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

I am so annoyed at the discussion surrounding college campuses because they always focus the discussion around traditional/residential students as if that's what ALL COLLEGE STUDENTS are. The country is teeming with commuter students, nontraditional students, and people for whom there is an entirely different calculus wrt "college." (I work at one of these places) It's like we and our students don't exist. Uncool!!

That's why my uni's doing better (so far) than the others in Florida. Our "traditional" footprint is minimal.

well residential students are what are going to make the universities into Covid factories

if you widen your focus to university education globally rather than just the USA, then residential education is a tiny part of the story. It just happens to include the wealthiest universities in the world (for the moment).

idk whether I have more anxiety over the fact that we have a government who is literally just abandoning its civilians and small businesses or the fact that I seriously have doubts that our lives will ever be the same again.

the fact that another relief bill is not even being debated on the floor yet, much less signed and on the President's desk is malpractice. and it's all Trump/McConnell.

my mother's unemployment resumed for a week two weeks ago, stopped again out of nowhere. have now given her $3,000 to help her pay bills due to the failure of FL DEO, and some on twitter are starting to say their cars have been repoed, relying on food banks to feed their families, and they're facing immediate eviction proceedings as soon as the moratorium is lifted in August. We're doing this to our own fucking people.

also my dad needs swallowing therapy now, and I was the one who foolishly kept telling mom it was probably nothing. if not for her diligence in making him go to the doctor, he could have gotten aspirational pneumonia.

shit is straining me. s/o is comfortable going anywhere anytime as long as masked and equipped with hand sanitizer. i’m like “nowhere is safe “bunker mentality :/

by anywhere I mean like Target

I still go to Target tbh

Same. Target, grocery, take out food. I'm good with that, and not much more.

yeah I mean, I’m down, it’s just that if I there’s something I want I’m inclined to wait as long as possible and just get everything at once. or just get it online. just feel uncomfortable with the spontaneous trips

of course after a stressful day of work, my mom wanted to call to chat (which I didn't mind), but naturally we got to talking about the unemployment thing, which of course began stressing me out more. then my best friend calls me stressed because the house she and her boyfriend are moving into had massive mildew damage that was undisclosed (fortunately their other lease runs through end of month) and she's having to demand they rectify it by law within 5 days. I could have told her "i'm really up not up for speaking atm" but she was stressed and she's the type that needs to let it out so I let her, but now I'm just exhausted. and worried that they won't have a place to live.

meh. so I'm buying myself a new turntable, cos I stress buy

I go to one of four markets per week, rotated through the month (Costco, the greengrocer, Vietnamese market/bakery, the Persian butcher), Target once a month, to an empty parking lot where I sit three spaces away from my friends and drink bad wine from flasks once a week, and on a walk around a local pond most dats. That is it. I could be on a spaceship with a treadmill. I want more, but I am afraid of everywhere still.

I was fine the last few months, but now I am in fact scared to go to the grocery store. Had been doing backyard hangouts, but everyone I know called off Fourth of July plans this weekend after Texas exploded with new cases. Back to Zoom happy hours!

Officials: COVID-19 positive young people party instead of quarantining in Tuscaloosa

From an article a couple of days ago:

Mike, from Old Town, who did not want to share his last name, ordered a vodka Red Bull before getting back in line with friends at Old Crow Smokehouse’s curbside bar. He had just gotten back from a vacation in Dallas, Texas, with a friend, where he left a day early due to the spike in cases and the state’s rolling back on its openings.

“(It feels) like I’m the problem,” he said with a nervous laugh as he talked about being out and about amid the pandemic. Looking around at the throngs of people drinking and walking around Wrigleyville, he said it is concerning.

Outside Vines on Clark, a patron said he felt guilty as things are going back to what he described as “normal.” Then he joined his friends on the patio.

From a brewery in response:

This bullshit will squander every sacrifice made over the past few months; render all of our painstaking efforts to get back to business safely useless; and frankly, is deeply disrespectful to our industry and to the health of our community.
We're calling for the reporting and citation of any and all bars operating in this manner. We give zero fucks about the possible loss of sales to these accounts. We care about the life and health of our community above profit - always have. Always will.
If you're heading out to places like this and plan to behave so irresponsibly, as far as we're concerned: NO BEER FOR YOU.

Keep in mind, things here are reportedly going relatively well. I can only imagine what things are/were like in other places.

I really do understand why everyone wants to die but it’s just so selfish of them.

(chuckles sheepishly) Gee whiz, I dunno, shucks, feels like I could maybe possibly be part of the problem! (shrugs guiltily, runs through crowd randomly licking the faces of strangers)

everyone is the exception

well to be fair quarantine is like quitting smoking, except instead of not going outside to smoke anymore you can't go outside to do anything at all

I went to a grocery store for our first food shopping run in three weeks. It wasn't crowded at all and the customers (almost all of them Instacart shoppers this a.m.) and staff were wearing masks, but it felt like almost no one was thinking about six feet of distancing and the basic precautions in the store seem laxer each time I return.

Oregon, like most states, is experiencing jumps in its numbers of infections (even though at far lower levels than AZ, TX and FL) and I must say I'm getting very nervous about entering any enclosed space for any reason. Even encountering people outdoors is feeling riskier than it did last month. Just had to vent a bit of my growing fear and loathing over the death cult crazies, selfish oafs and and ignorant louts who are undermining our whole society.

My partner works in the ED of the city's largest hospital, so we're cautious as hell, but I'm also noticing a dramatic increase in people hunkering down.

My county put in a mandatory masks-at-all-times order last night; we had not retreated from March's mandatory masks-indoors rule.

Although Miami-Dade has the highest totals in Florida, those cases look concentrated in, of course, the poorest and blackest parts of town, and for the first time less than half of new cases are in South Florida. I just haven't seen evidence of the lunacy Neanderthal describes upstate, thanks to the mask ordinance.

I'm still not particularly nervous. My family has a beach vacation on the Gulf coast; we plan to walk straight from condo to beach and avoid everyone.

Saw my first two tense arguments break out in a store a couple of days ago, at least one mask-related. And they were in a very granola co-op.

In San Francisco it's been interesting, because while there'd been some light retail opening a few weeks back -- primarily curbside pickup still, but moving a touch forward on certain fronts -- they, wisely, put a halt to what would have been an accelerated opening otherwise allowing outdoor bars and the like. That initially was going to be around July 15th, then pushed up to June 29th, but on Friday the 26th they'd clearly seen enough from SoCal in particular as well as some lightly rising numbers here and went, "Yeah, no." (However much London Breed was or wasn't involved in the nuts and bolts, she's two for two on the biggest announcements so far.) So essentially we're frozen in place rather than retreating -- at least so far -- and thus avoiding the clearly obvious fuckups elsewhere. In terms of masks, the requirement's been tightened a little more but it pretty much was actively encouraged the whole time and required for anything indoors; you do see the occasional person outside without them, more at certain times of the day, but less so now, and pretty much I haven't seen anyone while inside anywhere for my usual weekly errands (laundry, shopping, once-a-week takeout) without a mask. No cheers for us until we're all through it but we seem to have settled into a norm, though let's see what the next two weeks bring.

Texas just issued a mandatory statewide mask order.

oh, is it april already?

For counties with 20 or more cases. All those other counties can party on!

That's like every county that isn't 75% desert tho.

Although if this drives all anti-maskers to live free in the deserts and badlands, then hey-hey.

Right, I was wondering which counties could possibly fly under that radar.

As long as the people who make barbecue mask up, I'm okay with the rest of the rubes wandering off to the desert to live free and die.

Kind of wondering what all the anti-mask folks think when Republican leaders suddenly change course on this shit

"The deep state is even deeper than we thought ..."

XP They'll say they never trusted them and "All Heil Trump/Q!".

My wondering didn't last long. Abbott posted a couple tweets about the mask order, and the replies are every bit as horrific as you can imagine.

Ironically, I would wager that if 'Q' told his follower-bots that the USA had reached a top secret tipping point where wearing masks now was now mandatory for them, because it would cloak their identities from the surveillance of the Deep State, which is collecting all their names via face recognition software in preparation for attacking Q-Anon, but that a sudden turn to mask wearing will render it all inoperable, they'd all be wearing masks with secret signals emblazoned on them to show each other they are In The Know - Wink Wink.

the new all gas no brakes florida man 2 video is instructive

One of my anti-maskers on FB has already posted the exemptions list and advised everyone to save it to their phones for reference. I expect a lot of folks claiming they're exercising and/or giving a televised speech in the coming days.

COVID has tied ropes around my chest. it's made work more stressful than I can handle, and then there's the mother unemployment issues, the dad swallowing issues, the toxicity of the anti-mask and racist brigades that are everywhere lately, my state becoming the next COVID epicenter, and the cloud of gloom that just permeates fucking everywhere with zero escape.

I decided last night to try and cheer myself up and treat myself to a new turntable as I recently I started collecting vinyl versions of some of my favorite metal albums and figured hey, it'll be a new hobby. so I was excited as I had new albums coming in today and I was picking up the set, and figured I'd just chill and listen to toonz all night and turn off my phone.

and not only was work really fucking terrible to the point I worked two hours late, but my best friend had two crises today. she has Asperger's, depression, and anxiety, and so when she gets upset, she needs to just talk about what's bothering her to get through it, so she was msging me throughout the day.

and we thought the first crises (her apartment fiasco) was solved after she worked on it by herself for hours, and instead of thanking her, her boyfriend uncharacteristically decided to be a dick to her afterwards and created an explosive argument and she started freaking out, saying she didn't want to see him anymore, lamenting what a loser she was, saying she would be in a better place if she just killed herself, threatening to just drive back to Florida right now (an 11 hour drive from VA) because if her and her boyfriend split, she can't move into her new apartment, or go to school in the fall, or even bring her cat with her. then the BOYFRIEND Tried to call me right at the same time trying to get me to talk to her for him (literally this all happens mere minutes after I finished work and was just getting ready to relax for 10 minutes of peace and eat dinner, and instead, pelted with calls and messages from all directions).

not the first time she's mentioned self-harm and has never done it, but she isn't saying it for attention. now I can't get ahold of her, and out of all of my friends, she's the one I worry about the most because she's so fragile and people treat her like shit and she was abused by her parents growing up. i can't control what she does nor are her problems mine to solve but I just wish I could, so now I'm sitting here stressed out and worried about whether she's ok or not, and she's not answering her phone. which i know she doesn't owe me. but I just want to know that she's ok and not doing something destructive.

so now I'm sitting here in silence, next to my assembled turntable not wanting to do anything.

shit man

don’t forget to take care if yrself in all this...seems like your resources are depleted and you can’t be much of a help to anyone else if you can’t keep your head above water

what an impossibly shit year

This whole situation has me increasingly defaulting to direly pessimistic personal forecasts, feeling like all the best of life has just abruptly dried up...I keep seeing myself at 75 or 80, fixating on my parents’ mortality, my kids’ bleak futures.

lol I have a drawerful of MDMA that would come in handy but don’t think it’s possible to share responsibly while socially distancing

maybe I just need to double down and give myself a day in the woods with it

I'm driving six hours on Saturday to the Finger Lakes in NY to go to my Mother-in-Law's wedding on Sunday. We're going in commando; in and out. 15-45 minutes in a restaurant for the ceremony and then 6 hour drive back on Sunday.

fun!

that's some dedication

Find a safe ecstasy friend

fuck it, I just put on Mayhem - Deathcrush. that helped my mood a little. and short at 18 minutes.

ha I was on zing and forgot this isn’t 77

I meant M&M’s, I am always getting those mixed up

xp I would like to!