Simpson's Paradox

1. This person who said coronavirus was fake got coronavirus and died.

I don’t want to read this as a snarky tragedy-in-two-acts quoting their social media conspiracies and then their covid obit.  I don’t want to read this as an impassioned hospital-bed or graveside plea for others to take covid19 seriously.

By now, what’s the point? If Americans weren’t convinced by the first or the first dozen or the first hundred of these stories, who’s the audience for these?

2. Another article on how masks really do prevent covid.

I don’t think there’s anyone left maskless because they haven’t yet been told that masks slow covid and protect our communities.  A group in NC are burning their masks for Murica and freedumbs. It’s not like they’re waiting for a peer-reviewed study on masks effectiveness, with a large sample size and accurate control group to start believing in science and wearing a mask.

Again, if Americans weren’t convinced by the first dozen announcements that masks slow the spread of covid, or weren’t willing to wear a mildly-annoying mask when we first heard it probably keeps our parents safer, why would this article be any different?

3. A group of X got together and now they all have covid.

We’ve been in quarantine since March and pretty much every day since then there’s been a story about a choir rehearsal or summer camp or football practice that met up and now everyone has covid.  At first, I was deeply saddened by these stories, it seemed to really remind me of life in the Before Times, and all the things we took for granted, but now I think, yes, we know coronavirus spreads in groups.

WorkBro ran Zoom trivia the other night, and he made a category called “Literature” which was just posting one-star Amazon reviews and asking us to identify which classic novel was being reviewed.

Obviously, I got them all, plus the bonus for knowing the authors.

Today is June first, and my calendar alert reminded me to do my Free Donut Day class warmups. Every summer, I do a little activity with a coffee menu, a little counter vocabulary, and a roleplay conversation with directions to the nearest Dunks. I love setting up students to go eat sweets with their new friends.  Today is also the first day of the new session, and I usually run a smooth and solid into activity for new students.

You guys, I used to be so good at my job.

But this morning, I signed into my online classes, instead of doing any of that, I talked with students about racial tension and police brutality. We talked about the excessive force in the death of George Floyd that led to these protests, and the excessive force turning protests into riots all over the country. We also talked about staying safe from riots during a pandemic, with fairly low-level English students. There’s nothing in my teacher training or classroom experience to prepare for that. It was a dark version of the usual directions lesson, not talking about getting to Dunks for a free donut, but about where there were fires last night and which students live downtown.  My school said they’d be making a statement about tolerance and student safety, but didn’t actually send anything before classes, so I was 100% on my own.  We’re all on our own right now, looking for some kind of plan or way out, while our country’s president is tweeting from his bunker about not looking weak.

So today, my classes were just a place to talk a little bit, share a little information and get a little community, from our separate apartments. Maybe tomorrow I’ll teach some English.

In an entirely different universe, about a month ago, going to the grocery store wouldn’t merit a mention. But now… we made it 8 days since our last shopping trip, and I would really like to eat an apple or a cucumber again, also, we’re flying through our soap.

With mask and gloves, and without any buses or subways,  I walked to the fancy Whole Foods. After the socially-distant line down the block to get in, it was simultaneously luxurious and post-apocalyptic. We don’t usually shop for blood oranges and baby asparagus at $15/pound, and especially after so many homemade meals of variations on chickpeas and rice, browsing felt like a shock.  It felt like when I lived in Yantai for months, and then one weekend I saw all the luxe Western food in Beijing.

But there were a lot of glaring, empty spaces on the shelves. I read a lot of novels set in WWII, so I was prepared for very limited meat, eggs, and butter. I tried to pretend I was fighting the Nazis, but mostly I was fighting other customers stocking up. (You can’t even blame them, we all want to go out as little as possible.) Also, no TP, no hand sanitizer, no Lysol wipes, almost no handsoap.

I did find a giant refill bottle of Mrs. Meyers Geranium handsoap, for a price that I would never normally pay and also way too much backpack weight. But those are the concerns of my old life… Now, it’s necessary hand soap! We have 2 pump bottles at home, each with one squirt left, because it’s not polite to take the last of something, and that applies to soap in the plague. My mom didn’t raise me to be rude.

I found a box of matzoh, too, and I started mentally making jokes about hunting the afikoman, and I cracked myself up and starting laughing into my facemask, alone, in the apocalypse, so, doing great over here. Yeah.

Shoppers are no longer able to fill personal bags in the store, so I went out to where they’d put one picnic table upside-down on another one (to make sure no one could gather there) and used the bench as a little shelf to unpack my paper bags into my backpack, with minimum wasted space and evenly distributed weight for the walk home. I’m a master at this part, I did it in my old life, even if I don’t usually do it in gloves. The washing and disinfecting at home is new.

Anyway, did you know what Mrs. Meyers Geranium Soap smells like? Because all the rich people in the Whole Foods definitely knew, there’s a reason that was the only soap left. It smells like flower-scented hot garbage. It has the sweet-rotting scent of durian, with a spray of perfume on top.

A perfect scent for mandated 6 feet of personal space.