Dear God, please let today be a good day, that is, a day in which I do not do anything too stupid. Let it be a day unlike yesterday, when I thoughtlessly handled a banana with my bare hands without scrubbing the skin first, even though I left the banana outside for two days before I did that. I am too afraid to Google how many days the virus stays alive on banana skins, but it’s too late now anyway, isn’t it?

I think the banana peel also may have come in contact with the stainless steel around the kitchen sink, which I think is where I stood while I ate the banana, with the hands I failed to wash after peeling it.

Thanks to the thousands of cautionary videos that appear in my email inbox daily, I already knew that the virus stays alive on stainless steel for up to 72 hours, but it totally slipped my mind when I was eating the banana in front of the sink. I didn’t remember it until this morning, after I’d probably touched the stainless steel around the sink 500 times.

Lord, please try to help me remember that the point of wearing gloves during this crisis is to wear them, and not to keep yanking them off to do certain things, even though I don’t own any disposable gloves and the thick civilian-type ones I’m using make doing certain things difficult, as if I’m wearing a baseball mitt.

Yesterday, for example, I carelessly took off my glove (with my teeth!) to insert my debit card and punch my PIN into the little machine at the supermarket, which meant that I touched the numbers on the machine with my naked fingers, and who knows what I did with those fingers before I put the glove back on? Probably scratched my nose, or brushed a hair off my face, or something equally careless.

Also, if You could arrange it so that my face mask doesn’t slip down to my neck today, that would be great. That happened at the post office yesterday. I was standing on the very long (socially distanced but scary anyway!) line inside the post office when my mask slipped off. I wasn’t fussing with the mask or anything — I think the elastic band in the back may not have been quite high enough on the back of my head. But then I did touch it, a lot, to get it back on my face. And I had just read that morning to never, ever touch the front of your mask, because other people’s droplets could be on it. I just forgot!

And now that I’m telling You this, Lord, I’m thinking I might have taken off my gloves to do that.

Speaking of the post office, I just remembered another postal-related thing I did yesterday, which happened after I took the mail out of the mailbox. I remembered to wear my gloves to do that, You’ll be happy to know, and I remembered to put the mail in a box on the porch to sit for several days because of possible contamination.

But then I saw that one of the envelopes looked like it had a check in it, and in my eagerness, okay, desperation (I’ve been ‘furloughed’!) to see how much the check was for, I forgot all about contamination and tore off my gloves and ripped open the envelope right there. I am ashamed I did that, Lord, especially since it turned out that it wasn’t a check at all but a notice that I had failed to pay my car insurance premium.

God, You know how they say it takes 21 days to break an old habit and replace it with a new one? I looked it up on the internet and it turns out that’s not true. It takes a lot longer — almost a year for some people! I’m getting the feeling, just from the way things are going, that I’m one of the year people.

I guess what I’m saying is that if You could speed up that time frame, I’d just be incredibly grateful. No pressure, but I’m wearing a straitjacket until I hear from You, just to be on the safe side.

Jenny Allen lives in West Tisbury. She is the author of Would Everyone Please Stop?