Yesterday someone, talking with me about what is ok to do once we're fully vaccinated, referred to that as "the After Time".

I mentioned in April that if the pre-pandemic past was The Before Times, and the post-pandemic future will be The After Times, then "right now is The During Times. Right? That feels right. Duration, during, endure, endurance."

I don't know yet whether it will feel like The After Times for me once I have received my second vaccination shot and then waited two weeks. But I do know that I am having a hard time with endurance right now.

My brittleness is counter to how so many things are going better, big and small. Spring weather, the new federal administration, the vaccine rollout, book stuff. I cannot do a standard push-up but I can do inclined push-ups, and today the trainer for my remote exercise class explicitly told me that my push-ups are coming along nicely.

My habits are helping pull me through. The exercise class, and the other ways I exercise with friends and Nintendo. My regular coworking sessions in videocalls with friends. These took energy to establish, and now they are repaying the favor... I would say that I feel like they're a conveyor belt, but it's nothing so well-designed. I am being dragged along an ocean floor by a chain of metal links. Someday the surface will show up again. The light will be a different color and won't weave around in the waves. The smells and the breeze will smash into me without warning. And all around me friends and strangers will bob to the surface, and look around, and cautiously start swimming over to one another. Those who made it.