Friday Open Thread (with pandemic, 3)

Dear friends,

Stu and I are on Day 8 of our post-travel self-isolation, and no covid-19 symptoms have manifested, for which we’re both grateful. (We are less grateful to the person who sneezed on Stu in the airplane & delivered him a mild headcold that we’re experiencing in sequence, but even so it is good to be reminded of what normal, unthreatening amounts of illness feel like.)

I want to ask: what have you done during self-isolation that you would not have otherwise done? Good things, perplexing things, things you have observed in yourself as difference.

I made hummus. This is an important one to me, because it’s a thing I always want but never do for myself, because I was taught The Proper Way in Order to Not Be Ill-Spoken of in the Village and that way is time-consuming (soak the chickpeas, boil the chickpeas, strain them, mash/blend them, incorporate the mixture of garlic, tahini, lemon juice, decorate). But now I’m home all the time. Now cooking punctuates that time in a way that hunger used to. Now cooking is a long undulating rhythm ribboning up my days, and in the midst of everything, I’m grateful for it, I love it.

(Less virtuously but fully as comfortingly, I started playing Animal Crossing. A dear friend very unexpectedly gifted me with a Switch Lite, which I’m just now realizing is the first game console I’ve ever owned that wasn’t a PC or my phone, and it’s … so good, it’s so much what I need, and I’m grateful for that too.)

Let’s talk, then! What are we doing that we wouldn’t otherwise be doing, friends? Are there any gifts in this awfulness to feel complicated about?

Love,

Amal