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

Getting a haircut - my first since March - on Tuesday morning.

giving up has its attractions

i'm growing out my hair and will be a beautiful mermaid on the other side of covid

<3

A friend shaved my head last month; I looked like I co-starred in 12 Monkeys.

i had an unexpected video call today (our team never does video, only audio), an e-meet or greet (bleat, bleat) with some higher up. i had about 10 seconds to mentally prepared and i'm pretty sure i resembled tom hanks in Cast Away, just before he's rescued (note that i haven't seen the film)

tom hanks does get rescued, right? off-topic but have always been crossing my fingers for him and his goofy volleyball sidekick

lol yes he does get rescued

i got my hair cut and i feel so much better in that single one regard
everything else is total complete shit

when it comes down to it, hair aside, I've probably never been better, which is kind of confounding.

Miss friendship but I've adjusted to staying inside and working from home. Work is going well. Doing important relationship work with my partner. Cooking some good stuff. Idk.

i wish
if my workplace weren't being straight up abusive to me during a pandemic i would be more or less ok

Same silby. Only thing that would have improved my quarantine would have been a temporary layoff.

I have like 43 sick days, maybe I should get the vid.

I’m going to see friends at their house this weekend, which is technically allowed (it’s to do with bubbles, don’t ask) but you can’t follow the news even a little bit and justify doing something just because the official advice says it’s ok, so we’re all just on our own to decide what’s an acceptable risk. I have my own way of rationalising it: I’ve been walking the 4 miles home from work every day, halving my use of public transport, which easily offsets whatever contribution I make to the R number by visiting this one household every couple of months. But also this is a marathon not a sprint, and I live alone; having nothing but work, home and getting drunk for the next year is not something I can realistically cope with. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have some of the giving up malaise either, that shit’s as infectious as the vid

Noted by Chris Hayes that Covid was worst in the north when it was too cold to spend much time outside, now worst in places where it's too hot to spend much time outside. hmmm ...

I enjoy the fact that work from home + no day care effectively adds 2 hours to our day, I'm finally getting to sleep a decent amount. but both of us working + having 2 small kids who constantly need attention + having to do a bunch of cooking and housework feels like I'm working 2-3 full time jobs at once, it's crazy stressful and idk how much longer I can do it

For me, lot of things are better than they have ever been. Working from home has been an enormous improvement over commuting, but a lot of work culture stuff has gotten back to being the same old same old. I've finally ordered a desk though and will soon be able to set up an office with monitors and a keyboard instead of typing on a laptop from my couch, which I'm really excited about.

Some things have gotten worse - my family are the only people I really see, and I love them all a lot but we're bumping elbows way too much.

Lurking background dread of total societal meltdown a constant hum.

The chief of my department has taken to asking us all how we're really getting along - either in group Zoom meetings or one-on-one chats. Earlier on, when she did this in a group context, I had unmuted and was about to blurt out "pure unremitting terror!" because that was honestly how I was feeling at the time. But another colleague beat me to the punch and confidently stated "I actually think I'm getting through this alright - I've just had to stop watching the news!" So now I just tell her that I "have my ups and downs like everyone".

shaved my head/beard two days ago, feels good

. But also this is a marathon not a sprint, and I live alone; having nothing but work, home and getting drunk for the next year is not something I can realistically cope with. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have some of the giving up malaise either, that shit’s as infectious as the vid

I feel you. I am at this moment sitting in our empty, vast public hour because I couldn't face being at home until 5 p.m.

hour = library

xp to wins - I'm on that a little bit - a friend is having a picnic in the park at the back of her (very nearby) house tomorrow, with three other friends coming down, and I'm a) concerned that I'll just be miserable company, glaring at strangers who can't keep their distance and b) concerned that I'll be miserable and rude company, glaring at my friends who can't keep their distance.

I mean, I'm not not going - her dad died during the week, it'll be good to see her.

And none of these things matter in instance, they just matter in aggregate.

I thought that a month with no school (the original estimate) would be basically impossible. No way would be able to make that work - two jobs, two kids, the household, our non-work social lives, my musical projects, our aging parents, activism and community engagement...

That was three months ago.

It was, and is, impossible. But I've been kinda amazed what one can get used to.

we bought a little bouncy castle for them. bikes, Power Wheels, a ton of puzzles, etc. etc. I know we're spoiling them but they've basically lost the only real routine in their lives. plus we're saving a lot of money on day care & gasoline

We got a big kiddie pool for the backyard. For our teenagers. It's kind of ridiculous but also charming.

i bought my kids a new hot wheels set, which they loved. they played with it for a grand total of two hours.

Yeah my kids are very digital. Neither one has any interest in toys. They play outside but rarely want or need stuff. Makes birthdays challenging.

It helps that we have almost never had screen time limits (after age 2). And we mostly gave up on enforcing schoolwork weeks ago. Daughter already had As and Bs, so there was no incentive to raise them. Son is special needsy so is following his own path.

this might be useful for anyone with young kids or with kids in their bubble

https://explaincovid.org/post/open-child-care-centers-data/IBbgwzCHrA84R45AaErk

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/Kp2Y2YEyGbKFm9sKoS1KZW3eRAzBtGLS4mCfxYAJg7EfXJi5ulubhd1Q2m7tKuXf2kUJWuAxs-_A5fvCXVKr73B7VvX9A01e4zMqmviqrrBLw7YJ09IRmzZx23MDiT2GVh3HjLTB

Seattle just went to Phase 2, where you get to hang out indoors with up to five people outside your household per week. Some of my housemates of course want to interpret this as "each person in the household gets to hang out with five people," rather than "the household as a whole gets to add five contacts." And the language is just vague enough to let them read it that way. Sigh.

on the one hand the whole idea that otherwise seemingly reasonable people are mindlessly opening up to the maximum allowable extent dicatated by all these state "phases" is hard for me to understand...

on the other it does reinforce the argument (from other thread) that people of most political persuasions would have by and large responded to responsible, consistent, science-based messaging from the WH, and we wouldn't have gotten into the mess we're in now

yeah, for me there's this incredibly weird resentment; I'm having a picnic outdoors with one person this weekend, with a mask (other than, like, the picnic part) and that already seems like an unnecessary risk, while at the same time there are probably going to be like 200 people on st. marks

los angeles is allowing bars to open tonight so that's fine

Inside?! Or just patios?

xp caek

i'm curious what conclusions you draw from that (just the figures in the image, sorry. i'm being lazy)?

to me, it suggests a couple things. first, i seems to be a good sample to compare crowded schools vs relatively empty schools. roughly half of the centers in the sample had at least 10 students, the other half less. the vast majority of the students (88%) attended the centers with cohorts of at least 10 students. the average cohort size of the centers with more than 10 students was about 38 students, and an average of 14 staff. in other words, there are quite a few centers here that had a ton of kids and staff running around in close quarters. of the other roughly half of the centers in the sample, in the schools with fewer than 10 students, the average was 5.5 students per center, with 1.8 staff.

so with all that in mind, it seems striking that the rates were the same - a 0.13% infection rate for children and 0.87% in staff - for both the crowded and sparsely attended centers.

the size of the student cohort doesn't seem to make a difference - which seems odd, and makes me think i'm missing something. is it a case of a national-level sample disguising variations in the regional data?

xp
Inside, I'm pretty sure, with masks (when not at your table) and distancing.

My wife is bugging the hell out of me by nagging incessantly about me following up with the census worker application I made in February, iirc. They finally got back to me in maybe very early April about the position, just the usual door-to-door job, but even back then I was a little wary of how fast the interview was and how they were unable to answer what few questions I had. A lot of census prep was put on hold, for clear reasons, but now things seem to be moving again, yet obviously there are still other moving parts in play as well, and I'm just not that comfortable going door-to-door in the middle of a pandemic nagging others to fill out their census forms. On one hand I'm torn, because I know the census is important. But on the other hand, it's not that hard to fill out the census form, so that leads me to my preconceived notions of the sorts of people currently blowing off the census, who in my mind are the same people that would blow off wearing a mask (for example) and therefore are not the sort of people I want to spend hours every day hounding.

So: are my concerns rational or irrational?

Uhhh Idk who lives in the place(s) you would be going but your ideas of who doesn't/hasn't filled out their census seem extremely strange to me? But like I said, idk. The area where I live has one of the lowest response rates for all of NYC but it also has a TON of barriers to the process. Like people who rent and move often don't get their mail. Or recent transplants don't think the census has to do with them because they're not from the places where they live/are basically transient. Like ppl don't have internet access/have low quality access, or a lot of people being elderly and not having/understanding the technology to reply online. Like undocumented ppl who have an enormous amt of distrust, rightly so; even though as of now the census doesn't put them at risk, would YOU want to tell this government about yourself??! And so on. But maybe the demographics are different where you are.

I really wish Andrew WK still had his advice column.

My impression has been that a lot of community organizations who got funding to promote the census process this year don't really know how to approach it, logistically. They might not know what "success" looks like (I literally interviewed for a job as an outreach organizer and I asked the hiring CBO what would constitute success and they literally said "We don't know" because the local govt who was informing them hadn't given them any way to gauge progress--it's not as simple as "number of people who have filled out their census"). And Idk about other places but in NYC even after a lot of the community orgs started the process to hire ppl with the promised funding, the money didn't actually drop for months and no one could move forward.

There are lots of reasons why people might not respond, running the gamut from it just slipping their mind to tin-hatters. You do have the option of responding by mail or phone in addition to online, which makes it pretty accessible, but you're right, there's a lot of reasons it may not be on someone's radar. I dunno. I think going door to door in the best of circumstance makes me a little uneasy (I certainly don't like people knocking on my door), and yeah, I think the elderly or people who don't know how to use the internet *do* seem the sort either more at risk for covid or not following covid precautions. For sure as we have all anecdotally described, we see questionable behavior out and about on a daily basis, so I expect people in their own homes to be even more lax. And like you said, undocumented people (for example) might rightly have an enormous amount of distrust, so ... are those the doors I want to knock on and harass, even if it's to their benefit? I guess I can always just take the gig and quit if it makes me uncomfortable. Or maybe it will be a good experience, who knows.

You can just talk to people through the window I would say? Or a screen door? I know it's extremely weird, I had to get ppl to sign a petition for something I'm doing right as the threat of spread was getting real, but I had a pre-set deadline that I couldn't fight, so I got gloves and a sealed bag of new pens, and texted ppl ahead of time to ask if it was okay for me to come to their door so they could sign. Obv the census isn't like that, you canvas everyone. Have you done public outreach before? Like tabling or flyering? Ime there's sort of a relentless optimism/positivity that it helps to have in service of your mission.

Yeah, I've done door to door political stuff before (sucked, imo) and I also do (or did, before covid) home delivery for the food pantry, which is/was a lot more rewarding. I find the political stuff super depressing, honestly. 100 million people didn't vote in the last presidential election, for all sorts of reasons, but that number is so huge that a good hunk of them totally could have but didn't, and the cynic in me feels like a knock on the door wouldn't change that. Or maybe it would, I have no idea.

Josh I applied too and was hired, was fingerprinted and jumped through all the hoops, and then when the lockdown happened I just kind of forgot about it. Then a month ago they followed up to make sure I was still interested and I said yes...which isn't entirely true. I haven't heard back since but I will probably take a pass on doing that any time in the near future for safety concerns...

i applied to census as a statistician back in may 2009, and found out i was approved for the next stage of the job interview process in summer of 2010. they are moving at light speed on your applications

I'm actually waiting to be fingerprinted right now. We'll see what comes of it.

I had blown off the follow-up phone calls as well, then they just scheduled a fingerprinting for me anyway. Honestly I blew that off yesterday, because they don't allow you to cancel, only reschedule! And I tried to reach a human being for an hour and was never able to speak to anyone. So here I am the next day, giving it a shot.

may as well keep your options open as long as possible

My wife is bugging the hell out of me by nagging incessantly

*siren* sexist language alert *siren*

My impression has been that a lot of community organizations who got funding to promote the census process this year don't really know how to approach it, logistically.

in the last class i taught f2f with my students, a guy we had hired to work with my school to boost latinx response to the census came in and told us how important it was and i was happy bc i <3 the census
i remember everything about that class because it might be my last music class ;_; we had a big initiative and now we have...nothing

The library was going huge on the census this year—it seemed like it was going to be our priority for the spring—and then Covid happened. Not sure what’s going to happen now that so much time is lost and people’s priorities are understandably not on the census.