Day One Hundred Four

It has been such a strange year. I know we all know that, but sometimes you pause for a moment and the enormity of the WTF-edness overwhelms you like a tsunami of impossibility. HOW IS THIS ALL REAL? I mean, every time we think it's gotten as bad as it can get, we find another false bottom in the barrel of suck and dive a little deeper.

And deeper.

And deeper.

The thing that is currently drowning my joy is the realization that I'm so dependent on other people to keep my family safe. I can do everything right and focus all my energy on keeping them healthy and happy, but one false move by someone else can be the thing that ruins it all.

I'm looking at you, jackhole family not wearing masks at Mila's dance recital this weekend.

By "recital" I mean HOLY NOT NORMAL, BATMAN. In a typical year, dance recitals involve 3+ hour extravaganzas with hundreds and hundreds of people. Legit, the girls' studio has over 1000 dancers, so it takes two full weekends and multiple performances to run through all of the classes. This year it will end up taking several weeks and countless separate little "recitals." Mila's performance was one of 5 that was lumped into a recital together. FIVE! IT took less than half an hour to get through the entire show, which is roughly how long it usually takes for me to want to start poking my eyes out with a dull lollipop stick. Each dancer was limited to 4 people in the audience, which means that I'm not crazy when I say there were fewer than 100 people in attendance.

We were spread out over a 15,000 square foot space. The stage was smaller than what it would have been if not for COVID-19, but everything else was bigger. Emptier and bigger. The nearest we ever came to anyone was probably 15 feet, and that was passing through the doorway on our way out.

Even with that cautious approach, I couldn't help but glare. There was an entire family - four people - not wearing masks. They were the only ones and they were in the back corner, far away, BUT STILL. There is very little we can do to control our world right now and most of that involves a simple piece of fabric across our pieholes. It may be possible for one person to have a valid reason to not wear a mask, but an entire family? I call shenanigans. That's a choice.

And I'm still pissed the studio let them in. The performance was live-streamed, so it's not like there wasn't an alternative.

That's the thing that has broken me, at least for now. I can't control that family. I can't control the people who have been thrust into a position to enforce the most basic of rules. All I can do is hope that the dumbest thing either of them has done in the past few weeks is allow for that moment to happen.

This timeline sucks.

(But OMG Mila was so freakin adorable and did such a good job and I'm glad we went because the kid positively glowed for hours afterwards.)