Our most recent diary day, Oct. 22, was a Friday, and our volunteer writers shared with us how their workweeks drew to a close (aside from a few who had the day off) and how they settled into their weekends.
You can read their diaries here. You will see a wide variety of attitudes and experiences: while one diary expresses intense fear of contracting Covid (along with worry about the vaccine), many barely mention the pandemic, suggesting that, for the first time among our writers, the pandemic has entered the realm of the ordinary—of that which goes without saying.
A number of other themes stand out. For many of our writers, Friday rituals involve food and drink.
“My Manhattan is delightful, the one good thing from my pandemic:
“A new taste for mixed drinks.
“Turns out, I’m a bourbon man. Who knew?
“A vague letting go.
“Cocktail hour has become our pandemic ritual on the weekends.” (Diarist B37)
No fewer than six of our writers had pizza Friday night, with two diarists waiting simultaneously on Greek’s delivery.
And food—whether takeout, pot-luck, or re-heated dumplings—was frequently paired with media consumption—another major theme.
“Friday nights are pizza and movie nights for us. It’s something we started doing weekly due to COVID-19 and the lack of other things pulling us away from the house on Fridays. Now it’s something we all look forward to every week.” (Diarist I69).
“…came home, did my daily five-mile bike ride in my neighborhood and on the Cardinal Greenway, watched the end of the movie, got pizza for dinner, then settled into a couple of hours of streaming entertainment indecisiveness before a very early bedtime. out of fuel.” (Diarist B35)
At least two of our writers watched the new Dune film (one thumbs up; one thumbs down), including a co-owner of a downtown business, whose evening started early, and combined food, drink, and the movie. He and his colleagues
“…declared it Beer Friday. We’ll close at 4:30 and all head over to The Fickle Peach. OK, two beers later and we all had a good time, now 5:50 and my wife and I are at Twin Archer for dinner. Had wings and cauliflower wings. At dinner we talked about watching the new Dune movie tonight, I didn’t care for the first Dune movie but thought we would try the new one. The big question is, will my wife let me take some Carrot Cake home. It’s the best I’ve ever had. 7:10 YES!” (Diarist J85).
But more striking than these commonalities was the sheer array of entertainment our writers enjoyed Friday night, much of it digital. One listened to a soccer podcast and played with GoogleMaps Street View, “a hobby of sorts, a source of amusement.” Another amused himself by writing film reviews on the movie-themed social media platform Letterboxd. Yet another observed how the streaming age makes movies “more like books now in that you can stop and start them as needed, picking up where you left off later until the end.” Meanwhile a long-time diarist had a very twentieth-century evening, reading in bed while his wife flipped among reruns of sitcoms.
We will dig into these and other themes evident in our Oct. 22 diaries in future blog posts. For now, we invite you to read around and enjoy these accounts of Everyday Life in Middletown.