#168. Reactivated (Friday, June 17, 2022)
What was your best day…of feeling something again?
Twenty-seven months of isolation had thrown my standards so far out of whack that, by the end of this day, I was sure it belonged in the Top 25 of the main list. Only a little hindsight—and one key piece of information—eventually dropped it all the way down here.
My return to normality after COVID had been relatively delayed. #126 had brought back some social activity a year earlier, but the office remained optional until June 2022, when the institution finally introduced a soft four-days-a-month expectation just to get people reconnecting in person.1
It worked almost immediately. In my first week back, I was out late twice with colleagues—once with traders from my team, once at James’s goodbye party. Midway through the second week, market-structure researcher Dylan Cirillo tells me Happy Hour is back. Based on everything else, I believe him.
And he’s right. On Friday I walk into Happy Hour at The Office and find at least twenty people there: old familiar faces like Neerad Bhandari (#21), Kai Ho (#72), and Carter Hladnik, plus a whole crop of people who had joined during the previous two and a half years. Among them is a woman sitting with Dylan and Adrian Williams (#94) whom I don’t recognize.
Her name is Liana Fischer, visiting for four months from our Swiss counterpart institution. Dylan leaves, Adrian drifts to another table, and somehow Liana and I end up talking for at least half an hour. She seems genuinely interested in my work and my eternally unfinished novel,2 while I’m interested in her own research—and, more unusually, I find her quite attractive.
Eventually I move to another table with Neerad, Carter, and a few others. Neerad is especially boisterous, and it feels like old Happy Hours again. Then Liana comes over to say she’s leaving and that she’ll see me around—specifically to me.
This is not lost on Neerad, who waits until she’s gone and gives the table an extended “ohhhhh,” in exactly the way preteen boys do when they discover someone has a crush.
Between that and Liana adding me on LinkedIn first thing Saturday, this quickly becomes a real crush—not one of my previous theoretical ones (and I hadn’t even had one of those since 2016, #35).
And Happy Hour isn’t even the end of the night. I head to Lansdowne for opening night of Lightyear in 3-D, Uber to ByWard Market for my customary pre-clubbing fajitas at Lone Star, then finish at The Show nightclub (formerly Tequila Jack’s, #30). Just like everything else over those first two weeks, clubbing was back too.
It doesn’t take long for me to re-normalize. Nights like this stop feeling miraculous and start feeling like normal Friday nights again. And during one of several later coffee chats with Liana, before she returns to Switzerland, I learn she has a boyfriend back home. So much for that.
But on its own, it was still pretty nice to feel all these things again.
- Even though I was thoroughly tired of working from home by then, office attendance still hadn’t reached the critical mass that made the one-hour Barrhaven commute feel worthwhile.
- The novel inevitably comes up in every Happy Hour conversation, since it’s one of the only semi-interesting non-work things I have to talk about.