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.