Category: Life in the Time of the Coronavirus Contest

By Marieke Oudejans When I was seven and a half years old, we moved from a small town in the Netherlands to the big bustling city of Bangkok, Thailand. I was woefully unprepared, but adapted amazingly well. The farewell gift from my classmates had been a collection of their drawings depicting my future life. It showed me in front of a wooden house on stilts, lounging in a hammock strung to palm trees, holding monkeys in my lap. This was an era when people did not travel far. No one…

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By Rachel Monge The coronavirus took away my prom, graduation ceremony and my 18th birthday party. Although, those were once in a lifetime moments I would not ask for them back but instead I would ask for the rest of America to wake up and move forward. I’ve been working part-time at a grocery store since the summer of my junior year. However, the pandemic closed down my mother’s factory and I was left to work full-time to keep our household afloat. Working 6 days out of the week during…

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By Devra Maza  Writers are naturals at social distancing. We live in our minds, tossing thoughts out like lifelines, while transforming blank pages into stories. So when a “stay-at-home” order was issued in Los Angeles to slow the spread of the deadly COVID-19 virus, sending everyone home to stare at computers, I couldn’t help but think, “Now everyone’ll know what it feels like to be a writer.” I was deep in research on March’s Friday the 13th (go figure) when the public library and Getty museum abruptly closed. Not slated…

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By Rochelle Levy Happiness  (in this most unsettling time) is A gift at the front door—toilet paper, Kleenex and a roll of paper towels Telling my boss that my facetime is “broken” so that she doesn’t know that I am still in my pajamas When my grand daughter Charlie tells me that what she misses most during the week is “me” Answering every opinion poll that appears in my email account,  making me feel quite important to someone. . . Rain, lots of rain. . .that I  stay dry inside and…

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By Naiia Lajoie In the time BCV (Before CoVid-19), I held many titles: actor, automotive product specialist, traveling host, journalist, professional underwater performer, and children‟s entertainer. Work was consistent, paychecks were plentiful, and I was hardly home. When the Coronavirus hit, only one of those jobs remained. The entertainment industry went dark, travel ceased, my publications went on hiatus, and all of Southern California held onto their nest eggs tightly; uncertain of when their next paycheck would be received. Death tolls became a part of daily vernacular, and even the…

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By Kat Kramer Welcome to the Age Of Aquarius? We’re supposed to be approaching this incredible time, based on a New Age philosophy and Astrological principles. Instead, we’re now in the Age of Coronavirus. How long this challenging cycle will last, nobody knows. We do have past historical examples to learn from, such as the Swine Flu pandemic of 1918, which wiped out more souls worldwide than World War 1. People call me daily asking “how are you during this terrible COVID-19 pandemic?” I tell them “doing just fine, thank-you.”…

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By Allison Hong California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s face is symmetrical, the correct proportions of forehead to eyes and mouth to chin. His nose, the right length. The cadence of his voice, firm yet soothing. His salt-and-pepper hair, although coiffed just so, is the one thing shy of perfection. His hair is a tad long in the back. Perhaps he hasn’t been able to get it cut, because his statewide coronavirus response measures have all the barbershops closed. These are the things my mother, a 65-year-old former artist living in East…

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By Nikol Hasler From the balcony of my new home, I watched a neighbor water her tiny garden. As a 41-year old single mother who’d once been homeless, I never imagined I might own a condo one day. My roommate came along as my tenant, and we’d been eyeing up the neighbor’s pepper plants. “Beautiful peppers!”, I called out to her. She smiled and made a gesture toward me, asking, “For you?” She hosed off the peppers and put them on my porch, then said something to her son in…

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By Daniel Guss @TheGussReport – Once I got the handle on how to keep my local family members relatively safe during the Corona Virus, or COVID19, outbreak earthquake, I would describe the experience as more of an inconvenience than much of anything else in our households. In fact, there are laughs and other curious observations to be had if you know where to look and don’t let all of the death and unemployment get to you. Early on, when I tried to describe the apocalyptic conditions in the supermarket to…

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By Michael Goldstein Journalists are obligated to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. But what happens when we are afflicted by the very subject we write about? Despite how some view us, journalists are human, subject to depression, distraction, and the looming illness itself. COVID-19 is a worldwide pandemic. Its effects are felt in every household, including mine. One challenge is maintaining professionalism as a journalist. My “swim lane” at Forbes.com is the $5 trillion travel business. Chronicling its precipitous decline during the pandemic has been painful. It is…

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