by Caitlyn Kviz
6/10/2020
For my family, the Covid pandemic didn’t really start to have much of an effect on our daily lives until around the beginning of March. My brother and I were attending college up at UW Eau Claire, having an otherwise fairly normal semester. We didn’t have much on our minds other than the typical college kid stuff, like trying to get in our assignments on time and finishing up projects and big papers before midterms week. At the time, I worked two part time jobs, both involving working on stage crew for a local theater and the student center at the university.
The week of March 8 in particular stands out to me as the first time our daily lives began to be directly affected by this virus. As other schools in the UW system began to think about closing, our Chancellor’s Office sent out near-daily emails with updates on what the university was doing to control the risks associated with staying open. It all came to a head on the morning of Thursday, March 12, when our chancellor held a forum with local health officials that was live streamed across campus. I watched it on a projection screen in my painting class in the fine arts building.
Even while watching the forum, the mood in the room was happy and light. None of us really took the situation seriously at this point. Instead, we joked around and talked with our friends. I distinctly remember telling a friend, “The chancellor looks like he needs a nap. He’s like, what do yáll want now?” We laughed and kept painting, working on a big project that was due at the end of the week. I remember in a group chat with some kids from work, someone had made a March Madness-style bracket to try to predict which UW schools would close. Our university’s Facebook page for memes was full of stupid jokes about Covid, too.
At the end of the forum, he promised that a decision would be made by 5 pm. that day if the school was closing. Meanwhile, I moved on to my next class in typography and graphic design, and afterwards went back to my dorm room to drop off my stuff and eat dinner.
The decision, and many subsequent long emails, started rolling in at around 4 pm. that day. Our school was going to stop classes, and take essentially a three-week long spring break to allow time for our professors to figure things out. Then we would take classes online for two more weeks and make a decision on the rest of the semester based on how things were going at that point. Although we shouldn’t have been that surprised by it, the news hit me like a load of bricks. Things were getting real. I called my parents and younger brother to begin arranging an early ride home for the break. We finally decided on a bus ride home that Sunday afternoon, which was difficult to secure, because the website kept crashing from, you know, the whole UW system jumping on it at once. Afterwards, I called it a night.
On Friday, I woke up to even more crazy emails, this time from the theater in downtown Eau Claire that I work at as a stagehand. I quickly skimmed through it. So they’re closing too, and I’m laid off. WAIT, I’M LAID OFF? I read through it again. I am, in fact, laid off, news that I unexpectedly took very personally. I’ve worked there since the place was built and had its grand opening in 2018. It was like my little baby, in a way, a product of our blood, sweat, and tears. I watched it grow up. The job had provided me with so many great friends, and a steady income, among other things. I wondered if this was it, and if I’d ever run into these people again. At that moment, I was overwhelmed. I rolled over and cried myself back to sleep.
The weekend went by in a blur. After many event cancellations, I was left with only one weekend shift for my student center job, helping to close things up. The production office was empty except for me. And before I knew it, my butt was on a bus going back home to Illinois. After I got home, my feelings changed rapidly, from being happy about being on spring break, to more like, what the heck do I do now? Out of all my classes, only one had a real online meetup time, which I looked forward to, for my only real source of human interaction besides my family. Otherwise, my online classes just added to my feelings of isolation and loneliness.
To add to the sense of aimlessness surrounding our daily lives, my summer job was continually pushed back throughout the spring and then cancelled a few weeks ago. Me and my brother both got jobs at the BSA’s Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico, which we were really looking forward to. After talking about it, we both decided to resign a few weeks before it was officially cancelled, due to our own worries regarding traveling such a long distance during a pandemic. Still, it feels like it’s two different things to decide not to do something, vs. being unable to even if you wanted because it’s cancelled. It really takes the fun out of things. We’ve tried to find summer jobs afterwards, but by then it was too late to be hired for something we were really interested in. The only places that seem to be hiring are grocery stores, which we turned down due to the personal health risk of interacting with so many people daily.
And from there, the days blurred into weeks, which blurred into months, like fruit in a blender. You’d think it’d be more exciting to live through such a crazy historic event, but yet, this is quite possibly the most bored I’ve been in my life so far. It’s like our standard summer vacation boredom but on steroids. We can’t go anywhere or do anything without wearing a mask, sometimes gloves, and in some places they take your temperature at the door. There are stickers on the floor everywhere to mark where to stand to follow the CDC-recommended six feet apart from other people. In some stores, arrows are marked on the floor so that shoppers can only go one way, to minimize contact. Going out in general has a much different feel to it than it did before the virus. In grocery stores, people don’t wander around, and read nutrition labels, and talk to each other anymore. Hardly anyone goes shopping for fun or because they’re bored. Instead, grocery shopping has been reduced to a get-in and get-out type of procedure.
You might wonder what we’re doing with all of our sudden free time. I wonder about this too. My days since the quarantine started have been an unpredictable mix of getting tons of random things done to spending almost the whole day either sleeping or on some sort of social media.
I’m pretty sure I’ve watched almost the entirety of the videos available on Youtube, for example. Heck, I even started an artsy Instagram for fun. I miss human interaction. We’ve started taking care of all our projects around the house that used to be at the rock bottom of our to-do lists. We replaced our basement stairs from like the 60s with some nice wooden stair treads. We painted the kitchen. It was a rager.
As I’ve mentioned before, humor and sarcasm are one of the main coping strategies my family has been using to keep our emotional and mental health in check. When we first got home from school, we used an advertisement for Target’s 14 Days of Beauty sale as a way to keep track of how many days had passed. By April, I started designing my own funny calendars using software I’d learned in college. Your tuition dollars hard at work, as my one professor likes to say. April’s theme was coronavirus memes I’d found online. May’s theme was Sea Cucumber Fun Facts, inspired by my parents calling us a sea cucumber for working on schoolwork in our beds. Similarly, June’s theme was Swear Words in Foreign Languages, reflecting everyone’s frustration and stir-craziness from staying home for so long. Hey, man, you gotta do what you gotta do.
The numbers of both people infected and deaths are still rising, but our government is still going forward with their plan to reopen the state. The reopening has unexpectedly become a very politicized, controversial issue. Some people argue that we’re going to kill the economy by staying closed for so long, so they want to reopen, and others would rather stay closed to minimize the human impact. All of the confusion in government leadership has resulted in a feeling that the ‘goalposts’ or light at the end of the tunnel, are constantly being moved. Our individual actions to control the spread are overridden by morons partying on the beach in the hundreds, for example. This is perhaps the most frustrating part of this whole thing. Instead of being able to control our own lives, like planning trips for months down the line, for example, we are at the mercy of both the virus and our government’s actions.
If I were to give advice to future generations based on my experiences, I would say that it’s important to follow all health guidelines recommended by your state or country right away and without pushback to minimize the risk of a virus like this spreading again. Similarly, I encourage you to demand quick action from your government if they aren’t taking any measures to slow the spread. It’s absolutely heartbreaking to see those graphs online that show that so many lives would have been saved if our current regulations went into effect even a week earlier that they did. Lastly, this pandemic, like so many other things in life, has proven that knowledge and education is power. It’s important to stay informed about the virus by reading the news, scientific journals, and other reputable sources, so that you can better recognize the symptoms and next steps needed to get help if you start to feel sick. By taking personal responsibility for the wellness of you and your family, we can help to avoid the spread of future diseases.