JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Thank you for sending me the first-look photo of Timothée Chalamet in Dune. I only got it 100 times. Here’s a photo of House Atreides. Really looking forward to Denis Villeneuve’s Dune. I want to see the sandworms and navigators. The aliens in Arrival were brilliantly-designed.

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The most valuable items in my house, based on rarity and demand, are two 250ml bottles of 70% isopropyl rubbing alcohol that my brother-in-law found at Mercury Drug, along with three surgical masks that were selling at 300% of their retail price in February. (Which was already higher than usual since the ashfall.) I had not seen a bottle of rubbing alcohol since January, when “coronavirus” was a new fear following the eruption of Taal Volcano and the possibility of war between the US and Iran (which now seem as distant as the Cretaceous). The masks are also precious, since I’ve been wearing the same two masks for a month and they contain enough of my DNA to clone me from.

I spend part of each day plotting how to get stuff I need without leaving the house. Just as I was running out of coffee, Mark forwarded a message from a community in Nueva Vizcaya that was stuck with bags of coffee from a cancelled coffee fair. Caffeine supply solved. Last week I downloaded a grocery delivery app, and the service was so backed up, it wouldn’t even take my orders. Then I looked at the website of a supermarket, registered, and read every single item they carried (They were listed without categories, so bleach followed sardines followed cabbage). Two hours later, having filled up my shopping cart, I was informed that they had no available time slots for delivery or pickup, please come back another time, k thanks bye.

I had to get my prescription filled so on Monday I dressed up like an old-timey train robber and went to Mercury Drug. You would think I was about to climb El Capitan free solo, I was adrenalized. When I got there I was pleased to see that there was no queue, so I walked right up to the counter, only to find that there was a queue, seated on chairs placed six feet apart all over the store. I got my meds, but there was not a single multivitamin or vitamin C tablet to be found. Mercury had milk, though, and butter, bread, and tissues. This made me happy. Yes, my standards for happiness have dropped precipitously. A shelf full of cat food would bring tears of joy to my eyes. Which I would remember not to touch.

Still feeling intrepid, I dropped by 7-11 for liver spread and crackers. I returned to my apartment in triumph, but still lacked eggs, vegetables, and multivitamins (I know we should get our vitamins from food, but I don’t trust my diet). So I gave in and asked friends and sister to include my list when they did their shopping. The multivitamins were marked up atrociously. There ought to be a law. Wait, there is a law.

Had a Zoom chat with friends. Had not had a face-to-face conversation with someone who wasn’t ringing up my order from behind a plastic sheet for a month. Drogon my feline overlord joined us for a bit, and was so pleased at the attention from other humans that he’s been preening in front of my laptop. Von pointed out that if this lockdown had happened in the pre-Internet 90s he’d be entertaining himself by making prank calls. On a landline.

Internet access is not just a basic human right, but the primary form of sanity maintenance. It’s given us entertainment options. Remember how people used to spend hours dialing a radio station so they could ask the DJ to say hi to them on the air? Farther back, remember party lines? No, not those phone chats advertised on TV (Recall the screams of mothers when they saw the phone bill), but the people who shared your telephone line and never put the phone down, so you’d have epic screaming matches with these disembodied strangers. Good times, but I don’t want to go back to them.