I’ve let some stuff pile up in the RSS and newsletter readers again, so here we go with a quick roundup. I don’t seem to have any fixed format for these posts; it’s whatever strikes me as suitable for the batch.
It felt as if the insides of my brain had been unwillingly scooped out and taken from me, like something from The Body Snatchers. I didn’t want this virus. I had my own small set of homegrown strains that I’d been eager to unleash upon myself. But every person I encountered was also infected, so we could only mechanically flail our limbs and parrot our practiced lines to each other.
Another is that wearing masks sucks, and we’re pretty stubborn about our “ways of life.” This is where I think public normalization, and cheerful normalization, plays a big role. A big part of why wearing a mask (a thing to do not all the time, but when you’re in a place where you can’t control your spacing) sucks is that people are weird about it when they see. If people aren’t weird about it, it won’t suck as much. It will just be kind of uncomfortable, but a little fun if it becomes a cheerful solidarity thing and we get silly masks with cool designs and maybe like Snapchat filters that give you awesome smiles or vampire teeth or whatever but only if you got your damn mask on.
When I’m not talking to people for work about the trauma of a pandemic, I burrow further from reality from the relative safety of my room: I lean into nostalgia, turning to books I read in middle school — one, an epistolary novel where kids from warring high schools send snail mail back and forth — redownloading “retro snake” on my phone, and drilling Duolingo in my ancestral tongue. I sit in a big blue chair I adopted after finding it discarded on the street. (Normal: Picking up furniture off the street. Not normal: Worrying that someone sick has also sat in that chair. New normal: Taking it anyway and meticulously cleaning. You need somewhere to write.)