Things The Pandemic Has Taught Me

So. Here I am, staying home, because I am in the most staying-homest of states (New York) and my day job is about as non-essential as it gets. (I am an outside vendor for retail stores, and my product is far, far from a life-or-death necessity.) What is a writer to do with all this time? Why, write the romcoms, of course. Am I writing said romcoms? A little. Less than I’d thought. I have learned things, though, and writing a blog entry is at least a nod toward the great challenge of Writing Things. So here’s what I have learned about myself and my world during the pandemic, starting with the most obvious and yet the most dismaying revelation:

Given all the time in the world, I will not, in fact, produce a dozen novels as I expected (although I am making some progress)
I can happily live on lemon muffins and coffee
Cats are needier than we tend to think
Not even a quarantine can get me interested in podcasts
Water is the nectar of the gods
Teenage boys are the laziest entities on the planet and will invent new ways to outdo themselves and their lazy non-accomplishments at every turn
I don’t miss my day job much at all
Given the opportunity to police myself, I will not, in fact, eat vegetables
My night-owl body clock is the happiest it’s been since I was a teenager on summer vacation
It’s difficult, but not impossible, to communicate a smile from behind a facemask
Even with nothing to discuss, sports radio hosts do. not. stop. talking…for what seems to be 147-hour stretches at a time
A bedroom door, for however briefly a period it is closed, saves one’s sanity like nothing else
My mom shouldn’t have had to endure another global crisis after surviving the Great Depression and World War II, especially in her 95th year, yet here she is (sorry, Mom)
It’s astounding how much of my normal income had been spent on unnecessary purchases
I’m okay with “outside bad”
Human beings, whether uber-essential medical, emergency, and food retail gods and goddesses or non-essential average Joes and Janes, are amazingly strong and astonishingly adaptable superheroes, and we all need to pat ourselves on the backs for getting up every morning and doing what we do (and not doing what we’re not supposed to do)
I am not above stealing my son’s Easter chocolate (oh wait…that’s any time, not just during a pandemic)
For the most part, people are a whole lot kinder when we’re all faced with the same challenge
If we don’t come out of this with our priorities profoundly changed, reordered, and set right, we all deserve to be hit upside the head with an overly large, quite dead, and particularly smelly flounder
That thing older and wiser people say, “if you have your health, you have everything,” is 100% correct