Hey, there! Welcome, gracious readers and bots, to the eleventh annual Midlife Crisis Crossover year-in-review! Once again we run down the site’s highlights and nadirs among readers, skimmers, search engine gadabouts, and any other casual internet users who come within fifty years of this li’l flyover site. Over twelve months those fleeting glances add up to concrete stats that may or may not be reliable indicators of trends, fads, and successes ‘n’ sins on my part.
Tag Archives: COVID-19
Enjoy Every Sandwich
Some folks patronize blogs for the words. Some are just here for the pictures. Words and pictures are often meant to interlink hand-in-hand, but authorial intent is not truly in charge of the reader’s experience. Consumers can exercise their freedom to ignore one half of the storytelling in favor of the other. Comics have sold for years using a similar dichotomy.
Sometimes my connections between words and pictures are tenuous, but they’re no less real or visible to me. In this very entry, for example, food aficionados can appreciate glimpses of one August morning at a lovely little eatery in Zionsville called Rosie’s Place, the last time we hit up a local establishment that wowed us enough to remember to take photos. Previous Zionsville visits have been a treat every time, no matter which of their establishments we’ve visited.
While that photo gallery is in progress around me, readers who don’t mind my characteristic verbosity can see me fumbling for the right words in a moment of grief and rage.
Dragon Con 2021 Photos #10: Day Zero
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:
In 2019 my wife Anne and I attended our very first Dragon Con in Atlanta, Georgia. We returned home to Indianapolis with a plethora of new memories, hundreds and hundreds of photos, and a shared suspicion that we’d return someday. Not every year, but someday. In the year of our grand pandemic 2020 we attended exactly zero conventions for easily guessed reasons. In 2021 several cons made their comeback plans, but Dragon Con stepped up hardest and made us some offers we couldn’t refuse. We didn’t have to think long or hard before accepting the special rules under which this pandemic-era show would be held…
Once nice thing about dragging out a convention photo-gallery miniseries for weeks after the fact is, strangers have stopped searching for anything relevant that we might’ve had to offer them in the way of memories or cosplay photos that intersect with their own, so I can ease down, scale back, and touch on the smaller and more personal stories no one else cares about except us. Our arrival in Atlanta, for example, marked our return to comic-con life for the first time since November 2019. In many ways Dragon Con was easier the second time around if we disregard the parts most drastically affected by the endless pandemic.
The Post-Vax Celebration Breakfast and Field Test
Are you as tired of reading about the pandemic as I am of mentioning it in nearly every single post here? Wouldn’t it be great if I could move on? And if we as a planet could move on? It hasn’t happened yet, but we can dream of that future while we wallow in the mortal dystopia of Pandemica, because emotional multitasking is among our coronavirus-era coping mechanisms.
As with many an arduous journey, the path to the After Times will be a series of baby steps. And someone has to go forth and be those stepping babies.
Tiptoeing Back into the House of the Lord
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: pandemic pandemic bo-bandemic, banana-rama-fo-fandemic, fee fi mo mandemic: pandemic! It’s sucked beyond all calculable orders of magnitude, has put people we know in the hospital or the grave, and currently rated a negative-ten-million percent on the Tomatometer.
Then amid Worst Year Ever, a ray of hope: the vaccines arrived. Then amid our ray of hope, penetrating lasers of inky darkness: a media and populace that simultaneously embrace vaccines and distrust them at the same time. And I’m not talking about the deniers shrieking at us from their log-cabin schoolhouses with tinfoil roofs, boasting how they’re more interested in preserving their reckless impunity than achieving herd immunity. No, I’m talking about the ostensible “good guys”:
Emerging From Tombs
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: pandemic. Pandemic! PANDEMIC! How much longer, we all wonder? When will we as a planet — or at least as a country, or really just statewide would be nice — reach that quixotic goal of “herd immunity”? When can we go back to wandering within 2-3 feet of each other and resume absentmindedly taking everyday life for granted again? For us, Easter weekend represented another stepping stone toward that goal.
A Sunday Brunch Between Hope and Impatience
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: over the past several months my wife Anne and I have made infrequent outings to local restaurants using the guidelines I set forth in my previous listicle about how we do pandemic dining without getting killed or killing others. The TL;DR version:
- Masks, masks, masks, masks for for all the reasons
- Multinational chains will survive without us, so aim for locals
- Just the two of us, no guests from other households
- Places that take reservations generally plan better, so make them
- Eat pricey for maximum desertion
- Eat during slow hours when no one else is eating
- Don’t overstay the welcome
Last Sunday morning we stepped out of the house again. In a way, we had cause for celebration. That phrase hasn’t come up for us often during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Should We Have Taken a “One Year Later” Time Jump to Today?
Once upon a time in 2006, The Powers That Be at DC Comics continued their tradition of biannual publishing stunts with “One Year Later”, in which all ongoing series leapt forward in time twelve full months, dropped their heroes into weird new scenarios with no initial explanations, then kept the stories moving forward from there while occasionally braking for flashbacks to all the important events that messed up the status quo during the year they skipped. As superheroic special events go, it was kindasorta fun for about ten minutes till the next publishing stunt came along.
Meanwhile this past weekend, my social media feeds have been filled with friends, family, strangers and other users reminiscing of the Before Times way back when — whether wistfully or ruefully — all recalling “one year ago today” and “this time last year” and other non-milestones before the world was upended by horrid little microorganisms that exploited our weaknesses, and not just the physiological ones.
If you had the option to skip the past twelve months in real life so you wouldn’t have to have lived it one minute at a time, one failure at a time, one agony at a time, one calamity at a time…how confused would you be if your timeline ended “this time last year” and then you returned to your story today, and your supporting cast had to catch you up on everything you missed?
Precautionary Shoegazing: Our 2020 in Pandemic Floor Decals
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: pandemic! Pandemic! PANDEMIC!
Among the 6,000 things we hated doing differently for our own safety in 2020, one of the easiest yet weirdest was going into businesses to buy whatever, approaching the register, and having to take standing lessons from social-distancing floor decals. Because in a world where those infected with the coronavirus could unknowingly kill innocent bystanders with their breath like a clumsy ninja Godzilla, some folks were poor judges of distance and/or medical hygiene. As always, in a pandemic or otherwise, some people need practical advice.
Christmas Anyway
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: pandemic! Pandemic! PANDEMIC!
Also, it’s the holiday season! We found a way to enjoy Thanksgiving weekend safely and are among the 197 Hoosiers who didn’t test positive for COVID-19 two weeks later. Lord willing, we might just make it to Christmas Day. Maybe even beyond! It’s good to have goals and hopes.