Your Internet Connection Is Unstable: Life on Zoom

Who knew that, come the apocalypse, one of the main survival skills would be how to use Zoom? Good thing it's easily learned. Everyone's at it and the worldwide web is struggling to cope. "Your internet connection is unstable," my laptop tells me periodically. From Toronto I taught my 90-year-old father in Los Angeles to host Zoom meetings so he could continue to treat his psychotherapy patients.

I seem to spend half my life on Zoom (or one of its cousins; other brands are available). Take last Monday, for instance.  In normal times Mondays are tough: launching into a weekday routine, up early, dress nicely, pack a lunch or two. Long ago when our oldest child was about six years old, Mondays were further complicated by his after-school swimming lessons in Spennymoor, a village five miles away (and home to now-famous folk artist Norman Cornish). The complications involved school pick-up plus toting a small baby and a toddler, or negotiating complex child-swapping arrangements to enable carpooling. No matter how I sliced it, the Monday struggle was real. Our good friends across the street who also had swimming lessons in Spennymoor, but at a different time, simplified their evening: every Monday, they had frozen pizza for dinner. "We should do that too," eldest child suggested.

"Good idea. What kind of pizza?"

"No!" he said, horrified. "Not pizza. Not the same dinner. Something that we have every Monday."

We settled on pasta. Pasta with pesto or Bolognese or with tuna and peas and cream. Cook some broccoli or a toss a salad, and voilà. Manageable Monday mealtimes and a child who could swim. (That child is now at university across Canada, thousands of miles away, in a different time zone. He is a triathlete. Those swimming lessons came in handy.)

So, Mondays. This past Monday, two weeks after the Crack in the World--aka covid19--usurped our lives, we stayed home isolating as instructed, spending much of the day in pajamas. But thanks to Zoom and its ilk, Monday felt nearly as busy as in those days of yore.  First thing: roll out of bed, unroll a quilted mat, join a Pilates class on Zoom ("feel your core"). Next, don a wrap cardigan for respectability above the waist and attend a research team meeting on Zoom. Then a phone call with a friend who has just moved to Canada and now finds herself stuck at home with two preteen boys also new to this country. (She sounds amazingly cheerful in a situation that would have me curled up in a ball sobbing and drumming my heels.) While catching up with email correspondence I attend an arts talk on Zoom (of course) run by the Brooklyn Rail arts collective; this one features Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky, a polymath with panache. (I want to read his The Book of Ice.) As a lunch break I sing in a Zoom choir led by klezmer musician Polina Shepherd, my friend and former choir teacher in Brighton. I had been missing singing with Polina; a silver lining of the enforced isolation is reconnecting with her and others. Then another Zoom meeting with colleagues from a different project and some more work.

Finally I scoot out for a speed dog walk and back home for some speed grooming. I tart myself up by donning a necklace and some red lipstick. I have been invited to a Zoom cocktail party! BYOB. I mix myself a very tasty Cosmo, my first drink in yonks, and arrive fashionably late by five minutes. The cocktail party works brilliantly, as does the cocktail. Six of us natter and laugh and catch up and commiserate. We're doing it again next week.

A side effect of Zoom Life is spending a LOT of time looking at myself. I feel like a film star. There I always am, on screen, up in the top left corner.

From my perspective, The Pause has spawned an explosion in online activity. Social isolation it is not. Physical distancing yes, but with a whole heck of a lot of social connectedness. I almost feel I am wearing out. Or Zooming out, perhaps.

In real life--Zoomlessly--I go outside at 7:30 pm to play Chopsticks on our porch (doesn't everyone keep an upright piano on their front porch? Why not?), making noise in support of the frontline workers who are doing their level best to save our damned lives. My plinking is paltry, though: these heroes get a far better show performed by Gus, our neighborhood bag-piper, around the corner.

So even without swimming lessons and small fry, Monday was busy. And after all that, there was still dinner to prepare. Luckily I did not have to think hard. It was Monday. I made pasta.

TMI: coronavirus, CoViD19, and corporations

In this time of crisis, information is useful. Social media and other electronic communications can help. For instance, I recently learned the difference between coronavirus and CoViD19* on Twitter.

Also in the "welcome" category are updates on policies and plans from my employer, from my daughter's school, from my synagogue. These are organizations to which I or my family belong and I appreciate knowing what is going on with them (although, Cirque-ability, notice of cancellation arriving more than 3 minutes before the start of daughter's 'aerial and acro' class would have been appreciated). 

Other messages that drop into my inbox, however, are decidedly not useful, desirable, or even, really, polite. These include numerous "updates" on their handling of coronavirus concerns from any business with which I have ever had a transaction. Chiltern Railways, from whom I once bought a five-pound ticket from Paddington to Oxford--which I then didn't even use-- a year or two ago seems to be sending me twice-daily emails. Ditto the Gap, Hyatt Hotels, Thrifty Rental Cars, and the UofT Bookstore. To these corporate entities, let me say that I do wish your employees and customers well, but I can't help seeing these communiqués as over-sharing, over-the-top, unnecessary and -- the cynic in me suspects-- as opportunistic advertising disguised as concern. 

How would they like it if I decided to write to them with my own twice-daily updates? 

Dear Chiltern Railways, 

Please let me inform you that, due to the current situation with CoViD19, today I bought more hand cream because my skin is chapped from frequent washing. The dog and I had a lovely, socially-distanced walk in High Park yesterday.  My book group is considering postponing the next meeting or holding a discussion online. I hope you find this news helpful and reassuring. 

Yours truly, 

Mrs. Trellis**  

Who knows? Maybe they'll be so grateful they will thank me with a five quid ticket to replace the one I never used. 


*Coronavirus refers to a family of viruses; the specific microorganism that causes CoViD19, or "COrona VIrus Disease 2019" is one called SARS-CoV2.

**I'm sorry, I haven't a clue. 

Love in the Time of Coronavirus and Jalapeños

A recent tweet making the rounds reads, "Here's how to get a message across" and shows a photo of an official-looking sign from Round Rock, Texas: "Texas Coronavirus Protection. Wash your hands like you just got done slicing jalapeños for a batch of nachos and you need to take your contacts out. (That's 20 seconds of scrubbing, y'all.)"  I laughed, as they say, out loud (how else?).  

I have been washing my hands a lot. There's no hand sanitizer to be found in stores and when I look online, the stuff costs more than printer ink, that formerly most expensive fluid on the planet. I looked up how to make your own because I remember reading an article in the New Yorker years ago about the invention of Purell, and I thought, gee, that seems pretty basic.  I've yet to get the craft project underway however and am just carrying on washing my hands very often while singing Happy Birthday twice, once to each cat, and using the gel dispensers at work and in banks and shops and wherever else I can find them, and nagging my family to do the same. Thanks to the still-chilly weather along with all the alcohol and soap, I now have dishpan hands, a dire fate for a woman according to the Palmolive advert of my childhood.

Another childhood memory came to me as I washed my hands this morning (happy birthday, dear Chica...) while twisting my wrists to avoid getting my sleeves wet: this was a maneuver I practiced only in winter in southern California. For a few months, December to February, my mother insisted we children wear long-sleeved tops (...but Mo-o-om) and soon after Thanksgiving, we would re-learn the extra step of pushing the sleeves up our arms before grabbing the soap. February to November is a long time for a child so each year, we struggled anew to remember, suffering a string of soggy cuffs until it became habit. I'm learning again, not because I can go 10 months without warm clothing, but because it seems I have gotten sloppier in my hand-washing. A digital swipe of lather did me fine. Now I have to keep those jalapeño hands front of mind. Advice to avoid travel is becoming more prominent. I have plans to head west this week. To go or not to go? What constitutes travel? My first stop is home--Los Angeles. Another stop to see my sister, and then my son. The only part of the trip I consider travel is Tucson to attend a literary festival and a writing workshop that I am honored to be invited to.  

After 9/11, when planes were downed and getting across the Atlantic near-impossible, I felt a species of panic knowing that even if something terrible happened at 'home' in California, I could not get there.  My (semi-humorous) tag-line is that I can be homesick wherever I am; there is always somewhere I am not and miss. Occasionally I indulge in imagining how I would feel if I still lived where my roots were, where I grew up. The fantasy falls apart because in that scenario I would be without my husband and my children and want to cry. I do though compare myself and my family to some of our friends here, born and bred here or near. "Are you from Toronto?" I sometimes ask a new acquaintance. "Oh no," they'll say. "I'm from Burlington." Mentally I re-phrase their answer: "Yes."

Journalist Jacqui Banaszynski writes in the most recent Nieman Storyboard: "Coronavirus is as big as it gets...We find ourselves in the oft-talked-about but rarely realized same boat. That's not just about the potential for illness, but about the economy, how we're being served — or not — by our public institutions, civil and lifestyle disruption, and even about who gets to own the truth of this story."

It's fucking scary. And it is even scarier for those of us--those many of us--whose lives and life histories and families are scattered across the globe, whose boats are always afloat. Do I go to LA to see my parents? Vancouver to see my son? Seattle to my sister's? Take my daughter with me? Does husband go to London in a few weeks for work and to see his parents?  

Be careful out there.

It's a new world, one in which the best we can do is aim to stay safe, stay strong, stay sensible, and not worry about stockpiling toilet paper (there are other solutions). 

Wash our hands and think of jalapeños.