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Date is exactly
2021-04-22
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2021-04-22
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A comic strip about Covid-19 -
2021-04-22
Hospice and hospitals during a pandemic
This is a photo of my grandfather's glasses and a blanket given to him by one of the hospice nurses. He passed in April of 2021, not due to Covid. There were still a lot of Covid restrictions put in place by the hospital, and the hospice center. Everyone had to be checked in at the front desk, temps were taken, questionnaires filled out, and the number of guests at a time was limited. He was moved to a hospice facility down the road from the hospital that he had been in. I was spending 10-12 hours a day with him at this time. He passed very late in the night and the next morning I went to pick up his remaining items. Most I gave to my dad, but I kept the blanket and his glasses. This, I believe, shows a broader picture of the pandemic in relation to healthcare during this time. Everyday healthcare still was taking place, it couldn’t just stop, but they had to adapt. I’ve heard stories from social media and directly from healthcare workers about being exhausted due to the pandemic and Covid guidelines. All I can say is that even after being tired and working through horrible conditions for over a year, every person I talked to for the week that he was there was kind and caring. Healthcare for the last two years has focused a lot of Covid healthcare, which makes sense, but this, in my mind at least, serves as a reminder of the continuous healthcare that has always been happening. I am so grateful for the team of professionals that helped and cared for him that last week. -
2021-04-22
HIST30060: Anti-Lockdown Pub Menu
This screenshot of a pub's 'freedom menu' captures the way that people's opinions lockdown measures have been expressed in strange ways. It also highlights the unusual propensity for anti-lockdown opinions to elevate their struggle to that of great civil rights movements of history with their persistent use of terminology like segregation. -
2021-04-22
Bye Quarantine Hair!
In December 2010, my husband and I made a pact with our friends, all of us either brand new parents or weeks away from becoming parents, that we’d go on a Disney Cruise together in summer of 2020. Well by planning time 2019, our friends bailed, but we were still committed. For Christmas 2019, we gifted our two kids and my mom a 7 day Disney cruise to the Caribbean. The first week of March of 2020, I went to get my hair done. I considered chopping it to my shoulders, but I told my hair dresser that I wanted to wait until July and chop it right before the cruise. I’m sure you know where this is going. Clearly, the cruise was one of earliest events to be cancelled due to the pandemic and I never went back to my hair dresser in 2020. Throughout the school year, I lamented over my waist length quarantine hair, in desperate need of a cut. Over and over I told my students “when I get vaxxed, I’m getting this chopped off since you know, no cruise.” By the end of March both my mom and I were vaccinated, but were unsure about our hairdresser. She had lost her shop during Covid - had she retired? With case counts declining significantly, we reached out to her and not only was she still doing hair inside her house, (one household at the time), but was vaccinated as well. So farewell to my quarantine hair, cut away all the fear and panic and sleepless nights of the past year and let’s start fresh. (No cruise though, my short hair and I will just hit the beach). -
2021-04-22
Community’s importance to the service industry during Covid-19: A business owner’s perspective
This article, written by small business owners, addresses the challenges faced by the service industry during COVID-19. These owners of a coffee shop share a list of ways that the community can support their local service industry, and why it is crucial to do so. They make it clear that it's not simply about buying a product; instead, it is about building a community and supporting those that you care about, which goes both ways. If you support small business owners and show that you're there for them, they in turn will give back to the community in any way that they can, creating a caring environment. The lessons they share are so important to keep in mind as we are still dealing with the pandemic, so that we can build a support system that lasts long past when the pandemic is over. -
2021-04-22
Life During COVID-19
What has life been like for me during COVID-19? Well this photo pretty much sums it all. For this past year, I have spent the majority of my time on my computer which mainly consisted of it being completing work for my classes and watching TV shows during my spare time. The gyms were closed. I couldn’t eat at the restaurant my family and I go to every Thursday anymore. And seeing other family and friends became very limited as well, so I was alone by myself most of the time. The beginning of this pandemic was very difficult for me as my lifestyle changed drastically. I am a little bit of a procrastinator and when you have a nice comfy bed next to you 24/7, it makes it really hard to do things. But I understood that life goes on, so it is up to me to keep on moving forward. And that is exactly what I did. During this pandemic, I felt I was really able to focus and improve myself. I have become a more productive person and it has really helped me in finishing my classwork and doing other daily tasks. It has relieved some of that unnecessary stress that was on me that I had put on myself before this pandemic. At home, I didn’t have any weights to work out, so I decided to work on my flexibility/mobility. With the gyms beginning to open back up and going there just recently, I noticed the benefits of it in both my weight lifting and martial arts. In addition, I was able to gain new hobbies and one of them is cooking. Life during this pandemic has greatly helped me improve myself on many aspects. Life is unpredictable at times, so sometimes you just have to make the best out of it. -
2021-04-22
Lost Time
This story is a personal one. i hope it encourages others to love their loved ones and hold them close. -
2021-04-22
Kathryn Jue JOTPY Portfolio
In March 2020, I learned about a graduate fellowship for a project called The Journal of the Plague Year. I was intrigued because of my undergraduate work with collecting oral histories of Vietnamese refugees. I really missed doing research in my life as a classroom teacher. This Fellowship seemed to be a way of fulfilling that undefinable project I’d been looking for. When I received an invitation after applying to join the project, it was like a public history baptism by fire. I knew nothing about public history, and I learned a great deal during those five months. However, with so much uncertainty with how my school district was going to respond to COVID, and the eleventh hour decision that we would not be starting the school year in person and all the changes that went along with that, I made the difficult decision to step away from JOTPY when the summer ended. During the fall, I greatly missed the collaborative community, the curating, the debates about metadata, and the entire building of this rapid response, digital archive. This led me to join the Spring 2021 internship. I am so incredibly thankful to have been part of this internship because I learned so much additional information about public history. One of the aspects that I didn’t learn over the summer was the humanities portion of public history. The archive was so new that we really specialized in different areas, mine was building the teaching site. We did have weekly meetings that I greatly enjoyed, but they were more logistical as we tried to figure out how to best build the archive. Many of our meetings dealt with curation and the best process for that. I absolutely loved my summer team, but it was difficult for me to articulate exactly what I did when the summer was over. Going through the internship step by step, I feel far more equipped now to explain exactly what JOTPY is and the process behind it. I also was able to experience many different aspects of the archive, including curating and collecting oral histories, building a collection, writing a call for submissions, and writing public history. The two parts of this internship, aside from curation which I genuinely love doing, that I feel were most beneficial were oral histories and writing the blog post. These are both areas I would like to continue to pursue in some way, even if it not related to this particular project. I did not begin the MA program with any inkling of being part of an internship team or being part of any sort of public history project. However, JOTPY has been the single best part of my graduate program. My work with JOTPY has been a perfect marriage of my two passions, teaching and history. I love being part of a project that is accessible to the students I teach. Not only does it demonstrate to them that history transcends the walls of the classroom, it was a space they were able to be part of by sharing their own stories. I also was able to fulfill a personal desire to be part of project outside my teaching world. I love history. I am incredibly passionate about it, and I am grateful every day of my life that I get to spend my days sharing that passion with teenagers. Yet, I have been wistful for some sort of research to be part of. I love writing, and as a teacher, my writing isn’t really seen beyond the realm of the classroom. I didn’t know public history is where I could fulfill this sort of void. Overall, I am incredibly grateful to have had this experience. -
2021-04-22
CA Colleges to Require Vaccine
Numerous times in the past couple of months, we’ve been wondering if CA colleges would require the vaccine. Today it’s official - the answer is yes. To be transparent, this Californian who has friends and family employed by the UC system is extremely happy. I realize there is vaccine hesitation but I am relieved for the safety of students and staff that the universities are taking this step. And it’s not just the UC system, the Cal State system and Stanford are also instituting the same requirement (actually Stanford announced first). The UC system is often a trend setter - if it does something, other universities follow. I’m hoping this will begin a trend, not only in higher education but at the K-12 level. I know, super controversial, but schools already require other immunizations, why not this one? Public health, people! -
2021-04-22
The Best of Times, The Worst of Times
I am submitting this for my Rel 101: Religion, Culture, and Public Life course. -
2021-04-22
Why Religion Can Be Important To Many People
The pandemic has showed me the importance of religion in many people's lives including my family's. -
2021-04-22
Uncertainty, Spirituality, and the Inevitability of Change #REL101
I foolishly thought that it would be easy to write this post. I didn’t anticipate struggling so much with finding the right words to explain the impact the last year of pandemic life has had on me, but I’ve deleted about a hundred paragraphs of rambling, existential stream of consciousness nonsense about cherishing the small moments and growing in the face of adversity because it is surprisingly hard to be concise about your feelings on an event you’re still living through. I’m starting to think that maybe doing so is impossible, so instead of falling into cliche and flowery prose, I want to just be blunt. I haven’t seen my family in two years. My grandmother has dementia and in that time it has worsened exponentially. On a weekly basis, I have a call with my mom that starts with a debrief on whatever the newest updates in her condition are and ends with a plea to visit as soon as I feel comfortable traveling. Every day, I go into my retail job and tell them no, I don’t have symptoms or live with anyone with symptoms while waiting for the beep of a thermometer meant to ensure I don’t have a fever. I breathe through two layers of fabric, disinfect my work area between transactions, and field rants about restrictive mask mandates for six hours a day, then come home and begin the process of undressing, banishing my clothes to the washer, and trying to relax before I have to do it all again. Everything in that paragraph is, to put it nicely, so bleak it hurts. It’s easy to get caught in the feelings of overwhelm that came along with this pandemic and it would be a farce to say that there aren’t days where everything feels like way too much for one person to handle. Surprisingly, though, the thing that has blissfully not survived the most turbulent year of my life is the apathetic, empty cynicism I used to feel. Instead, I feel weirdly hopeful that this is the beginning of massive change both in myself and on a global level. Maybe it’s naive to think that way and maybe it’s just a coping mechanism to help me through the pandemic, but there’s a part of me that thinks that may not even matter because the changes are coming regardless. In the last year, I’ve moved out of Nevada and into a pink house in California with the love of my life. Despite a fraught, stressful prior experience in college, I’ve finally come back to higher education in a way that feels both healthy and exciting. The field of religious studies has reawakened my passion for learning and my ability to grow in academia. I’ve abandoned my skeptical, agnostic views and traded them out for a brand of religiosity that combines self-improvement, magic, and trust in something bigger than myself. I know how that all sounds and if the last sentence has you rolling your eyes reading this, I get it. The last year has been weird, don’t get me wrong. If I told a 20-year-old version of myself that one day we’d be living through the plague of a lifetime, studying religion with hopes of examining cultism, and practicing a version of witchcraft grounded in our ex-Catholic roots, I doubt she would believe me. It admittedly sounds pretty wacky all laid out in plain English like that. Part of what I’ve learned throughout the pandemic, though, is that suspending cynicism, skepticism, and disbelief can sometimes lead you to unexpectedly lovely places. Whether I saw it coming or not, Covid has changed my life in countless ways, just as I’m sure it’s changed the lives of everyone reading these entries. Some changes have been for the worse, certainly, but the things that have changed for the better are what I’m choosing to focus on. I’ve read articles about a reemergence of spirituality amongst young people that make me think others have been having similar ideas and something about that feels good. We’ve spent a lot of time isolated, lonely, and missing a sense of belonging we took for granted before, but there’s reassurance for me in knowing that my experiences aren’t all that different from anyone else’s. That type of community, however it manifests, is (and I hope you’ll forgive this admitted slip into flowery prose) something that the pandemic has taught us we must cherish above everything else because it’s what makes our little human lives worth living. More than anything, whenever this pandemic reaches the time where we split our lives into not just before, but after, I hope we don’t forget that. -
2021-04-22
Life During Covid
This story just tells what the world looked like during the Covid pandemic through my eyes. -
2021-04-22
Queer Joy
Throughout the pandemic I have found myself with a lot more time for introspection than usual. I had thought at the start of this pandemic I had felt rather self-assured. I thought I knew what I wanted as a career, for my future, and mostly what kind of person I wanted to become. However, the more time I spent alone the more I realized how much of myself had been a performance for others. For once, the pandemic encouraged me to slow down enough to evaluate what my own personal wants and needs are. I also grew spiritually, emotionally, and intellectually. I was especially surprised to find myself changing my opinions on religion. For years, I have subscribed to rather devout atheism, to the point it nears becoming a religion in my attempts to cut it out. However now I have found myself accepting the mystic much more, and allowing myself to stop explaining everything. Though all these added experiences I was able not to find something new in my queerness per say, but a new way to relate to my world. I was able to find peace with myself as a queer person in the world, not in spite of it. I think the time alone allowed me a lot of space to appreciate the community and its place. To finally start feeling like the bonds and friendships and joy of myself and other queer people is worth even more than just surviving. I think one of the most important things that happened was coming to terms with myself as a nonbinary person. For years I was confident I was a binary trans man due to my physical transition goals and personal fears of being delegitimized in public. I finally realized and accepted that myself is no one else’s business. I have found a new peace with living authentically, even when other people react poorly. Finally, I honestly love being queer. -
2021-04-22
Passing the Time
Staying inside all day has given me the want to greatly improve my entertainment center. This includes getting a nicer TV that was on sale and dusting off old video game consoles from long ago. -
2021-04-22
Seek the World talks about why their videos showed them without a mask
I am here to clarify the situation with Covid-19 and mask. I received many comments sharing their concerns about not wearing mask in the coronavirus pandemic. I kindly want to let you know all videos I released have been filmed before coronavirus. Those videos are new, yet I didn't get a chance to edit or release any video a while back. Why? I took a long break from Seek the World. The last time I filmed was more than a year. Thus, Sabrina and I didn't film or travel anywhere. From now on, you all will see new videos that were filmed before coronavirus. I applaud you all for showing care and making sure that I follow the safety etc. I fully agree with you all everyone needs to wear mask! Thanks! -
2021-04-22
How Covid-19 has Affected My Life - Kyra Smith
The Submission that I uploaded is a reflection on how the pandemic affected my life. What I shared in this story is personal, and might seem choppy because I do not do well when expressing personal stories and feelings to others. I hope this helps someone to know that they are not alone.