I’m Nailing This Pandemic

Killing it, if you will.

If you’re familiar with my writing, you know that I think this place is lousy with self-appointed hack experts: people who have no idea what they’re doing, but decided they do because one time at band camp they got a participation award. Or one time their orthodontist told them they were doing a good job wearing their retainer every night. One time their mom told them to ignore the mean girls at school “because they were just jealous” — as opposed to what the rest of knew, they were just mean as fuck. Some girls are. It’s science.

They survived band camp, retainers and mean girls and so now they’ve arrived en masse to this site, telling us how to be more productive (Literally. There are twenty-two-year-olds weighing in on this), or how to survive depression, or my favorite — when to know your boyfriend is cheating on you. (Ladies, if you’re not having sex, he’s cheating on you. That’s it. That’s the tweet).

And then BOOM. Global pandemic! Mother Nature has us in a headlock, telling us to take a damn seat, and suddenly all these “experts” are silent. Sure, there’s one or two of them popping up to write something like “exercise radical self care,” (LOL, okay? LOL) but for the most part — at least the stories the algorithm spits my way — even they know they’re in over their heads now. Like I said, Mother Nature is taking names.

But some personal news: I’m nailing this pandemic thing. Killing it. So I’m gonna step up as a self-appointed hack expert, and tell you how you too can survive it. To bastardize a phrase from some guy, if not me, who?

1. Be a member of Generation X

You forgot about us, didn’t you? That’s okay, everyone did. There was even a graphic on the news a few years ago discussing generational divides and they completely skipped us. That’s because we’ve been silently taking care of ourselves our whole lives.

A Gen X childhood Saturday went like this: wake up, eat sugary cereal or Pop Tarts in front of the TV. Wonder where parents are. Leave the house, find friends, and go exploring. Do dangerous things, like trying to start a fire with someone’s glasses and dried grass. Succeed at this. Dare your friends to eat a worm, and one of them does. Drink out of garden hoses when you get thirsty.

Fourteen hours later, return home to find your parents who are two vodka tonics to the wind and surprised to learn you were gone. Eat frozen chicken nuggets in front of the TV, go to bed and read all night with a flashlight under the covers, which is really just a formality because your parents don’t care what you’re doing.

A variation on this: be told to stay at home to take care of your little sister while your parents go somewhere. You’re ten and she’s three. Be told not to answer the phone (which you knew made no sense, because then the robbers would think the house was empty). Go exploring in your parents’ bedroom and find their pot, your mom’s vibrator and your dad’s porn. Ignore the pot because you don’t know how to roll a joint, but masturbate to your mom’s copy of Wifey by Judy Blume. Later find your little sister in the backyard, who’s been eating plants. Don’t tell your parents and hope she lives.

This lonely latch-key childhood not only taught us how to entertain ourselves for hours, it also prepared us for what the rest of you seem to be now (very slowly) realizing: no one is in charge, guys. There’s no adult in the room, no one who’s “got this,” no expert that has any real power. Everything is chaos, and you gotta handle this shit on your own.

The other day while teleworking I stood up after sitting cross-legged for about ten hours. My foot was asleep, and when it hit the floor my ankle buckled and I heard a crunchy sound. I hobbled over to the wall, taking deep breaths because the pain in my foot was “not cute,” as the kids say these days.

I considered my options: I couldn’t go to the the ER during a global pandemic, so the teeny tiny bone in my foot that clearly snapped was gonna just have to heal on its own. But I live alone and the dog needs to be walked. So I forced myself to walk her, hobbling along. Later that night, I took off my shoe to reveal a dark purple right foot, significantly larger than my left foot. But guess what? Still walking the dog, kids.

And that’s how you survive a pandemic: realize no one is coming to help, and power through anyway. As our eighties aerobics instructors used to say: no pain, no gain.

I wouldn’t have been prepared for the ‘Rona but for my lonely, survivalist childhood. And I’m not alone: all my Gen X friends are describing the “stay-at-home” orders as giving them the “cozy feeling” (opposite of the empty feeling). And if raising ourselves weren’t enough training for global pandemic, consider this: HIV and AIDS rolled around the same time we had all started to fuck each others’ brains out.

We know exactly what it’s like to get a flu-like symptom and think we’re gonna die — and not just die, but die a horrible, painful, undignified death. So pervasive was the fear of HIV/AIDS, that my girlfriends and I consumed any and all information about people who were considered “good girls” to confirm our suspicion that we too were going to drop dead because we were sluts. (And by “sluts” I mean we had slept with three people, all of them from our Hebrew school).

I was living in New York in 1993 when my friend Michael went in for a general check up. Because he had slept with basically every girl on the Upper East Side, he asked for an HIV test. On Friday he came from work to an answering machine message (yes, kids: we used to have to wait to we got home from work to get our messages) from his doctor’s office, “Hi Michael, please give us a call. There was a problem with your HIV test.”

The doctor’s office was closed until Monday morning, so assuming this could only mean that his test came back positive, Michael spent the rest of the weekend in his darkened apartment planning his death. By Monday morning he had resolved to sell all his belongings and move to Bali, where he could just die on the beach. It didn’t matter that he almost always used condoms. It didn’t matter that none of his sexual partners had reported any problems. So pervasive was the fear of HIV in the early 1990s, that we all thought we had it; it was a way to mentally torture ourselves for all the sex we had and enjoyed, but secretly brought us great shame. Remember: the 1980s were really the uptight 1950s, just with more neon.

When Michael finally called the doctor’s office, the nurse cheerfully said they had simply lost his blood sample (we used to have to do these tests via blood, too) and that he would have to come back in. Michael thought about screaming at her for leaving such a reckless voicemail message, but he was so flooded with relief he couldn’t bring himself to do it. That’s how scared we all were.

But as the years ticked by, we started to realize that not every body ache, moment of exhaustion or weird bruise meant we were dying. We got over it, saw that antivirals were saving people’s lives. And now we know that not every cough or headache means that we have COVID-19. So we’re keeping our heads. We aren’t checking ourselves into hospitals, demanding tests that should be saved for other people. We are, of course, noticing that rich and fancy people are getting access to tests while others aren’t, but unlike everyone else, we aren’t surprised. Peel a layer back, and we’re all just living a Lord of the Flies existence: no one in charge, every (wo)man for him or herself.

I’d also explain that we were all just starting our careers in earnest when 9–11 happened, which taught us to expect unanticipated existential threats, but as a true Gen-Xer, I kinda don’t care if you get this or not. Tired now. And I want to go walk my dog on my broken foot.

2. There is No Other Way to Survive a Global Pandemic

Sorry kids, but I just can’t think of any other life-hack to survive a global pandemic other than to be a member of Generation X. The combination of a survivalist childhood and the fear of dying simply because you had sex is just too unique of an experience to replicate.

The best you can do is just to copy us:

• realize that no one is in charge and never was;
• stay the fuck at home;
• understand that no one cares if you’re bored, so get over it;
• realize that if you cough, you aren’t dying;
• but also realize that other people are dying, and you owe it to them to fade into the background so that people can worry about them, and not you.

Whew, that was exhausting, so I’m out. Maybe I’ll pop back up and teach you all how to get ahead in your career, Gen-X style (required watching: the movie Office Space). After all, I’m an influencer-expert now.

(Tagging Xavier Van Holde, because I’m in a Civil War, and I’m not just settling for a participation award).

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