Random thoughts of January

This January has been a month of change and coldness and sickness.

I write these blog posts once a month (maybe more, who knows what the future brings?) because I want to keep up the practice of writing, and these posts give me the discipline of writing once a month. Because my other work-in-progress is on hold for now, for many life reasons.

I keep thinking about it though, reworking some of it in my head, and perhaps I will someday get back to it.

For a month, I didn’t have to go to campus. We had some holiday time off, and then we were “work from home” as the virus flared up yet again – and the quarter was pushed back a week, and the classes went remote for two weeks while the virus hopefully settled down.

Now the general feeling is the virus has peaked and we are settling back down into normal levels. Until the next variant hits us, of course.

I listened to a podcast talk about the Flu Epidemic of 1918, and it was fast and deadly and awful. But FAST seems key to me – it killed a lot of people very quickly, but then it was over. How do we know when COVID-19 is over? We go out and get vaccines and boosters and then a new variant comes along and we have to shut down again (which coincides with needing to be more indoors because of the weather, not at all surprisingly) and we cycle around and around, grateful for the shots that mean we won’t get so sick, and angry that Those In Power seem to do everything they can to pretend it doesn’t exist anymore and real people aren’t suffering.

And yet, it’s here. People are dying. Even more people are still getting sick. And there are beginning to be a groundswell of people who can’t imagine returning to life as it was.

We have no definition of what the “new normal” will look like, but for a lot of people, it won’t look like anything in the past.

Speaking of random deaths, the friend of my partner suddenly died on a visit to New Orleans – and there are so many mixed feelings there – I mean, horror at dying so far from home, but perhaps dying when one was out having fun was good? Much about the death is unknown (which has it’s own horror: I think we need to know WHY in order to process the fact of it) but it does not seem to have been violent (the police do not seem to suspect foul play, though he was found on the street). So that happened, and I don’t really have a place to put that.

I just finished reading CASTE by Isabel Wilkerson, and it is thoughtful and well written and absolutely true and absolutely depressing. It did give me a framework for understanding what is going on in the world right now, which is … maybe helpful? Why is fascism on the rise? Because people are afraid of losing caste status? Ah. Not so much economic vulnerability, but caste. And how do we fight that? Are individual acts of kindness and connection enough? I am no longer sure this country can overcome the sins of it’s past; at this point in time, we seem to be going backwards in willingness to even acknowledge those sins, let alone confront them in any meaningful way.

January is one of the longest months. It is cold, and dark, and snowy. And the snow seems relentless this year (we’ve had worse years – the snowfall has been absolutely reasonable and seasonable so far, I don’t mean to imply we’re having unusual or disastrous snowfall …). I find with the return to campus and “normal,” that I do not want to drive in the snow – my tough New England/Midwestern “Eh, it’s just a little bit of snow, no big deal,” has definitely changed in the pandemic.

Now I feel like “Why go outside? Outside will kill you.”

I need to toughen up and realize I can still drive in the snow. It’s not the end of the world.

But maybe it is.