Items

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  2020-03-14

  Drinking and Staying Healthy

  The photo is a simple picture but I think it gives in insight into what many people were doing during the pandemic. It's a picture of a tequila bottle and a pack of Emergen-C. I know personally along with many of my friends we were drinking a lot during the time of being in lockdown. There was not much to do and we could only do so much staying indoors. We would watch tv, eat, sleep and do it all over again. The picture shows that while we were trying to staying healthy we were also drinking our days away.
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  01/15/2021

  Parker Talbot Oral History, 2021/01/15

  A self-account of the exploding market of hand sanitizer and the smell thereof
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  2021-05

  Smelly Hands Are Clean Hands

  I welcomed my first child into the world at the very beginning of the COVID-19 crisis in the United States, leaving my fiancé and me isolated at home with a newborn. After three months, we desperately needed a night away from our precious bundle of joy. The only restaurant open was a sketchy looking German beer garden blasting accordion music, but we were just thrilled to be spending some adult time together while our son was with my mother for the evening. Upon walking into the restaurant, I readily pumped some off-brand hand sanitizer into my hand, and nudged my fiancé to do the same. I rubbed my hands together as we were seated, and breathed a sigh of relief that we were free from the colicky cries of our beloved child for the night. Suddenly my nostrils filled with the stench of bottom shelf tequila. The hand sanitizer wasn’t simply off-brand, it had been homemade by the restaurant. It was as if whomever had concocted the sanitizer was convinced that the best way to ward off the COVID-19 virus (and the fear attributed to it), was to completely bombard the olfactory system with the smell of alcohol. My fiancé remarked that because the sanitizer smelled so horribly, it must be killing all of the germs; unknowingly, he became a perfect example of how individuals have come to associate certain scents, like alcohol, with the illusion of cleanliness. Thinking back on that experience, I find myself pondering just how effective their homemade hand sanitizer really was. Or, more than likely, was it a last ditch effort (forced into action by society’s panic buying of cleansers), to provide their customers a sense of security through unconscious sensory associations.