Things are precarious right now.
I am writing this from the other end of a pandemic. Or maybe from the middle. Or even the beginning. I guess we’ll see, won’t we?
For a while now (since this post, really) I’ve stayed mostly at home, cooped up with my family while we avoided the world. I’m fortunate to be able to say that. Due to having a house in the suburbs large enough for us each to have our own room to hide from each other in, my family has gotten on just fine through all this. It’s a chore to have to wipe down groceries as they come and it’s stressful to have not done much socializing and only visited my grandma through her window, but things are okay. I know people with family who’ve gotten COVID and even died from it, and I feel for them so much. I feel very very lucky to not have lost anyone.
Yet. Because it’s still not over, is it? Everything’s starting to open back up, I myself have my first shift back at work on Saturday, but the numbers aren’t going down and are even likely to increase. Life is going back to normal, but a different normal.
What else has changed? The Black Lives Matter protests were incredible to behold. I’m glad to see that people are still fighting to improve the world, and it’s working. It’s the result of a painful history and unjust present day, and it hurts to fight for your life, I imagine. And goodness, what a fight. So many people injured, too many killed. Growing pains hurt but they mean change. I keep reminding myself that a fight is good. When people are too afraid to fight, that is when the war is lost. That’s why oppressors do their best to punish such protests—to quell the fight for change and keep things as they are.
What am I going on about? I know nothing about this topic. I’m in a position of immense privilege and every so often I get called a chink or have to hear about another asian character getting whitewashed and that’s almost the extent of my racial injustices. When the marches in my city were scheduled, the fear of COVID won out over my indignation at the state of things and desire to show solidarity. I cannot pretend to be good enough to breach this topic. Instead, I want to express my admiration for the thousands of brave people who put their lives on the line to get the message across—”Black Lives Matter”. And they do.
Like COVID, the BLM movement is not over, even if people are resuming their versions of normal, whatever that looks like now.
So many world events have happened, and I haven’t written here much because I had nothing to say. Who would want to hear from me in the midst of all that anyway?
But I’ve been busy with my own things, too. I officially cancelled Super Roommates but am still required to fulfill the terms of my contract with Telus Storyhive, so I made it with just me. No cast but me, no crew but me, no editor but me. It’s not how I would have liked for things to go, but I’m proud of how things have gone considering.
I wrote more of my novel and have updated the little word count meter on the right of my blog with every thousand words, so if you ever came to visit you may have noticed the meter going up even if no posts were. I was still dealing with a lot of Super Roommates stuff, cancelling contracts and paying crew and such, for the first few weeks in quarantine, but over the last ten weeks I managed 16k words. That feels good. If you recall, I stopped working on my novel on January 1st to focus on Super Roommates. It was nice to finally go back to it.
In the first two weeks of quarantine, feeling all cooped up, I took my siblings to the empty house where Super Roommates was supposed to film and we spent an afternoon making a short film. You can check it out here and maybe even give it a like if you’re so inclined. It was nice to be out of the house and even nicer to have a project to work on, a goal of sorts when life had so suddenly become directionless.
I should also add that quarantine would probably not have been as good to me if it weren’t that I had asked someone out on a date just over a week before everything went down as it did. Between socially distanced dates and FaceTime dates, we managed to have something of a romance, although it ended the way they often do. Still, it was nice to have that distraction.
There were other things, too: teaching my younger cousin (who lives in our basement with her dad so we weren’t breaking social distancing rules) how to do cartwheels in the backyard, going running once the weather got warmer like I did last summer, having a small quarantine birthday for my sister, my cousins organizing a drive-by birthday parade for my brother, enjoying a friend’s musical readings over Zoom, talking with friends over FaceTime, doing a self-portrait photography session, my mom finding a hobby making masks, making a monthly poetry magazine called Precarious Poetry, trading my photography skills for singing lessons, painting more, having dance parties in the kitchen, having a daily Reading Hour with my brother, beating my sister at Monopoly after a week of her wanting to play it, running after the ice cream truck with masks on when it made its first appearance of the year, building an Animal Crossing town with my siblings, finally watching Parasite, learning how to make my own memes…okay I think I’ve mentioned all the really good ones (and some).
(From my self-portrait photography session whilst in quarantine.)
I’m at my dad’s house now. My siblings and I again got tired of one house and traded it for another—a longer visit this time by virtue of the wifi available and helped by a dog. In the first week, I organized the living room and its bookshelves with previously unrealized potential, my brother’s room since he’s turned sixteen now and isn’t the kid he was when we first moved in, and my sister’s room because she visits my dad so infrequently that her room had become a storage space.
I’m still working on edits for my Super Roommates pivot project; I think it’s coming along nicely, I just need to figure out how I’ll do the music. I finished a few great books over quarantine, including one I finished just a few hours ago. I have my next read right next to me, a book that I started a couple of years ago, then I had to leave town or something and forgot to take it with me and never really got back to it until now.
All in all, it’s been an insane several months for the world, but I’m lucky and doing just fine. I hope you are, too.
Precarious Writer 