Author: Matthew Groff

  • Playgrounds and The Kid’s Mental Health

    Playgrounds and The Kid’s Mental Health

    Yesterday, I talked about how the virus may affect us and our kids in the future. I think about this often, especially when me and the kid head to the playground.

    When the playgrounds were closed in the City, it was awful for all of us. We tried to stay active by going for walks twice a day. The one nice benefit of this was that we got to explore all the streets in our neighborhood, but nonetheless it was not a substitute for a playground. Every time we walked through a park, and the kid laid eyes on the playground, I would get the question of, “When can we go back in there?” There was never an acceptable answer.

    With the lack of physically activity, and having no social contact with other kids, my daughter was starting to act out, and undertake behaviors she had never demonstrated before. She was more prone to scream, argue, throw things, and have temper tantrums, the likes she hadn’t done at least since she was three. We had been lucky in having a child that loved to sleep, and went to bed with no issues, but since April, she has been fighting going to bed, and getting up several times a night.

    Now that playgrounds have been open for almost a month now, it has made this situation more tolerable for the kid. Her behavior has gotten better, and she is generally sleeping solidly again. There are still flair ups, from time to time. I am sure that with the kid having a chance to be around other kids, and act out her frustrations and fears, that she is finding ways to cope with all of this stuff. It has been our one glimmer of hope in this season of unpredictability.

  • What Will We Remember from This?

    I had a video chat with a good friend the other day, who lives in Kansas City. He has a three-year-old son, and any day now, will have a newborn on his hands. Besides talking about the general insanity of the world, we started comparing notes of how we have been surviving with cuts to our income. I being laid off, and he having his salary cut. We both have been finding ways to make food last as long as possible, and we throw nothing out. We both joked to each other that we sounded like our grandparents talking about living through The Great Depression.

    When I was little and did ask my grandparents about the Depression, and mind you all of them were in their early 20’s when it happened, they all sort of laughed it off, but also, they did talk about not having a whole lot of money, and making every dime last. I especially remember all of them telling me that thy learned how to fix everything if it broke.

    I might have grandkids one day, and they might ask me about this, but what I really wonder about, and so did my good friend, was what will our little kids take away from this? My five-year-old knows that there was a lifestyle before Covid, and she is already telling me she can’t wait to return to normal when Covid is over. But is she going to remember the anxiety, the uncertainty and the feeling of discord from around the country? How much of this daily, just dumb fuckery will stick in her mind? How will this influence her for the rest of her life? For my grandparents, the Depression made them thrifty, inventive, and they had a sense of common purpose with all Americans to solve big problems.

    I hope we can do the same.

  • Coronavirus: Moving Out of NYC

    Coronavirus: Moving Out of NYC

    I know that I am not the first person to talk about this, but it does need to be repeated; the amount of people moving out of New York City is enormous, and just might have a terrible effect on the City.

    Today, another neighbor moved out of our building. Yesterday, a neighbor also moved out. Last month, the first tenant in left on the top floor. There are only twelve apartments in our building, so we are 25% vacant. In better times, an empty apartment here would be taken in a matter of days. As soon as one person moved out, the place would be cleaned and painted, and another person would be moving in.

    Our building isn’t alone. In our neighborhood, I counted two moving trucks Sunday, three on Saturday, and another three on Friday. On July 3rd, the first weekend of the month, I counted six moving trucks. Now, I do this count when I walk the dog in the morning, so I have no idea how many other people are moving themselves over the course of the day. And that’s only in a five-block radius around our place.

    When it comes to this, what has been making the news around here is the amount of rich and middles class families that are leaving New York for the suburbs and upstate. What has not been making the news is all the young people, who moved here to start their careers and live their dreams ,are moving back home. I know its kids moving out because the moving vans aren’t big, and the furniture they are throwing out is crappy.

    If all of these young people leave, and most of them are in the theatre arts, it will have, I fear, a dreadful impact. Yes, most actors wait tables, but I was a temp when I started here. I did dull filing and office work. Where are the temps going to come from to do that when the City does open up? They are also the diehard audience members, and they also are the new ideas. This virus might cause a huge creativity hole for a generation of theatre.

  • Pretty Much Back

    So… It’s been close to three months that I have been off of the blog, which is a very sad shame on my part.

    I feel compelled to update:

    I had a job, then my wife got a job, and we discovered that it was psychologically damaging our daughter to have both of us working from home, and both of us half-ass trying to help keep up with the kid’s school work. Then I got laid off from my job (thank you, Coronavirus) and I have become the stay at home dad now. I got the kid through her classes, and she has been promoted to go to kindergarten, and I am trying very hard to keep her skills up by working on her reading, writing, and math over the summer. I also quit drinking over the month of June, and did not gain any helpful benefits from doing that, and in fact, I put on more weight. My unemployment claim was denied. People are moving out of New York City left and right, and the town feels like a husk of its former self, and pretty much every day, the world feels like it’s coming to an end, but we are protesting with the hope that up until the end, if we survive, we’ll have a better world to live in.

    Oh, and I don’t have health insurance, and I started a novel, but hey, I bet half of NYC can say the same thing right now.

    How are you?

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  • Coronavirus: Return

    And that is the word we kick around here, “Return.”

    Such as, “When we return to normal,” or “When we return to riding the subway,” or “When we returning to eating out…” When it’s late at night, and I can’t sleep, that’s when I start thinking about the things, and how we might not “return” to a lot of stuff quickly. Moving back to New York, I was ready to return back to the puppeteering world, but I don’t know when theatres will be opened again.

    The other thing I get asked, is what do you want to do outside of your apartment when things open up?

    See, there isn’t one thing I want to do, or go to.

    What I miss is coming home. That it’s the end of the day, I am returning to my safe space. The place I spend with my wife and kid. I miss the joy of coming home, and choosing not to leave.

    It’s so much work to be outside of the home in New York City, and that was the good old days. You can’t get anywhere quickly, and you are around people when you want to be alone and introspective.

    Got off the rails here…

    Anyway, one day we will return to something.