It finally happened: I had a direct Covid exposure. I’ve been working in the office at my new job, and found out that my boss tested positive. In a not-so-great move, I hadn’t been wearing a mask at work because everyone at work is vaccinated. I allowed my guard to come down; I traded safety for a sense of normalcy.
Normal will likely be different moving forward. I think masks will be a permanent part of our lives now. Hell, I like having a mask on at the store so that people don’t recognize me. I also hope this means less hugging strangers, but that still remains to be seen. Most of all, we’ll add another layer of fear and worry into our interactions with each other.
We’ll all end up adapting. We haven’t been able to take liquid on to a plane in 15 years. Back in the late 1990s, I took a flight and a woman boarded the plane with a grocery bag. She got to her seat and proceeded to take out a 2 liter of Coke and 2 tubes of Pringles. For the remainder of the flight, there didn’t appear to be any point at which she was not eating or drinking. I imagine this was a way to cope with anxiety; I wonder how she copes now. Same for all of us. We have to somehow find our own way to cope with Covid.
First, some important distinctions between dressing and stuffing at Thanksgiving:
I personally believe that the continued ingestion of stuffing can lead to behavioral changes like the inability to recognize the downbeat or the desire to masturbate publicly. I’m just saying, I’ve eaten dressing all my life and have never once felt the desire to masturbate in a room with more than one person. Harvey Weinstein, Louis C.K. and Mark Halperin ate stuffing all their lives, and look what happened.
Second, as someone who never understood why parents would give a fictional fat white dude for the presents they bought with their hard earned money, I entirely agree with this statement:
This is why black parents always end the charade and let their children know that, like Chicago’s “gang thugs,” All Lives Matter and trickle-down economics, Santa is a figment of the white imagination.
Third, an important point about how to really seek truth:
Without this fastidiousness about truth, you can’t be truly independent-minded. It’s not enough just to have resistance to being told what to think. Those kind of people reject conventional ideas only to replace them with the most random conspiracy theories. And since these conspiracy theories have often been manufactured to capture them, they end up being less independent-minded than ordinary people, because they’re subject to a much more exacting master than mere convention.