Simpson's Paradox

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.

 

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A post shared by Meg (@simpsonsparadox) on Mar 23, 2020 at 1:23pm PDT

A few weeks ago, Harold and I went to visit my parents and see my mom’s art show, Waking Dreams. We almost didn’t go, because we had so other stuff much going on (mostly getting ready for conventions that never happened!). Anyway, I thought we’d be seeing my parents soon at my mom’s big show at the end of March.

Now I’m really happy that we all found the time because I don’t know when it will be safe and smart to go visit my parents again.

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Weird observation that scraping off the wall copy from my exhibition leads to existential/self-help/ narcissistic quotes 😉 . . . #exhibition #wordart #text #letteringchallenge #letterings #contemporaryartist #inthegallery #thingsihaveseen

A post shared by Heather Stivison (@heatherstivison) on Feb 15, 2020 at 10:33am PST

I have a review of Letters to Earth up on Endless Ink.

Zed’s world is connected to our own, but in a distant future, with some recognizable versions of present-day cultures, some entirely new religious cultures, and some elements directly from our world. Unexplained environmental problems require many people to live under protective domes, with others living rural, simpler existence in the Out Camps. The novel presents us with a troubled world, without getting bogged down in specifics, and suggests space colonization as a solution.

Once on the new planet, exploration, harvesting and crafting is the basis of the colonists’ lives, and this is the heart of the novella, too. When the planet rejects the planned terraforming, the colonists must rely on strangely appealing new natural resources. Alien versions of familiar foods appear, and along with fiber suitable for making important goods like thread and paper. In this intriguing world, the planet continues to provide for them in mysterious ways. The two goals, the crafting and survival of a new colony and the exploration of a mysterious planet, create the background for young Zed to grow and mature.

Source: Review of TLD: Letters to Earth, from thefictionaddiction.com – Endless Ink Publishing House

Me: Good morning, everyone! What did you do over the weekend?

Student: I go river and I run, swim and feed goose.

Me: Oh man, English….  every word there is irregular…

We have a motivational sign in the staff room at school, asking teachers if they have their attendance sheets, markers, flexibility, open-mindedness, etc. So the other day, I matched the font and secretly added “pants” to the list.

No one has noticed yet, but whenever I have to do something boring, I just look at the upbeat corporate sign asking if I’ve remembered my pants today.