Theo, somehow I misread as "trained as a ventriloquist" which sent me off on a wild tangent. Veterinarian makes sense.

Yes, my best friend since toddlerhood's adoptive mom developed early Alzheimers and sent her scurrying to find out everything she possibly could about her own birth family. For her, knowing was desperately important, and for various reasons it is important to a lot of adoptees.

Basically? I just don't care. And there may be a touch of resentment there: Throw me away? Fine. Eff you too. My surviving kid has my deets, and if he wants to search, he has my blessing to do so. Ditto the grandson.

I went out to dinner! With my mother, to a patio, with dividers between the tables. It was divine, I'm not going to lie.

I got a haircut, and then I went out to dinner! I was the only one on the patio. Other customers only started arriving as I was leaving.

Yes! Let's start paying other people for shit!

I'm totally willing to stay home until they make a vaccine.

That's what I'm looking at, too.

I can and will maintain my hermit-y lifestyle indefinitely.

Okay, honestly, for all my jokes about being a hermit, YES, I do miss seeing people and doing shit. I miss eating at restaurants. I miss going to the movies. I miss getting coffee with my friends. But. Being a hermit seems like the only way through this (and I recognize that I'm lucky that I WFH and can be a hermit.)

Honestly, the only missing thing that really bothers me is not being able to hug my mom or take her out to eat in a restaurant.

• I'm in touch with other family and my friends via phone, text, and internet, and with a good practical reason for not meeting in person any concern I'd ordinarily feel about going so long without face-to-face contact evaporates.
• I normally eat by myself about 95% of the time, so going to a take-out-only model doesn't bother me at all (and not buying beverages in restaurants makes tipping for to-go orders a wash monetarily).
• Lack of going to the movies isn't going to really bother me until I burn through my Netflix and Amazon Prime backlog, so that becomes a problem in 2025 or so.
• I'd been unable to get schedules to align for taking my current crush out on a date and he just moved away to a neighboring state last weekend, so the pandemic isn't actually having an adverse effect on my love life.

I'm very glad I'm living with two cuddlesome cats, to be sure. But aside from massages, haircuts, and pedis, I don't really touch others much anyway. Family, sure, and friends I haven't seen for a few months, they get hugs. But that's hardly an every day thing. I expect I'll be ok until June 2021.

Just got back from the grocery store. I had a headache and now it's worse and my internal temp is 100.3. I'm getting some fan time to cool off before making dinner.

I'm totally willing to stay home until they make a vaccine.

It's a huge pile of privilege, but we have jobs we can do 100% at home and resources to do stuff like order in groceries and a once-every-couple-of-weeks meal to break up the monotony. We even get wine and coffee delivered on a regular schedule. Somehow, while we weren't paying attention, we came up bougie as fuck.

But the lack of people contact other than each other is starting to wear. It's still deeply weird to have the conversations, but we do about whether we can safely do an outdoors distance hangout if everyone is transparent about who they've been in contact with and we only do it no more than every couple of weeks (current feeling: yes). Or whether we need to require everyone to get covid tested within 2 weeks before a slightly larger gathering in a couple of months (again, yes). Or whether the garden center feels safe yet (dear god no).

We're going to finally see my in-laws tomorrow, and I'm vaguely terrified because while they've individually been fairly conscientious, I'm not sure of their (republican, churchy, more rural) social circle.

And we can't even see my family because NY will rightly lock us the fuck down for two weeks, which I support as epidemiology but ... yeah. FaceTime just ain't the same.

But in spite of fraying at the edges, vaccine is the only way forward.

I'm tempted to quarantine for two weeks and then drive to my parents. Just for things to be different.