Should you have a dinner party?

Saturday night Jess and I had a dinner party. We probably shouldn't have. Everybody washed their hands a lot, multiple times. I write this as an admission of guilt — it's just as bad as going to a crowded bar!? — but also to memorialize the shock: A thing we decided to do 36 hours ago is more or less unthinkable now. The CDC recommended that "mass gatherings" of more than 50 be canceled. Austria banned gatherings of more than five people.

The parameters of the problem shift hourly. Like politics, there's more of a narrative than hard facts. For a while it seemed that travel restrictions would be the end of it. Then some time yesterday the tide of consensus turned and social media was full of call-outs. Do you trust the announcements of state government more or is a screenshotted, translated DM thread from an Italian doctor better? I don't know! I'm not an epidemiologist but a lot of people seem to be texting with one!

I feel a wave of nauseous relief that as I write this cities are one by one shutting down cafes and bars and making restaurants take-out only. Nauseous because I'm used to depending on those spaces to keep me in contact with humanity and break up my days. I never order delivery; all I want is to sit around other people and eat or drink as they do also. Relief because at least someone is drawing a hard line between what we can and cannot do.

The former is shrinking. What about outside, is being in a park better than inside of a bar or a store? Can you have one person over for dinner? What if you've already been in contact with them and otherwise you're all properly socially distancing? Jess says we should all pick our Corona families. We can limit our exposure while still maintaining some semblance of a social life that keeps us sane. I wonder if those kinds of relationships will evolve — a sense that you can at least trust a few people, especially for those of us who aren't living with families.

Of course there's the digital option. Social life at the moment is a collage of images-within-images, screenshots of gridded video calls or facetime chats like we're all perpetually caged in that Brady Bunch opening. As I text with a bunch of different people and different groups of people at once and check my Slack and look for DMs I'm brought back to early teenage nights on AIM, feeling like I was piloting life from within the cockpit of the desktop computer in the basement. But we were (I was) dealing with an excess of the digital already, lately. I need IRL interaction, unmediated presence. We're faced with the fact that our lives are online now, pressed thin onto screens, but left with no alternative besides the online. It must be real because it's all we have.

Do I need to feel bad that we went to the farmers market this morning, too? It was ransacked. Chicken and eggs were the first to go. People figured, probably correctly, that it would be the last one for a while. But maybe not? It's kind of a grocery store, after all, and those aren't closing. The vendors didn't seem nervous in the slightest, only laughing at the games buyers played to not touch the credit-card scanners. We went to Rock Creek Park later in the afternoon for a walk. It was crowded, too, with runners and bikers and a strange group of people who looked like they might be part of a bar crawl with no bars, only red Solo cups. They clustered together in one part of the woods, a group of more than 10 but less than 50.