I’ve been trying to process why grocery shopping leaves me feeling in turns anxious and hopeless. Each time I go out, and I feel a compulsion to go any time we get close to running out of something, I come home feeling beaten up by life.

My daughter has told me about the “uncanny valley,” a term introduced by Masahiro Mori that describes the feeling we have toward robots whose appearance is very close to human. Up to a point, he says, we are comforted by their human-like appearance. However, we reach a tipping point when they are too close to the human and become scary.

I suppose the uncanny valley is when the created world of robots interferes with our perception of reality. When a machine becomes too real, the threat grows because two worlds begin to merge, testing our basic sense of what the real is.

Grocery shopping for me, then, becomes a sort of uncanny valley, though it happens in reverse. The real, banal experience of buying food tips into the threatening when it diverges from the normal.

On a good day, six months ago, grocery shopping was never a favorite chore. I’m anxious in stores like these even when we’re not in a pandemic. The press of people, sometimes aggressively using carts like weapons, triggers in me a desire to retreat.

But now, dislike has morphed into a much more threatening feeling. The familiar grocery store is now an unfamiliar place of sanitized carts, signs on the aisles directing the one-way flow of traffic.

People, still aggressive and oblivious, wear masks and either observe social distancing or don’t. Either way, it’s odd. The observant see me coming and back up away from me, turning their heads. The oblivious forge ahead and I back up and turn away.

When I turn down the toilet paper aisle or the cleaning aisle or the baking aisle, I see yards of empty shelves. These very basic goods, what we need to stay healthy and well fed are gone, hoarded by folks perhaps even more anxious than I am. Or, worse, they are signs of the supply chain breaking down.

As I move haltingly through the store, my glasses fog up because my mask doesn’t fit quite right. I begin to heat up and get sweaty in a place where I’m usually shivering because of the refrigerated food cases.

The store is the same, but not quite. Doors are open on only one end. It’s unsettlingly quiet because it’s so hard to talk behind a mask.

The differences are likely not permanent, but I feel no assurance that we’ll go back to a true normal any time soon. I’m already beginning to feel like this is normal, the new way of life that pandemic has forced upon us.

It’s this last part that makes it so like the uncanny valley. Reality has morphed in a relatively short period of time that feels like years, into an unreal reality. In its wake I find that I feel differently about food itself. Grocery shopping is no longer a chore I dislike. It is now a chore I despise but rely on as if my life hangs in the balance.

My hard learned cognitive behavioral skills don’t hold up well in the uncanny grocery store. I can tell myself I’m catastrophizing. But a pandemic is a catastrophe, survivable for some, but not for all.

I can speak to my anxious self and tell her that we’re fine, that adult Kerri has child Kerri protected. But that’s a rationalization. I’m safer at home any day than I am in the grocery store, a place where many hands touch produce before I touch it. I feel guilty testing the avocados for ripeness, knowing that I’m leaving my germs behind on someone else’s soon-to-be avocado.

At night my dreams are filled with moving. I move offices and homes, constantly boxing up and putting away and then unpacking and putting away and then finding new rooms and abandoning old rooms. Each dream wakes me up and feels like a nightmare, rooms standing in for worlds that are no longer mine to live in.

Someone sent around the meme above over Facebook and it spoke to me. We have control over some things and none over lots of things. This has always been true, but the grocery store hammers the impossibility of control into my brain.

My goal now is to live as at ease as I can be in the world where I have some control, to create places and rituals of comfort. Meditation. Gratitude. Turning my eyes to what I love.

When a I return home from my uncanny valley, I unpack the food, wipe it down for safety, and organize the recipes that I’ll make with my spoils. I am grateful to be eating so well, to be able to chop onions and red peppers, to splash acidic touches such as vinegar or lemon on sautéed produce and to eat.

I remind myself that some are hungry and try to find joy in my meals instead of guilt. I make plans for new kinds of bread to make since I can no longer make the whole wheat loaves that I love. And I look forward to the time when I go to the store, as dangerous as it feels, to buy whole wheat flour when it’s back in stock.

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Joining the Bears, Blackhawks, Bulls, Cubs and White Sox, the Fire now have their own face masks with team logos on them. The MLS will donate its royalties from the purchase by the vendor to Feeding America (for US sales) and Food Banks Canada (for Canadian sales).

Fire masks are available for purchase here.

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My sense is that the worst of the Covid-19 crisis might be behind the Chicago real estate market though it’s not totally going away any time soon. Looking back at my previous weekly updates it appears that weeks 5 and 6 might have been the bottom. Weeks 7 and 8 were harder to interpret because the Easter bunny came a week earlier this year but it did look like things were getting better. Week 9, which is the week ending May 2, seems to be showing a bit more improvement:

Detached Homes

• New listings were down 39% from last year to 305 homes
• Contract activity was down 38% to 177
• Inventory in absolute terms was down 17% to 2760 homes
• However, in relative terms inventory was actually up from 11.6 weeks of supply to 15.6 weeks

Attached Homes

• New listings were down 40% to 533 homes
• Contract activity was down 44% to 250
• Inventory in absolute terms was down 13% to 4947 homes
• Inventory in relative terms was up from 12.6 weeks of supply to 19.8 weeks

As ugly as they still are, these stats seem to confirm that the Chicago real estate market is somewhat improving. In addition, anecdotally, our phone stopped ringing there for a month or two but in the last week we started to get calls again. To avoid simply reporting on the progress of paint drying I’ll probably stop covering this every week, waiting instead for evidence that things have gotten a lot better.

#RealEstate #ChicagoRealEstate #Coronavirus

Gary Lucido is the President of Lucid Realty, the Chicago area’s full service real estate brokerage that offers home buyer rebates and discount commissions. If you want to keep up to date on the Chicago real estate market or get an insider’s view of the seamy underbelly of the real estate industry you can Subscribe to Getting Real by Email using the form below. Please be sure to verify your email address when you receive the verification notice.

Alongside the likes of Tom Brady, Rob Gronkowski and more, Bears rookie tight end is among the players with the top-selling jerseys on fanatics.com.

Along with the Eagles’ Jalen Hurts, the Steelers’ Chase Claypool, the Colts’ Jonathan Taylor, the Buccaneers’ Antoine Winfield Jr., the Ravens’ J.K. Dobbins and the Bengals’ Tee Higgins, Kmet is one of seven second-round draft picks with best-selling NFL jerseys.

Kmet’s jersey is available for purchase here.

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With most sports around the world on pause, revisit iconic sports moments from the past to help fill that void.

With “The Last Dance” nearing its conclusion, legendary stories about Michael Jordan and his Chicago Bulls teammates continue to trickle out.

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In the future, when this day is history, what will future historians say about us, how we live now?  There will be archives, daily news of  life and deaths in these pandemic times.

There are so many heartbreaking stories. Here is one from the Chicago Tribune today.

People are also keeping personal diaries and notebooks.  There are Zoom meetings. And there are blogs, here on ChicagoNow, and elsewhere. There are posts on Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and other social media.  There  will be many stories.

And even  when this world as we know  it is gone, like civilizations before us, there will still be records of how we lived here, in these uncertain times.  How we cheered a beautiful day in May, the cloudless blue sky and the blooming lilacs and crabapples. How we put on masks, and planted tomatoes.

But more than that, future scientists will be able to study the impact of how our lives changed, and how the earth changed as well.

The story is in the glacial ice. You can read more about it here, in this article from Popular Mechanics. Much like tree rings, ice  cores tell a story of climate.

They also hold evidence of volcanic dust, atmospheric concentrations,  and ancient viruses. The ice cores contain ash from Krakatoa and radiation from Chernobyl.  And they will tell the story of COVID-19. The evidence  will be there, and the coronavirus, too.

The article explores how the Great Plague in the 1300’s changed the atmosphere and the environment. There have been disasters and plagues before, but humans have survived.

Our lives are very different, today.  We are learning more and more how things are connected, from weather patterns to supply chains.

But already there is less pollution in  cities in the US, and in China–two major polluting nations.  Every day, we are changing. Every day, we have a chance to change the future.

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How long will home cooking substitute for our favorite restaurants?

The lockdown is growing longer. We are tired of masks and disinfectants and waving through car windows. We are horrified by stories of massive unemployment, lines at food pantries (they used to call those lines breadlines,) and inadequate government response. We want it all to stop. We all want to get into Doc’s DeLorean, ride to the past, and make sure none of this happens. But that ain’t it.

I understand the cineplex owners, the sports moguls, and the restauranteurs who are saying enough is enough, let’s open our doors and go for it. Their livelihoods and the survival of their employees are at stake, all through no fault of their own. I can understand how overwhelming the situation is when the Tribune reports that even Chicago restaurant titans R. J. Melman and Rick Bayless are worried about paying the rent. I want their Leña Bravas and Di Pescaras to survive. I want the Mexican place down the block and the movie palace in the next town to survive too.

So I get the push to open things up, to assume the curve has flattened,  and to think we are all on the verge of being safe. But while I get it, the real question is whether or not I believe it. Will Barb and I be willing to go for a Saturday night date at the AMC, made safer with online ticket purchase, alternate seat placement, and scrubbed down armrests, or will we say “nah, let’s catch that flick when it shows up on HBO in a couple of months.”

Will we be brave and celebrate our next anniversary at one of last year’s 5-star restaurants, keeping our masks on except to sip our Martinis and devour the spicy gulf prawns, or will we feel safer with a romantic dinner at our kitchen table as Alexa serenades us with Billy Joel and Neil Diamond? And how long will it be before I am ready to brave the sweaty fitness center when I can just go to the basement to pound away the extra carbs that are part of my COVID diet?

My decisions won’t all be rational. And you may make different choices. How strange it is that your decisions and mine may be decided by the color of the Kool-Aid you and I drink and which cable station we watch–which way you balance the health vs. economy scales.

But no matter how you tip those scales, the question of the summer is bound to be “if they open it, will you come?”

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