My Pandemic Hamster Taught Me My Life Is Something

My value has always been in my work and my altruism.

When successful, my work. When unsuccessful, my altruism. In the pandemic, when work was cancelled and productivity meant little to nothing, I leaned hard into altruism. Fortunately, there was a lot of volunteering, donating, protesting to do. First food banks then defunding the police then supporting Land Back then flipping red places blue then back to my first love, concern over the environment and underserved teenage girls. I’ve joined so many action squads and email chains and signed so many petitions and called so many officials and bled cash all year. I worked too, but, of course, I've had 98 nos and 2 yeses since March 2020 (I keep a list). My worth as an artist floats low, like a balloon meandering around the kitchen several days after the party. Besides, it’s always been true that no matter how impressive my latest project is, it’s fleeting. My worth as a good citizen, completely unclear. No matter how much sweat I put into my community efforts, the difficulties for those in need rage on. Sure I helped those few old folks find water in frozen Texas, but if I hadn’t, would it have simply been someone else? Okay, I do what Sunrise newsletters tell me to, but will the Green Deal actually happen, and if it does will it be what we need it to be?

I felt bad. Often. “Worthless” my therapist pinned, and of course, she was right. What is the point of being alive in this boxy apartment? Am I even alive in this boxy apartment? I count who would notice my absence from Zooms. I ask what the future has planned for me and if I even want it at all, if I could even stomach it. These feelings used to rise in me before, but then I’d get busy and forget. Now in my one-bedroom strictly following CDC guidelines, there’s no such thing as busy or forget. And one day busy would return, but now I was too wise to forget, I worried.

 

I was tasked by aforementioned therapist to find worth in myself for myself. I couldn’t. The whole thing is were social creatures, I’d argue. And now I’m not, and so what am I even doing being alive at all? She’d disagree without any logical explanation, which made me insane. A currency of nothing? Not in my deep-seeded capitalist Christian values, ma’am.

 

Then one day I thought my hamster died.

 

She hadn’t stirred all morning, so I started mussing with her toys. That usually gets her to at least start sniffing around. But no, nothing. I poked her nest with a chew stick. Surely she’d nibble it. But no. I was overcome with fear. Fingers shaking, I started peeling back layers of shavings until I finally saw a patch of her fluff. Still. And then she scratched her ear and I sat down, on the ground, in relief.

 

I adopted her March 19th. She’s chunky and extremely well-behaved. I got her an hour before LA shut down. I raced out from my eight-day quarantine to save at least one critter from the impending closed doors. (Look at me, trying to justify my worth by saving a life UGH). The rep told me she’d been waiting for a ham parent four months. I held her little round body and fell in love.

 

It’s funny to have a hamster of all pets right now. I’m locked inside a small space, so I bought a smaller space to lock a different living being inside. That said, the great thing about having a Syrian hamster in a pandemic is that they’re loners. No guilt on me for lack of rodent friends, lack of cage-mates. She doesn’t want anything but to occasionally come up from her pile, eat a berry, and burrow again. I play with her once a day, which she is indifferent to.

What does she do for society? Nothing. Would she offer aid in an emergency, like a bird? No. Can she accomplish tasks like dogs? No. Do I even get the benefit of knowing she likes me, like how even the grumpiest cats nuzzle their owners? Absolutely not. My hamster would probably never wonder about me again if I left a robot in charge of feeding her, and yet I treat her like a tiny god. I obsess over her every scuttle and jump for joy when she likes a new chew toy. I marvel at her tunnels and observe all the wood sticks in new places each morning. If I hear her drinking water, I literally sprint from my desk to watch. This hamster has my whole heart for no reason other than she is alive, and being alive is enough.

What to Expect When You're Expecting COVID Immunity

A year and a couple days ago I wrote a post on Indoor Voices about having lived through a COVID outbreak in China, recognizing that I had a certain amount of insight into our collective American futures from what turned out to have been a disastrous vacation and what I had todo upon my return. Looking back on it I was right about certain things but dead wrong about the course of the pandemic. I said that it would just be a few months, and here we are a whole-ass year later doing basically the same thing. I should have known that America was in no place to fight this when I received no guidance on what to do when I returned from a hot zone, but I guess I (mistakenly) thought that we could all collectively identify a threat and mobilize against it. In a way we kind of have, engaging in the herculean task of vaccinating everyone with two shots of a miracle cure that has to be kept at temperatures usually reserved for Dippin' Dots, and because of that I have once again found myself ahead of the pandemic curve. 

My sister texted me one Sunday morning saying that there was a Duane Reade that had doses expiring at noon and that we should call immediately. An hour later, my girlfriend and I had a shot of Pfizer in our arms and I had whole lot of feelings that every American is going share in someday soon. It's odd, there's a process going on in my body that I have no real insight into that is going to change my life in significant ways. I've begun to think of it as being pregnant with not getting the Coronavirus. I know that it's a clumsy way of thinking about it, but I also don't have a different framework for waiting for the vessel that I inhabit to do something. All I can do is wait for my second shot, when all the antibodies and other invisible things inside of me can become real. I have to say as I come up on two weeks since my first shot - I'm getting kind of impatient with it.

That impatience is something that I haven't felt in a long time, since before any of this happened. On March 17th of 2020 I wrote:

But at the present moment, our completed loss is the loss of the ability to look forward to anything other than the end of the virus. I used to get through weeks by thinking about the weekend, and days by thinking about what potential the end of the day might have. Now the end of the day looks the same as the day, and the weekend feels the same as the week does. I do not know when it will end, but I know that someday my anticipation will return, unlike the other things I have lost along the way.

What I wasn't expecting was my sense of anticipation to crash back into me as soon as the needle entered my shoulder. As my girlfriend and I waited around the pharmacy to see if we'd have an allergic reaction I couldn't help myself from looking at Mets tickets on my phone and daydream about drinking a 25 oz Goose Island on a still chilly April night. For the first couple days after my jab I had issues sleeping. I guess I had forgotten how to turn my brain off over the past year and it excitedly jumped between thinking about haircuts and dental appointments. I know that we're still a long way from normal, but it's intoxicatingly invigorating to think about something as simple as having friends over to drink on the couch or receiving routine medical care. It's like emerging from hibernation after a long emotional winter.

That's not to say that my burgeoning immunity is a slam dunk for my mental health. I've always been a hypochondriac, and that's an urge I've done my best to fight over the past year to avoid becoming a paranoid shut-in. On a certain level we've all normalized the risks we take just to get through a pandemic day, accepting that we have to go to the grocery store and to try to socialize safely and outdoors, and we've made an uneasy peace with the idea that we can do everything right and still get sick. We can tell ourselves that it's not our fault if we get sick, but once there's a clock ticking on how much longer you're going to be susceptible to COVID, you realize just how embarrassing it would be to get it now. To get this close and get sick would be an absolute gutpunch, like you saw the face of god and he flipped you off. I'm a healthy young man so I'm not worried about dying if I do catch it, I take my precautions for the sake of people who aren't as lucky as I am, but I would feel like I wanted to die. It would feel like going on a nice run through the park was pure hubris, and I certainly don't want that.

This also gives me a convenient reason to talk about guilt, because that seems to be the primary emotion for young people who are already vaccinated. I felt it when I stood in line with people who seemed older than my 95-year old grandmother, but I told myself that the doses were going to expire in half an hour and it's better to put it in my arm than down the drain. When I posted that I had gotten vaccinated I was completely unprepared for the number of people who reached out to me to talk about how guilty they felt for getting it, that they didn't think they were worthy of getting a dose before other people. I wrote a whole piece about vaccine guilt on my Medium, but I'd like to repeat myself and say that getting vaccinated isn't just for you, so don't feel bad if you got it before you thought you should. You getting vaccinated breaks the chain of transmission and means you can't get someone else sick or, god forbid, take up a hospital bed that someone else might need. You're not getting vaccinated so you can go back to bars, you're getting vaccinated so someone else will have a better chance of getting back to however they want to live life.

Pretty soon we'll all get that second jab and give birth to our immunity. We'll be able to go back to doing the things we want to do. In fact, it's probably going to happen more quickly than you think. Vaccine deliveries are accelerating, more needles are finding their way into arms, and eligibility keeps expanding. Maybe you'll feel less guilty than the people I've talked to because of it. The nicer the weather gets, the better life will become. You might want to try daydreaming about it, it'll be good for your mental health. We're on the home stretch of this thing, just try to not go viral. It would be humiliating.

Coffeecore: The Goodbye

 

1.

My little flâneur, this time comes for everyone in the City, sooner or later. You give your orchids to Michiko, your spare set of cocktail glassware with the swirled teal stems to Adam and Lorraine.  They throw a small party for you at work; you remember the wide-cut ties and the smell of freshly laid industrial carpeting. You wait for a storm, the kind where you can see the backs of the wind-flipped leaves on the branches and hear the windows getting pelted. There are raindrops the size of train tokens. You walk out the front door of the building, and hear it close with a hydraulic whoosh behind you.

You do not take a key. 

Was this corner here a week ago? A month? You turn to go down the slick planes of the stairs and fold your umbrella neatly as the door opens. Where you are going, you will not need it. It is such a strange coincidence of the City, the ambient suitability to all moods and happenings of its weather.