A letter from April 6th, 2020

Dear FutureMe, Welcome back to the wonderful world of the COVID-19 outbreak. Status: I don’t even know, the US is doing the worst in the world and last time I checked 34 of the states have stay-at-home orders. It’s April 6th, 2020, and we have been self-quarantining for about 3 weeks now, but the actual stay-at-home order from Ducey is fairly recent. All I’ve been doing is work at Target a couple times a week, babysit Monday and Thursday, and do online school. I’m excited to be a senior next year, especially because I’ll have a half day. When the outbreak first happened in China, I can’t say I cared or knew a lot about it. Come February it was getting worse, and we heard about schools closing, but looking back I was in a bubble, and I felt like it wasn’t going to really affect me, (“They won’t close schools, no one I know will get it”). We joked about it constantly, but we’re Gen X, we joke nihilistically about everything. This was the time that I began reading the news and listening to my podcast in hopes to educate myself, but all of the sudden my bubble burst. School had been cancelled, so the first week of quarantine began. Spring break was the next week, and I still had a lot of hope: that school would come back, that this would be over soon, that life would quickly return to normal. Everything changed really quickly about a week after that, and I was starting to freak out a bit. All of the sudden my daily routine of waking up, going to school, coming home, sometimes working, sometimes going to French Honors Society: it was all gone. The only thing that really brought normality was my favorite show (GMM) that had a new episode daily, so that’s what I woke up for each morning. The next week I went back to work at Target, and started babysitting for the Lorence’s kids, Luke and Emily. Having something to do returned a bit of schedule to my life, and now that school has started up again online I have plenty of work to do daily. My hope is that by mid-summer the outbreak has calmed. I have been listening to the Philip DeFranco Show (the news podcast) for a while now because he has a lot of the facts presented in a *mostly* unbiased way. He seems hopeful as well (we just need to be careful in the meantime), but scientists also say the virus might be seasonal, but so is swine flu now, even though it was a bad outbreak like 10 years ago. Anyway, when we have free time we’ve been playing a lot of Switch, FaceTiming with our little cousins, and hanging out in the backyard. It’s really interesting to hear the perspectives of little kids now, because they see things much more simply than we do. What I’ve noticed is mostly they just miss going to school, and are waiting for this to be over already. The main thing I will remember from this time (I think) is the confusion and some of the hopelessness I feel, staying at home to protect myself and others but wanting nothing more than to go back to normal life (as I suspect everyone who goes through an upheaval in their life feels). Anyway, hope you’re doing well, future me! P.S. Because I’m curious, here’s the music/podcasts I’m listening to now, I wonder if it will be be the same in a year The 1975, Nirvana, Harry Styles, Billie Eilish, Red Hot Chili Peppers, John Mayer (literally my whole life), and some of The Rolling Stones and The Beatles. Rhett and Link also made a Mythical Feel Good Quarantine Playlist I’ve been listening to. As far as podcasts, I listen a lot to Ear Biscuits and NVC, and some Dolly Parton’s America and Revisionist History.