So, it’s a sunny day, and I’ve just completed uploading the next round of tsoris, the financial aid applications for my daughter’s junior year in college. While I did scrimp and save—particularly when I was at the height of my career—for college, I came up short nonetheless, and I require financial aid. I’ve been unemployed before, but now I’m unemployed during a pandemic, unemployed when your kid is midway towards her very specific degree. Of course, if she were a marketing major or pursuing education or anything that’s a broad umbrella of a topic, I’d have her transfer to the local city college, the same way I am attending, the one that is walking distance to my home. But lo, her degree is specific, very very specific and there is but one university that offers it as a major, and it happens to be the one she is studying at already. So I’m bound. I’m bound to support her as she pursues this dream. I can’t allow my mind to travel into the abyss, towards probability, towards science, towards the dark. I have to remain steadfast that the Brave New World, post-pandemic, will be a world filled with flexibility, with possibility, with a light, the light that we are accustomed to shining on us, the light that has allowed us to dream and to hope and to create our own mythic quest for. And it is with that I sat in front of my beloved laptop, an Apple laptop I bought in 2014, right before my own world turned sideways, that I opened the email I received from my daughter’s school, and began the chase, the chase of requesting a financial aid package that would make junior year at this institution affordable. There were three forms I had to fill out, and I hit send, a prayer accompanying it, the one that pled for an award that would make everything for her possible. I went to the kitchen, I made a lunch, I returned to my laptop to do some job hunting, and WHAM! My laptop had died. A blob growing across its soft screen, vertical rainbow lines adorning it. It wasn’t the dead Apple icon, but in a pandemic, when you can’t just run across town to your local Genius bar? It might as well have been. Considering my aforementioned burden, I don’t have the extra dosh to buy a new laptop for myself. But here is the thing about sharing in the digital era: FRIENDS. You cry, your friends are there. You laugh, your friends are laughing with you. You post your dead-blog laptop on your Finsta, your friends note it, and show up for you. Of all the things I miss from the BEFORE, it’s being able to be with my friends in person, hugging and laughing and not stressing when someone sneezes or coughs. The great things about having a social media feed however, is that your friends are there in that scroll, and they are reading and following and checking on me, and that, that has been the beacon leading me through this. So while I do have a laptop with a viral blob spreading through its entrails, I also have my friends. Here’s a big virtual hug to you. Soon, we’ll be able to do this in person, and not elbow bump it.

Have a good weekend, and watch the 30 ROCK One Time Special. It’s good to see Liz Lemon  and her crew back on the screen.