Journalism Wanted: where does Courtney Love get her COVID tests from?

Recently tweeted into my feed: Courtney Love says that wealthy people have had access to home COVID tests for months.

The article that was tweeted into my feed and others I've been able to google up basically reiterate the content of Courtney Love's original instagram post. 

But there a lot of questions here that some mild investigative journalism should be able to answer - or, at least, pinpoint the non-answers.

Who manufactures these tests? Who sells them? Are they out of reach to the general public because of price? Or because the test company will only sell to famous people? Or some other reason? How did Courtney Love and others like her find out about them in the first place? When Courtney Love wants to buy a COVID test, exactly what steps does she take? What would happen if a regular person who isn't rich and famous took those exact same steps? If someone asked Courtney Love where exactly she gets these tests from, what would her answer be? Would she decline to answer because they'd deny her tests if she leaked? Or for some other reason? Is manufacturing capacity limited? If so, what would it take to scale up?

Courtney Love's post flagged a problem, but didn't pinpoint what exactly the problem is. It could be anything from the utterly banal "home COVID tests cannot be produced at a sustainable price point" to the utterly terrifying "some malicious actor is trying to make sure only the rich and famous survive COVID by concealing the existence of convenient tests from the rest of us".

The job of journalism is to tell people what exactly the underlying problem here is, not just to transcribe Courtney Love's instagram posts. With a bit of investigative journalism, this would be a very interesting and probably very important story. But without the investigation, it's nothing but a celebrity gossip feed.

Things They Should Invent: one-way mirror webcam cover

A challenge with video chat is eye contact. We're inclined to either look at our interlocutor's eyes on screen, or to look at ourselves on screen. This means we aren't looking at the camera, and therefore appear shifty and weird to our interlocutors.

Proposed solution: a cover for the webcam made of a one-way mirror. In other words, the webcam can see you, but you see the mirror. If you make eye contact with yourself in the mirror, you're looking directly at the camera, so it looks to your interlocutor like you're making eye contact with them.

This would also make it easier to modulate your facial expression. I know that if I leave my facial expression unmonitored during a video chat, I tend to look like I'm sneering. (Really, my lips are just asymmetrical). But if I monitor my facial expression on the screen, I'm not looking at the camera and therefore look like I'm not paying attention. A mirror over the camera would make it easier to perform up to expectations.

40

I turn 40 today!

I think I am in a good place in life.

- Apart from the fact that I'm not married, I've done literally everything I imagined doing with my life. I have no bucket list.

- I'm weathering the pandemic well, and sustainably. I was sprinting at first and had to dial it back to a marathon pace, but I can keep this up long-term if necessary.

- So many of the life decisions I made when I was younger - so many of the life decisions people tried to dissuade me from! - have paid off during the pandemic. Obviously luck and privilege also contributed strongly to my coming through the pandemic well, but it's remarkable to me how basically every life decision people tried to dissuade me from paid off during this pandemic.

- My job comes easily to me. It's harder after my head injury, but still doesn't meet the criteria of objectively hard.

- Based on information to date, buying my condo was the right decision.

- My body continues to do what I need it to as well as it ever has. Any issues are head-injury-related, not aging-related. (Of course, I'd also love for the head injury to no longer be a factor.)

- I have social capital, at least in the circles I move in. At work, with family and friends, in the community, I can say "I think we should do X" or "No, I won't be doing Y", and I'm heard and respected. I can also say "I don't know how this works, what do I do?" or "I'm frightened and confused" or "I can't lift this", and people help. (Again, privilege is certainly a factor, but it didn't work this way for me when I was younger.) In non-pandemic times, people I know will let me hold their baby, and even strangers will let me pet their dog.

- I've been following a lot of younger people on Twitter, and it makes me feel confident about the future and quite content to step aside and let the youth lead. They tend to be more radical than people I encounter in the natural course of my life (most of whom are my age or older), and I feel good about this. I like the idea of a world where people like me are dated and old-school and things are growing and evolving beyond what we could even imagine when we were visiting geocities sites with our dial-up modems.

- I've recently stumbled into a new fandom (Good Omens!) and it's really good for me. I'm going through the same kind of growth and evolution as when I fell into Eddie Izzard fandom 13 years ago, and I'm looking forward to seeing who I become when I emerge on the other side.

Horoscopes

 My birthday horoscopes ceased having any remotely accurate interpretation with my head injury, but I'm still recording them here for my own reference.

Globe and Mail:

Artistic activities must be giving every chance to thrive over the coming year, even if it means having to cut back on work and getting by on less financially. You’ve been promising to create something amazing for as long as you can remember, so get to it!

Toronto Star: 

Profound, patient and prepared, you are in it for the long haul. A project you passionately believe in begins and succeeds brilliantly in 2022. Your strongly controlled emotions will find an outlet this year. If single, you tend to be solitary, but you do fall in love this year, in May. If attached, your relationship adds much richness to your life. GEMINI is light and almost ethereal compared to you.

As an aside, my horoscopes promise me love every year and it never materializes. This year's Globe & Mail horoscope is the first one I can remember that didn't promise me love.

(Also, absolutely everyone in the world is light and almost ethereal compared to me, and I'm not sure why that's in my horoscope.)

Books read in November 2020

New:

1. Queen of the World by Robert Hardman

Reread:

1. Remember When

Toronto needs to remove snow not just from sidewalks, but from the areas around sidewalks

I was particularly disappointed to see that the City of Toronto isn't extending sidewalk snow clearing to areas of the city that don't yet receive this service, because that's a giant step in exactly the wrong direction. In a pandemic year we need even more than sidewalk snow clearing. To maintain physical distancing, we need areas around the sidewalk, like curb lanes and boulevards and the edges of lawns, to be cleared as well.

Pedestrian physical distancing isn't just a question of two "lanes" that need to be six feet apart. Faster walkers also need to pass slower walkers. Some people are walking dogs or herding children. Some people insist on walking two or three abreast. Some people are carrying bulky grocery bags. People with wheelchairs or walkers or fragile ankles need to be able to avoid walking on the curb cut.

To physically distance through all these variables - especially on older residential streets with narrow sidewalks - we need to use not just the sidewalk, but also lawns and curb lanes. The sidewalk on my own street is just barely six feet wide, so I'm always stepping off the sidewalk onto the street, or onto a lawn or driveway, so I can stay six feet away from other people. I probably step off into a curb lane or onto a lawn about three to five times in a typical block of walking.

And in snowy weather, curb lanes and lawns aren't available because they're covered in snow. The curb lanes are full of snow plow windrows, and lawns are, at a minimum, unshovelled, and, more often, covered in snow banks from sidewalk snow clearing.

What the City of Toronto needs to do is clear not just sidewalks, but also curb lanes and at least 3 feet of lawns that are adjacent to narrow sidewalks. (Q: Won't that damage the lawns? A: The City can replant the lawns in the spring. Lives are more important than lawns.) They need to truck away windrows that end up in the curb lane, and go around making sure sewer grates are clear so gutters don't fill up with water.

In the Old City of Toronto - the portion of the amalgamated city where sidewalks aren't cleared - all these sidewalk-related needs and pandemic-related needs are exacerbated. There is higher population density, more people walking as a primary form of transportation, and more people who don't have cars. Older sidewalks tend to be narrower, buildings tend to be closer to the sidewalk, and the curb lane tends to be right next to the sidewalk (rather than there being a boulevard between the sidewalk and the curb lane). Grocery stores and other necessities are more likely to be within walking distance, so more people are carrying bulky packages and rolling bundle buggies. More streets have businesses with patios and lineups and those signs that they put out on the sidewalk. 

In short, there are more people trying to physically distance in less space as the second wave of COVID balloons around us. The City needs to help its residents stay safe by extending snow clearing not just to all sidewalks, but to the areas around the sidewalks.

Things They Should Invent: search and sort grocery websites by nutritional information

In the course of ordinary, in-store, non-pandemic grocery shopping, we often pick up items off the shelf and read the labels. 

During the pandemic, we aren't supposed to be handling items we don't buy. Also during the pandemic, many people are shopping online (either for delivery or for in-store pickup), and (at least according to the marketing emails I'm being bombarded with) grocery store chains seem to be encouraging this.

One thing grocery chains could do to make online shopping easier and to discourage people from handling things in store is for store websites to have extremely robust searching and sorting by ingredients and/or nutritional information.

They often have ingredients and nutritional information that you can click on for individual products, but searchable and sortable would be far more convenient and user-friendly.

Examples:

- Show me all products from the "salad dressing" category sorted in ascending order of sugar content, so I can choose the lowest sugar salad dressing that meets my tastes.

- Let me use the Boolean NOT function to exclude all products that contain my allergens.

This information is already in grocery stores' computers - you can see it when you look up specific products on their website. People already know how to program computers to do things like sorting and boolean search. 

If they could let us do this on store website, it would improve uptake of online shopping and reducing handling of items in-store, and may also introduce consumers to new products that meet their needs better than what they were buying before. A win for everyone!

Gold Bond Ultimate Healing: a hand cream that meets my pandemic needs

 As I've blogged about before, I've needed to up my hand lotion game because of all the additional pandemic handwashing.

Lately I've been using Gold Bond Ultimate Healing Hand Cream, and it seems to do the job. I'm moisturizing my hands exactly the way I was before the pandemic, and they feel comparable to their pre-pandemic state, with no cracking or pain.

My dyshidrotic eczema is still present, but under control, but which I mean it's in the calmest and least itchy state it can be in while still existing.  

I haven't tried every hand cream out there so I don't know if this is the best one, but my hands feel like there's no pandemic, and that's not nothing.

What if the difference in first wave and second wave pandemic response is due to racism?

Sitting here watching the second wave of the pandemic spiral with those in power doing little to nothing, I find myself increasingly surprised that the lockdown actually happened back in March. Given the apparent lack of political will to return to the now-familiar lockdown when numbers are skyrocketing and the seriousness of COVID is clear, I'm amazed that they initiated the then-unprecedented lockdown back when it still seemed possible that the threat of COVID might be overblown.

It makes no sense whatsoever!

Which makes me wonder: might racism be at play?

As I've blogged about before, I'm not nearly as good as I should be at spotting racism. I've been trying to learn, but it's slow going (especially since I don't want to, like, actively seek out racists to see what they're saying). However one thing I have learned is that when I feel a specific shade of "This makes no sense whatsoever!", it usually means that what I'm missing is recognizing how racism is at play in the situation. And this is the specific shade of "It makes no sense whatosever!" that I'm feeling here.

So, if it is a question of racism, how might that be playing out?

I see two possibilities, which are not mutually exclusive:

1. As far as we know, the pandemic began in China. Maybe back in March there was a sense that COVID was foreign, and the lockdown was motivated by keeping that Bad Foreign Disease away. Now that community transmission is by far more common, they don't see it as as much of a threat.

2. Here in Toronto/Ontario/Canada, COVID-19 is disproportionately affecting marginalized people, including racialized people. Black and brown people have disproportionately high COVID numbers here in Toronto, and white people have disproportionately low numbers. So maybe those in positions of power and authority are thinking "It won't affect us", or even "The people it will affect don't matter."

As I said, I'm not as good as I should be at spotting racism, so there are almost certainly going to be nuances here that I've missed.

But, conversely, if someone as clueless as me thinks this situation makes so little sense that I'm arriving at the idea of racism, it's probably a sign that those in power should, at a minimum, make the situation make more sense.

Cascade Complete is inferior to Cascade Original

I've always used the lemon-scented Cascade gel dishwasher detergent, which I believe is currently marketed as Cascade Original.

However, I haven't been able to find my usual Cascade during the pandemic (can't tell whether it's because of the pandemic or just a coincidence), so I bought Cascade Complete, which is blue, not lemon-scented, and claims to have more cleaning power.

Unfortunately, Cascade Complete is an inferior product. It doesn't always get fried egg remnants off the pan, and it often leave brown stains in the white mugs I used for coffee or tea. I've never before had either of these problems either with my current (decent quality) dishwasher or my previous (very mediocre) dishwasher.

At this point, some people (and, I'm sure, the Cascade corporation) would recommend using detergent in the pod format. Unfortunately, that simply doesn't work for me. the result is always a dishwasher full of dirty dishes with a mess of half-dissolved dishwasher pod at the bottom. Only liquid/gel dish detergent has ever worked with the combination of water and dishwasher that I have here.

I sincerely hope they haven't discontinued the lemon Cascade and it becomes available again quickly, because Cascade Complete is far less adequate, and I won't be buying it again.

Navigating conversations with family language barriers

From a recent Social Qs:

When we visit my mother, she speaks to me in Hungarian, her native language, in front of my husband who doesn’t understand a word of it. He told me he feels excluded by this because he can’t participate in our conversations. I’ve told my mother her behavior is rude, but she persists, saying, “I am Hungarian, and this is my house.” She is fluent in English, so she could honor our request if she wanted to. Also, she and I speak on the phone frequently. If she had something private to say to me, she could do it then. Otherwise, she’s nice to my husband. Any advice?

My recommendation, as someone born into a family with internal language barriers, is to translate everything your mother says into English for your husband's benefit. You can do this on a turn-by-turn basis, or summarize every few turns. (It will become clear and intuitive to you which approach is best.) This is hard work and quite inconvenient, but that very inconvenience adds a lot of clarity to the situation.

If your mother is speaking Hungarian out of pure stubbornness and can in fact manage just as well in English, the delay of waiting for everything to be translated will incentivize her to speak English whenever she can manage it. If she does in fact struggle to express herself adequately in English, she should find it a relief to have someone else doing the work. 

Another thing you might discover is that not everything is relevant to your husband. In the process of translating everything, you might both eventually find that there are some branches of the conversation that he just doesn't care about. This is good, useful information! It means that once you've established to everyone's satisfaction the proportion of the conversation that's irrelevant to your husband and the typical contents thereof, your husband may be comfortable with leaving the irrelevant portions untranslated.

When your husband does have something to contribute to the conversation, he should feel free to contribute in English, even if that portion of the conversation was in Hungarian. As you know, understanding another language is easier than speaking it, so, counterintuitive as it may seem to unilingual people, the conversation can still work perfectly well with him speaking English. And if your mother has some trouble understanding your husband's English statements, you can translate them for her just like you translate her Hungarian statements for him.

The advice columnist also suggests, as a last resort, that LW simply not bring the husband to visit the mother. I have no objection to that idea either, and don't think it needs to be a last resort, although I can't tell through the internet whether there's a good reason why LW is bringing the husband or whether this is one of those circumstances where married couples mindlessly do things as a couple even though there's no reason to bring both of them. But, in any case, translating the conversation is one of those things that will help if your mother's intentions are good while inconveniencing her if her intentions are bad.

Books read in September 2020

1. A Mind Spread Out on the Ground by Alicia Elliott

2. The Quite Nice and Fairly Accurate Good Omens Script Book by Neil Gaiman 

3. We Are Grateful: Otsaliheliga by Traci Sorrell

The amount of money that can change your life vs. the amount of money you can afford to lose

I recently saw a random internet stranger say "If I had $[specific dollar amount] it would solve all my problems."

If I were handed that specific amount of money, it wouldn't change anything for me. I'd throw it at my mortgage, my mortgage payments would become marginally smaller next time I renew, life would continue as usual.

But, even though receiving that amount of money wouldn't make a difference to me, I couldn't afford to give that amount of money away, even if it would solve all of someone's problems. Even if the person whose problems it would solve were someone I love, not some random internet stranger. It's just not an amount I could scrape together.


There's . . . something in there. Thinking about my previous post about socioeconomic classes, there's something informative or useful about the gap between the amount of money it would take for a positive change to be felt in your life and the amount of money you can afford to lose. There might even already be a word for this, but I can't think of it.

Cutex Nourishing nail polish remover

I've been doing my own nails at home for 25 years, and every nail polish remover I've tried takes a few scrubs and leaves my nails feeling naked and hungry for base coat.

Cutex Nourishing nail polish remover doesn't do this. Polish comes off at a single wipe, and my nails are significantly less hungry - if, for whatever reason, it wasn't possible to put base coat on immediately, I think I could adjust easily.

I've never before had nail polish remover brand loyalty, but I think I do now.

Books read in August 2020

New:

1. Margot and the Moon Landing by A. C. Fitzpatrick
2. Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley

Reread:

1. Imitation in Death

Would it help if we had more discrete socio-economic classes?

We tend not to like to talk about class (in the socioeconomic sense) here in Canada. We tend to be more comfortable thinking of ourselves as an egalitarian society that's beyond that sort of thing.

If you ask a typical Canadian to name the classes we have here in Canada, they'll hem and haw and, eventually, if pressed, probably come up with "middle class", "working class/poor", and "rich". We sometimes have sub-classes like "upper middle class" or "lower middle class", but essentially we have just the three basic classes.

I think it would serve us better - and, ultimately, lead to a more egalitarian society - if we had more.


For example, consider someone who makes $100,000 a year.

Are they rich?

Most people would say "yes".  (Some people would quietly think to themselves "Well, not that rich!" but publicly would say "yes" so as not to seem out of touch.)

And someone who makes $100,000 a year is rich. They're close to the top 5% of income in the country. Most of us will never make that much.

But, at the same time, they still have to work. Unless they're very close to retirement age already and have an excellent savings and investment strategy and don't have any strokes of bad luck, a person who makes $100,000 a year could still run out of money if they never earned another dollar.

They also have to get a mortgage. Unless they've been saving very aggressively for many years and are in an area with lower housing prices, a person who makes $100,000 a year still can't afford to buy a house outright.

Despite being rich, they could have some bad luck that would result in them being poor.


Now consider a person with a billion dollars in wealth. That's $1,000,000,000. That's ten thousand (10,000) years' salary for the person who makes $100,000 a year.

The billionaire doesn't have to work. They could easily live on the money they already have. If their remaining life expectancy is 50 years, they would have to spend more than twenty million dollars ($20,000,000) a year before they could run out of money.

They don't need a mortgage. They could easily buy a house outright - they could buy close to a thousand (1,000) detached houses here in Toronto outright. 


But both these people fall into the basic class category of "rich". When someone utters the words "rich people", that encompasses both these examples.


So why is this an issue?

Because a lot of people, even if they don't make $100,000 a year and don't have a clear line to making $100,000 a year, can identify with it. Maybe if you luck into a better-paying job, or get promoted into management, or get a lot of overtime one year. If you look at the Sunshine List, you can see jobs like police officers and high school principals - regular, everyday jobs that your neighbour might have or your childhood friend's mom might have had when you were growing up.

So when there's talk of taxing the rich, meaning billionaires, people who can identify with maybe possibly one day if they're super lucky making $100,000 think "Oh no, that could be me one day! But I don't actually have that much financial leeway!" and then end up opposing taxing the rich.


It happens on the other end of the economic spectrum too.

Making a below-average income in a stable full-time job is different from being caught in the gig economy is different from being on welfare where your monthly benefits are less than your rent, but they all fall under the label of "poor".


There are all kinds of nuance that make a real difference in socioeconomic quality of life.

Making $X a year and having your mortgage paid off is a very different situation from making $X a year and being fully leveraged, or just barely making rent.

Making a million dollars a year is very different from having a million dollars in total wealth, but we use the word "millionaire" for both.

Having wealth in the market value of your primary residence is very different from having the same amount of wealth liquid, or in a number of different assets that are less important than your primary residence.

Making below the poverty line for a few years when you're starting out is different from being below the poverty line for your entire life, and both of these are different from being below the poverty line after several years of having significantly more money.

Having no money readily on hand is different from having no money unless you tap your retirement fund, both of which are different from having no money and having no available credit.

Being evicted and having to go back to your parents' house and live in your childhood bedroom is different from being evicted and having to crash on someone's couch is different from being evicted and having literally no one who will take you in.


Maybe if we had discrete names for these different situations, discourse would be improved?

Current status

My Babcia (my grandmother) died last week.  I'm still processing.

I've never not had a Babcia before.

She didn't die of COVID, but the pandemic still fucks everything up. No one could sit with Babcia and hold her hand. She never got to meet her two youngest great-grandchildren, both of whom were born during the pandemic.

I don't know when I'll be able to hug someone.

Even without the pandemic considerations, this is completely different from other bereavements I've had. It's a completely different emotional arc. I think maybe every bereavement is different. No one talks about this.

Mask braindump: my struggles, what I've learned, and how some mask advocacy has been unhelpful

I have a lot of trouble wearing masks. I've learned some things that make it easier, and I've seen some people trying to promote mask-wearing in ways that are unhelpful and counterproductive.  So I thought I'd blog it all here for future reference.

I've already tweeted most of this as I was experiencing it, so if you follow me on Twitter there's nothing new here.

Caveats

1. I am not a medical professional. My explanation of any medical concepts is my own understanding and is not necessarily a perfectly accurate and comprehensive account of every medical consideration. I'm including it because my own understanding helps me figure out how to wear masks better and longer. 


2. Portions of this post describe ways that I misunderstood medical concepts en route to learning more. I'm including them because describing how I misunderstood things is important to understanding how some kinds of mask advocacy were unhelpful. If you read or excerpt only these portions, it's possible you might come away with incorrect information.


My mask-wearing experience

I'd never worn a mask before COVID-19 came along, but I'd never heard of anyone experiencing adverse effects from them either. So when I got my first cloth mask (thank you, Mommy!) I put it on expecting everything to go smoothly.

I was surprised to discover that my body was working harder than it should have been - I was breathing harder, and occasionally getting light-headed. There was even a time or two where I think my judgement was affected!

When the fabric of the mask touched my mouth, I started outright panicking, feeling that I was suffocating even though I knew I wasn't, but even when the mask didn't touch my mouth (and my mother tried multiple variations specifically designed to keep the fabric away from my mouth!) I was always in some degree of distress.

The mask usually becomes untenable after 40 minutes. My irreproducible personal best was one hour, but just the other day (even after I'd proven to my own satisfaction that I get enough oxygen as described below) I could only manage 15 minutes. It's unpredictable, and the unpredictability is an additional worry.

My original (erroneous) self-diagnosis

The problems occur when I wear a mask, in other words when my nose and mouth are covered. Oxygen gets in through our nose and mouth. If you don't get enough oxygen, you die. Falling unconscious is en route to dying. Feeling light-headed is en route to falling unconscious. Therefore, I concluded, I wasn't getting as much oxygen when I wore a mask, because the mask was blocking some of it.

Seemed like a perfectly logical extrapolation from available evidence, and I couldn't imagine any other explanation. 

My concern wasn't that I'd die from lack of oxygen. (I mean, I might, but then I'd be dead so I wouldn't have to worry about it.)  My concern was that I might faint from lack of oxygen. I've only fainted once in my adult life, and that resulted in my head injury, from which I've never fully recovered. I certainly can't risk it happening again!


The pulse ox selfie problem

As I was struggling with all this, a trend emerged of doctors posting selfies of themselves wearing a mask and a pulse oximeter showing a good, high oxygen level, with the general thesis that wearing a mask doesn't decrease your oxygen level, often suggesting or outright stating that if you think it does, you're ignorant or a liar or anti-science.

All of which is very annoying to have saturating your twitter feed when you've just come back from a grocery run of struggling to breathe in a mask!

From this, I saw several possible conclusions:

- If I went to a doctor with this mask breathing problem, I wouldn't be believed.
- Maybe my body works differently than their bodies, and therefore anything they have to say is inapplicable to me.
- Maybe people who struggle with masks simply don't make it through medical school, and then doctors forget they ever existed. 
- Maybe I have an unprecedented problem that medical science has never heard of, but mid-pandemic isn't a time to go down the diagnostic rabbithole that would entail.
- Obviously, from all these pulse oximeters, oxygen level was the crucial issue. I couldn't imagine any other issue, no one was talking about any other issue, so the cause of my problems must be low blood oxygen levels.

Low blood oxygen isn't the cause

All these pulse ox selfies gave me the idea that I might be able to use a pulse oximeter to detect when I was on the verge of fainting, or to convince myself that I wasn't going to faint.  I ran the idea by a friend with medical training, who told me it doesn't work that way - because your blood oxygen could be normal and you could still faint!

She went on to tell me that was what likely happening is I'm hyperventilating from anxiety at wearing the mask (shortly afterwards I learned this is called false suffocation alarm) which is lowering my blood pressure, which is making me light-headed. She also told me about counterpressure - clenching and tensing muscles to temporarily increase blood pressure and possibly prevent fainting.

So I tried counterpressure the next time I had an early glimmer of mask light-headedness, and the effect was immediate. About 80% of the light-headedness vanished instantly, and I could move about safely without fear of fainting.

This immediately proved two things to me:

1. The mask doesn't affect my oxygen levels - if it did, counterpressure wouldn't get immediate results.
2. The light-headedness, and therefore the risk of fainting, is real - if they weren't, the counterpressure wouldn't get results.

Improved, but not cured

Having effectively proven to myself that it isn't lack of oxygen that's making me light-headed, I soon became less uncomfortable in the mask. However, the false suffocation alarm persists, and my body still fights the mask. I counterpressure, my head usually clears, I move forward. If the counterpressure isn't immediately effective, I sit down, get my head down to heart level, regain equilibrium. I've gotten really good at doing this in a way that makes it look like I'm just examining the items on the bottom shelf, so people in the grocery store don't think I'm in distress and approach me.


I've had moments where I completely forgot I was wearing a mask and days where it took an hour for me to feel any symptoms, but I've also had moments where I feel like I'm suffocating even though I know I'm not and days where I feel symptoms after 15 minutes.

Disposable masks might be easier

As I was in the midst of writing this all up, I tried a disposable mask (sold in the grocery store, marked non-medical) for the first time, and found my body didn't panic in it.  I haven't figured out how to keep it from fogging up my glasses (the nose wire is less effective than in cloth masks), but I only rarely have to fight my body or get light-headed, which is a vast improvement! And even when I do have to fight my body, it's glaringly obvious to my brain that I can breathe, so I'm able to better psych myself out of panicking.

Which makes me realize - all the pulse ox selfies I saw were wearing (presumably medical) disposable masks. What if the thing they were insisting is easy is a completely different thing from the thing I was struggling with???


What mask advocates could have done better

The pulse ox selfies were intended to convince people to wear masks, but they were absolutely counter-productive in my case and, I'd imagine, for anyone else who is struggling with masks.


The emphasis on blood oxygen level led me to believe that blood oxygen is the only possible problem, thereby preventing me from finding my way to useful coping mechanisms. The strong "masks are easy and there's no difficulty at all" (or, at most, handwaving it with "masks can be uncomfortable", which is a word I'd apply to skinny jeans and the seats at Massey Hall - getting light-headed in the middle of crossing Yonge St. calls for a stronger adjective) sometimes made me think medical professionals wouldn't believe me and therefore couldn't help me, sometimes made me think I had to just push through my light-headedness (bad idea - the risk of fainting is real, even if the cause isn't low blood oxygen), and sometimes made me think I was experiencing some unprecedented medical problem.

What would have been far more useful would be talk about actual real-life problems that people sometimes have with masks, and how to actually address them in real life.

For example, the fact that I'm not experiencing low blood oxygen isn't relevant, the fact that I'm feeling light-headed is. So it would be useful for doctors advocating for mask usage to talk about how feeling light-headed is something that happens to some people, here's what it means, here's what to do, here's when to worry.

And do the same thing for any other issues people might have with wearing masks.

It would also have been far more useful to talk about different kinds of masks or mask-wearing options and how they address different issues. For example, I find disposable masks significantly easier. Maybe other people with other issues would find other kinds of masks easier.

"Masks are easy" harms your credibility in the eyes of people who struggle with masks, people who haven't tried masks yet themselves but know people who struggle with masks, and people who are afraid of masks. "Here's how to handle mask issues that may arise" is far more credible and useful, and will get more people wearing masks more often.

Books read in July 2020

New:

1. The Ward Uncovered: The Archaeology of Everyday Life Edited by John Lorinc, Holly Martelle, Michael McClelland, and Tatum Taylor
2. Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore

Reread:

1. Portrait in Death

Things They Should Invent: grocery pickup edition

1. Mark items as "essential"

The first time I tried grocery pickup (in this case, PC Express at Loblaws), I was making the purchase because I had immediate need of a specific item.

In keeping with the pandemic mindset of minimizing trips and keeping two weeks of provision on hand, I didn't just buy that one item, I bought everything I expected to need for the next two weeks, regardless of whether it was on sale.

Then, shortly before pick-up time, I got an email saying that my order was ready - except they didn't have that one specific item in stock! There was no way to cancel the order at this point, so I had to put on my mask, wait in line, go into a store, talk to an employee, pay for a bunch of stuff that wasn't even on sale, lug it all home and wipe it all down - all for nothing!

Proposed solution: users should have the option of marking one or more items in their cart as "essential". If the essential item is unavailable, the order is cancelled. When the user marks more than one item as essential, they can either mark them as "ALL" or "ANY". If the essential items are marked "ALL", then the order only goes through if all the essential items are available. If they essential items are marked "ANY", the order goes through if any one of the items is available.

This should certainly be programmable - it's basically a set of IF/THEN statements - and it would certainly help during the pandemic when we're supposed to be minimizing trips and contacts.

2. "Your cart contains # bags of groceries"

Another problem with grocery pickup is that ordering groceries online is much easier than carrying those groceries home - I'd almost bought more than I can carry!

Solution: tell users how many bags of groceries their cart contains, measured in the standard grocery bags found at the checkout.

People who are accustomed to grocery shopping have a good sense of how many bags of groceries they can carry and how many will fit into their tote bag or bundle buggy or bike basket or car trunk or whatever they might be using, so this would make it easier to avoid over-ordering, and thereby finding yourself at the store faced with more groceries than you can get home in one trip.

The ideal implementation would calculate the number of bags in terms of both mass and volume, because both of those are factors in how much people can carry. But I'd imagine an immediate implementation would be possible based on mass alone. Grocery stores already have a database of the mass of all their products, since the self-checkouts have a built-in scale to make sure you're not stealing. Surely someone in human history has quantified how many grams/pounds/kilograms a grocery bag will carry, so it's a simple question of division.

The mystery of the disappearing desks

I blogged before about how people keep saying "things you have around the house" for things that I don't have around the house.

One thing I do have around the house is a desk. And, with the pandemic, I was surprised to learn just how many people don't have a desk.


My high-school graduation gift was a computer - a desktop computer, because that's what my father thought was most suitable. Laptop computers did exist in those days, but in the days before wifi you were tethered to a wall if you want to use the internet anyway, so desktops were a lot more common.

I set up my computer on my desk in my childhood bedroom, and subsequently on the desk in my dorm room and, being an internet addict, I spent most of my waking hours there, talking on the internet to other people who were also at their desktop computers tethered to the wall.

When I got my first apartment, I brought in my furniture from my childhood bedroom (my parents had the foresight to furnish our childhood bedrooms with regular grownup furniture rather than small/cutesy child-specific furniture). It was a small apartment, but my computer was still my top priority in my waking hours, so I set up my desk right in the living room, so I could continue my habit of spending time on the internet talking to other people also sitting at their desks.

Around this time I learned about ergonomics at work, so I applied the same principles to my desk at home. My set-up in student housing had been unergonomic and caused me a lot of neck pain, so I wanted something more sustainable for my adult life.

Then, when I got a laptop, I saw no reason not to continue with my comfy, ergonomized desk. I connected the laptop to my ergonomic peripherals, and kept right on spending my days at my desk, talking to people on the internet who, I had every reason to believe, were also at their desks.


Then, when the pandemic came along and everyone who can work from home started doing so, I was shocked to discover that the internet was full of people who . . . don't own a desk!!!  All these people whom I'd always pictured as being at their desks were suddenly setting up makeshift workstations at kitchen tables and on couches and in bed . . .

Where did all the desks go??


I do understand intellectually that you can internet on laptops and mobile devices, but I've always found working at a desk more comfortable and convenient.

I also understand that many people live in small homes - I do myself!  It's just my desk has always been so important to me that it's my second priority, after a bed.

So it's quite astonishing to me that it's such a low priority for so many people that "how to work from home when you don't have a desk" was a major topic of conversation in the early days of the pandemic!


But in addition to the question of "Why don't people have desks?" there's also the question of "What happened to the desks that people used to have?"

A lot of the "no desk, now what?" that's reaching me is coming from people who have been on the internet (in a personal capacity, not just for work or school) for at least as long as I have. Which means that, once upon a time, they almost certainly must have had a desk in their home - even if not a literal desk, then a designated table where a computer could be set up.

And now they don't.  They must have, at some point, gotten rid of the literal desk. Which is so bizarre to me - they looked at what I consider the second most important piece of furniture in a home, and thought "I don't anticipate ever needing to fulfill this function again."

Or what if they never had them in the first place? What if, for all these years, all these people on the internet I thought were sitting at their desks actually weren't?

That would be interesting to study - survey people who were caught out without a desk in the pandemic and ask them if they've ever owned a desk.


If you had asked me, back in the 90s when I was setting up my very own computer at my very own desk, to predict what will happen in the world in the year 2020, I would never have come up with "A lot fewer people own desks"!

Books read in June 2020

New:

1. A Better Man by Louise Penny
2. Tilly and the Bookwanderers by Anna James

Reread:

1. Purity in death

Flaws in my education: treating anti-racism readings like any other literature

I blogged before about how the books used in the anti-racism unit in my Grade 9 English class didn't serve us well.

Another aspect that didn't serve us well was that they treated it like any other English class unit. We did discuss racism (I don't think we managed to get as far as anti-racism, given that I didn't know the nuance until I was well into my 30s), but there was a lot of writing and talking about symbolism, "compare and contrast", etc., and that got in the way of learning actual anti-racism.

An educational trend in that time and place was letting students arrive at conclusions themselves (in either Grade 9 or Grade 10, I had a whole-ass science textbook that used the socratic method FFS!), but a bunch of ignorant white 14-year-olds who may or may not be able to name a racial stereotype are not going to arrive at any sort of useful conclusion about anti-racism without a lot more guidance and context! (And having to sit in the classroom while we fumbled around trying to do so probably wasn't a very safe experience for the few racialized students in our school!)

Literature is an excellent tool for teaching students about all manner of people and lives and experiences and ideas, and English class seems like the sensible place for some literature. But anti-racism isn't just a regular old English unit like "poetry" or "Shakespeare". It's meant to equip us to function in society and right the wrongs of our ancestors and overcome the negative influences around us that we, at the age of 14, might not even recognize as negative influences. We certainly need a lot more structure and guidance than "what do you think?" and "Discuss themes!"


I wonder if approaching anti-racism in a way that's parallel to other, more abstract literature topics might also be exacerbating the unfortunate trend of some people think it's a good idea to "debate" or ask for documentary evidence of others' lived experiences, or trying to broadly apply philosophical theory to others' lived experiences, and then saying their lived experiences are inapplicable when they don't fit into the theory. When anti-racism is presented as though it's up for exactly the same kind of theorizing as things like the symbolism of the green light - and when ignorant white kids like me are specifically asked to write about it this way - the students might come away with the idea that their theorizing is useful and welcome.


There's also the fact that, like it or not, literary analysis is rather esoteric, with not so many direct, immediate applications to the practicalities of everyday life. And, because of that, it's seen as useless by many people who aren't huge fans of it. Treating anti-racism so similarly risks leading students who are less fond of literary analysis to see anti-racism as esoteric and inapplicable, rather than being a crucial part of living ethically in the world.


Some people will point out that students "should" be able to do both literary analysis and anti-racism.

But the fact of the matter is that, in that Grade 9 classroom 25 years ago, being new to the concept of literary analysis and being new to the concept of anti-racism, we weren't all able to do both effectively.


If our curriculum and our teachers had prioritized the anti-racism aspect, even if it meant we didn't read the readings like we did our other English class readings, perhaps I and others like me would be better people today.

Sanditon fanfic bunny, free for the taking: "I Will Toil and You Can Blossom"

This post is a full spoiler zone for the Sanditon miniseries.

I recently finished the Sanditon miniseries, and was pleased to see that my ship of Charlotte/Arthur is still a possibility.

I have a massive fanfic bunny and lack the skills to write it, so I'm posting it here in case someone else wants to write it. Steal this idea!

Premise:

Charlotte and Arthur enter by mutual consent into a companionate marriage (in the sense of companionate love as opposed to consummate love.)

This puts Charlotte in a good position to continue her work with the Parker family's business, which she found so self-actualizing in canon. (After all, it's much more respectable for a Mrs. Parker to be acting on behalf of the Parker family than a Miss Heywood.) She gets to be married to someone who is pleasant and harmless and respects her.

Meanwhile, Arthur gets to continue enjoying the simple pleasures of life without having to work too hard, because Charlotte is pulling their share of the weight in the family business. He gets to be married to someone who is pretty and personable and accepts him for who is he is without playing games. He can spend his days enjoying his port wine and buttered toast and getting down on the floor to play with the children.

(Despite it being a companionate marriage, I do imagine that Charlotte and Arthur would consummate their marriage. They've both shown themselves eager to try new experiences (e.g. sea-bathing) and sex is a new experience that's now available to them. And they may well continue to make sex part of their lives, either to have children, simply because they think it's fun.)

So where's the conflict in this scenario? From the whole rest of the town of Sanditon! Nearly everyone we've met in canon has some kind of drama, and with Sanditon being a resort town all kinds of personalities could pass through. And meanwhile, Charlotte and Arthur build themselves an oasis of peace in the midst of all the drama.


Interesting notions this fic would explore:


- A mutually-satisfying and mutually-respectful companionate marriage. In fiction, we see explorations of passionate marriages, unhealthy marriages, abusive marriages,  bickering marriages. I've never seen a portrayal of a marriage between two people who like each other and respect each other and get along well, but aren't in love with each other and are okay with that.

- Sex as fun, but not passionate. I do think if Charlotte and Arthur were married, they would explore sex. They've both shown themselves game to try new experiences (sea bathing, horseback riding), and I think they would have a go at consummating their marriage in a similar spirit. After all, they're allowed - even encouraged! And if it turns out to be an enjoyable experience for both, they'd probably make it a regular part of their life. Sex in fiction tends to be portrayed as imbued with great emotion and meaning (as it often is in real life) - either positively or negatively depending on the character being portrayed. But some people must find it just...fun. (After all, friends with benefits is a thing.) It would be interesting to see that explored in fiction.

- The value of a harmless husband. We normally see the notion of a "safe option" in marriage portrayed negatively, or as a person in a safe marriage yearning for something more. But in a historical era where a wife is entirely at her husband's mercy socially, legally and financially, a harmless husband like Arthur would be quite the catch! He's cheerful and happy to be pleased, he's happy to cede the floor to Charlotte when she knows better, and he's not going to bankrupt them (c.f. he's hardly touched his inheritance).

(Charlotte is also harmless and I'm sure that has value for Arthur, but given the realities of the era, I'm more interested in how Arthur's harmlessness enhances Charlotte's life.)

- Young newlyweds growing up together. Once upon a time, I read something that said that in the 21st century, people expect to finish growing up and then to get married. But in the past, when people married younger, they'd get married and expect to finish growing up together.  I haven't a clue whether that's true as a general societal attitude (I've only heard it once from a source that is lost to history), but it must have happened in some cases, and it would be an interesting thing to explore. Charlotte and Arthur, while of marriageable age in their historical context, are both very young and both still have some growing up to do. At the same time, living and working within the extended Parker family would give them a context in which they can safely do this growing up together.

Flaws in my education: using non-contemporary readings for anti-racism

In Grade 9, we had an anti-racism unit in English class.  Works studied included To Kill A Mockingbird, Black Like Me, and Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech.

Problem: these were all American works that were decades old.

I don't remember reading anything Canadian in our anti-racism unit. I never read anything about race set in my own lifetime until I was an adult. The only thing about race in Canada that I remember reading in school is Obasan, which is set during the Second World War.


Many white Canadians - including myself until shamefully recently - perceive racism to be a thing of the past, and/or an American problem.

And I strongly suspect this is influenced by the fact that our anti-racism education focused on American works from before we were born.


I often say I'm about 30 years behind where I should be in things like anti-racism. That Grade 9 class was 25 years ago.

Maybe the world would be a better place if I, and others like me, had been equipped for all these years to think of racism as a problem that exists in the here and now.  I know I certainly would be a better person if I were now decades into my journey into anti-racism rather than just starting out on the cusp of middle age.

O'Keeffe's Working Hands: a hand cream like any other

With all the extra pandemic handwashing, I needed to level up my hand cream game, so I decided to try O'Keeffe's Working Hands, which purports to be for dry, cracked hands resulting from manual labour.  Surely, I thought, a hand cream designed for working hands will be particularly magical on hands that normally do nothing more demanding than type, and are now being put to the test with a few extra washings a day.

Turned out, it's not particularly magical. It's no better on dry, cracked areas (or on eczema) than any other hand cream I've tried.

It's no worse than any other hand cream either, so if you feel like trying it, there's no reason not to try it.

Flaws in my Education: "You should speak up and contribute!"

I was identified as gifted when I was in Grade 5, which meant every year I'd get an IPRC, where I'd meet with my parents and the resource teacher and they'd make a plan for how to get the most out of my education.

The one thing the resource teachers always did (every single resource teacher over the years did this - I can think of at least three individual teachers and I'm sure I'm missing some) was put in the plan that I should raise my hand and answer more questions in class.

Even looking back at it as an adult, I don't understand what that was supposed to achieve. (I knew that I knew the answers, I was just staying quiet to avoid bullying.) But there was very strong messaging that I should raise my hand and give the teachers the answers I already knew I already knew, that doing so would be a good thing, and that failing to do so was a bad thing.


Similarly, as a shy person who doesn't always speak in groups, I've gotten a lot of "You should speak up! You should contribute!" as social skills advice.

As though I necessarily have something not just to say, but to contribute? I can't fathom what that might be!


So for the first 30ish years of my life, I was receiving constant messaging that I should say something, anything. That not putting in my two cents is practically not pulling my weight.


And then, when I was well into my 30s, I was exposed for the first time to the concept of staying in one's lane.

This was literally the first time in my life I had heard that perhaps I shouldn't speak up, perhaps I don't have anything to contribute to a given discussion.

(When I was a kid, adults would tell me to be quiet and not to talk back in a given moment, but on a philosophical/theoretical level they definitely would have said I should speak up and contribute.)


Now, I can't tell you how much of this "you should speak up and contribute" was because I'm white, and I can't tell you whether my non-white classmates were treated differently. My school was fairly small (if you had shown me a photo of any of my classmates, I could have instantly told you their name and something about them) and there were so few non-white students that I could count them without running out of fingers.

I cannot think of/remember a single instance of any of my classmates, of any race, being urged to systematically speak up more or to systematically be quiet. But also, I wasn't paying attention to such things at the time, so who knows what I might have missed?

If there was any difference in how we were treated, I'm sure the adults would have told you they were treating us as individuals, based on our individual needs. And there simply isn't enough data to suggest otherwise - I had too few non-white classmates to identify any sort of pattern.


But the fact of the matter is there were, in raw numbers, a lot of white people around in that time and place, and other times and places like it. I can't possibly have been the only person who was told to speak up and contribute. (I seriously doubt the adults around me would have come up with an all new unprecedented piece of advice just for me!)

Maybe the world would be a better place if more of us were told there are some times and places where you should sit down, be quiet and listen - and not just when those in power and authority are talking.

Things They Should Invent: express elevators for the pandemic

Most people in my building seem to be voluntarily abiding by a one person/household per elevator rule. I do this myself. I live in the lower half of the building, so often when I'm waiting for an elevator to take me to to the ground floor, there will already be someone in it. I cheerfully wave them on, and wait for the next elevator.

However, not everyone in my building does this. Sometimes I'm taking the elevator down, it stops to pick up someone who has pressed the call button on one of the floors below me, and they get in. And there's not really much I can civilly do to stop them. (I mean, I could scream and argue, or do something gross like cough or something creepy like scratch my ass and smell my finger, but I have few options that allow me to retain what social capital I have.)

I also think, in some cases, the person waiting for the elevator might feel it's rude not to get into the elevator, as though you're suggesting that there's something wrong with the person in the elevator. (Imagine, for example, how declining to get in an elevator with someone else would have read before anyone had ever heard of the coronavirus.)

It would be useful if, for the duration of the pandemic, elevators could be put in express mode. You get in the elevator, press the button for your floor, and it goes straight to your floor without stopping. Then it goes and picks up the next person who has pressed a call button.

This would make elevator use during the pandemic as safe as possible without requiring optimal behaviour or any sort of effort from users. In my own experiences with skipping over occupied elevators and waiting for empty ones, I've never had to wait for more than three (and, about half the time, the first elevator that arrives is empty) so I don't think it would cause undue delays.

The challenge is I'm not sure whether it's technically possible without changes to how elevators work. The elevators I'm familiar with can be put in service mode with a key - you turn the key, the elevator goes your destination floor without stopping and then waits for you there. But if you don't turn the key back to the normal setting, the elevator will sit and wait for you rather than picking up the next passenger. And if you do turn the key back to the normal setting, it will go back to stopping wherever there's a call button pressed.

So I'm not sure if elevators can currently be programmed to take each passenger to their floor then go back for the next passenger without constant intervention. But if they can, they should be. And if they can't, elevator manufacturers should figure out how to introduce this functionality for the next time we need it.

The best things in life and the worst things in life

The April 26 Frazz comic:

Caulfield: A few weeks ago, you were all but howling at the full moon.
Frazz: Beautiful! Enormous, razor sharp and bright enough to hold its own against the rising sun across a vast, cloudless sky.
Caulfield: So you remember it.
Frazz: Of course! A moon like that is one of the best things in life.
Caulfield: Do you remember a week ago?
Frazz: I guess I don't.
Caulfield: It was inky and overcast, and there wouldn't have been a visible moon anyway. The complete opposite of the best thing in life, if you catch my drift.
Frazz: You're overthinking this.
Caulfield: Ergo: The worst things in life aren't as bad as the best things are good.
Frazz: I like the way you overthink.

The interesting thing is Caulfield has essentially proven that the worst things in life are way worse than the best things in life are good.

There are people in the world who, like Frazz think the beauty of nature is one of the best things in life.

If you find one of these people, ideally at a moment where they haven't just opined on the best things in life, and ask them about the worst things in life, they will, rightfully, come up with something like war atrocities. (Or, if they don't will likely agree that war atrocities are far worse than whatever they just thought of. Unless, of course, there's something worse than war atrocities that I'm not thinking of.)

War atrocities are, by far, many many many orders of magnitude worse than the beauty of nature is good.

(If anyone disagrees, here's a thought experiment: would you rather never be subjected to war atrocities and never experience the beauty of nature? Or would you rather be subjected to war atrocities for the rest of your natural life as the price of admission for experiencing the beauty of nature?)


In fact, Caulfield has just demonstrated that the bad things in life aren't even on the same scale as the good things in life. The absence of a beautiful moon isn't a war atrocity, it's simply nondescript. The absence of war atrocities isn't beautiful, it's simply nondescript.

There's a saying that the opposite of love isn't hate, it's indifference. Maybe that logic applies to other things in life as well.

New Rules: Natural Consequences Edition XIV

19. If you're giving advice on how to make or fix something, and you say you can do it with "things you have around the house", you are required to provide those things to anyone in your audience who doesn't already have them around the house. You aren't allowed access to those things in your own home until everyone in your audience has them.

Pandemic, scarcity, and frugality

One of fate's running jokes during this pandemic is that my stuff keeps breaking.

There's a sizeable rip in my winter coat that's nowhere near a seam.  A load-bearing seam in my running shoes got unsewn. A t-shirt seam ripped. One of my bed pillows tore (did you know that could even happen? I didn't know that could happen!) My kettle completely stopped working. A rung one one of my dining chairs popped out of place. My computer monitor occasionally flickers ominously, as does my TV set. My computer fan is perilously loud, even after cleaning and reseating. My sandals really need refurbishment. Both my desk and my ergonomic chair have stability issues. My ancient cell phone isn't holding charge for nearly as long as it used to. The light inside my microwave sometimes flickers for no apparent reason, and I can't figure out if this is a problem.

We're hearing a lot about scarcity of consumer goods on store shelves (in my experience, we're hearing a lot more than I'm actually seeing IRL), but all these problems I've been having highlight another type of scarcity: in-person help has become unavailable.

Apart from the t-shirt, the clothing repair tasks I described above exceed my skill. Normally, multiple people in my life and multiple businesses in my neighbourhood are able and willing to do this kind of sewing for me, but during the pandemic that isn't an option.

Even for the t-shirt repair, I didn't have the right shade of red thread, and wasn't able to actually go to a place that sells thread with the shirt to find the right shade.

For the chair repair, I lack either the strength or the dexterity. In any case, while YouTube is happy to tell me how to fix the problem, I can't make the pieces move the way they'd need to. Again, there are people IRL and businesses on the internet that would be happy to help me with this, and I can't rightfully ask any of them to come into my home.

I'm not sure whether I could carry a new computer monitor or a new TV set home from the store, and my building isn't allowing delivery people to come up to the apartments. The monitor - as well as the desk and chair - has to meet ergonomic requirements that can't be looked up online, so I have to try these things out and see if they work, or get them delivered with a particularly generous return policy.  And, of course, I couldn't move a whole desk by myself and I'm uncertain whether I can move my old TV

My computer is under warranty so normally if the fan proves to be a problem, I'd have an on-site technician come and fix it, which obviously isn't an option during the pandemic. But, at the same time, I don't want to void my warranty by attempting repairs that surpass my skill level. 

Ordering a cell phone online or buying one with curbside pickup isn't particularly difficult, but my older phone has an older SIM card, and I don't know if I can get a new SIM card during the pandemic.

My microwave is mounted over the stove, so I can't replace it myself, and I don't know if it's possible to buy a range microwave and just plug it into the wall in the interim, or if they have to be hard-wired.


In short, all these problems and potential problems are not because of supply chain issues or lack of money, it's because I'm not allowed to access other people's help.


I've internalized my origin story of my grandparents coming from war and deprivation and scarcity since before my memories even begin, so I've spent much of my life thinking about what it would be like to live in war and deprivation and scarcity.  And it never once occurred to me that scarcity would look like not being allowed to have someone sew something for me! Even on a battlefield or in a concentration camp, if needle and thread and a willing person with sewing skills are available, you're totally allowed to have them sew something for you.

I always thought scarcity would look like not having money or not having resources. But here I sit with money, thread, needles, multiple people in my own life able and willing to do the difficult sewing and multiple businesses in my immediate neighbourhood who would normally be quite happy to do it for a price that's well within my reach, but their skills are still not available to me. This was not on my catastrophizing mental list of worst-case scenarios.

***

There's also been a lot of rhetoric about how the various pandemic-related issues with acquiring material goods might actually be good for us, theorizing that it will teach people to "mend and make do" rather than automatically rush out and buy something new.


But I find myself in this situation of multiple malfunctions in the first place because of a lifetime's habit of mending and making do!

This isn't something I do out of frugality or virtue, it's simply because I hate shopping. If something I own still works, I keep using it. If I or someone near me can fix it, I fix it. If someone I know is getting rid of something I could use, I take it.

But as a result of this, many of my possessions are getting on in the years. Nearly everything I've had malfunction is over a decade old. Some are newer but not brand new (for example, the computer is three years old and the microwave is four years old), some are way older (the dining chairs might even be antiques by now - they're certainly older than me, and my grandparents owned them at once point).

If I had been in the habit of running around buying new things at the slightest provocation, all these malfunctions wouldn't have been a problem. I'd have more than one workable winter coat and more than one workable pair of running shoes. I'd have multiple workable old phones and more than the absolute minimum number of chairs I need.

But instead, I mended and made do, and never felt deprived for any of these things because I always figured I can just go out and buy a new thing when true need emerges.

And now, as true need appears to be emerging in the middle of a pandemic and I can't necessarily just go buy a new thing, I'm being lectured to mend and make do.

Having an unsophisticated palate is convenient

One thing that people have judged me for my entire adult life is having an unsophisticated palate. For many kinds of food, I'm perfectly happy to eat eat cheap, processed, commercial convenience foods. I can enjoy a meal at a chain restaurant. I can enjoy a meal at a fast food restaurant. I can enjoy some junk food scarfed down from a vending machine.

People have always talked about this as though it's Less Than, but I recently realized: it's extremely convenient!


For example, one of the things the foodies in my life talk about is Really Good Pasta. You haven't lived until you've had Really Good Pasta!

I have never once in my life had really good pasta, by which I mean pasta that is noticeably better than other pasta. 

But I have had countless pasta dishes that made me happy, most of which were prepared by my own hand.  I can think of only one or two times in my whole entire life I haven't enjoyed pasta. (In one case, the sauce was runny like water. In another case, I was having a reflux flare-up and it adhered to the wall of my esophagus and stayed there for a couple of hours.)

Some people say fresh, homemade pasta is way better than the pasta you buy in a box.  I've tried fresh, homemade pasta with fresh, homemade sauce and fresh cheese. It was delicious! I've also tried pasta you buy in a box with sauce you buy in a jar and the shakey cheese you buy in a can. It was delicious! I've also tried just-add-water instant kraft dinner knockoff. It was delicious! Yes, I can perceive the difference, and they all delight me!


One area where I do have a sophisticated palate is fruit. I only enjoy certain varietals of certain fruits, and I only enjoy local fruit, which certainly makes life harder given that I live in an area with a short growing season!

I love apples, I eat multiple apples every day, and if someone who doesn't know my very specific preferences gave me an apple, I'd probably be unhappy.

In-season Ontario peaches are my favourite fruit in the world, and every time I buy a basket of in-season Ontario peaches, it contains at least one peach that makes me unhappy.

I love fresh, local, in-season strawberries, but they only make me happy for a couple of weeks a year.


This is not actually a good thing! It would be far more convenient if any piece of fruit that crossed my path made me happy. However, my tastes in fruit are sophisticated and nuanced. I only like the very best, and I'm less happy for it.

I'm glad I don't experience pasta the same way!

Analogy for app-only

An unfortunate trend that has emerged in the past decade or so is "app-only" - i.e. requiring a purpose-built app on a mobile device to do something (for example, make an online purchase) that is totally technically feasible over the web - and, often, was frequently done over the web before smartphones came along!

My shower gave me an analogy for why this is a problem:


Many devices started out being able to be used indoors only (or, at least, within a cord length of indoors).

Telephones needed to be plugged into the jack to have a phone connection.

Televisions needed to be plugged into the wall for electricity, and, once cable TV became a thing, into the cable drop for cable.

Computers needed to be plugged into the wall for electricity and, once the internet became a thing, into the phone jack and, later, the cable jack, for internet.

Then devices became smaller, batteries improved, wifi became common, data plans became common, and now we can do all these things outdoors on a laptop or tablet or phone.


But imagine if we could only do them outdoors.  Your laptop or phone or tablet won't work indoors. You have to step onto the balcony or into the backyard.

That would be inconvenient, wouldn't it?

Yes, it's convenient to be able to use it outdoors, but you don't want to have to use it outdoors. You don't want to have to step away from what you're doing, grab a coat or an umbrella, put on your shoes, and step outside just to make a call or read a text or watch TV. You still want to retain the option of using it indoors just like you always have.


Similarly, it's convenient to be able to do things on a mobile device, but once you have to use a mobile device, it becomes less convenient. If you're at a computer, you have to stop what you're doing and switch to another device. If your computer is set up to be ergonomic, you have to switch to a less ergonomic device.  You have to make sure another device has battery and connectivity. You have to use a smaller screen.


Adding options increases convenience, but removing options decreases convenience. An app is not convenient if it eliminates the option of doing the task with a computer, just like a device you can use outdoors is not convenient if you can't also use it indoors.

Books read in May 2020

Reread:

1. Reunion in Death

Top 10 petty things I hope come out of the pandemic

Many, many people who are smarter than me have commented on major policy and social changes that they hope come out of the pandemic - a robust system of sick days! Stronger income security! An end to just-in-time supply chains!

I'm going to let the smart people comment on those important things. Meanwhile, I have some less-important things that I hope come out of the pandemic:

1. Touch screens that can be operated with a stylus

Back in the Palm Pilot days, touch screens could be operated with a stylus or some other object. Since the iPhone came along, the trend on everything from self-checkouts to microwaves has been towards screens that require a human finger, which makes it harder to have a no-contact experience. Even if we don't take hygiene into account, screens that can be operated with either an object or a finger are more versatile than those that absolutely require a human finger. Hopefully we can get that versatility back.

2. Longer hair becoming popular

I find longer hair more attractive. Even when people wear their hair short, I prefer longer short hair. Frodo Baggins rather than Forrest Gump.  For purely superficial reasons, I would enjoy if this temporary haircut moratorium leads to longer hair becoming popular.  (Unfortunately, I think the opposite will ultimately happen as people rejoice in haircuts.)

3. Baggy pants coming back in fashion

Skinny jeans have been in style for over a decade. It's high time for loose-fitting pants to come back in style!  I'm hoping the combination of so many people staying home (and therefore likely wearing comfy pants) and so much bread being baked (which someone has to eat) will lead to societal intolerance of skinny jeans, and a move towards a roomier (and, on my figure, more flattering) silhouette.

4. Handwashing right inside the door

When I walk into my apartment, I know I need to wash my hands. But I also have to take my shoes off, which means touching the shoes with my dirty hands. (Yes, I know some people can remove their shoes without using their hands. I'm not one of them.) If I walk into the kitchen or the bathroom before removing my shoes, I'm tracking outdoor dirt (which might include germs) into the apartment. So far I've been addressing this by wiping down the parts of my shoes that I touch, but it would be convenient to have a sink for hand-washing right inside the door, so you can wash your hands right away, then remove your outerwear with clean hands. I hope home design evolves in this direction.


5. Touchless public washrooms

You know those useless public washroom taps where you need to hold the button down the entire time in order to make water come out? They need to be GONE! This pandemic should be the warning everyone needs to design public washrooms so they can be completely touchless, including opening the door on the way out of the washroom.


6. Homes designed for privacy from other household members

As someone who lives alone, I actually find my open-concept apartment convenient - I can keep watching the TV or the computer screen while I putter around in the kitchen! - but it is not the right design for a multi-person household. People - even people who love each other - need privacy from each other, and I suspect quarantine is driving his point home for many people. I hope home design evolves in a way that gives people visual, auditory and psychological privacy from the other members of their household.

Sometimes in advice column comments, I see people who think your romantic relationship is broken if you need privacy from each other, and/or think it's appalling and materialistic to plan your family and your housing so that each of your kids can have their own room. I'd be very happy if being quarantined with their household makes them change their mind on these questions, although I suspect it will instead make the other members of their household value their privacy even more.


7. Parent-neutral schooling

This is something I've been thinking about long before the pandemic but never got around to blogging about. Schooling seems to be evolving in a direction of requiring more and more parental involvement. For example, I often hear parents talking about their children's homework as though it is absolutely essential for parents to be involved in helping kids with their homework, and it is in no way reasonable to expect kids to be able to do their homework themselves based on what they learned in the classroom.

This creates a situation where students are put at a disadvantage if their parents, for whatever reason, don't meet the school's expectations.

Which is completely bass-ackwards. Schools should be mitigating any disadvantages or lack of advantages brought by parents, not exacerbating them.

The curriculum should be rethought so that students are not at any disadvantage if their parents do not contribute sufficiently. In fact, the curriculum should be even more drastically rethought so that parental contribution cannot put kids at an advantage - kids succeed on their own merits, regardless of what their parents bring to the table.

The switch to learning at home during the pandemic is exacerbating all these issues. Students whose parents aren't able to do what the school expects are at even more of a disadvantage. I'd like to see this result in a switch to a parent-neutral approach.  However, I fear that it might do the opposite - especially if we are pushed onto an austerity footing after the pandemic, schools might be pressured to say "the parents can help the students with this - after all, they did so during the pandemic!"


8. More lenient parenting

One pandemic problem is teens sneaking out to hang out with their friends, and therefore breaking quarantine and failing to comply with social distancing.

A contributing factor is that "don't hang out with your friends because global pandemic" is not terribly persuasive in a world where the grownups are always telling you not to hang out with your friends anyway - because they read a parenting article or because they heard your friend use a swear word or because there might be a boy there.

But this time it's different. This time it's really important. And I hope, when this is over, that parents remember that.


In recent years, is has become less and less socially acceptable to leave kids unsupervised, even in their own home. The age at which kids are allowed to be unsupervised seems to be significantly higher than the age at which they can actually handle it.

The pandemic rule is that only one person from each household is supposed to go grocery shopping, which is a problem in cases where there's only one adult in the household - especially since babysitters from outside the household are not an option.

In some cases, depending the kids' ages and personalities, the most reasonable thing to do is to leave the kid home alone while grocery shopping. I hope the pandemic makes that socially acceptable as well, and that it sticks.


Early into the pandemic, I saw a lot of stuff circulating about How To Quarantine Optimally - and, especially, The Optimal Quarantine Schedule For Your Kids - and I found myself thinking how much it would suck to have that imposed on you regardless of your own needs and temperament. I hope the challenges of quarantine make these parents see the folly of optimizing their kids and accept a more go-with-the-flow way of living, and that this happens without too much trauma for the kids.


9. Check real-time store inventory

When you're supposed to minimize trips into stores and have to wait in line to get into each store, it's a particular bother to discover that the item that was the underlying reason for your trip isn't available. If we could check real-time store inventory online, that would save all these failed trips, thereby reducing line-waiting time and contacts for everyone.

10. Normalize grey hair

I'm currently rocking my natural colour, greys and all, and I intend to turn 40 with my natural colour as a matter of principle, but the amount of visible grey is getting to the point where I don't feel my overall appearance is sufficient if I keep it natural. However, I have no desire to spend any more time in the hairdresser's chair.

Since so many people have gone so long without getting their hair coloured and skunk stripes abound, I hope greying naturally comes back in style. Unfortunately, I suspect this is another area where the opposite happens as people rejoice in finally getting their hair coloured.

Things They Should Invent: pandemic shopping edition

1. Glassdoor for the pandemic

With some jurisdictions permitting businesses to reopen, I wonder whether the employees of those businesses feel safe going back to work, or if they have no choice.

I do need to buy more things as the pandemic stretches on (so many things, ranging from my kettle to my mesh laundry bag, have broken somehow!), but if I have the option, I'd rather buy from somewhere that respects their employees' health and safety.

I'd very much like to have a single centralized website where workers post information about how well their employer actually is keeping them safe, so customers can make informed decisions about where to spend their money.

I mean, they could do this on Glassdoor too, but I haven't seen it yet for the businesses I've searched for.


2. Shopping search engine for boycotters

There's a lot in the news lately about how Amazon is making tons of money from the pandemic, but has horrible working conditions.

I've found that if I search the internet for a product description without having a specific brand or source in mind (for example, light cotton pyjamas or 4-cup coffee filters), I get results primarily from Amazon, and to a lesser extent from Walmart (which also has bad working conditions).  If I exclude Amazon from the results, I most often get wholesalers, retailers from other countries, and other such unsuitable sources.

This happens even when I use search engines other than Google. It's way harder than it should be to find an ethical place to buy things when you don't already know where to buy them!

As I've mentioned many times before for many other reasons, I'd very much like to have a single comprehensive search engine of all online shopping. But I'd also like to have it set up to help people boycott.

You could boycott a specific retailer by excluding them from your search, but it would be even more helpful to be able to boycott by cause. For example, search for light cotton pyjamas and exclude sources with bad working conditions.

"But what if they all have bad working conditions?"  Then you've done everything you can and don't have to knock yourself out looking for the ethical source that doesn't exist.

Of course, the complexity is that this would only work if they could index literally all retailers.

Things They Should Invent: tell everyone what information contact tracers need

In this pandemic, we're hearing a lot about contact tracing. We're hearing a lot about how it's a time-intensive and labour-intensive task.

We're hearing about the possibility of apps to help, but, in addition to the privacy issues, those also have a strong risk of false positives (e.g., people in different apartments in the same building) and false negatives (e.g., if one or more parties don't have a phone on their person with the app installed and GPS enabled that is turned on and has a signal at the moment of contact.) So a time-intensive and labour-intensive task still remains.

They could make this easier by telling the public exactly what information the contact tracers will need, so people can keep track if they choose to do so.

For example, with contact tracing in mind, I'm making all my purchases on the same credit card and using my loyalty cards on every transaction. This means that I can pull up my credit card account and tell you at a glance the last time I was in a particular store, and the store also has a record.

On days when I have to talk to the concierge, I make a note of which concierge was on duty and what day I talked to them, in case one of us is later found to have COVID.

But is this the information that contact tracers would need? Or is irrelevant? Is there other information they would need that it hasn't occurred to me to collect?  Should I be keeping track of who got in the elevator with me on which day? Should I be keeping track of what streets I walked down on which date and time?

I have no idea! I'm not trained in public health!

They might be able to make the task of contact tracing easier by circulating information about what the contact tracers would need to know.  Then anyone who is inclined to do so can keep their own records.

And, if public health ever calls you for contact tracing, you'll be able to give them a list of the specifics they're looking for, rather than having to go through a painstaking interview full of questions you didn't even know would be on the test.

This might also help reinforce in the public consciousness exactly what kinds of contacts we need to be avoiding. If we're told "Keep track of who gets in the elevator with you for contact tracing purposes", that reinforces the idea that getting in the elevator with someone outside your household is a potential for transmission (if it is in fact a potential for transmission - I don't actually know), and maybe more people will wait for the next elevator.

Books read in April 2020

1. The Crims by Kate Davies

How to make a "serious inquiries only" online dating system

This idea was inspired by, but is only indirectly related to, #9 in Captain Awkward's It Came From The Search Terms.


A problem that exists in dating is there are some people who will misrepresent themselves as wanting a serious relationship when they're really only looking for something casual.

I have an idea for an online dating system that can prevent that, or at least be unappealing to people who are really looking for something casual.


Basically, the premise of the site/app is that you can only talk to one person at a time. It won't show you new matches until you have decided to stop being involved with your previous matches - which your previous matches will be informed of.

So, for example, suppose you find someone interesting, and you message them. They can either accept or decline to chat with you.

If they decline, you will be shown new matches.

If they accept, you will not be shown any more matches until you mark the person you messaged as "no longer interested". They will receive a notification telling them that you're not longer interested.

If they do not respond, you can retract your message to see more matches. There could also be a built-in time-out system - if you message someone and they do not respond within a given period of time, they're assumed to have declined communication, so your message is withdrawn from their inbox and the system starts showing you new matches.


"But that's completely incompatible with the way I use online dating! I want to cast a wide net and talk to multiple people at once!"

Then this system is not for you! Go forth and use any other online dating site in the world!

"But I have a very specific, very important reason why I need to be able to see new matches even though I'm still dating my original match!"

Then you can explain to the actual human being you're actually dating what your very specific, very important reason is, and since it's so important and you're so compatible that you want to retain the relationship, surely they'll understand when they get the "X is no longer interested in you" email.

The Star Wars sequel trilogy should have started earlier

The problem with the Star Wars sequel trilogy is it starts too late.

The original trilogy ends with a happily ever after. Evil is vanquished! Fireworks! Ewok dance party!

When the sequel trilogy starts, evil has already risen again, complete with armies and spaceships and an established power structure.  Everything earned in the original trilogy was for naught. We didn't even get a moment to savour our happily ever after. This is emotionally unsatisfying and, as I've blogged about before, makes it practically impossible to end the sequel trilogy on an emotionally-satisfying happily every after.

This could have been avoided by starting the sequel trilogy earlier in the arc.

They could have started it the same number of years in the future - years and ages don't matter - but it should have started before evil began rising once again.


Picture this: we start in the happily ever after. The galaxy is a thriving, flourishing society. We see people living happy, prosperous lives, much like the Shire at the beginning of Lord of the Rings.

Our heroes from the original trilogy are living their best lives. Leia is in a position of power and authority. Luke is training young people (who may or may not include Ben Solo, depending on the needs of the plot) in the ways of the Force. Han is doing whatever is most convenient for the plot.

Then Ben Solo finds out something bad. Not "evil empire" bad - no war atrocities or anything - but rather peacetime bad. Corruption, insider trading, tax evasion, something like that. (Maybe Han is the perpetrator if that helps the plot?) This causes him to get disillusioned with the idealism he learned at his mother's knee, and he starts wondering if perhaps there's another way.

He goes looking for another way, gets radicalized, and begins studying the ways of the Sith.

In the process of doing this, he encounters Rey through their Force connection.

Rey is being brought up in the ways of the Sith, and she's beginning to question it.  Through her Force connection with Ben, she gets a glimpse of another life. But everyone around her - and this dude with whom she apparently has a force connection now - are out to destroy it.

Adventures happen! Light sabre battles happen! Special effects make movie audiences gasp in delight! Entertaining subplots involving marketable action figure characters happen! Emotionally satisfying beats involving old favourite characters happen! The couple you're shipping kisses!

And, ultimately, evil doesn't rise. It tries to, but throughout the movies we see how the the foundation built up by the good guys in the original trilogy stops them from getting too far, and provides us with the reassurance that, even if evil tries to rise in the future, things will never again get as bad as they were at the height of the empire.


This would still let us have our Star Wars adventure, but wouldn't render everything the original trilogy earned irrelevant. And, in a universe where the benefits of the original trilogy's happily-ever-after are felt throughout our heroes' attempts to stop evil from rising, we can feel confident that any happily-ever-after that this trilogy delivers will have lasting effects.

A pandemic moment

After multiple unfruitful attempts to find specific items at my local supermarkets, I decided to try the big Loblaws.

Since I'm not taking the subway during the pandemic, this meant a longer walk, past Mt. Pleasant Cemetery, but the weather was nice and the sidewalk and surrounding lawn/boulevard is wide enough for proper distancing, so it was no hardship.

As I've mentioned before, I live in a high-density neighbourhood with a lot of people around. Under normal circumstances, there are easily 100 people in sight at any given moment.  This has scaled back significantly during the pandemic, but there were still about a dozen people walking along the half-kilometre stretch beside the cemetery.

About halfway along, there was a guy standing stock still, staring at the cemetery. That seemed like odd behaviour, so I made a mental note to give him especially wide berth.

Then a jogger started approaching his location. He noticed her approach, and resumed walking like a regular person, taking care to give the jogger plenty of space. Good, I don't have to worry about him now.

Then the jogger stopped and stared at the cemetery.  Hmm, maybe there's something there?

Then an older couple started approaching the jogger's location. She noticed them approach, and resumed jogging, taking care to give the older couple plenty of space.

Then the older couple stopped and stared at the cemetery. There must be something there!

And, as I approached, I saw what it was:

A big fat raccoon!

He was so enormously chubby that every step made him waddle, which was just adorable and hilarious as he casually wandered around the cemetery, going about his raccoon business.

The older couple watched the raccoon, pointing and laughing, then noticed me approach their location, so they resumed their walk, taking care to give me plenty of space.

Then it was my turn to stop at the optimal raccoon viewing location and watch him waddle around a bit, before moving on to make room for the next pedestrian.

***

What I love about this moment is not just that that everyone made sure to attend to the public health need for physical distancing, but also everyone acknowledged and made space for each other's utterly frivolous desire to look at the chubby raccoon.

Looking at a chubby raccoon is by no objective measure important. I grew up surrounded by some very vocal people who were, for lack of a better word, stingy about that sort of thing ("What's the big deal? It's just a raccoon!") so, even though looking at the chubby raccoon is important to me, I would never have expected other people (grown adults! strangers!) to see it that way.

Many of those people around me growing up also very vocally espoused the opinion that City People Are Rude. They don't know get to know their neighbours - sometimes don't even know their neighbours' names! They don't say hi to you on the street or even make eye contact!

None of us there walking past the cemetery that day knew each other's names or each other's business. No one spoke to each other, perhaps no one even made eye contact. I would never recognize any of the people if I encountered them on the street again.

But everyone kindly, gently, considerately made sure everyone else got a chance to look a the chubby raccoon. Everyone took their turn, everyone kept their distance, and everyone got to enjoy a brief smile in the middle of the pandemic.

***

I previously blogged my theory that small kindnesses are bigger than big kindnesses, postulating that most people will step up when it's truly important, but it's easier to be selfish and let generosity fall by the wayside when the stakes are lower.

"Caremongering" has been a buzzword lately, usually used to mean taking care of your neighbours in important ways, like getting groceries and supplies to people in need.  But I find it comforting that, even in the midst what is for some of us the biggest global crisis of our lives, people can still be emotionally generous enough to take care of their neighbours in something so low-stakes as making sure everyone gets a chance to look at the chubby raccoon.

Chonky boi!