Featured Refresh
Text & Image
How is the coronavirus pandemic affecting your life right now? Tell us about your experiences, feelings, and thoughts.
... The record temperature recorded in Death Valley of 130 degrees F reminds me not to forget to feel despairing about the climate crisis. The pandemic has made everything feel like it's falling apart 8/19/20 Wildfire smoke from up north, and it's raining ash. Air quality monitors say unhealthy for sensitive groups/orange first thing today. By 1 pm it has crossed into Unhealthy (red). We're so lucky not to be in the middle of the fire, but our strategy in the past was to close the windows even in the heat and to wear a valved mask outside. Now I just feel hopeless enough about the future (keep pondering the fact that my injury keeps me from having the colonoscopy I should be having now, and knowing my own history and my family's, that makes it super likely I will die of colon cancer at some point -- is this just pandemic depression talking?) that we're just keeping the windows open so we don't get so hot, and going about life pretty normally except that S won't go running. Y and D had to evacuate to a hotel farther south with their cats. ...
February 9, 2021
Text Only
Let's talk about masks. When and where do you wear them, if at all? Has that changed over the course of the pandemic? If so, what's changed?
I continue to wear masks indoors everywhere--in France it's still mandated inside any business or public space so nothing has changed. I can't believe the lax attitude in the US and it makes me glad I'm not there. I don't always wear a mask outside if I'm just meeting my friend for a walk or am out walking with family and we don't have any contact with anyone else. But I do wear the mask even outside if I'm in the town; most other people don't though. Last week I was invited to dinner and I went, though I struggled with myself about how to manage the mask issue: I ended up not wearing one because we were sat right away at the table with drinks and snacks and it was just a student apartment so there wasn't much other sitting space...I felt really uncomfortable the whole time. I won't do that again. Today we are invited to lunch, but it will be outside--I feel like I should still wear a mask because of the transmissibility of the delta variant--at least when we're not eating. It's hard to know what the best practice is.
August 16, 2021