Writing at Rosarita Beach Cafe Posts

            Does the title bother you? Drove me nuts for a while, where only one spelling was accepted on spelling tests and English classes throughout my public schooling. It wasn’t until I was a few years into college that I was taught that the traditional American spelling (theater) was used to refer to the building, whereas its counterpart was used when describing the art style. But I didn’t start this post to discuss etymology of words, so let’s dive into the real substance of this post, shall we?

            It’s genuinely hard for me to remember a time I was uncomfortable with a crowd watching me, even though I know there definitely was a point in my life where that was the case.  I suppose in that sense, theatre helped me to become comfortable with presentations in school, among similar activities.  I distinctly remember a project I did in middle school on the French Revolution, in which each student had to do a presentation on the assigned topic, and I remember it mainly for how theatrical I turned the project when dramatically describing the last words of one of the major political figures of the era, and my abrupt change in tone talking about the immediate aftermath.  Later in life, this also helped me to participate and get first place in a Poetry Slam when it was my first time even going to the event, never mind actually participating in it, and again aided me when I had to do a presentation on a thesis required to complete my undergraduate degree.

            Apart from helping me become comfortable with public speaking, theatre also offered lessons of a different kind.  Theatre helped me through those awkward years as an adolescent…those years that, in roughly the words of John Mulaney: “…and you were like ‘no one look at me, or I’ll die.’”  Yes, as counterintuitive as it seems, theatre did help with that for a few different reasons.  The first of these reasons I view as something like immersion therapy, forcing yourself in a situation where all eyes will be on you to figure out standing up to that particular inner demon.  The second reason I think is one of the factors that helped me discover my love of writing; that on stage I could be someone else and escape the real world for a while.

            That is not to say theatre is a way to avoid all negativity.  I’ve found over the years that being exposed to so many different personalities through theatre can be a double-edged sword.  It’s equally possible that one can meet some talented and delightful people, and yet at the same time it is no less likely meeting people who have a little too much confidence.  Sometimes directors feel they can excuse it in exchange for the quality of performer they are getting.  Unfortunately, I have found that more often than not, those kind of people are a rarity, and that they think having the behavior of one offstage will endow them with the talent of one. They are wrong.  My philosophy when it comes to the theater I work in is that everyone there is not being paid for any of their actions, so I do what I can to help make it the pleasant experience that it should be.

            Just one quick note before I go; I was experiencing computer problems last week and was not able to get on and post. Barring technology related issues, I’m hoping to make these posts on a weekly basis.

A free cookie to anyone who guessed the meaning behind the title of this post before the last sentence of this paragraph. Anyone reading this this might have guessed it is some kind of a timeline, and they would be correct, but a timeline for what? This is the last chance for anyone to guess the meaning of the title, and the topic of today’s post. The title is the timetable to one of the most valuable things in this world: trust.

Trust is unusual in the sense that it takes approximately a minute to form, a second to break, and it can take up to a lifetime to be rebuilt. Though perhaps the first part of that sentence should be amended to say it takes that long for someone without trust issues. However, for the sake of argument, let us assume that it was said by someone blessed with a less cynical point of view than my own.

In some cases, trust can form over the short period of a conversation, other times it might take a few nights of hanging out to try and gage whether or not one is deemed “trustworthy,” though that itself is a little deceiving in its phrasing. There is a line I have stashed away for the right plotline where Character A asks Character B if they think that Character C can be trusted, to which A responds with something along the lines of saying that C cannot be relied on if their lives depended on it, however A trusts C to react in a way that aligns with C’s motivations. When I use it in the right story, I promise it will come out less clunky than that; I just kept the actual phrasing private to avoid anyone stealing it before I officially use it in my work.

One of the more somber memories I have from college was losing someone I considered to be a good friend over a stupid argument; an argument that to this day, I can’t remember how it started. Backing up about seven months for context, I had asked this person to a dance, and due to possible romantic feelings I had for her, I was thrilled to hear her say yes. However, she had overbooked herself, and the person she had agreed to help out would not let her off for that one night. When we talked about it afterwards, she said to me, apologetically, that she always did that sort of thing; said yes to fun plans when she had previous commitments to attend to at the same time. Thinking about it now, all it would have taken for me to have completely absolved her of letting me down then was a simple addition to what she said: “but I’m working on it and trying to be better.” In lieu of that statement, I figured that was just who she was, and I didn’t ask her to try and change that, I just made a note of it that she shouldn’t have been trusted in that regard again, not without rebuilding that trust, and as was previously stated, that could take up to a lifetime.

Although we never discussed it, she apparently had a different view on the timeline of rebuilding trust, or perhaps she thought the lifetime of a Mayfly was enough time to earn that trust back in its entirety. In the following months, no opportunity presented itself that made me think she was trying to earn it back, no signs of any altered behavior to avoid a situation like the one that arose with me. She didn’t understand that just being a good person meant that she deserved that trust and should be forgiven for breaking it in the past, so when we got into that argument, she took offense to it. I sometimes wonder if I had explained to her why she didn’t have my full trust if we’d still talk to each other today, but I was impatient, and knew I was in no condition to talk about such things at the moment, so I abruptly ended the conversation. I would regret that decision for over a year.

I did everything I could think of to try and earn a second chance; to be the kind of person who deserved something of that nature. I quit drinking; I started going to therapy in hopes of learning some other method besides repressing to deal with the anger that I felt to those closest to me, and I even turned somewhere I hadn’t seriously thought about in about two or three years.

I started attending a weekly religious group in hopes of growing in a spiritual manner. For months and months before speaking to her again, I tried every method of bettering myself in the hopes to earn that second chance I craved. I strolled through the campus at night, through all the drinking and shouting to get to a nearby beach, where I could sit and listen to the crashing waves, enjoying the smell of salt water, reflecting on if I was making progress or not, but telling myself the real test would come months later, when we would finally speak again.

I never got my chance. I was told the best thing was to let go of that friendship. I was told that she knew who I was and that I wouldn’t really ever be happy around her if I had the second chance I craved. She might have been right, or she might have been wrong, but it tore me apart that she made that decision for me. After all this time, I have no idea why I wanted that friendship back; I gave to her that second chance without asking for her to do a single thing to earn it, and there I was trying everything I could think of to earn one from someone who thought she was entitled to that privilege for simply being a good person.

And what is my opinion of trust now? If I seemed pessimistic then, now I am downright cynical. Nothing in this world is free; time is the thing that must be spent in order to deserve a second chance. I still hold to the timeline of trust as stated in the beginning of this post, but I must add something else; the visualization of trust…perhaps more accurately, the visualization of mended trust. I imagine trust is a vase, and someone breaking it knocks it off its place. Even if the act was unintentional, the vase is no less broken, and it will take time for all the pieces to be put back where they were. Despite that time is spent working on it, even if every single piece goes back to where it was in the original shape, the vase itself will never look as it did before it was broken. Unfortunately, too many of us think it simpler to buy another vase and throw out the old one, rather than taking the time to repair what once was.

           I debated for a while what I wanted this week’s post to be about. A couple ideas were tossed around on subjects ranging from ghosts to other things that fall into roughly the same category. Ultimately however I decided to hold off on that and wait for a more appropriate time of year to post something like that, and a source close to me suggested I might want to discuss this next topic as it is somewhat similar to the immediate predecessor to this post: funerals. 

Perhaps it is just because of the nature of my father’s side of the family, but I have really come to hold to the belief that funerals really should be celebrations of the deceased’s life, and being more about bringing a family together, if not a community. Additionally, this side of the family also believed that humor and laughter shouldn’t be put aside at funerals, rather embraced. One such funeral I remember that the relative in question had left instructions in her will that she wanted as many people at the service to wear “sparkles and bling” so that “everyone would look fabulous” in the church. Apparently that memo missed my household…or perhaps some people within it just chose to ignore it as “sparkles and bling” weren’t their style. There was, however, a piece of my clothing that was commented on prior to the beginning of the service.           

At the time my favorite dress shirt had a deep purple coloring. I distinctly remember this funeral occurred at some point in the season of Lent within the Catholic church, as the clothes covering the altar were purple; and a shade very similar to what I was wearing. One of my father’s cousins had walked up to me and said, in as serious a tone as could be: “Hey man, these people are depressed; we’re at a funeral and we all need some cheering up; why don’t you go stand somewhere by the alter and we’ll all take turns guessing where you are.” Upon hearing this, I replied: “Oh, yeah, I’ll stand right in front and look like John the Baptist.” While he was the only one to make such a request of me at the funeral, he certainly was not the only one in that kind of spirit. I have heard the only difference between a funeral and a wedding for that side of the family was the attire one wore as well as how many people were being celebrated, and I think this story perfectly captures that sentiment.            

After nearly all funerals for that family came a coalition at a restaurant the deceased particularly enjoyed in life. Also included in that relative’s will was a starter for what food would be served: shrimp cocktail, good scotch, and good hotdogs. No, that’s not an error; she requested good hotdogs to be made into a little appetizer at the coalition. Say what you want about that family, but they do know how to do funerals. 

           Mind, that is not a template for what the average funeral for them looks like, apart from adding their own brand of humor such as the guessing game with my purple shirt. At the coalition dinner for another relative, a story was told about the sons-in-law (I hope that’s the plural) of the deceased taking care of his house while the man in question was in the hospital following a car accident. For the record the car accident was several years before his death, so this story will not be sad in that sense. The uncle invited them to help themselves to his wine cellar as a thank you for taking care of his affairs while he and his wife were recovering. So, they decide to take him up on it and fetch a bottle of wine from that cellar. 

Once they poured this wine, they assume it has gone bad due to the brownish color it appeared to have. Under this assumption, they of course dumped out the contents of the bottle, not wishing their father-in-law to return home to spoiled wine. They opened another bottle only to discover the same brownish color. So, they dumped that one out as well. The next one they judged to be an acceptable color, so they drank that one. When going to the hospital the next day, they informed him that there were a couple of bottles that had gone bad, as they had a brown hue when poured. My father’s uncle was horrified to find out they had poured two bottles down the drain, as it turned out the wine was called Brunello, which roughly translates to “little brown,” and was fairly expensive. How does this relate to the funeral? His daughters called up the pallbearers at the coalition and told this story after handing each a wrapped gift which was clearly a bottle of wine. Upon opening it, they found a bottle with the label “cheap red wine” on it, and his daughters explained “Yeah, Dad thought this was the only wine you all could really appreciate.” I can only imagine that uncle was looking down laughing his ass off.

            There are certainly other shorter stories, such as the odd combination of serving Armenian food to honor one of the in-laws of this family at an Italian restaurant, to the vehicle carrying my grandfather’s casket speeding at the intersection of the church because he always believed it was too slow. My own father, although still very much alive, has indicated he wants a combination of an Irish wake where everyone tells joyful stories of when the deceased was alive with a New Orleans jazz funeral. As for me? Yes, I’ve still probably got several decades before any arrangements need to be made in terms of my own funeral, but right now I think the band Dropkick Murphy’s gave me the perfect idea for that occasion:

“You can stack me on a pyre; soak me down with whiskey

Roast me to a blackened crisp and throw me in a pile

I could really give a shit; I’m going out in style.”

Perhaps there were other ways of titling this post, but I poured over the idea for the better part of the day without coming up with a viable substitute for this name. The title “Take Me to Church” after the Hozier song just seemed like I would be trying to convert the reader to my personal religious views…at least I thought it did. Famous quotes on religion such as Friedrich Nietzsche sounded a little too nihilistic to accurately portray my thoughts on this matter. As I stated, I am not trying to persuade anyone to think as I do, merely explain the importance, and the dangers of it.
I grew up in a traditional Roman-Catholic Church, with both sets of grandparents devote Christians. Indeed, for most of my adolescence, I went to church and never questioned belief in the traditional Judeo-Christian God. I never questioned faith in something I couldn’t see because I had been told for many years that it was the main truth in the universe. So what changed? 
I got older, and I finally got teachers who didn’t just read to me about Socrates but encouraged me to start questioning authority figures. I began to understand that true wisdom must come from many sources, not just one narrow dogmatic view. I began to look at, not just the plain history of the Catholic church, but also all the atrocities committed in their God’s name. I began to see the true bigotry of those in the church, how its leaders tried to ostracize those who identified as any of the LGBTQ+ community. As much as those same people claimed we are all God’s children and that He has unconditional love for all of us, they apparently didn’t believe that we should afford that same unconditional love to our fellow brethren.
Don’t misinterpret this as that my claiming that I have not attended any religious services since that reckoning. I still attended church services and other religious events to support family members, immediate or otherwise, in their spiritual beliefs. A few months ago, I even attended my brother's wedding, which was a traditional Jewish wedding in the wishes of his now wife’s wishes. On another occasion I even seriously debated getting into a relationship with someone who was a practicing witch. Their name? That’s irrelevant, as is the fact that nothing ever came of this, although their religion played no part in the outcome of that interaction.
I believe organized religion offers some a feeling of belonging and sense of purpose, however it is not without its drawbacks. If there is anything within their specific text that preaches hate, it will always be exploited and used as justification for a religion which idolizes love to start preaching hate. Furthermore, I see it as inevitable that those in positions of power will abuse it if given the chance. A religious leader near where I live recently stepped down from his post as a leader due to the police reopening an incident involving children he was linked to that happened years ago. As long as there are people like that engaging in religious leadership, I refuse to be a part of it.
So we come back to one question which no one may have wanted answered; what are my philosophical beliefs? Earlier I stated that I don’t believe in God in the conventional sense. In a way, I see God as time, but it is more than that; I see a divine path all events must follow. I see God in the mushrooms I see growing out of what seems like nothing. I hear God in the trickling of a stream in the woods. Now, anyone who might know me says I of all people should know that God is more than that because of what happened to me; something countless people have referred to as a miracle, but that is for another blog post. God is not dead, as Nietzsche claimed so long ago, but He is dying. Our world is dying, our empathy for those less fortunate than ourselves is dying, and I don’t know if the remaining ‘faith’ the world has left is enough to save Him.
Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps when I meet my maker, I will hear them rant at me for being a heretic. If caring about those the church would see me turn my back on, then I welcome the title. All the better to distance myself from a group of people with that much of a questionable reputation. But what my philosophical beliefs do encourage me to do is care for those that life has not been kind to here and now. I believe this world would be a much better place if people cared as much about it as they do about its creator.

For any French speakers who might come across this, I apologize. As I believe I stated in a previous post, it has been some time since I spoke French in a classroom setting, so the grammar might not be correct. While I struggled for most of the day trying to decide if I did want to write another post about France so soon after my previous one, but I decided in honor of Bastille Day, it was the least I could do to honor the French blood flowing in my veins.

Many of you, like myself, may have neglected keeping up with your French vocabulary since being required to learn it for some form of academia, for which I do not blame you. English itself is very difficult, and I am still learning new terms such as pogontomy (the cutting of a beard), something I always end up regretting. The title of this post translates to “Mushrooms, Champagne, and Swords!” and you might be wondering what those three things have in common, to which I answer this: they all revolve around a restaurant that my family has grown fond of over the past few years.

The owner of the restaurant ties in the last two subjects in the title, and I would bet money that a reader of this post can guess the specialty of his chef. A year ago, my parents went took a mushroom foraging class with this chef and had a mushroom themed meal afterwards. How do I know the specialty of this chef is indeed mushrooms? Months later, a number of us went to a dinner and wine tasting at this restaurant, where the chef had prepared a multi-course meal with each dish involving mushrooms. Yes, even the dessert included a candied mushroom, and within a few weeks, I myself will be going on a foraging expedition with this chef.

As I have said, the owner ties in with the subject of champagne and swords, and the answer is simpler than one might think. No, he is not an expert fencer hailing from the Champagne region of France. Rather, he is the only man I have seen perform something known as champagne sabering, a practice dating back to the Napoleonic wars where soldiers would cut the necks of champagne bottles to open them. I have seen him saber a champagne bottle twice as of this post, and up until recently he was the only person I knew who could do something like that. More recently, I spoke with some of my father’s relatives, and learned that one of them had gotten a champagne sabering kit when he traveled to Champagne. In his words, he’s “100% when it comes to sparkling wine and cider, 50% when it comes to champagne.”

Perhaps when I return to France, I will visit Champagne and get my own starter kit for champagne sabering, as my father’s relative did. Perhaps one day I will be ready to try and get certified to sell wild mushrooms within the state. Just prior to writing this post, I am about 20% done making flash cards to study for the certification test. Who knows? I might even hire the restaurant owner to saber a champagne bottle at the release party for my first publication. Or maybe I’ll hold off until the second, while I had not seen the bill when he performed it at my brother’s wedding, I doubt it was that cheap. Regardless, all of what I have written about today will have an impact on my future, and I myself am eager to discover what role they will play in the times yet to pass.

No, dear blog readers, I don’t have covid; at least not yet. Actually, it’s fairly remarkable that I haven’t had it yet given that I lived with two separate people who had it one week apart and I still haven’t caught covid. Especially then, the precautions I took (and still do take) might seem a little extreme, but not without its reason. There was a point in my life where I knew everyone who cared about me had to see me on a respirator in a hospital. Despite the low probability of that happening with these newer variants, I’ve still no desire to risk something similar coming about due to covid, mainly because I know if it does grow to be that bad and if I pull through, I will never hear the end of it.

In a previous post I discussed how my resolutions for 2020 had to be altered to fit in with the unforeseen events the future would present to us all. Well, two years of trying to (and successfully, so far) avoid a potentially lethal virus seems to have reverted my demeaner back to its usual hermit-ish ways, and I’ve learned to accept that fact. Circling back to the title of this post, given the name of this blog, it was inevitable that at least one post would reference another Warren Zevon song, but I think it captures the essence of what I wanted this post to be about: being content with being alone.

I’ve heard that the right person won’t find you until you’ve learned to really own who you are by yourself. In fact, that was on the top ten list of do’s and don’ts for writing power couples put out by an author I follow on YouTube. Each partner was good on their own, but better together. That’s why I see being alone as a good thing; it presents an opportunity to grow and really find out who you are as a person. Like all things, however, it requires balance with something else. I’ve seen couples who try doing a little too much together, and it didn’t really work out, or if it did, the success was a result of what others were doing behind the scenes trying to clean up the personal drama that was brought into it. That is the reason why I wrestled with the decision to stop working with the theater I had been volunteering with for years after I thought there was a future where I was with someone I met through doing that type of work, which ultimately proved unnecessary due to reasons I’ll not get into on here, at least not in this post.

Whether or not one day, I’ll find that warm hand waiting for mine remains to be seen. I know I still have some work to do on myself in regard to trusting others and finding motivation to be…sociable, but I am working on those issues in my own way. Until I am ready, I guess I’ll just have to learn to live as the song states: “Splendid Isolation, I don’t need no one… Don’t want to take up with nobody new, Don’t want nobody coming by without calling first, Don’t want nothing to do with you.”

NOT parody of Emily in Paris

So I hope whoever may read this blog accepts my apologies for neglecting to add a post to the website last week. My brother was home on his limited free time from his education and we were invited to spend the week at a family friend’s vacation home in New Hampshire, so my scheduling skills might need some work. Originally, I had intended to post on a different subject, but after a brief call from the same brother, now studying in a different country, I thought I might revisit my time at the same location. My brief visit to the City of Lights.

I should preface this by saying at the time, I was in London on a study abroad program, during which the professors either had us going to some performance or on a weekend trip to a historical location around England, but they did give us two free weekends and a week off with the intention that we use it to travel. Perhaps the week off shall be another blog post (the first free weekend snuck up on me as I was busy with schoolwork, so I just explored London a little more), but the final bit of free time I had in Europe I decided to go on a nice relaxing weekend to Paris with my favorite people; me, myself, and I.

That was my intention, anyway. Having traveled alone to Edinburgh a few weeks earlier, I thought it would be relatively simple. My mistake.

I had taken three years of French class in high school, but never really used it afterwards. My second mistake was assuming all of it would come back to me after I was in Paris. Not exactly.

I knew barely enough French to get by, at least if I were in a more remote, less tourist-y part of France, yet I still had difficulty getting to my hotel. Eventually, however, I was successful, and tired as I was, I had the energy left in my to walk to a nearby café and get something to eat for dinner. On my walk to find this evening meal, I noticed how close my hotel was to the Eiffel Tower; so I thought that could be something I would want to see at night, more than likely after I had slept through the first one.

After I had finished at the café, (my first time having escargot), I went back to my hotel room where I figured I should just check in with my parents and let them know I had gotten to my hotel room alright and would venture out into the city in the morning. As my dad was still at work, my mother was the only one to take my Facetime call, and she commented how tired I looked, to which I relayed the long journey from the train station to my hotel, as well as the fact that my phone was slower than normal. At her suggestion, I got off the phone and started the update, which she estimated would take all night. As I had missed a few updates, however, it ended up taking all weekend. I decided after a five-minute scroll session through Facebook I would go to bed. Fun fact: five minutes can turn into an hour very quickly. Then the fun began…

I started to notice numerous sirens going off in the city, and I thought that was odd, though I reasoned that Paris was a big city, and so would be bound to have more sirens going off every few minutes as opposed to somewhere like Providence Rhode Island, so I brushed it off. Then I got a message from my uncle, who was in upstate New York at the time.

“Steven, are you ok?”

Not knowing what was going on, I sent back: “I’m fine, why?” Part of me wanted to send back “uh, how are you?” but somehow, I could tell it was serious.

He told me there was a suspected terrorist bombing in Paris, and as soon as I googled it to find out what had happened, everyone I ever knew started trying to get in touch with me via Facebook. At some points it felt as if the conversation (at least in my head) went. “Steven, are you alright?” “Yes, I’m fi— Didn’t we hate each other in high school?”

Eventually, I used Skype to get in touch with my parents, my dad was home from work at that point, and my mother commented on how I looked more alert than when we had spoke earlier. Later I learned that a cousin, who went to the same university in the same year as I was, called her father nearly in tears at the thought that it wasn’t really me who posted online that I was safe (longer story, I won’t go into it here), but eventually it got back to my parents who were able to relay that they had heard from me and that I was safe.

For some odd reason (sense the sarcasm here?), the sleep I got that weekend, never mind that night, was not the best in the world. The people at the help desk assured me that I could still walk around the city, despite all major tourist sites being shut down, and they encouraged guests to do so, thus that was the rest of my weekend in Paris. I saw the glass pyramid outside the Louvre. I stilled walked past the Eiffel Tower, and imagined if that had been a target for the attack, how much worse would my experience have been? While I did not go near it, because of its location it was nearly impossible for me not to have seen the cathedral of Notre Dame…well before the fire that burned it. I got to walk down the streets that Napoleon paraded his army down by the Arc de Triomphe. I also saw French authorities armed with machine guns nearly everywhere I turned that day. As I would later hear my father say, “Ironically, there is no where safer now than Paris.”

That weekend people I knew caught flack for posting about how tragic the events of Paris were while saying nothing of other terrorist attacks elsewhere the same day. No one had ever given me anything like that, yet if they had, my response would have been that I was in Paris when those events unfolded, and how that was a little more concerning to me at the time. Perhaps the reason I write this now is because of the fact that at least one of the people responsible just received the harshest sentence possible the French justice system is capable of giving. Perhaps I just needed somewhere to let my real feelings about that night out.

One day, I hope to return to France under happier circumstances. I want to go to Napoleon’s tomb and see all the generals he allowed to be buried with him. I wish to go to Champagne, drink the beverage while learning the history of champagne sabering (more on that topic in a later post). I wish to visit the beaches of Normandy, or the ruins of Oradour Sur Glane. One day, I will return to France, but I certainly won’t be the same kid who thought he was just going for a fun weekend in 2015.

Hey there! Thanks for stopping by to look at this blog! Ok, that may be enough exclamation points for the time being, but this is an exciting thing for me. If nothing else, it will get me writing on a regular basis. Before I get to the main point that I wanted my first blog post to be about, I just want to go over some basic things about this site, chiefly the name. A few suggestions were tossed around, but I kept coming back to the name you see on the website now. I chose this name because, aside from the singer being one of the most played on my Spotify playlist, for a couple of reasons. One such reason is so that when you tell your friends you read on the Writer’s Rosarita Beach Café, people listening in passing will think you’re a high-class person who just got back from a nice vacation while catching up on some reading. Another such reason is because I wanted this blog to be a kind of forum, where no idea was off limits for a discussion…or maybe the more appropriate term would be monologue, but as I have been very active in live theater for the past few years, hopefully I can make this “monologues” engaging and entertaining at least some of the time. Now that that’s out of the way, onto the first blog post! (at least I spaced out this exclamation point)

When I think back to my resolutions on January first of 2020, I laugh at how impossible those goals seem now. As I toasted in the new decade with a dram of whiskey, I made a vow that I would try to reinvent myself; go out to listen to live music, experience/observe live slam poetry artists, just be more social, maybe even figure out how to ask someone out I had a crush on for the past few months. For a time, I started to work on those goals: I went out to see friends from high school sing at local bars, I went to more events that in 2019 I would never have dreamed of going to, and just as I was about to ask out that special person, then came March.

With March, of course, came the shutdown. As staying in and writing had been my habit just a few months prior to that event, it was a little disappointing to see my plans to reinvent myself come to a halt, but at least I was not at a complete loss of how to handle it. When it first started, I just shrugged, not because I was determined to go out and live my life the way I had promised myself, but because I saw it as a sign that I needed to spend more time on my writing. However, even when not in a deadly pandemic, writers are experts at finding excuses not to write. Despite all the excuses I found, I did manage to make progress on a novel I already had in the works, in addition to brainstorming new ideas, even if it wasn’t as much as I had hoped.

Perhaps because of the habit I was in before the pandemic hit, I followed much more along Dr. Anthony Fauci’s mindset of caution; while I did occasionally see a friend or two, I wanted to avoid all higher risk situations. As an example, I did not feel comfortable sitting down at a restaurant until at least one month after Dr. Fauci himself went on the news to say that it was acceptable if the proper guidelines were adhered to by the restaurants. There is, however, one exception to this: a French restaurant in Providence by the name of Pot au Feu. When the governor of Rhode Island rolled back the restrictions on dining out, the owner of that establishment did not agree with the decision, as he felt that it left his employees exposed. What did he do? Exercising a similar philosophy of safety, he set out to make his restaurant one of the safest in the nation, getting KN-95 masks for his staff in addition to requiring them to double mask, installed HVAC air filters over and above the state’s requirements, UVC light treatment of the restaurant after the customers left, using FDA approved fogging techniques, requiring gloves whenever his servers handled food, constant temperature checks for both employees and customers, regular disinfectant wipes on all possible surfaces, and using even more precautions, as he did not wish to put either his staff nor his clientele at risk. Due to responsible people like that, I was comforted with the knowledge that I wasn’t overreacting, that there were at least some other people taking the pandemic as seriously as I did, and still do.

One of the aspects that started out as strange, but grew to become normal, was the wearing of facemasks in public. For a time, I was willing to allow people a little room for error, such as not wearing their masks in the most effective manner. As the weeks stretched into months, however, my view of this practice began to change. I began to judge others for conscious decisions not to wear a mask, or even wearing it in less than effective manners. There was one instance about six months into the pandemic when I was at my local pharmacy and saw an older man walk in without any sort of facial covering. Rather than reasoning that he may have had any medical issues, I looked down on him, scowling (which would have been obvious, had I not been wearing my facemask). However, my scowl turned into a kind of sheepish remorse when, after about three steps into the pharmacy, a look of realization dawned on his face; “Forgot the mask in the car,” and with that, instead of finding an excuse to go about his pharmacy visit maskless, he proceeded to leave the building, presumably to get his mask from the car. That was a welcomed event for me to witness, for a week earlier I was running errands at the supermarket and saw a man with his mask pulled down because he was on the phone. While I do understand that having a mask on makes it more difficult to be understood, at least in my view that is preferable to risking the possibility of being on a ventilator, and it is not worth the risk just because of one damn phone call.

On the subject of masks, I feel it relevant to discuss my first real job, and why it is no longer what I do for employment. My first real work experience was at a safety company where I assembled N-95 masks, in addition to a few other safety supplies that seem minor next to breathing protection during a pandemic. It was a very educational experience for me, not because of all I learned about N-95s, but rather because I learned new ways of incorrectly wearing face masks. I was already familiar with the technique of wearing it with an exposed nose, as well as what New York Governor Andrew Cuomo not so affectionately deemed “chin guards,” but I learned new ways of not doing it correctly, such as the self-explanatory “neck guards” or even something I had come to know as the “Darth Vader,” named such because of it revealing the upper lip of the person wearing it, as audiences could see with Vader at the end of the movie “Return of the Jedi.” Another reason why I left feeds into this point. The woman I witnessed wearing her mask in this Darth Vader fashion clearly did not understand what it meant to be in a pandemic, as she was hugging, and even kissing her coworkers. Now, a good portion of the factory’s workforce was made up of those from Hispanic communities, and from what I have observed, those with that cultural background can be more expressive in their natures as opposed to the stereotypical white culture. However, in a pandemic where we know saliva and even contact can potentially transmit coronavirus, perhaps curbing that type of interaction is for the best in a safety company. Ironically, I left there because I felt like I was not in a safe work environment.

Perhaps onlookers to how I live my life think that I am being overly paranoid, as I am not in a high-risk demographic for the serious consequences of coronavirus. I have no prior medical conditions that today would put me at any greater risk of death if I did somehow contract COVID. Yet I know there is still a possibility of my getting the disease and were that my only reason for expressing more caution, then perhaps I would agree that I am a little too paranoid about this, but there is more to the story behind my reasoning. When I was little more than a toddler, I was hit by a car that left me with a traumatic brain injury among other complications, such as complete hearing loss in my left ear. Of course, the immediate consequence of this was my lapsing into a coma, requiring machines to help me survive. Despite the fact that I emerged from that coma and today no longer require any sort of medical equipment for survival, I have never stopped thinking of the trauma my family was forced to endure seeing me on a respirator as I struggled to ultimately recover. I have no desire to put them in a similar situation when it can be easily prevented.

As much as we might want it to, time does not stop as the world waits for a way to have some sense of normalcy. So, what happened to my New Year’s resolutions to be more outgoing? Like so many other things after coronavirus, they had to be adapted. Instead of going out to local bars to see friends perform their music, I instead grew to become content to watching them stream their performances from what they chose to use as studios. Last March, I was thrilled to watch a special live stream St. Patrick’s Day concert performed by the Irish Rock group Dropkick Murphy’s, during which I was silently grateful for not having bought tickets to a music festival in Boston a few months prior. While it was not exactly what I had in mind at the beginning of that year, that was the way I adapted to make the goals I had set work out in the end.

While some goals were able to be met, there were others that I thought had to be put on the sidelines, such as asking out that special someone I had previously mentioned. Despite that Zoom meetings had become the preferred method of gathering in a responsible fashion, it can be difficult for intimacy to form over such a means of communication. For similar reasons, texts alone cannot always convey accurate sentiments. As an example, there was a sketch comedy duo a few years ago who based a skit upon that premise; one friend having a very lax approach to a conversation while his high-strung acquaintance becomes ready to become physically violent due to his interpretation of the friend’s response as condescending. Indeed, years prior to the coronavirus outbreak, I had lost a good acquaintance for a remarkably similar reason. As I was in no rush to repeat that situation, I put off asking out that special person, and while I do still remain hopeful, the question of whether or not anything will happen as a result of those feelings remain as unclear as when the vaccine will be widely available to the public.

I might not have attempted pursuing romantic interests during the pandemic, but that does not mean others have not done what they can to adapt to continuing their relationships. I saw that someone I met through the hospital (that’s a blog post for another day) had found a way to practice a socially distanced date, that is when nature permitted her to do this. Being over six feet apart outdoors sitting in lawn chairs on opposite sides of a chalk circle, she did say it felt like an adjustment going from seeing each other every day to only in person when circumstances allowed. Other than those few times when the weather allowed for this, they had to settle for seeing each other through virtual settings. She did confess it strained her relationship, but she felt like there were others for which the same applied. I cannot help but think back to lessons from science classes on Darwinism, as well as his voyage to the Galapagos Islands; how all creatures seemed to adapt to fit their way of life, and the similarities learning how to live within a pandemic.

Of course, another aspect of life that needed to be adjusted was how job interviews were and still are conducted in these strange times. For most of 2020, virtual interviews over Zoom were all that I could find that were offered. My living room became a virtual conference room where I met with employers about the prospect of working for them. Later, I attended a few in person interviews, and while one might think it was easier to form a better connection when you are not behind a screen, it was a little more intimidating. This is because I could not see the lower half of the other person’s face, and I feel that can be more telling about what one is actually thinking. Nevertheless, this reiterates the point of this piece; we survive, and we adapt.

When the ball dropped and rang in the new year of 2020, I find it difficult to believe that anyone truly knew what would happen. Despite all the twists and turns of the pandemic, humanity displayed true adaptability after being dealt a poor hand just a few months into the year. Although we did and still do have our struggles, it truly represents the resilience of our species; we may stumble, we might even fall down a few times, but we always need to be ready to brush off the dirt and keep working towards our rewards. Life will always find a way to go on.