How Sick am I?

The answer at the moment is "not very." Dry skin from hand-washing seems to be about it.

However, I find it difficult to avoid feeling like an absolute invalid, perhaps a plague victim, during the current panic.

• I'm an old guy, and family members seem to think that leaving my front door is suicide. I might as well just jump off a cliff.
• Just not supposed to go anywhere or do anything.
• When I sit in the same chair 24/7, I tend to get very achy, and by itself that makes me feel sick.
• I recently figured out that I must be lactose intolerant, so I'm trying very hard to watch what I eat. Looking at every label and saying, "Gee! I can't eat that either," doesn't really make me feel robust.
• Finally scheduled cataract surgery for my right eye. Reading everything with one eye closed to avoid the blurring doesn't make me feel young and robust either.

Add to all that the rather obvious fact that, in fact, if I escaped the apartment and went out, there would really be no place to go. And the fact that some of the things I would really like to have (orange juice in the morning, for example) really cannot be had because the hoarders cleaned out the store.

It's difficult to not feel like the sick one (and after all, the public health people tell us that it's prudent to act as if I am sick, so the few times I go somewhere, I address people from ten feet away). Unclean! Unclean!

I look at the weather report and it gives me hope that in a week or two, the temperature will soar above 50 degrees and the rain will stop. Then I'll get on the bike (hoping that I haven't lost much muscle mass from a month of enforced idleness) and stay ten meters away from any living human.

Schedule Stuff

I know that nursing home residents have a terrible time remembering what day it is. The problem isn't just a matter of senile dementia: When every day is exactly like every other day, they tend to blur. I'm feeling that too.

In my previous ("BV") days, there was a lot of structure. On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday I went to Ashland to teach my classes. Wednesday evening, I met with a group of Democrats at Phoenix Brewery to write postcards encouraging people to vote. Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday were my gym days (and sometimes on Saturday). Almost every Saturday morning, I went to Panera Bread for a nice breakfast and spent some time there writing letters. And of course, church was a fixed point for every Sunday morning.

None of that is available any more.

On the larger calendar, my time was pretty structured too. Ash Wednesday, Good Friday, Easter Sunday, Advent, Christmas, performances of Mid-Ohio Opera, and Ohio Heritage Days at Malabar Farm all provided mileposts as I moved through my year.

Everything I read says that we should prepare for the quarantine lock-down to go at least six months and maybe two years or more. No mileposts in that vagueness.

No wonder it's difficult to remember what day it is.

Things are no better on the micro level. In the "BV" days, I had to plan on being out of the apartment by 9:15 four days a week (easy schedule this year). That meant getting up promptly, showering, making breakfast, shaving, and getting dressed. And the need to be out of bed by 7:00 meant that the night before I had to be in bed by 10:30 or 11:00. My first class was done by 11 AM and the next one started at 1 PM, so lunch was pretty well nailed down too.

None of those daily schedule points exists any more. A single man, living alone in an apartment and avoiding all human contact, can realistically sleep and eat at any hour of the day. Shower, shave and brush my teeth? Why bother? I won't see anyone for several days.

This is all starting to sound rather grim and pathological. I think the only way to preserve sanity in this quarantine life is to come up with a schedule and stick to it very legalistically. Times for meals and for work. Strategies for physical exercise in the apartment (because in typical Ohio fashion the weather is predicted for rain and temperatures in the 40s for at least a couple of weeks).

Beginning the blog again in virus time

This blog has sat dormant for quite some time. I never really gave out the address, so there was no audience, and I figured out that using a fountain pen to write in a journal felt more therapeutic.

The corona virus changed all that. Suddenly everything that looks or feels like social interaction is deadly. I have no doubt that people in future generations will say to one another (from behind their surgical masks and being careful to stay two meters apart and in groups of 10 or fewer), "Gee! Did you guys actually go places together? Eat at restaurants? Attend concerts?" So I'm going to start documenting life, both before and after.

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Here's a Facebook post I did today. It's a good introduction to what I'm thinking.

I have no doubt that we will begin thinking of times "BV" and "AV" (Before Virus and After Virus). For me, the changeover began on March 11, when my boss emailed me to point out that the university's extremely toothless statement on our home page ("we're doing everything to protect students' health") really meant we would close classes down for two weeks. The process was completed (in my mind) yesterday when the governor closed all bars, restaurants, and theaters, the university announced that we would not have classes for the rest of the semester, and the bishop closed all our churches.

Apparently, there's no way to figure out how long these shutdowns will last, and Our Great Leader (because he hates all things done by Obama as well as anything that shows scientific knowledge) has fired all the people who can help us know. When there is a snow day, we know that things will be better in a couple of days, a week at the most. This era of closings and quarantines, so far as I have read, might last anywhere from six months to two years.

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Physical death isn't the only kind of death to fear. I assume we will survive all this, and we cannot let it kill our spirits.

Finally getting in gear

This weekend I have a handful of papers to grade. (Will I get them done? Who knows?) Finally I'm getting out of the phase of doing continual overhead and setting up, so I can actually teach courses. Over the last two or three weeks, I have averaged something like 15 hours a week on plain old "overhead" tasks. (Making copies, trying to figure out the latest software glitch, revising courses to conform to the boss's last-second changes, etc.) That's, of course, in addition to 18 hours of actual in-class time per week.

My most vivid task at NCSC appears to be dealing now with all the students who approach me in a breathless panic:

• "MY CAR DIDN'T START THIS MORNING!!! ARE YOU GOING TO KICK ME OUT OF CLASS???"
• The assignment said to write about my reaction to the essay and I used "I" and "me" but the writing center said I did that all wrong. Am I going to fail the course?

I guess I should welcome this. It's quite a contrast to the football players' attitude that all they have to do is sign up for the class, look bored, and occasionally turn in a late paper and — because they are so incredibly valuable to the team — they will pass and get a diploma that will make them rich.

Still, it just wears me out. Apparently these students had teachers who didn't know how to teach or grade, so they picked on the most trivial secondary issues (The printer printed this on both sides of the paper. Will it fail?) instead of trying to actually teach content. Once again, I find that my main task is dealing with the psychological damage. And that's not even taking into account the bias in Freshman English courses toward course designs that flunk people. (Yes, I failed two last semester because they couldn't figure out the software necessary to submit an electronic portfolio. That's the way the course was written by my superiors.)

War on Coal

When I drive back to Washington, I go through the mountains of Pennsylvania, and I often see signs demanding that Obama stop his war on coal. (Our president must be a very busy man to do all the things the Ultra-Right accuses him of doing.) On the same journeys, I run through a lot of areas where we are fracking for natural gas.

The problem with coal is not that the president hates it. The problem is that it is (to quote someone who was writing about steam locomotives) an ugly, dirty fuel. People die to get it out of the ground. It needs to be transported in huge trains. When it's burned, it releases sulfur and mercury and a lot of soot. And finally, of course, it leaves ash which must be disposed. It corrodes its boilers and generally causes a mess. None of those problems occur with natural gas. Yes, the fracking process is questionable, but once the stuff is out of the ground, it's a lot easier (and cheaper) to live with than coal, not to mention less likely to injure the people who must live near the electric plants.

At the moment, we also are being told that Obama is making war on the fracking process. Is this the same as raising legitimate concerns about safety?

Now we have the Charleston, WV issue of a mystery chemical that's used to clean coal getting into the water supply. I'm just waiting to see how this one plays out. According to one source I read, this chemical is quite obscure and nobody knows what it does to people when it gets into the water supply. Given the far right's tendency to personalize everything and to make every problem the result of an evil decision on the part of the President, I suppose they will have him kicking a hole in the holding tank the chemical came from. But won't that boost the fortunes of natural gas?

No, the real war here is between an older, more problematic technology and a newer one that promises to be cheaper. That's all.

In spite of

One of my Facebook contacts posted one of his inevitable comments today about true patriots opposing taxation. I was about to call him to task on this, but I went to www.dictionary.com to look up the definition of "patriot." There it was, the second definition:

a person who regards himself or herself as a defender, especially of individual rights, against presumed interference by the federal government.

That got me to thinking. So a true conservative patriot, by this usage, is someone who thinks the government of our country is evil. I guess in light of the the first definition

a person who loves, supports, and defends his or her country and its interests with devotion

this means defending the actual land mass, or perhaps the assorted like-minded people, against the USA and the Constitution.

Perhaps I think too much, but again I remembered the Conservative Bible Project, a movement to use public opinion and crowd-sourcing (presumably from the right kind of people, not those evil liberals) to rescue the Bible from liberal bias. Presumably, Jesus will turn out to be an anti-government capitalist who favors hunkering down in one's fortress and accumulating weapons. We will discover that Jesus was actually on the side of the Pharisees, not of the woman caught in adultery. We will discover that the basic gospel message was all about accumulating wealth. And in the garden Peter will be commended for cutting off the man's ear.

It's simply a question of who is the boss. The true conservative says, "I, myself, am the boss, the standard of the Universe."

My Teaching Schedule

I am editing this in March, 2020, six years after it was originally posted. I had thought of deleting it, but it will stay. I kept it because it's a good record of the kind of teaching I was doing back then.

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My weekly schedule is finally nailed down, and very unlikely to change. I have added travel time to the times below, to show when I'm really unavailable for much of anything else (and it's worth noting that the big gap Monday and Wednesday afternoon is so awkward that I will probably find somewhere to hang out and do more school work).

• Monday: 7:30 to 12:30 @ Ashland; 4:00 to 7:15 @ NCSC
• Tuesday: 10:30 to 2:15 @ NCSC
• Wednesday: 7:30 to 12:30 @ Ashland; 4:00 to 7:15 @ NCSC
• Thursday: 10:30 to 2:15 @ NCSC
• Friday: 7:30 to 12:30 @ Ashland

There are Spring Breaks (which, of course, do not match up), and the whole thing is done by mid-May.