We Can't Rewind, We've Gone Too Far

I got my booster shot yesterday, which has knocked me out like all the others. My immune system would like to know wtf I'm playing at.

Current pandemic obsession is embroidery, and at the moment specifically needlelace (modern explanation, Victorian explanation), which is something like embroidery without the cloth. It's also much more manageable than bobbin lace; if I tried to set up a lace pillow covered in pins and things hanging from strings around Pepper terrible things would happen.

I have been throwing myself into that with all the enthusiasm of someone who is avoiding preparing for the new semester and also has a bunch of Agatha Christie audiobooks on Libby, but in the interests of avoiding eyestrain, and also because I just had a shower and am now utterly out of energy, have a meme.

( AO3 Averages Meme )

I was going to post a link to quilt pictures here and then I thought I should post pictures of the other quilts I've done and then I realized I didn't really have any good pictures of them and then it was two months later.

So here are pictures of a quilt I finished in March! (Tumblr) (Twitter)

And here are some of the other things I did in the past two months that didn't make it here:

Learned more programming

A bunch of unrelated thoughts about The Old Guard on Tumblr: one, two, three

Listened to some French podcasts

Signed up for my local city councillor's mailing list, which I recommend if you are that kind of person and have a decent city councillor

Had meta-thoughts on omegaverse (Tumblr) (Twitter)

Provided a blood sample for the Ontario Health Study's COVID antibody study (Tumblr) (Twitter)

Was moderately snide about "accessible design" by non-disabled people (Tumblr) (Twitter)

I can't speak for how they're treating faculty and staff (my program's student advisor seems extremely overwhelmed, but that may not be new), but at least in terms of interaction with students my college's conduct during the pandemic has been exemplary. Primarily, we get clear communication, a full semester in advance, how classes are going to work. (That is, since May - it's not like they could have given us a semester's notice for summer classes.)

Almost everything has been online and the campus is almost entirely locked down. This has the negative effect that more of the cost is put on the students, who have to buy lab equipment for themselves that would otherwise be provided on campus, but for me it's still well within the range of my OSAP grants.

On a less systemic level, every professor I've asked for an extension has immediately said "Yes, of course, no, I don't need to see a note," which has been nice.

That said, this is a technical college, and there are in fact some programs, like, for example, Aviation, that cannot be taught entirely virtually. So I have one in-person electronics lab course this semester. Due to failures of preparation and communication on the part of the provincial government, they had to add a bunch of sections after students had already signed up, with the result that my lab is on Sunday afternoons and only has nine other people in it. And then a 2km walk home in January because it's not really worth taking public transit right now.

The first couple labs were very straightforward "Have you forgotten how circuits work in the last ten months" exercises, but this week we were doing something slightly more complicated and I got to spend almost two hours cheerfully doing science in a space made for the purpose and with no interruptions. It was great.

So. Cadillac-Fairview malls use digital information kiosks to show you store locations, which are poor design compared to just using a goddamn map. Only one person can use them at a time, they require you to touch the screen, they take longer, you can't see the whole mall at a glance, etc. I have been generally annoyed by them for the past year or so as I go to job locations in various malls that I haven't visited before. But they were just annoying, and poor design, and a bad idea during a pandemic. Fine. Pretty much everything is these days.

Turns out they can also be used to nonconsensually collect biometric information. Which CF was then storing in a third-party database. Or, CF claims, the third party was continuing to store them without their knowledge. That's not a defense.

The cameras were deactivated in 2018 when the government started investigating. Cadillac Fairview refused to "commit to ensuring express, meaningful consent is obtained from shoppers should it choose to redeploy the technology in the future."

I want go out. I want to go dancing. I want to go write in a coffee shop. I want to go to Oasis. I want to go wander down Queen West and stop in any store that looks interesting. I want to go hang out in the library for hours. I want to go to the Island. I want to visit my sister in Windsor. I want to see who's doing outdoor theatre. I want to see Pixie. I haven't been on the TTC since March.

I want to go to Pride. I generally avoid the actual parade because the crowds are too much, but I want to go to Pride. The fact that I think Pride should be cancelled and I am glad it's cancelled and if it wasn't cancelled I wouldn't go anyway and would probably be writing angry emails to the committee does not immunize me from being lonely.

Virtual does not substitute for any of these. It can be its own good thing, but it is something different.

I think it's important. I think it's worth it. I think it's necessary. But I think it's easier to do if we acknowledge that it isn't easy.

So I was wondering why I wasn't really feeling much about the situation. There were specific anxieties, like dad being in the States, but in general I wasn't anxious and I didn't feel the need to check the news every hour and all my issues were more depression in reaction to the lockdown than the pandemic. And this is a coping mechanism in itself, which gaudior has written a post about that I'm not linking directly because I'm on mobile, but it was odd.

And now I've realized that what was actually happening is that my brain is dealing with the anxiety with its standard coping mechanism, which is somatization.

I haven't had serious anxiety like this in so long that I kind of just forgot about it. But yeah, that's how it goes - anxiety may or may not be noticeable on a conscious level but it goes straight to physical symptoms.

(I *also* have some kind of non-covid infection, labyrinthitis or something, but the anxiety is making it Much Worse and probably also responsible for me catching it at all given that I've barely seen people outside the house for three weeks.)

Also legitimate reasons or not, it's really annoying that when I *can't* write I really want to write and feel like I could if only I could concentrate, and when I have time to write it all goes to staring at the internet and distraction.

So.

My college is switching to online classes, except they haven't done this before in the middle of a semester and also half of my classes have really important lab components which can't be done from home. They're saying the semester will end when scheduled; I kind of doubt that. They're supposed to have figured out how this works by Monday, and until then I get to review and be anxious.

All of my work's clients are cancelling their inventory counts, obviously. I am not seriously financially affected by this.

My 79-year-old father decided to fly to Texas last weekend. He's back now where we have free healthcare and my stepmother is in an AirBnB so that's resolved, ish, but wow, Monday night was not fun.

Unfortunately being stuck at home with my mother all day is not ideal for my mental health, but ... there's nowhere else to go and if there was I'd have to go on public transit. And it's still too cold to spend much time writing in parks. But I'm generally doing okay. Lots of knitting.

The problem with saying "use the time to write!" is that this is a major disruption of routine, with bonus anxiety, which does not actually lend itself to increased creativity. I don't have that much focus for reading, either, including my DW list, which come to think of it is probably a warning sign (so, now I know). There has nevertheless been some writing. Kate Bornstein is a treasure.

I am sort of doing more on twitter, but I would not really recommend going on twitter if you don't want ALL CURRENT EVENTS ALL THE TIME.

Recommendations for podcasts accepted, no horror or true crime, without frequent interviews or changing guests every episode. Basically I want to listen to a small fixed group of people talking about things they are interested in that will not give me nightmares. Examples are Jay and Miles XPlain the XMen, Lingthusiasm, and usually Sawbones.