One year, many thoughts

The prelude. March 11th, 2020. It’s clear this is the last day “before the pandemic in the US”. I’d toasted “to corona” at a happy hour a few weeks earlier. Whoops. I walk out of the office cracking jokes. See you all in a few weeks when this blows over. I make sure to snag the Super Nintendo that I kept in the office, just in case. Good choice. Lucky choice. I get home. I watch the NBA, my daily ritual, my comfort zone, my happy place. Rudy Gobert has COVID. The NBA shuts down. An incompetent con artist cast as POTUS45 makes a speech that makes it worse. He makes everything worse. Tom Hanks has COVID. He’s going to die. Everyone who gets COVID dies. It’s clear life will not be the same. This is real. I drink 2 bottles of wine. It doesn’t help. I will remember this day for the rest of my life.

Day one. March 12th, 2020. I have so much time. My daily commute is 90 minutes each way. I’ve been given back 15 hours every week. This is a gift. The gift of time. The only thing you can’t get back. But it’s too much time. The time stresses me out.  I don’t know what to do with this time. I already miss the office. I need the office. I’m no good working from home. I go to Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. I take four hours of work meetings walking the trails of the park. It’s a good day. Maybe I can do this. Maybe we can do this. Maybe it’ll be okay.

Day five. March 16th, 2020. Schools shut down. Uh oh. Damon home 24/7? I hadn’t thought this through. It’s not going to be okay.

Day twelve. March 23rd, 2020. Schools re-open remotely. Damon is in kindergarten. He won’t join the Zoom calls. He won’t do the assignments. He loves school. He loves his classmates. This isn’t school. He’s home and his parents are home. How is that school? It’s going to be a long Spring.

Late March. I don’t count the days anymore. Everyone is dying. The sirens are constant. I spend time every day looking up death rates by borough. My home for the past 14 years, the Bronx, has the highest death rate in the city. New York City has the highest death rate in the world. I live in the global epicenter of the pandemic. There isn’t a worse place in the whole world to be right now. This is the apocalypse. We wonder if the city will survive this. Not the city’s economy or tax base, but the actual city. We think about exit strategies. Ohio? California? Asia? Everything is in play.

We go outside no more than once a week. When we go outside, we don’t go in any buildings. We order groceries from FreshDirect. It’s tough to find delivery timeslots. We take whatever is available. We order a week’s worth of lunch. I order two week’s worth of wine. We do it again next week.

I spend almost every night on the balcony, alone in the dark, sipping wine and listening to music until after midnight. This is a new pattern. Should I be worried?

Early April. Animal Crossing released a few weeks prior. Everyone with a Nintendo Switch is playing it. It becomes ritualistic, making new animal friends and talking to them every day, digging for fossils, going fishing, catching bugs, improving the island. It’s a second life. A better life. One of my neighbors, Phoebe, calls me “sparky”. I like her. She’s my new best friend. Another neighbor, Raddle, constantly wears a mask. He does it because he’s a doctor, not because COVID is in the game. I like this world. I stay in this world. My wife and son do too.

Real world socializing has kicked up. Weekly Zoom calls with multiple friend circles. Connecting with people I hadn’t in years on a meaningful level. Maybe it isn’t all bad. This is refreshing. But is this what it took? A global pandemic to stay in touch with my friends?

I start cutting my own hair. I already had the clippers. I’ve seen this done for decades, I can do it. It doesn’t look quite as good, but it’s free. I start experimenting. Longer on top. Dyeing it blue. Adding product for the first time since I was in high school. It’s something to do. It’s something to try. Something new.

I miss basketball. The playoffs should be starting soon. Shouldn’t they? I start to lose my grip on time. The normal milestone markers that I rely on in my head don’t exist.

This is all happening while an incompetent con artist is cast as POTUS45. We hear about the “China virus”. East Asians are getting attacked in the street. Unarmed Black people are being killed by police. This is not a safe country.

I don’t know what to do. I try to make a difference at work. I push for us to take a big swing in a bolder strategic direction. We start building a new capability that could redefine diversity in the industry. I make my favorite presentation I’ve ever made in my career, one that ties together who I am as a person with what I do for a living. I feel less powerless.

August. I’m burnt out at work. We go upstate for a week. The COVID numbers are better now. Woodstock is a cute town. There’s not a ton to do here, but that’s okay. We stay outdoors. We relax. We eat at restaurants. We go on nature hikes. We go on long drives. It’s a good week. We feel safe. New Yorkers wear their masks.

In other parts of the country, people protest wearing the mask. If the mask worked the other way, and it protected the wearer instead of everyone else, it would have 100% compliance. We have a society built around the virtues of selfishness. Maybe you had to be here in NYC, when everyone was dying, to understand my anger. Wearing a mask says “I care about you”. That should be a good thing. That should be an American thing.

I’m back at work. I have agency there. I pour myself into the work. It becomes more intense. I put even more of myself into it. There’s nothing else to do, anyway, and the company needs me. The economy needs me. People are dying. People are stressed. People are desperate. I’m thinking about the economy. That’s what matters, I’m told.

Sometime in the summer. Hulu’s Palm Springs is hitting too close to home. If Animal Crossing was the perfect game for early pandemic escapism, Palm Springs is the perfect movie to highlight mid pandemic monotony. Every day is the same. Time has lost meaning. If time loses meaning, does life have meaning? Life matters because it’s finite. The gift of time this pandemic granted me is now a curse.

I find ways to break the monotony. I buy a new computer. I buy a new smartwatch. I buy a new iPad. I buy a new phone. I buy new AirPods. I buy a new Xbox. I don’t think this is a sustainable way to break monotony, but it helps right now. I get a new car, an Audi, because I want a car that is more fun to drive than my current Dadmobile, a Hyundai. I drive the Audi for fewer than 800 miles in half a year because there is nowhere to go. I’m still glad I did it.

My wife finds other ways to break the monotony. New plants come into the house. Some of them die. New furniture arrives. We upgrade different rooms in our apartment. We flip Damon’s bed into a loft. Meal kits start arriving. I create a spreadsheet to rank the different brands. Gobble is my favorite. Let’s keep Green Chef in the rotation too.

Summer, or maybe fall. The NBA returns. I’ve waited months for this. My daily power rankings can be run again. The NBA is modeling how to run a society in a pandemic. Social distance and wear masks. No COVID cases. Who would have thought? The bubble is inspiring. The basketball is great. But the players look emotionally drained. They put themselves on the line to entertain me. I will always be grateful for the NBA bubble.

School is back in the fall, and they will try doing it in person, 2.5 days a week. Damon is excited. He loves school. This is real school. Despite COVID cases shutting down the school five times throughout the year, we are thankful that they keep trying. Even though I have to remember every day which place to drop Damon off, it’s a lighter mental load. He’s learning. He’s progressing. We prioritized elementary school in NYC. We made the right choice.

There’s an election coming up. How could we forget. The incompetent con man catches COVID. Thousands have died because of him. I hope he survives so we can vote him out. It’s time to vote. I’m voting early in person. I wait in line for 30 minutes. That’s never happened before in my district. We’re wearing masks, because this critical election is taking place during a pandemic. This very scene is a consequence of poor leadership. This is my chance to do something to change it.

It’s the day after the election. I get a phone call. One of my close friends at work has suddenly passed away. It sends me into a spiral. I worry about his family, about my colleagues, and how to be a leader in tough times. I stress about my own health. I start having recurring nightmares about my own death. I can’t fall asleep. Wine helps. Wine forces the sleep. It’s not good sleep, but it gets me to the next day. I don’t feel well. I have a problem.

November 6th, 2020. Four days after the election. Joe Biden has won. It’s a beautiful, sunny day in NYC. We walk the streets to celebrate. We wear masks, because that is normal to do now. I love this city. It’s bounced back. The energy is still intoxicating. The diversity is still inspiring. NYC will survive this. NYC will thrive again. It’s the only place I’ve ever felt at home. I’m glad we stuck it out. Others won’t understand what this rebirth means to us.

I’m burnt out at work again. I make a conscious effort to separate “Ronjan the employee” and “Ronjan the person”. I get a work phone for the first time in years. I choose when to be engaged and when not to be engaged. If I don’t slow down, I’m going to run out of gas.

It’s getting cold. I guess that means it’s winter. Thanksgiving just passed and I didn’t spend it with my sister and my parents for the first time ever. I didn’t set foot in Ohio in 2020. That hasn’t happened for a full year since 1989, when I lived in Colorado. Damon hasn’t seen his aunt or his grandparents all year. They can’t tell how lean he is now. They can’t see how good he’s gotten at tennis. He doesn’t like talking to them on Zoom. They ask too many questions. He wants to visit them for real. He misses his family.

Thankfully we have a new family. A pod family. They live two floors down and have a boy around Damon’s age. We share Thanksgiving dinner. We watch movies and play games a few times a week. It’s kept us sane. It’s kept them sane. We spend Christmas together. We will need each other for this long winter. They’re our family.

Other socializing has wound down. Everyone has Zoom fatigue. There’s nothing to talk about or update each other on. Most of the weekly social circle calls have completely fallen off. Everyone is tired. Winter is here. The numbers are going back up. Everyone is depressed.

I recognize something is not right. I start seeing a therapist. It helps. The recurring nightmares start fading away. I start sleeping better. Much better. I start tracking my alcohol consumption. 6-7 drinks per night. Wow. I am really out of control. Data helps. If you can measure it, you can improve it. Alcohol consumption creeps downwards. It’s not where I want it to be, but I’m making progress. Progress is good.

January 1st, 2021. The year from hell is over. I stay up past midnight to feel the changeover. It’s cathartic. Fuck you, 2020.

January 6th, 2021. One of the worst days in American history. An insurrection attempt at the Capitol Building. It’s horrifying. Years of legitimized lying by our political, media, and ad tech landscape have led to this. People die. Blood is everywhere. If the insurrectionists were competent, we could have lost every member of Congress. The incompetent con man cast as POTUS 45 has secured his legacy as one of the worst humans in history. Those who stand with him will be judged.

January 20th, 2021. A new President is inaugurated. He’s not an incompetent con man cast in the role. He’s an actual President. I watch him take the oath. I watch Vice President Harris take hers. She’s Indian, like me. I cry. The part of my brain that has constantly been active, thinking about the incompetent con man, instantly shuts off. I feel a weight come off my shoulders. It’s a new day. It’s a new country. Maybe we are worthy of solving the problems that are in front of us.

It’s February. All it does is snow. So much snow. But people I know are getting the vaccine. My dad got the vaccine. My mom got the vaccine. We will get to see them soon. There’s light, but I don’t know how long this tunnel is. I’m tired of spending 50 hours a week in a 3x3 corner of Damon’s room that I call my office. On a whim, I subscribed to the print New York Times on the weekends. It’s something new. Maybe crossword puzzles are the key to the stretch run.

Yesterday. March 11th, 2021. It’s been a full year. Everyone has had a quarantine birthday celebration. Spring is here. It’s been in the 60s and sunny most of this week. I spend large chunks of my day outside. I take the same four hour walk I did a year ago. I shed a tear when I see so many people out in the city. We’re back. Almost. It won’t be official until we’re vaccinated, but that feels close. Perhaps by the end of the Spring. Maybe we’ll still wear masks. We may not feel safe without them. We may not feel whole without them. But we’re back. I have hope. I feel good, truly good, for the first time in a year.