So it's been three days now since the sky over the Bay Area turned the color of a traffic cone at nine in the morning, and I'm still thinking about it, which is why you're getting this instead of the GPU upgrade post I was halfway through drafting last week.
Wednesday morning, the 9th, I woke up around 7:45, before my alarm even, because something about the light through the blinds felt wrong. Not dark exactly. Orange. Like somebody had dropped a gel filter over the sun. I checked my phone thinking maybe I'd slept clean through to evening, but no, 7:47 AM. I walked out to the kitchen and my roommate was already standing at the window with her coffee, just staring, and neither of us said much because there wasn't a lot to say that wasn't already obvious.
The streetlights stayed on. All day, because whatever sensor triggers them never registered that the sun had actually come up. People were driving with their headlights on at noon. I checked my PurpleAir app, which up to this summer I'd only ever opened out of idle curiosity, and it was reading in the 200s and low 300s for our zip code, which if you don't follow the AQI scale, is the "stay inside, don't crack a window, don't go for a run" tier. I still had a couple of N95s in a drawer from back in March when nobody could find them, so at least that part wasn't a scramble.
Here's what actually got me, though, more than the color itself. I still had a 9:30 standup. I made coffee in a kitchen lit like a diner sign at midnight and logged into Zoom and talked through my sprint tickets like it was a normal Wednesday. One coworker had swapped his background to a Blade Runner still, which, sure, funny, everybody on Twitter had made the same joke by 10 AM. But doing ordinary work-from-home things, updating a Jira ticket, muting yourself because the dog started barking, while the literal sky outside looked like a different planet, felt genuinely disorienting in a way I wasn't prepared for. Nobody on the call mentioned taking the day off. I don't think it occurred to anyone, including me, that we could.
I'll admit my complaint here is a little petty, but it's mine so I'm putting it in: I went looking for an air purifier that afternoon and every single one within a reasonable price was sold out or marked up to something like triple what it cost in June. I ended up ordering a cheap box fan and a MERV-13 filter and taping them together because some thread I found online swore it worked almost as well as a real purifier for a fraction of the cost. It's loud. It sits in the corner of my bedroom now like some kind of shame trophy. It does seem to help though, so fine.
What I keep coming back to is how quickly the weird becomes routine when you've already been living in a routine-breaking year. We're six months into working from this same apartment, wiping down groceries, checking case counts before deciding whether to walk to the store. An orange sky at 8 AM should have been the single strangest thing that happened to any of us all year, and instead it got maybe ninety minutes of genuine "what is happening" before everyone, myself very much included, just folded it into the pile and kept typing. I don't know if that's resilience or just exhaustion wearing resilience's jacket. Probably some of both.
The smoke's mostly cleared where I am now, the sky's back to a regular hazy grey-blue, and the AQI reading this morning was in the double digits, which after last week feels like a luxury. But I've still got the box fan running in the corner, and I don't think I'm taking it apart anytime soon.