I love this informational cards on the tables at the snack bar, which feature both of Carleton’s unofficial mascots, cows and penguins.
I love this informational cards on the tables at the snack bar, which feature both of Carleton’s unofficial mascots, cows and penguins.
It’s a joke, how students will plead with their instructors to “have class outside today.” A Pandemic College, you can. In fact, you have to. On a gorgeous summery day like today, this is not a bad thing.
The old building where I’ve worked my whole time at Carleton is being renovated this year, so we’ve relocated to slightly less old building that boasts all of two restrooms. I dunno about the women’s, but the men’s has two stalls – done up in heavy, dark wood like a lavatory at Hogwarts – which under the new pandemic rules, has the capacity for just one, uh, user at a time. Barging in and knocking didn’t work very well to determine occupancy, so a colleague installed a four-phase system for using the restroom.
Phase I: Arrive and flip the occupancy sign to red:
Phase 2: Do your business and as you leave, let Uncle Sam remind you to flip the sign over:
Phase 3: Immediately forget to flip the sign over, but be reminded by the other sign, pinned to the bulletin board straight across the corridor:
Phase 4: Flip the sign back to green and walk away, wondering if touching the sign negated the 20 seconds of hand washing:
Every day before going to work, I’m supposed to complete a short form to document that I don’t have any COVID symptoms. Sometimes I swing a little late, but so far I’m batting 1.000. It’s bizarre how satisfying I find that streak of “Green – Negative” descriptions. Proof of my virtue, or luck, or privilege, or something.
Tuesday, I looked out my office window around 10 and saw a young woman, dressed in athletic clothes, lying perfectly still on the sidewalk below. I started, thinking something was wrong. But she had a laptop next to her, and after a second, she sat up and assumed a yoga pose. Ah, okay, she’s doing yoga. Outside. On concrete. In the open spot between one academic building and another. Okay.
Today, I happened to get a cup of coffee at about ten, and as I walked back to my office, I nearly stepped on her, again lying perfectly still on the sidewalk. This time, though, I could hear a yoga instructor giving directions through laptop. Ah, okay, she’s in a yoga class. A physical education yoga class. Online. The kid is doing her required PE class via Zoom. Outside. On concrete. In the open spot between one academic building and another. Impressive. Sad. Impressively, sadly normal.
With the return of students to campus last week and the start of classes today (finally!), signs about masks, about hand washing, about COVID symptoms, and about physical distancing* have flowered everywhere: walls, doors, windows, bathroom stalls, floors, pillars… I guess I haven’t seen any on trees or ceilings, but maybe those will show up tomorrow.
And anywhere two people can queue up, the floor is marked with traffic-flow arrows, spacing dots or x’s, reminders about the magical six feet (“2M,” if you’re metric)…
I have, I think, eleven masks. I have one stashed in each car, two hanging from a hook in my office, one or two on the hat rack at home, and the rest… Uh… Most of them are in my backpack, I think, but maybe a couple are stuffed in handlebar bags on my bikes.
Today, I headed off to the coffeeshop before work without one around my neck. “No problem,” I thought as I rode along, “I’ll dig one out of my backpack before I go inside.” Nope. Nothing there. I zipped my jacket up as high as I could, just under my nose, and went in. “Do you have any spare masks?” I asked. Luckily, they did, and the barista slid one over the counter to me. Crisis averted. When I got to work, I found the two on the hook, one on the cabinet where I leave my bike helmet, and one on my desk. They both went into my backpack for Monday.
I had my individual meetings with my four first-year advisees today – nice young men and women,* all suburbanites, all student-athletes, all excited about college. None of them took me up on my offer to have our meetings by video call, and each of them commented in one way or another about being “Zoomed out” after a disrupted senior year of high school, a summer spent looking at a screen, and now orientation that includes a lot of activities on Zoom.
So I enjoyed talking face to face with them, or mask to mask, eight feet apart. I found it taxing to listen to someone that far away whose mouth is hidden by the masks they all dutifully wore. Nonetheless we had some great conversations that covered a lot of ground I’d expected and needed to cover (general education requirements, Carleton as an institution, Northfield as a place) as well some topics that gave me a better sense of them as people – G, who worries about finding enough time to pursue all of his interests; I, who wants to know the best restaurants in town; B, who has already planned out her major; and S, who wants to meet more people already!
All in all, the meetings were refreshing reminders of what Carleton is all about and that the kids are going to do pretty well despite the world we’ve forced them to live in.
But sill: it’s insane to me that everyone – today, literally every person on campus! – is wearing a mask. Disposable ones, Carleton-branded ones, fancy ones, plain ones, pattered ones, solid-colored ones. 2020: the year we couldn’t see anyone’s mouth, and learned to recognize each other by eyebrows and noses.
* After 14 years at Carleton, I feel like I can almost start calling them “kids,” but I remember feeling So Grown Up at 18…
Every day, more signs, posters, flyers, reminders about pandemic health and safety appear around campus. At this rate, the restrooms in our office building will be wallpapered in signage by Halloween. Today’s addition to the door into the two-stall men’s room:
The commodes are new-ish, and there’s a touchless paper towel dispenser, but pretty much everything else appears to be original to the building. This wooden stalls create a look and feel that’s very Hogwarts – but the building went up in 1915, just before the Spanish flu pandemic. I wonder if the college put up posters to exhort masking and washing hands.
Today was arrival day for first-year students at Carleton – the Class of 2024! I felt a touch of melancholy all day at the atmosphere: dreary weather, parents and freshmen moving into the dorms on strict shifts, everyone wearing masks and maintaining distance, small quiet groups instead of the big boisterous crowds… It’s just not right! But it’s also reality. More happily, I got in touch with my four FY advisees today. We’ll meet tomorrow morning at 10, which is going to be a nice moment.
Today, the weather turned dramatically, shaving off 30º F and turning from windy sun to overcast rain. Not only did this mean that I had to scotch plans for a ride, but also that fall has started, at least in the practical sense that I needed an extra layer when I went outside to today.
And if fall has started, then the pandemic has now touched – harmed! – all four seasons. We joked in April about how difficult lockdown would be during the winter, and thanks to Trump’s ineptitude, we might now get a chance to see. At the least, we’re going to have to read the dismal news on the pandemic while enduring the dismal autumnal drizzle. And today, students started coming back to Carleton, which means that those poor first-years are always going to remember literal and figurative clouds hanging over their first days of college.
Today marks the thirteenth straight weekend that I’ve gone for a longish bike ride with one or more friends.
Till this summer, I’d gone years without riding with anyone, ever since getting out of the habit of the Tuesday-night gravel rides that the club here in town organizes (or used to, in the Before Times). Pressures at home made me stop, but now with teenagers instead of elementary school kids, it’s easier – if not painless – to get out the house on a weekend morning for a long ride – 30 up to 60 or so miles so far.
It’s been absolutely great to do these rides – physically, socially, emotionally. I have not amassed this many bike miles in many, many years, which can only pay off when or if I can race this winter. And I’ve turned a corner with my riding, where going for a ride, even a short one (like the 20-ish miler yesterday evening with Pete), feels wonderful – but where a 60-miler feels even better.
The pandemic has constricted almost everyone’s social life; mine is largely now messaging with a few friends, talk at work (which isn’t really a real social life), workouts with one other guy a few evenings a week, and the occasional evening beer with a couple people at most. Plus the bike rides, which have been 3-5 hours of conversation about politics, the pandemic, work, Carleton, etc. etc. It’s wonderful. I love the rhythms of these bike-ride conversations, which appeal both in being Guy Talk and in being chats with like-minded friends – and which are thus very emotionally satisfying without being soul-searches. I always end the rides feeling physically, mentally, and emotionally satisfied – and maybe spiritually too, since it’s hard not to like scenes like this:
But. Given the constant talk about physical distancing, about masking, about washing hands and such, it’s a bit weird to spend so long in relatively close proximity to several other humans. It feels wrong, even if we’re pretty far apart from each other. I have to keep reminding myself that this is normal and relatively healthy, that riding bikes was a perfectly ordinary thing to do this time last year, that not too long from now it’ll be normal again. I hope. In the meantime, we’ll ride a few arms’ lengths apart and bring masks so one of us can get beer at the brewery afterwards.
As the new school year approaches for both the K-12 public schools and the private colleges here in town, tents are popping up all over town. Julia’s cross country meet was held today at one of the elementary schools, where several tents stood near the playground. Later, I drove past the girls’ old elementary school and saw two more, mixed into some trees far from the building. They create a strange end-of-the-carnival atmosphere.
I hope that I always remember the scent of wearing a mask: warm, soft, slightly humid, breathy. It’s not appealing, exactly, but it’s not gross either; it’s more like the olfactory equivalent of the taste of a medicine. I like the scent inasmuch as perceiving it tells me that I have my mask on, which is usually the right thing to do. And I’m used to the smell enough now that it fades away after a few minutes. This afternoon, I almost tried to take a drink through my mask, I’d gotten so used to it!
Wearing a facemask is by far the strangest, most ordinary, and most indelible part of the coronavirus pandemic. In the past couple weeks, I’ve finally habituated myself to putting a mask around my neck as I leave the house for work or errands or whatever, and pulling it up anytime I’m in a place where it’s required (work, Target, Imminent, Little Joy, the grocery store) or where it’s just a good idea (almost anywhere else). It’s still a little weird to have my face covered for so much of the day, but the weirdness fades a little every day.
The ubiquity of masks in my life and everyone else’s right now (even the lives of the covid-deniers!) contrasts sharply with their total absence before about March – except on the faces of a few Asian students or elderly people. From that standstill till now, about six months later, we’ve seen masks and mask culture expand into almost every facet of public life. They’re a big and interesting business now, for one things, available everywhere from Target or Walmart to Amazon or mom-and-pop shops to niche manufacturers or crafters. I must have about ten masks right now, a few handmade, some standard ear-loop mass-market, a couple high-end nearly-custom ones. (The last work the best.)
Masks are also a point of personal pride, civic duty, and political controversy. Places that have mandated masks teem with signs to remind people to wear them and why they should wear them. On social media, mask wearers talk about how they wear masks not for themselves, but for others. Covid-deniers reject the practice and the science and the responsibility, often conflating masks with some sort of social control by… someone: the government? doctors? Bill Gates? The logic escapes me, as does the resistance – wearing a mask is almost effortless! But at this crazed moment in American history, everything has to be charged to the highest possible pressure, and masks are no different.