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The grocery stores were soon empty, the shelves sucked clean like chicken bones.
Because even this is the most predictable thing.
I think this explains why what I felt first was not fear but a thrill. It was a little exciting—a sudden sparkle amid the ordinary, the shimmer of the unexpected thing.
Do we always thrill just a little when something a little unknown is happening
By noon on that first day, the networks had run out of new information. Drained of every fresh fact, they went right on reporting anyway, chewing and rechewing the same small chunks of news. It didn’t matter, we were mesmerized.
Right?
I spent that whole day sitting on the carpet only a few feet from the television with my parents. I still remember how it felt to live through those hours. It was almost physical: the need to know whatever there was to know.
Ten weeks into quarantine and it's only slightly better.
Later, I would come to think of those first days as the time when we learned as a species that we had worried over the wrong things: the hole in the ozone layer, the melting of the ice caps, West Nile and swine flu and killer bees. But I guess it never is what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different—unimagined, unprepared for, unknown.
Is that true now? I couldn't begin to know.
could tell he was hoping not to scare us, but that was the thing: We kids were not as afraid as we should have been. We were too young to be scared, too immersed in our own small worlds, too convinced of our own permanence.
“Art thrives in times of uncertainty.”
Asa teacher living in a time of uncertainty, I can tell you that's a shitty thing for a teacher to tell a student. Crisis brain is real and it affects people differently.
“Markets need stability,” said the president. “We can’t continue this way.” It requires a certain kind of bravery, I suppose, to choose the status quo. There’s a certain boldness to inaction.
The current president would agree: Inaction during a world crisis is brave.
This was America. The government could not dictate the way we lived our lives.
Ha!
“These are amazing times,” he said. “We’re living in some amazing times.”
Do some people simply thrive in times of uncertainty?
Even beauty, in abundance, turns creepy.
But adrenaline, like any other drug, wears off. Panic, like any other flood, must crest. Six or seven weeks after the slowing started, a certain boredom developed.
I'm not sure.
We were nervous sometimes, other times not. Anxiety rolled over us in waves.
The extreme poles of living in crisis are undeniable and exhausting.
All the officials were repeating the same neat phrase: out of an abundance of caution.
The sweetheart phrase during a worldwide crisis.
