My Two-Cents: 3-Year Anniversary of Quarantine
Disclaimer: I am not trying to romanticize covid! But it's so much work to continually be a grudgen about quarantine, and now that it's been 3 years, I think it's okay to think back and remember the funny stuff.
Covid sucked. Quarantine sucked. The remnants of covid also kind of suck as well. People got sick, people sick, and many lives were temporarily put on hold until insight was gained into a virus that tore apart the social interaction of the world. There isn’t a lot of positive in that. And your status of well-being for five months likely depended on which mindset and policy you state adopted: petal-to-the-metal no social formalities for five months, or come here to die and let freedom live on! (South Dakota)
I am not going to speak to the scientific authority of Mrs. Kristi Noem's very controversial tactic. Being that it doesn’t have any. But, regardless of what I thought of its intelligence, I will grudgingly admit I did benefit from it. I was still able to leave my house and go to work. Hyvee-Aisles-Online Gang. Someday I will tell my kids about how a giant pandemic swept the world, so 74% of my high school population and I got jobs online shopping to pass the time. Some of my funniest memories were made in the aisles of Hyvee. (I am not sure if I should be depressed by that. But honestly, I feel like getting a high-school job at your local grocery is just a right of passage.)
On the day that was supposed to be prom, we all ordered a ton of appetizers in the Market-Grille and fucked around for longer than our break should have been. It seems kind of bitter and sad, but it wasn’t. One of my friends once watched an entire Vikings game during his lunch break (with his manager of course), so you could say Hy-vee was pretty chill about it. Except for when they would call your name on the loudspeaker and say you had to return to work: the Hyvee Walk of Shame. My friends and I used to take our lunch breaks together and talk about how crazy everything going on was. Talking about when things would return to normal (little did we know, it wouldn’t be for another 1.5 years). We used to make jokes about the kids we heard hiding in the freezer so they didn’t have to shop anymore. Or out in what we coined the “She-Shed”, the big box out in the parking lot where cars picked up their orders. The She-Shed workers used to throw brooms and kick holes in the walls and then remark they had no idea how that happened. So management attempted to put cameras up but then couldn’t figure out how they worked so they did nothing. One day it was really windy, and this one kid was carrying out a huge stack of pallets to the She-Shed, and it got knocked over all over the parking lot, and milk and eggs splattered everywhere. Oops! That’s what you get for being a fool who online-ordered your groceries from a bunch of minimum-wage-paid 17-year-olds. Once our manager accidentally called 911 instead of a customer and they showed up at the store. People used to express order (meaning we had to shop it in under an hour) 1000+ items and then five 17-year-olds would run around the store with carts ramming into people trying to get your fucking order ready in time. At one point we were getting a lot of complaints of workers running into customers with carts. Whoops. We had a time schedule! And speaking of carts, we used to get in screaming matches with the meat department about “stealing their carts”. The other funny thing about the job was that it left high school kids (people who are somewhat inexperienced in grocery shopping) in charge of substituting things for your groceries when stuff was out of stock – and everything was out of stock and the time. My friend once substituted a bouquet of flowers for a tomato. I’m sure those daisy petals tasted superb in someone's spaghetti sauce. My other friend was promoted from working courtesy to “cleaner,” where he had to wipe down the handles in the fridge and frozen section. We used to joke he was getting paid $10.25 an hour to give hand jobs to fridges. He used to set timers to see how slow he could make one loop around the freezer section. One day, a worker quit, ripped off his red polo, and yelled “Fuck Hyvee” as he walked out. Let’s just say not everyone shared the passion for online grocery shopping.
After work, we used to do the bike trails, roller-blade, go fishing, go hiking, play tennis (until all parks were shut down), hammock, and fuck around. Covid was an extravert's worst nightmare, but a hobbyist’s best friend. I found myself falling into both categories. I took up piercing ears as a moonlighting job. My sister and I got on a baking kick and spent a couple of weeks trying to make crème brûlée recipes. Then we went through a GTA phase. One day we thought it would be funny to dress my brother up like Post Malone with face tattoos. We also re-went through a Hunger-games era and bought fake bows and arrows for shits and gigs. I listened to Gravy Train and Blinding-lights 100-too-many-times. We would usually cap off our day with a viewing of Thor-Ragnorok.
Quarantine sucked, but I find myself thinking less about how I missed out on the last quarter of high school, prom, and what should have been the victory lap of my childhood and more about all things I ended up doing instead. My time at Hyvee with my friends. The ability to wake up every day and do whatever the fuck I wanted. The ability to Hobbify. Granted, I also spent a fair amount of time on TikTok. And sooner or later came the zoom era -- bedtime routines brought to you by group zoom and facetime calls. But the overarching miasma I look back at quarantine with now seems to be somewhat happy and melancholic. Granted, I think that once things become far enough out (we’re approaching the 3-year anniversary of this time), we begin to forget the bad and hold on to the good. At the time, I don’t think I appreciated the comedic value of my day-to-day activities at Hyvee. But when I texted my AOL group chat asking for some of their fondest and funniest stories, I found myself cacking so hard I had to leave the coffee shop I was at because I started to get looks. Early covid and quarantine was a time of much unknown, but the unknown often becomes the historic. I think that March 2020 will mark a pivotal point for my generation. I may have never finished high school, but I still remember what I was doing on what turned out to be the last day of high school. I remember the murmurs of what was to come during the last week of school. I remember sitting in my AP Psychology class and people saying they thought we might not be in school next week. Which was received with outlandish slander -- people had never heard of such a thing. Though I could feel anguished and cheated about how my high school era came to an end, I think I found peace with it. I might even like the unique memories I made from it. I can’t change it, but even if I could, I don’t think I would take back all of the things quarantine enabled me to find. Humor at my local grocery store, the ability to hobbify, and something that will never happen again in history.
