I Forgot How to Society
Facebook showed me one of those “One year ago today” pics and I swear to God I had the exact same craterous zit on my chin one year ago today that I have right the fuck now. Is my menstrual cycle so stable that my face is literally its my monthly don’t fuck with me flag on the exact same day, like it’s a sick fucking holiday? Or is it my Easter zit? Maybe this treasonous boil heard people chanting “HE IS RISEN” and thought “that’s my cue!”
I know you all follow this blog for updates on my complexion and meditations on a tale of two pimples, but seriously, the same zit in the same place, one year later? That’s gotta mean something.
Are you there, God? It’s me, Katie. What the fuck, dude.
You should know that this image, and all images in this post, were sourced from Unsplash using the search term “AWKWARD.”
A year ago today I had wrangled Ryan and the kids into doing a virtual scavenger hunt put on by a local adventure company that usually hosts hikes and wilderness experiences. (I have a video of Chicken and Buster doing the drum solo from In the Air Tonight on pots and pans and it is every bit as glorious as you imagine.)
A year ago today we were about a month into this thing and still trying to find ways to make a lockdown an adventure. I think I was still enjoying the way my schedule had ground to a halt, like the world was on a bullet train that had stopped dead next to a field of poppies in full bloom. “Oh! This is inconvenient and alarming,” followed by, “But you couldn’t have picked a nicer place. And look! I’ve got a snack in my bag.”
A year ago today we all went inside. And it was real uncomfortable. But it was real uncomfortable in PRIVATE.
Nobody saw zit 1.0 except my sons—who poked it while I did my best homeschool explanation of what a clogged pore is and why it is not in fact a witch’s curse because IN THIS HOUSE SCIENCE IS REAL—and my husband, who made sympathetic tsking sounds and brought me a sheet mask in bed while we watched TIGER KING. YEAH. REMEMBER TIGER KING? That was the beginning of this season we’re in. We started in Tiger King we’re ending in Bridgerton and if that’s not a Netflix glow-up I don’t know what is.
Me watching Tiger King
also
Me watching Bridgerton
A year ago I was scared and weird and anxious and controlling, but I was home with my family, and they’re kinda used to that vibe from me. My friends and acquaintances, the people I chat with at school pickup, the people I’ve worked with, they didn’t see this lady doing her best Yellow Wallpaper meets Girl Interrupted meltdown. That shit was private.
For a year I missed friends, movie theaters, vacations, family members, last-minute trips to the shop for a little thing I didn’t even really need but I could just pop in without weighing my potential exposure to a deadly pathogen, or worse, the likelihood that I myself could be an unknowing grim reaper to the cashier, the stocker, the man in aisle 4 who I guess is TOO BUSY AND IMPORTANT to go the right way up the one way aisle for his SOUP. Yet should his punishment be death? I hope not. Not least because I stopped using the one-way aisle arrows weeks ago. I mean, when the aisles are empty. If there are people in the aisles I use the arrows. Unless it’s like seriously RIGHT THERE.
For a year I missed the outside. I missed the world. I made my nest as cozy as could be and I waited.
Today, I went outside. And it was… real uncomfortable. But it was real uncomfortable in PUBLIC.
Hey neighbor
Holy shit… I forgot how to society.
To be honest, I’m not sure society remembers either.
The thing about society is that it’s full of rules. Some are simple, straightforward: Always greet the hostess. Never fart in an elevator. Never hit on someone on a bus or subway car. Always offer anyone in your home a drink, even if it’s just water.
Okay, but what happens to those rules when there are no parties, it was a one-person limit in the elevator, buses and trains go into long-term storage, and NOBODY SHOULD BE IN YOUR HOME FOR GOD’S SAKE DON’T YOU LISTEN TO THE DAILY?!?!?!
I’ll tell you one thing, people were farting in those elevators. And those farts were JOYFUL. They were a reclamation of our HUMANITY. A confirmation of the HUMAN SPIRIT that ENDURES in ELEVATORS after it POPS out your BUTT with a triumphant little POOT.
We could break all the old rules, bitches! After all, Covid broke them first.
God, remember Early Pandemic Rules? They changed a little as we learned about the virus but pretty soon, at least in Washington State, they crystallized into a blissfully un-nuanced code of conduct that could fit into the middle line of a haiku: Mask up. Stay at home. That’s it.
Your cousin’s friend’s baby shower you didn’t want to go to? Can’t. Covid. A family vacation you were dreading? Look, the rules have changed and I really feel I should stay home and not wear pants instead.
But Late Pandemic Rules… they’re more like the rules of society that swim in gray water and fluctuate with the tides:
“Always greet the hostess unless the hostess’s mother is the one who invited you in which case you should greet the hostess’s mother first, but then greet the hostess immediately thereafter and make sure to mention that you ran into her mother on the way to find her so she knows she’s second in line but it just HAPPENED THAT WAY, it wasn’t like an on-purpose thing even though it totally was.”
Or like the rules you hear when learning a new board game for the first time: “A mage can conquer a gnome after the dice are thrown unless the gnome is either more or less three spaces from the emerald eye and/or unless the mage has not yet rolled the dice.”
I want to play by the rules but what the Queen’s Gambit fuck? Find me lying in my cot at the orphanage hopped up on Benzos playing BRUNCH on the ceiling. If I do buffet-style then I’ll need to move the chairs… there… but NO, Katie, NO, that’s where the chocolate fountain has to go! ALWAYS THINK FIVE STEPS AHEAD.
Thank you for coming to my party. Here is a glass of milk and a chicken.
Who can wrap their brains around the constantly shifting, subtle power dynamics that NOBODY WILL TALK ABOUT and EVERYONE WILL JUDGE YOU FOR VIOLATING?!? AM I THE ONLY ONE STILL FARTING ON THE ELEVATOR???
“A friend can join a bride-to-be for dinner to celebrate an engagement unless the bride-to-be has not yet received either one or two vaccination shots within the past three days plus or minus a period of time to be determined silently between each player and his/her god, and/or unless the friend’s Zoloft prescription has not yet been refilled while her child has recently returned to in-person classes.”
Um… Dr. Fauci? Little help over here?
I don’t know how to society anymore because my understanding of society has broken. At least I’m not alone.
We broke this year. Or maybe we just found the fractures.
We the people of the United States couldn’t agree on whether our neighbors should be able to stay home to protect themselves from spreading or dying from a virus, because we wouldn’t want them to “get dependent on those government checks.” We couldn’t agree on whether wearing a mask was like wearing pants - just, you know, being hygenic and courteous over here - or like being STABBED in the FREEDOM SPLEEN by a HAMMER and SICKLE.
I don’t know how to reenter a world in which I felt a sense of camaraderie with every person I saw wearing a mask. I don’t know how to reenter world in which people transmitted their willingness to care about others by the placement of their god damn masks over or under their noses. What do I do when the masks go away? How will I spot the selfish ones? How did I spot them before? I don’t remember.
I don’t know how to reenter a world where people who sacrificed so much and people who didn’t sacrifice shit can all stand in the same line for movie tickets to see... I CANNOT THINK OF A SINGLE MOVIE THAT’S COMING OUT THIS YEAR. Bridgerton: Age of Ultron? Is that anything?
And are we just going to forget the cruelty with which so many people said “Fuck y’all poors I’m doing spring break”? As if the fact that they survived is proof that they were in the right all along, and not proof of their incredible fucking luck or money.
Potato, potahto, right?
I’m not using that expression correctly because I’ve forgotten how to society with words, and also I’ve been eating a LOT of potatoes.
And on that note… I do not know how to reenter a world in which I’m not eating a daily hot microwaved potato cracked open to bellow steam into my face, then wrapped in a cloth so I can do my ritualistic mental cosplay that I’m a 16th century peasant woman (with a microwave because it’s my fantasy)(also with all my teeth because—yep—still my fantasy) and I’m going to eat this hot potato for breakfast and then go tend to the ducks or lepers or whatever until one of my children yells IS IT MY TURN FOR THE COMPUTER YET and I take a bite, hunched over my steaming potato and mutter, “Ay, lad, ‘tis. ‘Tis your turn indeed.”
I guess I can keep the potato thing. But I dunno, once there’s not a pandemic on anymore it might get… weird.
‘Twas a hard year for Bentley and his potato allergy but he kept his spirits as high as his socks - aye, tuck in lad, just brought home an armful from the daisy garden
There’s so much we can carry with us out of this season of life. So much we WILL carry, regardless of whether we want to or not.
Me, I’ll be carrying light-to-moderate prepper tendencies; separation anxiety from my children; about 19 pounds of hair because holy lord a year of uncut hair and I look like Keith Richards over here; oh, the potato thing; deep loathing, and I mean authentic snarling hatred for the douchebags who watched innocent people die horrible, lonely deaths, and had the fucking gall to make some specious speckled nutsack argument about “you can’t tell me to wear a mask this is America”; the memory of explaining Breonna Taylor and George Floyd’s lives and deaths to my children; grief, so much grief, veins and arteries pooling with grief while I sleep, grief rushing through me when I wake up; and gratitude that even if my home felt like it shrunk an inch every day, it was always safe.
And there’s so much we SHOULD carry out that we may or may not.
After all, once Dr. Fauci isn’t giving us the unified code of conduct, our society will return to a knitted-together tapestry of personal choices.
Will we all carry with us the understanding of how important it is not just to act in our own best interests, but also to know how we can act as individuals on behalf of our communities? Will we all carry the memory of the store sign that read, “Limit one hand sanitizer per customer, because we’re all safer if everyone has some”? Will we carry with us the hard lessons we learned this year about boundaries - because setting them saves lives even when the poison we’re spreading isn’t germs? Will we remember forever the way it felt when we arrived at a park to meet a friend, and we were wearing a mask and they weren’t, and that friend noticed and masked up without saying a word just because in this world, in this micro-society, sometimes people did the most to make the least comfortable person feel okay, in a way that was finite and visible and felt like a promise: “I will protect you.”
Will we keep teaching each other that we deserve to be comfortable? Will we teach our kids that this is what love, consent, and friendship looks like?
And will we carry out of this dark time our deep and abiding hatred of uncomfortable footwear, bras, and pants? Please, God. I hope so. Because me, I’ve gone deep down the rabbit-hole of slippers and stretchies subculture, and there’s no coming back from this wonderland.
(the wonderland)
I fear we will forget. I fear a year from now I’ll be in underwire and pinchy shoes again, too close to someone I don’t like because I feel I have to be nice, and believing that I’m more important than the stranger on my left, that my needs outmatch theirs, or even the most benign version of that incorrect belief: That what I do doesn’t really affect the people around me.
I hope I don’t forget. I hope you don’t either.
I hope I remember what we all had to do when we forgot how to society, and society forgot too.
We broke this year and there are some things we left behind that can’t be brought through with us. But we found some pretty good shit in the shitstorm too. That good shit wasn’t worth the lives it cost, but fuck, what does it mean if we decide NOT to carry it, after everything we paid for it?
I still don’t know how to reenter this world, what the freaking rules are for God’s sake, and whether I’m even going to follow them.
When I get my “One Year Ago today” notification on April 6, 2022, what will I be doing? Who will I be, what will I still be carrying, and will I have rejoined whatever world emerges from this cataclysm?
And seriously, will I still have a fucking zit on my chin. Seriously?
This is literally the opposite of awkward look at his little face that rakish tilt of the whiskers the devil-may-care glint in his eyes I am now pregnant with half-human half-squirrels oh wait I found the awkward