Work From Home by Fifth Harmony

It’s still happening guys.

We’ve reached the part of the pandemic when I start making s’mores on my stove and read about QAnon while I eat them. Just because it’s the pandemic, and the pandemic is when you tell the truth, I have googled “best way to get marshmallow off your keyboard” in the last 48 hours.

Now, I guess, we’re all starting to make plans to try to figure out how to live our real lives from here on out, coexisting with the Rona. 

Up until recently I feel like we lived like this was going to be temporary. I was kind of really counting on that. Before this international emergency I had JUST reached some sort of safe place in life. I was starting a new job I was excited about, I was making enough money to live, and more importantly, to do it **alone**. I had taken the very adult step of not being friends with people I had always kind of hated anymore, and I finally accepted the fact that guys really do like how big my ass is. I just felt like I had been working for 31 years and finally getting to enjoy what security, and confidence in my place in life felt like. I mean I was never going to be perfectly happy, there would always be things to worry about for no reason, but I had real moments when things felt more or less settled.

The weekend before we were asked to stay home, I had had my first Rose New York date Saturday. I had decided that I had lived in New York for a semi-long 9 years and it was criminal how little of it I had experienced. For so many of those years, I was just working, or sleeping, or drinking. To a certain extent it felt like I spent that time earning the RIGHT to live here, which I knew could only be bestowed by The NY You Are Not Welcome Committee, who track your misery and sacrifice points using an app someone made for them in California.

I took myself to the LES that weekend. I went to the Tenement Museum and crowded into a room with a group of German tourists (I miss crowding into things) one of whom politely had to correct our American tour guide more than twice but less than four times. I got an absurd croissant with gold leaf on it at a bakery I’d been meaning to try (I have an extensive list off remarkable baked goods I need to visit.) I ended up at a new Chinese/American diner right under the Manhattan bridge. It was a perfect, meandering New York day. It reminded me why I was so willing to deal with the very real threat that at any moment a stranger could spit on me.

I’m glad I had a weekend like that before this all went down. And I’m also encouraged to see NYC rising to this. New York holds it down. NYC will spit on you then give you the most incredible experiences you’ll ever have. It has substance, and that doesn’t just go away. I<heart>NYC.

At this point I do feel like I’m boring my therapist. She would never say it, she’s lovely, and frankly, that would make her a shitty therapist. She hasn’t even given me any real reason to suspect that she is. I just know how boring I’m being. I know how bored I would be listening to me talk about the three guys I’m barely dating or about how I really didn’t plan on being in my apartment this much and how right now I didn’t really know who I was, as a person, outside of work. Work being the only thing I’ve been able to focus on definitely doesn't help the whole situation but there’s not a ton I can do about that right now.

I am using this pandemic time to choose new areas of exploration that it’s unlikely past Rose would bother trying. Like- I’m doing a new fruit thing these days. And that thing is eating it. I have never been someone who eats fruit regularly. I love vegetables, mostly because I use them as a salt delivery system, but fruit is just so…messy. I associate it with the children I don’t like (…every child who is not mine...) who always seem to have it smeared around their mouths.

And it turns out you be totally healthy without fruit. But so many fashionable people on instagram photograph themselves in a beautiful matching athleisure outfit eating fruit and caption it something like “I always like a little treat after I work out.”  I was feeling left out, if a little disgusted.

So I’m doing it. I’m eating it. And I’m wearing matching outfits to work out. And to be honest, both things are great. It turns out, the key is cutting it up (not the outfit) and by that I mean paying someone else to cut it. I’m ashamed of how long it took me to problem solve that one.

This new addition to my repertoire is a good thing but it’s also a weird one. Like, why now? I find myself doing out of character shit all the time these days. I just submitted an application to foster dogs.

I’ve also gotten weirdly vain over the last few months. I realized (at age 31) that any woman with amazing nails I’ve ever seen ever has some sort of fake ones.  It had been comforting, thinking that some women are just able to grow their natural nails long enough for them to be naturally perfect without breaking and that no amount of money could buy that level of orthopedic perfection. But I was deceived. It’s all fake, all constructed from man-made materials that haven’t existed long enough to know for sure that they won’t give you hand cancer. Right now I've got gel extensions on 3 out of 9 fingers (jk I have 11) and suddenly, I give north of two fucks about my nails.

I got my hair dyed platinum blonde. I look like a K-pop backup singer. It’s ridiculous and I am obsessed with it. It took six hours, during which my stylist told me her entire life story, which was objectively insane. She bleached the fuck out of it, to the point where I couldn’t imagine ever looking attractive again. Then she toned it, which makes it blonde and not like Carrot Top fucked a scarecrow. Now it’s six weeks and I already have to go back for another round. I know myself, and my commitment to all of this bullshit will wane, and it won’t take that long. I can’t use the shift key anymore and I can’t listen to my stylist talk for another six hours.

I don’t know why the sudden interest in more involved beautification endeavors. None of the people I speak with each day can see anything about me in any level of detail. None of them can tell how short I am. Being short is such a big part of my personality. I’m like the classic bitchy but adorable elf. Don’t even try to tell me that isn’t a type. It’s like Natalie Portman in Garden State but meaner and under a bridge.

My coworkers basically haven’t even met me yet, even after five months of near constant “contact.” So there’s really no need to make any presentational effort. Even if I did make an effort, cute clothes don’t look cute on Zoom. It’s a new job and I don’t even feel like flirting with anyone. I don’t even recognize myself anymore. The camera adds 10 pounds, but the web camera adds 8 pounds and a fucked up face.

I have taken note that I have the coolest Zoom background of all of company so far. I’ve been saying it for years, It’s just amazing what exposed brick brings to the table, and all my friends keep saying is “Rose you gotta shut up about the brick.”

In my almost nine years of living here I’ve been shown apartments with exposed brick that are BYOF (bring your own fridge) and I still hesitate for a second before saying no. My apartment now looks like (a smaller version of) the apartment of the mean but hot brunette from a WB teen drama. I’m like if that character shrunk and was  a lot poorer. Still glam, but compact. My studio apartment is the size of half of their foyer, but I’ve a substantial percentage of walls are exposed brick. It’s worth it- if all I have to do is store my bathing suits under the kitchen sink and develop an obsession with tiny house blogs, I feel it’s a fair trade. Everything from those blogs applies, and honestly I have big long term plans for a tiny house once New York fully digests me and I come out the other side. Sorry that was crass, what I meant was once New York shits me out into New Jersey.

I’m going to try to update this more often. I miss you.