This pandemic has taken more than our loved ones, our dignity, and our public freedoms: it’s also taken my bad hygiene... and made it worse.

Let me start off by saying I’ve never had good hygiene. I constantly suck on my fingers, pick up stuff off the ground, and shake hands with the reckless abandon of a Wall Street frat bro arriving early to the beer garden. That was my pre-pandemic lifestyle: touch every public surface, touch my phone, touch my hair, suck my fingies, repeat. It was all the directions of a bottle of shampoo with none of the soap. Just the repeating. So, as I stumbled to my desk for the 4th day in row of wearing the same thing, and I mean never changing, not once, it dawned on me that things may, in fact, be worse.

Why, in the middle of a pandemic, when we should be obsessed with being clean, am I in the same clothes as last week? To save on laundry? Perhaps. To make a fashion statement? Let me phone Prague. No, I think it has to do with the fact that I don’t know what day it is. One of my weekly rituals is rolling out of bed, landing at desk, and saying the word Thursday aloud to no one, knowing full well that it’s Monday. That’s just the kind of shit we can do now.

My girlfriend wants me to shower. I want to shower. I want to brush my teeth in the morning again too. But I can’t do any of that during the workday; not while I’m working. That time is sacred. It’s for work. Navigating the totally at home lifestyle of a global pandemic is uncharted territory. I tried watching all of “At Hone with Amy Sedaris;” didn’t help. You can’t ask your parents, your grandparents. They weren’t alive for the 1918 Spanish Flu, and if they were, they didn’t have to hop on the computer in their underwear to say I’m here for work. So there’ve been days where I’ll try to think back, way back, to a time last week when I last took a shower. It weirdly doesn’t fit into my schedule. There goes my hope of doing it, getting my body and teeth cleaned, right down the drain.

How do we constantly worry about getting sick when every day feels like a sick day home from school? Price is right and soup for lunch. Snuggled in bed and surfing the web. A good book and some hot tea!!! Virtually, it’s my childhood, and I don’t know if I’ll ever change the channel from this Scooby-Doo cartoon called “COVID-19 and the Case of the Arrested Development.”

Somebody grab the clicker. I wanna see what else is on. Oh, yeah, and my hygiene still sucks. Jinkies!!