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.