I’ve hit the point in the pandemic where I’m eating chips during the day, I’ve run out of clean sweatpants and I’ve begun to accept my eyelashes are blonde. It feels again like 1985.

I was reading on Twitter the other day wistful tweets about the personal blog and how they’re more endangered than (and when someone says endangered I flash to that NY Times story about the death of the insect population, something we really should cause alarm for and I’m not going to link to it because then you’ll never finish this sentence let alone this essay) but is this type of scrutiny really needed for personal blogs?

Probably yes. I have always slightly rolled my eyes, my husband would argue I don’t know how to slightly roll, it’s all full roll, at the commodified world of personal blogs as brands, when yourname became the Stylista or the Aspirateur or some other pretentious, big Carly eye roll, maybe I’ll even do full glare with eyebrow. There are exceptions to the rules, of course, but more and more, I despise the smoke and mirrors of everyone pretending everyone and everything is a brand, when really we’re all just people trying to survive.

Creative people. Trying to live.

And make people laugh a little.

But back to my point. I started this blog, this literal mynameis.com almost 5 years ago when I was unemployed. I needed a space to showcase some of the things I was seeing. I wasn’t feeling very eloquent at the time. And so this became that. I got a great job. Started traveling more than ever. And time passed. And many things happened, none which I wrote about. And now I am here again, at my kitchen table, it’s past dinner time, but we haven’t eaten because I’m trying to write an essay and it still yet doesn’t connect to the title.

That’s life in the pandemic.

That NY Times story about the insect apocalypse – you should read it – but don’t forget to come back to read the next section of this essay shortly.