Day 9362473643962 of Quarantine. I stopped counting a long time ago, and from the way some people act, we’ve stopped acting like there’s a pandemic at all!
The good news is, I left my apartment. Fresh air, stretching my legs, all that fun stuff. I had to pick up a package, as my folklore sweatshirt that I ordered in July finally arrived (yay!!), and we had to do a tiny run to the grocery store so that Wilmer could make his version of Tom Kha Gai (Thai coconut soup!) for dinner.
The bad news is, we apparently picked the worst possible time to go out into the world ever. It was so fun for awhile when NYC was a lawless land, where time meant nothing, rush hour was no longer a thing, and traffic was non-existent. But we picked 6pm to venture out into the world, and dear lord was that a terrible idea. 6pm in my part of Brooklyn is apparently once again the time everyone who got off work is stopping at the store on their way home, but also has now intersected directly with the people who simply do not give a fuck about Coronavirus.
Look, I get it. I’ve loosened my own personal restrictions little by little over the last eight months – and by little I mean, I went from never leaving my apartment ever to now I leave like, sometimes. But when I do, I feel like it’s my responsibility to make sure that my own actions don’t make someone else feel uncomfortable. My need to get a pint of McConnell’s Vanilla Bean ice cream out of the freezer aisle is really not more important than the person who is also shopping and also looking at the ice cream (because hello, it’s a pandemic – ice cream makes you happy, and happy people just don’t completely and utterly lose their minds in quarantine) having the right to feel comfortable doing their grocery shopping.
This idea is apparently no longer reciprocated by the 6pm crowd. I try to empathize, I really do. We are New Yorkers, after all. We move fast, we talk fast, we do everything fast. It’s not a stereotype, it’s just a fact. People call us rude for blowing past you at the train station, when really we are just trying to catch that fucking Q train that just left the station that we totally, absolutely would have gotten if you hadn’t been taking up the entire staircase trying to figure out which way is uptown and which is down. (Spoiler alert, we were never going to catch the train. The doors were closed before we even swiped our Metrocard. So it wasn’t you, but we’ll still say, “Ugh, tourists” as we walk down the platform since now we have the time to pre-train and you stand huddled around the end of the staircase still causing more congestion than you should.)
But being a New Yorker does not get to be an excuse for being a selfish, inconsiderate person in the middle of a deadly pandemic – no matter your views on it. We don’t get to go back to how it was before, not yet anyway. We don’t get to rush and take up space in the ways that we used to. Our needs are not any more important than anyone else around us. If I’m not squeezing past someone to grab my pint of ice cream because maybe that person is being absurdly slow and I know exactly what I want so I could totally just duck under and grab what I want really quick… then why in the world are you?
Anyway. Lesson learned, 6pm is back to not being the time to go grocery shopping, and my brief glimmer of hope that people took the time of quarantine to realize the world most decisively does not revolve around them was too far-fetched a desire.
And the soup, for the record, turned out to be quite delicious! ♡
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