Living in a future ghost town

Pretty much all of the tech companies (mine included) have moved to a “work from home unless absolutely necessary” policy. We’re all suddenly getting into a remote-worker mindset — which I think is a long-term good thing, but it’s jarring. Looking out my dining room window I still see a typical amount of foot and car traffic for this time of day, but there’s an air of desperation and paranoia. Maybe I’m just projecting though.

My own symptoms have all but cleared up. I do have a persistent ache in my back and shoulders, which I’m not sure if it’s attributable to this mystery illness or is simply my fibromyalgia flaring up as always. My temperature is back to normal. I’m still coughing on occasion but it’s infrequent, and it’s gone from dry to productive. My shortness of breath is… well, still lurking, but doesn’t feel like an impairment at the moment. I’m still glad that I have a pretty strong reserve of albuterol, all the same.

All of my meetup groups have canceled their meetups for the next few weeks; Double Jump is trying online virtual meets via our long-unused reddit group, while the Seattle Indies have just outright canceled all of the events in the immediate future. I wasn’t going to attend any of them anyway but I’m sure this is upsettng to a lot of people.

I’m constantly annoyed by people who downplay the virus and the cautious warnings about it. “It’s no worse than the flu,” they say, “it’ll only affect people who are chronicially ill anyway,” implying that those of us with chronic illnesses are somehow less worthy of protecton. I’m ashamed that when news of the virus first came out I was somewhat on that side, before it had escaped containment from China, before the 3% mortality statistic had been established. Now I know better, and I hope others will know better too.

Asthma means that if my symptoms worsen I’m in for a very bad time, and who knows what the combination with fibromyalgia will mean.

At work I’m supposed to provde a fun picture of myself and answer a bunch of “getting-to-know-you” questions like “what’s on your bucket list,” and it’s supposed to be fun and endearing stuff but right now all I can think of is, “Survive a global pandemic.” I’ve never been much of a bucket list sort, though; my main goals are to finish my piles of projects without acquiring even more projects to leave hanging.

I think for my bucket list item I’ll write, “Finish just enough of my creative projects that people are left wishing for more.”

Or is that too dismal?

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