Mostly Apolitical Thread for Discussing/Venting our Rational/Irrational COVID-19 Fears and Experiences in 2020

the amazon warehouse shutdown in France is hilarious because now amazon is saying they're just going to ship from other countries instead

Gave up after 40 minutes this time. Just have to hope the postman on the redelivery day rings the bell. This is probably costing me more in phone calls than the actual value of the items.

Leaving to go out for a short walk earlier, as I open the front door of the building I saw a delivery guy arriving for a neighbour. I thought he might see me in the doorway and give me a moment to leave but he kept approaching. When he''s nearly two metres from me and not stopping I say, loudly, I'll leave the door on the latch for you and I'll go back in. He STILL doesn't stop as I'm latching the door. So I go back into the building and wait for him to drop the thing off. Once he's back out the door I follow at a distance and he looks back at me baffled like he has no idea why I'd been hovering around the door if I was on my way out. *eye roll*

Just had the broadband guy in as out service was dropping out stopping us from working at home. He's the first non-household person to cross the door in weeks. We all kept our distance and cleaned everything etc but it's quite unnerving inviting a potential new "vector" into the house.

In other news two of my friends have lost parents (both over 80) and my neighbour is in hospital. Everything feels closer and more real this week.

Yes I drank white wine and ate sweetbreads and smoked a cigarette b/c it's Friday and a pandemic's lurking about.

xxps: Home ovens should be fine for recycling masks. In a paper bag, 30 minutes in a preheated oven at 70 °C, and that mask and oven is sterile. See Duan et al 2003, and this discussion by Peter Tsai, a guy who invents mask N95 filtration material.

i'm ordering more fernet

Hi, Brad!

chemo walk today

they're increasingly tiring, but I do not want to take transit or be in friends' cars

Has anyone else noticed that junk/spam emails have dwindled to almost nothing?

Nope! I'm getting bothered by them more than ever. Spam filters usually catch them but every day I'm getting a phishing one from "TESC0" that keeps getting tweaked, presumably to test its way past the filters.

Popping in at 10pm on Friday night after my 3+ hr class tonight to report 1) super proud of my students for trying so hard to adapt 2) they’re all showing up still and that makes me feel good as a teacher and 3) omgggggggg teaching via webcam is exhausting. I’m adapting just like my students are but holy crap. I can barely deal w the pressure of being their teacher before/after. I need to maintain my connection but it’s soooo hard. Also, I’m grateful bc they’re the only ppl I interact w face to face now

online teaching is invading my personal mental space, nothing like getting up on a Sunday morning to an email from some fucking student who started a quiz but didn't want to do it and could I please reset it for them. Or an email on a Friday evening asking when feedback is likely to be available. Hi guys, you know how we've given you extensions for everything because it's hard times for students? I'm a fucking person living through this as well.

dad's out of the hospital. infection is gone, WBC is higher. he's very weak, mostly cos he just went through surgery. we've bought a handicapped seat for the shower and toilet seat riser with bars to grab onto, should be here Monday.

Home health finally called to help my mother out and he's been doing physical therapy and he's going to keep doing it! finally!!!!. hopefully having this infection knocked out will restore him to strength.

was sad the other night, because I called him (since I couldn't be there), and I got his voicemail. I never call my dad (not even pre-stroke), so I hadn't gotten his voicemail in years. he recorded it probably ten years ago, and hearing his pre-stroke voice again just made me sad :(.

but....let me rephrase, this is good news, I am glad he is home.

sounds positive! glad he got the surgery so quickly.

Aw, that's good news.

ha matthew i got one of those emails today too. it’s like... chill out. i’m probably giving you a good grade.

anyway i’ve been very frustrated by the lack of testing / conditions one has to meet in order to get tested here in the states, which just seems to me like a way to impose regimentation and rationality on something that does not have the human capacity for logic. in part this is because i’ve been having major digestive problems and chills and coughing off and on since the beginning of march, but i don’t have a fever and haven’t been around anyone coming from a hotspot to my knowledge so i guess i can go get fucked, even though universities are petri dishes even when things are normal? cool system we have here

or as richard marx put it

Hey, remember how for years we had “smoking” and “non-smoking” sections of planes and restaurants? Then, eventually, enough people realized that cigarette smoke doesn’t know which section is which and it was stupid as fuck? Remember? Good, cuz a bunch of dumb motherfuckers forgot

— Richard Marx (@richardmarx) April 18, 2020

Richard Marx otm

Just checking his twitter, he's a cool guy!

Yeah but he also swears he "left her by the river" so

Social distancing in action.

even in normal times I don't really care when students turn in work---as long as it's before the deadline the university gives me for filing grades at the end of the term, I can work with them.

same here euler

nice

I don't have a lot of students this term, just one small course, but the students have been writing to me to say that they've had trouble thinking and getting their acts together and could I accept their work a little late, and I'm like, it's the same for me! it's hard for me to think right now and I have to keep begging for deadline extensions too! we are all in this together.

the administration of my school is being pretty annoying about micromanaging our compliance w the new reality -- there was a list going around of instructors who supposedly were not compliant but the list was pulled from bad data so we have to waste ALL THIS TIME clarifying and explaining and defending ourselves. it's ridiculous.

maintaining the connection i have built w my classes and staying organized and not losing students are my tpp priorities atm -- there are no due dates in the assignments i created in the LMS, people who are sticklers about that are either dealing with students who need a lot of structure or, at worst, are uptight jerkholes

the administration of my school is being pretty annoying about micromanaging our compliance w the new reality

I'm supposed to enter a list of what I did every day onto a spreadsheet, and I keep forgetting to do it at the end of the day, so I try to do it at the end of the week but by Friday afternoon my brain is a puddle of stew and I can barely remember that I'm alive, let alone what I did all week.

I made my meek adjustments to online (hate the term "remote") learning without a hitch, and I've had some mild attrition, but otherwise students haven't changed their habits. I've been slacker on deadlines -- that's the only difference.

sounds like you are doing awesome work la lechera, must be great for your students to have a caring teacher throughout all this.

my school trying to keep administrative procedures (and even our drop-in classes!) going was ridiculous...I'm laid off now and honestly I'm happy about it, 4 hours of online ESL teaching a day was doing my head in.

yeah that would do me in as well -- it feels like talking with the same people but talking through a wall or from inside a box. really hard to keep things moving!!
and thank you <3 i am doing my best and trying to be creative about how to approach end-of-semester projects and stuff like that. it has been fun to talk with them about what they're cooking, how they are approaching home ec topics.

i totally flaked on a class this week because i haven’t been feeling well. once my stomach gets right i’m planning on rectifying that though

The "Get My Payment" app on the IRS website is giving me the dreaded "status not available" message, and apparently there is nothing I can do. I qualify and filed a tax return last year so I should darn well be in the system. It's apparently a pretty common occurrence to see this info but given reports of money going to the wrong accounts it's still worrying/infuriating.

Also, comedy broadcast from the comedian's home is the saddest comedy.

Yeah, Colbert's opening monologues have the "pause for laughter" thing and its disconcerting with no audience. Though I have to say the Dylan bit at the start of Friday's was the funniest thing I've seen in a long while.

Ya, the pauses make it super weird. OTOH I caught Jimmy Kimmel's show a couple nights ago and thought he'd adjusted pretty well. Still it was very dark viewing somehow. But maybe it's growing on me, because I kinda wanna watch SNL tonight just to steep in the dystopian semiotics of the new format.

Tonight's a rerun, not sure when the next "live" one will be.

Yeah doesn't snl rely on ensemble qualities.

Completely unrelated.
Found out that Guerssen Records has a note up saying they have no way of sending things out. I think it says you can make purchases but there is no post in Spain at the moment. Hope that isn't fatal cos they're a nice label.
Have been meaning to pick up some stuff from them since I bought stuff before Xmas.
Wonder if this is happening elsewhere and if people can actually weather it.
Assume there must be rent and storage and things to cover while things are at a standstill.

Ensemble qualities being difficult to duplicate while members are in isolation from each other.

Did hear that Michael Che has picked up the rent tab for several apartments in the block his dead mother lived in in honour of her passing. & he's not that well off. Heard it on a podcast yesterday plus discussion of what a comedian's salary is likely to be.

That is baller as heck

K if SNL is a rerun then imma watch The Irishman instead

as predicted, The Discourse has moved from "actually, social distancing is really popular and only the protesters dislike about it." just because people recognize that they're worse than the alternative doesn't mean they're fucking popular! is there some parallel world where people don't feel complete despair over all this? do those people just possess a capacity to be morally shamed out of despair that I don't?

("they're" = "these measures")

depends what you mean by "popular". sad to say we live in a world where the options only seem to be "yes, we hate it but we want to save lives" or "it's a liberal Chinese conspiracy to shut down the economy and take away our guns and OUR FREEDOM". in that sense, yes, social distancing is more "popular"

is there some parallel world where people don't feel complete despair over all this? do those people just possess a capacity to be morally shamed out of despair that I don't?

Not sure if I'm managing to parse this but it sounds rather like you think people should be ashamed of not feeling despair (at social distancing?). If I don't feel despair it's not because I've been morally shamed into it. Quite the opposite.

Now this all may be all bad for many people, but I feel on the contrary that you're likely to encounter moral censure or accusations of contrarianism for saying what you like about (side effects of) these measures without including a whole stack of disclaimers. Even then.

And feeling despair (or anything) is never a moral duty.

Yeah. And nobody can police your thoughts because nobody knows what they are

Not sure if I'm managing to parse this but it sounds rather like you think people should be ashamed of not feeling despair (at social distancing?).

My reading of Katherine's post was more "it's okay to feel despair," not "you should be ashamed of not feeling despair."

Positivity over the measures in the survey clearly meant "we think they are helping and need to continue them", not "we are overjoyed at not being able to leave the house and everything being closed and living on meager savings

What survey? Maybe that's some context for that post.

Because of course I can understand "is there a parallel universe?"

But "do those people just possess a capacity to be morally shamed out of despair that I don't?" reads like "people who feel differently to me (must/might - it's a bizarre notion either way) do so, not because they just feel otherwise, but because they have a capacity (?) to have been morally shamed out of it.

I dunno, maybe that's supposed to be a positive quality "those people" have but it read ironically like a strange ('shaminf') attack on people for feeling a certain way (i.e. differently to 'me', i.e. not correctly.)

I remain open to the possibility I have failed to parse this post and also that it was just an off the cuff remark. Not trying to start a flame war.

I have been exchanging long emails over the past 3 weeks(?) with someone I met on OkCupid who I now believe is catfishing me. Anybody been in this situation before and have advice? The right thing to do is just block and move on, isn't it? Don't try to confront them, they'll just have an explanation ready for everything and try to make me feel bad for trusting my own suspicions.

I think you nailed it. Trust your instinct, chalk it up to experience and drop them. There's nothing healthy happening there.