(no subject)

[brin_bellway]

[cw: illness, death, venting]


"we", I say

even if "we" "time" "the" "household" "lockdown" "correctly"

this is eliding over a *lot* of bullshit, and I am beginning to understand just how much bullshit it is going to be

I figure the ascending order of difficulty here in getting everyone on the same page is Mom --> Dad --> Brother, and I just had a talk with Mom and even *she* was a massive pain.

she clings to anything that suggests things aren't going to be that bad (do you want to bet your life?), she has that parent-brainwashing cares-about-my-life-but-not-hers thing (I tried to bootstrap her into caring about her own survival by pointing out how much it would suck for me if she died, with *maybe* partial success)

Look, I'm not saying we should lock down *today*. Even I think that's too soon for us. But this is precisely why we need to have these arguments *now*, so that when the time comes we've already made our decision and we can just do it.

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We might end up with a staggered system, with different thresholds for at least some of:

• Parents stop working


• I continue to work but hole up in my bedroom whenever I'm not working (my brother is pure back-of-house staff while I do both back and front, which means that of the two of us only I come into direct contact with customers and I am therefore a bigger contagion risk than he is)


• I stop working


• Brother holes up whenever he's at home (god, good luck getting him to go along with that)


• Brother stops working

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Mom thinks the three of us (that is, not Brother: he keeps himself a little more separate) should come to an agreement first and *then* talk to Brother about what we've come up with. I worry that shutting him out of the initial discussion will just make him even less likely to adhere to quarantine.

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(...although, if I *can* get Mom and Dad but not Brother on the same page, maybe *they* can hole up in their bedroom.)

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(Interestingly, the 90% cancer-related figure that sticks in *Mom's* head is *not* the 90% chance of not having cancer given the tumor (which did not happen), but rather the 90% chance that, *having* this cancer, it would not recur within 10 years (and indeed, it did not recur).)

Comments

[contrarianarchon]

Unfortunate of you to end up in the space where quarantine is possible-but-hard; I've honestly just given up on getting anything more than hypothetical government-mandated quarntine out of my flatmates. I don't have enough pull with them.

[brin_bellway]

Apparently my parents talked amongst themselves last night and, *independently* from me, came up with the idea of preemptively holing up in their bedroom. Good sign, re: plan being actually workable.

The three of us will be hashing out some stuff this evening, but I expect that will be the core of the plan.

Let's see, things we need to hash out:

• Chore division (I cook on the three nights a week I'm not working but Brother is, Brother cooks on his two nights off, no hot meal on days we're both working? also, while we're at it, how much protective gear do cooks need to wear?)


• Fetching logistics (Mom had already come up with the idea of a table outside a quarantined bedroom's door, for items to sit on when moving in and out; maybe they can put disposable bowls/plates out on the table, and I bring up the dinner pot and scrape food into those? and they will definitely need some disinfectant wipes inside, since not everything can be fetched like that)


• The alarm signal (community transmission in Waterloo Region?)


• The all-clear signal (some number of weeks since last recorded community case, maybe? two? three?)

(and yes, this means not having treadmill access for potentially quite some time, although I *will* have access to stairs I can climb up and down repeatedly, and before we owned a treadmill I used to walk loops around the ground floor of the house)

(and if there *does* end up being some kind of mandated quarantine such that even Brother isn't leaving the house, there would have to be some point at which the whole house is officially clean and it's just the *rest* of the world that's presumed contaminated)

(we probably also need contingencies for if kid(s) actually become symptomatic: take your pick of reasons why I'm not making curry while feverish)

I've been contemplating this future, and the is-this-clean part of my brain is struggling to wrap around stuff like "being too sick to hug my mother but not too sick to work", "abandoning all but one room of the house to the germs with me inside", and "being in charge of cooking, but the cleanliness status of food containers has to shift *upward* to reach its recipients". I think I can deal if I have to, though, for something this important.