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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3Xh7VB-u-U

in other words, they probably wouldn't get on one either, if they had a choice

xp

What, at 3 o'clock in the afternoon?

It's London, the place is full of dipsticks.

the thing about the future vs. the present is that the present is being alone, hemorrhaging money and what's left of any career prospects I might have, gaining weight and getting older, having social ties atrophy. and then all of this is also happening on a global scale, and any options I might have previously had to improve my situation are no longer possible. and even when lockdown is over there will be pressure to self-lockdown anyway until there's a vaccine, which is 1-2 years.

I also lol at communications about my pension, it already existed in the realm of mythology for me and I pay into it as an act of radical optimism - yes, there will be such a thing as retirement for me in 2053 and I will get this much money to live on and it will be enough, sure - but now the idea is even more of a joke and paying in more than the minimum contribution feels mildly quixotic. Maybe UBI will be sufficient after the post-covid reconstruction tho eh

retirement is darkly funny to me because earlier this year I was finally in a position where I could start saving for retirement, but kept putting off opening the account (in part because when does one have the time to spend potentially hours in a bank?), and of course since the stock market crashed earlier this year would have been an awful time to start one

lol katherine, similar thing happened to me. i started up an account 2 months ago. at least since i invested little, I lost little, but sigh

i chose not to contribute to a 401k at my new job, because i doubt i will ever retire, HR followed up to try to convince me to use it, the day we went WFH i'd had a meeting with the company rep that afternoon which is now obviously cancelled indefinitely. felt a little bit redeemed

Also booming post from Lechera.

Seconded. Reminds me of this Rebecca Solnit quote:

Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or decline from it. Optimism is similarly confident about what will happen. Both are grounds for not acting. Hope can be the knowledge that reality doesn't necessarily match our plans.

And also regarding quarantine life more generally, from Clarice Lispector:

Living is like being tired and not being able to sleep.

Both are grounds for not acting.
philosophy it's a smile on a dog

that's not a bad album really

It’s a walk on a slippery rock? I thought religion was a smile on a dog 🐶

Also I always thought it was a smile on a doll. Is it dog??

the talk on a cereal box:a smile on a dog::a walk on the slippery rocks:a light in the fog

Philosophy is a walk in a cereal box: religion is a fly on a dog. I get it now.

In a verse that was ultimately cut from the final arrangement, Ms. Brickell is reputed to have asserted that semiotics is a frown on a cat.

Dog Fly Religion?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kzJE31TsPA

that me butchering the ref could turn into some lols for me is not bad not bad. :)

Living is like being tired and not being able to sleep.

― avellano medio inglés (f. hazel), Monday, 20 April 2020 16:57 (one hour ago) link

I wish this were a metaphor instead of an increasingly common occurrence in my life -- last night I attempted to get some sleep at 4:30, failed to do so, gave up around 5:45 and have been up since

"Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or decline from it. Optimism is similarly confident about what will happen. Both are grounds for not acting. Hope can be the knowledge that reality doesn't necessarily match our plans."

I don't think this quote really gets to anything much. It does feel like covid has put in a place a process which we will be all chewed up and spat out - we could come out of it better or worse, if we happen to get it/live through it. Optimism or despair does feel like it's for the world after that. It's more like we are being shaken up.

officially postponed my wedding and let the guests know over the weekend. i know that it's ultimately the right decision, and me and my fiancé are lucky to have our loved ones and jobs unaffected (so far), but damn if it isn't a huge bummer.

postponement was a full year, to june 2021, and part of me is worried that we might not have pushed it back far enough.

depends on how anxiety and despair affect you, I guess... this is not a kind of stasis where we aren't subject to being damaged, and I can use these kind of incantations to break the surface of an irrational mode of thinking that tends to settle in.

(xpost)

I would love for Djokovic to retire because of his refusal to be vaccinated. I would love never have to see his stupid face again.

and of course since the stock market crashed earlier this year would have been an awful time to start one

― like, I’m eating an elephant head (katherine), Tuesday, 21 April 2020 1:32 AM (six hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Best time to start one, you catch the recovery with your early investments. Also no need to go to the bank. Use the time to start one online. Pick an institution that is too big to fail, put some money in. You can sort out the details later.

Nobody not close to retirement lost anything (much) in the crash. It’s there for the long term; 20,30,40 years away.

I mean there is also the very substantial possibility of needing the money in the near future

I've a close friend who a month ago invested (first time!) in airline stocks, anticipating some kind of pay day when "this" is over.

Air travel ain’t going back to how it was. Whether that correlates with the stock price of airlines is unclear to me

Will the changes you anticipate in air travel be due to individuals choosing to travel less, businesses reducing business travel, governments regulating free movement more closely, or some combination of these? Of the three factors I named, I think the first effect will fade within a couple of years, the second is likely to have the most repercussions, and I don't think the third is very likely to happen.

I think a lot of remote-working tech has completely outstrippped senior exec's ability to keep up and they've had their eyes opened in recent months to the fact that it's not Skype and ICQ out there any longer.

Their long-held "people need to be in the office where I can see them" and "you better get on a plane" is going to be replaced for many with "how many expensive buildings do we actually need?" and "travel over my dead body"

xpost picking up what Ed is saying, if you just want a non-employer retirement account, you could just set up a Roth IRA quickly online. You could leave all the money as cash if you don't want to purchase anything at this time or feel like you might want to withdraw it, but at least the account is there if you change your mind.

https://reallifemag.com/grounded/

Business travel is pointless and where, presumably, all the money is made, and I don't know why it would ever go back to previous levels, surely hardly anybody likes it or views it as a perk

Flying is an already-miserable experience made more miserable by security theater, maybe this time next year the airlines will be selling anywhere-in-the-US tickets for $49 or something to get people to come back but a year to get used to not flying places or going anywhere at all might be enough for some people to get out of the habit.

If I hadn't moved across the country from my parents I probably would never fly at all, covid or not

That's a nice read. I wonder if there's going to be a business to be had in offering first-class Zoom or telepresence suites, like internet cafes of old.

just pop in The Shining dynamic background like i do, boom job done

I would love for Djokovic to retire because of his refusal to be vaccinated. I would love never have to see his stupid face again.

― Yerac, Monday, April 20, 2020 5:25 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

^^^
Rafa 4ever.

xps I admit I'm cynical, but I can't believe enough bosses will be willing to lose the ability to harangue their employees in-person. Really "make sure" that paycheck is getting earned. (I still look at WFH as this amazing luxury for most of humanity...)

my company's travel budget had already been plunging for years. i used to travel every 3 months. but even last year's Philippines one month trip is going to be a thing of the past.

I used to love business travel but IMO its the first thing that needs to fuck off in all of this.

because how often is it necessary?

so the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation projections are dumb and should be ignored, right?

https://vm.tiktok.com/7NrtEG/

I'm missing going swimming so much and haven't been since 4th Feb. I keep having dreams about swimming pools. I had one the other night that I was in the Falkland Islands but in dreamland it was like a Devon village but in tropical conditions and every time I kept trying to jump into this beautiful swimming pool there was somebody/something preventing me and I woke up before I got a chance for a dream swim, got robbed.

I had an anxiety dream last night that I was in the lobby of a big office building and a proper artillery bombardment began that I could see through the glass outside, accompanied by the certainty of the arrival of ground troops who would shoot whoever they saw. Panic and fear to the max. It was all closing in around me. I threw myself on the ground and held my hands up.

I would love for Djokovic to retire because of his refusal to be vaccinated. I would love never have to see his stupid face again.

― Yerac, Monday, April 20, 2020 5:25 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

^^^
Rafa 4ever.

― Fetch the Bolt Thrower (PBKR), Monday, 20 April 2020 22:57 (yesterday) link

Imagine if Fed keeps his record because the next 4-6 slams are cancelled.

So much for KIP, just had my first argument of the lockdown. You see, once upon a time there was a nice big post office on Holloway Road, staffed by helpful, knowledgeable people who were public servants, because Royal Mail hadn't been privatized yet. Then someone decided it would be a good idea to shut down that nice big post office on Holloway Road and open a shitty, tacky piece of crap (with a cafe added) on Seven Sisters Road. And the staff in this shitty, tacky piece of crap on Seven Sisters Road were uniformly rude, ignorant and apathetic because it was now merely a money making venture - and a monopoly in the area, to boot - and every single time I've had the misfortune to have to use the place I've got into a stand up row with whoever is serving me.

Anyway, so I had to go there today to collect an item - an item that should have been delivered on Friday but wasn't because the postman didn't bother ringing the door buzzer and which couldn't be sent to the local delivery office because the local delivery office has been shut down for the duration of the lockdown, despite the postman marking on the non-delivery card that that's where it was. To add to the stress of queueing up outside the post office for ages while legions of the idiots who frequent Seven Sisters Road paraded up and down, apparently in complete ignorance of the concept of social distancing, inches from my face, I kept thinking, "This won't be here and I'm going to get into an argument today".

When I got into the place the man behind the counter looks at the card and says, "It's not here, it's at the delivery office, don't you have a tracking number?" I pointed out that the delivery office is shut and shouldn't he know about that fact? Working in a post office and all? Then he said the fateful words, "No need to get angry about it", and that was the end of it really! Like, don't tell me if I can be angry or not - and, anyway, I wasn't especially angry until you told me not to be angry! Eventually I had to get my phone out and search for the email confirming that the item had indeed been sent to their shithole of a post office. He disappeared for a bit of theatrical rummaging about - though he'd already rummaged once and failed to find it. "Am I allowed to be angry now?", I said. "Phone the number on the card", he said - the same number I wasted an hour on last week and never got through to a single, solitary human being. So, I suppose I just have to keep going down there and hoping it'll turn up! Looking forward to it!

Ah, that's lousy, man - a perfect storm of annoying shite.

loads of parcels here seemingly going missing i.e. not being delivered at all because we're ALWAYS IN!

Two instances of mail getting errnousely delivered to me instead of ppl w/ somewhat similar addresses recently. I'm sure postmen are overworked rn, I bring the stuff to where it should be but feel slightly worried about it.

I'm only slightly miffed at the postman because, as you say, they're overworked at the best of times.