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Sunday, February 14, 2021

Starting The Second Complete Semester of COVID – Much Like the First: COVID Chronicles XVI

 

COVID-19, Lived Experience of the Pandemic, Teaching during the Pandemic, COVID Hopes and Fears, Psychology, Psychoanalysis

 


I have waited to write this missive because nothing seems to change.  Of course that is an illusion, but there is a certain dreariness that continues to hang on – and that I reported on in the last missive – and that will almost certainly be present in the next.  I went to a virtual conference on “Difficult Conversations” – conversations about race – on Campus (via Zoom, of course...).  The facilitator of the conference – who is clearly very committed to talking about race – seemed almost bored as she presented.  Was it that this is what she does all the time?  Was it that she was stuck, again, in her zoom room – wherever that is – with her zoom background that betrays little about her while she tells of her own experience of race as a means of inviting others to talk about theirs?

In the first breakout exercise, we were told to talk briefly about three things – our place, our name, and something else that now escapes me.  When I talked about my place – I talked about currently feeling dislocated.  This was ironic in some ways.  During the pandemic, we have been focused on nesting.  We have worked on remodeling the “public” sector of our home.  This has been fun and engaging.  As I write this, I am babysitting our new puppy who arrived two days ago.  Unlike our last foray into caring for a dog, this has been well planned and we have been reading about and watching videos of puppy parenting for a couple of months.

I am on campus for two days a week.  On each of those days I am teaching three one and a quarter hour classes.  For the first time in twenty years, I am teaching an introductory course, so many of my students are First Year Students and they are bombarding me with email questions, many of which involve my directing them to the syllabus where the answers to their questions are neatly laid out (thanks more to my borrowing and editing someone else’s syllabus than to my organizational skills).  These students seem to be more intent on coming to class in person on a regular basis than the cohort last fall – perhaps because they are younger – but perhaps the students in general are learning that being in the classroom, rather than coming by Zoom, is a better way to learn, even if there is a risk of infection.

I had an opportunity to get a vaccine a month or so ago.  As a mental health professional, I was considered a front line worker.  I went online to get a time, but when it came up, I balked.  I am not seeing any patients in person and don’t see any urgency to do that.  My risk comes primarily from my job as a teacher.  I had heard that teachers were going to be in the next wave, so I decided to wait.  What I didn’t realize was that when they said teachers, in our state, unlike others, post-secondary teachers are not included.  My ethical decision, which had included what turned out to be a false hedge, was not reversible!  I have tried to sign up on the medical worker site again, but now they say they will call me…  So far no ring.

In my worst moments, I wonder whether our school’s administration, which has not apparently advocated effectively for us, if at all, and who insist that we go into the classroom while other schools are not doing that, are in league with our Republican legislature in wanting to eliminate a wisdom culture – something like a mini version of the cultural revolution in China (Oh, the scale is way different and remember this is at my worst and most paranoid/hysterical moments).  When I utter some variation on this theme, the Reluctant Wife wonders, “Why haven’t you retired?” 

Similarly, my patients wonder why I didn’t take the vaccine when it was available.  Though we would not be able to meet in person immediately, they would like to do that as soon as it is possible.  Perhaps I want to stave off meeting in person?  Perhaps, as an introvert who grew up believing himself to be an extravert, I am luxuriating, the way a pig luxuriates in slop, in glorious isolation?

I think, in fact, I am dislocated.  I don’t like being isolated, but I don’t want to return to being in contact.  I am overwhelmed with work, and I think that would just get worse (though I’m not quite sure how) if there were things to do and go see?  More fundamentally, I am concerned with the state of the nation, I am concerned with the state of the world – when we have figured out how to address the pandemic – how will we address climate change?

As I mentioned above, we have joined millions of others in acquiring a pet in part as a reaction to the pandemic.  Kimba, named after the hero of a cartoon series that the Reluctant Wife watched as an adolescent, is a lovely little ball of fluff that we are enjoying connecting with.  The girls have come home from their socially isolated bubbles at their respective schools to welcome her in (Kimba, it turns out, is a chick magnet).  The Reluctant Son is already here as his school is still not having students on campus.  Kimba is very social and happy and already feels – after just a few days with the family - to be a member of it.

The process of training a dog, and watching it develop, will, perhaps, help restore – as will the reopening of the world – a sense of hope.  Springtime is just around the corner.  Assuming we can make it from here to summer and an inoculation without exposing ourselves to the disease we should, at some point, be in the clear.  OK, my gloomy self imagines, we might, like John Laurens in Hamilton!, become casualties after the war is won).  The Reluctant Wife and my Mother and Mother in Law have all received their second shots.  We will achieve herd immunity.  Currently, our nation doesn't have enough people willing to take the shots when they become available to do that, but many of them are waiting to see what the results will be for the millions who will take them before they have an opportunity.   I trust we will get there.

I trust that we will work towards herd immunity both here and in the world more broadly.  The local newspaper recently reminded us that a local hero who discovered one of the polio vaccines decided to donate the vaccines to the children of the world rather than profit from them.  The current vaccines are the result of corporate efforts – and the corporations will surely profit – but hopefully we will figure out how to equitably distribute them (though I have heard of isolated profiteering already going on in some countries). 

During this time, I have been reading a text about Contemporary Social Theories.  I will likely report on it in more detail once I have completed it.  It is describing the work theorists have engaged in during the last century or so to understand the dilemmas of the modern world.  Reading about how Adorno and others worked to understand Fascism in the middle of the last century feels very contemporary – and helpful.  We have struggled with the issues we are currently facing in different forms.  We do, in fact, have wisdom that has been achieved across time.  We need to re-access it and apply it to a world that is evolving and, as they cautioned us, realize that the individual ways that something as monolithic seeming as fascism can be experienced needs to be understood as well.

In the book, I am poised to read the chapter on Lacan and Derrida, two theorists who have always confused me.  The book promises to explain how they dislocated first the French Intellectuals, who, in turn, dislocated the rest of us.  The author claims that our burgeoning sense of, for instance, gender proliferation and confusion is traceable in large part to them.  Perhaps better understanding them will help me understand the experience of being dislocated - or perhaps it will plunge me deeper into what may become a deeper state of disorientation, dislocation and, perhaps, despair.  

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 For other posts on COVID:

I:       Apocalypse Now  my first posting on COVID-19.
II:      Midnight in Paris  is a jumping off point for more thinking about COVID.  (Also in Movies).
III:    Hans Selye and the Stress Response Syndrome.  COVID becomes more normal... for now.
VI:    Get back in that classroom  Paranoid ruminations.
VII:   Why Shutting Classes Makes Fiscal Sense A weak argument
XIII: Ennui
XIV. Where, Oh Where have my in-person students gone?  Split zoom classes in the age of COVID.
XVIII.    I miss my mask?
IXX.      Bo Burnham's Inside Commentary on the commenter.

 


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