Blogging: an anthropology of ourselves

Reading The Splendid and the Vile about the London Blitz– a couple days ago at the coffee shop across from where I'm condo/cat-sitting.

The  frontispiece: the library of a bombed residence, Holland House, Kensington, London, 1940.

And now Israel is blitzing Gaza, bombing civilians... Round and round we go.

“There is no safe place in Gaza, where two million people have been forcibly isolated from the rest of the world for over 13 years,”
said the U.N. emergency relief coordinator, Mark Lowcock.
--www.nytimes.com/live/2021/05/19/world/israel-palestine-gaza

Mass Observation

The Splendid and the Vile quotes from the journals of ordinary people living through the Blitz––part of a project called Mass Observation that started before the war.

"Founded in 1937 as an “anthropology of ourselves,”
the Mass Observation project was meant to record the mundane details of British life across every level of class and location." [Time]

Blogging these past 14+ months has been a Mass Observation project!
Someone could condense what we all wrote since March 2020 about daily life during the Covid-19 pandemic;
the police murder of George Floyd and its aftermath;
and the US elections & Trump's downfall (and/or other countries' political upheavals).

There's other social media, but I don't see people chatting about the details of their everyday lives there, like we do here. What we eat (and how much we drink), our boredom, our anxiety, our gardens, etc.

I've felt I should have written more!
It all was happening so fast.

It's still happening, of course. Here in Minnesota, Covid is dwindling, but there are still 112 people in ICU today, and 14 people died.

The state doesn't require mask-wearing, but Twin Cities still do, which I'm glad of--especially at work, in a crowded & impoverished neighborhood.
As I said to my coworkers, there are a lot of infectious diseases out there--I think we should all wear masks forever.

A sign of the change:
an ad on Facebook for 50-percent off handmade face masks.
The end (or something) is near...

One day (soon?),  I will not leave masks hanging off the handlebars of my bike, like so:

Meanwhile, the city feels calmer since Derek Chauvin was found guilty of murdering George Floyd (and the trials of Chauvin's accomplices has been put off until 2022).
But the uprising for social justice continues, as does the violence--daily gun deaths, addiction, massive homelessness.

Delicate Salmon Paté

Yesterday a guy came in the store asking if he could do some clean up around the store for some cash. 
(The store doesn't usually do this, but sometimes.)

He had stitches across his forehead. He'd fallen asleep in the sun, he said, become dehydrated, and when he stood up, he fell and hit his head.
He also showed me a couple raw blisters on his feet.

He's living in a tent in the woods along the river, he said--no running water (the river's not safe).
I got him a basin of warm, soapy water, a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, and some gauze bandages & medical tape, and some towels, and gave him a place to sit in the kitchen to tend to his feet.

(I always think of how people did this for me when I my feet were flayed from blisters on the Camino pilgrimage---
man, I'd had no idea before that how excruciating they are!)

Big Boss gave him ten bucks and told him to come back when his feet are better and sweep the parking lot.

He's on foot, so I also gave him a $30 bike. Pretty crap, but better than walking the four miles to his campsite.

Big Boss said I was giving this guy too much.
(BB is a penny pincher--not a good quality in a business person---he NEVER gets it that you have to invest in things to get returns).

So I paid for the bike myself, but made the executive decision that store should give the guy a backpack and some socks.

Then I went back to the condo I'm house-sitting and fed the cat her individually packaged dinner, "Delicate Salmon Paté".

BELOW:

I just ordered this Folio Society book from eBay ($27 incl. tax &shipping), Mass-Observation: Britain in the Second World War:

It wasn't the war that sparked the project, it was King Edward VIII abdicating the throne to marry Wallis Simpson, a divorced American.
(And then my generation got Charles & Diana;
and now it's Harry & Meghan--I even know how to spell her name!)

"In 1936 amateur anthropologist Tom Harrisson had become incensed by newspapers claiming to know what the British public thought about the abdication crisis.

He decided to find out by 'mass-observation' volunteer diaries a fuller picture of what the British were actually thinking and feeling."

 
What I'm thinking and feeling: Circus Girlettes!