there’s this thing people say sometimes about not counting “the COVID years” as part of their age tally, or just like --skipping that time, cutting it from their lives.
to the extent that that’s a psychological defense mechanism, I can induce some sympathy for it in myself. but in the end--even setting aside the whole “for whom is COVID ‘over’ or not over” thing--my reaction is always just, “tell me you got out of that time period without anything too huge happening to you without telling me.” like, I can’t cut that piece out of my life, because then I’ll need a fucking explanation for when my dad died. and why my dissertation project is completely different from what I’d always imagined. and why my relationship with my mother is the way it is. and why my family doesn’t play charades anymore. why I’m teaching online in the fall. all of that before I even touch the long COVID part.
I dunno. probably plenty of people who say this kind of thing underwent serious trauma and major events and they just want to escape from it a little bit. probably this thought is very unfair, and what this is really about is my having an overdeveloped ethics and philosophy of time and experience such that the premise simply doesn’t appeal to me the way it might to others. probably I take it too literally and too seriously, because it is very serious to me, the question of evading or refusing experience and its consequences. probably it’s nothing. but let’s just say I can’t ever laugh at those jokes.
One of the most interesting parts of my research was that I came to see the official indifference to the public's health as not a bug but a
I remember seeing an article about New Orleans and yellow fever - I would bet by the same author being interviewed here - early in the pandemic. It was very informative and prescient at the time, and this interview adds a broader context and some different details. The interview is also worth reading for conceptual resources: especially the concept of immunocapitalism and the way it brings together "capital" in a Marxist sense and "capital" in Bordieu's sense.
Anyway, an unfortunately relatable excerpt:
MH: Being a hub of global commerce, the city also becomes a center of disease and disease spread. We traditionally think about disease waves as public problems to be dealt with, or at least we used to. But you depict a situation in New Orleans where yellow fever becomes not only epidemiologically endemic, but socially endemic, too. How does this society become based around disease?
KO: Yellow fever radically transformed the lives of millions of Americans before the 20th century. The disease needs three things: a hot, humid climate; a sizable population of female Ae. aegypti mosquitoes; and a large population of non-immune people living close together. In New Orleans in this period, epidemics appear every two or three years in the summer.
After the Louisiana Purchase, thousands of people are pouring into the region because they want to get on the ground floor of this commodity revolution, or they want one of these good government jobs that they see as a springboard to slave- and land-ownership. And as more people are coming in, more ships are coming in too, carrying these mosquitoes from the Caribbean.
By the 1810s, the epidemic outbreaks were so frequent that they shaped the city’s calendar. The epidemics would generally be from June or July to November, when the first mosquito-killing frost came. That’s three or four months of fever season, so it obviously impacted people’s lives then but it really impacted their lives the whole year round. It greatly influenced the timing of the cotton market. Come January, the cotton and sugar and slavery industries were absolutely abuzz—but what would happen is suddenly one day in late June or early July a case of yellow fever would be reported or rumored, and eventually there would be a tipping point, where enough cases were reported and the entire life of the city would switch.
People who were rich and white—many of whom owned slaves and country plantations—were able to leave. You would get onto a carriage with your family, or perhaps with enslaved people whom you owned, and you would go to your country plantation. Or you would go to the north and you would take in theater and do business in New York. Some went to London or Paris to do their summer tours there. But that’s only for the very richest people, and many had no choice but to remain in town during epidemics because they did not have the funds or freedom to leave. And if you stuck in town, life would be very miserable. You would spend three months in utter fear that you were going to die. You would steel yourself to keep working because you would be fired if you didn’t, if you gave up your post in your grocery or wholesaler or merchant house. If you did get sick, you would spend all the money you had in the world and then some on doctors and nurses to try to safely take you through the acclimating process. If you survived, you would be known as an acclimated citizen; if you died, you were a poor and unfortunate unacclimated stranger. And you had about a 50% chance of living or dying of this disease in the 19th century.
And then, when the frost comes—so many people describe this in their letters and diaries—New Orleans bounced back to its former self overnight. Suddenly the street was filled with people, stores reopen, schools reopen. If you lived through this for many years, you became used to this kind of danse macabre, this semi-yearly pattern dictating the pace but also the emotions of your life.
Thinking about how tomorrow I have to go to class under no-masking conditions and what I'll do or how I'll react if nobody's masking. I don't mind masks off one on one or in very small groups. I went into Hunter the other day and most seemed still to be wearing them in the halls, elevators, etc. My seat in the classroom is right by the windows and a fan that blows right onto me toward everyone else (I made damn sure of that on day 1). But it is still dozens of people in a closed room for hours on end.
I know the professor is recording lectures for one or two people who are not there in person, for whatever reason. Presumably I could just tell him I'm going to become one of those people. I'm just mad that I have to think about this at all right now. When I agreed to take an in-person class it was under specific conditions. I wish the university would have just...kept the conditions we all agreed to in place through the end of the semester. (I can understand some reasons why they didn't. It just blows. So to speak.)
Having to send the archivist that question after much last minute back and forth about what files i want was just a deep trench of cringe. She's probably like, THIS fucking joker, OF COURSE, she hasn't answered me yet because she has to have a coffee and a deep breath about it
(In reality she does not care that much and she has dealt with plenty of weirdos, human disasters, and people much ruder than me in her career. I know this. But ugggghhh it's still Embarrassing)
i can hear a woman sobbing in the hallway/stairwell and it is heartrending. i really want to go ask if she needs help, but for a variety of reasons ranging from language to the spatial conventions of privacy (such as it is) in new york city i’m pretty sure the right thing to do is to leave her to it. but oh my god. i hate this whole period of time, i hate how awful it is for everyone, i hate the relentless suffering. i hate. this.
i was just looking at somebody’s blog to decide whether to follow them, and the first post was about having been to 10 funerals in 2 years. brazil and india are being fucking mowed down and nobody who could do a thing about it is going to. i know so many people who have dead family members or family members in danger of dying, not all from covid--it’s just like everybody who had a black star on the horizon, some illness or something that could kill them, had that star suddenly shoot overhead this year. not even the pets are spared. i have my own damn dead family member. the cops ramped up their ongoing constitutional murder spree for the chauvin trial and they are going to kill and injure and (re)traumatize so many fucking people this summer. i had to turn down my friend’s very sweet offer to come all the way out here to where i live so he could spend one of his iftars this ramadan with just me because i haven’t had my second shot yet and i can’t cognitively process what is “acceptable risk” in the in between stage. people still want to fight about vaccines. crypto is negating what little dents have been made in energy consumption and yet my friends in the group chat have (tiny amounts of) money in it and joke around about the shifting prices. i am staring down a frankly horrific 4-5 weeks of workload and a similarly insane 9 months starting in august, and at best i can hope for a 3-week break in between when until recently i thought i’d have almost two whole months. protest is being further criminalized in 34 states. denmark is expelling its syrian asylees and no one will do anything about that either. the two places i care most about in the world are drowning in layer after layer of misery in a way i’ve never seen, and i have no idea when or if i will ever be able to go back responsibly. i got an email today that may mean i won’t get the summer money i have the past two years, and i am too exhausted to even contemplate how i would go about finding out if it does mean that. fascist zionists are terrorizing east jerusalem.
due to some stuff i won’t go into detail about, i am feeling Alone in a way i really haven’t the whole pandemic until the last few weeks. and this is made worse because the burnout of having been producing writing and intelligent off-the-cuff comments and research plans literally nonstop since fall 2019 is manifesting as an increasing inability to communicate--i can tell that my writing and talking make less sense than they used to, and that people are not always understanding me.
my mom has come up with a cutting-edge 21st century post-pandemic form of Mom Shit, which is: concern trolling me about whether my zoom lighting is good enough
her: i’ve been thinking. i want to offer to buy you a little light, like the one i stick onto my computer for zooming.
me: oh! i can think about it.
her: i just think it helps connect better with people when the faces are clearer, you know?
me: i mean, i think my light situation in the spot where i zoom is pretty good! so all it would really add is mobility, and my apartment’s pretty small, so--
her: well, in my opinion, i just think you look a little flat. you know, like your face doesn’t have a lot of dimension to it
me, silently: incredible
been cutting my own hair for a year, no problem, but my mom asked me to take some off the back for her and the sense of earthshattering responsibility.....
got asked out tonight by a cute, nice guy from the corner store who i would ordinarily HAPPILY bang, but i am simply not taking that kind of unnecessary risk with either of my parents' very high-risk lives, and i am: feeling bummed about having had to say no
i'm extra bummed because he took it really well, which is a rare, good sign in a man :/
