Deviant Dispatches

I'm about to reveal that I'm even weirder than you always suspected. Sometimes, I've just known something. As certainly as you know an apple thrown in the air will hit the ground, I've (impossibly) understood a future truth.  When I was 19, I barely knew a thing about this boy in my band class. Despite that, I felt a connection and knew that if he gave us a chance, we could last a long time together. I'd never even had a boyfriend before.  Ten months later, we started dating. We've been together 15 years. When we lived in New Mexico, I knew about our future daughter. I saw her dark hair, her dimples. At that point, I didn't even know if I wanted kids, but the image of her was so clear.  Ten years later, she is five and as vibrant and full of personality as I saw then. I share these as a precursor so that you can fully understand. When I say I had a Feeling, I want you to know what I mean. When Trump came down the escalator four years ago to announce his can...

I need to start keeping track of what's going on for my own sanity. I want to be able to look back and say that things really were going that fast - to say, I hope, that we seem to have worried for nothing. To remember the good in all of this. I also need way more therapy than I can afford (though I'm still getting therapy, trust me), and so I write. I'm labeling the days in accordance with my workplace shutdown. Day 1 (Monday) was my first day working from home to prevent the spread of COVID-19. I'm happy to overreact so that others will survive, so they don't have to worry about whether a ventilator will be free if needed. I'm also still recovering, three and a half weeks later, from influenza A and am not eager to be that sick again. Less than two weeks after my trip to Korea (by the way, I went to Korea!), I got sick. After a little prompting, I requested COVID-19 testing and was told that CDC guidelines wouldn't allow my doctor's office to do ...