The Tornado Warning Syndrome

When you grow up in the Midwest, tornado warnings are a part of life.  The hot, humid, sticky day, the darkening skies, the alerts to a tornado watch, and then the sirens, blaring the news that a tornado might be in the area.

My hometown of Crystal Lake, IL, has not seen a significant tornado go through there since 1965.  That tornado was deadly and scary and at a time when the only way meteorologists knew there was a tornado on the ground—was when someone called them and told them a tornado was on the ground.

By the time I was in high school, the idea of a tornado hitting our town, while very possible, seemed very unlikely.  Tornado warnings were still issued primarily by observation and covered a wide area.  Even the worst storms produced funnel clouds, brief touchdowns, or what were ruled later as microbursts, straight line winds.

What we usually get from a tornado warning...do you see any rotation?

Perhaps that’s why, when eating dinner at a Chinese restaurant one summer evening a few years ago, I raced to the window when the tornado warning alerts came over the phone….instead of taking cover.  Peeking through the blinds, I thought, “oh, that’s just a microburst,” rolling my eyes that once again, the National Weather Service got it wrong.

Haha, trust the meteorologists. I can now say I’ve been through a tornado.  Thank goodness it was very, very weak, but as I run around town near the tornado’s path, I can still see the swath of branches that were ripped down by nature’s fury.

I’m in one or two tornado warnings every summer, and yet have only been in one tornado.  Over the course of my lifetime, that means I’m probably 1 for 50—2% chance—of being hit by a tornado when a warning is issued.  With those odds, it’s not a surprise that, when severe weather alerts are issued, people don’t even understand what they mean.  You have no idea now many times I’ve heard, “There’s a tornado watch, which means there’s on the ground.  Well, it’s sunny here, so I’m not taking cover.”  Of course it’s sunny—a tornado watch means conditions are favorable for a tornado to form, so you should be on alert.  The storms are on their way.

I call it the Tornado Warning Syndrome.  You’ve been through so many tornado warnings without actually seeing any significant tornado damage that the warnings are no longer taken seriously, even though tornadoes continue to be a threat.

I’ve been thinking about this mentality as our covid case numbers have been rising exponentially.  When the pandemic began, our governor put the entire state under a stay at home order for two weeks, essentially, a “pandemic” warning.  While we were in a place where only those who needed tests were taking them, the positivity rate was far below 100%.  People were getting sick, but not nearly in the numbers we expected.  Even so, our governor continued to extend the stay at home order for a total of two months, then rolled out a slow reopening plan, based on whether or not spikes would occur.  You could call it a “pandemic watch.”

The problem was that in Chicago, cases were growing exponentially, but even in my little community in the north suburbs, they were trickling.  By the end of the lockdown, early June, less than 200 people had tested positive.  In the rural western and southern parts of the state, the rates were even lower, with many counties having less than a dozen cases.

For the hundreds of thousands of people who not only didn’t know someone who had gotten severely ill, but didn’t know a single person who tested positive, it was just like those tornado warnings of my childhood.  Lots of anxiety and thunder, not a single home destroyed.

The summer continued, positivity rates declined, and people stopped taking the pandemic seriously.  Gatherings that had been postponed started to happen again.  Businesses reopened so they could continue to pay their employees.  People formed “pods” of friends, people who they trusted to stay safe, and continued socializing. 

Like a tornado that can rip a whole house down to the foundation while leaving the next door neighbor intact, outbreaks of covid were occurring, and people were still dying.  However, unless you were connected to an outbreak, the alerts and warnings felt like the tornado warnings with no tornado.  People became increasingly complacent, and businesses tired of struggling for no obvious reason.

As the chilly fall weather approached, people turned inside to gather, and cases started jumping up again.  The pleas to stay at home were falling on deaf ears, as families wanted to see each other, friends wanted to celebrate, and people craved social contact.  As the governor tried to stop the spread by restricting indoor dining, restaurant owners fought back, citing that not a single one of their employees had tested positive for Covid, so they were being unfairly punished when the actual outbreaks were tied to private gatherings where protocols were not being followed. 

When a storm system produces a large number of tornadoes, ironically, it is called an outbreak.  Well, we have an outbreak of Covid—a SuperOutbreak, even—but will people heed the warnings as hospitals and ICU beds fill?  Or will they feel like they’ve been told the sky is falling for so long that they’ll just ignore the warnings?

Don’t be fooled.  I’ll never forget my senior year first semester final exams.  It was January, and of course, a snowstorm was headed to Chicago.  The forecasters, based in Chicago, didn’t think it would be a significant snowfall, and so my district didn’t plan to cancel school (because, first day of finals).  Being so far from the city changed the forecast drastically.  While Chicago proper had a typical snowy January day, we ended up having to traverse heavy snow—the final storm total was over a foot—to get to school in time to take our finals.  The buses were having so much trouble that the school had to adjust the entire day by 20 minutes so everyone had the full time for their exam.

Just because you don’t see the havoc that these skyrocketing numbers are making doesn’t mean you’re not in danger.  Just like our school, watching the Chicago media, was caught unaware of a narrow, heavy snow band, don’t think that just because you don’t know someone with Covid means you have no risk.

Stay home.  Wear your mask.  Wash your hands.  Be safe.  Be well.  And don’t fall for Tornado Warning Syndrome.

Finding My Way out of Dreamland

I have a coffee cup that says, “Stop Dreaming and Start Doing.”  It’s one of those mantras we see everywhere, from wall hangings to planners to….well, coffee cups.

Are you dreaming, or are you doing?

One day last week, I intentionally chose that cup because lately, it’s felt like I’ve spent more time dreaming and less time doing. 

Then my toilet clogged, triggering my contamination OCD and just making me too anxious to do anything beyond the bare minimum.  I went to bed, frustrated at what little “doing” I was able to accomplish.  However, I did a great job dreaming my day away, fantasizing about a life where everything was just…easier.

Dreaming has been my coping mechanism ever since I learned to read.  Falling into books, creating characters, being the person I wish I was instead of the person I saw in the mirror.  As a child, I would hide in my room, acting out the scenes I created to alleviate the stresses from school and home and a Mensa-level IQ and an undiagnosed mental illness.  (OCD is something you’re born with, and I knew it was the right diagnosis when my childhood memories and motivations suddenly made sense.)  No wonder at times of stress, I would lose myself in a fantasy of my own creation.

This time, however, the message on the mug stayed with me.  I’d fallen into my fantasy so deep that it was running as a continual stream in the back of my head, impeding my ability to function on a daily basis.  My escape from stress and anxiety was now creating so much noise that I couldn’t focus on anything.  I would read emails and not remember a word of content.  I would complete a task and then redo it, having completely forgotten that I had just done it.  I would ignore the people in my real world, preferring the interactions of the scenes in my head.

Looking backwards, it makes sense.  Before there was a global pandemic, I had run out of savings.  Before I ran out of savings, I had a horrible ending of a four-year relationship.  Before my ex and I broke up, I had a complete mental breakdown.  Before the breakdown, I quit my job to save my mental health.  The need for escapism was real, but it had gone too far and too deep.  I was now lost in my dreamworld, avoiding reality at all costs.

I looked back even further and saw the hours I spent over the years dreaming about what could be, rather than doing the hard work to make these dreams happen.  Pursuing your dreams…..is hard.  It’s the grind of plinking forward, failing, picking yourself up, and plinking forward again.  It’s fighting the boredom and the burnout and the monotony of spending so much time on something with so little progress.  It’s dealing with challenges and roadblocks and people who think you aren’t worthy. 

Just like….running a marathon.  Or nine.  Why was I able to do that and not this?

In my real life, I’ve always felt powerless and silent, not worthy of attention.  As a child, my mom would tell me that it was best if I didn’t speak my mind because she feared me being rejected by society.  I bit my tongue, became invisible, and created an alternate world in my mind where my ideas were valued and appreciated.

Fast forward to January 1, 2020.  I decided it was time to start writing down my ideas, my scripts, my scenes, my stories.  Then the world turned upside down with the coronavirus, and I lost my way, reality being so grim that my dreamworld was my only safe place.  We all have been finding some form of escapism this year, whether it is getting lost in video games, social media, Netflix binges, or scenes being played out in my own house.  We all need an escape right now. 

But for there to be any possibility for my dreams to come true, I need to leave my dreamland behind and re-engage with reality.

Instead of dreaming, I need to be writing down my dreams.  Instead of watching YouTube videos, I need to be watching Khan Academy videos.  Instead of disconnecting into fantasies, I need to be connecting with people. 

Just like the mug said, instead of dreaming, I need to be doing.

Paradigms, Masks, and All the Anger from Paradigms and Masks

My freshman year of college, I had to read a book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn.  It blew my mind.  I was the science loving kid who talked in her college essays of the random science experiments she did with her makeup set when she was 5 and the hours spent watching clouds pass overhead, her inner meteorologist wishing for a storm.  Science was truth.  Facts.  Unbiased.  Solid.

Kuhn, a University of Chicago professor, had a different idea.  Ever hear the term, “paradigm shift?”  That was his idea.  What we think today about science can change, based on new information and data.  When he wrote it in the early 1960s, it took off enough that “paradigm shift” entered the modern vernacular, but his second idea didn’t.  It was that science is a series of paradigm shifts that take us closer to the truth. 

I loved it.  Whether looking at Galileo and Newton or the science section of the Sunday newspaper, every discovery, small or large, shifted the paradigm.  The study of facts and laws had become a journey of problem solving to get closer to the truth.

It was the start of four years where science wasn’t the study of facts but the study of what truth could be.  Classes where I manipulated virus DNA and played with organic dyes, and a senior year studying the paleoclimatology of the Lake Winnebago region of Wisconsin for an attempt at an honors thesis I was just too exhausted by May to finish.  In that process, I learned the journey toward the truth wasn’t always easy or kind or simple.

Fast forward to this January, as I started hearing about a novel coronavirus appearing in Wuhan, China.  Having a friend living there, I followed the story fairly closely as it traveled to Europe and Kirkland, WA, and New York City.  Suddenly, the paradigms that had served the CDC well during SARS and MERS and H1N1 didn’t work, and we were plunged into lockdown, with everything closed except the essentials. 

Kuhn, it seems, served me well.  I understood that we were in a situation with so many unknowns—so many variables—that we were far from the truth, and as such, were in for a roller coaster of paradigm shifts.  I expected changes and conflicting information as the scientists worked tirelessly to get closer and closer to the truth.

Which comes to masks.  With so little known about what would be called Covid-19 (or Covid for short), the question became, “Will wearing a mask prevent getting sick?”  At first, scientists didn’t know how Covid was spread.  Was it droplet?  Was it surfaces?  Was it close contact?  How close?  Plus, the largest producer of N95 masks, the ones being used in hospitals, was Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the Covid pandemic, so there were serious concerns about shortages from panic buying on an item that was critical for those treating Covid patients.  The official recommendation back in March was “No.”

Everyone accepted what the scientists were saying back in March as truth and made do with our new normal, but then the paradigm shifted.  What was true in March wasn’t true in May, including that the scientists learned that transmission was through droplets, so wearing a mask, especially in interior, confined spaces, would reduce infections.  The CDC shifted their recommendation, governments started to put in mask mandates, and citizens…scratched their heads at what they saw was an about-face.

Let’s not forget that masks are hot and uncomfortable, especially in the heat of summer.  People feel so suffocated that I see someone every day who is pulling off their mask every minute or so to breathe. 

While one population was struggling with wearing masks, another group of people were keeping on top of each and every news story about the virus.  These people were scared—even terrified—of getting sick and ending up in the ICU with Covid.  Whether they were high risk due to medical conditions, knew someone who had gotten sick, or just saw the reports from Italy and NYC, their fears were real and valid, and even one person dying of Covid was one too many, because it could be them next.

When the paradigm about masks changed, they breathed a sigh of relief, something that was visual and tactile to alleviate their fears.  If everyone wore masks, they don’t have to be scared.

However, there was more than the mask paradigm shift.  We were learning a lot about the little balls of protein that had taken our country hostage.  They didn’t live on surfaces.  It was actually safe to go to the grocery store (provided that you wear a mask).  You needed to be within 6 feet of someone for more than 15 minutes without wearing a mask to risk being exposed.  Being outside was safer than being inside.  Doctors in hospitals were learning better ways of treating patients so they didn’t require ventilators.  We got smarter in how we protected our most high risk, vulnerable populations.  The refrigerated trucks were no longer needed.  The makeshift hospitals were taken down. 

Covid, it seemed, wasn’t the black death we thought it would be in April, as long as we continued to wear masks.  The people reading every news story, struggling to make sense of it all, couldn’t.  There were too many shifts, too many changes….and we were still very far from the truth. 

We forget how few people in this country haven’t taken a formal science class in decades, probably in high school or to fulfill a requirement in college.  Even then, those are classes focused on teaching the basics, which don’t change much year to year.  When I started tutoring chemistry, I was concerned how much had changed since the 1990s.  At the high school level, not much, and for the most part, are things that they were predicting were true 30 years ago.

We also forget that for a lot of people, getting through those classes was a challenge.  I’ll never forget my chemistry teacher first introducing the concept of the mole my sophomore year in high school.  I saw classmates’ eyes glaze over in confusion, and some of them struggled for the rest of the year.  Even now, when I tell people I have a degree in chemistry, people respond with appreciation because high school chemistry was just that hard for them.

It was too much to understand why a hot, uncomfortable mask was necessary when nobody they knew had gotten sick.  It was too much to understand why people couldn’t take the illness that brought New York City to its knees just a few months ago seriously.  In this heated, divided environment we call the United States of America, the anger simmered over.

From angry posts on social media to protests about government overreach to actual confrontations in stores, people scared—of government overreach, of dying, of getting sick—lashed out in anger, creating more fear, more defensive behavior, and more doubling down on the divide.  We find the sources of information, the articles, the facts that support our viewpoint, and pontificate to the masses, accusing each other of “not believing in science.”

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but science isn’t black and white, or right and wrong.  When it’s something new and unknown, it’s fluid, and it will take a long time to figure out the truth.  It took scientists until World War II to figure out that the influenza virus that caused the 1918 pandemic….was caused by a virus.  Like, they were trying to save people’s lives and couldn’t agree whether it was a bacterium or a virus. 

We may be faster now, but we are still many, many paradigm shifts before the science of covid is part of the hard facts in a high school biology textbook and we’re back to our pre-covid lives.  For me, “believing in science” is believing that until we get to the truth, science will be filled with unknowns, conflicting information, and change, something very different than what we learned in high school.

I know it’s scary, but it’s time to ride the wave of paradigm shifts, being okay with what is truth now and being okay with when it shifts.  Even if it doesn’t make sense, it will soon, and sooner if we all start working together instead of against each other.  Starting with…..be nice, be kind, and wear your mask.

 Pink bandanas make everyone happy

(Oh, and if you want a great mask that does good in the world, check out 2 Little Mask Makers.  Custom masks for $5, which goes to the Northern Illinois Food Bank and local school districts in need.)

Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?

We all agree.  It’s been a rough year for the United States.  Americans are stressed and frustrated….and angry.

From politics to masks to the politics of mask-wearing, social media is filled with angry rants.  Rants that, at the end of the day, are just one form or another of “Listen to me!  Agree with me!  I’m right!”

It’s like we have become a real-life version of the Dr. Seuss book, The Sneetches.

Masks, Covid, Presidential candidates, and everything else has a “you’re either with me or against me” mentality.  Either you agree with me 100%, or you are evil.  No middle ground.  No compassion.  No empathy.

Remember the guy in the Sneetches with the Star-On and Star-Off machines?  He manipulated the division to become a very wealthy man.  Same is true today, as people on both sides capitalize on the partisanship for wealth and power and glory.

"The Sneetches" was originally published in Redbook in 1953.  Yet, so little has changed.

We have forgotten that our nation….was founded on dissent.  We fought a war to have the freedom to oppose the King.  We wrote a Constitution that gave a legislative body of elected citizens equal power to the President.  We amended that constitution to guarantee freedom of speech.  We also spelled out that the states had the power to organize and govern independently of each other.

Of course, we think this all happened in a room full of men wearing powdered wigs congratulating each other.  However, as a college classmate reminded me, the arguments that created the Constitution were probably just as heated and foul-mouthed as the ones on Capitol Hill today.

I’m fortunate to have worked hard through high school so I had the opportunity to attend a college where dissent was part of the culture.  Listen to dissent.  Challenge it.  Defend it.  Change your mind.  Respect that not everyone is going to agree with you 100%.  That, my friends, is critical thinking. 

In order to critically think, you have to be able to listen to people who disagree with you.  You have to respect people who disagree with you.  And that’s not happening.  Instead, I see people building bubbles of people who look like them, think like them, and act like them.  They’ll embrace someone who might be different, but only as long as they fit the checklist.

You thought Mean Girls was only about teenagers…..our country is filled with cliques.

Maybe because my brain functions so differently than normal, I can’t fit in those bubbles.  I don’t have a lot of true, close, real friends.  I can’t even have a normal conversation with my family.  But that crazy brain also allows me to have wonderful, insightful, interesting conversations with people who don’t look like me or think like me or act like me.  Due to those experiences, I have something important to say:

*grabs bullhorn*

If you’re too busy demanding that people listen to you and agree with you, you’re missing out on what makes this country so wonderful.

One of the “silver linings” of the pandemic is that I’ve gotten to know my neighbors, now that we’re all at home more and walking around the neighborhood.  I had no idea how beautifully diverse my neighborhood is.  Yes, beautifully.  Since we’re sort of stuck at home, we’re out of our houses, having the conversations we need to have to strengthen our community, because we’re all part of this community.

You see, the power of our country is our diversity.  Whether it’s a diversity of genetics or a diversity of ideas, what makes the US a superpower is that we validate everyone equally.  It’s not perfect or a sunny utopia, but as we hit rough roads, we grow and change and evolve.  (Though in some cases, not as fast as we should.)

Do you watch the Olympics?  I’ve been watching the Opening Ceremonies for decades.  It’s always fun when the USA is at the end of the Parade of Nations, because we spend an hour watching the rest of the world walk in, homogeneous, formal….and then there’s USA.  All colors of the rainbow, all backgrounds, all states, just dancing and filming and waving the stars and stripes.  Unified within our diversity, and in that, being one of the most successful nations in terms of medal haul, even as other countries cheat to compete with us.  It’s one example of how diversity makes our country great.

For us to get through 2020, we need to stop sticking our fingers in our ears while screaming “I’m right” at the top of our lungs.  We need to take a breath and show a little empathy for our fellow citizens.  We need to listen, honestly listen, to understand why they disagree with us.  You can be empathic without changing your viewpoint, you know.  You might even find out that you agree on a few things.  We need to go outside our circles, our communities, to try new things and experiences—because they’re interesting, not because they’re trendy or that’s what the celebrities on social media are doing.

(I know the partisans will hit his point and point fingers at the other side.  You can start by treating politics more like a policy debate and less like a Bears/Packer playoff game.  I mean, how do you want to be seen?  A thoughtful intellectual or a drunk tailgater?)

You see, once we open ourselves to those who are different, we gain the confidence to go outside the norms and be different.  We start seeing the world through other people’s eyes—yes, empathy—and we see the creativity and innovation that is inside all of us, the creativity and innovation that might solve one of our country’s many problems, and right now, we need to support that creativity and innovation, rather than squelching it, simply because we are afraid of being “wrong.”

The truth is that in a country of 330 million people and a Constitution that guarantees freedom of belief…there are 330 million belief systems in this country.  There is no “right” or “wrong.”  There is just being and living and growing and respecting and accepting and encouraging and innovating to a place where we continue to be the superpower we are.

So stop making people fit in your box.  Stop making yourself fit into other people’s boxes.  Be you.  Be nice.  Be kind.  Respect your fellow citizens.  Encourage all forms of diversity, especially within yourself.

We’ll get through this, everyone.  Together.

I Was on a Break....from Running

Global Pandemic.  Record Unemployment.  Civil Unrest.

Not what I was thinking when I said the 20s would roar.

It’s been a year—no, wait, a decade—and we’re only seven months into the 2020s. 

Our New Normal

Wait, isn’t this supposed to be a blog about fun and running and traveling around the world?  Well, when the marathons cancel and borders close and the run club stops meeting and you get furloughed from two jobs, running takes a back seat to life.  Life, as we knew it, had changed.

I wasn’t in a good place when this all started.  My mental health took a huge hit last August, and I’ve been slowly trying to get back to functional.  Things that you may take for granted, like the steps you take to make it to work in the morning, are very stressful to my OCD mind.  There are just so many steps, and if I don’t do them right, the anxiety surges, just like an electrical power surge.  Do I have a clean outfit?  Do I have a clean coffee mug in the dishwasher?  Did I remember to brush my teeth?  Did I brush my teeth before I put my shoes on?  Did I make sure to only touch the door handle with my pinky finger?  Did I wash my hands after touching (water kettle, sink handle, laptop keyboard, dryer handle, fridge, or anything else in my house)?  All while trying to get out of the house at a time that gets me to my job on time.  I’m exhausted before I even put my key in the car.

Running, especially running with a group, has all of that, too.  How am I supposed to put my hair in a ponytail without contaminating everything?  Where do I put my purse while I’m running?  What about my car key?  And shoes.  I’m afraid of shoes right now.

I can run or work, but I can’t do both.  And I have to pay the bills.

It’s so frustrating, after such a victory in New York, to have slid down to a place where I’m going to have to start over from scratch.  Unlike a physical injury, where your body is begging you to stop and heal, you feel like such a failure because you can’t get yourself out there.  The negative thoughts creep in (because your brain is already hurting) about how I’m going to get to do these last three marathons, especially Boston.  I’ve gone from “I can totally qualify for Boston” to “I’ll never run Boston” in the span of six months.

Then I think about why I run and what I love about running.  For me, it’s the meditation, the ability to let my brain get exhausted by the physical effort, to be outdoors and see new trails.  It’s the companionship of friends as well as the quiet solace of an empty trail, hearing only the wind and the birds.  Then I think about all the athletes who not only have seen their competitions and races and Olympics get postponed and cancelled, but also stuck at home, unable to do the training that they love so much, that would alleviate the grief of losing their Worlds or Olympics or Boston Marathon.

Running cannot be a chore.  It has to be my solace, not my obligation.

Quests are never easy.  Even Hollywood fills epic quests with monsters and quicksand and Eyes of Sauron and Darth Vaders.  I knew five years ago when I started my quest that there would be epic challenges (though not a global pandemic that would completely shut down the US for months), and the point of the exercise was how I grow from the challenges laid before me.  So I will face my struggles, heal my mind, and find a new path to traverse.  Some day, I will cross that sixth marathon finish line and kiss the ground.

I want to get back to this woman

We are all challenged now with so many things right now.  Just keep putting one foot in front of the other.  Treat each other with love and kindness.  Open your hearts and minds.  Let’s walk together.

Welcome to my World

Who had “global pandemic” on their predictions for 2020? 

*crickets*

Yeah, me, too.  As I followed the pandemic from Wuhan, China to my home turf, it has been the world of science fiction authors and dystopian fatalists.  The entire world captured by a tiny ball of protein.  People afraid to leave their homes without face masks and gloves.  Hand sanitizer flying off the shelves.  Radio shows discussing how to decontaminate their groceries and themselves.

Surreal, right?  Well for me, it’s just Tuesday.  Or Wednesday.  Or every day.

My life revolves around elaborate decontamination rituals, making sure that I do not get infected by the bug du jour.  Washing my hands to the point of cracked skin is an every day routine, as are multiple showers a day and constant laundry.  Touch is something I often fear, as it might contaminate me with dirt and germs, to the point where an innocent brush of a door handle or a coffee cup has me rushing to the bathroom to wash my hands.  Sound familiar?

The difference is that I have a diagnosis—obsessive-compulsive disorder—that generates my fear and anxiety.  In “normal” times, I’m considered an outlier, having an unrealistic worldview, unable to sit still until every germ and bug is vanquished, a “germophobe.”  It’s a world where half my energy every day goes to washing and decontaminating and figuring out how to keep people outside my personal bubble, all in an effort to “keep calm and carry on” with a normal life. 

Then a novel coronavirus jumps from a bat to a human, and we’re wearing gloves and sanitizing door handles and wiping down our groceries before we put them in the car.  We’re discussing if uv light can decontaminate, if our mail could make us sick.  Stickers and tape dot the floors at the stores that are open, reminding us to stay six feet apart, as public service announcements blare over the loudspeakers, reminding us to wash our hands.

The fear and anxiety is real.  Something that we cannot see, hear, taste, smell, nor touch has killed more people in New York City than on 9/11.  People are dying by the thousands in Europe every day.  Hospitals fill with patients, unable to breathe.  Others raging with fevers and cough in their homes.  Even after 100 years of scientific discovery and Kuhnian paradigm shifts, the human race is once again brought to their knees by a tiny little virus.

I was asked recently how the pandemic affected me, and I replied that my life hadn’t changed all that much because I was already doing the handwashing and the decontamination and the distancing and the sanitizing.  The difference, actually, was that everyone else was doing it, too.  It’s like everyone is looking at the world through my eyes and acting accordingly, stressed and scared about something that is hard to show really exists.

In this dystopian society, I have found utopia.

Except that I’m out of disinfecting wipes and hand sanitizer.