We are in the third week of school closures and general lockdown in New York and I keep thinking of the movie Home Alone. Famously in that film, Kevin went wild for his first few days off the grid, eating ice-cream for dinner and jumping on the furniture. After that, he tidied up and discovered that order and structure are the only way to live. When his mum came home at the end of the movie, he had reached a state of wisdom.

The trajectory from school’s out abandonment to set routine held true for the first two weeks at home. Now we’re in a new phase – one not covered by the three-act structure. If this pandemic has exposed anything, it’s how arbitrary many of the things we take for granted really are, including the way we organise our time. We dossed about, we knuckled down, and then this week we hit a wall. “I don’t want to,” said my kids when I set up the equipment for home-school lessons. I had no real desire to make them. We are unravelling and resetting, again.

It’s not just school. For those lucky enough to be healthy and have jobs, the mood veers wildly between anxiety and optimism. Several female friends report unwanted erotic dreams about Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York and very much man of the hour. (It begs an unthinkable analogy with Rudi Giuliani after 9/11.) We are all working on our time management skills, while realising that the only really valuable time management tool is a wife to watch the kids.

Outside the house, meanwhile, things get stranger. So far, neighbourliness still reigns; within our own networks, there’s a sense of solidarity. But there is an increasingly odd dynamic in public. In the supermarket, we glare at each other for passing too close. Hostility lurks near the surface. In the laundry room, someone stands three inches from me while loading the drier above mine. “Hey,” I snap. “Sorry,” he says. It’s all very awkward.

During the middle of the week, news reports say the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is about to recommend everyone wear a mask outside the house. It’s impossible to get one on Amazon and so we walk to a weird toy store in my neighbourhood, still open via a loophole that classifies sellers of “office supplies” as essential businesses, that is rumoured to have masks. The entrance is shuttered, but like something from a bad dystopian movie, after we’ve milled about on the sidewalk for a minute, someone sees us and opens the grille half way. We duck in. It’s a maximum of six masks per person, for $60 – 10 times what it should cost – and I’m only too happy to pay.

At 7pm that night, we go out on our terrace and clap for the hospital workers. People bang pots and pans. There is universal cheering. I had wondered if the novelty of this would wear off, too, diminishing through gratitude fatigue. But it hasn’t. The cheering, perhaps the real barometer of the city’s mood, is different from one day to the next. It keeps getting louder.

• Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist