2020.09 minutiae So far I’ve found that distance learning is going pretty smoothly⁠—I love the five-second commute from my bed to my chair, and it’s great not to have to stop every thirty seconds and get the students to quiet down so I can get through the next thirty seconds of material⁠—but one big downside is that even after nearly two months of this I don’t feel like I know the students very well at all, even though I still read their writing and hear their contributions to discussions.  I hadn’t realized how much of my sense of who last year’s kids were came from overhearing their chatter before the bell rang. Speaking of overhearing, overheard on a Zoom call I logged into a few minutes early: “…So the chicken just rips the egg salad sandwich right out of my hands, and I’m yelling, ‘Oh my god! Stop! You’re eating your own!’” I am finally caught up on Masterchef Australia, and was shocked and delighted when it turned out that my favorite contestant out of this season’s batch won and my second favorite came in second.  A 1‑in‑552 outcome! September 7th: heat wave.  I checked the National Weather Service web site to get a read on how bad it was going to get.  It reported: TODAY’S HIGH: 91°; CURRENT CONDITIONS: 94°.  Later that day I checked again.  TODAY’S HIGH: 90°; CURRENT CONDITIONS: 101°.  So, pretty bad, but not as bad as that site’s understanding of words and numbers. September 9th: as you may have heard, around here the sun didn’t come up that day.  Here’s a picture I took around noon:

The light gray dots are flecks of ash that got too close to the camera lens. September 11th: on this day the sun actually did come up, but it hung in the sky like a celestial stoplight, which made for an interesting picture when I found myself at an actual stoplight:

You’ve probably already seen this chart, but I’ll post it again, just because I grew up in the Anaheim part of Los Angeles – Long Beach – Anaheim during the period covered:

The air quality in my current environs in the middle of September was considered so apocalyptic that people were encouraged to stay indoors and wear masks when outside for that reason, not because of the covids; the school district canceled the distribution of materials for about a week because leaving home to go pick them up was considered such a health risk.  And yet, where I grew up and when I grew up… that was basically every summer day, and there were no such restrictions, because it was considered normal.  A real improvement over the ’60s and ’70s, even.  The point is not that people are babies now who should just suck it up (like, literally suck those particulates into your lungs)⁠—it’s that one reason we’re not allowed to have nice things is that if we ever had them, we might consider it intolerable to go back to what we used to tolerate.  We put up with unbreathable air because we were encouraged to think of cleaning it up as a pipe dream.  And yet we did clean it up, at least to a certain extent!  Recently I’ve run across some articles pointing out that government-subsidized housing in cities like Vienna is actually really nice and crazy cheap: $350/month for an apartment better than mine (even though my apartment is quite good and quite affordable for the Bay Area!), and available to people making up to about $53,000/year (and which they can keep even if their income later increases).  Yet we continue to put up with a housing apocalypse.  Perhaps someday we will look back at today’s rents as an equally disgraceful purple splotch in our history.  comment on Tumblr reply via email support this site return to the Calendar page