Busy Quarantine
My father once told me he’d learned over time that to-do lists are kind of like the tides: sometimes it’s high tide, and sometimes it’s low tide, but he’d always been trying to reach no water, and he’d eventually realized that just wasn’t going to happen.
I’ve been thinking about that of late, whenever I see various ‘things to do during self-isolation’ lists getting emailed around, or people complaining on Twitter about being bored out of their minds. Because, on my end, even having cleared my schedule of every outside-the-apartment appointment and obligation, I’m still making it to the end of each day feeling totally behind on everything I could and should be doing.
That said, I’ve also been extremely productive. I just have so much more that I want to get done. And that doesn’t even include the less urgent and obligated stuff, like catching up on the pile of books I’m hoping to read, or the list of movies I’d like to watch, or just taking some time to stare out the window and reflect on the big picture of life.
Part of the problem, I think, is that I still don’t really have a fixed schedule. I’m hoping to get that figured out shortly, adding a more formal start and end to my workday, making sure I observe an actual weekend. Anything that adds some regularity and contour to my self-isolated life. This whole thing could stretch on for quite a while, and as much as I’d like to come out the other end with a list of accomplishments, I’m even more concerned about getting there with my sanity still intact.
2020-03-19
Papered
Despite my prior hesitancy, I did, in fact, head out for a run yesterday. And, at about two in the afternoon, the streets of New York were still surprisingly busy. Though I was able to steer clear of anyone I saw by a margin of at least 15 feet, I ran past our local Trader Joe’s, where dozens of people were queued up outside, sandwiched together, waiting to enter a store I assume was even more densely packed inside. We’re not exactly crushing this whole social distancing thing, apparently.
Then, late in the evening, when foot traffic had all but disappeared, Jess and I headed out together, walking down to a deserted Riverside Park. Along the way, we crossed the street (or re-routed entirely) a few times, to avoid the rare handfuls of people (mostly in their teens and twenties) whom we did see. As we both agreed, we’d never felt more like characters in a post-apocalyptic thriller.
Back home, we re-inventoried our food and supplies, and placed an Amazon order for the last few things we’d need (aside from, ideally, perishable food items nabbed on weekly grocery runs) to survive two months of lockdown. Once those packages arrive, we should be good to go on everything. Or, at least, everything but toilet paper.
As a result, I was up past midnight, Googling around, scouring outside-the-box options for some still-stocked Charmin. But, despite my best efforts, all I found were gougingly-priced listings on eBay, and I’d sooner rinse my ass in the shower, bidet-style, each time I poop than pay $150 for a dozen rolls.
So, this morning, I headed out again, to see if I could find TP in any of the brick-and-mortar stores nearby. Doing my best to give everyone wide berths, and wearing a single latex glove on my left hand (like an immunocompromised Michael Jackson) for anything I needed to touch (and using my phone solely with my clean, ungloved, and otherwise mostly pocketed right hand), I headed into nearly a dozen spots – grocery stores, pharmacies, hardware stores, bodegas. And, in all of them, bupkis.
Fortunately, we’re still about a week and change from running out our current supply. And I’m hoping the reporting – that we’re not facing an overall toilet paper inventory shortage, just distribution difficulties in getting it out quickly enough to keep up with spiked demand – means things should look less dire in a few days.
In the meantime, Jess has suggested we simply stop eating, which would eliminate both toilet paper and grocery restock concerns. Which, indeed, has a sort of logic to it. This is a tough time to be full of shit.
2020-03-18
If you think you’re too strong to benefit from bodyweight exercise, try this.
Inside, Out
Jess and I haven’t left the apartment for about 48 hours now, and, thus far, I’m enjoying it immensely. I’ve been productive working from home during the day, and we’ve been cooking up a storm, and watching our way through The Crown, in the evenings.
Still, by Friday, we’ll have eaten most of our perishable food items, and I’m trying to leave the few weeks of stuff we have in the freezer and pantry untouched, just in case things take a turn for the worse. I had hoped to get groceries delivered going forward, but Whole Foods is still wildly low on inventory, and it’s far more difficult to order around that in the abstract than it is to adjust plans on the fly if you can actually look at the shelves. Similarly, I considered going back to Fresh Direct, which I used some years back, but they literally have zero available delivery slots in the next week.
So, it appears, I’ll be venturing back out into the world at some point soon. A block or so off, there’s a Key Foods, which remained fully stocked this weekend even as the neighborhood Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s largely sold out. (I suspect that’s a function of the largely Black and Latinx customer base; there’s a lot of privilege inherent in hoarding.) But, it’s also relatively teeny, with close aisles that back up with even just a handful of people in the store, and the selection of fresh foods is relatively sparse. Conversely, our neighborhood Whole Foods is fairly wide open, and seems to be full of vegetables (at least per Instagram). So I’m weighing out options, as well as crafting a shopping list ordered by aisle, so I can show up at either store as soon as it opens, and charge through in minimum time.
Today, I’m also considering possibly heading out for a run. The Upper West Side looks sparse out my window, and I usually run along the street, next to the parked cars, rather than on the sidewalks. So, I think, I should be far enough away from any other pedestrians to keep the risk low. Right?
Either way, still puzzling through this semi-quarantine, and the life logistics it’s going to entail. Though, as I suspect it will extend on until at least the end of next month, I should have plenty of time to figure it out.
2020-03-17
Pand(emic)emonium
I’ve been worrying about the novel coronavirus for nearly a month, for most of which time people seemed to think I was kind of nuts and overblowing the situation. Obviously, the tide has turned on that in the last few days, with government-mandated shutdowns, and people buying out entire supermarkets as they prepare to hunker down in social distancing mode.
Still, I don’t think measures have gone nearly far enough. And, given how spectacularly we’ve also dropped the ball on testing, I don’t think people really understand how bad things are about to get, nor for how long.
Part of that is a limitation of human brains: we’re terrible at emotionally understanding math, especially when it involves exponential growth.
Take the famous birthday paradox: how many people do you need to have in a room before there’s a better than 50% chance that two of them have the same birthday? Most people guess about 180 people – about half the number of days in the year. In fact, the answer is 23. In a room of 23 people, there’s a 50-50 chance that two of them have the same birthday. And in a room of 75 people, the odds are 99.9%. Which, even after you’ve learned the underlying math, just doesn’t seem to make any intuitive sense.
So, in talking with people about this pandemic, I’ve often fallen back on the metaphor of lilypads in a pond: imagine that you have a big pond, with a single lilypad in it on the first day. On the second day, it doubles to two lilypads. Then to four lilypads the day after. On the 100th day, the pond is entirely covered with lilypads. When is the pod 50% covered? Despite the simplicity of the math, surprisingly few people seem to realize it’s the 99th day. And almost all are shocked to learn that, on the 95th day, the pond is only about 3% covered.
All of which is to say, when things are growing exponentially, they get bigger much faster than we expect. So, even having thought a bunch about this all, and even understanding in the mathematic abstract what’s likely coming our way, I was still more than a bit shaken by this chart I recently stumbled across:
Pair that with a recent video showing what those numbers mean in terms of newspaper obituaries:
Graphs are useful but to really get what that rising curve is, have a look at the obituaries page of this Bergamo daily newspaper, comparing one from February with one from now pic.twitter.com/78mgZseyVt
— Ben Phillips (@benphillips76) March 14, 2020
Between the two, I’m definitely not feeling great about the next few weeks.
2020-03-16
Stop hoarding and panic-buying: there’s plenty of food.
Seder 2020
Spent most of today arranging life logistics to weather an extended lockdown. Realistically, I think this gets worse for at least two more months, unless the government starts to step up in a way that it certainly hasn’t thus far.
So, I suspect, we may not be headed to NJ or Long Island this year to kick of Passover with either of my mother’s siblings as we normally do. Instead, we’ll be celebrating at home. With a seder that looks something like this:
