If this were a cross-country road trip, we’d be at the part where the antsy kids have kicked shoe prints into the leather interior and mom and dad are threatening to dump everybody off at the next rest stop and just drive off in a cloud of dust.

If this were a movie, we’d be in the beginning of the third act, when the characters have run out of things to say and are just repeating themselves, the plot has become too convoluted to follow and everyone in the theater is uncomfortably shifting in their chairs wishing they hadn’t ordered the extra-large soda.

In school it would be the dreaded third quarter, when the first-day jitters have long gone, the respite of winter break has passed and it’s just a long slog until summer break.

This staying-at-home business has been going on a long time.

It’s been going on so long that everybody needs a haircut and a root touch-up. It’s been going on so long, movies that depict big crowds and casual hugging seem antiquated. It’s been going on so long that library books borrowed on the last day the state libraries were open are now overdue (though the libraries will not be assessing fines, so don’t let that add to your angst).

The exhausting effort to stay home in the name of saving the human race has reached a new phase. It is no longer scary and wholly unfamiliar, requiring rethinking for even the smallest acts. A bit of routine has been established. Folks are sleeping in later in the morning, going days without putting on any piece of clothing that has a zipper or a collar, learning to make their own coffee.

But the novelty has worn off, and the results of this community effort are beginning to show. A new phase has kicked in, and it is an irritable, cranky phase. It’s clear the goal is getting closer, yet it is still far away. When there is no end date to a long effort, people get angsty. A nation of cooped-up, frustrated people is asking, “Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?”

This manifests into getting really mad at people who are flouting rules, like tourists who keep showing up for their cheap Hawaii escapes and who blithely slip away where no government agency except the Kauai Police Department seems to ever catch them. The frustration is also aimed at those who make the rules, more and more rules every day, rules that seem increasingly capricious and impossible to enforce. (No more than two people at a time to enter the fabric store, and they have to be wearing fabric masks in order to purchase fabric to make fabric masks … Wait, what?) People are peevish about neighbors having “large gatherings” of six family members in their garage or people fishing along the shoreline and breathing upwind of each other. Whatever. So many little grievances. Big, real ones, too. But we’re at the point in the journey where it’s a little difficult to separate the things we should get worked up about from the things that won’t really matter.