Featured Refresh
Text & Image
How is the coronavirus pandemic affecting your life right now? Tell us about your experiences, feelings, and thoughts.
This week has me feeling a bit like I’ve fallen down a rabbit’s hole. Politics aside, the mixed messages on COVID are other worldly. More people seem to be out and about. There’s more traffic on the road, more cars in parking lots outside of restaurants and stores. More invites from friends to get together, with social distancing of course. Yet cases are on the rise, and The Presidents gets it which proves no one is immune. Then he gets an experimental cocktail and seems to indicate this is a cure and we should not be afraid. I guess he thinks it’s all over and It’s no big deal. Yet the cocktail contains stem cells, which will be interesting to see how that plays out with Pro-lifers who clearly will have to abstain right? And it’s experimental so not available to us. And the cost was tens of thousands, and we don’t know that he’s out of the woods yet. And contrast that with the video of the sobbing nurse who is furious at his indifference in social distancing because she has done chest compressions on hundreds of patients and knows this is not a joke for anyone else. Occasionally I pop on to one of the talk radio stations and am always amazed at the lies and vitriol that is allowed, and encouraged there. Having isolated and been so careful for so long to see the leader of our country speak and act with such indifference is another example of the parallel lives In other worlds some of my fellow Americans seem to be living in. Move over Peter, I guess I may be here awhile.
October 11, 2020
Text Only
We hear a lot these days about the economic impact of the pandemic. Has this been on your mind? If so, tell us what you're thinking.
I don't know where the economic effects of the pandemic will lead us, and I try to live day by day. My immediate family is not too badly affected - many of those I love are retired, so they are all right; most of my cousins have been able to keep their jobs. My sister, who is at the low end of the economic spectrum, has been able to get retail work. The person I worry about the most is my daughter, who is two years out of a film degree. The pandemic has prevented her from making the projects she organized for this year, and for which she still has funding. The pandemic has prevented her from carrying out work she was hired for this year and for which she tentatively is still on board to do next year. In the meantime she's been doing video work, so her skills are definitely in use, but she feels that this is an entire year out of her life in which she ought to have been getting a foot up in the industry, and in which absolutely nothing has happened. And I think she lives day to day as well, because it's not obvious how the entertainment industry will recover - or if there will be any difference for her in 2021. This entry doesn't really address the economy. I think that the entertainment industry, AND the global economy, in general, will recover: things will be DIFFERENT. Perhaps we will become less of a consumer society. Tourism will change. I could have written an entire entry on the aviation industry, rather than entertainment: airlines folding, pilots and aviation workers furloughed with little hope for future work; like entertainment, aviation will be DIFFERENT. But I feel that developments within the next few years will assist recovery. We are all waiting for a chance to work again and we are willing to work.
January 3, 2021