Quarantine Diaries

I couldn’t help myself. I’ve been thinking about this hokey title for weeks, knowing I need to find something better and yet just not being able to move past it. For those of us who are pop culture vultures, we think “Madonna” when we hear this, but really my reference is to a just-as-well-known Antonio Gramsci, a Marxist, who wrote a series of essays called the Prison Notebooks while imprisoned in Italy during the Fascist regime of Mussolini. This is exactly why Sociologists can’t have nice things. Because we’re all imprisoned somehow. Although, this particular “imprisonment” feels like sanity and the prevalence of science rather than radically destructive political autocracy. I’ll take this imprisonment, voluntarily, any day in this age of COVID-19.

I’ve been thinking for awhile now that it’s time for me to light the proverbial blogging fire and get to it. I originally rebranded this whole deal to chronicle my awesome trip to Peru…which will now take off in March of 2021, god-willing. So I’ve got some time to get the juices flowing. And I’ve got now a very novel social landscape to match to this very novel Coronavirus. The number of times I hear people say, “I’ve never seen anything like it,” can run between amusement and complete terror. No one can make sense of what’s happening now–add on top of that a clown show for a president and it’s, at the very least, confusing. It might be time to, most basically, write down some stuff (PhD word) to both process and remember this by. And why not? When life gives you Corona, you make…well, we have to work on whatever that adage is going to become.

For now, I’m going to plan to stop in every day and just write something. Who knows, really, what this will be. I make no promises of organization, sense, or logic but at the very least it’s a story. That doesn’t need a face-blurring filter because I’ve worn no makeup for a month. Also waistbands are largely a thing of the past. Here you have it. On this day in history, I wrote this. Already, that feels important [she writes sarcastically, unlike our President who suggested ingesting bleach to “internally cleanse,” also allegedly sarcastically but realistically, not.]