This personal story/essay/reflection is a creative writing post (#25) from my occasional series for paid subscribers, who can also leave comments on most posts. As always, email hollymathnerd at gmail dot com if you would like a paid subscription but can’t afford one.
“What are the sins against hope?”
“Presumption and despair.”
—from the catechism of the Catholic Church
New Normal Really Sucks
I’ve written before about new normal — how, post-COVID, many systems that used to work very well no longer do. Most alarmingly, teenagers of my acquaintance who are just now learning to grocery shop have never known a world where the store had everything on the list and so back-up choices were unnecessary.
Yesterday, I experienced more new normal. I need a windshield wiper, so I left early before therapy and went to O’Reilly’s. I had very carefully checked online and all three locations near me had special New Year’s Eve hours posted. All three went to the trouble of posting their special hours online…and closed early anyway.
It wasn’t urgent, since the wiper that needs replacing is the passenger one and I still have reasonable visibility. And I’ll get it replaced soon, of course. It was just another reminder of how badly many things are breaking down.
A commenter on the linked essay talked about a new business model that’s popping up in the US. It’s essentially being a “fixer,” someone who handles logistics and deals with the fuck-ups so that someone else doesn’t have to. It’s the kind of thing that Americans in foreign countries try to arrange to help smooth the way through unfamiliar bureaucracy and unreliable systems to secure goods and services.
American businesses are starting to need fixers.
This is an artifact of COVID, one that may never go away.
The Alleged Ubiquity of “Long COVID”
One of my time-waster internet sites—the kind of thing I scroll over meals, or during boring DEI work meetings—is the subreddit, “Zero COVID Community.” These are people who continue to live as if it’s the first two weeks of March 2020, giving up all semblance of a normal life to avoid COVID.
Reading that subreddit is a fascinating exercise in theory-of-mind, one that helps me appreciate how widely divergent the views and experiences and daily experiences of other people can be. Among the many interesting threads I’ve read on that subreddit: people who’ve divorced (or are considering divorce) over a spouse who wouldn’t keep up March 2020 levels of COVID precaution indefinitely, who’ve gone no-contact with loving, devoted parents for the same reason, who’ve missed four years of birthdays, Christmases, graduations, funerals, and other family events, and even people debating whether they — the COVID-cautious — will eventually have a moral obligation to have children to keep the human race going when we COVID-riddled fools are all dead or disabled from the consequences of what they regard as a (still, to everyone) deadly disease.