Covid Nostalgia
One of my besetting quirks (or maybe it’s a sin?) is nostalgia. I tend to wax nostalgic over even the worst times of my life. Maybe others share that quirk, and maybe it’s a human quirk. Or maybe it’s peculiar to only a small number of people. Maybe it would be different if I had had objective, according-to-Hoyle “bad” times in my life.
So I find now, in summer 2020, I’m nostalgic about the good old days, in late winter 2020, when the shelter in place orders were just beginning. I might have been a little hopeful then that things would resolve in a couple weeks or a month. But otherwise, it was quite a despairing time, at least for me. It was something I knew I would have to endure. However quickly it might be resolved, the bad parts were still ahead and there was little to look forward to in the near future. It wasn’t a good feeling.
And now, I look back on those days and miss them. Maybe I’d feel differently if Covid had harmed me more directly, or if I wasn’t so well off to begin with.
But I miss it. I miss the sinking feeling as the numbers of new cases started mounting. I miss being confined inside when it was cold. I miss the shortages (which are still here but less severe) (which never affected me very severely in the first place). I miss doing laundry by hand (though I don’t miss it because it sucks, and I only stopped doing it last week during my first visit in three months to the laundromat and I may or may not be too scared to go back next week).
I have lived a (mostly) charmed life, but these last few months have been among the worst of times, at least for me. And yet I miss them. In a few months time, if I’m still alive, I’ll probably be missing now.
It’s going to get worse before it gets better.
It’s going to get worse for a while.
Using the Spanish Flu as a basic template, we’ve got two years of this. The fourth wave is the one that will let us say “oh, this ain’t so bad”.Report
what’s gonna be weird is watching the repeated cycles of “well we can’t expect people to take precautions, that would be racist” which we saw in late February with In The Interest Of Being Visibly Not Racist We Won’t Cancel Chinese New Year, and then we saw in early June with In The Interest Of Being Visibly Not Racist We Won’t Cancel George Floyd Protest Marches.Report
If I wanted to make distinctions between criticizing the selfish bastards who want haircuts and praising the activists who oppose statuary, I’d say that the activists who oppose statuary are opposing statuary outside.
Being outside is so much better. I’ve read that direct sunlight gives the virus a half-life measured in seconds. A light breeze provides an amazing amount of circulation and the chaotic movement of the air without ceilings allows the virus to go more than 8 or 9 feet up in the air to die (rather than, you know, face-level where it gets ingested before it reaches four or five half-lives).
But it’s one thing when you’re out jogging and you get within 10 feet of another person for less than 5 seconds twice and quite another when you’re in an outdoor mosh pit.Report
New York City has had six weeks of daily protests and just had their first no covid deaths day.
I think at this point if you want to see the protest increased virus spread you’re going to have to actually bring proofReport
The early months were pretty bad, sure, but there was also a feeling that maybe this would be a reset too. It was like having the reel break in the middle of a movie and having to wait while they respool it and thinking “You know, maybe I’d rather be watching a different movie.” Now, there’s more social pressure to erase that and get back to a lifestyle that other people are more nostalgic for, back when we could eat frozen yogurt and life meant something, man.
But, like Jaybird said, it ain’t over yet.Report
I’m afraid you, and Jaybird, are right.
I’m not so much saying the worst is over, although maybe my OP implies that. To be clear, I’m not 100% sure I know what I’m saying.Report
To clarify, here’s what I think I was trying to say: We, or at least I, sometimes choose to be nostalgic about really horrible things.Report
I miss the feeling of something-like-hope I had early on, where I thought “Well, maybe if we all lock down really well for a month or two, this will burn itself out like SARS did”
I admit I am feeling somewhat dismayed at the behavior of my fellow citizens in this.
I also feel a twinge of nostalgia for February 29 – the last day I went out for “fun” shopping (as opposed to quick runs to the grocery or the home center for things I absolutely needed) and how at the JoAnn’s, looking at some of that ridiculous color-shifting cake yarn (other knitters/crocheters will know what I mean) and going “Well, it’s on sale, and also, if we have to lock down, it might be good to have yarn ahead for another afghan” and I remember even thinking with something like excitement (which seems kind of sick to me now) about “on lockdown, I will get so much knitting and sewing done!”
Reader, I have mostly been either too anxious/unhappy or too wrapped up in “pivoting to online teaching,” I have not finished a single thing during this time. The yarn still sits in my yarn-storage room, untouched.
On the upside? My garden is going well because apparently I can still cut brush and weed if I’m sad or angry
I have a few low-level risk factors and people here are absolute crap at mask wearing and social distance, so I am staying locked down as much as I can. (I will most likely be back teaching in person in August, but until then – at home except for necessities)Report
I may have the option to return to my worksite next week, but it won’t be required. However, layoffs are coming (probably) and if I can’t go to work, I might not keep my job. Or I might. Even if I do or can return, it would be for only one day a week.
People seem to do a goodish job here at wearing mask, though it’s not everyone.
(I’m blogging right now because I have the day off. Otherwise, I don’t blog during work time.)Report
I will admit I am not confident (at this point) in the plans my university has to re open “in person” in the fall. One of my older (early sixtiesish) colleagues (and an MD at that) has already declared his intention to do all lectures online….I am considering it despite being younger (and female, which is apparently a point in my favor for surviving COVID).
I will be teaching in a mask. I am not sure what faculty can do if they have a student who needs the cue of being able to read lips. Petition for one of those plexiglas face shields, I guess? Request an ASL interpreter, if the student knows ASL?
I suspect a LOT of higher ed closures are looming. Right now we seem to be OK and I am keeping my fingers crossed that that remains AT LEAST until I hit eligibility for early retirement (6 or so years depending on how much grace period they give; I could retire without needing early retirement in 2029)Report
My field is in higher ed, or rather, my worksite is at a university, even though not all people in my field work in higher ed. (I’m being cagey because I don’t want to out myself, but a close reader of other comments I’ve made in the past can guess my profession.)
At least at my my workplace, those with tenure or on the tenure have, at least for now, more secure positions. Non-tenured track people (like me) are facing the (still only potential, but in practice probably looming) layoffs.Report
Nate Silver, bless his heart, is running the numbers on the temperatures. There is a sweet spot where it’s warm enough to be outside but it’s not so warm that you say “heck with it” and go back inside for the air conditioning.
My take on this is that we seriously need to figure out a way to improve indoor circulation, filter the air, and otherwise make it so we aren’t constantly sitting in a petri dish.
You know the old joke about how a no-smoking section in a restaurant is like having a no-peeing section in a swimming pool? It is in that vein that I consider “no-COVID” sections at the office.Report
While I don’t know the facts, what I understand is that you’re right. I fear that if/when my worksite opens up, even on its planned limited and “hybrid” basis, they will not have accounted for the problem of air circulation or the fact that there will still be groups of people in the same place for up to an hour and 15 minutes.Report
During the early days of Covid-19, people thought two weeks of shelter in place would be enough to defeat it. I remember people joking on Facebook that this was the first time that sitting on your coach and watching TV would save the world, so let’s not mess this up. It quickly turned out that like all previous pandemics, Covid-19 is going to take much longer to defeat than anticipated and normal life is going to be suspended for a long time. Like previous pandemics, telling people to put their lives on hold for months or even nearly a year is a tough sell.Report
I remember people joking on Facebook that this was the first time that sitting on your coach and watching TV would save the world, so let’s not mess this up.
I remember one public health official in my state making a similar statement, not as a joke, but as a “this is all you have to do to save the world” proposition. It really was clueless, both for the reason you mention (things were going to last longer than two weeks) and because not everyone has that same leisure time. Also, this public health official said “Netflix” instead of TV, as if everyone could afford to pay for Netflix.Report
I don’t know if I would say I am nostalgic for it but there was a feeling of novelty a few months ago at the start of the pandemic. This felt like a new experience in so many ways and in some ways a kind of communal experience. I remember doing things like driving around downtown SF so my girlfriend could get supplies from office.
This was a mere three months ago but feels like it might as well have been years ago. Now things on wearing thin.Report