Right now, I have 87 episodes of Mysterious Universe and 49 episodes of Scriptnotes.
Mysterious Universe really needs to be listened to in order because they often make references back to previous episodes and I've made it to March 2021--a year into the pandemic. So I listened to their pandemic episodes a long time ago now.
However, Scriptnotes doesn't need to be listened to in order and I've been hopping around on that one, listening to whatever caught my interest. Frequently, it's been the latest episodes, rather than the earlier ones sitting on my phone.
Then I decided it was time to work through some of those early episodes. I actually was behind on this podcast before March 2020 and the pandemic, so I was listening to episodes that were taped and aired before anything happened. And then the other day, I hit March 2020 and it is extremely strange to travel back in time to when the pandemic was first starting to break in the US.
It was strange. Remembering how much we didn't know at the time. The assumption that it wouldn't last for all that long. It wasn't quite time traveling, but wow, talk about feeling vaguely discombobulated.
And to go off on a tangent, it's like a huge validation to me about not putting any COVID stuff in my books. I didn't want to anyway because who wants to focus on that? But this was a good reminder why it's not a good idea in general. Things have changed a lot in two years.
What behavior is going to stick into the future? Which behaviors will be a blip on the radar? For example, before we knew it was transmitted as an aerosol, we wiped down all our groceries with disinfecting wipes. We haven't done it in a long time and I hope to never have to that again. On the other hand, I've become zealous about washing my hands 1) after every trip outside the house and 2) for the full 20 seconds, which means I sing Happy Birthday every time. This looks as if it's going to stick.
So how dated are books with these abandoned behaviors going to look in a few years? Yeah. And like I said, I don't want to read books with the pandemic in them, let alone write books with it.
Oh, yeah, podcasts. Right. Anyway, so weird to mentally travel back to mid-March 2020 and think about how little we knew then and how scary everything was. I have more episodes (a lot more) from 2020, so I'm going to be doing a lot of time warps.
