Happy 2022, Pillowtown. If you’re new here, welcome. If you’re old here, age is just a number. Unless you are 65 in which case age is a golden ticket to early hours at Costco.
A new year is just a social construct. Your new year can start any day you want it to. This week is no different than last except that you have to pay rent again and check the date on your eggs. Also go into your settings under subscriptions and make sure to cancel anything you didn’t mean to sign up for in the first place. Looking at you, NYTimes Crossword Puzzle.
It’s 2022, and covid is over. We all got vaccinated and nobody has covid anymore and my childhood cat came back to life and the ozone layer decided to replenish itself. The Recording Academy released an official statement correcting the record that Beyonce did indeed win album of the year for Lemonade. And gas is $2 again.
Every time a new year comes, we pass go, but we do not necessarily collect $200. Some of us did not make it into the new year. Jobs and friends and parents and relationships have come and gone and we had little to no control over most of it. All that remains is the spirit of the American Dream. It courses through our veins like Diet Sprite.
A lot of Americans have recently come face to face with isolation. With no unified national response to the disease, we’re sort of doing an every man for himself with the new variants. This is not a newsletter about covid though, as promised. It is covid adjacent. Juxtaposed to he who must not be named. But now everyone either has had it or will soon so it might be time for an isolation guide.
Isolation, or, sitting alone for 10 days to mull over whether going to that alt comedy show was funny enough to warrant sitting alone in your house on Christmas, is kind of hard. Some of us are lucky, extremely lucky, to have access to working from home, food delivery, facetimes and phone calls and movies and coloring books and sparkly nail polish. In that case, isolation is manageable. But around day 5 or 6, there’s not a movie left that you care to see. Your nails are already painted and you can’t paint over them. Your throbbing headaches make it hard to read and your hand is cramping from all the journaling.
And that’s when the deep thinking starts. Do you remember time outs as a kid? The theme is always- go over there, and think about what you did. That’s maybe the most effective and most revealing form of punishment. This isn’t to say you should be punished for contracting covid, but you’re kind of paying an individual price for the fact that we, as a collective, don’t have this under control.
Sitting and thinking is difficult because when you tune out the noises that surround you constantly, you can be left with a lot of questions. Art is important to make us engage in creative ways and friends are important to make us discuss different ideas and laugh and tell stories and give advice we’ll nod in agreement to and then never visit again. But alone time is where the growth happens. When there’s nobody to tell you what to think or what to laugh at or where to go, you start to draw your own paths. Forge your own path? You can start to make up new phrases as well. The world is your clam.
Time alone makes you appreciate the time when you’re not alone. For more profound insights such as that, be sure to keep subscribing here. So often we want to stay home because it’s our choice. Suddenly, when it’s not your choice, it seems shittier. There’s a lot to be said about the constructs of free will but this is also not a philosophy blog. What is this? Nobody really knows. Least of all me.
Let’s wrap this up before it unravels any more. If you get covid, it sucks. If you have family and friends sending you hot chocolate and memes and candles, it sucks less. The moral of this story is, be a good person. Somebody people want to be nice to and hang out with. Someone people look up to and lean on and laugh with. So when you’re sick and all you have is yourself for 10 days, you find that your company isn’t half bad.