40 Days

I can’t help but think, when I hear about protests to reopen public gathering places, that it’s been about 40 days of this. And human beings, apparently for millennia, just can’t follow directions for 40 consecutive days. The Old Testament is riddled with examples of this phenomena: everyone’s on the same page about a direct order from leaders they trust, but somewhere between Day 1 and Day 40 things sour and factions rise up and decide it’s time to try a different tack. A few weeks of Moses communing with a thunderstorm drove the Israelites in the desert to melt their jewelry down and take up public sculpture. God, always one step ahead, was already telling Moses to nix graven imagery altogether. When Moses came down the mountain with those famously heavy new instructions for his people to carry (in a large box also made of stone!), he was so angered by their disobedience he destroyed the original tablets and God had to “burn” him a new copy. (With his laser fingers. Watch the movie!)

It’s rough out there right now for the party lovers. Some of us just need a little revelry at minimum once a month, and a virtual chat isn’t the same.

Some part of me prefers these cyber hangouts; being able to simply close my laptop and be home already is basically teleportation, and I’ve enjoyed not having to worry about parking. But even for an extrovert in introvert’s clothing like myself, the lack of true socialization is taking it’s toll. I can understand now the weird, strained, desperate tone of bloggers and social medialites who had already been “living the dream” of working from home for years. I’m making eye contact with everyone at the grocery store, and on walks I’ ve been waving at strangers. I’m actually answered the door without thinking last week for a salesperson making a house call: telling a person no politely has gone from an activity to avoid at all costs (I used to hit the deck and army crawl to a spot hidden from the front windows) to an event that brightens my day. And I told my mother on the phone recently something about how “Instagram has finally become the actual community I had always hoped it would be, like the early days of Facebook” which, when I heard myself say it felt impossibly embarrassing and weird, and to which she replied that she didn’t know what I was talking about and we thankfully moved on.

My point is that before this, if I had to guess how long these exact circumstances would have to be in place before I’d say, “I would totally wait in line to go stand at a bar on a duct taped x on the floor 6 ft away from anyone else, for a single beer of a variety I already had at home, and risk exposure to a lethal virus to do it, just to feel like I’m ‘going out’,” I’d have said 3-6 mos.

But the answer is 40 days. As I read through the White House’s Phases for Reopening almost 40 days from my first day of being home from work, and bracing myself to be truly, deeply terrified for what the month ahead might well look like, I read the guidelines for bars and thought, oh wow, going out sounds really amazing. Even now. Even like this.

I’ll still wait, even when things reopen. (Also this week, I nearly had a meltdown just psyching myself up to go to the grocery store.) But I had the immediate thought, the guttural impulse to do what I please, damn the consequences. I honestly cannot wrap my mind around how people manage to do this alone, with no one to talk some sense into them.