I miss the Pandemic Sometimes

 The pandemic started in January of 2020.  There was a total lockdown.  People were ordered to stay indoors, and there was no traffic in Los Angeles.  For the first time, it was relatively quiet everywhere I went.  I never stopped working for my job.  I still traveled and sometimes, there would only be like 20 people to board a plane.  I remember having entire rows in front of me and behind me all empty on Delta flights and being served a snack in a brown paper bag with a small bottle of water.  From toilet paper shortages to mask-wearing debates, it was a crazy time.  

When I was stuck at home, Cecilia and I would do workout videos after work and take online classes on an online platform called Monthly.com, not it had renamed/reinvented itself to be Studio.com.  During the pandemic, we learned to bake, oil paint, paint with acrylic paints, produce music, storytelling, making videos, dancing, etc.  We had a very productive time.  

Cecilia and I also took the opportunity to get married in Hollywood, CA at a stupid expensive place called Yamashiro Hollywood which is a historic Japanese structure on top of a hill above the Magic Castle in Hollywood.  We got a HUGE, HUGE discount and because it was the pandemic, there was a limited number of people we could invite.  Something that would've cost us upwards of $40K only cost us $12K, mostly because we only invited around 30 people.    It was a great deal.

I don't want to focus on negativity, but a lot of people did die due to the pandemic.  Los Angeles had about 300 deaths per day at one point.  You may think... WOW!  300 people per day?!?  Yeah, that's a lot, the morgues were running out of space.  However, after the pandemic, no one can tell that the population had decreased at all.  People die all the time, but not because of the pandemic.

Now, the pandemic is over.  Everything has gone back to normal right?  Not really.  The workforce has embraced video meetings through Zoom or Microsoft Teams.  Silicon Valley has recently had massive layoffs of tech gurus.  Nowadays, these huge companies can hire from outside of California and not pay them "California Pay" which is crazy insane high.  

Do I miss the pandemic?  Yeah, kind of.  As Neil DeGrasse Tyson (astrophysicist, and overall genus dude) would explain, that the pandemic was a test to see if humanity would all come together and tackle a single problem and, guess what?, we have all failed.