How has COVID-19 impacted your life?
Before COVID-19 happened, I was already barely making enough to live a simple life. I had shit for savings but I could afford rent and sleep in. I was working to stay alive and sane enough, for the most part; it was a life that I chose - current, achievable stability over long-term responsibility and security. I spent bus rides to and from work reading books (or listening to music and daydreaming about making grand-scale art installations), and I oscillated between being content with my lifestyle (grateful that I could afford to pay rent, eat vegetables, buy books and make art) and discontent with myself for no longer dreaming or working harder toward building a different greater reality for myself (a career involved in the arts). I know that for many people who work in the service industry, moving out of it isn’t an option to them at all. The service industry is held up by the hands of so many different types of people. You have mothers who are making sure that their kids are fed and educated; you have students who are trying to make sure that they can afford the textbooks for their classes and not have to depend on their parents for handouts (and some of them can’t in the first place); you have aspiring and struggling artists who refuse to conform to a 9 to 5 (creative inspiration doesn’t fall into your lap from 6 to 10pm) or an uptight business casual dress code who just want to make a healthy living. These are just some examples of the people who make you your piping hot morning coffee, put together your custom sandwich with care, memorize your order and make sure that it gets to you with a smile, and so on. I’m pretty uncertain about what I’m going to do to meet rent for the next couple (possibly more) months. A lot of my friends are doing their best to stay positive, getting creative, starting small online businesses, doing live streams of ther music and taking donations via venmo or cash app or what have you, etc. I feel compelled to do some version of that, and I might but already, the market is saturated, and it just doesn’t feel sustainable to me. Maybe I’m wrong. I’m going to be talking to some friends to see what I should do with my art, and if I should make the step at all in this current state of our world. Since all this has started, I have pivoted to looking for online remote work - capable as I am, the options look bleak. I’m back to the dizzying nightmare of looking for a job without enough experience in a recession. It’s like deja-vu; I left college around 2011 (so after the 2008 recession) and was obsessively poring over job boards every waking moment. Much of the problem was that I would get overwhelmed with fear of failure and perfectionism and I wouldn’t apply to most of what I was hopeful about. The language used on nearly every job description is alienating, and expectations for even entry-level jobs are that you have a proven track record of something. The dark, self-depricating side of me says that I’ve been proving that I can clean vomit and shit off of toilets, bus every table in sight, scrub floors, wash dishes, serve coffee and alcohol, and scoop ice cream for the last 5 years. I know the positive side of me is supposed to turn that smile on and write (over and over and over): 5 years of customer service experience. Everybody knows that no job is easy - every single job comes with its set of pros and cons. The service industry is no outlier; anyone who’s worked in it can tell you that, and back it up with endless stories of working around entitled customers, misunderstanding managers, and lazy coworkers that somehow snuck their way into the same role and pay as you but do half the work. But the service industry is also a degrading place to be. The work is hard, but nobody sees it as career experience (unless you are at the very top of management, or doing some marketing-related administrative work that is removed from the frontlines). I’ve worn the baggage of needing to shift from my service industry role to something else for a long time now. COVID-19 was just a weird kick in the ass to do it. I’m at my computer now for nearly all hours of the day, partly out of an inherent computer addiction that I’ve had since my first personal computer was introduced to me at age 10, and partly out of my introversion kicking into high-gear since the pandemic sent everyone semi-permanently home. My roommate is home all the time now and exists nearly as a permanent fixture to the living room at this point. Though he is pretty great, I can’t leave my room without bracing myself for it first. There’s more time now than ever before for both deep reflection and for reaching out over the internet. I’ve been texting and chatting with plenty of friends I didn’t really have a chance to talk to before, mostly because I was always working on a nocturnal bar schedule