nakedjen

Masked Compliance

I don't know, do you think this facemask restricts my personal freedoms? 

I know, might be hard to tell.  That's the point of Naked Fridays.  Let's think outside the masks that society asks us to wear. 

I know that many of us have our knickers in a twist over the new requirements that ask that you please wear a facemask in order to enter their establishment.  Or even to ask that you wear one if you're just going to engage in public at all.  We have thousands of Americans who are on the frontlines risking their lives every day to provide us with the basic necessities to allow our country to function, many of whom have shown up without proper protection and now we have entitled citizens protesting over being asked to wear a piece of fabric over their mouth and nose while in public.  I want to say that while I'm the first person to say that I acknowledge that I'm all about personal choice and personal freedoms, I also am a woman who encourages public health and safety.  In this particular case, science says that a facemask is helpful to protect us from one another and this unseen virus. 

Wearing a mask in public in America, I feel, is going to be similar to wearing a seatbelt and not smoking while we're indoors.  Initially, none of us wanted to ever do it.  As a child, I never wore a seat belt and have memories of sliding all over the vinyl backseats of our big Ford station wagon as my father purposely took corners a little too fast and my mother was smoking like a chimney sitting next to him, clouds of noxious smoke filling the entire car.  Now we all wear a seat belt and the smokers refrain from smoking in places where we all gather together indoors.  It's mandated in the public safety laws of every state and none of us would think of putting our child or grandmother into the front seat of a car without strapping them in safely or lighting up and smoking in the middle of a crowded restaurant or grocery store. 

Are you going to send your grandmother, or your own mother, or your teenager or your child to the store unmasked?  Just to prove a point?  Just to say that no one, no one is going to tell you that you have to wear a mask? For the safety of your community?  To perhaps save a life?  

A vaccine is not imminent.  It's important that we make our public places safe for all of us, not just a few of us.  We're not helpless, we actually do have far more power than we realize.  You are a real participant in making this society functional...right now. If you choose to participate.  If you choose. 

My mask protects you.  Your mask protects me.  It's science and it's compliance. 

Your life is important enough to me that I will wear my mask even when I choose not to wear anything else at all.  That is my promise. 

 

And now a message from our sponsors...

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It’s free and a nice option for those that dread phone calls. 

If you do want to talk on the telephone to someone, there's this option.

https://quarantinechat.com/

How it works.

Once you sign up and choose your language preferences, you'll be subscribed to periodic calls. Your caller ID will always say "QuarantineChat" when your phone rings.

After a brief moment on hold, you'll match with another random person. You don't have to pick up if you're busy—your partner will be automatically matched with someone else. And you can join and leave the line whenever you'd like.

It's private. You use your phone number to sign up for Dialup, but your matches will only ever see your username.

All calls are end-to-end encrypted.  

I've actually participated quite a few times in the QUARANTINE CHATS since we've all been isolated.  They're fun.  You get to make friends in far away places.  You're also given a prompt to speak about when you first start chatting so you are not stuck in those awkward silences.  

This has been your brief public service announcement for the day.  I do hope you're all staying healthy and well.  

If there is peace in your mind, you will find peace with everybody.

My Whole Foods market is a maze these days.  

In order to keep all of us from actually bumping into one another and to maintain the required social distance, there are physical barriers where there were once aisles. There walls of soda and beer and chocolate bars and haphazardly stocked HydroFlasks meant to be visual cues that send you this way and that as if we're all experimental rats searching for the proverbial cheese. 

The cheese I wanted today was my Tulsi Tea.  If it were not for the chocolate wall in my way, I would have found it immediately, but no, I was not allowed to go that way and so instead had to go up and down a bunch of other aisles to retrieve it.  Whole Foods is the only store in my area that sells this tea, otherwise I probably wouldn't don my mask to make the effort. 

I used my rat instincts to find my way back to the check-out.  The kind woman who was working the till shared that she also loved this particular tea.  Through our masks we shared war stories of the pandemic and how the tea was actually what was getting us through it.  My muffled voice saying, "It has kept the demon dreams at bay..."  and then she replied, "Oh, yes.  Exactly.  I'm so glad that I'm not the only one." 

No.  I do not think a single one of us is the only one.  Not at all.  

here today, gone tomorrow, so don't get attached to things now

How you do anything is how you do everything.

I feel a bit like Maude these days. 

My two feet, one in front of the other, tiny and compressed in their worn running shoes, follow the path that leads around the cemetery.  

I nod to the deer who keep watch. 

There are many of them now.  At least a dozen. Some standing, some laying down. 
All with big deer ears and big doe eyes and watchful gaze over the moss covered gravestones and the newly dead. 

It's the newly dead that I notice and that I count. The ones that make my heart stop for just a few seconds. 
I ponder their once full lives, their last fleeting seconds, their still living families and I wonder, always, out loud...

"Was it the virus?" 

This fresh mound of earth that was not here yesterday, now it is here today, shovels all akimbo, covered in a plastic blue tarp, a sharpied stake with a name.
"Did the virus do this to you?" 

The deer remain vigilant, keeping guard, ears spread this way and that, always listening, eyes wide open and knowing. 
There's an occasional Canadian goose honking its own sorrowful mourn, an off-key trumpet for us all, living and deceased. 

Today, there were two. Just like my tiny feet. Mounds of blue. 

I cheered for the living, cheered for LIFE, cheered for the grand adventure ahead. 

The deer will guide their journey and will keep them company as they make it. 

Welcome to the Hotel California

It's not a good day. 
I set a timer for five minutes and write.  No edits. Just write. Then I hit the publish button. 
I'm doing it mostly so I show up, but also to allow my brain a way to dump what's sitting there.

There's rain falling from the sky.  I think we've all spent too much time together (Day 51) and the buttons that we know how to push are now so large that they're like huge overgrown mushrooms on our backs and we bump them even if we're trying to avoid them.

I feel as if the entire world is on a roller coaster that never quite makes it to the top of the hill.  All this anxiety building anticipation bullshit riding up up up up up up up up up up....

It's so exhausting. 

I just want to actually get a good night's sleep.

Is that too much to ask? 

Are hotel's taking customers right now?  I kind of want to check in and never leave. 

Seriously.

It's kind of time for the Hotel California.  That doesn't feel like such a nightmare right now.

We Are All In This Together

One month ago I was sitting in the airport in Seoul, Korea rolling the dice.  My own dice.  I had gotten the last flight out of Bali and I was on the last flight leaving Seoul for America.  The destination was Seattle.  The big question was if it was actually going to depart?  Delta Airlines seemed to believe that it would, but that were not 100% positive.  No one could be, of course.  I had already spent the last 48 hours scrambling with flights out of Bali.  I knew that Korea was actually a fairly safe spot to be in terms of the virus and I actually have a good network of support there so I made the decision that if the flight was cancelled I was going to just leave the airport and stick it out in Seoul.  

I am not going to lie.  Making that decision gave me a real sense of peace.  It took all the anxiety out of the situation.  I was either going back to America or I was not.  But now it was no longer really up to me.  It was a matter of whether or not Delta decided to fly the plane. 

The flight from Seoul to Seattle actually did happen that evening.  It had very few passengers and the most surprising part of the whole journey, to me, was that while I was vetted thoroughly in Korea before boarding (temperature, travel, physical health) when I landed in America in Seattle no one was wearing a mask or gloves and I was not told to self-quarantine or even asked about where I had been.  I just walked right off the plane and right into America and was welcomed home practically with a bear hug.  In fact, my suitcase had literally EXPLODED on its way off the plane and all my stuff was all over the luggage carousel and everyone was quite helpful in helping me gather it up and shove it inside and then the people who help with luggage (I still had to fly to Salt Lake City) were also very helpful in duct taping my suitcase up so it could make its final journey home. 

America was not in any way prepared for the virus.  There were no marks, yet, on the airport floor telling me to keep my social distance.  There was no signage about the virus.  Seattle, which was at the time a HOT SPOT, had very few people at the airport, but they had yet to alert the world that perhaps we should be taking very careful precautions.  I eventually made my way to Salt Lake City, quarantined myself for 14 days, have still continued to practice careful precautions and have watched as our numbers in America follow the predicted trajectory.  Math and science and data of this virus are proving more powerful than whatever magical thinking we all wish to apply.

*****

I am a healthy white woman with access to excellent health care.  I even was able to get a test for the virus once I got back to Utah.  I do not feel unsafe here, but the color of my skin and my own demographics create a very privileged bubble that allow me to shelter in place and order my groceries online and not worry about how I'll feed my dog and even to send money and supplies and food to my friends (and strangers) who are not nearly as privileged as I am.  

Before all of this began, long before, I would say to the people in our community clinic that we're all in this together. 

I still believe that.  

Now, more than ever.  

I have no illusions that it probably is going to get a whole lot worse before it ever starts even begins to creep towards getting better.  I also can't even imagine what better looks like at this point, only that it looks incredibly different than anything we ever knew before.  

In fact, we can only hope that it will for the survival of us all. 

Always be a lady.

Always be a lady.

Pfft. 

My mother has said to me in only the way a mother can, I don't know how many times, "Jennifer, act like a lady."

A lady. 

I don't think, even now, I understand exactly what that means?  

I do have lady parts. Yes.  I think this lady business stops right there.  Or does it?

Is it about being soft?  I don't do soft.  I'm not soft.  I have never been soft. I don't even like soft. 

How about I just not conform to preconceived notions of gender norms and instead march in support of the voice that says I am here as LOVE personified? 

I'm loud and crass and very hard around the edges.  I stomp in my boots and you can hear me coming ten minutes before I arrive. 

I do not have a filter.  I tell you what I'm thinking.  It flashes from my eyes and spills from my mouth and sometimes I realize far too late that I might have wanted to actually swallow some of all of that rather than actually vomiting it all over your pretty lady shoes.

Fuck this lady business. Whatever it is supposed to be? 

I like me. 

I'll always be me. 

I am in no hurry to die

1,000,000

That's a lot of zeros. 

Back in February when I was still trying to suss out if I would actually get on the plane to Bali or not, there were 19 known cases of Covid19 in Indonesia.  I knew that number could not possibly account for all possible cases in Indonesia because testing was not widely available and at that point in time it was only being provided to people who were actually presenting with all known symptoms at hospitals.  We now know there are plenty of additional symptoms and plenty of people that are wandering around who are asymptomatic and who can have this virus and be spreading it among the community without even knowing it at all. 

Just now the numbers of known identified cases in America tipped over to 1,000,000 cases.  Known.  Identified.  This means someone had a test and tested positive.  

The good news, if there's going to be good news, is that we're providing a lot more tests in America.  The better news, if you'd like it, is that the majority of those 1,000,000 cases will make a full recovery.  The disheartening news is that for every single one of those cases there are probably at least one if not two cases that are currently undiagnosed.  Walking among us somewhere in this country and maybe standing not quite six feet away from you or me in line at a grocery store waiting patiently to check-out without a mask on because, well, they don't have symptoms and do not believe they actually need to wear a mask and it makes them uncomfortable.  Later today that same person who stood not six feet from you or me and coughed gently will go visit their own mother at the eldercare facility.   They may, also, for all we know be one of our valuable essential workers.  Again, this virus is not picky.  It doesn't care who you happen to be or where you happen to live or what precautions you actually take with your own health.  If it wants to infect you, it will.  

America might be in a hurry to lift restrictions and get back to business.  

I am in no hurry to die.  

Tell Me Something Happy

The sun came up today.  

I know, I know.  But it did.  Just as it seems to do every day.  

You asked me to tell you something happy and that was the first thing that popped into my head.  

I feel like that's a fairly good indication of the sign of these times.  Also a sign of these times is that the second thing that popped into my head was that a New York ER doctor suicided after taking care of so many COVID19 patients.  She couldn't take it anymore.  Immediately, I chastised myself for even thinking about it because, of course, it is not very happy.  

How can we have found ourselves here?  Where the happy thing is suicide?

I know how we found ourselves here, intellectually.  Of course.  As a nation we focused on more for ourselves, selfish taking, laughing and pointing at the orange man in the White House and ribbing our neighbors at his foibles every time he said or did anything to make the United States look stupid to the rest of the world all the while ignoring the blaring sirens of the warning signals ALL AROUND US.  

They were very loud and obvious and we did not listen because why should we?  We could push BUY IT NOW and have whatever we wanted on our doorstep by the end of the day.  Life was so damn grand.  

Except that it was all an illusion. 

It certainly was not really happy.  

Now we have dead bodies piled up.  Kids who are not able to go to school.  Millions without a job.  Domestic violence on the rise. Doctors taking their own lives.  

I can't possibly tell you something happy.

The sun will come up tomorrow.