But our collective loneliness and pandemic dread in those off weeks made me and my podmates more committed to keeping our little hub working as well as it could. Sometimes, the podmates who weren’t breaking the bubble in any given week silently questioned the choices of the ones who did. In the weeks when some of my podmates were quarantining and the others were busy with work or family stuff, my tether to normal life began to fray. There were some weeks when this dance was more stressful than others, and some tiresome text chains about the specifics of, say, a barbershop’s PPE and ventilation system. Eventually, we settled into a routine: of negotiating these kinds of breaches, of deciding who was comfortable with what, of quarantining and testing, or just waiting, before we came back together. The rest of the pod wasn’t comfortable with that, so the four of us stayed home. But that friend’s partner is an essential worker, and she couldn’t quarantine before a pre-trip COVID test. One podmate planned a birthday getaway of her own, a weekend in a cabin with the pod and one other friend. That visit happened to fall on my birthday, which meant I couldn’t celebrate with two of the four friends to whom I’d limited my indoor social life. One couple had a group of friends from out of town stay with them the weekend before Thanksgiving. Maintaining a pod-an actual, tightknit, exclusive pod-is a much harder social endeavor than any of us initially appreciated.īut as the pandemic wore on, we took occasional steps outside our bubble, which made things more complicated.
It demands a level of exclusivity, communication, and commitment that is unfamiliar to the average platonic relationship, with the specter of illness or death hanging over every potential breach of trust. While the reaction to the piece mostly focused on Manjoo’s decision to maintain his Thanksgiving travel plans after his big-bubble reckoning, to me, his realization underscored something different: Maintaining a pod-an actual, tightknit, exclusive pod-is a much harder social endeavor than any of us initially appreciated. Even though he felt he only had close contact with his wife and kids, he was still connected to somewhere around 100 people. In a piece that inspired heated debate in November, Farhad Manjoo tried to figure out how big his bubble, which included various “pods,” really was. And yet, we have simultaneously started to realize that as much as pods are a useful tool in the pandemic, they come with their own issues. Jewish congregations have scheduled sukkah time slots by pod, and one retreat center offered rentals for one POD, or People of your Own Designation, at a time. Sports clubs have created systems of “ squash pods” to limit potential outbreaks among players. Universities have helped pairs of roommates link up into pods to foment a safer social scene. Some local governments, including California’s Alameda County, have even provided pod guidelines as part of an official government response to the pandemic. While the initial response to pods was mixed-I got plenty of pushback when I wrote about forming my own pod in May-several months later, with months of lockdown likely still to go, pods are a far more accepted part of pandemic life.