66 It Will Only Last a Month

Tomas Greenberg

When COVID-19 hit, I was house-sitting for my mother and stepfather in Newmarket. They had flown to Costa Rica to find a place to retire when I got the news about the first lockdown. I was 28 years old, and I had a job at a local board game café in Guelph called The Roundtable. 

The lockdowns started on my birthday, of all days. There were plans made for the place my family was meant to celebrate, but the restaurant had called to say they didn’t feel comfortable. This cancellation was the first instance where COVID-19 directly affected me. The cancellation made me rather upset, and as a result, the first month or so after, I was deeply skeptical/dismissive about the virus, the government’s reaction to it, and the sense behind the lockdowns; this was until I learned more about it. These were initial full lockdowns, so I think it was 3-4 months, only grocery stores and essential services were open. I remember going on a walk down from my house to the main intersection a block away. The intersection (and adjourning artery) was one of the main routes anyone takes in Guelph from downtown to the South End. It was totally empty. I walked in the middle of the road for a mile without the single sound of a car. It was an eerie visage of apocalypse. My day-to-day life changed drastically. I was working in the service industry, so I was used to working 4-5 days a week for 6-12 hours. But the bar was closed and, as a result… I was utterly elated. I loved it. No work, plus the gov’t began paying out CERB (Canadian Emergency Response Benefit), $2000 a month (which was 300 more than I would normally get). Suddenly, I had all the free time in the world and more money than I knew what to do with. 

The only major change was the lack of a ‘third place,’ a place other than my home or work. I couldn’t go to the gym or a café to write or see friends, but I’ve always been a sedentary homebody. So, I spent most of my time (as I had on my weekends) painting, writing, playing video games, and experimenting with new recipes. With the extra time and money, I learned to cook several Indian dishes as well as Korean Bibimbap, Bahn Mi sandwiches, French Bourguignon, perfect butter scones, and tacos… so many tacos. I had a whole month where I only ate a wide variety of tacos, breakfast, lunch and dinner. It was an abundance of freedom with nowhere to go but the kitchen. When I saw friends, I had to check in with my roommates to see if they were healthy and felt comfortable having others around. I couldn’t hug or shake hands, which was a bummer. I remember there being this constant, unshakable aura of tension surrounding interactions with other people, like we were all in some other country trying to suss out the social conventions on the fly with each other. Do I hug you, do I not? Do we wear a mask? Do we not? Are you vaccinated? Are your parents? 

The best thing that came out of COVID-19 was the challenges I had to overcome, which led me to return to university. I had so much time to truly think about what I wanted to do with my life. I was in a good place spiritually (I began taking meditation seriously) and had enough money to experiment with things I wanted to do. I tried day trading first (the GME thing was big, and I made a lot more money), but it ultimately kicked my ass. Then, I tried being an artist/writer, but it turned out I didn’t like them as much as I thought. Finally, I tried starting a mutual aid organization to help people in my community with errands, which was fun but labour-intensive and involved me just doing groceries and gardening for my neighbours. The true revelation came as I entered the workforce again near the end of COVID-19; it was as if my life was going back to the ‘old normal.‘ I didn’t want that. So, I decided to go back to university, saved money from my job and came to McMaster. 

(What was virtual schooling like for you?)

I wasn’t in school. But I did do DnD (Dungeons and Dragons), a tabletop roleplaying game. This was originally in-person, but it all switched to online; I hated online interactions. There is a magic and comfort that come from in-person meetings, which are wholly removed for me when done over Zoom.

The most significant cultural changes for me were the explosion of conspiratorial thinking prompted by the fear/confusion COVID-19 brought, missteps by officials within governments, and the general lack of understanding regarding epidemiology. The conspiracy thinking was already there, fueled in some way by the rhetoric of the recently elected U.S. president Donald Trump (as much as I’d like to blame it all on him, the man is not the source but rather the exploiter of the epistemic environment). During COVID-19, the conspiracies were met with a ‘physicality,’ an everyday reminder that something was up, masks and lockdowns, something was finally happening that they could map their ideas onto. People who were otherwise apolitical in my life (even hospital nurses) began to furiously consume content about Chinese bioweapons, secret underground tunnels, and mass eugenics programs. My favourite was the last one, a family member claimed that everyone who took the vaccine was going to be dead in 2 years (for us, that would have been 2023), I bet him 10 bucks, but by the time 2023 came around all of a sudden it wasn’t instant death it was a ‘nano-bot trigger’ that could be activated at ANYTIME THEY WANTED!!