It was just days after my child was born. As she was premature, she was immediately admitted to the NICU, and it was heartbreaking to leave the hospital without our daughter coming home with us, but we tried to take comfort in the fact that she was exactly where she needed to be in order to play some physical catchup to where she would be allowed to come home.
Every single day afterward, mythical wife and I would go to the hospital twice a day to spend some time with our child. Except for those first few days, I didn’t go, because I had come down with a pretty nasty cough, and given the situation that was rapidly spreading across the globe, understandably, there were some major red flags about an Asian guy having a cough, especially not just at a hospital, but at a NICU.
Fortunately, it was most likely just allergy-related, as like a true genius, I had participated in a double 5K event that involved running two 5Ks in an eight hour span; one at 1 am, and then one at 7 am the following (same) morning; it was daylight-savings themed, and the novelty of it alone made me want to try it. But in doing so, I had inhaled a metric fuckton of early Georgia spring pollen, and my body was revolting as a result. However, it cleared up fairly quickly, as the pollen coursed through my system, and I would get to go into the NICU later on.
However, it was on one of those days in which I dropped mythical wife off at the NICU, and came back home to log into work, I have a memory of swinging by the nearby Publix on the way home, and knowing we were low on bottled water, I made a point to pick up some more. There was a display upon entering for a buy 2, get 1 free, so I figured, why not just get three cases? With this whole pandemic thing starting to gain momentum, I figured three cases of water between two adults should be sufficient for all this shit to blow over, right?
Funny how perceptions are when you’ve never really lived through a global pandemic in your life.
So here we are, one year later; people with brains larger than a pea, are still wearing masks out in public, if they’re even leaving home in the first place, and coronavirus has officially killed over half a million Americans, and countless many more over the rest of the globe, but pretty much nowhere worse than it was in America. Several vaccines have finally come to light, but the distribution of them leaves a lot to be desired, considering an entire planet’s population all need it in order to hopefully return to some semblance of normalcy, so in spite of the supposed cure existing, it’s still a slow and still dangerous path to the finish line.
Personally, coronavirus has done some pretty regrettable things to my life; it 100% cockblocked me from getting a job that I really had my heart set on, seeing as how I had interviewed, had generated interest, but then shit hit the fan, they went on a hiring freeze, and then the position evaporated. It also prevented most of my family from meeting my child, as nobody traveled, much less us, and only through effort and determination was I able to bring my mother down to meet her newest granddaughter, but my sister and father have yet to meet the newest addition to the family.
And then obviously, there’s the massive amounts of less consequential drawbacks, such as being unable to really see friends, trips ruined, plans derailed, and you get my point. Oh yeah, also the gym. Not being able to go to the gym for a year royally blows.
However, in a stroke of irony, there was actually some positives to have come out of the bullshit coronavirus put the world through; most notably the fact that due to all the stay-at-home directives, I have gotten to spend a godly amount of time with my daughter from the time she came home, all the way to her first birthday, I have been home with my child every single day (minus the two days of traveling to bring my mom down), and gotten to bond and spend time with her, in a scenario that I know that not everyone is as fortunate or lucky to have gotten.
My car never hit the 10,000 mile mark in the first year, because I barely go anywhere if I even leave the house in the first place, and nobody in my household has gotten sick at all throughout all this time.
Here’s the thing though: despite the fact that there’s light at the end of the tunnel now, and the world on somewhat of a track to eventually being mostly fully vaccinated, there are aspects of the current world that I have zero desire to relinquish once coronavirus is brought down to a point of control.
Namely, the whole going back to work in the office thing, I abso-fucking-lutely do not want that. Ever again, if it were up to me, honestly. The whole “graphic designers can’t work from home” bullshit rhetoric that had been popularly believed for the past decade was debunked harder than Manti Teo’s imaginary girlfriend, and my team and my reports having been thriving while working from home. Most designers are in their natural habitats, holed up in isolation like most like, when they’re working, and the results have been clear and consistent.
But at the same time, I want like crazy to be able to go out into a restaurant and eat out again. It’s like a weak catch-22, because I do want restaurants, but if the cost of being able to do so, is then going back to work in the office, then fuck it I’ll keep ordering takeout for the rest of my life if that’s the case.
Either way, I find it somewhat ironic that I’m in a position where I would almost rather prefer if the world remained in a pandemic, if it meant that I got to spend more time with my kid from the safe comfort of home, than see the world claw its way to recovery, and then have to being in a position where I have to go back to the office, and I pay egregious amounts of money to have other people mediocrely watch over my children, in combined groups of other plague rats.
All I know is that my reaction to the news that vaccines had broken through, wasn’t nearly as joyous as it probably should have been. But frankly, I’d also have a hard time believing that I was the only one out there who had this tepid reaction to it, who might been in similar circumstances as I have been over the last year.
Oh well. It’s been a year of definite extreme lows, as far as the global opinion might be, but it’s still been pretty good for me, as far as important parenting experiences are concerned. I’d honestly be sad to have to “go back to normal” because I’ve never had to live that life, and compared to how I’ve been living over the last year, it pales in comparison, and I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want that kind of normal.
