Walk It Back

We’ve all seen them, starting around the middle of 2016 and slowly growing, at least around here in the middle of rural Pennsylvania. Those red hats. The large hand-painted Trump signs on the side of the highway. And those jacked-up coal-rolling trucks with like 8 flags bolted to the tailgate. And you think to yourself, how is this a thing?

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Zoom.

You know, I think people are clinging to the idea that they can simply continue to work and block out all the shit that’s swirling around us daily. I think they want to forget about the pandemic, the systematic racial violence, the people who can’t go to work because they had to close or their job simply doesn’t exist anymore.

I see it on their faces during teleconferences. Tiny, grainy portraits that glitch out every few minutes and are back again, a four-by-three stack of rectangles filled with forced laughter and thinly-veiled fear.

It had been a hunch for years, now, but for the first time in my adult life, I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that nobody, nobody, knows that the fuck to do about this, and we are all simply along for the ride.

‘I Wish I Could Do Something For You,’ My Doctor Said

This sounds horrendous. You really don’t want to get it. Wear your masks. Keep each other safe. Don’t be so eager to get back to big crowds…

I am one of the lucky ones. I never needed a ventilator. I survived. But 27 days later, I still have lingering pneumonia. I use two inhalers, twice a day. I can’t walk more than a few blocks without stopping. I want Americans to understand that this virus is making otherwise young, healthy people very, very sick. I want them to know, this is no flu.

Mara Gay, writing for the New York Times

That Discomfort You’re Feeling Is Grief

“There is a storm coming. There’s something bad out there. With a virus, this kind of grief is so confusing for people. Our primitive mind knows something bad is happening, but you can’t see it. This breaks our sense of safety. We’re feeling that loss of safety. I don’t think we’ve collectively lost our sense of general safety like this. Individually or as smaller groups, people have felt this. But all together, this is new. We are grieving on a micro and a macro level.”

— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, That Discomfort You’re Feeling Is Grief

The First Grown-up Watch

I’ve recently become slightly obsessed with watches. Ever since I gave up on the Apple Watch Series 2 I had been wearing for a year — it just didn’t launch as fast as I wanted it to — I looked into getting a “real” watch, that is, something that looks a little more “grown up.”

That’s when I started doing a little bit of research, and oh man, what an expensive hobby this could turn out to be.

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