COVID-19 has had impact on mood

Let’s see if we can agree on a couple of things:

•You’re sick of reading about the coronavirus pandemic.

•I’m sick of writing about it.

OK, maybe there’s one more: We can’t get away from it.

Switch on the TV looking for something to distract us, and what do we find?

•Street scenes crowded with pedestrians. Where’s their social distancing?

•Love scenes with lots of intimate contact. Where are their masks and PPE?

Even re-runs of game shows exhibit a disconnect.

Watching the Jeopardy re-run of the ultimate championship match last week, it was impossible to ignore that it was an artifact from an earlier time.

Back in the olden days — February — everything seemed so simple. No death counts, no monitoring of local positive cases, no anxiety in the middle of the night.

Weddings were weddings. Funerals were funerals. A shopping trip was a shopping trip.

It’s still hard to believe that something so ordinary could provoke nostalgia, and yet that’s where we are.

In fact, it’s the pervasive presence of COVID-19 in our lives and the clear delineation between Then, before the virus, and Now, when it complicates what used to be the simplest of decisions.

Not surprisingly, experts are weighing in with the obvious observation that all of this is taking its toll.

We’re all stressed. Anyone who says he is not is either lying or kidding himself.

For me, the stress has exhibited itself in a couple of different ways:

•I am crankier.

Ordinarily, I hum along on a pretty even keel, steady as she goes. Now, it’s likely I’ll grouch aloud about the other drivers on the road during the short trip from home to the office. And once I’m there, I can be pretty snappish.

OK, a correction: I can be extremely snappish at times.

•I am more profane.

All right, I am not at all proud of this. But it’s a fact that my vocabulary — particularly at work — would make my grandmother blush and prompt a sermon from my grandfather the Presbyterian minister.

If there were a swear jar, it would be full and my pockets would be empty.

But somehow the expletives help. (Sorry, grandfather.) They provide an opportunity to vent.

It also helps that so many of them are adjectives.

A simple frustration or complication seems put in its place when it has at least a small measure of profanity in front of it.

(As I said, I am not at all proud of this.)

•I am tired.

Putting out a newspaper is considered an essential function, and I’m fine with that. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

But during the stay-at-home period, that’s resulted in getting more things done in a shorter period of time with fewer people in the building.

And it’s resulted in taking more work home, like this column.

My apologies for writing, once again, about the inescapable reality of the pandemic.

I’ll try to do better next week.

But I can’t promise anything.