What day is it? Is it still 2020? Is that spring out there or a thermonuclear thaw? Did Elon Musk go to outer space and bring home a virus souvenir? Did Sarah Palin really show up on The Masked Singer? Am I dreaming or did somebody just tell the whole world to #stayhome?

This thing is actually pretty weird for me and not for the reasons you may think. I love being at home, I love being able to work from home. When this first went down, I did a fist-bump with myself and thought, “I got this.” I mean, if I got a day to #stayhome #allday pre-March 2020, I was thrilled. I am, do not forget, an introvert.

But I find myself strangely moody that I’m suddenly without the freedom to just go.

What is that thing inside human beings that says don’t tell me what to do even if I want exactly what you are suggesting? And also, there’s that spooky admonition: Be careful what you wish for…

I don’t know about you, but I don’t like to be so figure-out-able. Like when I take some quiz from a magazine and think my answers are so avant-garde, so against the tide of the rest of humanity? And then I flip to the answer page, tally up my score and find that I am incredibly average, one of the herd, just a human being after all.

And so I find myself analyzing myself: what is it I’m really missing?

Well, contrary to my introvert-self, I miss people. Sure, I have Rick and Gil and Simon in the house with me. And bonus: I actually like all of them. And I text and I talk and I read a lot, which to me is like someone usually way smarter talking to me. But I am missing the impromptu chats around town and at work or even the usual kind of shopping at Co-op here in town where you have to budget twice as much time as you think because People Gonna Talk To You.

Not no more. Earlier this week, as I shopped for a few things, everyone was leaning away as we passed by one another in the aisles. It wasn’t nice. It was sad.

And I find myself asking the question: How long is this gonna last?

Cue the crickets. Because nobody really knows. Smart people on the news say annoying things like: It’s going to get worse before it gets better. Well, that helps. Not. Because Newsflash: Smart people sometimes don’t have answers. And in this case, if they do have answers, they’re probably not that smart.

*Sigh.*

There’s a part of me that knows it’s gonna be (sort of) okay, that it will be over eventually and we’ll all look back and say: whoa, that was something. But I don’t want to just look ahead to when it’s over because that could be wishing a lot of time away. And it’s never a good thing to do that.

So I will remember that I’m human and I will just do the next thing and be thankful for the time, no matter how hard it is to watch it go by.