Curating Your
Bubble
by Flora Jardine
Since you're
supposed to stay within your bubble during the
COVID pandemic, it's important to curate it. Who's
in it? Friends, relatives, co-workers? These are
people you are thrown into a cell with as if for
a prison sentence, so from a mental sanity point
of view you should design your bubble carefully.
Your spouse and kids are in, presumably, but
beyond that? What happens when your spouse adds
people you dislike? You don't want one of the
precious spaces in this exclusive club taken up
by someone objectionable. Should there be a
member-nomination process? A way of black-balling
the unwanted?
Should there be a planning meeting, of the “if
we have to take a weekly walk with your friend
Moaning Mary then I get to include Manic Mark”
nature?
Should in-laws be confined to zooming and skyping?
What about parents of your kids' friends? Hikes
with the Dawson-Brown family, to get some
exercise?
“Oh no -- with their hyperactive autistic
kid?”
“We have to.”
“Why?”
“Because he's a hyperactive autistic kid.”
“Our kids don't even like him.”
“They have to learn that 'we're all in this
together' ...”
Maybe you create a sub-bubble. “Just popping
down to the grocery store,” you call out
while slipping off to meet a secondary-bubble
friend in the park, each bringing a flask because
the local cafe and pub have both been shut down.
Inevitably, chatting bundled up in the cold, you
analyze each other's bubble. If yours isn't
intriguing, you suffer bubble-envy. You indulge
in a spot of name-dropping.
“Sounds like you're breaking the rules,”
says your friend. “Surely that's more than
six people in your bubble?”
“But not really – it's still only six
people per bubble.”
Anything to get away from Zoom, you say. You're
seriously suffering zoom-fatigue. It's bad enough
having to use the platform for work meetings;
social meetings as well are too much, and those
annoying volunteer groups that invite you to join
their informational sessions “should be
illegal,” you declare.
Plus, zoom-room-envy is worse than bubble-envy.
Competitive zoom-room-design is one of the
pandemic's most demonic features. You happen to
know that behind your acquaintances' carefully
chosen background of sculptures, hanging plants
and window features, the rest of their house is
like a rubbish tip. You assume it's the same for
those experts, officials and intellectuals who
pose and pontificate to the rest of us on Zoom.
You're particularly amused by those who choose
shelves of books for a background, with
particular covers artfully turned face-out.
“Look what I read,”
they're saying. “Only quality new releases
for me during my studious stay-at-home lock-down.”
Finally you come up with a brilliant alternative
to all this imprisonment and frustration: you
adopt a rescue dog. Nobody can blame you for
being abroad, masked or unmasked, if you're
exercising an innocent abandoned dog you rescued
from a shelter.
“Just taking the dog for a run,” you
call breezily to your family whenever you find,
like Wordsworth, that they are “too much
with you”. What a relief to get off to the
park or beach where all those lucky dog-walkers
jog along free as the wind that blows through
their hair. You meet all kinds of new friends, a
cast of characters that burst your tiny bubble of
confinement in a flurry of excited socializing
– and the humans aren't bad either.
|
