Friday, March 22, 2024
The 2024 Inspired Home Show
Thursday, March 14, 2024
My 4 Year Pandemic Anniversary
"Four years! My God, four years!"
—Dr. Lutkin, A Bitter Pill to Swallow
It's been four years, and my soul is weary. I am so tired of the world. For the past few years I have been accused of "living in fear" when really I was living in a constant state of rage. And now I feel nothing but exhaustion and despair.
Since it's an election year, politicians keep asking, "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" I don't think anyone on either side would like my answer. Both Trump and Biden and their respective administrations are to blame for the mess we're in, whether the media and the general public want to acknowledge it or not. Mainstream publications minimize the danger of pandemic the same way they minimized the danger of Trump, and they fail to hold Biden accountable for his broken campaign promises the same way that they fail to inform the public about how many people are still dying of COVID.
One of many broken campaign promises from 2020 |
Since 2020, I've made an effort to learn as much about COVID as I can, and I never stopped studying. That's why I know that COVID is airborne, you don't want to catch it multiple times, it lingers in the air for hours, one-way masking isn't enough, ventilation is extremely important, the current vaccines are only halfway effective, the virus keeps on mutating, you can still catch it outside, and that immunity to it doesn't even last that long! But few people I speak to in person are interested in any of these facts.
I feel like a prophet of doom who no one wants to listen to. I am a voice crying out in the wilderness. It seems like no one wants to hear. I try to share what I've learned about COVID and the information is met with hostility, indifference, or silence. It's easier to just withdraw from all the unmasked people in my life and be alone. I feel a profound sense of alienation and isolation, as though I don't live in a shared reality with anyone else. Other people are around me and not with me, it seems. At some points I have even begun to cynically wonder, what do they have to offer me besides COVID?
Late last spring, I discovered some online communities of people who are still taking precautions. Talking to them has been the only antidote to the loneliness of being a lone masker in so many of the places I go. Since then, I've met people from all over the world of all ages and walks of life who are trying to protect themselves and others from COVID. Many are severely immunocompromised and have been increasingly shut out of public life as protective measures like mask mandates and vaccine requirements have been rolled back. Many of them can't go to work, or travel, or go grocery shopping now. Some have long COVID and are rightfully concerned that another infection will make their health problems even worse. Their conditions include sickle cell anemia, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, cancer, and immune deficiencies. Many of them had been thriving despite their illnesses pre-pandemic, but now because of everyone else's selfishness, they have no choice but to hunker down at home for their own safety, or that of the vulnerable children or other loved ones in their households. For many it has meant the loss of livelihoods, hobbies, and human connection. If you're not part of these communities, you probably have no idea how much those disabled by COVID or those who are at high risk of horrible outcomes have lost because of this. Careers, educational opportunities, relationships... These are the people who have been flippantly told "just stay home" over and over again by jerks on the internet. And do reporters interview them when protective measures get rolled back? Of course not. They're too busy interviewing the feckless fools who protested against mask mandates, just like they went out of their way to center the opinions of racist Trump supporters hanging out in diners. Virtual communities are all high-risk people have left, so they have built small but thriving parallel universes while the rest of the world ignores them.
But as I said, these communities are small, so small that they are not conducive to finding my ideal clients, art collectors, or a romantic partner. There have even been times when I've felt like the only interest that we have in common is our COVID caution. As much I appreciate my new virtual connections, I'm missing out on so much by taking precautions that others no longer will. Sometimes it can feel like I've given up on an ocean of opportunities to go live in a safe little fishbowl. I have been forced to rely on the internet, where my art is rarely seen by the right people. The internet, whose algorithms are always asking too much of me. And as I mentioned in a previous post, when I've opened my studio and required masking (and provided beautiful masks), half the potential visitors get an attitude and leave. And why? Because most art spaces are run by people who take no mitigations at all, and most of the interior design trade shows have policies like this:
So why am I still taking precautions? Because every time I read new research about what the virus can do, my first thought is, I have enough problems. I don't need this. So many of my dreams have never come true and I would prefer not to add to my preexisting miseries. I am concerned about the toll that long COVID would take on my life, not just physically and emotionally, but financially. My fields of interest are precarious enough as it is.
I have read too many horror stories at this point. All it takes is one time. All it takes is one person.
One celebratory birthday meal in a restaurant.
One opening reception in a poorly-ventilated gallery.
One crowded flight.
One champagne toast in a busy art fair booth.
One small dinner party.
One hair appointment.
One family member who didn't show any symptoms.
One medical appointment with careless doctors and nurses.
One car ride with a friend.
One office party in a crowded conference room.
And it's a wrap.
I have seen too much now. I know too much now. And I can't let my guard down now.
I also can't let my guard down because I now know too much about the damage the virus can do. It's an insidious virus that deceptively appears to be a cold but causes so much damage covertly. Unlike pandemic diseases in movies and TV shows, the drama of the suffering COVID-19 causes happens silently at first, behind the scenes later. It can cause organ damage, infertility, impotence, miscarriages, stillbirths, premature aging, and it can wreck the immune system. It makes existing health problems worse.
A recent, catastrophic example of that was laid bare in the circumstances surrounding the death of one of my favorite mutuals on Twitter, Shafiqah Hudson, aka Fiqah, aka @sassycrass. When she wasn't sounding the alarm about fake accounts wreaking havoc on social media or sharing witty remarks and insightful social commentary, she was very open about her health issues. She was already suffering from some serious ailments and getting infected with COVID 3 times made everything worse. Her second infection led to kidney failure. She already was dealing with heart failure. She died tried to crowdfund for medical care and housing. She caught COVID for the third time in the hospital. Not just kidney failure and heart failure but a societal failure all contributed to her demise.
Internet trolls would write her off as just another statistic and one even called her a hypochondriac in response to a memorial I posted (before I blocked that jerk and hid their comment). Shafiqah was just one of the many amazing people who was left to "fall by the wayside," as Dr. Fauci said. Or whose death would be explained away by some nit-picking weirdo who would pedantically ask if she died "with" or "from" long COVID, seeking to invalidate the meaning of her life. I remain heartbroken because she was brilliant and deserved so much more, and I know there are more stories like hers.
There has been so much death, and yet so little public grieving. Maybe that partially explains the collective denial. I blame the rest on corporate and political interests. They are the ones who are successfully manufacturing the consent to be infected repeatedly. They have popularized the wishful thinking that the coronavirus would somehow miraculously evolve to become milder. They spread made-up nonsense about "immunity debt" while denying the very obvious fact that children keep bringing COVID home to their families because schools no longer mandate masks or tests and most didn't bother updating their ventilation systems.
Companies keep having super-spreader events with no safe or creative alternatives. If you want to move up the ladder at work or network to find more clients, you have to subject yourself to being exposed to the virus again and again in poorly ventilated rooms where no one is masking because the food and drinks being served are the main attraction.
Our government says "we have the tools," but the tools they've given us are expired tests that give false negatives and vaccines that don't do enough to prevent transmission. The CDC sounds like the Cigarette Smoking Man from The X-Files, lying, denying, and hiding the truth from us all the time.
Perhaps they are honoring their Tuskegee Syphilis Study era and returning to a time when they would rather study how a disease progresses than prevent it, if their new quarantine guidelines are any indication.
Perhaps in a generation or 2 they will apologize (too little, too late) to the remaining survivors and their descendants, as they did for the Tuskegee Experiment.
I have lost so much respect for the authority and expertise of so many public figures. Life-and-death policies have been shaped by the opinions of "experts" with irrelevant credentials. We are perpetually sleepwalking into disaster, trapped in a viral quagmire. The only hope that I see of getting out of this mess is the possibility of the nasal vaccines that have shown promising results in monkeys and hamsters and are now ready to be tested on humans. But otherwise, it seems like the efforts to minimize and normalize COVID seem to have paid off. We lack the patience and endurance to get through this as a society, and the people in power are taking advantage of that. Maybe television, texting and TikTok have destroyed our collective attention spans. The result is complacency and apathy.
I felt profoundly disheartened when someone I care about deeply told me that if he dies of COVID, it was just his time to go. It wasn't the first time I've heard this sort of Final Destination fatalism expressed. Are we all so dead inside that this is how we have come to look at life-threatening situations? Is this resignation to a tragic fate shaped by our constant exposure to senseless mass shootings and other random acts of violence? I want everyone to understand that death is not the only bad outcome, and neither is hospitalization. Some people have been left in such agony from long COVID that they have chosen to be euthanized in Switzerland, or they've taken matters into their own hands.
"The burden of disease and disability from Long COVID is on par with the burden of cancer and heart disease.
— Dr. Lucky Tran (@luckytran) January 18, 2024
The best way to prevent Long COVID is to prevent COVID in the first place. There is no Long COVID without COVID."
Brilliant testimony by @zalaly! #HELPLongCovid pic.twitter.com/Cw24Eg8TiJ
Were people only choosing to wear masks and get vaccinated to score political points and dunk on their enemies? A lot of Democrats seemed to think that Biden's words about the "pandemic of the unvaccinated" only applied to stubborn MAGA people and not small children or others who either couldn't get vaccinated because of certain medical conditions or who have conditions that make vaccines less likely to work for them. Belief in Biden's words about the vaccine meant that everyone could be "vaxxed and relaxed." Never mind the possibility of breakthrough infections. (Remember when they used to call them breakthrough infections?) Never mind the fact that the virus keeps on mutating and the immunity to it doesn't last. Never mind the fact that since most Americans have had COVID by now, most of us are actually at higher risk of bad outcomes from additional infections than we realize.
And then there are Christians who insist that wearing a mask means you lack faith, but not wearing one means you have a "faith over fear" mentality. They treat COVID the way snake-handling churches treat pythons. Funny how the same faith community that
so adamantly taught me to stand in the courage of my convictions is so
opposed to be doing just that when it comes to dealing with an airborne
virus. This is a test from God and they have failed it repeatedly. They have no idea how many parishioners no longer attend because every Sunday is a super-spreader. These are the fellow Christians I know from online COVID-cautious groups.
Some poorer countries never got a vaccine. COVID is spreading through prisons, homeless shelters and migrant and refugee camps all over the world, compounding human suffering. You would never know that looking at the smiling, unmasked faces of glittering celebrities at fancy award shows, or from the considerably less glamorous yet similarly maskless politicians in Washington. They have access to tools the rest of us may have never even heard of.
Yet the public scarcely knows about the far UV lights, high-tech air filtration systems, highly reliable tests, and nasal disinfectants the elites can afford to take advantage of. We watch these people on TV without knowing of all the hidden mitigations that are propping up the appearance of normalcy. Meanwhile, the rest of us are playing games with a virus that's in the same category as plague, rabies, tuberculosis, and anthrax.
Is it ignorance or sadism? Incompetence or malice? Some of it seems to be motivated by short-sighted foolishness. Do you really think that people who've gotten POTS from long COVID will want to go to your theme park to ride roller-coasters? Do you think people who've lost their sense of taste from the virus will want to spend money on expensive restaurant food they can't fully enjoy? Do you expect people suffering from chronic fatigue to take expensive vacations on your cruise ships and at your resorts? Do you think people who now have chronic pain will be excited about standing in long lines in an airport so they can cram themselves into an uncomfortable seat on one of your planes?
But it's not just a lack of foresight and a profit motive, not when our captains of industry are the kinds of sociopaths who, when they finally go to hell, will try to find a way to get their assistants to bring them water because they're thirsty. Of course they're fine with social murder. These are the same people who brought us forever chemicals and microplastics. They want plausible deniability. They don't want us to be able to sue them. They want a chain of transmission that never breaks. They don't want us to be able to pinpoint the source of a COVID exposure. They want us to be complacent, compliant, and complicit.
That's why they keep lying. That's why they stopped collecting data and made what little data is still available much harder to find. That's why the news keeps trying to give us all a false sense of security in a fake-normal world that is far more dangerous that most Americans realize.
But if all you've been paying attention to is the way the major corporate news sources have been reporting on the pandemic, you have no idea how bad things really are. So you let the CDC and the President get away with telling you what you wanted to hear and never bothered to look beneath the surface. You plan events with no regard for safety. You don't cancel your travel plans when you're sick anymore. You started coming to work sick again and you stopped testing. You started sending your kids to school sick again and stopped testing them. And you are unwittingly part of the problem and have unintentionally made yourself an asymptomatic carrier or the host of the next variant mutation.
Don't yell at me. Yell at your local health department and the CDC. Yell at your boss for not protecting you at work and your school district for not protecting your children. Yell at the restaurant and hospitality lobby for prioritizing their profits. Yell at the CEO of Delta Airlines for shortening the length of the quarantine. Yell at your mayor, your governors, your state and local representatives. Yell at the President for not doing enough.
I don't care what everyone else is doing. Sometimes everyone else is wrong.
But I'm not wrong. I'm early.
RELATED MEDIA:
The CDC is gaslighting us about COVID (again). Here’s the truth.
3 COVID Experts on Why the CDC’s Isolation Guidelines Are Bad for Public Health
AAPD Admonishes Proposed Changes to CDC COVID Isolation Guidance
Coming To Terms With Long COVID: Deepa’s Story
The Isolation of Having Long COVID as Society Moves On
Disabled people's exclusion from indoor spaces is a civil rights violation, not an annoyance
Why are you afraid of the falling anvils? (Response to NPR essay)
Covid Just Killed The Last Person Living In An Iron Lung
Hidden COVID virus found nearly two years after infection
PMC COVID-19 Forecast, March 11, 2024
Is It Dangerous to Keep Getting COVID-19?
Covid scientists issue warning new variant could cause global 'heart failure pandemic'
Pandemic Profitability: Understanding the CDC's Proposed COVID-19 Isolation Guidelines
Why Are We Still Flu-ifying COVID?
A pandemic that won’t go away – as COVID enters its 5th year, NZ needs a realistic strategy
Here’s how much coronavirus people infected with COVID-19 may exhale
Spillover (esp. the chapter on SARS)
Thursday, February 29, 2024
My discontent with content
Joining Threads has me thinking about how I would prefer to show up in the world of social media. I've been at it for 15 years. I've developed a communication style that feels natural and comfortable for me. I share in a way that doesn't make me so uncomfortable that I feel like I have to hide, deactivate, or take breaks. I share in a way that doesn't invite the kinds of interactions I prefer not to have. I don't want unsolicited advice, critiques, and people acting too familiar with me. I have too much respect for friendship to expect it to happen instantaneously. I have seen the weird parasocial relationships some social media users have with each other and want no part of that at all. Honestly, I just do the bare minimum at this point. I copy and paste. I have a document with a master list of all my repeating social media posts. Same pictures, different words; same words, different pictures. I see my social media as a bulletin board, billboard, or bullhorn, not a way to start a community. I don't actually want to start a community, anyway. I'm fortunate to already be a part of some wonderful communities online and in-person, and I feel like Facebook groups, Discord, Zoom calls, forums, specialty websites, and other smaller networks have been a better way to facilitate that kind of interaction on the internet than social media sites like Threads and Twitter.
After doing all the exercises in The Artist's Way and Walking in this World, I feel very protective of my creative process. It's not something that I feel comfortable sharing in high-speed time-lapse videos. I have no desire to invite an audience to pack shipments with me or get ready with me. Not sure if it's due to my age or my introversion, but I often prefer to just be left alone.
I want to work alone and then share my finished product with an audience. I don't see performance as a part of my art practice. I don't enjoy live painting. I want to be alone with my supplies and my ideas. I don't want input from a focus group. I'm not looking for collaborators or brand partnerships. I don't want to show everyone what my process is. I feel like my process is none of the internet's business.
Perhaps I've been subjected to too many micromanaging bosses and nit-picking teachers over the years, but at this point in my life, I don't want to be judged, watched, and second-guessed as I work. I would like to work without the suffocating presence of hovering know-it-alls giving me the kind of performance anxiety that ultimately blocks artists.
When I watch biopics and documentaries about artists and writers who lived in the past, I see how they were allowed to be aloof and mysterious if they wanted. No one was pressuring them to share every aspect of their daily routines and personal habits. No one expected them to. I find that quite enviable.
I've written before about how much I hate the expectation to overshare in the name of "authenticity." My unpopular opinion is that I don't owe the internet the whole entire story of my life. I'm not interested in satisfying the curiosity of nosy people on the internet. I don't work for Instagram, Threads, Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. I work for me. I shouldn't have to put on a fashion show or perform a choreographed dance routine to sell a painting. My art should speak for itself.
Joining Threads has also introduced me to a lot of influencer accounts that I don't follow and has given me a chance to learn more about their struggles through the posts they share. And that's given me a lot to reconsider when it comes to how my feelings about them have changed over the years, namely my resentment. I think what I resent is the outsize influence that influencers have had on how those of us in other industries are expected to show up on social media. The advice on how to succeed at social media comes from that lens. And that advice ultimately trickles down from the pyramid scheme shaped world of motivational speakers, coaches, and sales trainers, the same phony garbage advice I was forced to listen to when I worked in retail. I was supposed to use neurolinguistic programming to manipulate customers into buying things whether they wanted them or not. I was supposed to strictly follow sales scripts. My micromanaging bosses were spying on me from adjacent room vignettes to make sure I did.
Putting on a show, mugging for the camera like a kid on a Disney or Nickelodeon sitcom, effervescent, carefree, and upbeat, embodying the Great American stock characters of the beauty queen and the door-to-door salesman, all pageantry and spectacle and no substance are the things the experts say we all must do for engagement and likes.
And when we're done mining our personal lives for material, we're encouraged to look around and see if there's anyone in our vicinity who we can use for that purpose. That has led to a cringeworthy trend of eavesdropping and being a tattletale as content. I see this as an outgrowth of our see-something-say-something post Patriot Act milieu. Little by little, with every smart device and social network, we have surrendered our privacy and subjected ourselves to endless surveillance. But it's not just the apps that are telling on us. We are telling on ourselves. I now know entirely too much about complete strangers against my will because of their oversharing content.
Art and content are two different things. My art is not content, but sometimes I make content about my art. Art, to me, is something that is intended to last. A painting or sculpture you want to live with, a book you're happy to add to your shelf, a movie you want to watch again, a song you can't stop listening to... all those are things that were done for the art. And content is fleeting. I see content as something you make to promote the art, a commercial for the art, a trailer for the book or the movie. So in my mind, art is timeless and content is time-sensitive. Acknowledging the difference between art and content helps me keep things in perspective.
Related Reading:
Want to sell a book or release an album? Better start a TikTok. - Vox
How TikTok became a place for tattletales
Reesa Teesa’s ‘Who TF Did I Marry’ & The Highs & Lows Of Oversharing On TikTok