I'm not feeling resilient...

Today I emailed the university's "resilience" committee, which is responsible for managing the pandemic. I asked:

I am curious about the status of the decision to open in person for the spring. I would like lead time to adjust if necessary (I'm sure students would too), and if we are opening as normal, are we going to be providing high-quality masks like N95s to students, since vaccination no longer prevents disease? Are we considering moving the testing site near to where the people are? Are the unvaccinated going to be on campus? That sort of thing. When will we know what's changed, since the threat has changed?

The reply I received was...not very satisfying. I won't post it without my colleagues' permission but in essence, as far as I can tell, literally nothing has changed at all between last semester and this semester. 

I don't know if I feel distraught or despair or maybe just numb. 

I postponed surgery anticipating that we were going to have the largest spike yet. We're having the largest spike yet. And I can't point to a single thing that is going to be different next semester. That seems crazy. Shouldn't there be a change in procedures when the bug becomes more virulent and dodges the vaccines? Am I wrong about that? 

B

Coping Object 3: Ninja Shoes!

 Alright not actually ninja shoes. There's a story. 

About in about April of 2020, when the nostalgia was hitting hard, I found myself wondering about a pair of shoes I acquired when I was in Spain for the first time, shoes that had soles made of rope. So I searched for a similar pair. The closest thing that I could find was tai-chi shoes, and they look like this:

These are super cheap. Suuuuper cheap. I have had about 6 pairs of them, and since I never go anywhere in them, the fact that they can be so beaten up just by farting around the house really speaks to their quality. And they have no grip. I fully expect to be found dead on linoleum one day wearing a pair of these. The only reason I mention them is that they are feature unique since my pandemic life began. 

Last night, by the way, Eve mentioned that some neighbors were talking about how their houses had all had covid. That's 2 or 3 houses in the neighborhood. This is a pretty conservative part of the state, and when you are out (or at least when I was going out regularly), you rarely see people masking up. This, I'm afraid, is going to bite us in the backside.

B

3 Nights in a Row Counts as a Compulsion....

 The next item that has sustained me through the pandemic only became important when my school reopened and I was heading back to school. Campus had a vaccine mandate and I believe that when the delta variant arrived we also returned to mandatory masks. I had only removed my mask in the presence of others at a single orientation/registration event anyway, and even then only for a few minutes, so it was no big change for me. 

I do teach, however, and I wear glasses. I had KN95s enough for every class, and I was only on campus on teaching days unless something really pressing called me in. So, this was my teaching combo this fall:

That's it. Hey, it counts as a post. 

B

See? Two nights in a row.

 It's like a trend or something.

In my quest to loosen up my pen and get the creative juices pumping, I want to record for posterity a couple of objects that have helped me through the pandemic. I'll do one a day for a couple of days. 

The first object made absolutely no material difference to my health in the pandemic, but it served the purpose of a talisman or good luck charm or similar psychological crutch. It was my little bottle of hand sanitizer:

 

Behold its glory.

I think I got this at Walmart during my first pre-pandemic freak-out. I bought about three 32oz bottles of hand sanitizer and a tiny, portable one that I would refill. To get you in the sort of mindset I was in--my weirdness manifests in strange ways-- I got it in my mind that I needed a funnel to fill the little bottle, so I headed off to the automotive section to find the right one. It was completely unnecessary. Who thinks, damn it, I need a funnel for this apocalypse? A similar buy was a big thing of instant coffee. My reasoning went: I'm addicted to Diet Pepsi, and it's probably because of the caffeine. When I quit drinking coffee, I had headaches for a few weeks. I must never have another headache. Therefore, I must buy a buttload of instant coffee to somehow step down if I need to. Never touched it. This bottle was with me whenever I went anywhere, which was mostly nowhere with occasional runs to the grocery store. You can see that the printing has rubbed off it has been toted around so much. Whenever I touched anything, I gave myself a little squirt of sanitizer; it was like I was training for the OCD Olympics. It turns out that COVID-19 doesn't spread by fomites, but handwashing stations and handwipes remain everywhere. Hygiene theater, they call it. 

B 

I'm back...

Not much has happened since I last posted in December 2019. Perhaps that's why the blog has been lying fallow for two years, the sheer uneventfulness of it all. 

The pandemic blew up in our face just a few months later. I was worried. I had been listening to the BBC and they were doing a good job reporting on the "flu" in Wuhan, as was STAT news. And I had an inkling. This is not one of those retrofitted memories that one makes up after the fact. I was freaking out long before the coronavirus made it to the neighborhood and I have the gallons of hand sanitizer to prove it. I made night runs to Wal-Mart weeks before the lockdown. I had already trained my students on all of the online tools that we would be using for the rest of the semester and had essentially excused them from attending in class a week before the school closed. I never lacked toilet paper and I never lacked Diet Pepsi--at least not until they ran out of it all over South Jersey this fall. Believe me, I checked. 

I had purchased gloves and goggles and alcohol wipes and even had a box or two of facemasks before they disappeared, the last ones in the local CVS, if I remember correctly. The lockdown, when it hit, was very intense; it was a hard year and a half. Eve and I did--and are doing--our absolute best to keep our distance from the rest of the world during this ongoing public health emergency. After the first three or four months, I had dreams of hugging people. 

Right after the virus appeared in China, I finished my tenure file and submitted it. As the months of lockdown dragged on and as my colleagues and I worked from home, the file made its way up through the layers of the university bureaucracy, and I believe tenure was voted on by the Board in April 2020. I am glad I had already finished the file before the end of the world. I'm not sure how I would have coped if I had to complete the file under lockdown. Truth be told, I think the jury is still out on how well I coped anyway. 

This site is my New Year's Resolution. Just typing more. That would be nice. 

 

That car's not right...

Today was going to be productive. I was going to go down to campus after breakfast, do a little work, and then find a stretch of beach to walk along. Well, that didn't happen. After I pulled out of my parking spot the brakes were not right. The pedal gave no resistance, I only realized that down the road a bit, so I coasted into nearby Tweeville (not its actual name), which is a mall of antique stores which are in turn made from authentic antique buildings shipped in from the . This is all a few blocks down from me. There's an excellent bakery there, so I at least coasted into a place where I could get breakfast while I planned my next move.

Inside, I recognized two of the patrons at a table in the back, an elderly couple (ages 95 and 93) who my students have been interviewing. The fellow was a paratrooper in the Philippines in WWII (wow!), so he has been interviewed for the USAHEC veterans oral history program that my students participate in as part of an independent study. One of my students will be interviewing the couple, who have been married 75 years, about the history of Atlantic City, and I'm hoping she'll get a publishable article out of it. I met them at this bakery earlier this year, and my students and I will be taking them out for breakfast next Sunday anyway. I know their great-grandson, a former student of mine. When I first met them, in fact, I had a photo of their great-great-grandson on my phone that my student had sent me. I of course shared it with them.

After breakfast, I checked the brake fluid in my car and found the reservoir to be bone dry. I schlepped across the street to a dollar store to get some and very quickly the car started to feel more normal. But my morning was thrown off, and I was not so keen to take the car all the way to campus. As a consequence, I was at home all day.

Not a thunderingly interesting post, I'll admit, so here's a report of a Philadelphia goldfish dealer who found a "Jersey Devil" among his stock. This seems to be an early "scientists baffled"-themed story.

Source: The Libby Herald, 17 Aug 1911, Chronicling America

RJB

Running for Office...

Today was one for the books. Jeff van Drew, my local representative, has apparently decided to leave the Democratic party and join the Republicans. I voted for him. I may have even donated to his campaign. I met him a few weeks ago at an event for veterans on my campus, and I asked him about the impeachment. I wanted to know if he he was open minded about voting to impeach if it came to that, and he said that there would have to be something big and new to come out of the now-recent round of hearings. He said he thought that the country was too divided and that next year's election would settle things. I take it by the current reports that he found the new evidence not substantial enough to justify a vote to impeach.

This, of course, means that someone needs to run against him as a Democrat. I toyed for about 5 minutes with the idea of throwing my hat into the ring. I was running through possible slogans in my head: "No, Jeff, we really meant blue" was my favorite. Most of them, however, had expletives in them (e.g. "Don't be a dick"), and hence, I won't be running for office any time soon (though, let's face it, swearing is small potatoes compared to the type of shit the head of state gets away with). This frustration comes on the heels of the conservative win in the UK general election, so my exasperation with the ineffectiveness of the forces for good is pretty acute. 

I would not be the craziest person to run for office, however. In 1932, the quack John Brinkley, who claimed that transplanting goat testicles into men had health benefits, ran for governor of Kansas:

Source:  Indianapolis Times (9 June 1932) at Chronicling America

There was also Dudley J. LeBlanc, a Louisiana politician whose Hadacol Caravans, a medicine show, toured with top Hollywood talent. (When asked what his medicine was good for, LeBlanc once replied, "It was good for five million dollars for me last year.")

Ignatius Donnelly was another goofball who actually made it to the House of Representatives. He was a crank in many fields. To archaeology, classical and biblical studies, he popularized the idea that the Atlantis was consumed by the Noachian flood. To literary studies, he discovered if you wrapped the text of the plays of Shakespeare around a cylinder, you learned that they were actually written by Francis Bacon. 

One day, I'll probably run for something, just to have done it. For now, however, I'm working on other things.