Pandemic Journal, Part 12: Back-to-School Doom-Anxiety Edition

 

My pandemic journal continues with Part 12, Back-to-School Doom-Anxiety Edition.

Tomorrow is the beginning of the 2020-21 school year for me, so this juncture in my life and the lives of many others seems like a good time to post a journal update. You can see my latest thoughts at the end.

In recent week's I've come to feel what I've been calling doom-anxiety about the impending school year.

And as always, there are plenty of doom-memes to make the doom-anxiety go down a little easier. 

Whether you're here for the memes, my random thoughts, or you just realized you clicked on the wrong thing: good luck to us all!

Mon. 27 July 2020

 

Something I put on social media, maybe because it’s 3am and it’s the weirdest, most wonderful time of the day.

 

Scrolling through various streaming services: Paralyzed with indecision. Gets to Shudder: Watches Blacula for some reason.

 

Note: I think I watched Blacula on VHS in the 90’s. But it’s on Shudder, and they said it’s going away soon. Not sure that’s much of a reason. Anyway, it’s cheesy 70’s blaxsploitation, sure, but it actually has some scary vampire stuff and the idea that Blacula became a vampire as punishment from Dracula for trying to use his power as a leader of an African nation to end the slave trade in the 18^th century is pretty interesting.

 

 

Tues. 28 July 2020

 

I voted early today for the TN state primary. There was hardly anybody there besides the poll workers, there was ample social distancing, and masks were required, so it felt pretty safe. It

was weird going to the same place I just went several months ago (at the end of February to vote in the Presidential Primary). It’s the same place and roughly the same process not that long ago, but it was a totally different feeling.

Then later I stopped by my office to pick up some mail. I checked on my classrooms for the fall. They’re set up for social distancing. Teaching in those rooms is going to be really, really weird.

Thurs. 30 July 2020

 

Today these final words of the late, great John Lewis were released on the day of his funeral as he specified. It’s hard not to be moved by tears and inspiration.

 

I loved the whole piece, but this line was a particularly moving expression of Lewis’s famous concept of “good trouble.”

 

Ordinary people with extraordinary vision can redeem the soul of America by getting in what I call good trouble, necessary trouble. 

 

So, let’s honor this great human being by getting into some of that good trouble.

 

 

Fri. 31 July 2020

 

It’s the last day of July. Tomorrow it’s August, which is horrifying for many reasons, but I’m looking forward to tomorrow as my first day of being officially tenured. I might go buy myself a congratulatory bottle of Scotch.

 

I’m actually starting to work on my syllabi today. The hybrid courses are going to be … difficult? Impossible? I guess we’ll see. As I get more into it, I wonder how any of this is possibly going to work.

 

In the meantime, I’m tackling the important issues of the day on social media:

 

Dear frozen burritos that tell you to microwave with a second plate on top of the burrito: If I wanted to dirty dishes unnecessarily, I wouldn't be making a frozen burrito.

 

 

 

Also tonight: the Hugo Awards ceremony! Online from New Zealand and around the world!

 

 

From Danse Macabre, which I started reading recently

 

Sat. 1 Aug. 2020

 

Normally Aug. 1 is the melancholy day I realize summer is almost over. I was expecting it to be that and so much worse this year, but instead I decided to celebrate the fact that this is my first day as a tenured Associate Professor. That, along with drinking some of the fancy bottle of Lagavulin I bought yesterday and finishing Stephen King’s Wizard and Glass as part of my Dark Tower re-read, have helped me delay that anxiety a little longer.

 

Funny thing: the Scotch was distilled in 2001 and aged until it was bottled in 2017. 2001 is also the year I started grad school at the University of Hawaii, so that’s a good Scotch to drink for this particular occasion.

 

 

Mon. 3 Aug. 2020

 

I had a pretty good weekend to celebrate tenure. The Lagavulin was excellent.

 

I wrote about the 2020 Hugo results as well as the controversial award ceremony hosted by George R. R. Martin (link here).

 

This morning I read this article that explains how almost everything has gone wrong with the pandemic here in the US.

 

Now that my doom-anxiety is appropriately stoked, it’s time to get back to my syllabi…

 

 

The other day I had nostalgia for nostalgia. In the summer of 2016 I was watching Stranger Things and listening to a lot of Synthwave, especially GUNSHIP. I listened to that GUNSHIP album the other day and now that it’s 2020 and things are what they are, I felt nostalgic for the summer of 2016 (before the election) when I was nostalgic for the 80’s. But even back then I reflected that the 80’s weren’t actually that great. In this case, the summer of 2016 was actually much worse than I thought, given what was about to happen in the fall and in the years since then. 

The immediate months before us at this point fill me with doom-anxiety, but who knows? Maybe the next few years will see something better, or at least moving in the right direction (no, I’m not just talking about American Presidential elections, but that’s part of it).

 

Another weird bit of nostalgia. A former student let me know about this fun site that has information about old movie theaters. Here's the really cool relic of the 50's that we lived near in the early 80's. I think I saw Return of the Jedi and Jaws 3 here as a pretty young kid.

Here's the theater where I usually saw movies in the late 80's, including, if I remember correctly, Spaceballs for the first time in 1987. 

This became a dollar theater in the mid-90's, and I went there even though I had moved 20-some miles away (after having initially moved 100-some miles away to Wisconsin—it’s a long story). I was there partly for nostalgia’s sake, partly because I was hanging out with friends who still lived there. I must’ve already been feeling nostalgia for living there in the 80’s at that point (hence, nostalgia about nostalgia). Anyway, my friends and I were detained by police in the parking lot for allegedly vandalizing some cars. We didn't do it (they said it was "kids with long hair"), but being typical (white) 90's teen smart-asses, we thought this infringement of our civil liberties was rather amusing. This is also, as my friend Adam put it on Facebook (he was one of the friends who was there), a major “white privilege moment” for both of us, even if it took us a long time to realize it.

 

A few years later the police in that same city (Brooklyn Center, MN) pulled me over because they thought I looked like a guy who wrote a bad check. They called in three or four cars for backup and then wasted about an hour of my time (which included voluntarily going with them to the gas station so the attendant could verify I wasn't the guy, which they did immediately). After all that, the cop told me not to major in English, but to do something useful with my life. 

But all I had to do to stop this kind of harassment was to cut my hair and become middle-aged (except for the cop in Kentucky who pulled me over for driving the speed limit a couple years ago). But still, in none of this did I feel like I was legitimately in physical danger from the cops, which is more than many other Americans can say about their encounters with police.

 

To go back even more, that theater existed where it was in the first place as part of suburban white flight of the 60’s through the 80’s, and that area is largely empty today partly because too many of the “wrong kind” of people moved in during the 90’s and 00’s. In America, not even nostalgia about childhood movie theaters can be separated from racial issues.

 

 

Wed. 5 Aug. 2020

 

Worldwide 

cases: 18,827,433

deaths: 707,039

 

USA

cases: 4,933,435

deaths: 160,759

 

Hamilton County, TN

cases: 5,669

deaths: 48

 

 

Some of my social media updates of the day:

 

·      One syllabus is kinda done. On to the next one. I suspect my Canvas pages will be "under construction" throughout the semester, or really since I'm starting with Before Times content, maybe they'll be "under deconstruction."

 

·      I needed a break from doom-prepping the fall semester, so I updated my CV to say I'm tenured and snuck all my pop culture stuff back in there.

 

 

Thurs. 6 Aug. 2020

 

My mom died 20 years ago today. It simultaneously feels like it happened yesterday and a lifetime ago.

 

She died while Bill Clinton was President, before 9/11, before everyone had a cell phone, before smart phones, before social media.

 

(My sister and I briefly shared a cell phone when our mom was sick to keep in touch with her while we were out, but I didn’t get my own cell phone until 2005. I didn’t have a smart phone until 2012. Social media as it is today was mostly unimaginable 20 years ago, although I think I got a LiveJournal around 2001.)

 

She died before I started grad school for the first time, before I got married, before a lot of my college students today were born, long before my nephew (her grandson) was born.

(Read the rest of my reflections in a blog post based on this entry.)

 

 

 

Sat. 8 Aug. 2020

 

 

Superheroes, violence, and the status quo...

Tonight Beth and I watched Captain America: Civil War, because we’re watching some of the Marvel movies on Disney+, which we got mostly to watch Hamilton.

 

Anyway, I had an insight about why I don’t connect strongly with the core Avengers movies (especially Captain America and Iron Man): the main superheroes in these movies usually use violence to preserve the status quo. I mean, they use their power to save people’s lives (often from supervillains), which is cool. But compared to other superhero stories like X-Men, which is about protecting mutants from people who want to persecute them as a thinly-veiled parable of the US Civil Rights movement, or HBO’s excellent Watchmen show, which interrogates the very concept of superheroes as well as the history of racist violence in America, most of the main Avengers movies are in the end about saving the status quo from those who seek to uproot it. 

Not that this is always bad. Usually the baddies in these movies are intent on causing needless suffering of innocent people (although Thanos sort of had a point in the Avengers movies even if it was cruel and short-sighted, and Kill-Monger initially had a better argument than T’Challa in Black Panther). But after they save the world or the universe or whatever, the Avengers are pretty content to let things go back to normal.

 

Because I’m a nerd everybody assumes I’m a fan of comics and superhero movies, but I’m really not. I mean, I watch a lot of comic book movies (indeed, it’s hard not to watch them as a science fiction fan given that superhero movies have taken over big budget SFF movies in the last decade… I mean, what am I supposed to watch, boring mimetic dramas?... well, back when movie theaters were open, anyway). Most superhero movies are genuinely entertaining. But I don’t obsess about them or connect with them the way many other nerds seem to.

 

Imagine trying to explain this meme to yourself from six months ago

I wrote a blog post several years ago about why I don’t like superheroes, but in recent years I’ve come to complicate my opinions. I’ve always liked the X-Men more than most superheroes, and in recent years I’ve appreciated Wonder Woman (yes, I know that’s DC, not Marvel), Captain Marvel, and Black Panther. Part of it’s that these are all stories about recognizing power for people whose power is discounted by others. But they also to varying degrees use their power to question the status quo. (Think also of the violence of other movies like The Matrix or Star Wars that’s used to liberate people from injustice).

 

Of course, a lot of the main Avengers movies do complicate the storylines in interesting ways (Civil War, Spider-Man: Homecoming) and I love the funny ones (Ant-Man, Guardians of the Galaxy), but in the end there’s nothing particularly radical about most of these movies. As cool as they are, most of the Avengers are basically cops in spandex.

 

Underlying all of this is that I’m really uncomfortable with violence. I’m a pacifist at heart. One thing I didn’t like about Civil War was that the superheroes are supposed to be friends, but they can’t resolve their conflicts without beating the shit out of each other. Of course, in narratives violence is often a convenient way to dramatize conflict, and a lot of my favorite science fiction, fantasy, horror, and games are heavily dependent on violence. 

And in real life I admit that violence is sometimes the best of bad options or at least understandable (my answer to the question of whether one should punch Nazis: no, but I wouldn’t get that upset if you did). I’m not trying to haughtily wag my finger at violence in general. But I guess I prefer stories where violence is serving some more interesting purpose than preserving the status quo.

 

So, anyway, I think this insight explains a puzzle about myself. Superheroes who use violence to preserve the status quo just aren’t that interesting to me. We have enough violence preserving our status quo in reality.

 

But of course if other people like the Avengers, I don’t mean to take away from that. I’m just explaining where I’m at. Even a curmudgeon like me admits there are plenty of cool things about those movies. I like plenty of things that are even more problematic (Lovecraft, for starters…). To each one’s own.

 

 

 

On an unrelated note, I’ve been thinking lately that all these people using the pandemic to make sourdough or deep clean their living spaces or whatever don’t have as much imagination as I do when it comes to thinking of ways to avoid these things. Or maybe I’m just lazy. I haven’t really done many new things besides keeping this pandemic journal and discovering new depths of an emotion I call doom-anxiety. Mostly it’s more of things I was doing before, like reading books, making blog posts, and being involved in social justice causes. Come to think of it, that’s where all my time has gone. 

 

I have yet to feel bored in any of this, but I was that weird kid who could entertain himself all day and now I’m a weird adult who entertains himself all day. Sure, I miss things (especially movie theaters, live music, travel), but I can occupy myself in other ways. I think I put it this way earlier in the pandemic, but I seem to have dialed up my introvert settings to accommodate present conditions. I used to enjoy in-person socializing a lot, but I’ve found I’m also fine chilling at home.

 

(While I lean toward introversion, my relationship with the whole introvert-extrovert question is complicated by the fact that in certain circumstances I can actually be pretty extroverted. I rarely just walk up to people and start talking to them, but if a social context makes it okay for me to talk, I often won’t shut up. This is a big part of why I like classroom settings, presenting at conferences, and being on panels at cons. I also often get energized by crowds even if I’m not talking to anyone. Or I used to enjoy all those things, anyway…)

 

 

Mon. 10 Aug. 2020

 

Today I trimmed my beard for the first time in a month. In the Before Times, I would usually do this about once a week. But now …. Meh.

 

Personal grooming has never been my strong suit, partly because of absent-mindedness but mostly laziness. Sure, I would usually take a shower and put on deodorant if I were going somewhere to be around people, but now that I so rarely go somewhere to be around people… Meh.

 

 

Tues. 11 Aug. 2020

 

An email I just sent to the Tennessee Philosophical Association. I was elected TPA President last year and thought I would have a bit of service this year planning a small, in-person conference at Vanderbilt. Oh, well.

 

Dear TPA members,

After much agonizing deliberation, we have decided to postpone the 2020 TPA Conference until fall 2021.

After consulting with TPA Secretary Charles Cardwell, Scott Aikin at Vanderbilt, our keynote speaker, and a few other TPA members, I decided that, although an online conference is possible given Vanderbilt’s technology resources, the logistical difficulties of organizing a totally new kind of conference would make it hard to pull off. We also felt that an online conference does not foster the same sense of community that forms a large part of the TPA’s mission. So, we decided that postponing to 2021 is the least worst option.

To accommodate this transition, I have agreed to continue serving as TPA President until we can elect a new President in 2021.

I would have preferred to be sending you this email to announce the call for papers. But, alas, this pandemic has other plans for all of us.

I can, however, announce that we have secured an excellent scholar to serve as our keynote for the Fall 2021 TPA: Dr. Amy Olberding of the University of Oklahoma. In addition to her work in classical Chinese philosophy, Dr. Olberding has written on the need to diversify the philosophy curriculum as well as ways in which contemporary philosophers can learn from classical Chinese philosophy. Her latest book, The Wrong of Rudeness: Learning Modern Civility from Ancient Chinese Philosophy, was published by Oxford University Press in 2019.

While I deeply regret that we have had to postpone this year, I look forward to seeing you for a meaningful and spirited reunion in 2021.

Sincerely,

Ethan Mills

TPA President

 

 

 

While I’m sharing things I’ve written recently, here’s an excerpt of a note for my students in my horror and philosophy class, which is a “hybrid” course (mostly online with a few optional in-person meetings):

There's no getting around the fact that this is going to be a very weird semester. I'll do my best to make some of that weirdness good weird, but we are all living in difficult times so there is bound to be some bad weird. One thing we'll discuss is whether horror fiction and film helps us deal with the horrors of reality, something we all might find ourselves putting to the test this semester.

Good luck to all of us.

 

Here’s what I said to my Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy course, which is 100% online.

Lastly, there's no way around it: this is going to be a strange and difficult semester for all of us. While having this course 100% online means we thankfully do not need to worry about physical safety in a classroom, I understand that we are all dealing with a lot these days. Please understand that I am far more concerned about your physical and mental well-being (what Aristotle would call eudaimonia) than I am about whether you meet all the deadlines. Please don't hesitate to turn things in late (no questions asked, honest). If you feel you're having trouble with the course, I am happy to discuss ways to help you complete course requirements. 

 

 

Later: We tried to order Taco Bell to get the menu items going away in two days, and they’re already out of potatoes. Farewell, Spicy Potato Soft Taco. You were carby and delicious.

 

 

Dark Tower re-read news: I finished The Wind Through the Keyhole (Dark Tower 4.5). On to Book 5, where things start to get even more delightfully weird!

 

 

 

Wed. 12 Aug. 2020

 

I realize this will sound odd to a certain type of person, but one thing I dislike about online classes is that they are far too organized. Like many things in life, I think education benefits from a little chaos.

 

 

Thurs. 13 Aug. 2020

 

Today’s puzzle: A lot of people are (at least privately) thinking schools will be all online within a few weeks of reopening. So why are we reopening at all?

 

(Our K-12 public schools reopened this week and my university reopens next week. Good luck to us all.)

 

 

Other news, I wrote a re-review for my re-read of The Wind Through the Keyhole. 

 

I’m almost done with my syllabi and Canvas pages for the first week. I have a feeling the first week will be the week I’m most prepared for all semester.

 

Another random thought: Gotta hand it to the pandemic: It has done a great job shining some harsh daylight on every fucked up thing about America.

 

Speaking of the pandemic, here are the latest numbers…

 

Worldwide 

cases: 20,877,111

deaths: 746,414

 

USA

cases: 5,363,373

deaths: 169,181

 

Hamilton County, TN

cases: 6,380

deaths: 56

 

 

When I started this pandemic journal on March 18 there were about 200,000 cases worldwide. Now we have over 20 million. In five months.

 

 

 

Well, I have my Canvas pages ready for week one (next week). In one sense, that’s probably the week for which I’ll be most prepared all semester. In another sense, none of us are really prepared for anything this semester.

 

 

 

Fri. 14 Aug. 2020

 

School starts on Monday. Syllabi, Canvas pages, quizzes, discussion boards, etc. are in good shape. But I’ve never felt less ready for a new semester.

 

Today I went out with my friend Dominik to hand out lunches, water, and fruit. We switched to Fridays to accommodate our school schedule, but I’m glad we can still do it (although of course in a better world we wouldn’t have to).

 

 

Sat. 15 Aug. 2020

 

Some quick updates:

 

Today I had a couple online hangouts with friends. It was great to see people. I feel like I’ve been far more in touch with my far flung friends during this pandemic than I was before.

 

Then we got Indian food delivered for dinner. Yum.

 

We got one of those beds in a box. We lugged the box upstairs yesterday. It was fun to watch it unfurl itself.

 

I was on the radio the other day! I talked with a colleague about “the new normal.” It was fun to have my radio debut. Here’s a link.

 

I submitted a short story to a magazine just now. It’s already been rejected twice, but maybe the third time’s a charm. I never know if mentioning I’m an academic is a good idea in the cover letter for fiction magazines, but that is most of how I’ve been published (this time I mentioned my forthcoming piece in the Journal of Science Fiction and Philosophy, which at least feels more relevant). I did have one short story in Big Echo last year, but somehow it feels more awkward to say, “I published one thing” than it would be to mention nothing.

 

 

 

Sun. 16 Aug. 2020

 

Tomorrow is the first day of school for my fall semester 2020.

 

Normally the day before school is a day of mixed feelings. I’m already pining for the flexible days of summer, but despite my bellyaching, I’m excited to get back in a classroom, meeting new students.

 

This year I’m primarily feeling something I’ve been calling doom-anxiety.

Although I did get a lot of projects done (including the most fun: a forthcoming publication in the Journal of Science Fiction and Philosophy!), I didn’t quite get as much done this summer as I hoped. Aside from all the travel I didn’t get to do (and I had a lot planned before the pandemic), I have a writing project I was supposed to finish that I didn’t start. 

 

I did more blogging than usual (including this journal, which I started in March) and maybe read a few more books than usual. There are many far-flung friends I’ve talked to more than usual (electronically, of course).

 

But I didn’t learn how to make sourdough or learn a new language or deep-clean the house or anything. I didn’t read quite as much of the Hugo stuff as I hoped. I didn’t finish my re-read of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series (although I started Book 5 the other day, which is where things start to get mind-bogglingly weird).

 

But all in all, I think I did pretty well this summer all things considered. Doom-anxiety is pretty time-consuming, after all.

 

I am also officially tenured as of Aug. 1, so that’s something.

 

And now a new semester is about to start.

 

At my university and many other schools at all levels, a lot of people have been working very hard all summer to make school as safe as can be. But even given all that, I can’t help but feel like we’re walking head-first into a disaster. I hope I’m wrong about that.

 

I’m lucky in a lot of ways. I have one class totally online and the rest are “hybrid” (the details are complicated, but basically this means students will be in class less than 50% of the time they normally would be). I’ll only need to be interacting with people on campus for something like 5-7 hours a week. I’m also doing my hybrid courses totally online for the first two weeks. Compared to real teachers and people whose jobs require 40 or more hours per week of contact with the public (our so-called “essential workers”), I’m pretty lucky. I’ll still mostly be working from home this fall, and maybe totally from home soon enough.

 

Almost everybody (at least in my social bubbles) seems to be thinking that we’ll only last a few weeks before we’re back to fully online again. We’re already getting emails about contact tracing from social gatherings. Many colleagues and I have already gotten notes about students in quarantine. I got another for a student awaiting test results.

 

So, why are we reopening at all? Why go through the trouble, including a deliberate sacrifice of the health (maybe even the lives) of students, faculty, and staff?

 

I admit I’m a bit hazy on the answers. I mean, there are lots of “answers,” but none of them seem to have to do much with safety. 

 

I agree it’s pedagogically and socially better for students to be in class in person in many ways (in an online environment bullying and school shootings may decrease, while abuse at home may increase…). I dislike teaching online, too, although I dislike people getting sick for no good reason even more. 

 

I agree that, given thoroughly-planned and strictly-followed safety measures, schools can reduce the risk for students. But I worry that many schools lack the resources (human and financial) to enact these measures. I worry about whether fallible humans are capable of adequately following such measures. I worry about people who aren’t taking any of this seriously, or who have family members that aren’t taking it seriously. For colleges, telling a bunch of 18-22-year-olds not to socialize seems like a really bad idea, and I don’t blame young people for this at all.

 

I agree that, when it comes to preschool-12, we’re putting way too much stress on parents in ways that are showing yet more fault lines in our society, especially the extra burdens we as a society place on most women with children.

 

I agree that the US has made almost every conceivable wrong choice during this pandemic, which has led to probably thousands of preventable deaths. As some have pointed out, we made schools unsafe when many of us decided we had to go to bars and restaurants as if everything is back to normal. Back in May when I agreed to do some hybrid courses, I thought things in my area might be more under control by August. Instead, things in Hamilton County have gotten worse in terms of number of cases. Reopening UTC and most schools in the area won’t help. (As in many places, the death rate has gone down, but deaths continue. We had three deaths in one day a couple days ago in a county of 370,000.)

 

I agree that, given the choices the US has made in recent decades to fund higher education less and less through the state and more and more through tuition and room and board, many schools literally cannot afford to operate without students on campus (this is a huge and almost entirely unacknowledged element at my school). 

 

I don’t know what the answers are. Maybe they’re different for different families, students, and schools in different areas. I maybe would have loved online school during some of my painfully awkward teen years (the years that sometimes make it hard for me to watch movies about teenagers to this day). But other kids are different. Some schools and some parts of the country might be fine.

 

Many college students lack the high degree of self-motivation and self-direction needed to succeed in online environments. Many students, especially “non-traditional” students, have messy, complicated lives that make online school difficult. Many students at all levels lack adequate technology resources (something I worry about a lot, so I tend to make my online classes pretty bare bones).

 

A couple weeks ago someone said in a meeting, “There’s not really a good option.” I decided that will be the slogan of the 2020-21 school year.

 

So, am I ready for school tomorrow?

 

Syllabi are finished. Canvas pages, assignments, readings, etc. are totally ready for the first week, and they're in workable enough condition to be ready for the next few weeks.

 

But am I ready to start a new school year in a pandemic?

 

Hell, no. None of us are.

 

Good luck to us all.