January 19th, 2020.

I had no idea this would be the last party I would go to for over a year (and counting). That it would be the last time I would dance with friends, the last time I would be squeezed indoors with strangers I barely knew, the last time I'd be in public without a mask.

OK fine - this wasn't technically the last time I went out without a mask.

But this night lives in my memory as the last time things felt truly "normal" to me - a normal to which we can never fully return.

Of course, there is more to life than partying with your friends. But also, in defense of partying: it is fucking great. You don't appreciate it, or any of the other things, until they're gone. Remember going in stores? Or going on dates? Barely.

Dear reader: will it all return to normal, or will things stay some shade of Permanently Bad?

Personally? I don't know. The urge to celebrate deep into the night, to travel on a lark, to be surrounded by strangers and friends in dank and sweaty rooms, these things will persist.

But we've also picked up new habits: among them, we've narrowed our social worlds and adopted a degree of suspicion of others.

(OK, I was always suspicious of others)

And having realized that this would be a marathon rather than a sprint, we were forced to adapt. Our survival depended on it. One way to cope with the pain of being unable to meet your preferences is to alter your preferences and pick up new ones. Before you liked parties; now you like waking up at 6am for a long bike ride.

Covid also pushes you to trim the branches of your social tree down to your barest core connections, the people you love most, and then invest like crazy in those relationships. When it's over, will we want to expand again or will we be content with the new steady state? Which parts of our old lives will we even want to go back to?

There is that worn trope of the grandma who lived through the depression and penny-pinches the rest of her life, never able to abandon her hard-won survival skills.

I wonder what that trope will be for all of us. What's the pandemic comfort we won't we be able to abandon?

I'll tell you one thing it won't be: Zoom.