Featured Refresh
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How is the coronavirus pandemic affecting your life right now? Tell us about your experiences, feelings, and thoughts.
There's so much we can't do right now because of COVID -- so many ways we're stuck. Sometimes, though, the inability to do stuff we want to do makes us pay attention to other things we wouldn't necessarily do otherwise, or notice otherwise. This is the sunset my family and I watched over the weekend after a long (and unseasonably warm) day of playing board games, zooming into the really moving bat mitzvah of a family friend in another time zone, going for a walk, and hanging out in the backyard doing yardwork. Snuggled with my kids in the hammock with songs from Hamilton and the new Mary Poppins playing and just soaked it in.
December 15, 2020
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How has the coronavirus pandemic affected how you feel about yourself, others, or the world?
We're about a year and a half into this pandemic, and I'm genuinely surprised about what I've learned about myself in that time: I'm not as compassionate a person as I thought I was. There is a subreddit in which people post articles and photos of folks who were publicly anti-mask or anti-vaccination or both, and who subsequently ended up infected, hospitalized, or dead. I have to say I'm surprised at the internal glee I feel upon reading these posts. I'm not proud of myself about this. Maybe I should try to tamp it down. But reading about people who were virulently wrong about a public health matter, and then suffered as a result of their opinions... The worst one was a fellow who did not get vaccinated, got infected, was hospitalized and died, leaving his widow with seven children. Someone commented, "It looks like he didn't believe in protection for any part of his body". I laughed. I'm a horrible person.
September 1, 2021