics)

Sure I miss my old life.  I miss my friends.  I miss my kid who moved to the middle of nowhere during the pandemic.   I miss hugs.   I miss going out to eat, or having coffee with a friend.

The thing is, I'm terribly afraid I'm adjusting to the "New Way".

I don't know about everyone else but when I do find myself out and about I can't wait to get back to the safety of my home.   When, on the rare occasion I run into someone I know in the grocery store and we have a socially-distanced chat, with masks on, I spend the entire interaction wanting to run away as fast and furiously as I can.

This is not me.  This is not who I once was.

I was the person that people feared seeing in the grocery store before.  "Oh no!  She's going to talk to me!" they would say when they spotted me a few aisles away.  Then they'd hide safely in the cat food aisle until I passed.

I am an extrovert, a very social person, but this pandemic has changed me.

I may have had FOMO before but now I have FOMMyCouch, and it's a bad case.

I am no longer fit for socializing with other humans.

Sure, I can text, and on a good day when I've brushed my hair and put on a fresh shirt (which is exceedingly rare), I might be willing to Zoom or FaceTime.

Many moons ago I worked for an organization that sent high school students abroad for a year.   We would always tell the students that coming home from a year abroad can be much more challenging than the year abroad itself.    You expect a foreign country to be different than home and you adjust to a different way of life, but when you come home, what you don't realize is that YOU have changed and you no longer fit into your old life the way you did before.   Re-entry can be extremely challenging when you've had a life altering experience.

Can you experience re-entry when you've never left your couch?

Tune in to find out.

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I'm not the cook I thought I was.   For the past 25 years of my marriage I have been the head chef of the household.   I always fancied myself a pretty good cook, at least better than average.   Of course, in actuality, I cooked about 15 dishes really, really well.   I stopped using recipes a long time ago because I just knew how to cook things.  Who needed a recipe?

Apparently, I did.

Over the course of this pandemic, my husband has decided to "dabble" in the kitchen.   AND he uses real, actual recipes. It turns out that there are all sorts of recipes out there from all over the world and you can make things from Australia, Japan, and Kazakstan, if you are willing to use a recipe.   I found myself sitting at the dinner table in awe and, to be honest, I felt a little inadequate.

So, being the competitive person I am, I started looking up recipes too!   Wow!  The possibilities are endless!

And, let's not forget to mention the plating!  My husband started making our dinner plates into works of art and he really upped the ante.   Our dinner table became like an episode of Iron Chef, and we even have our resident judge, the returned college student, who is not afraid to offer criticism like, "I don't like beans.  There are beans in this Chili," and "Not enough ginger".

And tonight my husband and I spent 15 minutes in the kitchen debating whether Bok Choy or Broccoli holds up better with the homemade teriyaki sauce that I made.  He is team Bok Choy and I'm team Broccoli.   He's just wrong.

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Social Media likes to reminds us about what we were doing this time last year.

"You have a memory from this day last year. You wanna see?  Click here!"

This time of year, this can trigger a lot.  December is a usually a busy month.

"On this day last year, you spent the day in Boston with a group of friends, and you ate at a restaurant and all squeezed into a booth that was too small for your party.  You wanna see a picture?"

At first, I look at the picture with nostalgia.   Oh, how I miss moments like these.  Why can't we have this kind of fun anymore?   Why can't we have good things?

Then I look at the picture with 2020 vision and I see the bread basket that we all grabbed rolls from, and the different cocktails on the table that were passed around because "YOU HAVE TO TRY THIS!" and there was that plate of shared fries, and the collective salads that we all stabbed our forks into, and then there were the three shared desserts for 10 people.  Everyone grabbing! touching! biting!

There was also a lot of conversing and laughing while eating.   Little droplets flying out of everyone's mouths, right towards each other like heat seeking missiles, fully loaded with all kinds of good stuff.

There were no masks.

Just germs.  And they were EVERYWHERE.

It's like we were trying to get the flu.

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I don't know about you, but I'm pretty comfy on my couch, or in my kitchen making a mean teriyaki sauce, that goes excellent with broccoli.   

I'm not making any Facebook worthy memories.

I'm okay with all of that.

Re-entry is going to be a bitch.