Uninhabited

 It's a pandemic and we've sent away the few students who were here. This is campus but looks as empty as a golf course.

This post's theme word is kapu (n), "taboo" (Hawaiian root). Even hanging out on the lawn is kapu in pandemic summer.

Quotes, summer 2020

I jotted down many quotes in this time interval, because every. single. social. interaction. now feels deeply meaningful and like a carefully conserved resource. Plus they're all happening over video chat, so my notebook is always at-hand. Here is a selection (some quotes were expurgated for being too personal, or too crass when out-of-context); my apologies that my name-randomizing algorithm does only one letter/person, and so has a lot of collisions in the namespace.

M: "I'm super-enjoying not owning things."

Z: "I'm sure there's middle-management goats."

M: "I have the, like, the limping-along ovary."

Z: "Moving online is just an endless stream of apps that stink."

B: "We're DnD role-playing millennial fantasy: we all have stable jobs and healthy relationships with good communication."

B: "Climb the clocktower?"
K: "That's the kind of thing I should wait until AFTER I have tenure to do."

J: "Filibuster #4 has been my favorite"

I: "I am confident our future department chair can be nimble and flexible in the upcoming Battle Royale."

Z: "A lot of this makes no sense."

K: "We learned: everything is bad and nobody is happy."

K: "I can't wait to read your bestselling business novel about How Not to be a Craven Bootlicker." 

Q: "Basically everything the administration does is a giant fuck-you to student culture."

Y: "... not disappointed with the decision, more disappointed with reality."

Y: "You can't compress coding time."

I: "What happens in a COVID year stays in a COVID year."

Z: "I have to look up what is legal or not legal in Pennsylvania."
Q: "Most things are legal if you don't get caught."

N: "[name redacted] stepped on my glasses. I'm trying to fix them."
N': "With a pine cone?"

Z: "All KINDS of things can happen!"
Q: "Meteors?"
Z: "Hurricane season's just getting started."

M: "Oooh, all this talk of working out, I'm sweating."

Z (offhandedly): "high-functioning democracy here"

M: "In theory, anything can be ruined with any move."

N: "If you go by feel you'll know what to do."
Z: "You might be setting your expectations of [name redacted] a bit high."

N: "Winter is coming." (w.r.t. self-haircuts)

Z: "Koi are domesticated carp. They'll eat trash. They're aquatic goats."

Z: "We need to think about how to teach our classes. We can't spend all our time doing other people's jobs."

M: "I don't like shoreline poop."

D: "To Americans right now, euros are fantasy currency."

N: "When I began my homeowning episode..."

Z: "I got the email that Swarthmore ran out of electricity." (i.e., power outage)
Z': "I like that phrasing."

Z: "Postmodern algebra... it's like Bauhaus meets rings and groups."

C: "[name redacted]'s like, this is lovely, I love being so confused."

C: "I tried to write 'an exercise left to the reader' in my homework."
Z: "In physics you can totally just insert a random minus sign to make it work."

C: "I ended up playing with my tmix configuration for a day and a half."
Z: "Quarantine life! ... why do something in 4 keystrokes when you could do it in 3?"

N: "He had it apart several times this week, doing exploratory surgery." (re: the dryer)

N: "You're living the life! Tomorrow you'll be 90 and you found a secret medication that lets you eat salami!"

Z: "I snoozed the email and hoped it would go away in a week. It has not gone away."

K: "We had a really similar form that was much shorter but still as stupid as this one."

N: "The serger so ups the quality of your sewing."
F: "It doesn't if you don't use it."

F: "Bike doula."
K: "I think you mean 'sherpa'."

K: "You're very badly-behaved children." (re: some adults)
F (parent): "They could be worse."

Z: "For upper-level courses I have no problem offering both, and if one of them just dies a natural death, that's fine."

N: "The 38th is conventionally the bandsaw anniversary. ... the 39th is the home security system for birds."

I: "We don't get updates because the policy is changing, we get updates because the slogan is changing."

Z: "Thank god there's a deadly virus around so we don't have to focus on Brexit anymore."

I: "That crisis only affects teenagers, so we don't care."

Z (product pitch): "Each week you get a box of foods that people won't purchase even in an emergency."

Z: "Thank god for climate change and the death of the amphibian."

Z: "Could the Ottomans competently administer a test to teens? I say, welcome to our new Ottoman overlords."

Z: "Someone pored over the outline of the eagle thing. Gotta get paid somehow."

Z: "Everybody universally hates the robot, which is the appropriate response."

Q: "Static! I only hear it when you're talking."
Z: "That's just my midwestern accent."

Z: "I was uncomfortable because I'm an idealist."

N: "It's a circular saw at the end of a string trimmer."
M: "Wait, like... Mad Max?"

[D joins the video chat]
All others: "Good morning! Welcome to Vasectomy Talk."

Z: "I have walked less than 20 steps today & all of them were on this camera."

D: "Whoever is playing the video of my voice, can you mute it?"

Firstborn: "Everyone knows I'm the one who inherits the titles and lands."
Secondborn: "And I have the right to marry a divorcée."
Thirdborn: "And I'm supposed to go into the clergy?"
[laughter]
Parent: "I love my children! That was the best possible answer! Perfect!

Q: "They'll only hear your yowls of pain when you're shocked for typing on the keyboard wrong."

This post's theme word is lithophone (n), "a musical instrument which is sounded by striking pieces of stone." It's easy to fall down a quarantine video rabbit-hole and watch many modern and ancient lithophones played.

Live theatre, sort of

WHEREAS the ongoing pandemic and various other elements of environmental, social, political, economic, and biological disaster loom large, and

WHEREAS the rational fairly strict self-quarantine (of those who are able) has, since March, severely limited occasions to socialize and gather in groups for the purposes of mutually enjoying culture and company, it is

HEREBY ACKNOWLEDGED that having so many performers shift to an online method for displaying their art to a geographically disparate crowd has, in fact, WIDENED this reader's ability to financially support the artists she loves while appreciating their performances in real-time.

Everything's on a screen, and frankly having to see my family only in delineated, buffered, pixelated windows feels much more limiting than having to see live performers in windows. Realistically these performers would have been mostly inaccessible because they were not touring my locality; so I find a tiny sliver of redemption for 2020 in the broader access to live art. The rest of 2020 should consider itself still on blast for its shortcomings.

This post's theme word is rort (n), "a wild party." I have tickets to watch shows three nights this week, from the comfortable pajama-clad rort of my own sofa!

Mosquito resolution

 After many months of living at the end of a narrow internet pipe, my bits finally stopped flowing (the pipe was blocked? ok, metaphor) and I caved and signed up for fiber. Now I have a much bigger pipe! Bits are freely flowing as never before!

Importantly, I am now viewable as many pixels, often even in motion, for my many, many, video calls. My life (and many others) now consists mostly of taking video calls in different parts of my dwelling, and my interlocutors can now see me in smooth motion and continuous audio! What luxury and decadence, etc.

The pixels are in fact so delicate and rich that yesterday during lunch on my porch, my interlocutor was able to see the mosquito that I chased in and out of the frame, as it hovered around me and tormented me with the threat of stealing my blood. This was nice, because I got reassurances that I wasn't completely insane (another person validated the visible insect!) and that I didn't look completely insane (chasing an invisible phantom).

Today I received a belated housewarming gift: a giant citronella candle. Emphasis on the houseWARMing, and also on the acknowledged battle that owning a house is: battle against my house being washed away, battle against incursions of snow and mice, and the personal battle to keep all of my blood --- which, I want to emphasize, I am currently using to support vital life operations --- inside my body. I don't plan to burn it indoors, but hopefully this will resolve my outdoor mosquito deliciousness problem.

This post's theme word is henotheism (n), "belief in or worship of one god without denying the possibility of others." Welcome to my henotheistic house; over there is the citronella shrine.

Cobwebs

I went outside and discovered a spider had built an extensive web across the rear entrance of my house, spanning the door, deck, and stairs. This is some sort of arachnoid commentary on human self-quarantine and it struck me as both sticky and humorous. (Zeugma!)

This venture into the horrible humidity was made in order to chip away at emptying my office, which I'm not-really-using, for sabbatical so that someone else can not-really-use it. (Everything is wonderful, the world is totally fine, don't look too closely.) My two most neglected plants stubbornly hang on in what is surely the most arid, frigid, inhospitable summer that southern Pennsylvania can artificially offer to indoor plant life. An enterprising indoor spider, hoping in vain to capture prey in the abandoned, sealed, locked building, had constructed a foolishly hopeful web from the ceiling down to the desk chair, completely blocking off the shelves and the keyboard. This struck me as sticky and a silly emerging theme.

Are spiders everywhere just constantly walling in everything, and only the entropy of weather and large fauna keeps pathways clear?

Given the prevalence of webs, the visible black cloud of mosquitos that chased me from my car back into my house seemed incongruous. YES, I had to pass through a partially-reconstructed deck-spanning web to reenter the house. NO, it did not appear to dissuade the accursed vampiric horrors. Please, can we get some mosquito-eating bats to colonize my block?

This post's theme word is durance (n), "confinement or restraint by force; imprisonment." In this grimdark modern fairytale, the protagonist is self-quarantined at home and entirely encased in cobwebs and loneliness so thick that the quarantine becomes permanent; "Dream Durance" is rated NC-17 for psychic damage inflicted on readers and anyone attempting to engage in concurrent political discourse.