Everything feels pretend.

I still have a day job advocating for better public transportation. Apple is still releasing new hardware. Survivor still airs on Wednesdays nights. But, like, none of that stuff seems particularly real at the moment. We're all carrying on like everything is normal, just digital and remote. I'm getting more and more invites for more and more conference calls and Zoom meetings. My calendar, which was mostly white space this week, has a slow tide of colored blocks rising next week. Meanwhile, I keep looking at the number of reported coronavirus cases in Virginia and keep thinking about how exponential math works.

"New Normal" is a trope, but I get the push to return to a normal—or at least move forward to a time of less uncertainty. Filling up your calendar with a scaffolding of Zooms to hang your week on does create certainty. But is that normal? Lately, I've been spending some time teaching my son how to make a Keynote about the solar system. Is that normal? I'm cool with that being the New Normal, honestly.