My 2021 new year's resolution

 I hadn't been planning on making a resolution, but a simple and useful one came to me a couple of weeks ago:

While the coffee brews, I'll do something I've been procrastinating.

Normally, while the coffee is brewing, I stare blankly at the internet doing nothing - after all, I can't do anything productive when I haven't had my coffee yet!

So now, instead of doing nothing, I'll do something I've been procrastinating. Something small, because it doesn't take that long for coffee to brew. Empty the dishwasher. Break down a cardboard box for recycling. Make an online purchase.

Since it doesn't take very long for coffee to brew, I might not finish my task. I might just empty one rack of the dishwasher, or just manage to remove the tape from the box, or just add one item to my cart. That's okay. I can stop when the coffee is ready. Or I can keep up the momentum, whatever feels right in the moment.

This works well for me for several reasons:

1. I respond well to "sprints" - working full-out at a task until some external phenomenon interrupts me. (Yes, I've heard of the pomodoro method. No, it hasn't solved all my life problems.) Coffee brewing time is the perfect length for a sprint.

2. This doesn't require any additional time commitment. Not even the infamous "just 15 minutes a day!" Coffee brewing time was previously unused dead time, and I've found a way to make use of it.

3. It helps me address the things that fall through the cracks in my system. Some things pile up because there isn't a place for them in my system (which I never managed to figure out how to reboot), or because there isn't enough room for them in my system. This lets me make progress on those things without having to figure out how to revamp the system, or having to take the emotional risk of completely disregarding the system.

4. There are no specific "shoulds" or tacit prerequisites on my "to do while the coffee brews" list. Part of the problem with my system is I've inadvertently imposed prerequisites on myself. I keep falling into a trap of "I can't do the thing that really needs doing because the system dictates that I have to do other things first!" (Unfortunately, removing prerequisites isn't sufficient to fix the system and sometimes would bring its own problems.) But while the coffee brews, anything that needs doing meets the requirements.

I've been doing this for a few weeks already, and have made a noticeable dent in my tangible and mental to-do piles. (If you could see my piles, you'd be like "That's an after picture???" and the answer is yes, it is.) We'll see if it's enough to affect my quality of life in the long run.

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.