Month: August 2020

A Quickie about Curves

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This pandemic is a lot of things, but one thing it isn’t is confusing.

Viruses are designed (and I use “designed” in the loosest possible sense, i.e. not actually designed but rather shaped by their environment and by evolution) to replicate and spread themselves as efficiently as possible. Some are very good at this and stay widespread and contagious for a long time, others are not so good and die out or are easily contained.

COVID-19 is pretty good at spreading itself. And once you know how good it is at spreading itself, then how it spreads becomes a pretty simple math problem. When plotted out geometrically, patterns emerge in the form of lines and curves.

Blatantly stolen from https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america/

These lines and curves are not confusing. As more people are exposed, more people contract the disease, and then those infected move on to expose even more people.

Again, these lines and curves and concepts are not confusing.

And yet so many people you meet in the world seem not to understand these simple concepts at all.

The pandemic is not confusing.

What is confusing is the way people react to the pandemic. Because it is very easy to pretend that it’s not a big deal when it’s not affecting you, but rather those people, over there.

But suddenly, when the pandemic affects somebody close to you, it becomes a lot more serious.

I guess some of us have forgotten that we all live in the same fishbowl.

Fish Bowl, Fish, Glass, Water, Bowl, Goldfish, Aquarium

A Quickie on the Quickies

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What the heck am I doing here, anyway?

For the longest time, I sort of made my bread-and-butter on this site these longish, pondering deep dives on whatever.

But lately, I just don’t have the stamina or the focus for all that.

Maybe it’s being 40.

Maybe it’s COVID and everything else going on in the world.

Maybe I’ve just gotten lazy.

Whatever the reason, I didn’t have it in me to sit down and write 1000-plus words about whatever, so I haven’t.

But then, my thoughts about myself turn dark. Writing has sort of become a big part of my identity for the last several years, so to not write … well, that’s an issue, right? After all, I still want to write these little blargs. Even if they don’t mean much to anybody outside of my own skull.

So, maybe my long wandering posts aren’t in the cards right now. But could I do two hundred words? Could I dip my toes in a topic instead of cannonballing into the deep end of overthinking? Hammer out a few words instead of over a thousand on whatever’s in my head?

Yeah, maybe I could do that.

the lord of the rings GIF

So, this is me doing that. This is me putting words one after the other, moving the needle, keeping the momentum going … even if it’s only a teeny tiny bit at a time.

It’s something. And something, most of the time, is better than nothing.

Know what else is better than nothing?

Cat gifs.

nothing GIF

A Quickie about Geeks and Cups

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Because I am a geek, my co-workers, colleagues, and students didn’t think it was odd that I got a Star Wars tattoo over the summer.

Because I am a geek, nobody thinks twice about my Doctor Who lanyard or the assortment of posters featuring fictional characters hung up in my office.

Because I am a geek, students are quick to include me in conversations about which Marvel movie is best or which superhero would win in a fight. (I don’t actually know. Marvel movies are great fun but I can’t say I’m super-invested in them, and I definitely for sure don’t know which one would win in a fight — except it would totally be Thor — and I double for sure definitely don’t know anything about the comics, which always disappoints them when they ask.)

Because I am a geek, I pay something of a price when it comes to discussions of real “man things” like football (American) or football (proper) or baseball or, lol, basketball. On these topics I root for my home teams and my alma maters, when I can be bothered, and know virtually nothing of the respective leagues at large.

And because I am a geek, when I lost my Star Wars cup, it was returned to me within a week.

The cup itself isn’t special — it features characters from the second-worst Star Wars movie, after all, and as such I wouldn’t care about it too much — but it was given to me by a student who said, earnestly, that I was like a father to him.

So when it appeared on my desk after going missing for a week, I was pleasantly surprised. I tracked down the colleague who returned it, who said “oh yeah, it said Star Wars, so I figured it was yours.”

REUNITED and it feels so refreshing

Geekiness has its perks.

A Quickie on the Snooze Button

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There’s a beautiful line in High Fidelity:

“Did I listen to pop music because I was depressed? Or was I depressed because I listened to pop music?”

To dumbify it a little bit, it becomes:

Does the music we listen to set the mood or does our mood dictate the music we pick?

And to generalize it a bit further, it becomes:

Does our mood dictate our circumstances, or do our circumstances dictate our mood?

I like to think that mood dictates circumstances: that we can choose to think and feel a certain way and thus to take control over how things affect us and how we move through the world. That seems to be mostly true, most of the time.

But it’s not entirely true. Sometimes you can’t put a smile on your face no matter how much you tune up your facial muscles. Sometimes you can’t force yourself to tough it out when you’re totally tapped out.

These thoughts fought for dominance this morning as I pressed the snooze alarm instead of getting out of bed to go on my regular 3-mile run. Days when I run are better days. I’m clearer, calmer, better able to deal with whatever comes. Days I don’t? Less so. So to choose not to run — when I’m awake on time, especially, and just feel like sleeping in — is to choose against the rest of my day.

I know this. And yet I snoozed. Because while I recognize that not running is a mistake, I also know that forcing the effort when you’re tired and beaten down beyond reason and it’s only three weeks into the school year is a mistake.

Was I unjustly and wrongly lazy? Or was I righteously claiming a few precious minutes of recuperation?

Did I let myself snooze because I was too tired to run? Or was I too tired to run because I let myself snooze?

Smash Bill Murray GIF by Groundhog Day

A Quickie from the Dentist’s Office

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“It’s a wonder you’re not in more pain,” my dentist said.

I nodded around a mouthful of q-tips and numbing agents, staring vacantly up into a blinding fluorescent ring. “I guess I’m lucky like that,” I meant to say, but it came out more “ahh gehh ahh luhee li fhaaa”.

(I wonder if dentists ever understand anything we say with all their instruments crammed in our mouths, or if they’re just good at pretending to. Or, maybe more likely, we’re so desperate for any semblance of normality and human contact in such a vulnerable moment that we greedily interpret their disinterested nods and “mmhmm’s” for deep empathy. Either way, the dynamic is very strange.)

He nodded absently and went to work with the drill, while I listened to the music of the vibrations inside my skull.