A Journal of the Plague Year, Part the Seventeenth - Things I No Longer Need

1. My glasses.

I’ve been wearing glasses since I was in graduate school.  I probably should have been wearing them earlier, given my genetics and the fact that the world had gotten rather fuzzy around the edges by then, but life being what it is that didn’t happen.  So it’s been about thirty years now and I’ve graduated from what were essentially part-time glasses to full-time glasses to bifocals and most of the people I talk to probably don’t even know what I look like without them.  But for the last several years – through at least three different prescriptions – I have been far more comfortable without them when reading or working on a computer.  And since that’s about 90% of my days here in lockdown – and most of the rest of the time I don’t really need to have sharp edges on the world – there have been entire workweeks where I haven’t bothered with them.

2. My keys.

I don’t really drive anywhere anymore, except perhaps to the grocery store once a week.  I don’t go to my old office on campus, where I have anywhere up to half a dozen keys that I use on at least a semi-regular basis.  I’m usually inside my own house so I don’t even need my house key.  I do have a number of fobs that I need to log into various computer systems so I keep the key ring on my desk, but as far as carrying around bits of metal to stick into locks, yeah not so much anymore.

3. Work clothes.

I’m working from home.  I’m going to be comfortable.  Well, more comfortable – I am the living embodiment of comfort over style, after all, and even my work clothes are things I can hang out in on weekends if necessary.  But I haven’t worn a button-down shirt in a month and I suspect I won’t do so again until we’re out of lockdown.  I’m still wearing pants, though.  Ain’t nobody need to see all that.

4. Shoes.

Again, I’m home.  I don’t really need to go outside, especially since Lauren is now comfortable backing the car down the long stretch of our driveway that squeezes between the house and the property line so I don’t have to do that before she heads off to feed the chickens anymore.  Other than going to the grocery store I haven’t put on shoes in weeks.

5. Full breakfasts or lunches.

When you go into an office every day, you need to have a breakfast big enough to carry you over to lunchtime, and then a lunch big enough to carry you over to dinner or at least when you get back home.  Working from home you can spread that out a bit.  Plus I don’t do as much walking as I used to, so I don’t need full-sized meals at all really.  I have neither gained nor lost weight under lockdown, to my knowledge.