No fear

By Netnet Camomot .

PEOPLE were either partying or planning parties and gatherings last Thursday while Cagayan de Oro’s epidemiologist Dr. Joey Retuya was enumerating at the daily press briefing the city’s 54 new confirmed cases. Yes, 54. In a single day.

On Saturday, there were 62 new confirmed cases. 41 of them were persons deprived of liberty.

Once CDO’s Covid-19 cases reach 100 per day, will that be enough to convince you to stay home?

But nothing could stop the Cagayanon from partying. It’s their nature to party. And it’s party pa more if they’ve remained Covid-free despite the parties they’ve hosted or attended amidst this pandemic.

FOMO—Fear Of Missing Out—is still alive and kicking in the hearts of partygoers. FOMO was kind of okay in the old normal. There was no deadly virus hopping from one host to another then. For FOMO to still be their norm now, will the parties continue once they’re inside a City Isolation Unit or a Temporary Treatment Monitoring Facility. Or—gasp!—confined in a hospital.

We can only hope that those who partied and are now Covid-positive have learned their lesson. But what if they’ve not. What would it take for them to finally realize the importance of physical distancing.

People who have recovered from Covid may become positive again in the future, their infection morphing into a neverending story. Still, this fact has not stopped people from partying.

It has been seven months of staying home, working from home, Zoom, video chats, and people not understanding why some people are staying home.

I’ve been staying home since mid-March and sometimes it feels like I’m being forced to be guilty of staying home and not entertaining guests. Whew.

I’m still in spring-cleaning mode, throwing away the non-essentials, keeping the essentials. The meme that truly describes me now is this:

“I needed to do the laundry. But then I realized I was out of detergent, so I went to write a shopping list and realized how unorganized the junk drawer was, and started checking pens for ink. When I went to toss all the junk, I saw that the trash was full but before I took it out I wanted to get rid of old food in the fridge. That’s when I realized a juice jug had leaked so I needed to clean it up but when I went to grab a rag, I saw that the pantry closet was a nightmare so I started organizing it. And that’s how I ended up on the floor looking at my old photo albums from 1990s and not doing laundry.”

So, on Saturday morning, there I was choosing the next book to read among the unread books inside the cabinet, when I noticed that the top shelf now had a heavier load than that of the lower shelves. This observation progressed to me rearranging the books and the few piggies in there, until I was assured that the bottom shelf was filled with the most number of books.

I’ve spent more time in spring cleaning than in reading and writing. Even Oil Painting (the video game, not the art) has taken a back seat as I now tend to check out Facebook in lieu of “painting” after dinner.

I don’t watch Netflix and TV, my baking days are so over (part of history—decades ago, teenage years), and the green mind failed to hypnotize the thumb to be green, too, thus paving the way for spring cleaning to be my stay-home strategy.

Question: Five years from now, will this piece of paper still matter to me? If the answer is no, throw it away.

Question: Five years from now, will I still remember why I’ve been keeping this? If the answer is no, throw it away.

Question: Five years from now, will I look back to this and laugh? If the answer is yes, throw it away.

As I wrote in previous columns, spring cleaning evokes mixed emotions—good, bad, happy, sad, laughter, tears. No wonder at the end of the day, all I can do is “paint.” And morph into a backseat audience while trying to guess the actors behind the voices I could hear from the Netflix shows that my sis is watching. And most of my guesses have been correct! Yay!