The World Has Changed, Shelly

Tracy and I were talking about something entirely inane, although, given today’s current political climate, everything seems inane. Still, this was especially so, something like, we were standing at the check-out line at Costco when I asked if he wanted me to find some cardboard boxes for us to carry our stuff back with. He responded, dryly,

The world has changed, Shelly.

Suddenly, I knew just what he meant and that it applies to so much of how I’m experiencing everything, absolutely everything. 

We left his sticks-and-bricks, March 2020, right when the pandemic started in Washington, D.C., and we stayed on the road, sometimes entirely off grid, for nearly five years. We didn’t buy much, we didn’t drive in cities much, we didn’t go to restaurants or music festivals. A lot changed during that time. Here are my notes on this subject just since that moment in Costco, although I am sure I can think of a ton more. Most of these are based on consumerism, which is embarrassing how much we are consuming now. 

I’m illustrating it with part three of my How Funky Is Your Chicken series of lawn items I’ve found in our neighborhood, although the yard plaque about the UW soil professor and the coat rack for folks using a store’s beer cave are both on the other side of Atwood Avenue.

These days product (a kazillion boxes of Triscuits, for example) isn’t transported on palettes via ships and trains and trucks, is that right? This is my title example—you can’t get cardboard boxes at the Costco checkout line anymore because product is shrink-wrapped instead of boxed. Maybe that’s a good thing for the environment, but it’s a hardship for us Costco patrons! (I’m kidding, it must be a great thing for the planet.)

You can watch your UPS or FedEx or Uber driver get closer and closer to you via an app, thanks to location-based notifications.  I’ll be damned. 

You can pay for anything with tap-to-pay these days, even your meal at the table of your restaurant without involving your waitstaff at all.  So much for the days when the staff looks all cheerful and pleasant so, if you want to give them a bad tip, you have to do it to their face. Ha!

You can accidentally put something in your Amazon cart by pressing a link on your TV screen while watching a show on Amazon Prime. I know … what?!? We noticed something odd was in our cart, like Tide clothes-washing pods, I think it was, and the next day we noticed that those pods are advertised on the TV show we were watching at night that week, and there’s a button right on the screen during the commercial for the item to show up in your cart. For fuck’s sake. 

How do you find local weather without local tv? I believe the last time I cared about the weather day-to-day was eons ago. When Finn went to school, he had to wear a uniform, so it didn’t matter what the weather was, so maybe it was even before that, 20 years ago, when I knew the local weatherman on TV? (I do remember Gene Cox on a TV station in Richmond, since he has my last name.) I have learned while traveling that your local forecaster is better equipped to provide a proper local forecast than the national forecast on an app, so when the shit hits the fan weather-wise, I want a local dude. Now I guess I need to follow this person on social media. 

Everything costs a TON. I mean, really. Imagine you lived under a rock for six years, during covid then during Trump, and now during this latest war. Suddenly, sandwiches at the deli down the street cost $16. And that’s not even for a club sandwich, which is $18! Tracy has finally gotten me to stop exclaiming like an idiot when I hear the price of something, at least not to the person trying to serve it to me. I get so overwhelmed with amazement that I am rude and don’t realize it. 

What, all windows tilt inside for cleaning, now?  I was thrilled to discover that ours do, and Tracy said that I was kinda nuts because they all do. The last house I owned, the one Paul still lives in in West Virginia, is 100 years old and has original windows, each with a rope and pulley system to raise and lower them. That glass is lovely, but man are these an improvement when it comes to washing them! I’ve already washed all the windows in this house, and it has a lot. Twenty to be washed, and I did it in one day, easy peasy!

The medical system is truly screwed up.  I knew this to be the case when I was close to Katherine in the hospital all those years, the way she’d need a crucial test, but if the next day was a holiday, no one was working so forget that. The way all her doctors were specialists who didn’t talk to each other and no one coordinated her care, so duplicate tests were conducted. The way no one specialist heard the results of other tests and no one was seeing the whole picture. And, I knew it was screwed when I had a bunch of medical stuff down in Brownsville where so many mistakes were made. But, here, where medical care is especially good, there’s still a shortage of medical professionals, and those we do have are tight on time thanks for mandates from insurance. Well, I imagine there are a bunch of other good examples of this bad thing, but it’s not until just now that I realized things are worse than they were when we last lived in the real world. 

In this world of shared calendars, how do you maintain privacy and not overshare info with a close person in your life? Tracy and I started sharing our online calendars when we hit the road, since we did everything together, anyway. If I wrote something on my calendar, chances are he would be doing that thing with me, or driving me to it, or needed to know about it for some other important reason. Then, when we moved to the apartment, again we were doing a lot of the same stuff so we kept the shared calendars. But, now that we’re starting to have separate lives (to a small extent, enough that he doesn’t need to know when my ukulele classes are, for example), I have to decide what to share with him. For so many calendar items I have to think, will he need to know this? Will he want to know this? How do you manage a digital life with someone? 

Bathroom scales now measure every aspect of your body! The last scale I owned had a little analog dial that turned to show you your weight in pounds, and that was it. I bought a scale the other day where you stand on it with the balls of your feet and your soles, and it measures what you’re planing to watch on TV that night!  Seriously, how do these things even work? I assume it’s similar to how my watch measures my heart rate, but still, it’s astounding.  I don’t even know what some of these measurements mean.

I’m sure this list will continue to grow as I continue to re-assimilate into the real world. But, the How Funky Is Your Chicken viewings will increase, too, so stay tuned for more.