24 hours can make quite a difference.  Yesterday I was thinking it would probably take a while for us to feel any real impact if we felt any at all.  Today things felt different.  I hit the grocery store twice today, once for us to pick up staples, once to go out with my son to get what he needed.  Another son checked in to see if we had stocked up.  The lines to check out took us longer to get through than the shopping itself.  Shelves were bare and grocery carts were full.  Everyone was very calm but the situation itself was crazy.

The university decided to close beginning tomorrow and students and faculty are scrambling, trying to figure out what next steps are.  The school district asked for local businesses to provide bags for students to take their chrome books home.  We’re supposed to hear something tomorrow.  My supervisor has been working on remote learning for music students.

All sports have stopped and both pro and college basketball is over for the season.  No tournament, no 2020 Champion.  Those who can’t accept this are wondering if we can reschedule for later in the year.  I have one word for them:  LOGISTICS. Sports commentators spent the day talking about what might have been.  My sports loving husband is going through a little bit of a funk like I’m sure a lot of people are.  After all, the tournament is a national social phenomenon, something we all watch and talk about together.  What are we going to do now?

The NY Metropolitan Opera closed which means my students won’t be watching The Flying Dutchman streamed Live from the Met.  We had studied it for weeks.  Broadway has closed down.  Performances, conferences, concerts, workshops have all been cancelled.  My meeting next week in D.C. has become a virtual meeting.  I’ll see if I can’t get a voucher for the tickets to use this summer.  That’s if we’ve gotten back to normal.

There’s this idea that we can all isolate and work remotely using our devices.  All at once.  I don’t know about you, but it’s a good day at school if the server works without knocking you off, freezing or spinning the beachball of death.  Can you imagine everyone on their devices all day?  It won’t happen.  I’m thinking paper and pencil.  They never break down.  They don’t get lost in some cloud.  This is where old people will become hip again because we actually know how to use these resources.  I’m personally looking forward to our resurgence.

There are a lot of naysayers, convinced that things aren’t as bad as people are making them out to be, that we’re overreacting.  After all, can we really trust the media?  Isn’t it all “fake news”?  I hear some people saying things like “ONLY (number) people have died or only older people have died.  How many people have to die before it’s enough to shut things down?  It’s going to be very hard, and at the very least, a great inconvenience, but as a nation we’ve survived much harder.  We can do this, as long as we work together and not against each other.

Today was weird.  I didn’t even begin anything I wanted to do because there were other things that kept popping up, all related in some way to this virus and how it is affecting everything it touches.  I’m sure tomorrow will bring more surprises.  I keep wondering what we’re supposed to be learning here.  Events like this don’t just happen – at least I don’t believe they do.  Are we willing to learn from this or will we just be anxious and complain about first world problems?  How are we going to handle it if there are more empty shelves tomorrow?