A Journal of the Pandemic #18

Reopening...! That's the hot topic now, right? Reopening schools, with the new year beginning or about to begin around the country. This involves two segments of the population who have kind of sat out the last few months of dramatic developments. The students, of course, who stayed home for a kind of regular summer vacation, and the teachers. 

These were also two of the most visible segments of the early pandemic, engaged in the strange new world of virtual learning. That’s how the school year ended. Optimistically, the next one might have had slightly less to worry about. We know, of course, now, that this will simply not be the case. 

The slow process of figuring out the (temporary?) new normal has been developing as people have tried to figure out how to open up the shutdowns. Here at my childcare facility we’re recalling staff that haven’t been active in months. Not everyone’s back yet, but it’s already provoking further complications of absorbing the extra staff from my original building; apparently we have a surplus of caregivers. For me, that means a lot of standing around waiting for something to do. The assistant director has remarked several times to me that with my degree I could take advantage of the circumstances and pursue a teaching career.

Which, for any number of reasons, I’m still hesitant to do. One of them, now, is the idea of swooping in and claiming a spot that’s empty mostly because someone else is feeling uncomfortable in this new environment, whether the concept of distance learning or not wanting potential exposure to the coronavirus. It’s not just kids, after all, who will be newly vulnerable to it, but the teachers, many of whom are alarmed about it. 

We’re at a point, though, where I think impatience is setting in, not in the ordinary folk everyone likes to blame for spikes, or the most visible politicians, but the decision-makers running the regular operations. Even those who tried to stick it out are starting to feel the pinch. DC Comics just announced massive changes to its internal structures, for instance, this after already months earlier upending the distribution process of the medium, all as a result of the pandemic. Change is always going to happen, but some change is absolutely attributable to the pandemic. DC has been confronting its future throughout the year anyway; before the pandemic it fired its longtime publisher Dan DiDio, accused of too much editorial meddling and continuity reshuffling. Now, who knows?

Last Friday I had a good phone conversation with my brother in Maine. It was actually about our dad. Like me he’s been struggling with how to perceive our dad, but he’s been having an even harder time of it. On Sunday I talked with my dad, as usual, and...I sort of realized all over again that there are things I don’t often think about in regards to him, how his sense of community is considerable, for instance. He’s involved in his community in ways that objectively put me to shame. His priorities are very different from mine. His life is very different from mine. This is part of why I try so hard to appreciate the differences, work with them, and maintain my relationship with him. Because the funny thing is, no matter how different we are, we can still have conversations, which isn’t always true, not for me, and maybe not for a lot of people. I consider it a very good thing that this whole thing has put such a spotlight, for me, on my dad, for good and otherwise. 

Yesterday I finally got to submit some stories to a comic book publisher I’ve been waiting on since the pandemic began. This publisher prides itself in stuffing its comics with bonus material, which means you can submit to them on this basis. They say they look at more than just microfiction, but that’s all I’ve personally seen them include, and all I’m currently interested in sending. They periodically open, and then close, the submission portal. It was supposed to open in March, but then of course the pandemic hit and threw everything into disarray, and comics were hit like everything else, and the portal remained closed until this month. That’s a long time to wait! I had written two stories for the company early in the year, and that’s exactly what I ended up submitting. I could have written more, and obviously I still can, but that’s two, and now I want to see if either is accepted. I like ‘em both, besides (but hopefully I do, right?), so I guess it was just hard to give them additional competition from my own material.

This week I read Ted Chiang for the first time. Chiang wrote “Story of Your Life,” on which the film Arrival was based. Arrival is one of those movies I loved instantly and somehow began to think even more highly of as time went on. So the story, and Chiang’s storytelling in general, had a tall order to follow. For me he isn’t really up to it. He’s more of an idea guy, who wants desperately to impress but kind of hopes the ideas alone will do it. As fate would have it, I’ve been working on a lot of ideas lately, and Chiang’s ended up feeding into that. That seems good enough.

Finally watched Josh Trank’s Capone, with Tom Hardy, one of the movies that managed to get released during the pandemic (and not as a Netflix release, or some other premium streaming platform). Hardy is Hardy (which perversely is harder and harder to impress with), and he portrays the famous mobster in his inglorious final year, in which his diminished mental abilities drastically affect his affairs. Too often we either glorify our famous figures, or vilify them. This is a rare instance to see something else.

And, today, as I have throughout the pandemic, I ordered Dominos. And as of a week ago yesterday, my niece is a big sister!