Tag: Covid-19

Raw, Thoughts

Quarantine Week #10

FanTC

This is normal.

I don’t know why conspiracies bother trying to stay hidden. They inevitably crawl out of the woodwork and blow their cover. I’m friends with hard rightists and hard leftists, and it’s been whiplash watching them battle it out on social media. I’m not sure I prescribe to the political religion, but I do think there’s always something going on behind the curtain which certain persons don’t want the general public to see. This I believe all day long. But there are other people more gifted in this field of study than I, so we won’t get into it here.

I had a strange encounter with political religion the other day. I made a light-hearted comment about modern plumbing on a friend’s meme they reposted, and one of their acquaintances made due purpose to comment on my comment. Again, I was talking about plumbing. They made it about capitalism shaming. I’m not sure the point they were trying to achieve, because I was in no humor to humor them.

If we were in a cafe – I and my friend – and one of her friends happened to show up, overhear our conversation, and decided in that moment rather than introduce himself politely, talk of the weather, the coffee, any number of other pleasantries, he decides to immediately conversation shame someone he has never met before and turn a half-heard subject into his political platform, it would be like that. It would be exactly like that.

We comment on other people’s comments all the time, sometimes positively, but sometimes negatively. Social media has put all of us into one big room together and provided permission for us to talk to anyone we want without proper introduction or pleasantries.

I suppose it would be odd if everyone went about introducing themselves and providing small talk on Twitter…

“Good day! My name is Robert. How do you know Anne?”

“Hello! I’m Clara. Oh, Anne and I met at the library. We shared a love of dragon fiction!”

“Jolly good! I love dragons myself. The meme she just posted on which we are both commenting rather makes me envision Capitalism as the great evil dragon of our time!”

“Oh… You’re in the camp of depicting dragons as evil villains? That’s really disappointing. I don’t like you. Good bye.”

“Well, if you didn’t want to get hurt, you really should have private messaged Anne rather than comment on her meme!”

 

This has been,

Fanny T. Crispin

Raw

Quarantine Week #8

FanTC

These are getting a little droll, aren’t they? Someday our kids might stumble upon these accounts, and it might help them to understand what we’re all going through.

 

After 8 weeks of the stay-at-home orders, the governors seem to be going back and forth about opening up shops and stores. The economy has taken quite a hit. There are so many Americans on unemployment, some may never regain their jobs, and small businesses are going bankrupt. My husband and I are so blessed and fortunate to be able to keep our jobs – for the time being.

That’s been 2020’s motto, hasn’t it? FOR THE TIME BEING. We are truly in the black hole of the unknown. We simply can’t predict anything for the future. I just received an alert of the airlines that they changed up our flight itinerary to Ireland (which totally screws with our work schedules,) and our only option is to cancel or…wait. Wait 10 days or 30 days prior to the flight to change anything. They’re so overwhelmed by flights cancelled, changed, rearranged, and passengers calling in to get resolution, they simply won’t accept a call/respond to an email until its your turn.

The flight isn’t for another 3 months. That’s how bad this unknown is. The government keeps extending this stay-at-home order by 30 days at a time. The frustrations are rising. The death toll is real.

I pulled some images from the John Hopkins University website. You can see the full reports here.

Covid-19

With so many different opinions firing off at once, it’s difficult to form your own opinion about all this. But the facts are something is happening. We can’t deny this. No one has experienced a pandemic like this before. We’re all just doing the best we can with the information available to us.

I’m sure reports will come out and documentaries made years from now explaining how our leaders could have performed better. But when those reports come out, their makers will have privilege to data we’re lacking right now. We are responding to each bit of information as we receive it and praying it was the right choice.

Stay safe, dear readers. Use your best judgement. And maybe send up a little prayer.

This has been,

Fanny T. Crispin

 

 

 

 

Ponderings, Raw

Quarantine Week #6

FanTC

Can you believe it? It’s already been 2 months since the pandemic outbreak in the US. There is so much news and misinformation going around, I hate to stake a claim on anything. But where do we go from here? It’s already too late to stop it. The virus is here. It’s in our air and in our blood. Most of the population won’t feel its affects, so the numbers are already heavily skewed with no way of correcting them.

I suppose what I really want to know in all this is what’s really going on, guys? I mean seriously. SARS and Ebola came and went with far less commotion than Covid-19. The common flu has claimed as many – if not more – lives than this Corona thing. But you don’t see those other viruses garnering the attention this one has. What’s different in our society? What triggered the wide-spread panic?

There’s never a tell for how the mass media will react to a situation. In some cases, we can rise up and stand together, but in others we break down and riot in the streets. The settings have to be just so for each scenario.

But what do I know? I’m just a writer stuck at home with a cat and a ginger and trying to make the best of her situation.

How are you making the best of your situation?

 

We were walking the other day around the lagoon near our home. The graffiti we discovered along the way is already being influenced by this pandemic.

 

This has been,

Fanny T. Crispin

Raw

Quarantine Week #5

FanTC

I can feel it. I’m losing my edge.

Nothing is convenient about working from home (I mean, besides hot coffee on a whim.) Agitation is setting in, but with it comes a loss of motivation. When you spend your days doing nothing, you feel like doing nothing. At the start of all this, I went on walks regularly. I woke up at the time I usually do if I was working in the office, so I had plenty of morning for cleaning, prepping, or walking. Now I find I sleep in later and later. I’ve turned to escapism hobbies like reading and writing (or the Netflix show Lost in Space, oh my word, it is INTENSE!)

How are you handling this week of quarantine? The Midwest is on the rise of the curve. There’s talks of shutting down even the grocery stores. I admit, it’s probably a necessary action. There are too many people who don’t take it seriously – and I don’t mean grocery shoppers. I mean the folks who visit each other in their vehicles, driving from home to home to home picking up the Covid-19 virus from the third or fifth passenger and carrying it with them to the next visit.

It doesn’t seem a wise past-time. Why not sit in INDIVIDUAL vehicles six feet apart and talk through the windows? The mother-in-law came to visit Saturday. That’s what we did with her. She sat in the driveway, we sat on lawn chairs. She even brought the puppy for a visit because he loves car rides. As difficult as it was to ignore his pines for attention, we knew we couldn’t go near the vehicle for fear of putting Mom at risk.

I’m not worried about becoming terribly ill or dying from this infection. I am worried about the rate of spread. I’m worried about my grandma and mother-in-law who are high risk.

And I’m getting terribly annoyed not being able to go anywhere or do anything. This pandemic certainly isn’t the worst that could happen. America isn’t being bombed. It’s not Bubonic. It’s not a hundred other worse catastrophes. But it’s life-altering. It is certainly that.

How are you coping?

This has been,

Fan T. C.