The Quarantine Diaries

Saturday, February 29th, 2020

Kevin and I cancel our trip to Japan. My mom has been telling me to cancel for weeks now, and I’ve resisted, but I just saw a post on Reddit about a guy in Brooklyn that returned from a trip to Japan, and had coronavirus symptoms. He tested negative in 25 different tests and his doctor requested a COVID-19 test from the CDC and was denied. They essentially told him to go about living his life as normal. Now I don’t feel safe, knowing that there are people just walking around with it, and knowing our government is being so irresponsible in containing it. We cancel everything—our flights, our hotels, our tours. My friend Keika says this is probably smart, because Japan is refusing testing for a lot of people, so the numbers are likely falsely low anyway. I’m mostly anxious about going into any airport, because you just never know where they’re coming from. I’m very disappointed, because we started planning this around a year ago. But health is more important.

Saturday, March 7th, 2020

Kevin and I go composting in Brooklyn, our Saturday routine (the most Brooklyn thing possible), and run a few errands. We note that everyone is much more tense on public transit. I personally am wary of people suspecting me of carrying the virus. I’m fully prepared to fight any and all racists.

We have a game night at our house with a couple of friends. We discuss the coronavirus in very distant terms, lightly worried. It seems as though no one really knows the scale of its effects yet; we’re still just hearing about it in very abstract terms, with the exception of China, but those numbers are likely unreliable anyway. One country that’s doing pretty well is actually Singapore, probably because of their use of tracking civilian data. I think it’s pretty well-contained there.

Sunday, March 8th, 2020

We ended up sleeping at around 2:30 am, which is unfortunate because Kevin signed up for a 5K today. It is doubly unfortunate that today is Daylight Savings, so he actually has to wake up at 6 am vs. 7 am. I wake up at 6:45 and take a train all the way up to West Harlem, by Riverside Park. There are lots of people there, but I notice that everyone is a bit more careful.

We get bagels at Absolute Bagels, which is easily my new favorite bagel place in the city. We’re 15¢ short, and the kind woman at the register says we can pay her later, and we’re so touched that we immediately go to the Duane Reade across the street and buy a small package of popcorn to get change for her. The little bagel shop is crammed full of people at 8:30 am, because it’s one of the only places open, and I look around and realize that this may not last if the virus continues to get worse. It’s businesses like this that will suffer.

Monday, March 9th, 2020

We go to a little café/cocktail bar/sound room called Public Records for an OFFAIR concert with Moses Sumney. One of the greatest live performances I’ve ever seen; his voice is unparalleled. Literally two days prior, Kevin was saying that Moses was the only one of his favorite artists that he hadn’t seen live, and then, like magic, Moses announced that he was playing a free show in Brooklyn, with limited seats. I hopped on the G train after work to meet Kevin, and we waited for around an hour. The lights inside were red and dark and moody; we had stickers placed over our phones so we wouldn’t take pictures, but I couldn’t resist snapping one of the disco ball-lit ceiling with the front camera.

I’m a bit nervous about the virus in such close quarters, but at least it’s only 150 people? It’s very intimate—we were right at the front. He was surprisingly sassy; surprising, I guess, because he always seems very brooding and wistful in his music. But he’s funny in real life.

On the way home, we are craving Taco Bell, so we run (literally run) to the one in Greenpoint, but it closes two minutes before we get there. I settle instead for an Arizona Iced Tea from a gas station and McDonald’s chicken nuggets just as they’re about to close.

Ireland has cancelled St. Patrick’s Day festivities and pubs will close, which feels very culturally significant. Colleges across the East Coast have cancelled classes and closed down.

Tuesday, March 10th, 2020

Coachella is officially postponed until October, and Kevin’s New York City Half Marathon was canceled.

Wednesday, March 11th, 2020

The COVID-19 outbreak is officially declared a pandemic by the WHO. I have lunch with my former boss, who is from Spain, and she says the situation there is also getting worse. She encourages me to stay home and to stop taking the subway—she walked all the way from West Village to NoMad to meet me to avoid public transit.

Thursday, March 12th, 2020

I start working from home. I’m supremely paranoid now, not necessarily of the public but because the CEO of the Port Authority announced that he tested positive for the virus and the Port Authority is our client. We had people in their offices last week. Not sure if anyone has been infected. We can only wait. Also, the subways make me nervous. There are a lot of people (now Asians and non-Asians) wearing masks. I consider Asians wearing masks a courtesy, but non-Asian people wearing them feels a bit racist, especially since we know they’re not effective at keeping the virus out, only in. I haven’t personally experienced any racism, but a bunch of my friends have said they’ve received dirty looks. My heart breaks for Chinatown.

Friday, March 13th, 2020

Kevin and I go shopping in Chinatown. Hong Kong Supermarket is fully stocked and packed as usual; I note that they still have masks in stock. We eat at Cheeky Sandwiches, a place close to my old apartment and one of our favorite hidden haunts in Chinatown. They have a fried chicken and biscuit sandwich with gravy that’s to die for. We meet an older Asian guy with tattoos all over his arms, wearing a grease-stained apron. “No one’s come in lately!” he says. “They’re all scared. There was one guy earlier, he didn’t want to touch the keypad.” I ask him if he’s the owner, but he just works there. He used to be retired, but wanted something to keep him young (besides riding motorcycles) and he knew the owner, so he asked for a job.

I don’t plan on eating anything but I feel bad, so I order a chicken sandwich and a ginger ale with jasmine tea. Both are delicious.

We also go to a Chinatown pharmacy in search of hand sanitizer. I’ve been really nervous lately, because I’m afraid that when the pandemic is over that there won’t be any hand sanitizer left. My OCD has gotten much better over the years, but I still always have hand sanitizer with me at all times. I don’t know what I’d do without it; I feel like I’d have an anxiety attack. No such luck in the pharmacy. We do find some Clorox wipes (“Our most popular item,” the clerk tells us) and I pick up some Vitamin C and Vitamin D. Just in case.

We go to our favorite Trader Joe’s, the one on Grand Street, because it’s nice and big and usually not too crowded. But now there’s a line wrapped around the entire store; it goes out the door and down the block. We go home instead.

Later, we go out to a bar with some friends who are in town (edit: This is, in retrospect, a very poor choice). I am extremely uncomfortable the whole time, trying not to touch anything and trying to breathe as little as possible, and I promise to stay in from now on. If I’m WFH, I should be staying away from all people. I start making a list of things to actually do in quarantine, because it’s becoming a real and imminent possibility.

Saturday, March 14th, 2020

I bake a loaf of French bread in my Dutch oven and I am v proud of it. I’m at that point.

Sunday, March 15th, 2020

We were supposed to go to Ekali for my friend Leyko’s birthday, but New York announced that they were banning events over 500 people. Webster Hall is probably the last place I want to be in a virus. We’ve now resolved to stay inside in our apartment, only going outside in case we really need to.

Tuesday, March 17th, 2020

My office is announced officially closed—one person who was at the Port Authority is being tested for COVID-19 and someone else at one of the other companies in our office building was tested for it too. Quarantine has been okay for the past couple of days. Taking walks outside helps; we have a really gorgeous waterfront that we like to go to. It’s concerning how many people are outside, though, mostly millennials, because that’s our neighborhood demographic. The most concerning is all of the kids that are still climbing all over the playground at the park near the waterfront. That’s probably the germiest possible place, even without a pandemic. And because kids aren’t affected, I highly suspect that they’re carriers of the virus.

Friday, March 20th, 2020

Andrew Cuomo announces a PAUSE executive order—effectively a shelter-in-place. All non-essential businesses are closed. Evictions are halted. MTA buses aren’t collecting fares. Essentially, a lot of the things we’ve been told are “necessary” aren’t really that necessary.

I’ve been sick the past couple of days. It sucks. And it could be the virus, but I doubt it. I think it’s just a cold. Either way, I’m staying inside. I haven’t left my house in three days. I’m normally an introvert, but now it’s much different now that I literally can’t leave; it sucks. I’m glad I’m quarantined with Kevin of all people, but it’s just...not a fun situation.

I read that bars and distilleries have pivoted to making hand sanitizer, using ethanol and aloe, after the Defense Production Act was invoked, and it really does feel like wartime right now.

Saturday, March 21st, 2020

I do a quick scan of my purchases from the past week. Almost all of them are takeout. I justify it by saying I’m not really doing anything else? This spot from DoorDash breaks my heart a little bit, but this tweet makes me laugh.

Sunday, March 22nd, 2020

I work for a good chunk of the day on a freelance project for an agency that I really like and I’m trying to get hired at. It’s really cool, but it’s also hard to be creative when I can only move in a 15-foot radius at any given time.

We watched the last The Fast & The Furious movie, The Fate of the Furious. Number eight. We’ve watched all of the movies in the franchise over the past week, because we have nothing else to do and I’ve never actually seen them. I think I saw Tokyo Drift years ago, but I only had a very vague memory of it. I actually really liked The Fate of the Furious. Charlize Theron is gorgeous as usual and makes a very convincing villain. I’m still sad for Dom and Han, though. Hoping Han gets justice in F9, though who knows when that will be released now.

I’m recovering from a cold now—I’ve been sick the past couple of days and now I’m finally getting better. The luxury of just being able to recover safely, with an income, in my apartment.

I was talking to my friend Owen yesterday, and he was saying that as of right now, the current doubling time is every three days. The number of cases doubles every three days. That’s absolutely insane. If we do absolutely nothing, the death toll will be 4 million people. The population of Los Angeles. If we “flatten the curve,” the death toll is still around 1.1 million. That’s a crazy amount. We’re both trying to read more studies, because there’s just so much misinformation going around right now, and he sends me this study from Imperial College, which is a study that uses data modeling to project outcomes of using non-pharmaceutical interventions, i.e. not using a vaccine. This Twitter thread is a good summary of it, but essentially:

• We have two options: mitigation (tempering the effects) and suppression (stopping the spread further); mitigation is easier but will likely still cause a lot of deaths, and suppression is hard
• “...the effectiveness of any one intervention in isolation is likely to be limited, requiring multiple interventions to be combined to have a substantial impact on transmission.”
• This is purely practical epidemiological research, so it doesn’t take into account any economical or ethical considerations
• “We assumed an incubation period of 5.1 days. Infectiousness is assumed to occur from 12 hours prior to the onset of symptoms for those that are symptomatic and from 4.6 days after infection in those that are asymptomatic with an infectiousness profile over time that results in a 6.5-day mean generation time.”
• If we do nothing, we’re looking at 2.2 million deaths in the U.S.
• Either way, we’re still looking at the virus in full effect until at least September (yikes); the most practical strategy is temporary suppression; i.e. two months of quarantine and one month return to normal for 18 months (double yikes), until a vaccination is developed and widely available to create herd immunity

Monday, March 23rd, 2020

My office sent an email announcing that one person in our office tested positive for COVID-19. I don’t know who it is. They told us that they have notified everyone in contact with him/her, and I started WFH before the office was officially closed, but still I feel very uneasy, almost contaminated.

I submit my last work for the freelance project and then do my work for my actual job. I clean my apartment and then I need to cook dinner, but I’m just...so tired. I realized I like cooking and I don’t ever regret cooking, but I’m often unmotivated to do it. I downloaded the Instagram app and I’ve actually watched peoples’ stories, a first. It’s mostly serving as cooking inspiration at the moment. My office announced that the person who was tested for COVID-19 was positive. I’m not worried, because they notified anyone that was in contact with them and I was note. But I worry that this means we’ll be out of the office even longer.

As of today, I haven’t stepped outside of my apartment in five days. I’ve worn the same clothes for three days in a row. I feel a bit imprisoned, especially because the weather’s been so nice. But today was grey and rainy so it felt like a treat to stay indoors and feel cozy, just me and Kevin and our two cats. I thank god once again that Kevin rejected living in a studio—I don’t see how we would’ve survived this quarantine. And right now, living in Long Island City is a plus. The grocery stores and drugstores here are less crowded; there’s a lot more open space. It makes quarantining easier.

We finally do trivia with friends! It’s fun with a Zoom room, six of us typing furiously in the chat, debating over answers. I also Skype my parents, like I do every week, but I don’t really have any new updates for them, so we play Scattergories instead. It feels so long since the quarantine started. But it’s only beginning. Now we’re just watching the effects unfold.

It’s actually easier for me to WFH than to sit in my office. My company has these super expensive that are supposedly ultra-ergonomic chairs...but only if you’re 5’6” and up. I’d much rather sit on my couch cross-legged, so the cushion supports my back, with my laptop and mug of tea on IKEA lap desk. It makes me think of this tweet, which I found funny because I was literally working on a Macbook with a mug of tea as I was reading it.

Tuesday, March 24th, 2020

The 2020 Tokyo Olympics are postponed. They’ve only been postponed twice before—and both times were because of war.

Wednesday, March 25th, 2020

My friend Lianne mentioned that she couldn’t remember what we did before the virus, because now everyone’s kind of just planning day to day. It’s a stark contrast from how we used to live, when our whole lives were oriented toward our future. I was telling my friend Ben that it’s a weird time to be a millennial because our whole lives were shaped by subtle trauma—subtle in the sense that we weren’t living in a warzone or anything, but we were first traumatized by 9/11, then the recession, and now this. Our whole existences have been shaped by anxiety. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t have to take off my shoes at the airport, and that was 18 years ago. Now our whole future is uncertain.

Friday, March 27th, 2020

I have my first therapy session ever. I’ve meant to go to therapy for years, because I think it’s just a good thing for your mental health, like going to a doctor for an annual physical just to check on everything, but now it feels especially pertinent. And I genuinely really enjoy it. I think having OCD, I have a very high level of self-consciousness and self-awareness, but simply don’t have the emotional intelligence to deal with it, so it’s nice having her to discuss it with. She asks a lot of questions, and I find that just having to articulate my answers carefully is really helpful. I just like having a professional help me work through things, because I never know if I’m doing the “correct” thing, mentally and emotionally. I feel refreshed and full of clarity afterward.

We go to the store, just to get a couple of things for dinner, not a full grocery run (yet). It’s been tricky, cooking two or three meals a day and trying to time everything so the groceries don’t spoil. I actually notice how much more often we’re running the dishwasher, and it’s because I normally eat one meal at lunch and wash my dishes there, but now I’m eating two to three meals a day and drinking tea nonstop. I don’t think I’ve quite figured out a schedule yet. It’s the first time I’ve left my apartment building in ten days. First it was because I was sick, and then it was just that we had nowhere to go.

The store closest to us is surprisingly crowded and well-stocked, but people are so close to each other, and I feel my OCD anxiety coming back. Really trying not to regress to how I used to be, because that was...not fun. But I feel as though I can’t breathe, and even though I know the virus isn’t airborne, it’s all I can think about. I feel panicked just being outside.

Also, we started Tiger King and it is wild. 100% not what I expected when I saw it floating around on Netflix.

Saturday, March 28th, 2020

My aunt sends us all an invite to a Zoom meeting called “Chin Family Zoomba” which leads me to believe she’s going to lead a Zumba session via Zoom, but instead it’s just a chaotic family video call with all 22 of us. There’s a lot of people changing their Zoom backgrounds to other peoples’ faces, but it’s nice to see all of them, especially since we can’t go home. My mom asked me a couple of days ago if I wanted to come home, but I decided that it would be a lot more inconvenient—I’d have to enter so many public spaces just to get to the airport, quarantine for 14 days, and wake up at 6 am to work. I think it’s better (and safer) to just stay here.

Sunday, March 29th, 2020

We go grocery shopping to get all of our essentials, plus some supplies for when it gets bad. The government has extended social distancing guidelines until the end of April. Given that we’re still waiting to see the effects of the beginning of March, I’d say things are going to get really bad next month. We buy some things like shampoo and paper towels, plus some non-perishables. The Duane Reade near us is pretty empty, and there are signs placed on the floor instructing people where to stand while waiting on line.

But there’s this weird surrealism that permeates everything, like in Midsommar; I keep saying that it feels like the slowest apocalypse ever, because all we can do is stay home, and Kevin notes that it feels like we’re not supposed to be out, even though getting groceries is literally one of the reasons you’re allowed to leave the house. And I feel extremely anxious, darting around other shoppers like a fish, and sanitizing my hands after touching everything. When I see other people wearing masks, my first OCD thought is always, “I should get a mask,” but then I hear reports about hospital shortages and I feel guilty for even having the thought. I shower immediately when I get home, just to be safe.

I’ve been really uninspired to write lately because it doesn’t feel like I’m oriented toward anything—everything is in flux and conditional. I don’t know the next time I’ll see my family, I don’t know the next time I’ll be able to travel; both of those uncertainties make me very sad. And beyond me, people are literally dying, virtually healthy people, because other people refuse to take social distancing seriously.

But still, I’m determined to put something out, because I want a record of this when all of it is over. So a couple of friends and I are starting a little “newsletter club”; we’re all going to write a short newsletter about the things we liked that week and send it out to each other on Fridays. It’s a nice little way of staying connected and seeing what we’re all up to. Sharing interesting links with people is my primary love language, so I’m really excited about it.

Wednesday, April 1st, 2020

The agency I did the freelance project for is freezing hiring, and I am disappointed. I was so close—I literally finished interviewing like the week it got really bad, and this is actually my dream agency that I’ve been trying to work at ever since I moved to New York, so it’s frustrating. It’s understandable, but I’m still sad about it. One guy was getting onboarded while I was doing my freelance project, so he probably made it in like right before I did, right under the wire.

It feels strange that some lines of business are operating exactly as normal, whereas others, like the hospital industry, are completely overwhelmed.

WIRED wrote a piece on this exact phenomenon, quoting a child psychologist that studied the effects of 9/11 on developmental growth. Essentially, it’s because we’ve been unceremoniously tossed into an unfamiliar and unprecendented situation and are suffering from the disorientation.

Right now, many of the patterns we know and love have been obliterated. We can’t go to happy hour, we can’t get toilet paper when we want it, we can’t plan our annual trip. “My wife actually said this to me just a couple of days ago: ‘It's like there's no future,’” says Matzner. What she meant was we can’t plan for the future, because in the age of the coronavirus, we don’t know what we’ll be doing in six months, or even tomorrow. We’re stuck in a new kind of everlasting present. “And so everything seems completely otherworldly,” Matzner says.

Thursday, April 2nd, 2020

I Skype my friend Ali, who lives in Hawaii now and I haven’t seen in years. She was one of my first friends in college, and together we relive all the craziness of UCSB. It’s refreshing to talk about something other than the virus. I envy her for all of the open space and nature in Hawaii. Apparently, people are still allowed to surf there. Afterward, Kevin and I walk to the waterfront and admire the skyline. Today was an uneventful but good day. I almost forget about why we’re doing this, but the uncertainty still clouds any thoughts of the future, and I think the peak is projected to hit mid-April, so I’m still worried for what’s to come.

Friday, April 3rd, 2020

I mention to my therapist that I’m anxious, and she asks how my OCD is doing, given the circumstances. I feel like overall it’s okay, because I stay inside most of the time, in my clean apartment. But I feel even more anxious about going outside than usual, and the fact that people are just now learning how to wash their hands, cough into their elbows, and use hand sanitizer is a bit horrifying. I think of all of the doors and elevator buttons I’ve ever touched, all of the hands I’ve ever shaken...it’s just a lot. I find this article about OCD in the midst of the virus, and it is comforting knowing that other people are going through the same thing; I feel a little bit more calm now that everyone is taking extra precautions. It’s also a bit gratifying to know that everyone is navigating the world as I do on a normal basis—when I see people opening doors with their elbows or covering their noses when someone nearby coughs, I want to say, See? This is what I do literally every day of my life. That’s how uncomfortable I feel all the time.

I’m also just trying to read less real-time news (a decision I actually made after the 2016 election), because it usually isn’t that helpful; I’m trying to limit my intake of coronavirus content because realistically, all I can do is stay home. This tweet is me, because I really miss going out to restaurants.

I finally give in and watch Star Wars: Episode IV–A New Hope. Prior to this, I’d only seen Episode III and Rogue One, which according to all Star Wars fans, does not count. I’m a little afraid to actually engage with the fandom, but it was actually pretty good and I’m intrigued. Kudos to Kevin for putting up with me pointing out all of the inconsistencies in the plot.

We went out the first edition of our newsletter club newsletters today! I’m immediately so impressed by all of my friends’ creativity and the things that they’re interested in, and it’s nice to have a little thoughtfully-curated library of weekend reading/cooking inspiration. You can read mine here!

Tuesday, April 7th, 2020

I finally finish a piece I started writing two weeks ago, so today is already a good day. I couldn’t quite articulate what I wanted to say, but I read this piece and it all kind of fell into place. I’ve struggled creatively for the past couple of weeks; I’ve wanted to write but it all feels very meaningless. So I wrote this to make sense of everything—why we actually miss going on vacation and the things we lose along the way, what these “vacation selves” offer us in terms of self understanding.

It’s my grandpa’s 91st birthday today, so we have another family Zoom call, in which a cake is delivered to his door by the workers at his retirement home, and my mom shows off a cake that she baked with little flags in it that spell out “Happy Birthday, Grandpa!” She promises to freeze him a slice for when the quarantine is over.

Our trivia team (team name “Zaddy Issues”) placed 6th last night, so we’re riding the high of that—there are over 600 teams that compete every night. It was such a glorious feeling hearing the host call our name.

And lastly, my friend Britt texts me that my social distancing playbook popped up in her work slack, which is amazing and coincidental because she wasn’t the one that shared it. It makes me really happy that people are actually using it as a resource.

Wednesday, April 8th, 2020

Bernie Sanders officially drops out of the 2020 Democratic race and I am devastated, because we are now no longer under the illusion that we have a choice. I was originally a Kristen Gillibrand fan (she got an upsetting lack of coverage and I don’t really think she got a fair shake because she was always overshadowed by louder people e.g. Bernie and Warren but she was for Medicare for All and invested in gender equality at the federal and social levels), but I understood that it was my civic responsibility to vote for Bernie because he actually promised policies for the greater good of Americans. I definitely had doubts about their actual feasibility, but the strong support for him across the country gave me hope.

And now we are forced to choose—in a literal trolley problem of an election, the oldest moral dilemma in the book, an impossible Hobson’s choice—between two racist sexual predators. But I’m still going to do it, because I’m not stupid, and I was never under the impression that I was voting for myself. I am solidly upper-middle class, and I think when you know you won’t be affected by the outcome of an election, you are morally obligated to vote in the interests of the most disadvantaged and marginalized people. It’s why democracy exists. I genuinely don’t understand people who won’t vote for Biden because it somehow goes against their morals, when they are voting in another racist sexual predator by default, who has proven to be terrible for the American people. We’re in the middle of a pandemic that this administration is grossly mishandling (he makes Andrew Cuomo look like a hero, for god’s sake) and people still want to say that there is no difference between the two candidates. I’m furious because I know Biden is a weak candidate and doesn’t stand a chance, and people have the privilege and the audacity to claim that their votes don’t make a difference.

Inaction is still action; you’ve just chosen plausible deniability and I think that’s worse, because you’re acting with self-interest and the projection of being a good person despite doing the utilitarian thing. You want to say you adhered to an arbitrary moral code because you didn’t want to be the one to pull the lever, but people will die regardless and that blood is still on your hands.

This Desmond Tutu quote resonates more strongly than ever:

If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.

This pandemic is not the great equalizer, not even close, but if anything it instills fear in the normally privileged and I don’t think that’s a bad thing, because maybe they’ll finally have the guts to act on things like climate change when they understand that mortality is a real risk.

Saturday, April 11th, 2020

I’ve been thinking a lot about ancillary markets in this pandemic, because supposedly that’s an entrepreneur’s secret weapon. But after I read this Vox piece on the “micro-trends” of quarantine, I started making a mental list of markets that have expanded exponentially due to the virus. And since this is now essentially my diary, I thought I’d put it here, because it’s interesting to see all of them listed out; it really reveals our fears and priorities in crisis:

Edit: Here is a cheat sheet, because apparently someone has already done the research

Tuesday, April 14th, 2020

Kevin and I take a Lyft all the way down to Chinatown to go grocery shopping at Hong Kong Supermarket, since it has everything we need and some more niche items like pork belly and dumpling wrappers. It’s been a full month since we’ve gone into the city and ventured outside of a five-block radius from our apartment. Insane. I note that the tulips outside of our apartment are just starting to bloom, and I’m so pleased because I didn’t even know we had tulips!

Manhattan is a ghost town—it only takes us 20 minutes by car and it’s noticeably deserted. Most of the shops in Chinatown are closed. We quickly spot the line for Hong Kong Supermarket; it’s stretched down the street and around the corner. Everyone is wearing masks and standing six feet apart. I’m actually quite impressed; Chinese people aren’t huge rule followers or personal space givers when it comes to grocery shopping, something you’ll know if you’ve ever been to a Chinese grocery store and witnessed the chaos that is the produce section. That’s how I know it’s serious.

While we’re in line, we pass another smaller line for the pharmacy next door. They aren’t letting people in—instead they have a little table set up at the door and are handing customers their products over it, like a makeshift pharmacy counter, except now they’re doing it for everything and not just medication.

An employee hands us both disposable masks, which we appreciate. The door is blocked by a broom handle and they’re only letting a couple of people in at a time. The grocery store is emptier than I’ve ever seen it—the aisles are clear for once, the lines aren’t long, and there’s none of the shouting you normally hear. We get everything we need and get out, quickly. Going to a Chinese supermarket was smart, because there’s no shortage of anything.

Wednesday, April 15th, 2020

Well, today’s the day we go full apocalypse. New Yorkers are now required to wear face masks when going out in public. I know LA required masks a couple of days ago, so it makes sense that New York isn’t following in its footsteps. And I understand the intent of it, but I don’t like it because a) there’s still a PPE shortage in hospitals and b) I change clothes every time I go outside, so it feels unsanitary to still wear the same mask over and over again.

On a lighter note, my sister texted our group chat a picture of the sanitizer showers in Peru, asking “Wasn’t there a doctor who episode where they had one of these?” and the answer is yes, it was “New Earth” (Season 2, episode 1) with the hospital in New New York and Lady Cassandra (moisturize me), which was quite clever except that that future projects hospitals run by the cats, so I hope our future doesn’t look too much like it.

Thursday, April 16th, 2020

Kevin and I venture out to get a couple of things from the Duane Reade a couple of blocks away from us—we are so lucky to have a pharmacy nearby. Bodegas are fine, too, but I always feel a sense of reassurance from pharmacies because I know they’ll have what I need. Except hand sanitizer, I guess. We make our own masks using the CDC guidelines, which are actually very useful because they’re no-sew, so you can just cut them out of a t-shirt. As I was making mine, I asked Kevin, “Did you ever think in a million years that this would be our life” to which he responded by studying his mask in the mirror and replying, “I look like a Mortal Kombat character” (he did).

And...it’s beautiful outside. Upsettingly beautiful. It’s springtime and we’re missing it. The flowers are starting to bloom and all of the gorgeous colors are bright against the pavement. I’m so mad. I didn’t even know we had tulips in our neighborhood (there are some right outside our building!) but now I’m upset that I don’t get to really enjoy them. Although, I do question whether or not I’d notice them as much if I were allowed to go out and do things, or if they’d just be a passing thought when rushing home. Silver lining? I don’t know. I have very mixed feelings about “making the best” of a pandemic.

I originally intended to just take pictures of the flowers, but instead I take pictures of all of the oddities in our neighborhood—all of the closed signs, all of the abandoned places, all of the signs instructing people to practice social distancing. It looks like a couple of bodegas and restaurants have pivoted to what this designer calls “general store mode,” where the entrances are blocked and they simply hand you what you need, like the pharmacy we saw in Chinatown a couple of days ago.

We end the night by watching About Time, which is a rom-com I’d forgotten about until the Netflix Twitter account announced that it was now on Netflix. I can’t remember exactly when or why I decided to watch this years ago, but I just remember it being the perfect rom-com. It’s definitely in my top three (How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days and To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before are up there too) and in my opinion it’s extremely underrated. I love that unlike most rom-coms there’s no witty banter or fantastic tension between the leads; it’s about a very ordinary guy with a very ordinary life, but it’s so sweet and so wholesome and so precious that it really allows you to appreciate the small nuances of ordinary life. It has the added element of time travel, which in any other movie would be very odd, but it really works here because the lesson isn’t “don’t mess with time travel,” but rather to live your life to the fullest every day so you don’t have to use time travel. In the final shot, Tim says, “I just try to live every day as if I've deliberately come back to this one day, to enjoy it, as if it was the full final day of my extraordinary, ordinary life” and I love that so much, given everything that happens to him. But it’s really a crystallization of how all of the precious moments and mishaps make the best stories down the road, and those moments are the ones that make up a life well lived. I think it resonates now more than ever, since so much of what constitutes “normal” life has been stripped away and we’re left only with the people we love and the little rituals of living one day at a time.

Sunday, April 19th, 2020

Today we are ambitious and we walk all the way to KazuNori in Manhattan, a hand roll bar in Nomad that we both are obsessed with. Pre-pandemic, we were so close to becoming regulars; we’d always sit at the end of the bar with the same sushi chef and I feel like he was starting to recognize us. But alas. I mentioned the one in Santa Monica two years ago in my 2018 favorites, but since then, I’ve gone to the New York one a handful of times and there’s just something about it that makes it so good. I feel like you can really tell if sushi is good because there are so few ingredients to hide behind. The rice is delicious and I could eat a bowl full of it plain, and the fish is so fresh and tender and amazing; it is truly unparalleled. It’s perfect every single time I go. But I digress. We decide to walk because I haven’t really done any real form of exercise in over a month (may or may not be pandemic-related), the subway is out of the question, and even rideshares still make me a bit nervous.

We walk all the way across the Queensboro Bridge (which is surprisingly long), 25 blocks down First Ave, and into NoMad. The streets are deserted; I’ve legitimately never seen the city like this before. It doesn’t even feel like there’s life here—it feels as though everyone has simply left. I think a lot of people have fled the city to their hometowns, and Kevin thinks that the indiscriminate nature of the virus has forced people to actually follow directions for once, but either way, it explains why Manhattan has relatively fewer cases of the virus than the other boroughs. Obviously, there are other factors like age, but I’ve definitely seen fewer people out here than in our neighborhood. Everything is shut down and deserted; we encounter fewer than 25 people in the 25 blocks that we walk. It feels very eerie and apocalyptic; I can actually note the silence, which I’ve never been able to do here, not even at night. I also need to get something from my office that I left behind in haste when I started WFH. I clear out my desk drawer (I tend to keep a lot of snacks in my desk, and while some of them are still good, I don’t want to risk it) and empty out the water that’s been sitting for a month now. We pick up our food and check the number of steps we’ve walked once we’re in a Lyft home—9,730. It only takes us 20 minutes to get home, a ride that would normally take 30 or more.

We spend the rest of the night playing a strategy game called Coup (highly recommend, although I’m still learning to consider all the moves) and Jackbox games with friends—I think Fibbage may be my other favorite game, because you have to think carefully about what will fool the other players as well as finding the right answer on your own. I like strategy games like that; not complicated, but clever—Coup, Decrypto, Fibbage.

Wednesday, April 22nd, 2020

It’s taken a while, but I finally feel the exhaustion of being stuck at home. We spent this whole past Sunday just lying around, completely unmotivated to do anything. And of course it’s nice to enjoy some of those days, but I just...would prefer to lie around outside, especially because we’ve had some really beautiful days lately. It’s just disheartening, I guess. We’re all sick of talking about the virus and of quarantine content, and yet we can’t not talk about it.

I was reading this piece from Vice about how we’ll likely forget what it was like living for a pandemic; we’ll likely remember the general anxiety and its manifestations in our daily habits, but we won’t remember day-to-day events. So I’m glad that I’m keeping a record of them, even if it’s only for me.

I also found this article about how Singapore has become “a cautionary tale”—it’s crazy how fast things can flip-flop; South Korea was doing really poorly but their government reacted quickly and flexibly and they ended up curbing a second wave, whereas Singapore started off strong but weren’t able to adapt as fast. But because of these failures or people pressuring governments and economies to reopen, we’re starting to see resurgences like in Hong Kong. So when I see “anti-lockdown” protesters, it truly makes my blood boil because I don’t understand how people can be so incredibly stupid. We’re literally seeing into our future with countries in Asia, and people want a frickin’ Baskin-Robbins to be reopened. It’s so incredibly childish and selfish and I hate Americans for it. They’re such a type too. The gun-toting, American flag-draped (which is apparently disrespectful, according to the flag code), middle-aged white person. Disgusting. It’s ironic that people are blaming China for this outbreak (Missouri even sued the Chinese government for its mishandling of the virus, in the world’s stupidest court case) when we have people like this in our country, like how people claim women leaders would be “too emotional” and yet resilient female leaders like Jacinda Arden are saving their countries while our incompetent male leaders continue to flounder. Also, it should be noted that 100% of world wars were started by men.

Well, this took a tangent, but I’m frustrated and if you want women to be calm and docile, you should actually take care of us—funny how “my body, my choice” only applies to conservatives who want to get their hair cut in a pandemic. Sure, Karen, your hair is the worst thing about you right now.

I’m just annoyed and I’m annoyed at being annoyed. It makes me sad that it’s Earth Day and we can’t even go outside.

Sunday, April 26th, 2020

We spent almost this entire weekend playing games, which makes me considerably happier. My friend Rekha and I were talking about how this time has really made us realize that although we are naturally introverted, having the choice to stay in taken away from us has made us crave human interaction. It’s quite a cruel trick.

We played Scattergories with my entire family, which was predictably chaotic—we had 22 people on a Zoom call, and people kept talking over each other. I ended up having to institute a hand-raising policy so everyone could give their answers one at a time, but my grandparents kept shouting out their answers and forgetting to mute, which was endearing. My mom and sisters won, unsurprisingly, as we are a very Scattergories family and also very competitive. Marisa and I usually win when we play just the four of us.

Then we played Coup with Kevin’s friends, which we love because we can all be on the same Zoom call, and the games go pretty quickly. It’s very gratifying. I also taught my mom and sisters to play, so I’ve gotten really into this game in the past couple of weeks. It’s really all because of Kevin’s friend Zach, who is also the person who introduced us to Decrypto, so I’ve unofficially appointed him my board game consultant in life.

Today we watch Killing Eve, which is so good. I watched season one when it first came out, and it was fantastic but I never followed up. But three people have recommended the third season to me, so now I’m playing catch-up, and I can’t remember why I ever stopped watching it because it really is such a masterfully-written show. Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Sandra Oh, and Jodie Comer are all impossibly brilliant. I don’t really like Eve’s character though—not sure if we’re meant to? I know she’s supposed to be a flawed character but I find her very selfish. And obviously Villanelle is equally selfish, but since she’s the assassin I feel like it’s more expected from her.

We play trivia at 6 pm with some friends, and Zaddy Issues places 14th! I think something like 660 teams competed last night, so even placing 14th is quite an accomplishment.

Then we play Decrypto with my friends, which in itself is a logistical nightmare, but we make it work. We have to have a main Zoom call so we can share clues with everyone, and then Zoom breakout rooms so teams can discuss our individual clues and answers and talk about what we think the other team’s are. Here is a helpful guide to the rules, if you’ve never played before; it’s my favorite party game and I highly recommend it.

We end the night with a couple of games of Coup and Secret Hitler with Kevin’s friends and Rekha. We all get along very well, which makes me really happy. It’s almost 2 am by the time we sleep, but it’s worth it.

Wednesday, April 29th, 2020

I finally got a keyboard! I’ve literally wanted a keyboard since college, but I would just go around and play the pianos in the dorms, and my rooms were always really small, so I never did. I was happy with the fact that my parents still kept our baby grand in their house in San Diego, but then they sold it (after promising it to me) so I was sad that I had no access to a piano and finally bit the bullet and purchased a model that my friend Owen recommended to me. This one is so nice! It’s very simple, just a regular 88-key piano with a couple of modes, nothing too fancy, but I’m excited to play it. The keys are semi-weighted but still super light compared to a normal piano—it’s definitely an adjustment learning how to navigate quick fingering and trying not to rush. To my amazement, I actually remember most of the songs I learned 14ish years ago by heart, courtesy of the Suzuki Method. The downside is I only really know those songs. The keyboard is also missing a pedal, and I didn’t realize how many songs I used the pedal for, so I’ll have to get one of those. But I’m determined to get good at using this keyboard first before I do anything fancy. I want to learn a new piece, too. Maybe something fun and not classical, for a change.

Thursday, April 30th, 2020

It’s another irritatingly gorgeous spring day outside. I decide to wait, to avoid the sun and the crowds, and I end up taking a walk at 11:30 pm, to the waterfront. I walk through my empty neighborhood and the deserted streets, past closed shop fronts and empty bars. The air is so warm and inviting it feels as though you’re slipping through a pleasant bath in the spring night air. I want to cry; it feels as though I am the very last human on the planet. That is, until I get to the waterfront. There are a lot of people out—not an absurd amount, but a lot, considering it’s 11:30 at night. And a lot of them aren’t wearing masks. I’m annoyed that when I walk past some of them, they don’t move over, even though I’m on the very edge of the sidewalk and they have so much space. Some of them are so close I could touch them with an elbow, and I’m furious. How can people be this careless? I’m not normally a person with the mindset of, “I have to suffer, and so I think everyone else has to suffer,” but in this case, when you’re affecting real lives and the very real state of the pandemic, in a borough that has the second-highest number of COVID-19 cases in the city, then yes, I think you should also suffer. It’s not fair. It’s not fair that hundreds of people are still dying every day, and people are treating this as though it’s an extended holiday. It’s just so stupid that people are celebrating social distancing well done by going outside and forcing us to take two steps backward for every step forward, because they’re bored. I get the need to go outside, obviously; I’m here too. But there’s a way to not be dumb about it—the very bare minimum. I should carry a water gun and just soak anyone that comes within range. Better yet, I should just cough enough to make them panic. It would serve them right, for ruining a perfectly nice walk. I admire the glittering skyline and I miss Manhattan. How strange it is to feel ownership of a city and to feel so far away from it, when it’s less than half a mile away.

I was reading this piece from The Atlantic about friends breaking up over different interpretations of social distancing. But if anything, this time is very telling—do you care about peoples’ lives more than absolving your own boredom? Are you doing everything you can? Or are you selfish? I think we’re all going to come out of this pandemic with our values changed, and I think it’ll be very clear who it’s worth spending time with and who really tried to be a good person during this time. People who choose to ignore the rules because they decide not to listen to science or think they’re exceptions deserve everything they have coming to them, and at some point we have to accept that we did our best to warn them and it wasn’t enough.

Friday, May 15th, 2020

How is it mid-May already? I feel as though April was nonexistent. The past couple of weeks have felt more or less the same. I feel lucky, because for a split second when I wake up in the morning, I have the luxury of sometimes forgetting that there’s a pandemic. But I also feel sad because it’s beautiful outside and yet it still feels dangerous everywhere I go. I can’t explore my neighborhood or spend more than a few minutes outside, and the people protesting the lockdown are only making it worse.

Spring is always very short in the city, and after a weird cold snap, I can feel the tendrils of summer creeping in. The weather is pleasantly warm (not stifling yet); I feel that lovely warmth that envelops you on mild summer nights, and during the day people are sunbathing and working outside, albeit with face masks on. Summer nights in New York are intoxicating, and I miss them, because the city feels alive and electric, more than usual. My therapist says it’s the nothingness that feels the most frustrating, but that you have two options: you can accept it, or you can find other milestones to celebrate and be satisfied by. I’ve been cooking and baking a lot; having a weekly Zoom call during which to cook with Britt helps. I’ve also watched a weird amount of Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives—there’s something about Guy Fieri and his relentless enthusiasm that warms my soul.

Today is the EDC Las Vegas Virtual Rave-A-Thon (my favorites so were Zhu, Claude VonStroke, Valentino Khan, Deorro, Oliver Heldens, and Tchami, of course). I’ve never had much desire to go to EDC, but I think I really do miss dancing in crowds of hundreds of people all on the same wavelength, soaked in bliss. It was funny; I read this from The Atlantic and was so taken by the way he describes the collective experience of live music, that I found myself missing places I normally hate, like crowded bars and nightclubs. I’m going to need to go to a rave when all of this is over. It only took a pandemic.

Wednesday, May 20th, 2020

Tonight, after a long day of work and trivia (we came in fourth place with the second-highest amount of points in our bracket in the trivia tournament last weekend!), we head into the city. My best friend’s little (as in, 6’2" and 22 years old) brother graduates from Columbia today, and in honor of the class of 2020, the Empire State Building is lit up blue and his mom wants me to take a picture of it for him. I realize this is actually the first time in three months I’ve ridden the subway. It’s a strange thing. It feels very World War Z, with X’s marked in blue tape on the ground and all of the monitors playing some version of a health PSA to empty platforms.

When we arrive in the city, it’s also empty (I recently learned the reason is that the wealthiest people in Manhattan have simply left their neighborhoods, and don’t even get me started on that). We see a group of girls taking pictures in front of the Empire State Building, and we congratulate them on their graduation. It’s so sad! I feel really terrible for the class of 2020; college graduation is a once-in-a-lifetime thing and I would be so disappointed if mine were canceled. We snap a quick picture of a little handmade sign that says “Congrats Noah!” and go home. It reminds me about “sweet, but sad” this piece about prom at home, from The Atlantic:

Putting on your prom dress and sitting in your house alone is not going to prom. Posting it is not going to prom. FaceTiming is not going to prom. A TikTok video is not prom. But they still have the gesture of prom, which comes with huge expectations and so often involves disappointment anyway. People cried in prom dresses before the pandemic, and they will after it too.

On another note, I keep getting mail and tweets from people who have seen my TikTok deck, and it makes me so happy every time! This is from a Slack group that I am not in, but was sent a screenshot of.

Wednesday, May 28th, 2020

Well, it has been...a couple of days, to say the least. In the two days since George Floyd was killed, the world has erupted in outrage. There have been protests every night, in several cities across the country. I’m not quite sure what was different. The Black Lives Matter movement has existed since 2014, when Eric Garner was killed by police. I clearly remember “I can’t breathe” being a protest cry. But never have I seen so many of my friends actively participate in the movement. I’ve never had my feed so flooded with information about anti-racism. I’m not sure what makes this different. I think it was just a powder keg waiting to happen. First there was Breonna Taylor, then Ahmaud Arbery. People were outraged by their deaths, but some still managed to make excuses to justify their murders. Then the attempted swatting of Christian Cooper. And then George Floyd. Coupled with the fact that people are bored right now. There are 21 million Americans out of work. We’ve all been stuck inside with nothing to do but confront our own humanity, with no distractions. We’ve seen, on video, how white Americans weaponize their privilege and given endless benefit of the doubt while Black Americans are senselessly murdered by police for crimes they did not commit. For the first time, we are being forced to acknowledge our silence as complicity. Most of my friends are Asian, but I’ve never seen them having these kinds of conversations about anti-racism in the Asian community. I think for the first time, “anti-racism” is an understood term in our lexicon, rather than claiming plausible deniability by being “not racist.”

I don’t exactly know for certain what’s different this time. But it feels different. It feels like we’re having the conversations we were always supposed to be having, donating to the right causes, signing the petitions, marching for our community in the way we should have all along.

Saturday, May 30th, 2020

Kevin and I go to a protest today in Jackson Heights. Last night, I was overwhelmed by guilt, and told him I wanted to go to a protest for support. He was hesitant, because we haven’t been around a large group of people in three months and he’s flying back home to California in a couple of days. I worry for him because he’s a brown guy in a face mask, and since he cut his hair short he has the potential to look threatening (a first, for him). But it’s the right thing to do, and I feel ashamed that it’s taken this long for me to use my privilege to do something good. He agrees to accompany me, for my safety.

It’s hot in Jackson Heights. We start in a group of maybe 40 people, but it quickly grows to 1,000 and then too many people to count. It’s very peaceful; we have minimal police supervision and the whole time we’re standing chanting in the square, most of them are just hanging around the perimeter, joking and chatting with each other. It’s a little sickening. Whenever a car passes, they’ll honk in support and everyone cheers, and I feel that swell of community that you get when you’re a part of something. My favorite sign is one that says “Police are neither essential nor workers,” toted by a tall redheaded guy who is carrying a backpack full of water and supplies for protesters. I’m amazed by how supportive the community is. People lean out of their cars to offer us water, or out of their windows to bang together pots and pans in support as we march by. Store owners stand in front of their businesses clapping as we pass.

There are a couple of people leading the chants, and at one point we crowd a bunch of police cars with our hands up chanting, “Hands up, don’t shoot.” The shift changes and we’re not accompanied by a group of policemen with shielded helmets that look like something out of The Hunger Games carrying batons. It’s a little frightening, especially given that this is a peaceful protest and we’re all unarmed, but the police can really do whatever they want. At one point, the organizers yell, “If you’re white, walk to the left” (where the police are walking), and a crowd of white people moves to form a barrier between the police and the protesters. The optics of a bunch of white people carrying signs that say “Fuck the police” walking alongside the police are a bit stunning. The privilege to be able to do that is something I can’t comprehend.

We walk all the way from 74th street to 92nd street to the front of the 115th police precinct, where we chant and stand in solidarity as a couple of officers watch us from the roof of the precinct. And that’s where we leave the protest, hot and sun-baked but feeling very happy and empowered that we could be there. I think even if you’re not participating in the chanting, it’s nice to go as a show of support, if not to just signal that you oppose the police. But it’s also worth remarking that the reason this protest was peaceful was that Jackson Heights is majority white, Asian, and Latino. We aren’t considered “thugs”; that’s why we had minimal police presence, that’s why the police weren’t really taking it as a serious threat. I consider my privilege of being able to protest peacefully, to be able to casually think the night before, I think I’ll go to a protest tomorrow, because my life isn’t actually affected. I think one of the trickiest things is learning to be empathetic for the Black community, not as a minority or “as a woman” but because they deserve the same compassion as everyone else.

Tuesday, June 2nd, 2020

All 50 states are protesting (here is a full map). I’ve never, ever in my entire life seen a map like this. New York has had protests every day and night, some that have ended in police violence. We’ve seen police cars driving into crowds in Brooklyn, and the other night a bunch of protesters marched to the Brooklyn Bridge and were surrounded by cops on both ends, who then set a gas fire on the bridge. The brazenness with which these cops disregard human life is astounding. I didn’t understand the necessity of abolishing the police, but I do now. It occurs to me that I’ve never felt safer around police; it just makes me nervous that someone is carrying a gun close to me. And police are almost always unhelpful in cases of robbery or sexual assault. Looting is something that I’ve just now grown to understand as well. Not looting stores is a social contract, built on the premise of protecting economic assets. But when that social contract is broken over and over again, when Black people are so marginalized and oppressed in a society they essentially built for free—it’s understandable. It’s only property, after all. Trevor Noah explains it well—“the police are looting Black bodies.” It’s just so fucking unfair. All of this stress and anxiety of being killed in the streets regardless of achievement or economic status or education level...I don’t understand how Black people wake up in the morning and are able to function as normal humans. It’s just so much. It’s exhausting. I can’t even imagine feeling that assaulted every single day of my life.

I sense a lot of resistance from liberals right now as well, people who are insisting on posting a black square on their Instagram and staying “mute” in solidarity, which really just contributes to complicity and oversaturates Instagram with performative allyship. I think that’s one of the things I’ve struggled with, because I tend to judge people really harshly for what they post on social media. When I see people protesting the “wrong” way, I’m quick to look down on them. But I suppose the other option is staying silent, and posting is better than not posting. But I always wonder if I should call people out when they post a black square or that stupid poem that says “2020 isn’t cancelled; it’s the year of realization,” as if thousands of Black people needed to die in order for you to not be selfish. Maybe I’m being too hard on them. But I think that’s part of learning. I’d expect to be called out in the same way.

Thursday, June 11th, 2020

It’s a grey day in Long Island City. Grey summer days are my favorite; the air is warm and inviting but there’s the promise of rain and the sky is heavy with clouds. It feels very familiar to me. I have this extreme nostalgia for the summer of 2015, when I worked in New York and was finally determined to move here after college. I was staying with my aunt and uncle on the Upper East Side, and I’d lie on the couch watching the city glitter, all the way down Lexington. I’d watch the lightning crackle through the sky when it rained and be enveloped by the smell of the wet pavement below. To this day (ironically), I find the sound of ambulances echoing through the city streets both comforting and a little lonely. It takes me back to those summer nights in the city, when I really fell in love with it and knew it would eventually be my home.

I took a walk last night, late at night, to the waterfront. It’s such a tease to have the city right across the river, but I know that even if I were there, it would still probably be empty. All this turmoil from the past couple of weeks—100,000 COVID-19 deaths in the U.S., the #BlackLivesMatter protests—its so hard to remember that the world is in chaos when it’s such a peaceful night here. And that makes me feel guilty too. There’s something very melancholy about the neighborhood on a perfect night when the world seems at a standstill.

It seems as though my theory has been confirmed. It feels different, more sustained. The momentum is continuing; people are still signing petitions and seeking justice retroactively for all of the people that were ignored—Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland, Philando Castile, Breonna Taylor. And those are just the names that stood out to me the most. I went to another protest last weekend, with my friends Annie and Jess; we marched from Union Square to Washington Square Park. It was the biggest one I’ve seen. There were people handing out PPE and water and Pressed Juicery drinks, people that had marched all the way from Harlem prior were carrying instruments. We stood in Washington Square Park where organizers sang and shouted through giant speakers that echoed through the giant arch. It felt like a historic moment; surreal that we are still in a pandemic and we wear masks for safety, but the whole city is coming together to protest.

A lot of good has come from these protests. Breonna’s Law, which regulates no-knock warrants, was passed. All four of George Floyd’s killers were arrested. Minnesota has announced its intentions to disband its police departments. 50A (which allows police records of misconduct to be kept secret) was repealed in New York. Racist statues are being torn down. Racist/useless celebrities are being outed. Use of force policies are being reconsidered in many cities. IBM has pledged to revoke law enforcement’s access to their facial recognition technology. But still, these things don’t address the attitudes and biases that contribute to systemic racism. I’m so sick for all of the children that will grow up without parents because of police violence. It’s insane. There’s just this pervasive feeling of hopelessness, because I feel like after donating, protesting, posting on social media...it’s still such a small impact (but I do like this perspective). I’m trying to have conversations with people about this and educate others, trying to read more to be anti-racist myself. I think that’s what we really need to work on—ourselves. Chokeholds have been banned in so many states, but that didn’t save Eric Garner or George Floyd. We need to understand that our inherent racism is the problem, and then demand our laws be adjusted accordingly.

Friday, June 12th, 2020

Another day, another protest. Today, my agency has given everyone the day off and called it the “Day of Action,” essentially giving everyone the time to participate in something meaningful, whatever that may look like. I think it’s extremely generous, and I’ve wanted to go to protests during the week but have to work during the day so it’s usually out of the question. Kevin is in California visiting family and all of my friends are at work, so I go alone to the Black Womxn’s Empowerment March led by Strategy for Black Lives. It starts on Fifth Avenue, right in front of Trump Tower, which is fittingly blocked off for a bunker boy, so that people can’t gather in front of it (what does it say about a place that organization is so anticipated that you have to block it off?). The gathering starts with several organizers reading off the names of the Black women killed by police, starting with Breonna Taylor (how her killers have not been arrested when there was a law passed with her name on it is beyond me). There are so many names I don’t recognize. Then we march up Park Avenue, toward Gracie Mansion. The march is very well-organized—we actually chant, “We are non-violent, we are organized,” and the Black women are leading the march in the front while the Black men are on the sides to protect the protesters. And everyone is so prepared and so caring; people constantly offer water, snacks, PPE, and hand sanitizer. The theme is “dress for success,” so the organizers are wearing full suits and dresses, which is admirable in the summer heat. I think the real appeal of attending these things is feeling like you’re a part of a community—at one point we stand in front of a hospital and clap for the essential workers, who are waving excitedly out the window and clapping for us. For me, I feel comforted by the knowledge that when someone asks me what I did during this time in history, my answer will not be “nothing.”

Friday, July 9th, 2020

Well, I’ve made an unthinkable decision. I’m going back to California, indefinitely. At least until the pandemic is over, i.e. until there’s a vaccine and everything has opened up like normal. None of this “outdoor dining only with your baristas wearing full PPE” nonsense. I don’t know how people feel comfortable going out to eat in these conditions. We walked around Brooklyn for Fourth of July, and I was shocked by how many maskless people were crowded around bars.

Originally, I was against leaving the city, because I’d just moved into a new apartment in Long Island City, but we’ve decided not to renew our lease in October and I think I need to be home for a while. I’ve woken up with stress headaches for the past week, agonizing over the decision. I definitely never planned on leaving the city like this, but then again, I certainly did not predict a pandemic. I’m comforting myself by telling myself that it’s not forever; I do still hope I’ll be back at least for a little bit before settling in California permanently. But with the way things are going, even though New York has been doing really well lately, I think we’re going to be in this pandemic for at least another year and a half. And I just can’t justify staying. I moved to the city to live in the city, but spending all day in my apartment has made me miss home, because I could be stuck inside anywhere. And I miss my family and my friends. I’m very sad to leave the city. I still feel almost...guilty? It feels like I’m abandoning the city I love so much. But I never in a million years imagined that I’d ever be in this situation.

Sunday, July 12th, 2020

We walked almost the entire length of Manhattan today, or at least its equivalent. It’s for a project ~coming soon~ (edit: You can read it here!), and I did not expect it would be this much work. We walked for eight hours, 16 miles, 39,692 steps—all the way from the 125th Street in Harlem down to the State Street Ferry at the very southern tip of the island. I’d researched a lot of different locations that I wanted to see, so it was kind of like a mini scavenger hunt around the city. Since I recently decided that I’m leaving New York for the time being, it felt bittersweet, but a nice way to say goodbye to the city and see things I wouldn’t normally see.

Thursday, August 7th, 2020

I can honestly say I didn’t expect packing to leave New York would be this emotional. It’s not as if I’m never going to visit again, and I still do plan on coming back to live here for a little while in the future. But it feels sad all the same. When I come back, I’m only planning on being here for a year or so, and I feel sad that it’s never going to be the same as it was. I’m saddened by the process of selling most of my stuff. It’s reviving memories I’d forgotten and attachments to things that I didn’t even realize I had. Purchasing a little pan from a nearby “$2.99 and up” store in Bushwick on my way home from my office, because I was extremely poor from living off of an intern’s salary. Buying a little set of plastic food storage containers from a corner store in Crown Heights. All of the postcards I’ve collected from countless restaurants. All of the furniture that we bought for this apartment, nice furniture, because we were so sure we would be here for a couple of years. But I still don’t have faith that we’ll be able to kick this pandemic any time soon. Schools are reopening, unbelievably. We are the only country in the world that has had a sustained outbreak of this virus. And I think our individualism and worries about superficial “freedoms” are going to kill us.

This really encapsulated the trauma of living in New York City through the pandemic, but in some weird twisted way, I’m still sad to leave it behind.

Saturday, August 15th, 2020

Annie and I go to an outdoor art exhibit at the New-York Historical Society called “Hope Wanted,” about the way New York City has been affected by the pandemic. Nothing feels more meta than attending a socially-distanced outdoor exhibit about the coronavirus, at which your temperature is checked at the door and everyone is required to wear masks. Each borough is introduced by a little poem that captures the essence of it, accompanied by a series of photos. It feels very surreal, but a perfect way to leave New York. It reminds me that I’m privileged that I haven’t lost anyone to the virus, that I have a home outside of New York to go back to. And yet it still feels traumatic. I’m happy that I stuck it out during the worst months and I know I’m coming back, but it still feels like something I’m leaving behind, something I’m abandoning in its time of need, at a time when the city is still struggling.

“The last thing left in Pandora’s box was hope and so no matter what rages in the world or in our minds, there is always hope.”

We end the day with food in Chinatown and dessert at a little café in the East Village, and then I go home and do some homework. Out of quarantine boredom and consideration for potentially going back to school, I’m taking two courses through Coursera: social psychology at Wesleyan and game theory at Stanford. Most of the social psychology material I already know from Psych 1 back in college and by way of working in advertising, but it’s nice to have academic terms for the phenomena that I study for my job. But game theory is hard as hell. I get the logic behind it, but the formulas trip me up because it’s like algebra but more difficult. And I was never great at algebra. Both are very interesting, especially in parallel with one another because they’re both essentially focused on the same thing—how and why people make decisions—but from different angles. I think taking both allows me to be more critical of both fields and to understand their limitations; for example, game theory is pretty much predicated on the idea that people act in their best interests and will act rationally to achieve the outcome they want. But common sense and advertising tell us that people don’t act rationally. And in fact, social psych says that our human brains will do an insane amount of mental gymnastics in order to retroactively rationalize our impulsive decisions that we make based on emotion. It really makes me question everything I do.

I find game theory difficult because from a logical perspective I understand everything. The matrices make sense to me. But the formulas are confusing; the letters assigned to them feel very arbitrary and I don’t understand the patterns and it feels as though I’m reading Chinese in the sense that I only have a very vague sense of what’s going on. It’s like algebra 2.0 and I was never good at algebra to begin with. So if you know game theory, please tutor me; I got a 77% on my last problem set.

Wednesday, August 26th, 2020

Today is my last day in the city. So many lasts, which always make me wistful. Walking around my neighborhood fills me with extreme sadness, because I love Long Island City, so much more than I expected to, and I feel like I still haven’t seen that much of it. I feel like we just moved here, and now I have to leave.

But today I’ve decided to do all of the things in the city that I’ll miss. Unfortunately, a lot of those things, like going to the Met or eating out at restaurants, are now allowed right now. So instead I run a couple of errands, get KazuNori one last time (I have no idea when I’ll have this again), and sit in the fountain in Washington Square Park and read. I listen to people play jazz and watch children splashing through the fountain and artists hawking pins and postcards. There’s not much indication that anything is different, except that someone is leading an outdoor workout class under the arch and everyone is wearing masks. The city has pretty much returned to normal, or at least it feels normal. All the more reason I’m sad to leave it behind.

Ang and Annie meet me in the park, and we all go to Spot Dessert Bar, which is one thing I couldn’t leave without having. I wanted to walk to the Upper East Side to get the truffle gnocchi at Uva, one of my favorite indulgences, but I’m not that hungry after the matcha lava cake, so instead we walk to the west side and admire the Jersey skyline. We sit on the grass at Pier 45 at Hudson River Park, which is the perfect place to be on a warm summer night. It’s just the right amount of breezy, and we watch the lights twinkle in the water. The air and the park are so alive; there are people dancing and exercising and picnicking on the lawn, everyone enjoying the fresh air we’ve waited so long for. I realized that one of the things I’ll miss the most in California is the public space. For such a big and outdoorsy state, when you live in the suburbs, it’s all private. I don’t even know where the nearest park is that’s not attached to an elementary school. And the beach is nice, but it’s an event. It’s not a place you just casually stop by; you make a day out of it and you drive intentionally to get to it. I like New York because it’s all wandering and discoveries and happy little accidental pockets of joy. It’s good to be here. I’ll miss it all.

Friday, August 28th, 2020   

I leave New York tomorrow. Time has flown by and yet...it’s been a really fucking long month. I’m physically and emotionally drained; I’ve slept really poorly for most of quarantine and I’m ready to go home. But I’m also sad. Three years in New York. Three wonderful years, and I had no intention of leaving at the beginning of quarantine, but so much has changed. I keep thinking if only COVID weren’t a thing, but I also realize it’s silly to think if only because that’s life, baby. A pandemic is our real life, and there’s no point in pretending that it’s just a blip. This has been life for six months now, and I think it’ll be another year and a half or more until it’s totally back to normal. The new normal. God, I hate that phrase. I’ve seen it way too much in advertising. But it’s true.

Today, at this moment I’m on a bus to Washington D.C. I had this crazy idea a couple of days ago that I would go to the March on Washington (they’re calling it the “Get Off Our Necks” Commitment March)all day today, somehow make it home, and make my flight tomorrow at 8 am. And the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to go. So now I’m here. At 4 am with a group of people I’ve never met, going to march on the National Mall for Black Lives Matter. Exactly 57 years after Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, 150 years after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. It’s sad to see how little has changed. And yet, going to something like this makes me feel a little bit better. This is a historic event. And someday I’ll be able to tell my kids that I was there. And that’s worth waking up at 2:15 in the morning.

I’d arrived in Bryant Park at 3 am. The sky was pitch black, but then again, all the hours look the same at this time of night, all blending into each other in shades of black and purple. There were already people in a socially distanced line around the perimeter of the park specifically for this. At that point I knew I was certifiably insane, but it was nice to know that other people are equally as insane. I noted that everyone in line was around my age. I guess this is what you do, in a pandemic, when the world is both figuratively and literally burning around you: you march. People carry cardboard signs with them: Black Lives Matter. Get your knees off our necks. Silence is violence. My favorite: “If you’ve ever wondered what you would have done during the Civil Rights Movement, this is it.” It’s part of the reason I’m here.

I saw Times Square flashing ahead of me, advertising to no one. It occurred to me in the eerie stillness that as dead as it is, there’s no other place this awake at 3 am, and I felt another ache knowing that I’m leaving it all behind tomorrow. Even at 3 am, the city was beginning to stir. The Sweetgreen across the street was getting their ingredients delivered. All of this invisible labor that we never think about, but these people do this every morning.

Four buses. Around a hundred people. The organizers have taken care to make sure we could still maintain some distance, so no one is seated in the same row. A couple of girls behind me chatter in Spanish, and I admire their energy at 4 am but I also wish they would shut up so I can sleep. I somehow manage to close my eyes for a couple of hours, lulled by the rumble of the bus, and I wake up at a rest stop in Delaware. It’s still only 5:30 in the morning and nothing at the rest stop is open except for Burger King and the souvenir shop that reminds me of the Hudson News booths at the airports. Is Hudson News an exclusively American thing, and is it consistent across the country? I feel like I’ve seen one in every U.S. airport I’ve ever flown out of.

After a quick break, we’re back on the bus. As we drive the sky turns to cotton candy and I start to see the city take shape over the horizon. And then I see it: the Washington Monument. We’re here.

The last time I was in D.C. was when I visited Gwendolyn two years ago. It feels simultaneously like a million years ago and yesterday. The bus drops us off on a lawn near the monument, and we hang out in groups waiting for instruction. I think there was something like 10 buses from New York total, all organized by Unite NY, a cross-borough activist organization, so we’re a pretty large group. Our bus captain seems to be all over the place, so I quickly latch onto two people I recognize from my bus, Anderson and Sam. We agree to stick together to get back to the bus, because I need to be on the return bus. I’d discussed my idea to go with a couple of friends, and gotten various reactions from “you’re crazy” to “you should definitely go.” Angeline gave me the most practical advice: only go if you have three backup plans. My three backup plans, in order, are Megabus, Amtrak, and Lyft. The last one would be about $300, so I do not plan on missing this bus.

Once there, we make our way to the National Mall. We get our temperatures checked and receive wristbands, and we kind of break off into groups to sit on the lawns surrounding the memorial pool. There are a bunch of very impressive speakers in the program—Ayanna Pressley, Charles Booker, Martin Luther King III, the granddaughter of Martin Luther King Jr., Reverend Al Sharpton, the families of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Jacob Blake. The speeches are short, but impactful. The lines that stick with me are “People over profits, joy over fear” (Ayanna Pressley), and “Demonstration without legislation will not lead to change” (Reverend Al Sharpton).

The speeches are short but the program is long; we sit from around 10 am until 2 pm listening to them. But I’m grateful to be here, absorbing all of the energy, all of the inspiration, all of the history imbued on these steps. It’s insane that I’m here, in Washington D.C., in the middle of all of this, when I was just in New York earlier this morning.

At the end of the program, one of the speakers recites the names of some of the victims of police shootings: Trayvon Martin. Tamir Rice. Sandra Bland. Philando Castile. Ahmaud Arbery. Breonna Taylor. Hearing the names echo across the National Mall is incredibly symbolic and indelibly powerful. And sad. Most of all, it’s sad that we’re still marching for the same things that Martin Luther King Jr. marched for 57 years ago.

We march around the perimeter of the National Mall, past the gated White House and down Pennsylvania, past the closed storefronts and across the bridges. It feels powerful to be a part of a crowd, unified for a cause, on the right side of history. I like attending these things out of solidarity; I see some Asians but not that many, and it feels good to represent our community in supporting another. It’s stunning to see all these BIPOC people marching, holding protest signs, juxtaposed with these monuments built to white (often terrible) men hailed as the bedrock of our nation. It’s truly inspiring to see them taking up space, and reclaiming the country they helped build.

We stand in the streets with a full procession behind us, with a drumline and a band and a crowd holding protest signs. We listen to the leaders of Unite NY speak. It’s interesting to study good speakers. Their words are important, but equally important is the delivery, their charisma and presence. I think about this a lot when I’m presenting, because I wish my voice were a little lower, but I don’t see a way to lower it without pulling an Elizabeth Holmes.

We leave D.C. at 6 pm, and I settle in for another long bus ride. I finally get back to my apartment around 11 pm, fully exhausted but happy. I feel like I’ve closed my chapter on the East Coast, for now, and I’m ready to go home.

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2020

I signed up for a virtual workshop series hosted by No Insights, a community for women, nonbinary and trans strategists of color in the advertising & media industries, called Strategy for Black Lives. Today’s session was called “Decolonizing ‍The Brand Strategy Discipline,” and the host, Sloane Leo, introduced the idea of “community design,” or “for the people, by the people”—designing with the goal of creating equitable and accessible spaces. 

Five Quick Takeaways:

1. All design/strategy should be a conversation, and conversation begins with inquiry—how are you feeling? What do you need? In the same vein, active listening is not just listening with intention, but also listening for gaps in the narrative and listening for the things that aren’t being said (and I’d also add understanding why those things aren’t being said and noting whose voices don’t get a seat at the table)

2. Using “How Might We” (collaborative, inviting) as an alternative to “Get Who To By” (can be a little condescending, a bit manipulative) when reframing problems

3. There will always be urgency in the workplace, but it’s worth paying attention to whose urgency you’re responding to and why—and ensuring that you’re centering the community you’re trying to serve in discussions

4. A strategist’s job is to be a steward, not a savior; your goal should be to either leverage or build collective power (how we win, not how I win)

5. Black and brown people are inherently strategists; there is so much energy spent daily on just learning how to navigate a world that is built on their oppression

An hour prior to attending this workshop, I’d attended another virtual strategy workshop hosted by a prominent white male strategist that I admire, about how to cultivate the skills to reach the C-suite as a strategist, and it was great! But it also reminded me of how much richness is missed when the default perspective in strategy is white and male, and of the burden of being a minority in any given room: wanting to educate people but also feeling the obligation to serve as a representative for your community, regardless of whether or not you’re the best person equipped for that job.

The whole time I was listening to the first workshop, the two things I was thinking were: that I don’t know if I ever want to be a C-suite strategist, and how much it was focused on overcoming internal hurdles, but failed to take into consideration the fact that not everyone begins at the same baseline.

I think attending these back-to-back really made clear that although DE&I is hot right now, the real challenge is fostering empathy beyond “marketable” empathy and remembering why we get into strategy in the first place—not for ego, but because we have the skills to help people. It was ironic because even though it was great presentation and it was amazing to see the No Insights community (all women/POC) feeling supported and validated, I noted that the people who really need to hear this stuff aren’t the people attending workshops like this. I don’t really have a solution to this. I don’t really believe in DE&I programs because I think they’re clumsily inorganic, but the alternative is to do nothing, which is also not an option.

You can check out the full presentation here! It’s well worth a read.

Thursday, September 3rd, 2020

I am officially home! And as of today, I am COVID-negative, so I can finally come out of my room. My mom has been delivering my meals on a tray, like a warden, and I’ve stayed in my room and occasionally in our backyard. It’s strange being here, because while it is “home,” it doesn’t feel like my home. My parents moved my junior year of college to a smaller house that had bedrooms for both of my sisters, but not me, so I’ve never really lived here. But now Marisa is living in LA and I have her room, so it’s something to get used to. Kate is doing her first semester of college virtually, so it’s very strange because we just watched her matriculation ceremony online and she’s doing her orientation while I’m working from home. It’s a strange situation all around.

The test was extremely quick and efficient; I drove up to a station in the parking garage in the Highlands and a nurse swabbed my nose. And that was it! I got my test results less than two days later. It was amazing. I got tested once in New York and I had to go to a walk-in clinic; I waited for like an hour, and I literally never got my results. After two weeks, I just gave up waiting for them. So Cuomo’s “everyone should get tested!” mentality rings a little condescending, when the results aren’t reliable. Personally I don’t take testing that seriously because you can contract it the moment you walk out of your test. Everyone should just be careful regardless.

Wednesday, September 16th, 2020

Leaving New York has felt like going through a withdrawal, or mourning a lost love. The smallest things can remind me of what I’m missing, can bring me a wave of melancholy and send me spiraling. I saw this TikTok and got unexpectedly emotional when I heard, “Stand clear of the closing doors, please!” Who knew I’d actually miss the MTA? Who would’ve thought? Not me.

Sunday, September 20th, 2020

I found my Five-Year Journal that Chianna gave me in my room (no, I did not write all five years; I think I stopped after two) and I am dying at the entries. It’s objectively funny to see things like “I refuse to date anyone in Isla Vista” written in 2015 when I would go on to date two separate people from UCSB after that, and the fact that I described my social life as “a bit grandma.” I have not changed much. Sometimes I feel lazy about writing entries here, because nothing really changes in quarantine, but finding this journal reminds me that it’s nice to have even the small things documented. I remember these dates very clearly; I can attribute very specific mindsets and feelings to those dates and I know exactly where I was mentally and emotionally (the “haha, and then what?” reminds me that I do not miss flirting/dating), and it’s both hilarious and comforting to reread the entries years later when I have the benefit of hindsight. I read something that said we’re often nostalgic for our teenage years because now, even the terrible parts seem very insignificant. I don’t think I’ll look back on this as insignificant, but I hope I’ll be able to look back on this time and see some good in them. A lot of personal growth, for sure, whether I want it or not.

Thursday, September 24th, 2020

So far, the cutest part of being home is that Mia and my sister’s bunny Java have become friends. Java kind of has free rein of the house so he’ll just hop upstairs and say hello sometimes, or sometimes we’ll bring him into my room for “playdates” and watch him and Mia interact. Mia was a bit scared of him at first because he’s so quick, and for a while we thought she was just tolerating him, but she actually really likes him. I think she’s tried to groom him before but he always hops away, and whenever he’s running around upstairs, she’ll always go and follow him and just sit in the same room (that’s her way of hanging out with people). I think she appreciates that he gives her space, unlike Fish. Java, on the other hand, has zero survival instincts or any idea that she’s a carnivore and could absolutely eat him if she wanted to, and he’ll hop right up to her to touch noses and say hello. He’s so dumb. Dumb but cute.

In other news: My good friend Tia got married! She and her husband Adrien have been together for like seven years, so we always knew they would get married and were always waiting on the when, but they had a quarantine Zoom City Hall-like wedding. I’m so happy for them. It’s nice to have these tiny bright spots of joy in a pandemic; selfishly, it’s like a reassurance that good things can still happen when everything is terrible. I’m excited for them to have a real, in-person wedding and for us to celebrate like normal when things are finally like normal. They’re also just such a good-looking couple, and look how cute their dog, Violet, is!

Saturday, October 10th, 2020

I voted today! Like everything in this pandemic, it felt bittersweet—I did a lot of research on all of the ballot props and the people running for local office, sealed it in the envelope, and dropped it off at the public library that I would frequent as a kid but haven’t visited for over a decade. It felt good to vote, of course, but voting under these circumstances just reminded me of how badly this administration has destroyed this country, and how much this vote actually matters. I miss voting not having to worry about the fabric of our democracy hanging in the balance.

Sunday, October 18th, 2020

This makes me unspeakably angry. I know it’s not entirely the public’s fault; to understate the way our leadership has failed us on so many levels is misdirected, but still. We are eight months into the pandemic. EIGHT MONTHS. We have been doing this lockdown thing for eight months. And still, people refuse to wear masks. Still, people are holding events that the media characterizes as “superspreader events.” And still, I am so shocked by the number of people on my Instagram feed, people I used to think were smart, going to weddings, happy hours, birthday parties, group vacations, all without masks. It is literally unbelievable how dumb they are, not only to engage in this activity but then to post about it? These are the same people who posted Instagram carousels for #BlackLivesMatter, the same people who post about “wearing a mask!” at the beginning of the pandemic; the cognitive dissonance is just so strong and I am honestly at a loss for words. Your quarantine bubble is so much bigger than you think it is. It’s always so much bigger than you think it is.

Sunday, November 8th, 2020

Joe Biden is officially the 46th President of the United States.

Friday, January 22nd, 2021

A lot of things are bittersweet in this pandemic, but maybe none so much as dropping my baby sister off at the airport as she leaves for college 😭 my mom and I take Kate to the airport in the evening, and it is devastating. The airport is empty—I guess no one wants to take a red-eye to Boston with a layover in Atlanta—and it’s just us, huddled in a corner at a piano that in pre-COVID times was available as a public art project for people to sit down and play freely. My mom is devastated because her last child is finally leaving for college, I am devastated because I feel incredibly old and remember when Kate was born and I was in first grade, and Kate is devastated at the prospect of having a new experience in someplace completely foreign in the middle of a pandemic. She’s never flown by herself before. I can’t even remember my first solo flight, I’ve gotten so used to them. But my mom and I wave frenetically goodbye until she’s past security, until we can’t see her anymore, like we’re two old women christening a ship on its maiden voyage, and that’s exactly what it feels like. The last of our life as we knew it. But I’m so proud of her for embarking on this journey by herself, because I know it’s far outside of her comfort zone; just a couple of years ago she never would have dreamed of going out of state for college, and as adventurous as Marisa and I like to think ourselves, neither of us left California.

When I get back home, the house already feels emptier. It reminds me of when I’d come home and could immediately feel if one of my sisters was out, because the house would feel too big, like their absence expanding. Now it’s just me and my parents. I’m so glad I was never an only child—even being one temporarily is indescribably lonely.

Friday, January 29th, 2021

Coachella is canceled again, and it feels eerily like déjà vu, I think because it drives home the fact that we’ve been in this pandemic for a year. I don’t even really care about Coachella but I would sell my soul to go to a music festival, and it saddens me that due to the colossal failure of everything in America, that won’t be a reality for at least another year. I’m still so infuriated by people waiting out the pandemic for the vaccine, while still going out to restaurants and out with friends and on vacation. Because if we had all just worn masks, we wouldn’t have to wait for a vaccine. It feels like taking the easy way out when this past year has been so, so hard, and I’m trying to be empathetic about it but as someone who stays home literally weeks at a time, it’s difficult. I feel like I’m going to be resentful about this for a long time. The pandemic has revealed a lot about the people I know, even just on Instagram, and I absolutely will not forget it once this is all over.

Friday, February 5th, 2021

I got approved for an apartment I wanted! I am over the moon, because I’ve felt so stagnant and not like myself ever since I came back to California, so jolted by the sudden reality of this pandemic, and I can’t wait to go back to a place that’s truly felt like home for the past three years. Not to mention it’s a gorgeous little studio right on the water, so I’m insanely happy about that, because I don’t plan on moving again for the remainder of my time in New York, and I love this apartment and this building. It’s in my friend Sunny’s “sister building” and right down the street from my friend Sam, and a 10-minute walk from my friend Owen’s apartment, so I’m just happy to be around people again. I’m excited to go back to Long Island City, where I only lived for a very short time but I adored. I’m excited to build a new life there, in an apartment I get to decorate, that’s just mine.

It was a hell of a process, though. It’s a lot cheaper than comparable units and it’s rent-controlled (a dream in New York City) because it’s through the NYC Affordable Housing Lottery. They were extremely thorough in vetting me, to make sure I wasn’t hiding any extra money anywhere and fit within the income limits, including making me send them a screenshot of my Venmo account balance and sending me an itemized list of deposits over the past six months that I had to explain (it felt very stupid to have to write “$100: sold Nintendo Switch games”).

But I’m so happy. I’m so happy to have all of this uncertainty around when I’m going back and where I’m going to live simply disappear. I have so many people waiting for me in New York that I can’t wait to see, even six feet apart. I’m excited to finally be going home.

Tuesday, February 16th, 2021

Texas is freezing right now, and it’s so sad. A big storm knocked out a main power grid, and so many Texans have been without power and heat and running water for days now. It’s deeply tragic. And with the pandemic, the ongoing violence against Asians, the shootings of unarmed Black people, people fighting police over discarded groceries, a stagnant unemployment rate, and the refusal of Republicans in Congress to help with any of it, including Ted Cruz flying to Cancún (and blaming it on his daughters) and the Texas governor claiming that the government “owes you nothing” while the state is in dire straits, the feelings of dystopia are stronger than ever. The fact that people still insist that climate change is a hoax, when Texas is literally freezing over and San Francisco’s skies were an eerie orange just a couple of months ago...it all feels so ridiculous and hopeless. It truly does feel like this country is breaking down, or it has been over the past year. It’s just all of these disasters and all of this trauma continuously compounding before we’ve even had time or resources to recover from the last one. We were quite literally not designed to withstand so much. And it’s coming from someone who hasn’t had to deal with any of it head on...but that should not be “lucky”; it should just be a human right! I feel so stupid working my dumb little desk job in the middle of a pandemic that’s approaching the one year mark; I feel stupid donating $100 here and there when I feel like it, while worrying about choosing a design aesthetic for my new apartment, and I feel resentful about the fact that it’s my responsibility at all to help people in crisis because the government refuses to. I’d really like to ask these representatives what they think their purpose is, if not to serve the American people. They make upwards of $200k in salary. And as far as I can see, we’re just paying them to spend more time defending their right to do nothing than actually doing something. That, and for their plane tickets to Cancún. It’s all so depressing. I feel like I’m living in constant anxiety just waiting for this bubble to pop, waiting for something truly cataclysmic to happen (because apparently a pandemic wasn’t enough) so we can just start fresh. Waiting for something that will never come. But I don’t know what else to do. There’s only so much I can do in my stupid little millennial New Yorker bubble. It’s a very grim outlook.

P.S. Here is a big Google Doc of resources to help Texas if you’re wondering where to start.

Friday, February 26th, 2021

I finally made it back to the city! It was a big ordeal; I was actually supposed to leave yesterday, but right before I left for the airport, Mia escaped her carrier and hid. She didn’t come out for eight hours, and I had to reschedule my flight. We tore apart the house and checked every single corner and crevice and could not find her. I still don’t know where she was; our house is not that big.

Nothing ever compares to the swooping feeling in your stomach when you first see the big city lights from the plane window. The skyline is so unique and easily recognizable—you recognize the landmarks like the Empire State Building and the Chrysler and the Brooklyn Bridge. When you see it from the plane window it feels impossibly big, a glittering city of stars, but it also feels like coming home because you know there’s a place for you somewhere. It feels like all of the clichés but in the best way. Like recognition of all the people that have come before you, of all the people that have lived in this city and made it what it is, all of the movies and the books that have made it so iconic. There’s an overwhelming feeling of I made it. There’s this excitement in knowing you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be, maybe not forever and maybe not even for a long time, but for this exact moment in time.

One thing I love about living in LIC is that I actually get to see the Manhattan skyline, which you miss when you actually live in Manhattan. I always think about that word from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, “sonder.” I think it was coined with New York City in mind. I swear the ambulance sirens sound different here than in other places. There’s a familiar echo throughout the streets that reminds me of the summers I’d spend at my aunt and uncle’s apartment on the Upper East Side, and I’d hear it on rainy days. It’s strangely comforting.

It’s so good to be back.

March 5th, 2021

I’ve been watching a lot of Iron Chef recently, so naturally I was on Masaharu Morimoto’s Wikipedia page, and then fell down a rabbit hole from there. I found out he was on Binging With Babish and at one point it said “...during the COVID-19 pandemic,” which gave me pause. I know Wikipedia is supposed to be neutral, but it sounded strange to use dissociative language when in fact we’re still in it. I’m writing this as the one-year anniversary of New York’s lockdown fast approaches. As of right now it still says it’s an “ongoing pandemic.” They can’t even give an updated death count because it’s still happening. It’s just weird to be currently living through a historical event and being aware that we’re living through it, that someday this will be studied the same way

And it’s also incredible that some people still think it’s a hoax and still don’t take it seriously and still are prioritizing the economy (thanks, Texas. Also Cuomo, you spineless worm. Who the hell needs to be in a movie theater right now? Don’t you have better things to do in a frickin’ pandemic?). It’s just...insane. I’m truly out of adjectives to describe it, because I’m still saying this, one year later. I saw this tweet that said, “We're gonna have to retire the expression “avoid it like the plague” because it turns out humans do not do that,” and it’s still so unbelievable to me. Were people this stupid during the Black Plague? Did people see bodies being thrown out in the streets and think, oh, just a seasonal flu? It’s truly barbaric, and if our government weren’t so completely stupid, they would file criminal charges against the governors of states like New York and Texas for sheer negligence. I still maintain that you should be charged for not wearing a mask, because you’re a literal potential biohazard. If you can be prosecuted for pricking someone with an infected needle, you should be prosecuted for not wearing a mask and endangering other people. And you can quote me on that; I really don’t care if “mask-shaming” is ineffective, because I’m tired of having to coddle people to follow basic instructions. If children and immunocompromised people and doctors can wear masks, you can too. Don’t be an idiot. 500,000+ deaths. That’s the price of your freedom. I wonder if conservatives think about that; if they know you can’t be free if you’re dead.

My friend pointed out that we’ve had a much different experience than in other states. Because we’ve both lived in New York and California, we’ve seen the effects firsthand. I was still in New York when the streets were filled with refrigeration trucks for leftover bodies. I was in Cailfornia when Los Angeles was declared the most infected city in the most infected state in the most infected country, and air quality standards were being lowered to accommodate higher rates of cremation. But that’s the difference between me and conservatives. I don’t need to experience something in order to care about it. I’ve thought so much about empathy in the past year and cooperative politics, and I still literally do not have an answer. I have no idea how you solve an epidemic of selfishness.

Friday, March 19th, 2021

Today is the one-year anniversary of the day I made this. And it’s more depressing than anything. When I made it, I had no doubt it would be a hard couple of months and everyone felt optimistic that we would be out of quarantine by summer. People on TikTok define stages of quarantine as “seasons” and Season One of quarantine was all virtual concerts and baking bread and Dalgona coffee and that one TikTok audio. It makes me nostalgic in ways I can’t quite understand, but I do know that at that point we never could have predicted how poorly our government could’ve handled it, how belligerently so many Americans just blatantly refused to comply with any kind of regulation or consider other people for a second. I blame everyone. I have so much resentment toward everyone. Half a million people dead. All of the broken systems laid bare. If there was ever an event to radicalize you, this was it. I think about that quote from Nikita a lot: “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.” And that’s just it, isn’t it? Everyone thinks they’re so important to the economy; it’s so important that they go back to work! And yet people still won’t wear a damn mask. I genuinely hate it here. And before you say, “Just leave then,” I cannot express how much I’ve legitimately considered it. I was looking for another excuse to live abroad, and maybe this is it.

Sunday, March 21st, 2021

Some friends and I go to the AAPI Rally Against Hate 2021 in Columbus Park in Chinatown. There’s kind of a poetry to the fact that my dad used to play basketball in this park after school when he was in high school, that this is where all the seniors in Chinatown play chess and Chinese families bring their children to play. A surprising number of people show up, which I’m grateful for; I’m impressed at how well the Asian community has organized. We listen to some speakers (one of whom is Andrew Yang, which is...a very interesting choice), and I even meet up with my aunt and my little cousin for a bit, which I’m also happy about. I wish I’d seen more things like this when I was younger.

Unfortunately, the circumstances of it can’t be ignored. I wrote about it here if you haven’t read it. I have a lot of thoughts. It’s frustrating to be in this position, one year after the Black Lives Matter protests last summer, as George Floyd’s literal murderer is on trial. It’s sad to see that nothing has changed. And of course, progress takes time. But I can’t believe that instead of making any progress toward collective liberation, another community is being targeted. I’ve ordered a small knife to carry around with me. I don’t think I’ll ever need it. I’m always in safe places. And it’s small enough that it would be a last resort anyway. But still. I think I’ll feel safer having it.

It’s made me think about all of the people who commit this type of violence. I was walking on a weekend, at 11 am, to drop off compost, wearing headphones, and I passed a guy. I guess he said something to me, but I didn’t hear it, because I was wearing headphones (duh). And then my music paused and he was 30 feet behind me, and I heard him call me a whore. And I was seized by fear, not for my life in that moment, but because it was so completely unhinged and uncalled for. Because I walk people like this all the time, and if he had had a gun at that time, I’m positive he would’ve killed me. There are so many insane people just walking around all the time. What kind of person calls someone a whore at 11 am? What kind of person thinks he’s entitled to my attention? What kind of person seethes about it for 30 feet and feels the need to call it out later? It’s truly scary.

Wednesday, April 7th, 2021

Thursday, April 29th, 2021

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