Marie Javins's Blog, page 36
June 27, 2020
Cultural Appropriation Mask
Here I am, ready for my run to the post office.
June 26, 2020
My Pal Larry
Here's my new action figure! I got it off of Kickstarter.
June 23, 2020
Era of the Murder Hornets
Wednesday, March 11, 2020. I went by Trader Joe’s on the way home from pilates. It was busy but not too bad. Thursday night I stopped at Vons after work, and that was okay too.
Friday we learned we were going to work from home. We all raced around the office, except at the sink, where we’d spend 20 seconds, methodically scrubbing our hands just like we’d been taught on YouTube.
Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you.
How long would we work from home? A while. A few weeks, maybe. Surely no more than a month?
“Did you go to Vons recently?” Liz asked me. “Yeah, it was fine,” I told her.
I stopped by Vons that night. It was not fine, and the checkout queues stretched down the aisles, so I didn’t hang around.
I went again at 8 the next morning. There wasn’t much Vons left. The paper aisle was bare. The pasta aisle was vacant. I saw one of the women from work picking over a few remaining packs of chicken. I bought what she didn’t.
On Monday the 16th, I had a scheduled routine colonoscopy. Yay, me. The doctors gave me a printout with little photos of my healthy colon. Little round pink images I didn’t understand.
Someone has to sign you out of colonoscopies, and Liz lives nearby, so I asked her to pretend to be driving me home. Neither of us has a car. She signed me out and walked me outside. We sat down for a while as my anesthesia faded.
“Vons wasn’t fine,” Liz said.
Remember at the start, how we were afraid to touch doorknobs and ATM screens? The lines at the supermarket, the taped Xs on the sidewalks, keeping us all six feet apart?
No one had any masks except for carpenters, fine arts painters, people who fix things. Those of us anxious to prepare for California wildfires. But we weren’t supposed to use masks—we were supposed to leave them for the first responders. The cloth mask idea came later. My sewing machine came out then from under the dining room table.
I went through disinfectant wipes I'd brought home from work. Then I stopped wiping down the laundry room, the mailboxes, the doorknobs. There were no more wipes in North America. I bought vinyl gloves at the pharmacy.
The wipes were gone. The soap was gone. Then the bidet attachments were all gone. The toilet paper was gone. The gloves were rare. Thermometers were hard to come by. Pulse oximeters were mentioned in the New York Times, then they too became hard to find. Forget finding rubbing alcohol.
Hand sanitizer was practically a rare mineral.
Yoga mats and bicycles eventually became rare commodities, right after yeast and flour. Then the supply of meat became strange, but never ran out. My local stores always had plenty of fruits and vegetables.
No one knew how the illness worked yet. At one point, we were briefly advised to disinfect our groceries.
We learned to wear masks. We cowered in our homes, sheltering in place, reading stories about temporary morgues, learning to go to Zoom birthday parties and to see doctors on our iPads. The pandemic forced our technological hands on several fronts.
Eventually, medical professionals learned more about managing the ill. Videos came out telling us if we all wore masks, washed our hands right after coming in the house, and didn’t get close to anyone we don’t live with, we could exist kinda...not normal, but we could go about some of our business. At least more normal than in a world of wondering how to wipe down groceries when the world had run out of wipes.
One day, the toilet paper came back. Sometimes, wipes would show up at ShopRite. You can place a mail order and predict when the box will arrive. Vons is full of food and rubbing alcohol. Governors stopped giving daily updates.
There is so much hand sanitizer in the world, it feels like there was never a shortage.
It’s like March-May was a dream. I barely remember the anxiety of those first few months, the fear of not knowing how to get the virus or how to avoid it.
I’m not even sure how this bidet attachment got into my house.
Friday we learned we were going to work from home. We all raced around the office, except at the sink, where we’d spend 20 seconds, methodically scrubbing our hands just like we’d been taught on YouTube.
Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you.
How long would we work from home? A while. A few weeks, maybe. Surely no more than a month?
“Did you go to Vons recently?” Liz asked me. “Yeah, it was fine,” I told her.
I stopped by Vons that night. It was not fine, and the checkout queues stretched down the aisles, so I didn’t hang around.
I went again at 8 the next morning. There wasn’t much Vons left. The paper aisle was bare. The pasta aisle was vacant. I saw one of the women from work picking over a few remaining packs of chicken. I bought what she didn’t.
On Monday the 16th, I had a scheduled routine colonoscopy. Yay, me. The doctors gave me a printout with little photos of my healthy colon. Little round pink images I didn’t understand.
Someone has to sign you out of colonoscopies, and Liz lives nearby, so I asked her to pretend to be driving me home. Neither of us has a car. She signed me out and walked me outside. We sat down for a while as my anesthesia faded.
“Vons wasn’t fine,” Liz said.
Remember at the start, how we were afraid to touch doorknobs and ATM screens? The lines at the supermarket, the taped Xs on the sidewalks, keeping us all six feet apart?
No one had any masks except for carpenters, fine arts painters, people who fix things. Those of us anxious to prepare for California wildfires. But we weren’t supposed to use masks—we were supposed to leave them for the first responders. The cloth mask idea came later. My sewing machine came out then from under the dining room table.
I went through disinfectant wipes I'd brought home from work. Then I stopped wiping down the laundry room, the mailboxes, the doorknobs. There were no more wipes in North America. I bought vinyl gloves at the pharmacy.
The wipes were gone. The soap was gone. Then the bidet attachments were all gone. The toilet paper was gone. The gloves were rare. Thermometers were hard to come by. Pulse oximeters were mentioned in the New York Times, then they too became hard to find. Forget finding rubbing alcohol.
Hand sanitizer was practically a rare mineral.
Yoga mats and bicycles eventually became rare commodities, right after yeast and flour. Then the supply of meat became strange, but never ran out. My local stores always had plenty of fruits and vegetables.
No one knew how the illness worked yet. At one point, we were briefly advised to disinfect our groceries.
We learned to wear masks. We cowered in our homes, sheltering in place, reading stories about temporary morgues, learning to go to Zoom birthday parties and to see doctors on our iPads. The pandemic forced our technological hands on several fronts.
Eventually, medical professionals learned more about managing the ill. Videos came out telling us if we all wore masks, washed our hands right after coming in the house, and didn’t get close to anyone we don’t live with, we could exist kinda...not normal, but we could go about some of our business. At least more normal than in a world of wondering how to wipe down groceries when the world had run out of wipes.
One day, the toilet paper came back. Sometimes, wipes would show up at ShopRite. You can place a mail order and predict when the box will arrive. Vons is full of food and rubbing alcohol. Governors stopped giving daily updates.There is so much hand sanitizer in the world, it feels like there was never a shortage.
It’s like March-May was a dream. I barely remember the anxiety of those first few months, the fear of not knowing how to get the virus or how to avoid it.
I’m not even sure how this bidet attachment got into my house.
June 22, 2020
June 14, 2020
A Craving
I just typed "best salad in Burbank" into my browser and yeah, I got nothin'.
June 11, 2020
Black Lives Matter
I was in high school the first time I learned about the perils of walking-while-black in the USA.
Our family friend, Les, showed up at our house a little later than expected, and explained he was late because the police had stopped him. I was confused. Why would the police stop Les?
He explained this had happened to him often. He'd be stopped, spread up against a fence, frisked, and told he fit a description. He'd cooperate and then be on his way. The description was usually black, male, tall, about his age.
I was stunned. I was by no means naive. I'd grown up with plenty of poverty and violence nearby, and the neighbors...remember the (white) neighbors in the adjacent row house were always drinking, shouting, fighting, cussing, battling it out in the yard, and when they got more creative, one of them was arrested (in my attic) for firebombing a car in Georgetown. The police were actually quite helpful. My mother called them when those same neighbors tried to burn down our house. When my sister fought with one of them in the yard. When they traveled as a pack and assaulted my sister and mother walking to the supermarket. It's entirely possible my family might not be alive but for the Alexandria police force in the seventies and eighties.
This was long before the militarization of local police forces. I didn't get a clue about that until a vehicle resembling a tank rolled onto East 13th Street, beneath my window in early nineties in Manhattan. My childhood was even before the Federal deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill. I'm not going to say things change, because change is always ever-so-slight. But militarization, hell yeah, that changed.
But I digress. I just digressed a lot, became puzzled about what I was thinking, and nearly lost my point.
My point was Les showed up one day in 1982-83 and said "Oh yeah, the cop made me stand up against the fence while he frisked me and questioned me. This happens all the time. It's called walking-while-black." He laughed at my innocence. Laughed and laughed.
None of what's happened the last few weeks is new. Is it the sheer volume of outrageous acts of violence against people guilty of jogging, sleeping, going about their business? Is it the video that laid bare the brutal, simmering inhumanity-to-man our country was built on? Combined with no one having anything else to do but have their eyes pried open by very public civil rights infringements and bias crimes?
Yes to all. And I keep going back to that moment in my own education. Walking-while-black is not a crime. It's been a helluva few weeks, full of hope in my opinion. This moment seems fraught but genuine. We can allow ourselves to hope just a little that this moment might bring actual change, a bit more than the usual slight movement of a second hand.
Our family friend, Les, showed up at our house a little later than expected, and explained he was late because the police had stopped him. I was confused. Why would the police stop Les?
He explained this had happened to him often. He'd be stopped, spread up against a fence, frisked, and told he fit a description. He'd cooperate and then be on his way. The description was usually black, male, tall, about his age.
I was stunned. I was by no means naive. I'd grown up with plenty of poverty and violence nearby, and the neighbors...remember the (white) neighbors in the adjacent row house were always drinking, shouting, fighting, cussing, battling it out in the yard, and when they got more creative, one of them was arrested (in my attic) for firebombing a car in Georgetown. The police were actually quite helpful. My mother called them when those same neighbors tried to burn down our house. When my sister fought with one of them in the yard. When they traveled as a pack and assaulted my sister and mother walking to the supermarket. It's entirely possible my family might not be alive but for the Alexandria police force in the seventies and eighties.
This was long before the militarization of local police forces. I didn't get a clue about that until a vehicle resembling a tank rolled onto East 13th Street, beneath my window in early nineties in Manhattan. My childhood was even before the Federal deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill. I'm not going to say things change, because change is always ever-so-slight. But militarization, hell yeah, that changed.
But I digress. I just digressed a lot, became puzzled about what I was thinking, and nearly lost my point.
My point was Les showed up one day in 1982-83 and said "Oh yeah, the cop made me stand up against the fence while he frisked me and questioned me. This happens all the time. It's called walking-while-black." He laughed at my innocence. Laughed and laughed.
None of what's happened the last few weeks is new. Is it the sheer volume of outrageous acts of violence against people guilty of jogging, sleeping, going about their business? Is it the video that laid bare the brutal, simmering inhumanity-to-man our country was built on? Combined with no one having anything else to do but have their eyes pried open by very public civil rights infringements and bias crimes?
Yes to all. And I keep going back to that moment in my own education. Walking-while-black is not a crime. It's been a helluva few weeks, full of hope in my opinion. This moment seems fraught but genuine. We can allow ourselves to hope just a little that this moment might bring actual change, a bit more than the usual slight movement of a second hand.
June 8, 2020
Coast-to-Coast
Twenty days after leaving out of LAX, I flew EWR-SFO-BUR.I was much less anxious this time around. Since my last flight, I'd been on buses, PATH, light rail, the #4 subway, one taxi with the windows open, three Lyfts, two Citibikes, and had been in a laundromat. I'd ordered grocery delivery, which I'd never done before. I'd ordered a pillow on a website and did curbside pickup (walk-up, actually). I'd sat masked in the park or on the stoop with friends, with several feet between us. I'd ordered from various delivery services ($$$$) and from restaurants that delivered to my neighborhood in Jersey City (most don't--yet). I'd worn four different masks and gone through over a dozen vinyl gloves.
Newark Airport was nearly a ghost town. There was no food for sale except for the self-serve "Global Bazaar" prepackaged stuff, so I was glad to have brought my own. I had nine seats to myself on the EWR-SFO flight.SFO was a little better, and I was able to buy a salad. The United Club in SFO was open, FWIW, which wasn't much, but at least I could sit in a distant corner, remove my mask, and guzzle water.
TSA was easy and empty in both EWR and LAX. Precheck is meaningless without queues.
Would I fly again? Now, sure. Next month assuming flights are fuller, maybe not. My SFO-BUR flight was half full, and that was awful. Just too anxiety-inducing.
And now I'm going to sleep.
Lots o' Lint
Houses.
It's always something.
Before. Lint. Lots and lots of lint.
After. Now with bird protection.
It's always something.
Before. Lint. Lots and lots of lint.
After. Now with bird protection.Morning Social
Ninety percent chance I'm heading back to Burbank today, but first, I spent the morning socially distanced from two friends in masks.
I got to pet this snore-y guy though. He was a foster named Thor. I nearly asked to take him back to Burbank with me.
I got to pet this snore-y guy though. He was a foster named Thor. I nearly asked to take him back to Burbank with me.
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