Help, I Think I'm In Love With Andrew Cuomo???

My roommates moved out of my Brooklyn apartment just ahead of the pandemic, and their replacements haven’t moved in yet. (At this point, they might not move in at all.) This means I haven’t had much company in the last week, and based on current covid-19 predictions, it might be like this for a long time. I am lonely and scared and anxious, but I have mitigated some of these feelings with my day’s two bright spots: 1) My afternoon run, and 2) New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s daily streamed press conference.

I worked in local New York news for years and developed an intense and reasonable dislike of Cuomo. He has repeatedly hindered attempts to reform the criminal justice system, he took advantage of a once largely conservative state Congress to keep progressive legislation on reproductive health from becoming law, he fucked around with the MTA so much he forced out the only useful subway leader the administration’s ever seen, etc., etc., etc.

And yet, in this time of crisis, with little concrete information available, I need Cuomo’s measured bullying, his love of circumventing the federal government, his sparring with increasingly incompetent city leadership. Not only that, but the less contact I have with other humans, the more I start to think of Cuomo as my only friend. I’ve started laughing at his little jokes. I catch myself touching my hair (not my face!) when he talks about an increase in testing capacity. I swooned when he told a reporter he had his own workout routine. I have watched a clip of him and brother Chris Cuomo bickering about their mother at least 20 times. I think I have a crush???

It seems I’ve fallen victim to Stockholm Syndrome, which Merriam-Webster defines as “the psychological tendency of a hostage to bond with, identify with, or sympathize with his or her captor.” Cuomo isn’t holding me hostage so much as coronavirus is, but he is the only one telling me what to do, where I can and cannot go (anywhere), who I can and cannot see (everyone), who I can and cannot listen to (President Trump, Bill de Blasio), what I can and cannot eat (anything but pasta).