Adventures in Isolation (?) - Day 109
It’s been a while. Just over two months, to be more exact. My university sent an email a little while ago about collecting information from this COVID-19 era, so they can store it and study it in future. That’s been a key motivator in me making this update post.
A little meta note that I feel might be interesting for anyone reading back in the future: you may notice I’ve largely avoided using the terms COVID-19 or ‘coronavirus’ in these posts. Even ‘lockdown’ and ‘quarantine’ I tried to minimise using. I felt a similar way about those words as one does when a family member passes away. ‘Died’ feels far too blunt; too real. Euphemisms like ‘passed away’ help us talk about these issues while shielding ourselves from the full emotional impact of the actual words for the concepts we are talking about. I used as vague terms as I could to try and euphemise what was happening in the world around me, for my own wellbeing’s sake.
It was around the 14th of May that I first got to see my boyfriend. 51 days without seeing anyone (aside from my dad and occasionally my mum) doesn’t sound like a long time, but it honestly felt like several months. For the first few weeks, my dad drove me to and from my boyfriend’s place, over 40 km away. I am very thankful that he allowed me to see him without having to go on public transport when there was still a lot of uncertainty and risk about going out in public. Since then, I have been taking public transport. Generally, I don’t wear a mask - I haven’t felt the need to as I have ensured I travel outside of busy times, and there is plenty of space on board the buses and trains. I have worn it once or twice, however, when a bus I needed to take started to fill up.
New Zealand is currently in Level 1 alert, meaning we can basically live life as normal (I even went to a 21st at a bar last week), but overseas travel is heavily restricted. We had no cases of the virus for over three weeks. We started letting people come in to the country from overseas, which I didn’t know about at the time. Naturally, some of those visitors had the virus. Two of them were allowed to break the mandatory 14-day quarantine to attend a funeral, but when they tested positive for the virus, the compassionate policy was quickly reversed. At the time of writing this post, we have 24 active cases of COVID-19, all of which come from people who were overseas. There have been cases of travellers breaking their quarantine, which make most people very mad. Even I thought for a while that we should not allow people into the country at all, although now I have slightly eased up on this opinion, despite the lack of enough enforcement of quarantine for new arrivals. I also pondered the concept of any further deaths in New Zealand of people who didn’t come back from overseas being manslaughter, where the travellers knowingly risked bringing an eradicated virus into a country. These thoughts have some quite clear xenophobic elements, and I was honestly surprised at how I was reacting. I think there’s a difference between xenophobic thoughts based on racist stereotypes with perceived threats that are imaginary, and thoughts based on a real threat of a deadly illness being brought back into an island nation which had worked to contain it. I’m not sure if the second thought is really xenophobic, because sure, it is a fear of people coming in from other countries, but it has nothing to do with the actual origin of those people - not their home country (and many of the people coming home at the moment are New Zealanders), the country they were staying in over the past few months, their race, ethnicity, etc. I’m writing this here to be transparent about how I am experiencing the world at the moment. It is probably worth noting that I consider myself to be very open-minded, and conscious of the privilege I have and the biases I may have internalised because of it. This is why it surprised me so much to be having these ‘get out of my country’-esque thoughts.
A major thing that happened since my last post (I believe it was only shortly after) was the large-scale movement against police brutality in the USA. I won’t cover too much here, since this has been widely documented and as a white person from a different part of the world, I don’t think I have too much insight into the details of the situation. The catalyst for the riots was the murder of a black man named George Floyd, who died as a result of a police officer kneeling on his neck. Floyd’s last words were “I can’t breathe”, a phrase which has become synonymous with the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020. These riots involve arson, destruction of confederate/colonist statues (in the USA and in other places including the UK), and the establishment of an autonomous zone or occupation protest at Capitol Hill in Seattle, Washington. The main goal is to defund the police, due to it being an oppressive organisation, and use the funds to develop social services to ensure the wellbeing of people, especially marginalised communities like BIPOC (Black and Indigenous People of Colour) and LGBTQ+. This has started conversations overseas also, including in New Zealand, where the appropriateness of some statues has been questioned. As a reference for the future, I wholly support the Black Lives Matter movement, and firmly believe that black people do not deserved to be treated in such a manner as they are currently, no matter if they are being arrested on murder charges or just walking down the street.
Back to a more personal note, I am extremely thankful that the university decided to increase our overall grades for this semester by one grade boundary (generally 5%). I only have one exam result back so far, but I was getting high 90%s in coursework and got a 68% on the exam. Thankfully this only brings me down to an A-, which should become an A with the increase. Exams have been really hard to do at home. Taking an exam in a space where you do casual study and play video games is really difficult. Certainly, going in to an exam room with hundreds of people with no talking allowed and paranoia over excessive coughing is stressful, but it is also an environment more conducive to the flat-out essay writing that exams expect. My exams were meant to take two hours and ended up taking about 4-5 hours, and the honours-level exams my friends took were taking 12 hours each. The statement of ‘a well-prepared student should be able to complete this exam in two hours’ is laughably incorrect. I just hope I do a bit better in the other exams, since I put in a lot of effort and stress and I’d like to finish my degree with a reasonable GPA.
I’m not sure if I will write any more posts in this thread, unless we have a second wave of virus cases (I sincerely hope not) or something along those lines. Life is pretty much coming back to normal now, and the second semester of this year starts in a couple of weeks, theoretically operating as per usual. Maybe I will make a follow-up post about how it goes.
