My plans for the Next Pandemic
Every so often, while doom-scrolling from my phone, I register someone who apparently used the pandemic to do something marvelous.
I know what you are thinking. Who? Where? Which project?
Well, I could not name you a single one of these people if you asked. There’s no specific project I’m thinking of, it’s just a background hum that seems to follow the topic everywhere it goes. Or I could be misled. It could be that the first thought that came to your head was an example of a pandemic project, because you (like me) have seen this phenomenon already.
I don’t know about you, but whenever I stop to think about it, the whole situation gives me a vague sense of FOMO. Everyone else spent that time building something (and I did not).
I want to be upfront about how thin that feeling usuallly is, because it would be dishonest to build a whole post on it as if it were preventing me to sleep at night (I can’t sleep only because the heat is brutal, no pandemic thoughts fester my dreams). It’s an impression with no source I can name, which makes it exactly the kind of thought that should not trigger an accounting of what I did during the pandemic.
So let’s do the accounting.
What I actually did during the pandemic
If you’d asked me, at any point during those two years, what I was constructing with all that reclaimed time, here is the honest ledger, in full.
My accomplishments were (in no particular order) 1. I knitted square of pasta. 2. I put together a puzzle (first and last in my life). 3. I made a lot of drawings, the kind that now live in a drawer or were lost in a moving. 4. I watched a dangerous amount of Murder, She Wrote. 5. I baked. A lot. (who didn’t??)
That’s the list. Not one item was moved to a resume or was mentioned in a job interview as an example of ambition. Nobody has ever asked me, in any professional context, to tell them about a time I demonstrated resourcefulness, and had me answer with ’Once I knitted pasta! My mom thought it was cool!” (She did, by the way, think it was cool. There is a picture of her just here).
There is only one line that could, if you squint, pass for an actual achievement: I found a PhD position and started it in August 2020. That’s the closest this insane post comes to “built something during the pandemic.” (Except I didn’t finish it until 2024, well outside any reasonable pandemic timeline, so whether it counts as a pandemic project or just something that happened to start near one is a question I’m not going to settle here. Depending on who’s asking, I’ll will not take questions at this time).
At the same time, what’s missing from the list is also as important. I was impressed at my fellow humans that during the pandemic found the focus and inspiration to write a novel, have a published paper, start a business, got a full project done; there’s nothing like that from my side. But you know what’s also definitely not there? No abandoned novel, no half-written paper (those came after the pandemic), no half-built business gathering guilt in a drawer, no serious project I can point to and say “and then I gave up on it.” Nothing serious got left behind, because nothing serious got picked up in the first place.
The plan for next time
Here’s the part where, instead of feeling bad about that, I decide to get ahead of it. If there’s ever a next pandemic, it will find me **ready*.
So here’s my plan for the next pandemic.
I will: - Learn to throw pottery, badly at first, then acceptably, until at least one bowl holds soup without a lean. - Write a novel. A real one, with chapters, an outline, and a title I’ve already decided on and am not sharing here in case I never get further than the title (it’s a lie of course, I don’t even have the title yet). - Learn conversational Elvish, past the stage of ordering lembas and into the stage of understanding what’s said back. - Build something out of wood that a professional carpenter would describe as an attempt, and that I would describe, generously, as “furniture”. - Run a tempo I currently associate exclusively with being ‘zombie safe’, wearing the kind of shoes that imply a plan.
I know there is no next pandemic coming (or is it?). Let;s rephrase that: I am not lying awake worried about one. And even in the hypothetical case where one arrived tomorrow, I know myself well enough to know this list would end the same way the last one did: not even existing.
At least I could revert to knit pasta, do some drawings, and watch an unreasonable amount of a show about solving crimes.
In general I think there’s something almost restful about dreaming up an ambitious project with zero chance of ever being accountable for it. I get all the pleasure of imagining owning a pottery wheel and none of the part where I have to actually sit at one wondering why nothing I make comes out round.
I think this is what I actually wanted the first time around too, if I’m honest, back when the real pandemic was happening and I was making yarn pasta instead of learning something useful: the permission to imagine an ambitious project without anyone ever checking with the ever so horrid: ‘How did that thing go?’.