The picture I used for the Facebook event notice for this event was perfect, a cover illustration from The New Yorker by Adrian Tomine of a woman on a Zoom date wearing a pretty top with a fancy drink in hand, sitting in front of her laptop propped up on books with a desk lamp shining on her face from behind the screen, a perfectly cultivated image for her Zoom audience. Behind her there is a Japanese style rice paper folding screen, the kind I use on my Zoom calls because my computer is too old to create those cute virtual backgrounds (which interestingly most people have grown tired of and now let their homes show). Around the woman there is chaos, an unmade bed behind the screen, unwashed dishes in the sink, cats spilling stuff over, crumpled paper on the floor. Aside from the cats, it looked very familiar, I felt seen!
On the call we talked about the Georgia Senate debates that were occurring that evening, and then about our weekends. I talked about how I’d spent a lovely day out in Westchester touring an old home, not something I might have done but for the pandemic and a drive to get out of our apartments and out of town. We discussed our phones, what brands we’re using, about television shows we’re watching and about eating outside as it gets colder. We talked about SNL, about shopping online, about our concerns about social media. We discussed how Giuliani just came down with COVID and wondered about how many people he might have infected while pursuing the fraudulent court cases alleging election fraud. I brought up a Theater of War reading of the Job story, interestingly with Bill Murray, and how one of the questions that came up was our lack of empathy for people like Giuliani and others who flout the pandemic protections. Most people were all in on being less empathetic to the Covidiots.
We then talked about the vaccine and how excited most of us were for it. The New York Times posted a handy online calculator that would show how many people were “in front” of you before you could get the vaccine based on age and comorbidities. Most of us had a couple of million people ahead of us, even in NYC, so we joked now would be a good time to get fat so we could enjoy the benefit of obesity, a comorbidity for COVID that would push us forward in the line.
We ended by talking about how many of us are choosing to decorate our apartments for the holidays, even as many of us face a “long dark winter” on our own. We talked about bringing in their Christmas trees, even if it was just for ourselves. I even brought in some extra pine branches that fell from the trees sold in little half block forests on the NYC sidewalks which pop up every season, and fortunately popped up this season too. A very nice Christmas tree salesman allowed me to dig into a giant bag of loose branches and take all that I wanted for free. I put the branches in a flower vase and am enjoying the fresh pine smell, which apparently provides some sort of health benefit, which may even be where the tradition of bringing pine into the house was inspired.
