CV Diary, Part 6: Hunkering with intent

Now that we’ve decided this is a war, I guess I’m a war correspondent. That makes all of these battlefield updates much more dramatic, including…

1. Along with coronavirus, we’re also experiencing a pandemic of hunkering down. I haven’t heard that phrase more than once in the 45 years since Richard Nixon made it famous, but it’s already the leading candidate for my 2020 Word of the Year.
2. Our self-quarantine is beginning to look like a 12-step program. There’s a larger power at work here and I have to take it one day at a time.
3. Pots and kettles/Motes and beams. Politicians are continually seeking political advantages, but they’re absolutely shocked and outraged that the other side is doing the same thing. It makes me sad, though, when my friends repeat their team’s talking points with no awareness of the hypocrisy. It makes me even sadder to know that so many people will read this and think I’m talking about everybody else. 
4. I’ve received about 50 emails from various law firms with advice on how to deal with the coronavirus. It turns out that washing my hands is a constitutional issue.
5. One upside to staying indoors is that I have been sober for a whole week. That’s a new record, if you don’t count the month before my bar mitzvah.
6. A guy suggested to me that the virus isn’t all that dangerous, since neither of us knows any victims, but I think his math skills are lacking. If there are 330 million people in the country and I know just 330 of them, I’m not likely to know a victim until there are close to a million cases, plus or minus one or two hundred thousand.
7. To keep ourselves occupied, we decided to watch a bunch of the movies we’d missed over the years. After watching a few of them, I’m grateful, retroactively, for all the movie tickets I didn’t buy over the last couple of decades.  
8. Teaching is one of those lip-service jobs that everyone says they respect and everyone describes as the hardest and most important career in the world yada yada. Now that millions of moms and dads are home-schooling their kids for weeks on end, we’re probably going to see less lip service and more real appreciation.

 
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