Ornoth

I haven’t posted anything about the Covid-19 pandemic other than one brief update at its onset. Now that our lockdown has spanned a full year, I should probably document how it’s been.

Our active social life

Although it’s not as if I haven’t written about it… When the virus was two months old, I had an update ready to publish; but with the pandemic story continuing to evolve each week, we never reached a good point to stop and summarize.

Six months in, I revisited that draft and added a framing story, showing how our lives had evolved from pre-Covid, to onset, and then to longer-term steady-state. But that too never saw the light of day.

Now it’s been a year, and I still don’t feel I can do the subject justice. On one hand, what little I have to say seems like the mundane, everyday trivialities of spending a year as a shut-in.

On the other hand, it’s difficult to put the stress and unease into words that convey what it’s been like, knowing that outside our 1,200-square-foot apartment a quarter billion people have contracted this novel, insidious disease, leaving 3 million people dead in its still-reverberating wake.

So let me guide you through a year of life under the pandemic, chronologically, step by step. I apologize in advance for any repetitiveness.

For the full experience, you might choose to begin with my initial March 2020 blogpost entitled “Miles Away From Ordinary,” which describes our outlook at the time of the initial lockdown.

Two months later, in mid-May 2000, I wrote the following:

We’re now ten weeks into our Coronavirus quarantine. How has it gone?

Over two months, I’ve gone outside for one grocery run, three long walks, three short walks, and that’s about it. Outdoor cycling hasn’t happened at all, save for one brief excursion to observe the Ride of Silence. We haven’t picked up restaurant food or had any delivered. I’ve had to defer my plan to recreate my family’s spaghetti sauce due to ingredient shortages and lack of freezer space, but have happily added burritos to my cooking repertoire.

After taking a 10 percent hit to my net worth, I’m about 50% recovered financially. I’m surprised that the stock market bounced back so readily and hasn’t re-tested its March lows. Aside from stocks, I’ve happily got a couple CDs earning a healthy 2.2% and 2.8% that don’t mature for another year; a rare victory over interest rates which have dropped to zero.

Given the widespread economic damage done during the lockdown, I fully expect more pain to come, and a drawn-out recovery, with some sectors (e.g. retail, restaurants, live sports & entertainment, travel & tourism) having to make radical changes before consumers will return.

There’s growing calls to end the lockdown and allow businesses to open, which doesn’t make any sense to me. Two thousand Americans are dying every day due to Covid-19. The virus has killed more Americans in the past two months than all U.S. casualties in the entire Vietnam War. And the death toll is projected to increase to 3,000 Americans per day by June.

Everyone is relieved that we have managed to “flatten the curve”, ensuring that peak simultaneous cases don’t overwhelm our medical capacity and giving researchers time to work on a vaccine. But no one seems to have picked up that flattening the curve also means extending its duration, lengthening the period of time it might take for the overall population to become exposed to the virus and develop herd immunity.

The basic scenario hasn’t changed one bit in the past two months. There are more than a million carriers walking around our country — with thirty thousand more infected every day — and those are only the ones with obvious symptoms! We still have no treatment and are months-to-years away from a preventative vaccine, and we’re only testing a microscopic subset of the population. We have no idea whether individuals who survive gain future immunity to Covid-19, but there's anecdotal evidence that people can indeed become re-infected.

Yet people seem to think the danger has passed and we should relax the restrictions that have successfully limited the virus’ spread so far. I don’t care if you’re dipping into your savings or feeling “quarantine fatigue”; why did we order people to stay at home in the first place if we’re just going to turn around and rescind that order at the precise moment when the infection rate and death count are both at their peak?

To those protesting against our nation’s efforts to reduce the impact of the pandemic, I say: Every generation of Americans has had to make sacrifices to defend this country; but today’s prima donna “patriots” are so soft and self-absorbed that they can't even handle being asked to go home and sit tight for a few weeks. To those clamoring for bars and restaurants to re-open I say: you people are shortsighted, selfish, and pathetic.

Irrespective of what our government advises, I plan on being extremely conservative in resuming normal life. I’m not itching to hit the local restaurants, visit friends and relatives, see any shows, or travel. While I miss biking outdoors, I don’t want to ride anywhere near other people, especially anyone who hasn’t taken the danger seriously.

My goal, more than anything, is to avoid this virus as long as I can, in hopes that eventually progress will be made toward detection, treatment, and prevention. But that hasn’t happened yet, and I’m not willing to wager my life that the danger has passed, especially when evidence clearly shows quite the opposite.

As you can see, I was pretty skeptical about our American exceptionalism right from the start. Back in the early days when grocery stores couldn’t stock toilet paper, ginger, baking flour, or yeast, and when meat purchases were rationed.

That was in mid-May. Time passed, but the six-month anniversary of the outbreak prompted me to revisit the topic. So I wrote the following fragment in late August and early September:

In May I wrote — but never shared — a little blogpo about how things were going two months into the Covid-19 lockdown. Now here we are six months into a pandemic, and the situation has evolved slowly. Perhaps now it’s time to actually share my thoughts, before the whole episode blows over and is forgotten.

The initial phase went pretty well for the most part. Being fully locked down actually wasn’t a huge change from our normal winter lifestyle. Inna stopped her already-rare visits to her downtown office, restaurant food was declared off-limits, and our grocery trips became less frequent, meticulously planned, and considerably more expensive. I added burritos to my cooking repertoire.

Our social lives have been limited to a tiny number of masked porch visits with friends. The two local meditation groups I sometimes lead both went online, and my former Kalyana Mitta (spiritual friends) group from Boston — who are now spread all across the United States — reconstituted itself on Zoom.

Through the end of May, cycling was 98% indoors, but I got outside more over the summer, though only for short rides. With all my cycling events cancelled, I’ve mimicked most of them indoors, on Zwift. You can read all the details about how that’s gone on my cycling blog. And I even registered as a virtual rider on this year’s Pan-Mass Challenge!

Financially, we’ve been fine. Inna’s job remains secure. Savings and investments took an initial 10% hit, but have more than fully recovered. With interest rates pegged at zero, I’m very happy to have a chunk of cash earning 2-3% in CDs; but I’ll need to figure out what to do next spring when they mature.

By then my lack of faith in Americans was fully proven out, leaving no need to make further dire predictions. I was mostly occupied with Inna and my domestic situation, which had reached a sustained level of quote-normalcy-closequote.

Which brings us to March 2021, the anniversary of our Covid-19 lockdown. What is there to say now?

Winter was hard. No social contact with anyone. No outdoor cycling at all, not even occasional walks. Just a solid five months of staring at these same unchanging apartment walls.

As if the pandemic itself weren’t enough to deal with, 2020 also brought us the murder of George Floyd and subsequent Black Lives Matter protests and rioting, severe Australian bushfires, Prince Harry renounced membership in the British royal family, there was the sudden appearance of murder hornets, the horrific Beirut explosion, an economic war with China, Brexit finally happened, a major Russian cyberattack, oil prices crashed and actually went negative, the stock market pulled back, fanatical right-wing lockdown protestors stormed the Michigan state capitol, and the historic Aricebo radio telescope collapsed. Oh, and notable deaths included Kobe Bryant, Little Richard, Alex Trebek, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and John Lewis.

American “exceptionalism” was on full display. Over the winter holidays, infections soared and the body counts rose to 3,000… then 4,000… then 5,000 per day (and 880,000 per day globally). And still people disregarded pleas to wear face masks in public and called for businesses and schools to re-open.

The sitting President of the United States was impeached for asking the Ukraine to investigate his opponent, then got Covid himself, and had protestors at a church teargassed so he could pose for a photo op, blasphemously holding a Bible.

America’s Presidential election was pathetic and terrifying. We had the most divisive, violent election in 50 years, followed by open insurrection and the occupation of the US Capitol by domestic terrorists incited by an openly lying lame duck President in direct violation of his Constitutional oath. But despite all this, he was vociferously defended by his morally bankrupt political party. My country: the shitshow.

Following the overdue removal of our virus- and election-results denying “leader,” we are finally producing one conventional and two novel messenger RNA vaccines which are presumably extremely effective. We’re still in the early days of distribution, but people are getting inoculated, which is the thread of hope that we’ve all been clinging to since this ordeal began.

So after a long, hard, dreary, stressful winter, the impending return of spring comes with some long-awaited, tender shoots of hope.

Inna will be fully vaccinated this month. Unfortunately I'll have a much longer wait, because I don’t meet any special age, co-morbidity, or career role qualifications.

And the weather should start permitting properly-masked and -distanced social contact, as well as solo outdoor cycling... although don’t ask about my bike and the continuing complete unavailability of both new and replacement parts!

So there’s a little bit of hope that this spring we might be turning the corner. It’s still overshadowed by the knowledge that even fully vaccinated it’ll be another year before life gets back to anything “normal”.

It’s still hard to write about. For an entire year, our lives have been reduced to the most mundane, uneventful commonalities, which makes for a pretty boring read.

And it’s still just as hard to articulate the lingering, perpetual stress, discomfort, and unease of living with this pandemic. Getting a haircut or an eye exam and new glasses still seem like remote, almost inconceivable luxuries. And bike parts… well, as I said, don’t get me started about that.

And still, we endure. Be well!

As a man who tries to be sensitive to gender issues, I want to address one way that I think women and men both unconsciously perpetuate marginalization of women.

You might not think one’s given name could be the source of judgement and marginalization… but you’d be wrong.

It might sound like an incredibly minor nit, but what could be more core to one’s identity than the very name you use to refer to yourself, and the names you use for others?

Consider the difference in how you respond to a man who calls himself “Robert”, versus if he introduced himself as “Robbie”. Even if you’re looking at the same individual, most of us will have a meaningfully different initial impression of someone depending on whether he is introduced to us as “Billy” or “Willie” or “William”.

The underlying cause goes at least as far back as Latin, if not earlier. In Romance languages, words that end in open syllables (ending in a vowel sound like “Billy” and “Robbie”) are almost always grammatically feminine, while words ending in consonant sounds (closed syllables) like “Robert” and “William” are usually grammatically masculine.

Don’t get confused by the labels “masculine” and “feminine”. Those just represent two classes of words. I’m not saying that “Robbie” is really a girl’s name, or that “Janet” should be a boy’s name. At least not directly…

However, in Romance languages—and thus in Western society overall—the grammatical feminine has often been applied to things that are cute, small, young, informal, trivial, and (in gender terms) feminine. As a result, when we hear a name that ends in a vowel sound, we tend to ascribe those attributes to the person.

Calling someone “Scotty” is not just a less formal way to address “Scott”; because names ending in open syllables carry this historical baggage, it also carries with it the idea Scotty is more diminutive or more childish or less serious than Scott. And it isn’t much of a leap to infer that Scotty himself is inferior, subordinate, and less capable than his “older brother” Scott. Just as Robbie is less adult than Robert, and Jimmy is less professional than James.

This becomes an even greater concern when applied to women. We have very different preconceptions when we meet a girl named “Chrissie” than a woman named “Christine”, or “Shelly” versus “Michelle”. When a woman’s name ends in an open syllable, the association with grammatically feminine attributes like smallness, informality, and youth becomes really problematic. They didn’t call her “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” because it’s a strong name; they used it because (in contrast to her occupation as a Slayer) it’s such a weak, fluffy, impotent, “girly” name.

What’s worse is that we as a society still prefer to name women something cute and feminine, automatically hampering our daughters’ chances of being taken seriously right from the maternity unit. And even then, women will often choose to abbreviate their name into a “cute” nickname that ends in an open syllable.

When I first wrote this article, I looked at my employer’s “About Our Team” page. After removing the outliers from our India office, I counted up the names that end in open syllables, and grouped them by gender. What did I find? In a progressive software company, 73 percent of the women listed names that end in vowel sounds, while only 13 percent of men did. Our female employees were more than five times as likely to bear names associated with smallness, informality, and inferiority than their male coworkers.

I also checked out the most popular 100 given names for each gender over the past 100 years, thanks to this Social Security Administration page. While not quite as dramatic, the trend is inescapable. Women were 2.5 times more likely to have open-syllable names as men (56 percent to 23 percent).

Bottom line, we’re saddling our daughters with names that trivialize them from childhood through adulthood.

Of course, this only applies to Western society. The Japanese language doesn’t natively have closed syllables at all, which can cause some confusion among Westerners. It shows the extent of our bias that you might guess that Japanese people named Tomoya, Takeshi, Makoto, Kenichi, Junichi, Yuji, Katsumi, and Koki were female. They’re not; those are among the most frequently-used male names in Japan.

As a final parting shot, I encourage you to take a moment and consider your emotional response and preconceptions based on the following pairs of names. For me, the conclusion is absolutely clear that using a name which ends in a vowel sound is both trivializing and marginalizing, and something I’d suggest be avoided, especially by progressive-minded parents.

With sincere apologies to those of you who might already bear such names!

I suppose an end-of-year update is in order, since I haven’t posted to my main blog since last August.

It’s ironic that my last post covered Inna’s and my summertime trip to Maine, visiting my mother as well as my brother, who had made his annual trip from his west coast home on Vancouver Island.

Ironic because for more than three months now I’ve been back in Maine, caretaking my mother, who has repeatedly bounced back and forth between hospital and nursing home. After several weeks managing it alone, my brother joined me here, so we’re both dealing with another unwanted Maine winter. The only person missing from making this a full repeat of our summer visit is Inna, whom I’ve barely seen at all since last September.

So no Inna, no biking, no Begemot, no job hunt, no Thanksgiving, no Christmas. In their place there’s nothing but snow, ice, and freezing cold, amidst long, dark months spent inhabiting Maine’s fine medical institutions.

It’s hard to look forward more than a day or so. Mom’s health is a perpetual roller-coaster ride; meanwhile, there’s the added stressors of managing her finances, trying to dispose of her accumulated belongings, finding a nursing home placement for her in Pittsburgh, and figuring out how to transport her there. And lo! here comes tax season, when I get to file taxes for two!

To make this vacation extra fun, over the holidays I contracted a really nasty influenza. While that gave me recourse to avoid holiday familial obligations, it cost a solid two weeks of weakness, nausea, coughing, and other unpleasant symptoms that I’m just coming out of.

And I have to admit a very deep-seated depression regarding the election and the prognosis for American democracy. For whatever misguided reasons, the people have ceded control to a selfish, petulant, xenophobic, entitled, compulsive liar who seems intent on systematically dismantling everything America once stood for: quaint, 19th century concepts like truth, ethics, democracy, justice, rule of law, fairness, rationality, integrity, respect, and compassion. It’s astonishing and demoralizing to anyone who still believes in those averred American values.

Meanwhile, the people—from whom all power emanates—stay willfully and myopically focused on things that don’t really matter. It was painful to see so many people wishing “Good riddance to 2016”. If the loss of Prince and Princess Leia (sic) upset you that much, then I have some sobering news for you: 2017 and the complete trainwreck of a “post-ethics” Drumpf Presidency is gonna make your hated 2016 feel like a goddamn Carnival cruise.

So, yeah. Happy new year.

A quick post about my most recent read: David Byrne’s “Bicycle Diaries”. Yes, that David Byrne. It’s really more about his observations based on various cities he visited than it is about cycling, so it’s not surprising that the two bits I want to share from it have absolutely nothing to do with the bike.

In his section on Berlin, he talks about the Stasi, the East German secret police:

The combination of psychological and Orwellian horror is hellish and weirdly seductive. The agency was known for turning citizens against their neighbors by subtle pressure, implied threats, or economic incentives. It seems it’s something that many national security agencies do from time to time. (“If you see something, say something.”) Turning the citizenry into rats makes the entire populace scared and docile, and after a while no one knows who’s informing on whom.

The quoted phrase rings loudly in any Bostonian’s ears, because the MBTA transit police have been drumming those exact words (authored by the Department of Homeland Security) into our heads for more than eight years, encouraging us (as described here) to be on the lookout for anyone carrying a backpack, holding an aerosol can, or “acting in a rehearsed manner”.

Orwell’s rep as a visionary becomes that much more impressive when you realize that he was only off by 17 years.

The other interesting bit was a quote from Enrique Peñalosa, former mayor of Bogotá, which goes like this:

In developing-world cities, the majority of people don’t have cars, so I will say, when you construct a good sidewalk, you are constructing democracy. A sidewalk is a symbol of equality… If democracy is to prevail, public good must prevail over private interests.

His perspective in that last sentence is profoundly interesting for those of us in 21th Century America, torn as we are between the American dream of freedom to acquire and amass unlimited wealth and the protests of the Occupy movement, which make it abundantly clear that the American dream is inaccessible to most, and has resulted in an unsustainable concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a small elite minority.

Just some thoughts, sadly having nothing to do with cycling whatsoever.

Today Barack Hussein Obama II was sworn in as PotUS. I took a couple quick notes throughout the day that I would like to record.

The most obvious is the historic occasion of the first African American President. For many it’s a dream they never thought would come true. It is poetic that this year, Barack Obama’s inauguration took place the day after the observance of the Martin Luther King holiday.

For some, it’s a day they hoped would never come. My father, for one. I’m sure if he were here today he’d say something derogatory and mean-spirited. Fortunately, times change, and an astonishing amount of progress has been made since his generation led the nation.

Personally, I find it equally poetic that George W. Bush is the person who had to shake hands and turn power over to the nation’s first Black President. I wonder what that felt like for him. It reminded me of the famous episode of “All in the Family” when Sammy Davis Jr. kissed Archie Bunker.

However, what matters about Obama isn’t his color but his politics. He is a liberal, and hopefully he’ll be able to undo the innumerable wrongs of the Bush administration. As Dubya leaves public life with an approval rating below 25 percent, Obama has inspired the American people with his eloquence, wisdom, and humility. What I heard today from everyone I talked to was a renewed sense of trust, faith, and hope for the future. Yes, we can.

Even before his unfortunate medical misadventure, I had written in my notes that I was deeply glad that Ted Kennedy was present and witness to today’s inauguration. Ted has held the office of Senator from Massachusetts since before I was born, having inheriting it from his brother, John F. Kennedy, when he was elected President in 1960. He has been an icon of the liberal cause for half a century. May he make a speedy recovery and continue in good health.

I was also glad that John Kerry was in attendance. Would Obama be President today if Kerry had won in 2004? I don’t think so. After Kerry’s loss, Bush’s second term of gross incompetence made November’s choice obvious; you couldn’t find a starker contrast in Obama’s unselfrighteous candor and hopefulness. It almost makes Kerry’s loss worth enduring… almost.

And so today we observed a moment in history: the elevation of America’s first Black President. What remains to be seen is whether today was also a sea change in the direction of the country. The rhetoric is there. The hope is there. And by all indications, the political unity and will are there. But now it’s time for us to deliver, to epitomize these values in our everyday lives and interactions.

Now, finally and at long last, the call has gone out. I eagerly await your answer.

Today is election day in many jurisdictions across the US. Please go vote.

I find it serendipitous that this comes just a couple hours after the release of this Associated Press article, which I’ll cite momentarily. I’ve had a political rant coming, and that article was definitely the last straw.

Now, I’m not particularly radical politically. Sure, I have liberal views, but I’ve had occasion to praise certain administrations, even when their policies have been right of center. Nixon, although Vietnam was his downfall, was an absolute foreign relations master. I think Reagan, for all his problems, did a good job bringing the country together after the wandering Ford and Carter years. The wiser Bush, despite the Iraqi war, also was competent in the area of international relations. I can live with Republicans, when they’re intelligent, competent, and rational.

So the current administration of Baby Bush comes as a very rude shock to me. It seems that every time I listen to the news, there’s more and more evidence that George Bush is not merely thoroughly inept and stupid; not merely hateful and criminal; but singlemindedly intent on doing the most evil things conceivable.

Consider the following facts.

1. The United States, under GWB, invaded another sovereign nation and deposed its legal government, in direct violation of international law.
    
2. He did so with full knowledge that Iraq did not, in fact, possess any weapons of mass destruction.
    
3. He did so against the counsel of the United Nations, the entire free world, and significant domestic protest
    
4. The administration allowed, encouraged, defended, and continues to defend the unabashed torture of prisoners at Abu Graib, in violation of international law.
    
5. The administration has imprisoned hundreds of noncombatants at Guantanamo Bay, without charges, withheld due process of law, and tortured them, in violation of both international law and the U.S. Constitution. Independent international inspection of the facility has been prohibited by the US government. Bush has allowed, encouraged, defended, and continues to defend these actions.
    
6. There have been several stories recently that detailed how the government set up dummy front companies which leased private jet aircraft to the government for the exclusive purpose of extraordinary rendition, i.e. moving prisoners, held illegally, to jails outside the US so that they could be held and tortured without being subject to US laws forbidding such actions.
    
7. The US has admitted the existence of several covert CIA-run prisons across Europe after the International Red Cross discovered their existence.
    
8. Even after all this attention, the administration is still publicly trying to retain the ability to torture anyone they want, without due process. While Congress is trying to pass a bill to further specify what kind of treatment constitutes torture, the Vice President of the United States (and this is a quote from the AP article) “is seeking to persuade Congress to exempt the Central Intelligence Agency from the proposed torture ban”. According to GWB, torture should definitely be illegal… for everyone but our secret police.
    
9. None of those items above are disputable; they are publicly-known facts. But here’s the kicker. This quote from the AP story shows the true measure of this administration’s evil intent. When asked about the secret CIA prisons in eastern Europe and Asia, this is what the President of the United States said: “Anything we do … in this effort, any activity we conduct, is within the law.”

Come on, people! “Anything I do is, by definition, within the law”. That is not representative democracy. That isn’t even limited monarchy. That is outright, unabashed dictatorship. He couldn’t have said it plainer if he’d claimed to be Holy Emperor Bush!

That isn’t America. It’s not Abraham Lincoln or John Kennedy. It’s not FDR, and it sure as hell isn’t Thomas Jefferson. That’s Louis XIV and “l’etat c’est moi”. That’s Napoleon Bonaparte and Julius Caesar’s “vini, vidi, vici”. That’s Genghis Khan and, yes, that’s Adolph Hitler.

The Pledge of Allegiance says “with liberty and justice for all”, not just for legal American citizens. The Declaration of Independence says that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights”. George Bush would change all that, and have us treat any man who differs from us with hatred and fear. That’s the world he lives in, and he would have us all live in. But it’s not America the brave or America the beautiful.

Torture, illegal imprisonment, invading other nations under false pretenses, and brushing it all under the carpet with the excuse that anything the government does is, by definition, legal. These things are all being done in your name, people.

Where is the fucking outrage?

This administration has openly resorted to illegal invasions, illegal imprisonment, and illegal torture camps. Think what a comparatively small infraction it would be to rig an election.

Go vote, while you still can.