So it’s been about a year now since life started to return to normal, two years since life as we always knew it ended with that last nice meal in that nice restaurant before everything shut down.
Looking back from the vantage point of 2022, it’s strange to see how so much has changed, both during the long months of isolation and the subsequent return to non-virus life. Ironically, the whole pandemic was liberating in many ways.
After people went back to work in offices, they refused to wear old-fashioned business attire, so now sweat pants and other comfortable clothing are typical office wear. A lot of offices, I hear, have “dress-up” Fridays, where men put on suits and ties and women don business suits and strap on heels. Some women, apparently, even go so far as to wear makeup.
Zoom meetings and other teleconferences are still really popular, though. (Ha! Ha! Just kidding!)
After the whole mask-wearing thing and the political divisions it somehow caused finally ended, people decided that personal freedom trumps personal responsibility. No one pays any attention to speed limits or traffic laws anymore; just because the light is red, that’s really just a suggestion that you should stop, right? Of course, the increase in traffic accidents is a small price to pay for freedom of the highways.
People also ignore the old shirts-and-shoes requirement in restaurants, which regular readers will know is okay with me since I am of the less-is-more school of thought when it comes to clothing, although some people are bothered when women feel the need to express their freedom by forgoing their shirts while dining.
Bras, needless to say, went out of style more than a year ago.
And speaking of dining out, many of us are struggling to come to grips with paying ridiculous prices for cocktails compared to the cheap drinks we had for that long year we were stuck at home. But then what price can you put on the fact that you’re not having to cook at home every night?
We all welcomed socialization back with, well, not exactly open arms, but with a bit more personal spacing. Most of us still tend to shun large crowds – I mean, a year of phobias agains folks coughing and getting too close and spewing their personal germs in your personal space is hard to let go of – but it’s also difficult to resist live music and live theater and just live performances period.
Some people, of course, just never got over being homebodies. They argue that their big-screen TV and Netflix and free snacks are just as good as paying $25 for a movie and some popcorn and they don’t miss those germy seats and chattering people and endless previews. But they’re probably not real movie fans anyway.
Some of us chose to wear masks this past winter even though the pandemic was long gone by the end of summer because, well, we liked not getting diseases other people had, like colds and the flu. Sometimes if takes a half a million deaths to get us to pay more attention to basic precautions and cleanliness.
Hugging is a thing again, at least among family and close friends, because, well, who doesn’t need a hug on occasion? But the handshake is long gone and replaced with the elbow bump or, of course, the more fashionable hip check.
Looking back, it seems odd that so many people opted not to get vaccinated; most of us don’t seem to care about the secret mind-control microchips that it turns out actually were included in those vaccines since we don’t have that much free choice anyway. Personally, I thought it was only fair that doctors and hospitals were allowed to refuse treatment to people who opted not to get vaccinated. Those who are still alive are still stubbornly clinging to their ways, proclaiming their right to do whatever they want even if it means endangering others.
Alas, we still haven’t developed a vaccine for stupidity.