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How is the coronavirus pandemic affecting your life right now? Tell us about your experiences, feelings, and thoughts.

Well! What a nice surprise to see an article in the NYT about... US! This project!! It was fun reading an overview of the project and some of the results the researchers are finding, although now I feel like the experiment has been tainted since we know what the scientists are looking for :)). Okay, Just kidding. While I thought the reporter did a good job, it all felt very meta--a story within a story, and confirmed my commitment to this project. Because every time a reporter or writer tries to make sense of something, they impose their own structure on top of it. By design, a report will always be reductionist, trying to make sense of the "data" or the "noise". So that made me feel even better about the time I take to write here, where we share our raw feelings. I know these will be far more valuable because no one is interpreting what we say or trying to make a story out of OUR stories. Our thoughts and stories are ALL OURS! I really love the idea that future historians will have all this raw data to draw from and understand what life was like during this pandemic. So, future historians, when we're all dead and buried and you're huddling inside from polar vortex frigid winters and oppressively hot-baked summers, I hope you will find our stories useful/instructive/entertaining. Anyway, here's my story for Feb 16. My mother, who is 85, went in to a nursing home right when the pandemic started, around March of 2020. She has not been out in the world since it started. She has also been in serious cognitive decline since then. We think she has dementia/early Alzheimer's. So it's a struggle to keep her updated on why she can't go anywhere. Thank God she has forgotten most things such as her apartment and her cats. She is also now used to weekly zoom calls with my two brothers and can joke around with us through the screen. Anyway, today was warm enough (45+ -- one of the few places in the US not crushed by the polar vortex) for me to have an outdoor visit with her. She's been depressed and keeps asking me when she can leave the nursing home. I decided that I would try to cheer her up with some music. So I brought my phone and a bluetooth speaker and a really good dancing playlist I'd made on Spotify, with all kinds of R+B and disco. So After we chatted for a few minutes, I said "let's dance." I went to turn on the playlist and... GRRRRR! No cell service. Luckily I still had music in itunes, so I put on Jorge Ben, Ponta de Lança Africano, also known as Umbabarauma, a great samba funk dancing song. Like a wild woman I waved my arms and boogied around the patio while my mother......... burst into hysterical fits of laughter!! She could not keep her head up she was laughing so hard. Okay, the point was to get her moving, get her heart rate up and have some fun. But I guess if she had fun at my expense that's okay too. I had no idea I was such a bad dancer and normally I might have been insulted. But we're one year into a pandemic and honestly, the only way to survive this is to just let go!!!! Truly, it was nice to see her laugh like that. Totally made my day.