It is around 2:30 on March 26th and I am at home busy putting out the paper.
Just came back from a "quarantini" street party where we all kept
the appropriate distance from each other.
As you can see I'm working from my second bedroom office.
Baby!
We're worried that our child will never meet another human again.
It's gonna be a Zoom baby basically.
It's basically a Zoom baby.
We're making a Zoom baby.
It's hard to be away from family at Easter.
Easter was really hard big for my family.
We moved in together in November, so it's been pretty early on in our living situation.
Just kind of enjoying the sun and a bit of wind on my face.
I needed the break today it's been kind of an unrelenting
stream of grim projections about where we're headed in the next few months, so...
This has been a grand experiment.
A forced grand experiment.
I was just looking at my journal from 2020 and on March 13th I'd written
"I wonder how long this could possibly last."
Don't stress you're in it for the long haul, this is a marathon not a sprint.
You know when we think about the transition from going from mat leave to work,
everyone's like "oh it's gonna be so hard for the child,"
but I think it's gonna be hard for me, like i've never known my life away from her.
Our reality kind of feels like the fugue state
that you're in when you're first starting parenting,
so like we're still in that like, it doesn't change.
Being single during this time would have been really tough, you know having,
having Danielle here has been an incredible support for me.
One can only hope the same in reverse? Yeah, I would say so.
Nice!
I wrote a book about intergenerational trauma and the Holocaust, during a pandemic.
I wouldn't necessarily advise anyone to do that,
it was a lot of darkness.
Just a chance to hit the reset button and ask yourself "why am i doing what i'm doing?"
Is it force of habit?
Is it because you know i'm just on the treadmill or the hamster wheel and i'm going?
Or is it because I really want my life to be this way?
I've made kimchi, that was something I wanted to do.
Cooking duck, making a duck confit.
I've gotten to know my colleagues a lot better than I used to,
and am enjoying the vast majority of them very much [laughs].
The feelings you have between projects can kind of be like really overwhelming,
because it's all, it's brand new and you sort of,
my feeling was like, what do I do next? I kind of constantly had that feeling.
So I think I had to get used to that idea and sort of,
just sort of calm down a little bit and just chip away at things differently than I used to do.
I got to spend a lot of time with my teenagers and they probably will disagree with me on this,
but I loved it.
They probably wish they did not have to spend quite so much time with their parents,
but I found it really kind of wonderful to get to know them so well and so deeply.
Not that I would wish this pandemic on us so that I could, you know,
Give my kid some fresh meatballs at 3:15 on a Tuesday, but it's been nice.
My cats have no respect for personal space or deadlines.
None. None at all.
Now the UK is under a pretty heavy lockdown these days so it's really
important that we check in on our neighbours.
This is Betty and Beatrice. They're not doing quite as well with the lockdown,
You can see I think the cabin fever is getting to them just a little bit.
What I do hope is that we continue to focus on our elders and care about them because,
you know there's so many times when we kind of just brush that
aside like they're like they're forgotten and,
I think that that's just just a shame for our society, so I hope that we continue to
to care for them.
When this is over I hope never to take for granted again the people I'm able to have around me,
mostly the people I work with who I get to see five days a week, all day long,
chatting about stuff, laughing, sometimes crying, sharing news: good and bad.
And I miss that so much.
I miss those people, I miss being around them, they've become like a family to me.
We've shown effectively that the remote workplace is a viable option.
On the flip side we've also shown that
we do lose that special something when we're not all together.
I think that we have found a bit of a balance between the two
but, I missed that special something.
But it would still be nice if you didn't have to use a Webex background
in order to show a palm tree behind you.
We've contributed to community fridges, community pantries
so that's something that I think is gonna carry on after this
is that we're gonna keep being really committed to our local neighbourhood.
Probably a lot of regeneration of community and just way of life here.
You know, because I moved during the pandemic, I
moved like you know down the shore to Hamilton from Toronto.
You know, I want to be i want to be a good neighbour,
so I don't want to take anything for granted,
so yeah I just feel like it's always going to be on my mind
that I didn't know what this place like was was like before.
I sleep through the night. I get up, I either walk or run five kilometres every day,
I've had time to think about what i'm putting in my mouth.
Some of the changes I've made I like to think that they are permanent lifestyle changes
because I had a chance to experience the positive impact of them firsthand for
months and months and months on end.
I interviewed a few
historians over this time period about what happened 100 years ago during the Spanish Flu,
and they all pretty much said societies just bounce back, they snap back,
and the big changes you want to see often don't happen.
But I hope that that's different this time, I really hope that we
do take into account what this pandemic has exposed
which is the huge cracks between people who are well-off and people who are not,
people who are marginalized and people who are not.
We live in such an unequal and exploitative society
and I think we now can't pretend not to see that,
and I really hope there's political and social will to change some of those things.