I looked forward to this arrangement – not only would it
minimize students heading home in the middle of the semester – the semester
would be over early which would allow for a longer Christmas break and that
would allow me to work on some projects that have needed my attention. I have also always thought of things like
Fall Break (a random Thursday and Friday in the fall with no classes) as kind
of silly – Spring Break, too, for that matter.
My clinical work continues during these “breaks” and I experience them
more as a bit of a lull rather than a true break.
Well, I don’t know whether it was sprinting through the
semester, or the strain of COVID, or the weirdness of this political season,
but by the end of the semester, I was all but wrung out. I have not slept so consistently soundly in
years. By the end of day I was tired,
and by the time bed time rolled around, I was deeply exhausted, as if I had
been hard at work all day out of doors.
I have not posted on this site in over a month, which is unusual for me –
and a sign of not feeling like I have had time to do anything but work on what
needed to be done.
Another feature of this time is that I have been completely
at home except for the six clock hours each week that I was on campus to teach
two face to face classes (these were simulcast on zoom – and the last two weeks
I was the only person in the classroom – my other class was online throughout
and I “broadcast” from our home office).
I have been spending less time on campus in recent years – but even
recently, I have been on campus for 30-40 hours each week – seeing patients at
home – and working at home on the weekends.
It made a huge difference to be working at home all day every day. There was no shift in place to work. Before there was a sense on the weekends that
the work I was doing was “not work” because it was at home. Now home feels like the work place and it
feels like I am always at work…
Of course, this is a first world problem, and in the first
world, especially now, there could be way worse problems!
The bad news, of course, is that this won’t be over soon. The novel vaccines are being pushed through
the pipeline, but it will be a logistical nightmare to get them to us and we
don’t yet know how quickly they will be produced. To most effectively prevent the continued
transmission of the disease, they should go to front line and essential
workers. We’ll see how they are actually
distributed. And we don’t yet know what
it will mean to be inoculated. For
instance, one question that has not yet been experimentally addressed is whether
a vaccinated person can be a transmitter of the illness. A corollary question of mine is can a person
who has had the illness still carry it?
But of course, we don’t yet know how long having had the illness will provide
immunity or whether it will provide immunity from other
strains. And getting to the point Nationally, much less internationally, where enough people are inoculated that this thing will die out will take months or perhaps another year.
If you detect an increasing line of hysteria underlying the
questions above, your radar is working well.
As a dear friend and analyst once told me, living in the world of the
unconscious means that we are more, not less prone to the fears, follies and
foibles of being human. The Reluctant Wife just calls me Captain Calamity.
I started this line of posts with the intent of tracking, in
real time, my experience of the pandemic.
Especially in the wake of revelations that we really don’t know much
about the public’s reaction to the 1918 influenza outbreak, I thought it might
serve a useful purpose. A
recent NPR spot on a book about the Spanish flu clarified that part of that
had to do with a national media blackout orchestrated by President Wilson who,
not wanting the backlash that Lincoln received by allowing reporters to travel
with the troops in the Civil War, kept a lid on the news about both the world war and about the
ensuing flu.
On our own smaller home front, my fear at the beginning of
the semester had to do with being in front of a classroom full of students some
of whom likely would be sick. Very quickly,
my classroom was largely empty, as
I reported earlier, because the students chose to participate by zoom. But when one of our reluctant children came
home from school to spend a week with their paramour, the paramour’s boss and
co-worker became sick, so the paramour was tested and found positive – so the
adult child was tested and fortunately turned out to be negative, both on
testing and symptomatically, as were the reluctant spouse and I. Why did we duck that bullet? Was the reluctant child's spring illness really COVID though she tested negative at the time?
Based on a near miss, we were more cautious at Thanksgiving –
having only nuclear family at our celebration.
This meant that there were about half as many people at the table as usual – and we
could hear each other talking! We also
spent the rest of the weekend masked in the house after kids starting connecting
with others to celebrate the holidays.
Our world is smaller – and will stay that way over Christmas
and the New Year – but more intimate.
Were it not for the sameness of the days, sheltering in place hasn’t
been a bad way to live. The Reluctant
Wife is not travelling, so that is a real bonus. But the uncertainty, the compressed
schedules, and living in fear for family members are all things I could live
without.
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Isolation. That is the challenge. And monotony. My wife is also an academic at another institution. We see each other in the morning, then she goes to her space and me to mine. Not so different from the past "normal" times, but as you mention, it takes place at home. This used to be a refuge from the frustrations and obligations of work. We now joke that home has become the "Faculty Lounge" with all of the noise that fills the more institutional version of that space. My students seemed to run out of gas by mid to late October. Much less engagement, more names rather than faces on Zoom, late work, etc. I perceive damage there, but time will tell. Glad you are back with this blog.
ReplyDeleteYes, the Reluctant Wife and I work in opposite ends of the house and it is all the more alienating to have been so close and yet so far away all day. We feel more like strangers at the end of every week than we ever have. And my students, too, lost their mettle by the end of the semester. It is rare to have students not finish my upper level class, but there was a cadre who did not make it this semester. Will we continue to be teaching to students who hide behind their name shield and who are not there when we call on them when we are back to normal? I hope not. I think the students were as pressed as we this semester. I do worry about what next semester will bring. Hang in there!
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