"You are (not) the only one in this room."

You Are the Only One in This Room

Wouldn't that make a good book title? Maybe about living through a pandemic?
It's a Zoom message. You may know, but I didn't. I've Facetimed for the first time since Covid, but never Zoomed--I have no reason to, since I see my coworkers f2f, and when I'm home I don't much want to see more people.

On the blog Going Gently, John wrote a list of good things he did from the past year–– "What has the lockdown ever done for me?" He includes a lot of zooming.

Got me thinking,
How have I adapted to the pandemic in a way helpful for myself and/or others?

[***I'd love to hear other people's responses to that question ^ too!]

I've made many little changes.
Most were extensions of things I'd do anyway--like bike riding instead of taking the bus (I just did it more, for longer).

Or sharing the girlettes.

Dolls Help.

When a frightened friend told me early on that it helped to have Penny Cooper come and stay, I posted in March >
that the girlettes could come and stay with anyone who wanted/needed them.

And several did, and since then, they've really spread out--some permanently, for fun and everything.

Racer, for instance, moved to London. Recently she went with Sara to get her Covid vaccine.

This makes me so happy!

Without downplaying it (I'd up-play dolls, if anything), it's an extension of the sort of thing I was already doing. It's nice to feel I was on the right track and just need to extend it further.

One thing I did, however, was a real brain-changer:
making cloth toilet wipes, after people panic-bought all the t.p. in stores.

Since then, the house has bought only a few packs of t.p.
Saves money and environmental glop.
I'm most excited by it as proof:
WE CAN CHANGE.

We, individually and socially, can change even deeply ingrained, automatic habits, like reaching for the roll of t.p.
And relatively quickly, too.

I think about this a lot, when I see people wearing masks out and about:
It's become a social norm. Here, anyway, not everywhere.

The point is, it's doable. It took enormous social pressure--laws, to begin with, and fear, and information.

And availability.
I sewed masks for people, early on.
Now the city provides free disposable masks on the bus (though they're often out), and fashion designers produce masks.

Five days ago Vogue posted "Where to Buy Face Masks That Are Stylish Online". Most of the 100 masks are affordable (around $20) from Etsy and the like, but there's also this ($465, Fendi).

It'd look nice at the Oscars. Are they having the Oscars?
(Yes, an in-person ceremony will be held two months later than usual--in late April.)

If we can do this, we can change a lot more habits.
I'm thinking of climate change--we will need to change, voluntarily or otherwise.
And we can. It's in our nature to be adaptable, like squirrels.

Not to be entirely perky chirpy about it---we didn't change fast enough to save, in the United States, half-a-million people and counting.

But looking at the big picture, the public health of the species overview, even with half-assed or outright crap leadership, we've bumbled ourselves into some good changes.
Compared to doing nothing.

The pandemic has been, is being hard. It grinds on and on, scraping up the landscape like a glacier.
What we do about it is personal and social, but the virus itself is an impersonal force of nature.

Ingrained habits of social beliefs that we generate ourselves--that's another matter.
The things we do to one another.

What's been harder was the police murder of George Floyd a mile from where I work and live, and its ongoing aftermath. (The trial is next month, godhelpus.)

It took events out of words (in newspapers and novels and history books) and into my ear canals, up my nostrils, and under my skin.

Hearing helicopters overhead and smelling burning car parts as I was trying to fall asleep, and getting cut by broken glass as I cleaned after looters broke up the thrift store.
But that would be a different post.

As for being alone in the room...

As long as there's a book in the room, I am not alone.

I'd gotten rid of almost all my books in the past fifteen years––figured I'd always have access to libraries––and I was caught out without a lot to read when the Stay at Home order started March 17, 2020 (St Patrick's Day).

As soon as the thrift store reopened, I began to collect books again.
I'm like Scarlett O'Hara shaking a wilted carrot at heaven;
"As God is my witness, I'll never be bookless again!"

So that's a change---a reversion to the old ways:
KEEP THE HARD COPIES.

I read Ali Smith's Hotel World last night--it follows five people whose lives intersect at a hotel. (Weirdly though, not like Grand Hotel.)
It centers around the accidental death of a young chambermaid who folds herself into an old dumbwaiter, which drops, unable to support her weight.

Chambermaid sounds Victorian, doesn't it? I wonder why it's hung on as the normal word for a hotel cleaner. The book is set in the present.

Ali Smith asked in an interview,

"Do you come to art to be comforted, or do you come to art to be re-skinned?"

Now?
Comfort!
I want the story to be comforting---and Hotel World is a story about nice (sort of nice) humans. 

(Ali Smith also said she’s in love with life. It struck me as a weird thing to say. It shows in her writing-/this book anyway—her only one I’ve read.)

I put down a couple books about how horrible people are. That's already right in my face. (See, police murder of George Floyd and its aftermath)

But I do like it if the story form is... re-forming. Reading Hotel World takes some attention to who? and what?

And the Murderbot Diaries tell a familiar story--a sort of "coming of age" tale––but the way it's told has got me truly re-skinning how I see the characters in my mind.
I'm continuing to look at pictures of real people I could cast instead of my imagination's default #OscarsSoWhite cast.

That's not directly related to the pandemic.
Or is it?
Living through what seems like a science fiction movie does, or can, shake up preconceptions, default settings.

Does it take a little conscious effort, a little cooperation, to enter into making changes though?
I kind of think so.
I think we want to settle back into comfort.
Who wants to be re-skinned?
I don't. But I think we better keep choosing to adapt. That's where we've got it over squirrels--we don't just react, we can choose.

Anyway, I just don't think we will be able settle back into comfort.
Look at the Texas power grid failure. The police murder of George Floyd.
This stuff is happening. And we're doing it, together.

For better or worse, I, you, we are not the only ones in this room.