By: Revanche

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (298)

February 16, 2026

Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area

Year 6, Day 294: I keep wanting to make a box cake. Then I remember: it’s so mediocre I won’t enjoy it. Which, I’ve always known what it is BUT I liked it just fine. I took advice to use butter instead of oil, milk instead of water, and added an egg to make it better and still, meh. I keep wondering if it’s me or if something changed with the mixes. Everyone else likes them just fine. I used to live week to week for my Friday night box-cake-and-laundry ritual in middle and high school. I want to reinstate the ritual! But not if I can’t enjoy the cake part of it. I’ve gone searching for other ways to make it better. It feels like by the time I’ve added the butter, the extra egg, the ricotta, the pudding pack, maybe I might as well make the whole damn thing from scratch? I can’t remember the last time I did a cake from scratch, if I ever have. But it feels a whole lot more energy intensive than I can afford. Which takes me back to being grumpy about box cake not tasting quite right anymore.

Year 6, Day 295: Last summer I impulse purchased beautiful Maya Kern skirts with enormous pockets. Advertised as “fits a Nintendo DS”! I don’t have a Nintendo DS but I do have a phone and a wallet and keys and kids who always need snacks and water – I foresaw a fabulous future of magical pockets full to bursting. It was going to be my Mary Poppins moment.

However. While the pockets were absolutely not oversold, the waists are a simple elastic and they defeated me. All of my other skirts have defined waists so I never had to think about it before. I could just pair them with pretty much any shirt and they’d be fine.

Maya’s feed is full of lovely women of all shapes and sizes, mostly plus size with more shape than less, looking wonderful in their skirts with a simple top tucked in. When I put it on, and tucked in a tee (because when packing my bags for that weekend I wasn’t thinking beyond “clothes for the top part”, “clothes for the bottom part”) I looked drab and frumpy. Drab, I’m used to. I’m ruler of sweatpants at work world. But frumpy, ugh. During bedrest, I scrutinized the pictures of Maya’s customers: trying to take notes on how they styled their outfits to get some ideas and even asked some of them for their thoughts. The simplest one seemed to be adding a belt so, using the existing customers’ pictures as a guide, off I went shopping for belts in various colors.

Next problem: I’ve never accessorized with belts successfully. I’ve bought belts but they’ve never made an outfit look better. Fashion bloggers made it seem so easy! This week I finally tried on the belts and promptly made the outfit look much worse. I texted bestie pictures to confirm and she both confirmed it did NOT work and gently guided me to use different color combinations whereupon voila! The belts work for me, not against me! Honestly. Only I add accessories and end up looking significantly worse. There’s a whole world of rules around colors and shapes and lines that I’m overdue to learn in order to dress my adult self.

Year 6, Day 296: The to do list is about a mile long and growing. I’m adding things that need to be done faster than I’m able to do them.

So much grumble.

Year 6, Day 297: Bedrest again. I managed to clear my call schedule for the week though, so at least while I’m confined to working from bed, I don’t have to fake my way through video calls. Yay for that.

Year 6, Day 298: Depression has hijacked my brain.