Make Life Annoying Again
What I think about when we talk about “normal.”
The other night, I went to a bar where the bartender poured a beer with far too much head. Half the glasswas foam. But I sat there, vaccinated and unmasked, with friends who were about to get on an actual airplane the next day. I was not sitting in front of a laptop for a seventh consecutive hour of screen-sharing and unmuting myself. I was barely even flinching when another patron sneezed. I have never felt so blessed to receive a mediocre pour. Life is becoming normal again. Annoying again. Thank God.
Maybe you, too, relish the familiar little miseries that made life normal way back when. Tedious uncertainties. Vicissitudes of weather. Human error on an extremely local scale. Join me now as I count my blessings by counting a few familiar problems.
My hairstylist, whom I can go see now, overcharges.
During an active shooter drill next fall, my students will not have to ask how to achieve 6 feet of social distancing while a gunman is in the building.
I eat a tuna sandwich and wonder about the tuna it allegedly contains, not the hands that prepared it and whether we shared a breath across the Subway sneeze guard.
The line for the women’s bathroom.
It’s now possible to underdress for a work hang.
I reject an outfit because it’s cute, but the air is too hot — not because it’s cute and the air is poison.
I leave the house for a walk with a friend and wonder if I will be late, rather than leave the house for a walk with a friend and panic because the strap to my surgical mask snaps.
When other pedestrians take up the sidewalk; I no longer see oncoming traffic as the less dangerous place to be.
I do the crossword puzzle on a park bench with a friend; we cannot find the answer to a clue and we feel stupid, rather than do the crossword on a park bench with a friend and later serve as a vector of a disease for my older colleagues.
I choose a bottle of chilled rosé from the wine shop and learn the price at the cash register, a price at which I promptly chuckle and ask for a more affordable wine. I do not choose a bottle with the speed and furtive movements of a hunted animal for fear of contagion from being in public spaces.
A kid plagiarizes her essay on The Crucible, and whether she spent the weekend at an unmasked slumber party sharing finger foods with and breathing the same air as her friends is of less than zero interest to me.
My thighs chafe when I run outside. I sweat through my t-shirt. I get tired. I have to find a public bathroom. All of this happens without my being afraid of actually dying.
A motorcycle gang roars past my apartment, and I am irritated with the volume of their engines, not concerned in a weird, overly maternal way that there are some bikes with two riders who are unmasked.
I buy a salad at sweetgreen and wonder if this joint and I are locked in a dark capitalist love story where I pretend to like salad and they pretend to foster community (which I suppose is just a more cerebral, less concrete version of wondering if the workers have PPE and health insurance).
I don’t have to wonder if I’ll infect my grandmother with her last-ever illness by hugging her. Instead I worry about normal things like whether she will say something accidentally racist to my Black boyfriend.
We are back. Back to mediocre restaurant service and standing too close to strangers in line for a dingy bathroom. Back to eavesdropping as a woman complains on the phone about her wedding planner. Back to facing the problems that are more than two years old. Back to awkward interactions with important people and mosquito bites on your feet.
Back to being stymied, hindered, scammed, overcharged, harried, frazzled, bothered, misunderstood, conflicted, underestimated, and inconvenienced.
Welcome back, friends, to the bad old days. They’re better when we’re together.