Day 33: the fundamental interconnectedness of all things
Tuesday, 28 April 2020 11:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
freckles_and_doubtI am in the throes of remote orientation and remote curriuclum advice simultaneously, which is at the very least preventing boredom. It's also keeping my blood pumping as I patiently answer email queries whose answer was contained in the announcement I have just sent out and which was quoted in the query. Yelling and shaking helpless fists at the sky are cardio, yes?
I keep having email exchanges with colleagues where they apologise for a delayed response and refer to the difficulties of working from home in the midst of small children. And every time, I reply to reassure them that I get it, it's fine, I am facing the very different challenge of isolation, and I really think I have it easier than people with young families. Even despite the clear and present danger that not leaving the house for two weeks at a time may lead inexorably into my becoming a crazed, feral hermit, or at least even more of a crazed, feral hermit than I already am under my routine non-epidemic conditions of extreme introversion.
But I was thinking about it at 1am yesterday, which is where random insomnia bloody landed me after two hours of sleep: this epidemic may have been enabled by our globe-spanning travel technologies, but its quarantine lockdowns are also enabled by our equally globe-spanning communications tech. I am not alone. I have a high-speed fibre internet line and a cellphone contract. I am in contact with colleagues and students daily, and have check-ins with friends and family via WhatsApp several times a week, plus Skype and Zoom and hangouts, and weekly gin dates with Vi. I have kitties to pet, and with whom to hold conversations out loud, as for instance now, when Pandora has climbed under my desk and is headbutting me lovingly in the calf.
And more than that, I am through Tumblr and Twitter and this blog plugged firmly into a global community of experience. I am watching people bake bread and homeschool kids and rant at the government, and lose friends and family to the virus, and exchange jokes and wry insights and mad lockdown self-entertainment memes, and support each other and commiserate, and record sports commentary on their dogs and play videogames as performance art, and deliberately set out to entertain each other and make this whole horrible experience, in some small way, more human and connected and bearable. The manifest iniquities of various governments aside, this epidemic has demonstrated over and over again that at heart the vast majority of humans are communal, and mutually supportive, and pretty decent, really. We make the best of things, for ourselves and each other. We are tanking our own economies and employment by staying home, and we're not only doing it out of love for our fellow humans, we are doing it good-humouredly and creatively and in mutual support.
Sometimes I like us. It's nice to know it's possible.
I keep having email exchanges with colleagues where they apologise for a delayed response and refer to the difficulties of working from home in the midst of small children. And every time, I reply to reassure them that I get it, it's fine, I am facing the very different challenge of isolation, and I really think I have it easier than people with young families. Even despite the clear and present danger that not leaving the house for two weeks at a time may lead inexorably into my becoming a crazed, feral hermit, or at least even more of a crazed, feral hermit than I already am under my routine non-epidemic conditions of extreme introversion.
But I was thinking about it at 1am yesterday, which is where random insomnia bloody landed me after two hours of sleep: this epidemic may have been enabled by our globe-spanning travel technologies, but its quarantine lockdowns are also enabled by our equally globe-spanning communications tech. I am not alone. I have a high-speed fibre internet line and a cellphone contract. I am in contact with colleagues and students daily, and have check-ins with friends and family via WhatsApp several times a week, plus Skype and Zoom and hangouts, and weekly gin dates with Vi. I have kitties to pet, and with whom to hold conversations out loud, as for instance now, when Pandora has climbed under my desk and is headbutting me lovingly in the calf.
And more than that, I am through Tumblr and Twitter and this blog plugged firmly into a global community of experience. I am watching people bake bread and homeschool kids and rant at the government, and lose friends and family to the virus, and exchange jokes and wry insights and mad lockdown self-entertainment memes, and support each other and commiserate, and record sports commentary on their dogs and play videogames as performance art, and deliberately set out to entertain each other and make this whole horrible experience, in some small way, more human and connected and bearable. The manifest iniquities of various governments aside, this epidemic has demonstrated over and over again that at heart the vast majority of humans are communal, and mutually supportive, and pretty decent, really. We make the best of things, for ourselves and each other. We are tanking our own economies and employment by staying home, and we're not only doing it out of love for our fellow humans, we are doing it good-humouredly and creatively and in mutual support.
Sometimes I like us. It's nice to know it's possible.
