A Journal of the Pandemic #15

Yeah, I'm starting to become annoyed.

 

Wrangled with Pat Dilloway on Twitter a few days ago about how he keeps insisting I haven't been taking the pandemic seriously.  I don't even blame Pat so much as how Twitter is being, well, Twitter. I know I already said I wanted to just back off Twitter again, because I have no history of heavy usage, and the pandemic period saw me use and learn more about how to use it than I'd ever done before.  As it turns out, just as everyone on Twitter lost their minds on every possible crusade.  One acquaintance I have there from back in my Colorado years noted how depressed he was getting from all the negativity, because he thoroughly identifies with everything Twitter is upset about, so I tried pointing out to him that what he needed was a break, because as it turns out regardless of how you view it, viewing that all day long every day is not going to be good for you.  I have no idea if he actually took it to heart, because soon after, despite taking a break from making his own posts about these things, he continued viewing and "liking" the tweets others were making, and...So, I'm just going to back off of Twitter. For real this time.

 

Obviously, what a lot of these people don't for a minute understand is that these crises are happening because there's a lot of pent-up frustration from the pandemic that needs a release valve, and there's nothing possible except getting angry about something, anything.  This is not to say these causes don't have merit, but that the ways they're being addressed right now are surely being affected by factors that have nothing at all to do with them, and maybe nothing at all to do with politics, either (to even address that would needlessly drag this discussion into politics, and I'm somewhat sick to death of politics right now...and there's still a massive election at the end of the year!).

 

I worked every day last week.  I know when I last wrote I was optimistic that there might be some sort of concession to the spiking numbers here in Florida and other places...but there wasn't.  Not in any appreciable way.  There are people who will blame politics for this, that woe is the leadership who won't do anything now and only did something then out of massive pressure...But that's the problem.  There was not a "one size fits all" approach to the early pandemic, and yet everyone was forced to react as if there was.  If reasonable measures had been put in place to begin with (work on getting masks for everyone, cutting off out-of-state, let alone out-of-country, travel except for truly essential purposes), we might have been able to see what the shape of this thing really was.  The United States is a big country.  We reacted as if everyone everywhere was faced at the same time with the same problem.  And that just wasn't the case.  But all discussion was muted because any discussion was deemed to suggest that the pandemic wasn't "real," that anything but the central narrative was counterproductive.  Which was and is complete hogwash nonsense.  We knew early on who the most vulnerable segments of the population were.  We knew who was most likely to die.  And yet the most shameful outcome of the pandemic to date, the nursing home deaths, remains all but ignored because it's not convenient and is not a big enough number for the number itself to shock and appall.  Well, I remain shocked and appalled.  These are invisible deaths, but they are still tragedies.

 

But the numbers spike and now, because we were bullied once, we seem more reluctant to respond as we did before.  Of course I'm annoyed.  I didn't want the response to be irrational in the first place, but that response was forced on all of us.  My job shut down for a month.  We reopened, cautiously, and slowly increased the numbers.  We were about two stages in last week, and by Wednesday, as per the announcement I heard and wrote about last time, technically all the kids I watched last week should have gone back home.  Their parents were not first stage essential workers.  That was a demonstrable fact.  Leadership decided otherwise.  Likely they decided they were simply going to freeze at the point they had reached, rather than continue incrementally increasing the numbers at the pace they had previously set.  I don't know.  Probably.  Hopefully?

 

Working with the one-year-old age group was interesting and challenging. This was the group I worked with the first year of my current job, before moving on to babies the second year, but I had never been in a room alone with them (given ratios and waiting for security clearance to finally happen, this wasn't surprising), so even though these were three-hour days it came with a learning curve.  This weekend I bought a few flashcard packs to help fill out the time, given how the kids responded well to that sort of thing last week.  Part of my spike response was just trying to escape the responsibility and challenge of it, but on that score I seem to be doing reasonably well. 

 

I continued working on the In the Land of Pangaea project, having renamed this second act The Pearls That Were His Eyes.  I hit a roadblock with the longest chapter, but broke that up (partly because of how last Monday played out in general) between two different working days, and soon enough had wrapped things up, happily figuring out a few more changes that needed to be made and how to handle them along the way.  Out of all the writing projects I've tackled during the pandemic, this was the most interesting. 

 

On that score, things are working out.

A Journal of the Pandemic #14

Well, the numbers started spiking in Florida...

So we are probably going to be sliding back to previous restrictions. They mandated masks inside public buildings Friday evening. Assuming it holds, at work they’re going to revert to the lowest level of numbers by midweek. Today was the first of what was supposed to be at least a week of helping out with the further expansion from previous levels. Guess that’s going to change...Again, if what I heard was accurate, and I understood it properly, none of these kids will be here by Wednesday. But I guess we’ll see.

Strange to be a part of the surge. Again, everyone expected Florida to be a hotspot early on, which never happened, until three months in. So I guess this COVID-19 business will just keep being interesting...

As I talked about last week, it’s now been a year since my niece, the Burrito, went to live in Texas. By midpoint last week I was having a hard time with it, and once again vowed to myself that I was just going to go cold turkey and put her behind me. But I got to talk to her a few times later in the week. I didn’t give up. Sometimes when you’re absolutely convinced about something, you can still end up changing your mind, even if it seems impossible. 

I mailed her a box for her birthday, which like my two-year anniversary at work and the year-mark with Texas, is a reminder that time is still passing. I’d been piling things up for months, for her, her coming baby brother, and my nephews in Maine, most of which, for them, had been waiting since last December, when I was supposed to see them, or maybe March, when again I was supposed to see them. Shipping those boxes was a good feeling. I don’t ship boxes very often. I do most of my Christmas shopping on Amazon (it’s convenient, okay???). I’ve sometimes felt, during this, that I haven’t done nearly enough for family, not that any of us are doing badly, but that staying connected, keeping spirits up, feels like what everyone ought to be doing. For a guy, even with family, who hates to initiate conversation, I hope I’ve at least done okay. Sending the box to my nephews felt especially necessary, because I really haven’t been able to do much with them since 2017, when I left Maine with my niece, and I cherish them greatly.

Anyway, so the transcription project with the second act of In the Land of Pangaea has been going well. When I reached the longest chapter I kind of hit the pause button, because transcribing is hard! Especially if you want to get a whole chapter done in one sitting! It doesn’t take much time, in the grand scheme, but it’s like writing longhand for a long time. It takes a toll. So when I finally tackled it this morning, I got about halfway, started feeling really good about it....and of course I was called in early at work! But I had gotten over the hump, and that’s what mattered. I’m almost done. I just have a little more to transcribe, a little new stuff to write, and then...!

I’m a troglodyte when it comes to entertainment platforms. I still buy DVDs. This weekend someone placed a box stuffed with old DVDs in the laundry shack.  The one movie I absolutely wanted (Burn After Reading), which I’ve sort of been obsessing over since talking about it with the Armchair Squid a few years back...the case was empty. But there were a few others that looked good. That was a pleasant surprise. I get that other people live in the modern age, but I don’t mind benefiting from their moving on. No movie in the box was particularly recent. For some reason there were two copies of Troy (I already have it, and the director’s cut). I just hope the box was there for good reasons, just making space. 

Oh, and got a Tom Brady Buccaneers t-shirt. Just a small reminder that good things have actually happened in the recent past...

A Journal of the Pandemic #13

It actually feels wrong to continue this journal, as the pandemic seems to be fading almost completely into the background, somehow, except in matters of slowly reopening things, and flare-ups. A quick thought on the recent flare-ups, though: One of the regions facing this is Florida, where I currently live. Back when all this started a lot of observers expected Florida to be hit heavily, which never really happened. Now that we’re ticking back up, I wonder if it has less to do with reopening measures and more the pandemic reaching here in numbers that just hadn’t happened previously, sort of the way the pandemic hit South America hard & heavy in recent weeks after having previously been virtually nonexistent. All of this suggests, to me anyway, that our response never really took a measured approach, that we went straight to panic, denounced anyone who contradicted this approach, and...But I guess this is the era we live in. I desperately wish there was a mainstream voice of reason, because all we seem to get is kneejerk rubbernecking that doesn’t stop for a moment to consider whether or not it’s remotely helpful. 

Anyway.

At work last week was easy. Two days of light duty at the center that’s closed, cleaning things up a little (there remains the possibility that if we return to full numbers and need to, we will...not actually keep the center closed until it can be renovated). My third and final work day was spending the day with a one-year-old I hadn’t previously had a lot of interaction with. But she was great! It was a good day. This week today was supposed to be my first day of work, but more busywork, but that was called off, and so I’m writing this. 

I’ve been immersed in the transcription process from the second act of In the Land of Pangaea. Honestly, this has been some of the best revision experience I’ve ever had. I know there are writers who do this all the time, but most of my writing has been directly to computer, except in instances where I’ve written passages in a notebook. This is material I really haven’t even looked at in five or so years. I knew this act was the strongest, but didn’t have active memory for most of what I’d actually written, and so I’ve been surprising myself. There’s been some of the material I’ve completely rewritten, and some I’ve tweaked considerably. And again, this is the sort of thing a lot of writers do anyway, as a matter of course. I’ve been getting into legitimate revision with some of my projects in recent years, but this feels like a whole different level. If I had this kind of time previously, and printed works-in-progress, probably this is what I would have been doing all along, especially seeing how it plays out. Always looking to grow.

On Sunday it will be one year since my niece, the Burrito, moved to Texas. It’s weird living a life where I’m not actively devastated by this, because I know intellectually I absolutely am. It helps to be working with kids, even in these current conditions. Losing my niece is second only to gaining her in the first place in terms of significant life developments for me. That’s how important she is, the void she left behind, how much I wish she were still an everyday part of my life, how much I want to be there for her, to help in any manner I can. One year, and this is still only the beginning. What’s it going to be like in five years? Ten years? Will I still be considered important to her? 

The effects of the pandemic are still only in their infant stages. We don’t know, for instance, just how dramatically this will have affected movie theaters. For people like me, who if I had the money would probably see every movie, just...every movie, released in theaters, this is cause for considerable concern. But my niece is a more significant question. That’s where I am, in terms of the pandemic.

A Journal of the Pandemic #12

Obviously since last I updated the United States became embroiled in another crisis, sparked by the death of George Floyd.  Last weekend mass protests broke out and some became riots, and this is what has been happening for the past week.  Black Lives Matter. 

 

I am not black.  I'm white.  In high school, in college, in Maine and Pennsylvania, black people were so rare they were almost novelties.  In my freshmen year of college I joined a club called Diversity 101, which predominantly featured black members and concerned itself with the black perspective.  The most dramatic thing I did with the club was attend a march on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, which might have seemed easy enough, but it was a frigid day in January, and I don't know if it's just colder in Pittsburg than in Erie, but...yeah, they looked at me like I was crazy, the organizers, not because I was white but because I was stupid enough not to bring warm gloves.  Eventually someone let me borrow some.  All I remember about it was how cold my hands really got.  I grew up in Maine.  I delivered newspapers every morning for five years.  I'm pretty sure that January morning was the coldest my hands ever got.  But it was worth it. 

 

I haven't attended any events.  I actually more or less quit Twitter for real because I was sick of the anger.  Angry tweets don't solve anything.  Have we learned nothing at all from Trump???  Maybe it's strength of solidarity, strength in numbers, I don't know, but it makes for a lousy social experience.  On Tuesday, when everyone was supposed to quit tweeting personal stuff, everyone pretty much went silent entirely, because at that point, despite repeated reminders of what the day was supposed to mean, everyone who was going to be participating was only angry tweeting anyway.  They had nothing else to say.  I checked back in yesterday.  Some of Twitter is back to normal.  But now it's just weird.  I talked before how I was going to quit because it's damn hard to be social when you suck at being social, even on the internet, even though I kept trying, and made a few tweets people enjoyed, but it's weird, trying to look at it the same way, after everyone decided they only wanted to say what everyone else was saying.  I love the sentiment.  I don't need everyone saying it.  Well, I don't.  It's an echo chamber.  That's the biggest problem we have today.  Everyone's indignant, but they're all complaining to everyone who already believes exactly what they believe.  What's being accomplished?  Everyone becomes convinced that they're absolutely making their points that whatever it is they want is definitely going to be accomplished...

 

Listen, and I don't want to get political (hey Pat! here's where you don't need to make a comment that I already know you would make), but this has become a problem that's only increased since 2016.  Since 2016 the absolute same things have been said repeatedly as if they're absolutely new, every single time, and...That's just not something that interests me.  I purged Facebook in 2016 because of this, because it's not just that there's no possibility of dialogue, it's that the people who talk about these things all the time seem to forget there's anything else worth talking about.  You're not saving civilization.  You're kind of destroying it.

 

Anyway, amazingly or not, the pandemic is still happening.  At work we had enough babies back for double staff ratio this week.  It was also my last week, as it turned out, as a part of the particular building staff I'd started out with two years ago, the last week I would have with my babies.  There are three buildings in the childcare system, as I've mentioned.  The one I started at needs to have renovations.  Finally the decision was made to reassign staff to the other buildings, and I ended up assigned to the other building, not the one we're been sharing the last month.  I don't know yet my specific fate, if I will even still be working with babies...!  I'll get to reunite with some staff that had been reassigned last fall, and with kids who went with them, most of whom I haven't gotten to see since then (the kids; I've managed to see all the staff in some capacity; I'm not social, so the chance of seeing them outside of work is remote).

 

I'm going to miss the babies I've worked with for so long, but at least of the ones we've had the past month, I can once again say I've gotten to enjoy seeing them make real and fantastic progress, which will always be rewarding.  I saw a one-year-old yesterday who...probably forgot all about who the heck I am, but suffice to say we enjoyed many great moments together in the baby room.  That's the nature of the job.  You're always saying goodbye.  That's really what this is, again.

 

Last time some of you expressed surprise that management would play so fast and loose with continuity.  I completely understand.  A part of me is horrified about what's happening with the staff.  Continuity is crucial!  But that's also...parenting.  I don't want to make this an ego thing.  I'm not the only person capable of caring for these kids.  It might sometimes seem that way, but, at the end of the day, the control I have is only as much as a day at a time gives me.  That's all anyone can say.  Some of us use that time wisely.  Some of us have no idea the impact we have.

 

Anyway, the pandemic will help the transition.  The numbers are low, and that's actually a blessing.  Some of these kids, as I've suggested, are forming new bonds with their parents.  Some of them are forgetting what it means to have an outside world, and that will produce its own challenges.  My sister used to be concerned about her daughter's socializing, what she might be missing out on if she stayed exclusively under my watch.  These are all kids who had that socializing.  Not everyone's me!  Some of us like hanging out with other people! 

 

The effects of the pandemic unquestionably fed into the reaction to George Floyd's murder.  It might even be argued that George Floyd died as much because of the pandemic as because of a callous police officer.  The arrest happened because he was attempting to use fake money.  I don't know why he did that.  I can only guess that he did it because he thought he had to.  I don't even know if he was employed at the time.  Black people are particularly vulnerable in this economy, and I can't imagine they weren't hit particularly hard by the shutdowns.  I don't know.  The rush to report outrage usually leaves these kinds of things unobserved.  If it wasn't economic reasons there was still unquestionably pent-up reactions to the shutdowns themselves.  There needs to be serious reflection on a lot of things.  It's not enough to say we have social safety nets.  We need to be able to have the courage to say it's not good enough for anyone to be privileged at the expense of anyone else.  This will hit black people, and it will hit all manner of other underprivileged segments of the population.  That's the whole point.  We live, as every society ever has, on unequal footing.  The idea of the American Dream always said that if you make the effort you can achieve anything.  Why does it have to come with strings attached?  Why do some people have to scratch and claw and others get a virtual free ride?  You don't have to look far.  You can see it in your own life, if you're honest.  Everyone benefits, or suffers (or, both).  Can you say which you experience?  Or if you have ever done something about it?

 

This is a moment in history built for reflection.  We have the time.  Let's call it something like a New Horizon.  Let's give each other the chance to see their dreams come true, without telling them they don't deserve it inherently.  Let's be honest.  For a change.