Back with Mom and the Cats

Story and photos by Nick Cornish

All of my belongings wait to be sorted through after moving back home in Rochester with my mom.

March 23

Here we go. Coronavirus log entry one. I’ve been home with my mom for a total of 13 days, and it’s going alright. What I really mean by that is it’s extremely frustrating at times and okay at others. One of my biggest pet peeves is when people chew with their mouths open. The smack, smack, smack and crunch and weird slick tongue noises absolutely disgust me. My mom chews with her mouth open. In other news, I officially moved home on Saturday. My aunt helped me get all of my stuff except for my couch out of my apartment in Global Village. I shoved my life into boxes and tubs, grabbed the tabs at the end of Command strips and peeled down my posters, and I pressed my scrub brush down against the countertop in my bathroom until I realized it was futile for removing water spots. And then my aunt’s husband played van tetris with it all and I went home, leaving behind my plush, red suede couch and my bike.

March 24

I didn’t do a lot today. I had my butt plopped down on the couch in the living room until 3am last night watching anime, so opening my eyes at 8am for a meeting via Zoom was hard. But I made the meeting. My finger hit the mute myself button so fast once it started though, because my cat was meowing and racing around the room, his nails scraping against the floor each time he took off in a sprint. After the Zoom meeting I had a meeting with professor William Snyder over FaceTime. After that meeting I watched a tea bag disperse its flavor into hot water, drank the tea, and went back to bed. I opened my eyes again at 3pm, my soft orange tabby cat Butterscotch curled up at my thigh.

I’m feeling less scared of this whole coronavirus situation today than I was yesterday, but overall I’m still pretty scared. I fear the panic-inducing sounds of ambulance sirens coming down the street to pick up my mom or myself. EMT’s in condom-esque suits taking her or I to the hospital. A place where we could very likely suck in our last breath, alone spare for doctors and nurses who are just as terrified as we are. Both my mom and I have asthma. Every other week she takes a pre-loaded syringe, pushes the needle into her skin and injects Humira. It helps with her chronic pain but leaves her immunocompromised. And me? There’s a pustule monster on my gums from a bad tooth infection that drains into my mouth constantly. The antibiotic I’m on for it will hopefully kill the infection, but also hacks and slashes my good, necessary gut bacteria to death like I do to enemies in video games. Long story short, severe consequences of this virus are very real fears for me right now.

March 25

Today I worked on stuff for my senior capstone story. Thinking about and working on my capstone makes me worry for next semester. I worry about what will happen if all of this hasn’t blown over by the start of next semester. And I’m considering taking time off from school if it does continue into next semester and we’re still doing online learning only. My capstone is currently a story about my cousins Sammy, Brendan and Peter, and the bond they share as brothers who are all on the autism spectrum. The story is being told through still photos and audio including interviews and ambient sound. Because of my own risk factors with COVID-19, along with the need to practice social distancing for the good of all people, I can’t be shooting photos for the story right now. My hope is that by June things will start going back to normal, but if we’re still in lockdown after that I might have to switch to a photo editing based capstone. I really don’t want to do an editing based capstone. I want to shoot. So I feel like I’d rather take time off so I can continue with my original capstone story than switch to a different one.

March 26

I had my first video chat class via Zoom today. It was interesting. However, faces on a flat, impersonal surface, some blurry, some glitchy with broken pixels in lines across the screen, are in no way the same as sitting at the long, rickety table in the PJ lab. Trying to work as the table wobbles like jello. The class was highly engaging in person, but I found myself dozing off towards the end from across the screen. The class I had today was a lecture/discussion-based class, and it went pretty well considering the situation, but I do wonder how my ASL class is going to be. If there’s any lag, it could be very hard to understand the professor or my classmates. Lag is a minor problem compared to those of students who are in hands-on classes such as woodworking, glass making. I can’t imagine what this ‘distance learning’ is like for them. Sometimes I wonder whether it would have been better to just cancel the rest of the semester altogether.

March 27

I really didn’t do much today. When my phone blares my ringtone at full volume at 11am when my mom calls to wake me up, I fumble around the tubing of my CPAP machine that seems as long as a burmese python to grab my phone, grip it and then tap around the screen until I hit that little green phone button that picks up the call. Then I say “call me back in an hour”, because I’m just not ready to get up and have to adult yet. My cat curls back up at my thigh, and sometimes I’ll wake up to the cough and hack and wet dropping of a furball onto the floor beside my bed- that is if I’m lucky enough to wake up before he finishes hacking it up and it ends up on my sheets.

I’m going to be working on cover letters for the internships I’m applying for once I’m done writing this entry. I’m applying to three internships in Rochester, two of which are paid. The one that I’m hoping to get most is a photo internship with Daystar Kids, a program that helps families with infants and young children with special needs transition from hospital to home. The internship falls directly in line with my interests in working with people with disabilities and people in minority groups after graduation.

March 28

This will be my last entry! Not for any morose reasons, it’s just time to move on to someone else’s story. So, for a few good notes as I leave, so for anyone who reads this far leaves on a good note: I’ll soon be starting to meet with my friends from my Kung Fu class once a week over Zoom so we can continue to practice and stay in shape. I’m also registering for classes for next semester this week, so hopefully everything will be back to normal and I’ll be able to complete my senior year on time!

To end this diary, I’m going to introduce the members of my family. First is my mom. Here she is, cooking up some venison steaks. “You can caption this as ‘Mom cooking Bambi’” she said.

Next is me! I had my mom help with taking this photo of me and my cat, Butterscotch. Butterscotch didn’t really want to be photographed, so here’s a better photo of him on the right.