This. Is. Not. Okay.
We're two weeks into our personal experience of the grand national experiment that is Distance Learning, and spoiler: Nothing about it is even close to workable.
My kids and I are enormously privileged. We have WiFi (when it feels like working, which is about 60% of the time). Computers. One work-from-home parent and two who are deeply invested in their education. A school with resources and incredible teachers. Plenty of outdoor space.
This whole post is basically an ad for my next book
Ohhhhkay, so today? Was one big reminder why I am so super glad I am not a teenage girl anymore. Because teenage boys are the fucking worst. And they're so adorably charming-when-they-want-to-be that you forget! But then you remember. Because they do something that's the fucking worst, and they could have really just HAD A LITTLE FORESIGHT or DISPLAYED A MODICUM OF RESPONSIBILITY, but NOPE.
I have this couch. Or rather my landlord has this couch, and when I moved in he asked if he could leave it in the family room because it was apparently a twelve thousand dollar couch when it was new (!!) and one day he might want to recover it. And I said sure, fine, because a) it wasn't terrible, and b) I'm not in the business of buying anything that I don't absolutely need to buy these days. I had it steam-cleaned when I moved in, and I tried to be okay with it, I swear...but what it came down to was that perhaps it was worth 12 thousand dollars in, oh, I dunno, 1981, but it is now the same age as me and neither of us are quite as sprightly as we were back in the day.
On Thursday evening - four days ago - I got in a car crash. It was bad. It was also my fault.
I was driving through the middle of nowhere, headed North along the coast, on my way to be with a friend in crisis. The sun was at that point just above the horizon when it's blazing directly into your eyes, and you have to flick the visor from side to side to side with one hand while you steer with the other just to see the pavement ahead of you.
I didn't expect a stop sign anywhere along that particular stretch of road, empty as it seemed. I wasn't looking out for one, but even if I had been I was blinded, and I wouldn't have spotted it. So when one suddenly appeared, I drove straight through it at 40 miles per hour. A man turning from the opposite lane hit me directly on the driver's side door (it's called a "T-bone"; I know terms like this now) and my car and I went flying off the road into a field, where we crashed through wheat and dirt and narrowly missed telephone poles, and finally came to a stop.
Marty is so helpful
The bloom has, shall we say, fallen off the shelter-in-place rose.
I am enormously privileged during this time of COVID-19; that fact does not escape me. My parents are in New York City, which is frightening, but they are being careful, and are healthy. I have friends who have fallen sick, but all have recovered. I have a porch where my children can grow a garden and breathe the ocean air. I have the ability to teach them - not nearly at the rate requested by their teachers, of course, but I also have the sense to know that we are all doing the best we can, and that is enough. I am an introvert, vastly prefer my couch to a bar stool, and have worked from home for most of my adult life, so puttering around my house for most of every day honestly feels like more of the same.
I am exhausted.
I most definitely should not be: I'm sleeping literally more than I ever have, and doing oh my god, so much less - on the work side, at least; the parenting side is obviously, ah...intense. But even on the days when Kendrick has the kids, it's like I can barely keep my eyes open. I sleep for 10 hours, at least. Nap for two hours, at least. A walk around the block feels like the equivalent of running a marathon: I cannot do it, which is fine, because I also do not want to do it.
Lest all this sound like perhaps somebody has come down with a case of The Depressions, though: I really don't think so. I'm anxious about money and the health of my family and, you know, THE STATE OF THE WORLD, for sure. But I'm also smiling more easily, and more often.
