{"id":4114,"date":"2020-04-27T19:38:36","date_gmt":"2020-04-27T23:38:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/walkingrichmond\/?p=4114"},"modified":"2020-05-09T14:08:07","modified_gmt":"2020-05-09T18:08:07","slug":"when-this-ends","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/walkingrichmond\/2020\/04\/27\/when-this-ends\/","title":{"rendered":"When This Ends"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Nina Joss<\/em><\/p>\n

April 13<\/em><\/p>\n

I watch the news and they talk about things starting to calm down, the deaths in NYC are less than 700 per day now. My first reaction is rather perverse. To be honest, it is a, \u201cNo! Don\u2019t tell us we\u2019re not gonna have another snow day, that the storm is almost passed over us!\u201d feeling. That sounds terrible and I\u2019m not sure how to explain it. I think it\u2019s just the side of me, the side of an eternally busy person, who has really enjoyed this forced relaxation. I don\u2019t want this disaster to continue, but I will miss the beautiful simplicity of quarantine.<\/p>\n

But then I realize\u2014holy frick, it still hasn\u2019t passed over us. We\u2019ve been here for how long? A month now? Long enough that I had a Leadership midterm right before spring break and now the final is next week. This should be over by now.<\/p>\n

Yes, the numbers are plateauing, it\u2019s maybe gonna get better \u201csoon,\u201d they talk of turning the nozzle of normal life slowly on again. But we are still in this. These are predictions, estimates, hopes. We could be here a LOT longer.<\/p>\n

And the next part is gonna be confusing, too. What does turning the nozzle on \u201cslowly\u201d look like in a world dying to be on full blast again? A world of people who can\u2019t wait to move and hug?<\/p>\n

This might be getting better, but it\u2019s not even close to over. Our normal lives really might be a thing of the past, in some ways.<\/p>\n

Also, there were tornadoes yesterday in Louisiana, Tennessee and New Jersey. Watching the news usually makes the world look like it\u2019s going to sh*t. But these days? It really makes it look like it\u2019s ending.<\/p>\n

April 5<\/em><\/p>\n

My family drove to my grandparents\u2019 house, about an hour away, to dance in their yard and entertain them today. Coming home afterward felt like coming home from a vacation because those 5 hours were the longest we had left the house in weeks. The culture shock after this is going to be so weird. It\u2019s crazy how this whole stay-at-home situation feels so different\u2014almost normal\u2014now, compared to how shocked and in denial we were when we couldn\u2019t hug at first.<\/p>\n

April 21<\/em><\/p>\n

It’s so weird that this thing we\u2019re living right now is going to likely truly affect the rest of our lives, especially economically. That this has become almost normality now, being at home, all of this stage new life, people dying every day. It feels normal. That’s crazy.<\/p>\n

But it feels normal the way Christmas break feels normal, like it will end sometime and real life will resume. Just a little break from reality.<\/p>\n

But I just read an article with a quote: \u201cI don\u2019t think the New York we left will be back for some years. I don\u2019t know if we\u2019ll ever get it back.\u201d<\/p>\n

To think that that New York City might be gone forever. The little me who dreamed of one day living in that magical place might never do it. Movies set in New York City will reflect a place that is gone, in the past, like movies about the Roman civilization.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a bizarre thing to think. That even when this winter break part is over, what we are living now might really affect the way we live, think, exist in the world.<\/p>\n

If you had told the little Nina back then that when she turned 21 the world would be hit by a pandemic, killing thousands and shutting down places she knew and dreamed of, she would have been afraid. Now that it\u2019s normal, it seems less scary. It just is. But as it goes on, I think we\u2019ll realize more and more how insane this is, like I have over the course of the past month and a half.<\/p>\n

Or maybe we won\u2019t. Maybe it will stay normal, stay reality, hitting us with shock every now and then and then returning to normal\u2013because once this is the case for a while, it will be.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s strange how reality can become history and the present can become normality so quickly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Nina Joss April 13 I watch the news and they talk about things starting to calm down, the deaths in NYC are less than 700 per day now. My first reaction is rather perverse. To be honest, it is a, \u201cNo! Don\u2019t tell us we\u2019re not gonna have another snow day, that the storm Read more about When This Ends<\/span>[…]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4705,"featured_media":3817,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[97658,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-plymouth-mi","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/walkingrichmond\/files\/2020\/04\/VisualEditor_-_Icon_-_Journal.svg_.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7o53H-14m","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/walkingrichmond\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/walkingrichmond\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/walkingrichmond\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/walkingrichmond\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4705"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/walkingrichmond\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4114"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/walkingrichmond\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4114\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/walkingrichmond\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3817"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/walkingrichmond\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/walkingrichmond\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/walkingrichmond\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}