April 17, 2020: Timeline, Milestones -

On Tuesday, March 10, (back when the Right Thing to do was to support your local small businesses (because, you know, they might have to shut for two weeks, and that would be a financial hardship on them)) we went out to dinner at a restaurant owned by our friends.

The next day, Wednesday, March 11, I went to Portland State for my last Linguistics class of the term, and then a friend and I went to see The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time at Portland Center Stage, having talked about how maybe it would be the last time we could do live theater for a while. (Support local arts!) We were right. That was the last show, and the theater shut the next day.

On Thursday, March 12, out of an abundance of caution, choir practice was cancelled. (Let’s just pause to appreciate how great that timing was – I would have gone to rehearsal that night, because I was still feeling fine.) With no choir to occupy me, I quarantined myself (“quarantine-lite,” sleeping in the guest room while working on my term paper, not doing the whole Purell on the doorknobs thing yet).

As it happened, it took a while to get the term paper licked, so I stayed in the guest room Friday and Saturday nights too, working late, then tumbling into bed. I got sick on Sunday, March 15^th, suddenly and unmistakably.

I was pretty wired when I got sick, not remotely sleepy, and though I attempted to practice what one friend calls “sleep hygiene,” my body was Wide Awake. So when sleep failed, I would watch dumb TV, or listen to meditation tapes, as opposed to lying bolt awake in the dark and spiraling. I also sent some very long messages to a few friends, in the middle of the night. Then I realized that I was wearing them out – no individual friend had time to read my abundant thoughts, least of all my buddies who were working in hospitals, or creating an entire home-school curriculum, or worrying about their aged parents or their disabled offspring, or working twenty hours a day in scientific research, or just freaking out entirely, as we were all freaking out.

So I got the idea of posting stuff on Facebook.

My thinking, such as it was (wired and not sleeping much) went like this: right now, NOBODY has the time to read what I am compelled to write. But I have an awfully nice, and very carefully curated, Facebook friend group. If I post my thoughts on FB, nobody HAS to read them.

But somebody WILL.

I figured: if I am willing to process on social media, I can crowd-source this awful experience, spread myself out over a bunch of friends, get random supportive messages from whoever has time to read what I write, and no one person has to bear the whole weight.

I posted my original “Five Competing Imperatives” analysis on FB on March 20^th, five days after falling ill.

That post begins, “Okay, people, I just grasped the whole current situation.” I had written it in the wee hours, which helped distract me from the terrible “fire ants” sensation that would awaken me every time I managed to fall asleep. 

Somewhere between March 20^th and March 31^st, I started getting requests to Facebook-friend people I didn’t know, because those people could use, or might enjoy, the COVID-19 posts. I didn’t really want to friend anyone I didn’t know. My curated FB friend group suits me down to the ground. But I did a little bit of stranger-friending.

On March 31, I decided to make a blog, open to anybody, so I could send strangers there if they wanted to read along. I went back into Facebook and grabbed all the C19 posts. I started the blog with that seminal post, March 20, 2020, “Okay people ….” (If you are thinking, Boy, she sounds manic, you are a teensy bit late to the party. We have established that I sounded pretty manic for much of the time I was ill, which was about 14 days, give or take.)

So in the archive there are a boatload of posts dated March 31, and then another boatload dated April 2. (I dinked around on April 1 while a couple of dear friends did some beta-testing, and I kept trying new layouts and color themes and fonts and whatnot.) And then pretty soon after that, the dates that are auto-filled by the blog program finally matched the dates the posts were entered.

The blog just hit 50 posts and, amazingly (stance adverbial!) 31 countries, six continents.  It has been grand to have all of you reading it and cheering me on.

I’m thoroughly well, all the way back to (my version of) normal.

I’m still pondering what the heck is going on all around us, and the ramifications, so I’m still writing.

I wanted to thank you all for your company. Extroverts have to find some way to deal with social distancing, and having you around makes it feel like there isn’t that much distance.  

Thanks also for bearing with me when I got extremely wound up. A quite private young friend asked me if I regretted getting naked, as it were, in public.  (Implication: SHE sure would have regretted it.) I told her it wasn’t like getting naked in PUBLIC. It was like getting naked at your own birthday party, because wasps got inside your clothes: the people who were there may not have wanted to see all that, but they will continue to care about you regardless.