There aren't many things that one can say virtually the entire planet is aware of, but at the time of me writing this COVID-19 might be one of them. Everywhere you look, both on the internet and in real life people are panicking. Of course, there are also plenty of people who are calm and collected during the whole thing. I'm mostly in the latter.
A lot of people have been beaten down by not being able to go out into the world and hang out with friends, but this is irrelevant to me because for several years in advance I haven't really had a social life. Pretty much the only people I talk to on a daily basis (Other than my mother) are the regulars on IRC, so staying indoors isn't much of a burdan on me. Of course at the time of this I'm still going to the back lawn to enjoy the fresh air, and whenever it's sunny, the nice weather.
Other than chatting online and listening to music, I've been spending most of my time in isolation learning to play the guitar. I'm not by any means a prodigy, but I've been learning at a sluggish pace since 2018. But since the outbreak started, I've been making far more and rapid progress than I ever have. I've also been growing a mustache, because I figure that once all this is over my hair will be pretty long from not getting haircuts, so I might as well embrace it, get an acoustic guitar and dress up like Country Joe McDonald ala Woodstock until it gets old. I've even got an olive green shirt I can modify to look like a Vietnam fatigue shirt.
At the moment, a lot of people are saying this virus is going to end the world. I for one don't believe this alone can acomplish that, the fatality rate (From what we know at this time) is too low for this, with a global death rate of 4.4%. The flu kills more people a year, but the corona virus' real weapon is how contagious it is. Theoretically it could be mostly under control if every person on the planet went into isolation, but that's putting too much faith in humans. We are very social creatures. :P
Never the less, I'm hopeful. Though it is a bit of a putoff when I see YouTube comments such as the follwing:
"the world is 100% going to end this year, but it's going to be with nuclear war, not a stupid ass virus. we need war to bring us out of this recession."
And of course there's the fact that everyone online is using the term "coronapocalypse". Yeah, this is either going to turn out to be an actual apocalypse or yet another Y2K doomsday prepper scenario. And I don't mean the Y2K bug itself, that was a very real issue that IT engineers worked around the clock to fix. I mean the 2012 type bio-bunker type prepper.
I might as well note some of the stories I've been hearing, such as kids getting bullied for their parents working at hospitals, which I have heard started as "Now little Jimmy, don't hang out with those kids or else you'll die.". If you're wondering as to how this is spreading so quickly, it's because a lot of people still aren't staying st home despite the entire world being told to do so. As the virus was just picking up momentum America, I heard someone in a store say that a mom got the virus and was placed under self quarantine, which she violated to take her kid to a school function. Heck, some college students are going to the beach for spring break, and being entirely shocked when they get sick. Also, I don't follow Fox News, but I heard as I'm typing this that Fox is telling people to go outside despite everything going on. :\
One way this has been affecting me is skin care. For one thing, I'm not at all concerned about getting the virus, just passing it to other people. The reason I'm not afraid (At least for now) is that I have some kind of freak X-men spartan human-terminator immune system. The reason for this is easy enough to understand. In public schools all my classmates coughed into their palms, the teachers didn't even think of this as a problem, hand sanitizer was a controlled substance because kids kept eating it (!!!) and nobody washed their hands unless they went to the bathroom, and this was a communist school who made everyone share everything. To top it all off, I never washed my hands with soap because I'm somehow allergic to every hand soap on the planet. Even the unscented stuff. As you can imagine, I was sick constantly, but after several years of this I just stopped getting sick. I don't think I've been distractingly ill since I was... 12? Maybe 13.
But you're probably wondering, "Argot, what does this have to do with skin care?". Well, I am still allergic to every hand soap I have ever tried, and now that hand soap is pretty much mandatory my hands are dry as death valley. Every couple of days I have to smother my hands in Eucerin or else they get so dry that even the slightest twitch will cause a new split in my skin. It also has me wondering how long that Eucerin has been in the cupboard for. I can't remember anyone in the family buying any since the late 2000s or something.
Another thing I think is interesting is a particular package I ordered. I ordered something online March 10th which ships from Japan to America from a seller that is known to be notoriouslly slow at fufilling orders, during the corona virus outbreak. As you can imagine, progress is slow. Normally I would be upset be this, but given the circumstances and that I'm not in any rush to recieve it, I'm now just wondering if I can break some kind of record for slowest shipping since the advent of airmail. It would be an interesting footnote to look back on, wouldn't it?
The last thing I can think of noting is that I started taping my local radio station, digitally of course. It's an AM station, so I'm using a sample rate of 22050Hz, as I don't think it matters to have the quality any higher than that. This low sample rate gives me a staggering max recording time of 1,943 1/2 hours, and I've already been going for 5 1/2. My local station is a CBS affiliate, so they get CBS news flashes at the top of every hour, on top of the local news. I've spent years complaining about how it's so hard to find old radio news programs from historic events, even if said news program was syndicated. Well, I hope this proves I'm not too much of a hypocrite :3
Well, there you are. I just wanted to write this as a record for what my life is like at this time. I don't plan on making a regular blog or journal of this, as not much happens during isolation. Though I am backing up my IRC logs, those should be really interesting to read twenty years down the road.
I leave you with this tweet, because I thought it was pretty funny.
Argot
Page created: Wednesday, March 25th, 2020