I tried Target’s curbside pick-up (which they call Drive-Up) today for the first time, in an attempt to broaden my options for acquiring supplies. I hadn’t tried it before, because perishable items and many scarce items such as hand sanitizer and cleaning supplies can’t be acquired this way, and pretty much everything else could be shipped instead, so why would I drive 45 minutes AND force some store employee to shop in-store for me when I could instead stay home AND have an employee shopping more safely in a warehouse?

But, as I say, I am trying to broaden our options. And for me, the first time I do anything can feel insurmountable, so this was a trial run to make the process familiar if I turn out to need it later. (If more things become unavailable for shipping, for example, or if I need something sooner than it can be shipped.) And it went pretty smoothly: you add things to a cart using the Target app on your phone; you check out and pay; you get a little notification (phone and email) when the order is ready (within 4 hours). The app then has you click a button to say you’re on your way, and another button to say you’ve arrived. An employee comes out to your car and loads the things into your trunk. I had to roll my window down to say hello and have them scan a bar code on my phone, but it was otherwise contactless, and the employee was masked and so was I, and we were out in the nice fresh air so it felt safe.

Some huge upsides to curb-side:

1. I could get Diet Coke (for me) and Diet Mountain Dew (for Paul), which can’t be shipped and which take up a fair amount of room in the grocery cart.

2. I could get Monster Trail mix in the BINS (they’re currently only shipping the bags)—especially important because right now we have only ONE bin for making our own, and I want at least TWO bins for that, plus we may occasionally need a fresh new bin, plus it’s nice to have extra bins for trying new combinations (I am thinking of doing one with honey roasted peanuts instead of regular, caramel M&M’s instead of plain, and butterscotch chips instead of peanut butter chips). And FURTHERMORE, they were on sale with pick-up, so they were $6.99, so that’s within pennies of the cost of making it myself, so that was satisfying too.

3. I could get M&M’s, which haven’t been shippable recently, including the mini ones I haven’t been able to find even at my grocery store!

4. I could get the additional TV tray I wanted for the living room: having more people home means needing more surfaces.

5. I was able to get some chips without worrying they’d be crushed. Normally I just let them be crushed, but this was for something I particularly wanted uncrushed chips for.

6. I was able to buy some heavy things, like cat food and cat litter, without wincing at the idea of Target having to ship those to me for free.

7. The whole process of driving up and having someone else put stuff into the trunk worked very smoothly and well; and I didn’t have to phone anyone, I could just use the app to let them know first that I was on my way, and later that I had arrived. And they don’t make you sign anything: they scan a barcode on your phone, and the app walks you through that so it’s not weird or something you have to fumble to find. (I have had to hand my phone to cashiers before when I wasn’t able to figure out coupons or bar codes on my phone, to give you an idea of my ability level.)

And some downsides, which are only to be expected in this imperfect world:

1. The app. Oh my goodness, the app. I had HEARD the app was bad, but I thought it was bad the way the website was bad, and I’ve gotten pretty accustomed to the website. No: it was far, far worse. It was slow, it was laggy; when I selected an item/button, there was a pause that might be just a few seconds or might mean the app was crashing again, which it did literally every few minutes, including twice while I was trying to check out, so that I wondered if after all that fuss I would even be able to complete the order. It happened OFTEN that an item would appear to be available until I tried to add it to the cart, at which point it would inform me that it had just gone out of stock, or that it wasn’t available at the location I had supposedly already filtered for. When I tried to browse a category (like: I know they’re out of a lot of cleaning supplies, so I won’t hope for specific ones, but just want to see what they DO have), the search results were unsatisfying and baffling. Why am I seeing face wipes when I searched all-purpose cleaners? Why are we LEADING with the out-of-stock bleach-sprays and not with the out-of-stock all-purpose sprays I asked for? Anyway. Anyway. I breathed through the pain and thought of it all as part of the learning experience.

2. And you HAVE to use the app! Even though they have a perfectly good multiple-cart system on their website, AND the items you add to your cart on the app SHOW UP IN YOUR WEBSITE CART, you can’t add them on the website and have them show up in the app. I don’t LIKE doing stuff like that on my phone. I am a slow phone typist and a fast keyboard typist, and I hate seeing search results a couple at a time on the little screen.

3. One item was missing from the order. Luckily just a $2 item, which falls into my “Just let it go, for heaven’s sake it’s a pandemic” category.

4. Also, they accidentally gave us one container of Monster trail mix and one of Caramel Cashew, instead of the two bins of Monster we ordered. But (a) we LOVE Caramel Cashew, and (b) it’s FOUR DOLLARS more expensive than the Monster, which is why we usually don’t buy it. This more than compensates for the missing item (we were only charged for the Monster, because you pay when you order), which is pleasing. One thing I like about Target is that when they DO make errors, as everyone must from time to time, they seem to go either way: sometimes in their own favor, sometimes in mine. In general that lets me feel that I can just let everything balance itself: when a jar of pesto arrives in the mail with the seal broken, I can toss it out without bothering Target about it, knowing that in the future I am likely to get a container of $11.99 trail mix when I ordered the $7.99 trail mix.

5. I did feel uneasy about having someone else taking on the shopping danger for me. But it’s on the minor end of such uneasiness: this seems to be Target employees who are there ANYWAY (as opposed to someone doing it independently), which means they are in the building no matter what, and so it is safer for them to have customers outside in the parking lot rather than sharing the air inside the store. My top choice would still be the warehouse/shipping situation, which seems to maximize safety for the maximum number of participants, but this seems like a very close second.

In the balance, a good experience even considering the app, and a good addition to our supply-acquiring methods. I will probably now have a running cart in the app to which I will add the things that are not available for shipping.

It’s hard to come up with a term I can use to indicate “people I know in a non-online-only sort of way” that doesn’t accidentally communicate “non-online is real and online is not.” “In real life” is a common shorthand, but…YOU are real-life! HERE is real-life! We are all real, and alive, and this is real life! I need a term that communicates NOT here, and instead more like…the people we know away from here, in the space where we bring our kids to the same schools, and where we get together in coffee shops and for lunch, and where we see each other in the grocery store. So I would say “local people”—except I’m also including in this category people I know who don’t actually live in my same town, such as old high school and college friends, and friends we knew before we moved to this state, and friends who used to live here but moved away, and so on—some of whom I now interact with only online, so how to differentiate them from people I only know because of online? We are not going to say “in meat space” *shudder* but then what DO we say? I think this is one of those topics, like “What do we call the first decade, if we’re apparently not cool enough to pull off saying The Aughts?,” that comes up again and again because there just is no good solution.

Well. Among those people, those people I know separate from this cherished online community, I don’t know any whose college students are not going to college if in-person college is an option. (That is, I know people whose kids are attending remotely because the college has gone all-remote, but I don’t know anyone who had the option of in-person or remote and chose remote.) And I don’t know any who are choosing the remote option for their school-age children, either, if a hybrid/in-person option is available. And all the nurses at Edward’s Remicade appointment are sending their children back in-person to college and/or K-12 schools and/or pre-K/daycare.

I am feeling lonely in our pandemic choices.

I am not feeling lonely overall. There are six other people in this house with me: I am back to the days of hiding in the bathroom, locking my bedroom door, asking people to please please for the love of god stop talking to me every ten seconds, etc. Also, I have access to friends through emails, texting, IM/DM, Zoom/Hangouts, and (theoretically) phone calls, which makes us so much luckier than, say, early settlers. But I am feeling lonely in that I don’t know other families who have chosen remote-learning when they could have chosen in-person.

It could be that I have lost my mind. It really could! People who have lost their minds generally THINK they have NOT lost their minds! People who have fully crossed into tin-foil-hat category don’t think, as far as I can tell, “Oh, how funny, apparently I am now a person who has crossed the boundaries of the rational, and am now thinking irrationally!” It could very well be that other people are right, and I am wrong, and I fully concede that point! I fully concede it! Not only do I concede it, I HOPE FOR IT TO BE THE CASE! Because if I am right, THAT IS THE BAD OPTION.

Because let me tell you what I think is going to happen (not what I’m SURE will happen or KNOW will happen or CONFIDENTLY PREDICT will happen, just what I THINK), considering more than 170,000 people have died of Covid-19 in the U.S. so far, and the rest of the world pities us and is appalled at our behavior, and our country is still not doing anything in particular about any of that. I think all the college kids will be coming back home, after thoroughly mixing with their peers from other parts of the country/world. I think all the work and expense K-12 schools have put into figuring out how to do in-person learning (the scheduling! the cleaning! the equipment! the policies!) will be wasted after a few weeks, maybe less or more in some cases, and that soon they will all be remote ANYWAY, and without having used all this time to figure out how to do remote better, and without anyone having found any sort of creative solution to address the fact that many working parents rely on schools for childcare so that they can work.

Here are the plans, as they look to me: We are deliberately throwing a nationwide Covid-19 party. Every household that can spare a representative, perhaps a young child who doesn’t have a job, should send that representative to a daily location where they can spend a large chunk of hours breathing the same air as representatives from other households in the local area. If the household representative is an older child who can be away from home longer, they should be sent to share air on a more macro level, living in groups of thousands with representatives collected from other towns and other states and even other countries, and then they can be sent back in a few months to their own communities. The goal is to make sure the virus is spread as thoroughly as possible across our households, communities, and country.

At this point there may be those who feel inclined to tell me why this is the wrong way to see things, either to defend an alternate choice or in an attempt to console me / talk me down; but I hope you will understand when I say pre-emptively that I have been WIDELY and THOROUGHLY exposed to alternate and potentially-comforting points of view on this topic, to the extent that I have just said I am literally questioning my own sanity. And I have said I know of NO ONE in my non-online life who is voluntarily keeping their students at home, NO ONE, so in fact ALL I am hearing is alternate/disagreeing views. And this makes me feel as if I am alone in my own views, and that is the point of this post, and so hearing that YET ANOTHER PERSON doesn’t share my views is not…THERAPEUTIC or USEFUL here. Only time can help: either I will find to my great relief that I am completely wrong, or else I won’t.

What I HAVE found useful/therapeutic is access to the online community. The broader scope of online interaction lets me see I am not actually alone, and there are MANY other families choosing the remote option, or tentatively signing up for in-person but continuing to consider the option of switching to remote before school begins. I am not sure what I would be doing/feeling without that connection. It reminds me of how so many people, including me, found online communities when they were feeling isolated with newborns and young children.

The other day we learned that Edward, age 15, thinks that tongs are called “egg holders.”

One of my friends goes with her husband and kids to Disney every year, and it is one of those things that is a big part of Their Family Identity: they are A Disney Family. Annual matching family t-shirts, mouse-eared family stickers on the car, using a Disney family photo for their Christmas card, etc. I tell you this so that you will understand why the necessary cancellation of this trip is especially disappointing for them: it’s the blow felt by everyone who has had to cancel a vacation/event due to the pandemic, plus the additional blow of losing something that is an important ritual for them, plus the additional blow of breaking their streak.

To somewhat ease this disappointment, they are doing something that seems fun to me, though I could see how for other people it might hit as extra sad. But to me it seems fun, and this is what it is: they are doing an at-home version of SOME of the things they would be doing on their Disney trip, using a schedule of what they WOULD have been doing each day. It’s not at all meant to replace or compensate for the lost vacation; it’s more like…finding a few little happy things in spite of the disaster. So for example, on the day they were supposed to have left for this vacation, my friend posted that normally they would be packing the car and heading out at 7:00 a.m. with one last stop at [particular favorite local coffee shop] to pick up breakfast on their way out of town, and so she got curbside pick-up at that coffee shop and brought it home, and that’s what they had for breakfast. She said they always stop for lunch at [particular chain restaurant] on their travel day, so she went online and found a dupe recipe for what they always order, and she made it at home and they had it for lunch. Meanwhile they are playing all their Disney CDs as they usually would in the car on the way there, and they have their usual car activities (magazines, travel snacks, puzzle books, Disney trivia cards) on the dining room table, and they are watching all their Disney movies, and they have all the photo albums out of previous trips. I don’t know, I can see how it could feel a little bleak, but it comes across more like salvaging what they can + remembering other fun trips + the diverting and creativity-stimulating project of thinking about what they can do/make/eat that would be reminiscent of those trips.

We had our first awkward situation of needing to RSVP a no for an in-person birthday party. I’d been kind of dreading it. “Dreading” is overstating it, but I can’t think of a milder word. Perhaps I could have said “anticipating it warily.” Anyway it happened: Henry was invited to a birthday party at the kind of place that hosts children’s birthday parties, followed by an indoors restaurant meal. Happily the mom who contacted me did so by email so I had time to work out how to respond, and also happily she included a list of precautions they would be taking (masks, hand sanitizer, only three children and one adult at the party) but also said she completely understood if we didn’t feel comfortable, so I didn’t feel like she was someone who though the pandemic was a ridiculous hoax and/or someone who would scoff at me for declining. I was actually more worried that by declining I would accidentally send the vibe that we disapproved of their plans/invitation. Sometimes my social anxieties are unfounded, but from the careful wording of her invitation I DO think there was a chance she was worried about that. So I responded with happiness to have received the invitation, a sorrowful inability to accept (with a brief, non-identifying mention of an immunosuppressed person in our household), and a cheerful instruction to wish the child a happy birthday from Henry and me.

Social interaction can be so tricky. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could beam over a little mental packet of what we INTEND to communicate?

I am still pretty low. The upcoming presidential election is well on its way to being fully compromised. And apparently we are going to have a do-over of the whole “a non-white political candidate must not have been born here” thing. The United States Postal Service, which I love, is in serious jeopardy. And Congress…went on a break? I guess? See you later, folks! Don’t worry about us!

Meanwhile, our school system is still planning partial in-person school, and they do have a remote option but the remote option is that they MIGHT have some teachers teaching only remotely but they don’t know which teachers will be doing that or which classes will be available, so if we want to we can make our own separate plans, homeschooling or classes through a different online high school, and can we please let them know right now which way we are going to do it. WE CANNOT MAKE THOSE CHOICES WITHOUT MORE INFORMATION. Whenever I feel like going into a full freak-out about this, I remember most of us are in the same boat: there just ISN’T the information we need. Wringing my hands doesn’t result in the creation of more information.

Also I have gone back on keto, which I was reluctant to tell you about because of how I would have felt when I was off keto if someone had said they were going back on it. (PRETTY BAD.) It was a combination of two things, and I hope those two things will relieve your mind: i.e., that you will be able to think “Ah! Yes, perhaps if I had those two things, I too would go back on a diet during a pandemic, but I do NOT have those two things, and if Swistle had not had those two things, she would not be on a diet either, so we are still on the same page.”

The first thing was the much smaller thing, so I will mention it first, and it’s that I hit a weight-gain level that felt less worth it. Up until that point, I’d felt shruggy: I could not feel it was important enough to worry about during a pandemic. Also, I have a pretty wide range of weights I feel comfortable at, and I was still comfortable. But I FELT myself go past that mark, and I was no longer comfortable. Still, if it hadn’t been for the second thing, I would still have been shruggy about it: yes, I’d prefer to be a different weight / more comfortable, but it is not important enough to justify the actions that would need to be taken to achieve that right now.

It was the second thing that really mattered, and it was this: I stopped feeling the thrill of the unrestricted food options. For MONTHS, I would wake up feeling bad in one way or another (discouraged! angry! anxious!), and then I would remember I could have a bagel or cereal with breakfast, and/or sugar in my coffee, and I would perk right up and go humming into the shower. Mid-day I would remember I had to make dinner, and then I would remember it could be something delicious and I could eat it too, and I would perk right up and start looking through my recipe file to see what I might like to eat. After a delicious lunch (with potato chips! and/or coleslaw! and/or potato salad!) I would have a cupcake and I would RELISH it and feel so lucky and happy. And all of those things stopped happening. I still ENJOYED the food, but if the thrill level had been at a 10 for all those months, now it was at about a 2. The situation went from WELL WORTH IT to NOT well worth it.

Also, many of the practical/logistical considerations had cleared up: eggs, meat, and cheese are no longer restricted or hard to acquire. I’ve gotten accustomed to shopping less frequently, and I’ve become less stressed about it. I don’t feel anymore that cruising-for-disordered-eating feeling of needing to dramatically reduce how much I eat of the precious supplies. And Paul went on a diet, which first of all thanks I hate it, and secondly means I felt pretty resentful to have gone off my restricted foods list in order to make grocery shopping simpler and less stressful, and then have him make it more difficult and stressful again.

I thought about it for awhile, wondering if it was something I actually wanted to go back to, and then I got to that magical and hard-to-manufacture point of Feeling I Was Ready To Do It, and then I did it. It has been a rough week. When I was doing keto before, I could even take off, say, five days for a vacation, and then go right back to it with maybe just a slight Low feeling the first day. But after more like four and a half months, it was like starting all over, with the queasiness and exhaustion and everything, and feeling like there’s nothing I want to eat. Well, I remember it from last time, and I remember it stopped being like that and then it just felt normal, so I am leaning on that memory.

And it might not TAKE. I might do this for a couple of weeks and then think NOPE: too hard to shop, too hard to cook food I can’t eat, too hard to cope with the news without kettle corn, too hard to handle five kids doing school at home if I can’t start the morning with a bagel and end lunch with a cupcake. Or maybe I will be on it until the next time I feel the desperate need for the support of delicious unrestricted foods—in, say, November. We will just see.

Sorry again for talking about dieting during a pandemic. I know it can be discouraging to hear about. Even when I AM dieting during a pandemic, I find it discouraging to hear about other people doing it. But also, I don’t feel right when it seems like I’m keeping something secret from you, and I can tell that’s happening when I go day after day after day without writing anything: it’s like I have to tell you the thing first. So I thought, let’s get it over with, and then we can go back to normal.

Let’s talk about something else. Tell me something that’s on your birthday/holiday wish list.

I am weepy because I got an email from Target saying items I ordered YESTERDAY will arrive THIS MORNING already, and one of the items was something someone should have put on the list before my last grocery store trip but didn’t, and I went to the store recently and am not going back for awhile, so I was feeling some despair about how can I keep the house stocked during a pandemic IF PEOPLE CAN’T EVEN BE BOTHERED TO PUT THINGS ON THE LIST, and now I am feeling so GRATEFUL to online stores, and to warehouse workers, and to delivery workers, and *WEEP*. So clearly the emotional fragility continues.

Shopping is one of my coping methods, and another recent example of this is that I impulsively ordered a whole lot of notebooks and folders, even though I don’t know if the kids will even need them or use them. Mostly it seems like school supplies are for carrying information back and forth between home and classroom, but also they’re for keeping things organized, and if I were doing classes online I would still want to have a separate notebook for each class, and ideally a folder to match that notebook, and so forth, and buying school supplies is so fun and I’m sad at the thought of missing it, and also I was worried about things selling out and this is not really the year for going from store to store, and so I placed the order.

The three younger kids were all in bed (these days they go to bed about when I do, but I was up late because I couldn’t sleep) so I couldn’t ask them what colors they wanted as I usually would, so I just got two each of every color and we’ll let them cage-match it out: there’s a certain fun in choosing your own stuff, but there’s another kind of fun in figuring out how to divide pre-chosen stuff. Normally I would buy Mead notebooks and folders in hopes of higher durability, but this year I got the store brand of both. These supplies don’t have to survive being shoved into a backpack/locker every day, and I don’t even know if we’ll USE them, so I went cheap: paper-cover notebooks, vinyl cover notebooks; and folders (on clearance!) with and without binder holes (we still have some serviceable binders from last year).

We don’t really need anything else, I don’t think. Normally I want/need to buy more pencils and pens, but we have tons. Normally I would buy new erasers and new pencil cases and new highlighters and basically new anything that seemed fun or was on the teachers’ lists, but this year I don’t have that impulse.