Two years in

Starting to write this on 2/6 and worked on in it in several sessions between then and now.

The Summary

The Start

For us, everything changed on Monday, March 16, 2020. The kid's school had a teacher in-service day scheduled for that day, so we had her scheduled for a sort-of-day-camp childcare at the YMCA where we regularly had swimming lessons. We felt a bit bad about that, given the pandemic all over the news, but we both thought we'd have to go to work Monday, so we felt we had no choice. But Monday morning I got word from my office that I and most other people should work from home until further notice. If I remember correctly I got that notice while on the bus to drop the kid off at the YMCA, so I just did so and went home. That night, we found that the kid had been the only kid at the YMCA. I felt bad about that but she had fun. The school had recently announced that they would moved the upcoming spring break from some time in April to that week so they could plan, so the kids would be out all week instead of just that day. That grew into remote school for the rest of that school year. 

Year One

See posts throughout 2020 for most of this. I worked a lot of half-days that spring and T. took some time off too so we could parent without just parking the kid in front of the TV. For the rest of the 2019-2020 school year, the kid's school was worksheets, YouTube videos, and a video chat or two. Pretty weird for anyone, especially for pre-K. We spent most of that summer out of town, with T.'s parents and mine. There was a roughly two-week gap in between. We tried to hunker down and socially distance intensely, something like a proper quarantine between trips. The kid spent the 2020-2021 school year in a pod. 

T. and I basically always worked in the same place unless we had to participate in meetings at the same time. When the pod wasn't in the house, we'd be at the dining room table. When it was, we'd be in the guest bedroom, on folding tables. I went into the office two or three times for a few errands but other than that have worked fully from home.

A bunch of stuff about my job changed in April 2020, which is related to the pandemic only coincidentally but feels related because of that coincidence. A bunch more changed in October.

I got the first shot of the vaccine January 4, 2021. I was lucky. My office had extra and gave them out on a first-come, first-served basis. I felt guilty taking it when so many people needed it more than me, but I figured if the people in charge were giving it out on that basis, who was I to argue? The more shots in arms, the better, I told myself. Life changed little at that point, though, because T. and the kid couldn't get theirs for months yet.

Year Two

By the spring of 2021, some kids at our school got the option to go into school some days, but we chose to stay fully remote. The pod was working better for us than the alternative at that point. The summer of 2021 was similar to the summer of 2020 with minor differences. (We visited the grandparents in reverse order, we did more fun stuff while out of the DC area than we did in in 2020, and the kid had a day camp while we were in DC instead of just playing with us.) 

I began putting more effort into exercising this spring or early summer. More on this later. 

This school year, she has been going to school in person, but masked when not eating, with testing and quarantine protocols. Parents have basically no access to the building so I know a lot less about her school this year than I did in pre-K. The kid has had probably a dozen covid tests due to exposures or suspected exposures, all negative. Despite those precautions we have missed one or two weeks due to quarantine and some friends have missed a lot more. Childcare after school in first grade has taken more planning and money than it did in pre-K because childcare is a nanny shared with another family or two rather than something hosted and supported by the school.

Around January, I started working in the guest bedroom most days, leaving the dining room table to T. Overlapping meetings and the pod are no longer problems. I have to walk a little farther to get to the kitchen, which is a mixed blessing.

What it all Means

This mess has had lots of little unpredictable effects on life.

Certain everyday items aren't everyday. 

I have a messenger bag I used to like to use, a man-purse, big enough to easily hold lunch and a novel, or hold a whole change of clothes for biking to work with only a little difficulty. I don't even know where it is at the moment, probably buried in a box at the bottom of the closet. For Christmas of 2019 T. gave me a sun lamp for my office, since my office was in the basement. The light is now in our basement, still in the box. Why would I need it around here? On the other hand, I always know where the closest mask and hand sanitizer bottles are. And the car is now an everyday item. (Although that's partly because I didn't have a bike from December through the beginning of March. As of today I have biked the kid to school at least five times in March.)

Clothes and shoes wear out more slowly. 

In the before time I had two nice button-down shirts that were formal until I ripped the sleeves on a chain-link fence. Pant cuffs get damaged easily by bike chains and shoes. I wore socks daily, of course, two pairs on days when I'd bike to work and change clothes there, and socks get holes. But these days I bike less. In the summer I don't even wear socks or shoes except when working out, just sandals.

I've become nihilistic about clothing. 

This is separate from the actual quality of my clothing. If "nihilistic" is too depressing, I could say I have freed myself from arbitrary social expectations. In the before time I'd try to save time and water by wearing button-down shirts or slacks two or three times before washing them, assuming they weren't soiled at all, but I'd never wear the same clothes two days in a row. Instead I kept track of what had been worn since last washed and tried to mix it up from one day or week to the next. 

Now? Obviously I change my t-shirt, underpants, and socks (if relevant) every day, and I don't wear anything that's noticeably dirty. But it's surprising how much following those rules permits wearing clothes multiple days between washing. Over the summer of 2021 I gave myself a rule that I'd wear a shirt with a collar every workday in the summer, because I feared how grungy I'd get otherwise. 

I'm out of shape. 

I've discussed this in detail here and in passing in many posts. Snacking is easy these days and exercise is hard. I started putting effort into getting exercise over the summer of 2021, by jogging, and in the fall of 2021 I biked the kid to school until the accident, and when it has been warm enough in February and March I've jogged again. I'm still definitely far from my peak fitness though. Even all through this time I still never found a good way to work out indoors, other than going to the gym and I can't do that often.

My social life is almost nonexistent. 

First observed here. Two years ago I had one current co-worker I was fairly close with and several others I could chat with at the water cooler, figuratively speaking. I had befriended three former co-workers. How much we saw each other depended on convenience, but still, "friends" feels accurate. T. had several friends who were basically mutual friends but she knew them before me and was closer with them than I was. I also had at least three friends that were "mine", not T.'s, and not co-workers. We had grown apart in recent years, we all had our own lives, but still, in theory we could pick it up with just a week's notice to plan something. 

Now? Picking it up with any of those three would be a lot harder. All my current co-workers are a lot more distant, literally and figuratively. I see certain parents of friends of the kid often, but at most we just exchange small talk while the kids are having fun and often do less than that. 

The cumulative effect of this adds up to almost no socializing. It's been striking as T. went to a political group event or two in early 2022, or a school parent happy hour, and I didn't.

I'm getting sick of computers.

Maybe "sick of" is putting it too strongly. I'm distressingly close to resubscribing to World of Warcraft. But I spend even more time on computers than I used to and have even more problems with them. 

At the office, I remember things working the way they're supposed to, more or less. Log in, use office programs, log out. Here I have one technical difficulty after another. This is fresh in my mind (see here for details about how bad it was), and before that it was taking 20 minutes to log on to my corporate computer, and before that I finished a massive effort to organize emails because AutoArchive doesn't work, and before that it was something else. Connecting to meetings through Teams depends on a complex relationship of ways to do it. I got a new personal computer in June 2021. It's better than the old one in most respects but the built-in microphone doesn't work well. Not just a problem for the job, also for PTA and similar meetings.

This seems worse than what my two teammates go through. I guess it might be because I work from two different rooms (therefore changing wi-fi connections) on two different computers, three if you count the current and previous personal computer, but who knows. 

Work-life balance is gone, or at least, a lot more complicated.

In the before time, on the days I went to the office, I'd go to work in the morning, stay for the allotted time (8 hours and 15-30 minutes at my current job), and go home. If one day it took me 10 minutes to get lunch and the next day it took me 20, or if I read some article in between meetings, who cares? Literally every office job has stuff like that. I've worked from home one day a week at my current job and that was a bit more fluid, but (a) that was only once a week, and (b) I still tried to stay by the computer and accessible to work for eight consecutive hours. The kid's school was just a block away, and earlier her daycare was just 5 blocks or so, so those were easy walks in the morning. Work in the evenings or weekends was a big deal. Sounds pretty healthy by American standards in my opinion.

In the past two years? Hah! Right now my routine is something like this: log in at 6:30, try to tackle something simple in the morning before or during breakfast, step away from the computer for 40-60 minutes to get the kid to school, and work and do stuff around the house until 4:30 or 5, when I'd actually log off and start parenting duties. Sounds like 9.5 hours of work or even more, right? I'm doing all this in the same house as a bunch of books, sometimes on the same computer as World of Warcraft. Sometimes I'd leave early to run errands or get some exercise and return to work afterwards. Work after 6 PM is still rare but has happened at least once this month. In the first year it was even more complicated, with the pod and health scares and before the pod even formed. I could be logged in for 11 hours and actually work 10 hours or 3.

Politics has gone from depressing to horrifying.

This is obviously not due to either the pandemic or the contract transition at work. And hey, Biden's better than Trump, so it's progress in that sense. And I've handled things better than T. And I'm not quite as despondent about our democracy as a lot of my friends are.

All that being said, living in DC on January 6 was pretty scary. Same for seeing what America's fascists are getting or have got away with.

What's next?

I think I could make things basically back to normal for me by now, if I really pushed.

Virus numbers are down. Masks are coming off, at least for the grownups. It's been weeks since the kid last was kept home from school due to covid issues. The kid's school has announced that things are going to loosen up soonish. I'm not sure I could go back to the office if I wanted but everything else seems normal. T. is making plans to go to the office in person once a week, starting in a few weeks. 

But getting back to the office now would be selfish because it would force T. to take care of the kid more without me. And commuting would take more time. And there's no regaining the people lost; most of my previous co-workers are gone and not coming back. And it would mean curtailing lots of not-work-related things I do during the workday, which I'm ambivalent about. And it's not like I actually enjoyed keeping my closet sorted, or most office chitchat, or lots of other things about the old days. 

(EDIT 3/21: I couldn't go back to the office even if I wanted to. I'm not totally sure why, I'm a bit surprised that the old space isn't available, but it's not and there's no ETA on that.) 

I miss the feeling of normalcy. The actual facts of the old days, some I miss more than others, and some of them I can get back and some I can't.