The weather has been rather unpredictable: searing hot sun for a moment, and then torrential heavy rain. This morning we almost had to plead with a restaurant owner to sit outdoors – they asked if we had a reason, and my partner responded that we are covid cautious, so they relented. Unfortunately it started raining very heavily less than 15 minutes after we were seated, so they had to cancel our order even though the food was already being prepared.
We have had to tell people we are “covid cautious” several times whether we are travelling or in Singapore, though we are not sure if they actually understand what we mean. Most of the time it is to justify a seemingly unreasonable request to them – like wanting to sit outdoors in the hot sun where nobody wants to step out of the comfortable air-conditioning to serve us. Once in Singapore we told a restaurant server we want to sit outdoors because we are covid cautious, and they became unreasonably angry. The word “covid” has become like an unspeakable word, and people like us who would still like to avoid the virus have become social pariahs.
That a virus is airborne and therefore indoor-dining is high risk shouldn’t be too difficult to understand even for people without a science background. But it somehow is. Even for people who understand it they don’t want to understand, because it would mean acknowledging the fact that we are now constantly being surrounded by something that can easily disable us.
Nothing much has changed since omicron arrived, the variant that caused a pandemic that is too contagious to control. Waves are still high now, one after another, while hospitalisation rates are still high in many countries. The virus never really went away. But somehow because we are tired of it we are now pretending it is over, and it is now safe to do anything because it is “endemic”. Somehow the word “endemic” has changed to become a word that means harmless.
After living in a generation that seemed to go from strength to strength in terms of knowledge and science, I am now witnessing an actual rapid decline. It feels unbelievable.
My partner and I are now being treated as weird people, because we wear masks, don’t dine indoors, and we don’t dine with family or friends. Recently I have a fellow covid cautious acquaintance who hung out with a group of close friends after they insisted they “recovered” from a recent infection. Sadly, now the acquaintance’s family member is now positive with covid. Imagine reading countless studies that show that the virus is systematically damaging, then trying really hard to protect themselves by making so many lifestyle tradeoffs for years, only to get infected because a friend they trusted let them down. People also don’t know asymptomatic spread is a thing.
Doing the right thing in this society can be a very lonely endeavour, and it doesn’t only apply to covid cautiousness. I am glad I have a partner doing this with me and she’s actually more cautious than me, so she’s always assessing the risk for us. I used to joke a lot that I would be a nun if not for my partner, but in this climate I don’t think even being a nun would be feasible for me, because I doubt monastics are covid cautious.
I’ve also been called “bonkers” on facebook by an acquaintance because of our very public covid cautiousness. This person hardly interacts with my stuff but saw the need to tell me I’m bonkers. I am not alone in being treated this way, evident with the stories shared by fellow covid cautious people.
Why are we the ones regarded as bonkers when we are the ones following the science, and that we want to do our best to protect our health? Why do we live in a society where mask-wearing is so triggering to people?
Thankfully for us the heavy rain lightened after a while. We tried to takeout food from a few restaurants but they don’t do takeout at all. Felt really discouraged – just because we are careful about our health we had to spend an hour trying to look for food. I guess there is always the convenience store, and some zero-covid people may feel we deserve this because we are travelling unnecessarily. What a strange space to occupy: pariahs to the average people because we are moderately covid cautious, pariahs to the zero-covid people because we are travelling.
I told my partner we’ll take a last shot at one final restaurant before giving up. What a lovely surprise when we saw sheltered, beautiful out-door sitting:
Despite the difficulties of being covid cautious while travelling, I am still rather grateful to be able to travel. Yes we mostly don’t get to choose what to eat, instead we are directed by the places that have outdoor seating and are kind enough to let us actually dine there.
^This is an example of a restaurant that had outdoor sitting but they are more like props. The server said no when we requested to dine there, but someone came out and gave us the go-ahead. Most of the time we have had to ask several restaurants before we can actually find one, so we are always glad to be able to actually sit down and eat.
But I love the experiences that can only come with travelling. The awkwardness of the language barrier, the grace that is being shown despite all the communication difficulties and misunderstandings, the challenges that come with navigating and being in unfamiliar environments.
In Singapore I feel half of my consciousness is being shut off due to the familiarity and the fact that Singapore can be driven from one end to the other in less than an hour. We are constantly trying to experience our country with renewed eyes, but we cannot overcome our subconscious being in auto-pilot mode.
I don’t feel like I have many reasons to live – unlike many people I don’t particularly like chasing goals or even having a purpose in life. But I love my partner and when I am not existentially depressed I like to feel that my consciousness is expanding. Travel is something that consistently enriches my soul – it adds colours to my dull existence.
Looking forward to: potential friend adventure to Seattle this weekend 😃
Stuff I did:
10 hours consulting — sent my big signs off to the printer!!! 😱 and submitted another deliverable to a different client
1 hour writing
installed software on my new work computer — why do I have to add a program just to move my taskbar these days? 🤦♀️ — trying out a font manager (FontBase)
did a make-up weekend walk with my friend at the local State Park (where there was a horse show going on so it was busier than desired 🙃)
met a friend I hadn’t seen in a while for a mid-week mid-morning walk to beat the heat
explored a new-to-me park with a third friend
picnic dinner and a wander with the husband at a pretty creek
more weeding while I was out watering the backyard plants — I tried watering in the evening and the mosquitoes were brutal
rewatched Howl’s Moving Castle
did a big tidy-up-the-house session (because I didn’t feel like writing 😅)
went to Homebrew Website Club
played games with my sister
Dinners:
pasta with veggies
takeout: impossible burger with caramelized onions + strawberry milkshake
Mexican takeout: camarones with onions and peppers
baked potato with cheese and sour cream + fancy salad
grilled cheese + fancy salad redux
Thai takeout: pad thai with fried tofu
Reading:
Read Cat’s Cradle: The Mole King’s Lair by Jo Rioux and The Way of the Househusband Vol. 1 by Kousuke Oono
2 Craigs is a neat idea (a better format than the multi-person art blogs I had in college, where we had no prompts or schedule) — just wish they had an RSS feed 🤷♀️
An eye-opening segment on Brian Lehrer's show today. The first half is an interview with Hakeem Jeffries, you can skip that part, pretty standard stuff. It gets interesting at 17:50 when they take calls from listeners. A lot of different points of view from people of all ages, they're incredibly passionate, well thought-out, coherent. This is way better than the punditry you hear on news. The real crime here is that the insiders of the Democratic Party are taking control, after they were manipulated by the press. A total insider's route-around of the democratic process, it's just as bad imho as what the Repubs are planning around Election Day. The press did the same thing to NY governor Andrew Cuomo, who was elected by the people, and forced out without any legal process, and certainly not a vote. That experience argues in favor of when you're in doubt, do the thing the voters said to do. Anything else is very very questionable. Why are you taking control? Where are you authorized to do that? I think perhaps some of the Dems forget how huge an issue this was in the 2016 process. #
Historically it's unjustifiable. The NYT et al are grievously wrong, and that should be reflected on their op-ed pages. We've been here before, this is as much a hack as Hillary's Emails. Maybe you can't see it now, but win or lose, people are going to look at this period when we all lost our minds.#
I posted the above piece around the social web, I like the way it looks on Threads the best. #
Matt says some interesting new stuff is coming from Automattic now that WordPress 6.6 is out. Something for writers? Perhaps something that moves WordPress into a space adjacent to twitter-like systems? They just added support for Threads to WordPress, so now you can crosspost from a blog to a thread. Haven't tried it yet. They also have a new identity system built around Gravatar, announced in early June. It'll be interesting to see what they come out with. I wonder if there is a developer ecosystem building on this, and if they have an evangelism program. I have my own vision of how these things should work. #
Now that Elon Musk is giving so generously, dollars and flow, to the fascists, he's encouraging more of us to use Zuckerberg's twitter-like system, aka Threads. But Zuck isn't making it go down easy. There's a piece in Bloomberg (paywall) that says Trump is badass but isn't supporting either candidate. What could possibly go wrong? #
An eye-opening segment on Brian Lehrer's show today. The first half is an interview with Hakeem Jeffries, you can skip that part, pretty standard stuff. It gets interesting at 17:50 when they take calls from listeners. A lot of different points of view from people of all ages, they're incredibly passionate, well thought-out, coherent. This is way better than the punditry you hear on news. The real crime here is that the insiders of the Democratic Party are taking control, after they were manipulated by the press. A total insider's route-around of the democratic process, it's just as bad imho as what the Repubs are planning around Election Day. The press did the same thing to NY governor Andrew Cuomo, who was elected by the people, and forced out without any legal process, and certainly not a vote. That experience argues in favor of when you're in doubt, do the thing the voters said to do. Anything else is very very questionable. Why are you taking control? Where are you authorized to do that? I think perhaps some of the Dems forget how huge an issue this was in the 2016 process. # 
