Blizzard today in Toronto with a Stay Home advisory. Continuing Omicron surge with Work From Home advice. That howl you heard across the city at 7 a.m. was parents learning that Toronto has closed its schools again for snow-related reasons on what was supposed to be the first day back to in-person learning. 

Around here, my husband had to cancel his physiotherapy session, although he has an online exercise class he can take. Inadequate, but it’s what he has. We’re all making do—and I’m sick of it. I can’t even tell you how sick I get of second-best and high stress and the unanticipated consequences of the pandemic, one thing after another and another which together make life feel so inadequate.

Yes, I can. Let’s be Shakespearean and count the ways.

1. I grow old, I grow old, I wear the bottoms of my Lululemons rolled—because I ordered too long a leg length online and it’s too much work to repackage them and ship them back. I also have an idea that returned clothes go into landfill (guilt). I used to love going shopping. Now when my clothes go ragged, I either order online or, if it’s even faintly possible, scuttle in and out of stores like a crab in crabbing season, grabbing what I can.

2. Seriously, I feel the pandemic has aged me five years in two, despite my attempts to keep in shape mentally and physically, doing online yoga, playing hockey when I can—which at times has meant getting changed in the arena parking lot—and if all else fails, heading out for walks. Hey, it’s a balmy 0 degrees, but doesn’t the broken ice click prettily on the lake? At least brain fog means that I’m guaranteed to forget at least one of the five things I’ve run down to the basement to get, and there’s more exercise than you’d think in running up and down stairs.

Meanwhile, I try not to doomscroll about whether scientists have in fact found that we’ve all aged five years in two.

3. Harvard Health: 

Q: I hear that stress causes our cells to age faster. Is there something to this, or is it just more nonsense to worry about? 

A: I think you’re probably talking about research showing that stress affects a critically important part of every cell in our body—the telomeres. If so, it is not nonsense. In fact, it’s part of a discovery so important that it led to the Nobel Prize. 

4. I’ve had a recurring dream since the Omicron surge. Remember how before it arrived, we could see people for a while? Things were easing up, life returning to some degree of normal. Then the bait and switch.

In my dream, I’m trying to meet up with a group of old friends I haven’t seen forever and I can never find them. I get into an elevator that’s going to the floor where I know they’re waiting, but the elevator lets me off in a janitor’s cubby like one from high school, a small windowless room with one hanging lightbulb, plank shelves containing what-all and in the middle of the floor, a wheeled bucket with an old mop standing up in it.

I try frantically to call the elevator back, but when it arrives, if it arrives, it either returns me to the janitor’s cubby or lets me off in a different place that won’t take me to my friends either. Once I ended up in a big old fishing boat, and when I made it to the bridge, the captain told me it no longer went to the place I wanted to go. He looked over his shoulder at the other stranded passengers, which was his dream-style way of suggesting I join them. When I turned, I saw these other passengers were getting into golf carts in groups of four and motoring off the boat.

I decided to walk. I always end up walking in this dream, and sometimes that’s when it ends, and sometimes the dream becomes a nightmare when an entity starts chasing me, and There Will Be Blood.

I realize my dreams are pathetically transparent.

5. I’ve been proud of myself for not giving into pandemic trends, failing to hoard toilet paper and never starting sourdough, even though I love sourdough bread, since I knew I would kill the poor microbes with neglect. I haven’t watched Succession, which a friend says feels like being trapped in a room with all the people you’ve ever disliked , and I haven’t played Wordle. Because—locked down, glasses fogged, snowed under—surely we have to try to use this time to find our individual ways forward, to learn more about ourselves, and to find a way to contribute something valuable and unique to our poor battered old world.

6. Wordle 3/6

7. A friend who knows someone senior in public health says this senior person believes the Omicron wave will be the last gasp of covid, which I now refuse to capitalize; that the virus will become milder and endemic after Omicron ebbs, probably in February, and afterward we’ll get shots for covid annually as we do for the flu. The pandemic will soon be over.

The screenwriter in me isn’t sure this is true. Two years into the pandemic, I can’t help seeing Omicron as the climax of Act Two, the violent event that leaves our protagonist alone—as I feel alone lately, battered and abandoned. As most of my friends do, too. But bad as it is, this isn’t the end. In Act Three, the writer is going to throw in a few more nasty twists and turns before we reach the final climax of this journey, this hero/ine’s quest. I say this partly because I thought, right at the start, This is going to last three years. I can’t justify or support any of this, but I’m still afraid the senior public health person is giving in to the same wishful thinking as the rest of us in saying it might end soon.

Meanwhile, we have to settle for ice crackling prettily on the lake. Which isn’t terrible, and isn’t enough.