Like any person trying to survive in LA, my days were spent hustling constantly from the moment I opened my eyes to the moment I dropped off to sleep, exhausted. And you must have noted that I used the past tense. Yes, there was life before Corona. And now it’s life after Corona. Or, during Corona, should I say?
Even a couple of weeks ago, at this time, I was wondering how I would steal time from my other activities to accumulate that one hour I needed to get a haircut. There was my main job with a minimum three-hour commute both ways, there was my part-time commitment, there were classes with similarly long commutes and assignments and eating and sleeping and breathing.
Enter COVID-19.
The first thing that happened was grocery store shelves becoming empty where toilet paper (or bath tissue, as the stores politely say) and hand sanitizers used to be. The next thing you know, the canned food aisles are starting to look the same.
Then school says, don’t bother coming to class. Just do your lessons online. It was an advantage for certain people – their instructors scrapped finals and final assignments and just gave students a straight ‘A’. I wasn’t one of them. So now I don’t have to commute to class but I do have to turn in assignments, possibly harder versions.
Then yesterday, my workplace said we are closing till April 10. They were super nice to decide to pay employees till then even if we didn’t work. Which is awesome!
But now I have gone from being someone with zero time for herself to someone with all the time in the world with not much to do.
If you thought it was a nice feeling, think again. Stuck in an alien city (and yes, it will always remain an alien city no matter what my residency status in this country is) with promise of pay for hours I haven’t worked is disorienting. Very.
Are you similarly disoriented?
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