Items

• 
  2020-11-24

  Pandemic Protesting

  A summer protest against police brutality at which you can see people wearing masks
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  2020-11-23

  A communal event during coronavirus

  My mother works on organizing programming at her church and the regular event for the congregation to collectively make a mandala had to be conducted outside, socially distanced, over a number of hours to allow everyone who wanted to take part to do so in a safe way and prevent too many people from congregating at any one time.
• 2020-11-22

  Voting during the pandemic

  The 2020 election was supposed to be my first chance to actually vote in person: unlike my peers, I was only 17 during my senior year of high school, and I had spent almost all the subsequent years out of state. And while I might have had the opportunity to visit my polling place in 2019 that was no longer an option once I signed up to be a poll worker and was assigned a precinct that was not close enough to mine to make it during my lunch break. Covid already disrupted my plans to be a poll worker for the 2020 Ohio primary in March and I forwent the opportunity to work the polls during the general election due to the risk of virus spread. Although I myself do not have many risk factors, I live with my mother who is in a higher risk category and occasionally visit my grandmother who is even more so, therefore I try to limit my exposure as much as possible. With voting in person seeming too risky, I went with my old standby of voting by absentee. However, while I normally complete the entire process by mail (the Ohio Secretary of State automatically sends me a request form at this point), I did not feel entirely confident entrusting my ballot the USPS this year. Rather I made use of the drop box at the Hamilton County Board of Elections so that I could be assured my vote would count and not be affected by the widespread postal service delays partially induced by the virus. Thankfully, the BOE has the functionality to allow me to track my request form, my incoming ballot, and it being recieved and counted so I could be doubly sure of everything working.
• 
  2020-11-22

  Wedding Delay

  A notification that a wedding at which my entire family had been planning to gather will be delayed an entire year due to Coronavirus concerns.
• 
  2020-11-22

  Family of Masks

  These are masks my mother and I have acquired by various means to wear during the pandemic.
• 2020-08-25

  Classes in Covid times

  In some ways, the beginning of classes in this new age of ours is now all that different than in the past: we spend a lot of time going over the syllabus and being warned against plagiarism. But even in these early days of the semester, when not much of real consequence has happened, the differences are also readily apparent. While most of my professors have opted for maintaining synchronous class meetings through virtual means and otherwise trying conduct online classes as similarly to in person ones as possible, those virtual means produce a distancing effect. We may be able to see each other to a certain extent, though not everyone chooses to use their camera, but it is impossible to clearly read anyone's body language or for free flowing discussion to truly happen. We may all be in the same virtual place but we cannot truly form any sort of community under these circumstances. This is not to advocate for in person classes to resume- I fully understand the reasons for circumstances being as they are-but rather to note the loss of intangible things.