Note: I spoke with my husband about how comfortable he is sharing his experience being sick on the Internet. He isn’t, so this post will primarily focus on my experience taking care of him.
From our visit to the Pearl Harbor Aviation Museum
I started writing and writing and writing and it wound up being really long. I haven’t really been talking to people about this experience because… I don’t know, I haven’t really processed that it all happened yet. My husband is literally still in isolation today.
TL;DR My husband had a high fever starting exactly 14 days after we began self-quarantining, aka the maximum amount of time that the novel coronavirus can supposedly be incubated by a person. It burned for 12 days straight, during which time I felt very alone, almost like we were in a distance relationship, with the distance being the space between our living room and the bedroom he was isolating in, and I stopped taking care of myself. Thankfully, he was never sick enough to be able to get a test here in New York, and his fever finally broke this past weekend. I’m learning that I really just let this entire experience destroy me and I’m trying to recover now. He is feeling significantly better and will be ending isolation soon. I’m finally allowing myself to rest.
Stay home, please. To keep yourself from having to endure even a “mild” case like ours. To keep others from the same. To lessen the load on our healthcare workers and other essential workers. Please.
I know that I’m in good company when I say that I have a really hard time staying focused and with procrastination. Recently, I’ve bungled together a strange system that works for myself and figured it might be worth sharing it in case it can help anyone else out.
Essentially, I guilt/shame myself into staying on task.
Step 1. Using either a sticky note or a notebook (one that you will be using daily), designate a space and split it in half. You can use your entire sticky note if you have one, but I often like to draw a circle or a square about 2 inches wide and tall. Optional. Write the date. This can be a good way to start your daily notes for the day if you are using a notebook/planner for your day-to-day. Even more optional. Write your start-time.
Step 2. Split your designated space in half. Usually, I draw a horizontal line across the middle, but sometimes I do it diagonally. (Maybe that means something…? I wouldn’t know haha.)
Step 3. Label one half with a “C” and the other with a “D“. These stand for “Considered (a distraction)” and “Distracted“.
Step 4. Begin working and add tallies to the appropriate halves if needed. In action, here are some example scenarios would lead to tallies:Read More »
It has been 28 days since I last stepped foot outside my apartment building. The above fact seems both bewildering and (now) unremarkable at the same time, somehow.
I’ll admit that I was later than I should have been in taking the coronavirus threat seriously. I had just come back from a bachelorette party on a cruise ship (!!) and a day trip to Universal Studios in Orlando (!!!) and went to the office on Monday, March 9 with every intention of finishing the week in the office.
My husband, on the other hand, took the virus more seriously than I did. I think perhaps I took it less seriously because of how concerned his parents were about it back over the Lunar New Year. At that time, I was primarily worried about my family in China, which was experiencing their peak of the outbreak and during which time was suffering through the biggest holiday of the year. My mother called me one day from the airport, which was unsettlingly quiet. Everyone was scared to speak to one another, wearing masks, avoiding other people.
But in the United States, at the end of January, we had 4 confirmed cases with zero on the entire East Coast of North America. So, when my in-laws suggested that we not even visit them for the new year and offered to mail us surgical masks instead, I was really dismissive.
Fast forward to Sunday, March 8. I am buying groceries because I’ve decided I am going to start a Whole30 post-traveling. (HAHA) My husband urges me to abandon the low-carb diet and stock up on staples we’ll need for quarantine. I compromise and bring back a lot of produce and freezer items. By Monday, husband has convinced me that we should pack up our things and prepare to work from home indefinitely. I tell him I’ll probably try to pop back into the office once a week or so, and tell my co-workers that I’m likely to go back to work that Friday for our department briefing. We have already received the go-ahead for everyone in the department to work from home if they are uncomfortable coming into the office. Some of my teammates gladly take up this offer because they have long commutes.
The mood shifts in the afternoon for me. The week prior, after I returned from my trip, we had been hearing rumors about someone getting tested for coronavirus in an office building that was operated by the same property management company that ran our own. By the afternoon of March 9, there seemed to be a confirmed case in every office building near us, and the head of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, Rick Cotton, was also confirmed positive. That was the news tidbit that pushed me to start packing my desk. After all, this was the man who had been visiting major transit facilities to oversee their coronavirus procedures: all of the airports, major train and bus hubs, etc.
We leave the office early that day to avoid the crowds on the subway during peak commuting hours. The train is emptier at 4pm, but it’s tense. A handful of people are wearing masks. I feel acutely aware of people staring at us, two Asian people, while a homeless man lying across a seat at the end of the car coughs in his sleep. Read More »
The Mulan live-action adaptation release date has been pushed back to July 24, after being delayed indefinitely and after the red carpet premiere took place earlier last month, before Hollywood was shut down.
Will I watch it? Absolutely.
Am I excited to watch it? No. I’m really really skeptical of how much I will like this movie, even though I do really want to like it. Watching the first trailer planted many doubts in my mind that I’ve ranted about enough to friends that I figured it was worth it to write it all down to save everyone some time the next time I need to get this off my chest.
I don’t know about you all, but I’m really struggling to make lemonade from the proverbial global pandemic crisis lemons I have been allotted during this time. I just don’t currently have it in me to do a bunch of home workouts (as someone who has more success with the external accountability of a class), to bake all day? (I don’t even have… the ingredients…?), or even to binge-watch shows. I’ve had an aversion to the commitment of starting a new show for a long time, and that has only been exacerbated by the toll of living during a worldwide catastrophe.
What I do have an appetite for, however, is videos. Specifically, I watch a lot of food preparation videos (which has always been a guilty pleasure of mine), and lately, I’ve been really enjoying calm and relaxing food preparation videos.
I tend to watch videos at 1.5x speed or faster, but with these, I am able to sit back and watch at the intended speed (haha) to really attempt relaxation. It’s almost meditative, to watch someone prepare something delicious.
So here are a few of the videos that have brought me a few minutes of peace and calm. I hope they can do the same for you.
I have really gotten into watching Li Ziqi 李子柒 because she is connecting viewers with the traditional ways to make Chinese foods. I can be completely enraptured watching her harvest soybeans to make soy milk to make tofu in order to make mapo tofu 麻婆豆腐. Or even planting rice to make rice cakes and scorched rice. I spend a lot of time unwinding and craving Chinese food watching, so it’s no wonder that she is perhaps one of the most influential online creators in China, with a rumored reach wider than even CCTV.
Haegreendal 해그린달 is a Korean woman who is part of a wave of content creators that make these supremely cozy videos that really add the homey to home. She cooks simple dishes, does household chores, with little bits of commentary that give you a bit of insight into her thoughts and sometimes ask you to take time to discover insight into your own. I discovered her videos very recently but know they will be something I come back to when I need to quiet my mind and feel motivated to take care of my living space and myself.
I would be remiss if I failed to mention Alvin Zhou, from BuzzFeed’s Tasty team, as this video actually introduced me to Haegreendal. She is one of the people he cited as inspiration for the above video, which is one of the quarantine videos that was released recently. It’s a very simple concept – he makes a series of 3-ingredient recipes all day – that is really pleasantly executed. I felt super at ease watching, and because all the recipes are just 3 ingredients, I felt like I could easily get up and make one or all of them myself if I so chose. I hope he enjoyed making this one as much as I did watching.
This insanely gorgeous cheesecake recipe from HidaMari Cooking appeared in my suggested videos so many times that I finally relented, being a huge fan of peaches and a disliker of cheesecake. This Japanese creator’s channel is full of these absolutely beautiful creations, all with the goal of being pleasing to the eyes and ears. I would consider this part of the wave of mostly Japanese creators who were creating this ASMR cooking content last year.
Another prime example in this genre is Peaceful Cuisine, who makes soothing food videos with and without music. (There are 2 versions for many of the recipes he makes.) This is his most popular one, and he’s been creating little moments of peace and tasty treats for years now.
If you haven’t seen yet, Dalgona coffee has been a beverage trend in South Korea for over a month now as Koreans in quarantine learn to make something delicious and beautiful in the confines of their home. This video, from Cho’s Daily Cook, is part of a trending genre in Korea called #homecafe, where people create sumptuous-looking beverages in aesthetic as all heck videos. (Eater did a great write-up about this trend.) This was one of my favorite videos from early on before Dami Lee blew up the trend’s spot in the United States and it started going viral on TikTok and Instagram here, too.
I hope you enjoy these videos and that they help you find a bit more calm in your day. Relax your jaw, take some deep breaths, release the tension in your shoulders. There are cozy food videos waiting for you.
If you have any relaxing food videos to share, please do! I’m always looking for more to enjoy.
Sip of Starrshine 