Day #43: Pandemic Media Consumption
I'm kinda between audiobooks right now so I've been listening to one of my favorite podcasts The History Chicks and they did an episode just recently about Typhoid Mary...talk about your timing! So I just listened to that and it was just eerie. It was kind of a gut punch because the reality is over the next couple of months we are all going to be dealing with a reality of how much do you/can you confine people who aren't sick to protect others. Mary was imprisoned on an island for twenty years...now, granted, she received that imprisonment because after first being imprisoned and released she broke the rules and did not come back for further testing and went back to her previous job as a cook. But the reality is she was confined to one place for twenty years and she was never sick. There are hard decisions coming. I am not an infectious disease specialist and I am grateful for it because the decisions are not mine, but I will tell you the three things I am sick of.
1) I am sick of everyone and their brother being an infectious diseases specialist. I am also sick of there being this theory that there is one person or a small team who are the infallible word on this. This is new science. There will be flaws. I want to hear from scientists, not other people, and I want it to be okay that scientists question other scientists as we learn more without the collective world going insane.
2) I am sick of the perception that the fact that I want or expect things to slowly begin to reopen means I have a death wish and I want the world to descend into chaos. I'm for a science based approach. I'm for monitoring. I'm for listening to experts. I also want to see the experts work on a solution for how to move into the next phase. Maybe they are. I hope they are. I haven't seen it yet. So I continue to wait and hope for the world to reopen and when it does I want to be in it.
3) I am sick of being told what not to do. I am doing it. I am working really hard. I am ready for some of the people in charge to start telling us what we can do. Or at least letting us know that they are working on that plan. I understand this one is problematic, but it's my truth.
Typhoid Mary is such a hard case because you can see both sides. No, it's not fair to hold someone basically hostage and require them to undergo medical treatment and testing. But yes, you do have to protect the public interest. Risk reduction is hard and nothing is ever zero risk. I understand we can't snap our fingers and open the world up tomorrow like it was without bringing this thing back in force. But I'm also not particularly interested in staying bricked into my house for 18 months until there is a vaccine. In 18 months Max will literally be 2x as old as he is now. That's a long time to keep him away from the world and people who love him. Has it been done? Sure. Is is the best idea in this situation? Hard to imagine it is but, again, not an expert. Six weeks ago it was hard to imagine this and here we are.
Generally my media consumption during this time has been more of the avoidance nature than this. My attitude towards the news is sort of, I will absorb as much as I need to to get through the day which these days isn't much because no news is really going to change what I'm doing or how I'm living my life. Hence there's been a lot of Harry Potter and not a lot of current events. But there's also been some of the insane variety. There's something about this world we are living in that is making me (and I don't think I'm alone on this) gravitate towards the most insane entertainment options. That Tiger King documentary series is a TRAIN WRECK and yet it seemed like everyone was watching. I watched that Love at First Sight show about people who date in pods with a thin wall between them and then get engaged, then meet and decide at the altar if they are going through with it. It is horrifying and yet somehow couldn't look away. So today I picked up this 116 year old children's book called "Peck's Bad Boy Abroad" that has an extremely racist cover...why I have this book is beyond me but Beckett on the History Chicks mentioned that as a child her grandmother had the first book in the series. So I started reading it...it's 400 and something pages long and OMG it's just insane. It's like the ramblings of a crazy person and somehow I had to keep reading. I'm six chapters in now. It's crazy. I don't know what's wrong with me.
I am still reading the L.M. Montgomery book I started yesterday...definitely need something to keep me sane...and also listened to her episode on The History Chicks so I'm deep in her life as well. Her cousin, her best friend, the person closest to her...died of the Spanish flu.
James had kind of a revelation the other day. He was telling me that the coronavirus is new and no one knows anything about it. I told him this whole time, everything happening right now, it is all new and nothing like this has ever happened before. This is history he is living through and when he is an old man people will ask him what it is like (my prayer is for him to be an old man someday....I want this so much.) I told him when Grandpa George was his age he lived through the end of World War II and he should ask Grandpa what it was like to live through something like that at that age. He then asked me if I ever lived through history as a kid. The only thing I could think of was the Challenger disaster, which I tried to explain to him but it was hard to do. He carries a lot on his shoulders, that little one.
He wrote a poem today. The school district is having a virtual spoken poetry event and I wanted him to write something to enter. We wrote words together and cut them out and moved them around to make them sound cool together. It was fun. Poetry month and doing activities like that with my students was one of my favorite parts of being a school librarian. I can't figure out how to enter his poem...the platform they want them submitted on is not something we have access to...so I'm hoping I can figure it out. Either way, I'm glad we did it. We did minimal school today so it was a better day. Thursdays are the teacher's office hours day so we just practiced writing numbers, watched the library lesson we didn't get to yesterday, did a lot of reading, he started the journal I bought for him because I wanted a place where he could write anything he wanted. and then we wrote a poem. It was a nice day. Tomorrow...sigh...there is another Zoom meeting.
Today I'm grateful for my boys, homemade spaghetti Bolognese, goodnight snuggles, reading with James, Max and bubbles, Max having a nap schedule, James being able to make breakfast, homemade delicious food not in a bag, poetry, prose, health, and life.
1) I am sick of everyone and their brother being an infectious diseases specialist. I am also sick of there being this theory that there is one person or a small team who are the infallible word on this. This is new science. There will be flaws. I want to hear from scientists, not other people, and I want it to be okay that scientists question other scientists as we learn more without the collective world going insane.
2) I am sick of the perception that the fact that I want or expect things to slowly begin to reopen means I have a death wish and I want the world to descend into chaos. I'm for a science based approach. I'm for monitoring. I'm for listening to experts. I also want to see the experts work on a solution for how to move into the next phase. Maybe they are. I hope they are. I haven't seen it yet. So I continue to wait and hope for the world to reopen and when it does I want to be in it.
3) I am sick of being told what not to do. I am doing it. I am working really hard. I am ready for some of the people in charge to start telling us what we can do. Or at least letting us know that they are working on that plan. I understand this one is problematic, but it's my truth.
Typhoid Mary is such a hard case because you can see both sides. No, it's not fair to hold someone basically hostage and require them to undergo medical treatment and testing. But yes, you do have to protect the public interest. Risk reduction is hard and nothing is ever zero risk. I understand we can't snap our fingers and open the world up tomorrow like it was without bringing this thing back in force. But I'm also not particularly interested in staying bricked into my house for 18 months until there is a vaccine. In 18 months Max will literally be 2x as old as he is now. That's a long time to keep him away from the world and people who love him. Has it been done? Sure. Is is the best idea in this situation? Hard to imagine it is but, again, not an expert. Six weeks ago it was hard to imagine this and here we are.
Generally my media consumption during this time has been more of the avoidance nature than this. My attitude towards the news is sort of, I will absorb as much as I need to to get through the day which these days isn't much because no news is really going to change what I'm doing or how I'm living my life. Hence there's been a lot of Harry Potter and not a lot of current events. But there's also been some of the insane variety. There's something about this world we are living in that is making me (and I don't think I'm alone on this) gravitate towards the most insane entertainment options. That Tiger King documentary series is a TRAIN WRECK and yet it seemed like everyone was watching. I watched that Love at First Sight show about people who date in pods with a thin wall between them and then get engaged, then meet and decide at the altar if they are going through with it. It is horrifying and yet somehow couldn't look away. So today I picked up this 116 year old children's book called "Peck's Bad Boy Abroad" that has an extremely racist cover...why I have this book is beyond me but Beckett on the History Chicks mentioned that as a child her grandmother had the first book in the series. So I started reading it...it's 400 and something pages long and OMG it's just insane. It's like the ramblings of a crazy person and somehow I had to keep reading. I'm six chapters in now. It's crazy. I don't know what's wrong with me.
I am still reading the L.M. Montgomery book I started yesterday...definitely need something to keep me sane...and also listened to her episode on The History Chicks so I'm deep in her life as well. Her cousin, her best friend, the person closest to her...died of the Spanish flu.
James had kind of a revelation the other day. He was telling me that the coronavirus is new and no one knows anything about it. I told him this whole time, everything happening right now, it is all new and nothing like this has ever happened before. This is history he is living through and when he is an old man people will ask him what it is like (my prayer is for him to be an old man someday....I want this so much.) I told him when Grandpa George was his age he lived through the end of World War II and he should ask Grandpa what it was like to live through something like that at that age. He then asked me if I ever lived through history as a kid. The only thing I could think of was the Challenger disaster, which I tried to explain to him but it was hard to do. He carries a lot on his shoulders, that little one.
He wrote a poem today. The school district is having a virtual spoken poetry event and I wanted him to write something to enter. We wrote words together and cut them out and moved them around to make them sound cool together. It was fun. Poetry month and doing activities like that with my students was one of my favorite parts of being a school librarian. I can't figure out how to enter his poem...the platform they want them submitted on is not something we have access to...so I'm hoping I can figure it out. Either way, I'm glad we did it. We did minimal school today so it was a better day. Thursdays are the teacher's office hours day so we just practiced writing numbers, watched the library lesson we didn't get to yesterday, did a lot of reading, he started the journal I bought for him because I wanted a place where he could write anything he wanted. and then we wrote a poem. It was a nice day. Tomorrow...sigh...there is another Zoom meeting.
Today I'm grateful for my boys, homemade spaghetti Bolognese, goodnight snuggles, reading with James, Max and bubbles, Max having a nap schedule, James being able to make breakfast, homemade delicious food not in a bag, poetry, prose, health, and life.
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