Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (134)
December 26, 2022
Year 3 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 3, Day 274: Fluh. Smol is finally through hand foot mouth and then immediately caught another virus. *Slump*
They’re grouchy as all get out and I’m still tired as hell because my cold thing still hasn’t gone on its merry way. JB is sniffling a bit, too, may it go no further. We’re quite the merry band.
I have got exactly zero holiday spirit at this point in the week. Maybe it’ll change as we go along but I’m skeptical.
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What’s the opposite of self preservation instinct? I caught myself feeling today as if I were not rested, but as if I had enough of a break that I should start thinking about how we could possibly fundraise in 2023 without a functional Twitter. I don’t have much reach here on the blog, I don’t want to spam email folks. But I also don’t want to let the Lakota Giving Project wither away.
I asked a friend to holler at me to settle down if I try to start hatching plans too early. I really do need a real break before diving headfirst into new iterations of the project.
But surely brainstorming ideas isn’t doing anything?? I don’t want to use a fundraising platform, I’d stick to the easy and informal setup we have now with Ruth. Put together a page on the Giving page again and ask friends to share it? Maybe offer small rewards when someone gets us over a fundraising milestone? I wonder if that makes sense. Thoughts?
Year 3, Day 275: Smol was screechily excited to meet our friend’s cats, they’re already friends with JB, but that delight was their downfall. They’re really good at petting cats gently but they can’t help their squeal of excitement once petting commences and that squeal absolutely terrifies the cats who take off running. We practiced doing shh shh shh with a finger over our lips, they imitated that, but the second contact was made: *delighted cackle* and off goes the cat. I can’t fault their joy but it was working against them.
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Oh hey, I made a sale on Kindle Direct Publishing! A little book that I designed was bought by someone! That’s very exciting! I hope they like it.
Year 3, Day 276: I thought my congestion had finally moved to a clear mucus stage but no. Alas. Not yet.
I had stocked up on kids; medications, thinking we’d have enough to get through the end of the year before I had to worry and of course the Imp of the Illnesses overheard my nonsense. Bam, we’re halfway through the medication supply, no end of their illness in sight, and not a medication to be had from any store.
My dear friend happened to be around. He checked all the local stores I hadn’t checked (because I was pretty sure they wouldn’t have it either and I was right) and then ran over with some from their own supply because his partner had stocked up before the shortage without any notion a shortage was coming. That buys us about 7-8 more days, I think. Haven’t quite figured out the math on volume to doses to how long a single 4 oz bottle will last.
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I’m organizing all our receipts for the tax year. I’d dated several of them incorrectly and had to download another dozen or so. Usually I’m a lot better about keeping up with all the paperwork as we go through the year. This makes me mildly paranoid that I’ve forgotten to either record the donations or to download the receipt, or both, for others. For the moment, so far as I know, I’ve gotten that all together.
Year 3, Day 277: This time of year feels BEYOND hectic but there are some small bright spots. We got to visit with a very good friend. She was talking about buying me some clothes but I didn’t want them to go to the trouble, so I redirected with my current need I’ve been pondering: what kind of wallet can I switch to? My debate is between two fundamentally different shapes: a long slim zip around, vs a thick squat sort of shape. Having had both, I couldn’t decide.
She happened to have an old but never used wallet in their closet and so I have now inherited that. Perfect! It saved me the trouble of overthinking this for the next six to twelve months! But it didn’t ultimately deter them from buying me clothes which was the point. Whoops. But they were awfully nice sweaters and I’d just discovered four holes in one of my two turtlenecks so it worked out in the end.
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A Black professor I follow talked about how she grew up surrounded by Black people and was loved growing up, enough so that she was surprised by anti-Black racism when she encountered it as an adult. She was talking about this in relation to people disbelieving Meghan Markle’s not realizing how very very racist the UK was going to be towards her. I had a similar experience growing up within Asian culture. Asians have a real problem with anti-Blackness, that wasn’t a surprise to me but I learned to see it for what it was because I grew up playing with Black kids and anti-Blackness was easier to identify as wrong. I was surprised by Asians claiming to be superior Asians to others. I was, of course in this scenario, the inferior Asian. A boy I dated told me his mother would just have to deal with the fact that I was “an inferior Asian race” (paraphrased). She only wanted him dating the superior Asian races. Of course. I was offended but I was more surprised than anything at first because what? What’s your problem??
Year 3, Day 278: Smol’s whatever they’ve got, and my cough, seems to be finally on the mend so naturally, OF COURSE, JB spiked a fever of 104. They went from playing at top speed and top volume, of course, to dragging, no appetite, burning up, and exhausted with a headache and sore throat. I put them to bed at 7 pm and crossed my fingers.
That’s about all I can take of this week. I hope everyone’s holiday weekend will have gone well by the time you read this.
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Help! Our lovely elderly neighbor we have said hello to most mornings for the past few years as she passes by gave us an unexpected Christmas gift and a $25 gift card. I consider that a not-small present, especially when we don’t know them beyond 2-3 minute conversations. Our kids/grandkids don’t play together.
I have trouble with feeling transactional about gifts of any kind, it’s taken me 20 years to shut up and accept gifts from chosen family that are greater than what I can give them, so this throws me on a bit of a loop. What’s expected in a situation like this? Do I need to get them something? Do I not commit to a gift giving cycle and send them a warm thank you note? Would it be unforgiveably rude not to gift back to them? I really don’t know if there’s an etiquette for this.
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Thanks to Nicole and Maggie for highlighting these Donors Choose campaigns to support trans kids that only have a couple or a few funders and may not fund in time. Can we help them out?
We Don’t Ban Books – We Read Them – yay this has funded!
Reading without Barriers This has until Jan 28 to fund.
Not sure what’s going around — I think of myself as someone who never gets sick, but I’ve had some wicked sinus issues this last week, first time that ever happened to me. I hope that you and SMOL continue to mend! Likewise, JB.
As for your neighbor: I sometimes get gift cards and have no idea what to do with them, so pass them along. Is it possible this neighbor is in the stage of life of feeling like, “let’s pass things along to the next generation?”. If it were me, I’d reciprocate with warm thanks and something effusive about how much it means to the kiddoes to have neighbors who care about them. I’ve lived in neighborhoods where some of the neighbors (particularly those older than me) baked loaves of bread — loaves and loaves and loaves — and then went door to door, delivering these to people. It was lovely, and also kind of overwhelming!
Oh dear I hope your sinuses are recovering / recovered!
Thanks for the well wishes. We’re struggling a bit still, I’m hoping we are on firmer ground by next week.
That’s possible, they’re deep into the grandchild range of life. I just assumed they had plenty of their own folks to regift to. But a thank you note sounds like just the ticket and I love the writing prompt.
Happy day after Christmas!! I hope JB and all of you are mending.
My take on the neighbor gift: do not escalate or return in kind. Stick to your moon-gifting plan! If I were your neighbor it would delight me to get a drawing from JB and/or Smol along with a post-it (I.e. casual) thank-you.
Moon-gifting = non-gifting of course!
Happy post-Christmas week!
I have hopes of being not sick by next week. 🤞 It’s important to have dreams. 😆
Thank you for the vote!
I’d write elderly neighbor a thank you note but wouldn’t bother specifically getting them a gift. Maybe some other time of year if you do a bake sale or something I’d run over some excess desserts if you want to keep the reciprocity going, but again wouldn’t go tremendously out of the way for it.
On growing up and racism, I kind of had the reverse experience. I went to pretty diverse schools, and kids had no shortage of dumb racist things to say to each other that they had heard from their parents. It wasn’t until college that I got more exposed to racism as a structural force than individual epithets. I remember hearing for the first time from white LAC graduates that PoC can’t be racist (punching up vs. punching down sort of thing) and my immediate thought at the time was, “You sure haven’t met my Chinese dad.”
Thanks for the vote! A Happy New Year and thanks card sounds like a plan.
Ah that’s interesting. I think PoC can’t be racist towards white people in a destructive way because they don’t hold the power in that dynamic but Asians are virulently racist within Asian groups and against other minorities.
I most experienced it from Chinese people, and still do. I heard it explained as a need to establish hierarchy and it both makes a terrible kind of sense and also strikes me as horribly illogical to carry on determining some sort of pecking order whereby this Asian is better than that one etc while white supremacy rules over everything. Yuck.
Thank you for the boost!
Agree on the thank you card and not escalating!
You’re welcome!
Thanks for the vote!
aw jeez WTF are the superior Asians even?
My parents were very judgemental of… people who ‘wasted’ money, single parents/broken homes… with racism I noticed they never liked basically any of my (very few) white friends. They’d say things about native people like ‘they’re very musical’ which… I guess is a stereotype that is quite true but also, that generalisation is pretty racist…
Agree with others on how to handle the kindly elderly neighbour 🙂
I believe it is “whatever I am and you are not”, from the racists that I have observed. There’s something about Chinese folks in particular (again just in my experience) who think any other Asians are inferior.
Yeah there’s a whole lot of judginess without any notion of what people might be facing in their lives.