Five years on

 Everyone else seems to be doing it, so I will, too.

Today is the five-year anniversary of my university going all-virtual because of COVID. I remember the day because it would have been my father's 85th birthday (he had died the previous July). It was a Friday; the last day before Spring Break.

I had already cancelled my plans - I had been going to visit my mother, but figured Amtrak travel, even in a roomette, would not be safe (In retrospect, given the spread at that time, it might have been, but my mother and I are both cautious people). I was able to get a voucher for future travel with no loss of value; my thought was "well maybe I can use this at May, or failing that, Thanksgiving"

It would be May 2021 before I traveled again.

Similarly - my campus started out saying "faculty can come in to teach from their offices" and "we may only be online for two weeks"

The week after spring break we were told no, we had to stay home and do the best we could to teach from home. A colleague who didn't have internet at his house (out in the country) would record his teaching videos and "sneak" in late in the evening to upload it on campus. 

We weren't officially welcome back on campus until July (which was also the start of a new fiscal year, and that may have been partly why that date). I finished up some research I had begun (And I got it published the year after that )

We went back to being sort-of in person in the fall, but one of my classes was too large to "distance" in the room (people were supposed to stay 2 meters apart, which probably was based on outmoded research, but) and to wear masks (and I had one or two folks I had to mask-police during the time masks were mandatory, and it was unpleasant for me to have to be confrontational in that way, but it would have been my fault if I let someone not-mask and someone else got sick.)

Anyway. My one class had to be online; the only other option would have been to get to the ballroom that was about a half-mile across campus and then back after class (in 10 minutes) for my next class in my regular building. Parking has ALWAYS been an issue, and while I didn't have an injured knee then, I figured it would cut it awfully close many days, and if it was storming, I would not like to walk in it.

So I taught over Zoom from a classroom. It was distressing at times - the time a colleague leaned in the door and turned  out the light thinking the room was empty because I was supervising some kind of think-pair-share type thing, the fact that I had to put everyone on automatic mute after having a day of being interrupted by (a) someone watching tv while on the zoom, (b) someone trying to supervise their kids during class, and (c) the worst - someone doing McDonald's drive through with class apparently on their phone. 

And even outside the frustrations of having to say "hey, the mask goes over your mouth AND NOSE" a couple times a week, and making sure the tables were wiped down with antibacterial goo after every class (even long after fomite transmission was largely disproven; we got angry-grams when our goo didn't get used up fast enough, to the point where I contemplated taking the bottles and just pouring a bit down the sink every week) and the fact I had to change up how I did certain labs (in one class: having to run between two rooms as students worked), there were the "outside" frustrations

Things like, "will the grocery store have organic milk in some denomination (skim, 1%, or 2%) that I will drink" or "are eggs in stock?" (which ironically and uncomfortably, has become an issue again). Things like "will the store be too crowded to go in?" All the little inconveniences which, while they did increase our safety, were another cognitive load and also another reminder of the terrible times we were in.

And this was long before masks became politicized! That started when our governor banned mask mandates - not merely DROPPED them, but said no facility could issue them. (I continued to wear a mask into 2022. I got multiple complaints on teaching evaluations about "I can't hear or understand you" which may have been as much a political as a practical statement, I don't know. And I got laughed at by some woman once in the walmart for wearing a mask. Eventually I quit - it's uncomfortable in our high humidity with my asthma and once I'd been vaccinated 3 or 4 times, I decided "well, if my being careful to wash my hands and stay apart from people and my vaccines aren't enough, fine, I'm done")

As far as I know, I've never yet had COVID. Of course, I'm also a near-hermit, and I do have a pretty vigorous immune system - and I've kept up with the annual boosters. 

There was also the emotional fallout - early on, staying strictly home (only going out once every week or 10 days to grab groceries, doing nothing "fun," not seeing anyone not through a computer screen - and then later the whole "third quarter phenomenon" where you were just SO tired but didn't know for sure when it would be "over," if it ever was going to be. 

There were weeks in summer 2020 where the only other human I spoke to was my mother, over the phone.

It got bad. I thought I was an introvert but that level of isolation was too much for me; looking back I can tell I really had some trauma and maybe something like ptsd for a couple years; I'm just now snapping out of it (ha ha ha just in time for all the chaos in the federal government) 

It was a big big day in 2021 when, after the first vaccine, I decided it was "safe enough" for a quick masked trip into JoAnn Fabrics (I had been doing no "unnecessary" shopping)

(And now JoAnn's is gone, sigh). 

And how things slowly returned. I was MUCH slower than most people I know to go back to eating in restaurants - even in 2023 I was mostly only ever doing carry-out, or eating somewhere where I could eat outside.

I also remember it took me a long time to be comfortable driving to Sherman again. Part of that was the construction on the bridge over the Red River; for a while it almost felt unsafe (no wiggle room and the barriers so you didn't go over the edge were lower) but also the length of the drive felt like a lot. 

And I've now worried for a while about a "new pandemic" - I was thinking H5N1 (and we might still get that in humans), but now it looks like measles? A vaccine-preventable disease? (I have had three doses of the vaccine, might get a fourth if it seems like it's showing up right where I am). But man, there's been a lot of bad history I lived through.