Anna Holmes posted 17 August 2024 on annabookwriter.medium.com

To My Unmasked Friend in the Fifth Year of COVID

But you didn’t wear a mask.

For whatever reason — you wanted to show off your makeup, it makes you itchy, you believed the messaging that COVID is endemic (what does that actually mean?), you just don’t think about it anymore — you made a choice that actively excludes people like me from participating not only in an event like a convention, but society at large. And yes, it is a choice. Every time you step out into the world without a mask on your face, you have made a decision that your very good reason, whatever it is, supersedes the right of disabled and at-risk people to exist safely in your orbit.

Well, hold on, you say. It’s not any one individual’s fault, it’s the inadequate public health messaging. Isn’t that what you’ve been saying?

And I have. In the past, I have talked about how it is unconscionable that health authorities have thrown their hands up and rescinded guidance that would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives and prolonged a pandemic that, to hear them tell it, has been bested. It hasn’t. Worst of all, the financial motivation that we all know is driving this premature victory lap isn’t even being fulfilled. Long COVID and other post-COVID complications are costing the global economy one trillion a year. Meanwhile, article after article handwrings about nobody wanting to work anymore, about the sagging college application scene, about declines in military enlistment, and the strain on our healthcare systems.

All of this is very much the fault of our leaders, who have decided the political ramifications of “normalcy” are more important than the health and lives of the 400 million people living with long COVID across the globe, the immunocompromised folks who are increasingly being shut out of every conceivable public space, and the disabled community which has been screaming into the wind about our marginalization since before the virus even hit US soil.

But I want to be very clear. You are helping them do this.

…

This hard but important post captures something I've wanted to express for years but have never found the words (or the courage) to say out loud. I try very, very hard to avoid getting outright angry at the people in my life who take no precautions against COVID. I tell myself over and over that their behavior is a product of larger structural forces that shape their understanding of themselves and of reality. This helps. It keeps me sane in an insane world.

And when I talk to people about COVID, I am as non-confrontational as I know how to be. I frame everything in terms of my own safety measures and say nothing about theirs. This keeps me sane as well, because I do not have the energy or the skill or the grace to try to convince everyone I…

I take pride in my cocktail mixing. I've put in a lot of work into honing my judgment of flavor combinations, learning how to construct an effective cocktail recipe, and building a stable of excellent ingredients. Whenever anyone comes to visit my house, I do my best to give them a beverage experience that's perfectly tailored to their desires, whether it's sweet or bitter, punchy or mild, alcoholic or not. Although sometimes experimentalism takes me in a direction that is not worth repeating, by and large I believe the drinks I make are excellent.

But excellent is not always what's called for.

Liz and I used to love going out to bars. Our signature move was to take off work early of an afternoon, show up just as the doors opened around 4pm or so, and just shoot the breeze with the bartender during the easiest hours of their shift. Bartenders are great conversation because they're always up to something else in their lives, and the best ones also care a lot about the craft of serving people just what they want. We'd stick around for a few hours, get some snacks, maybe order dinner if the bar served it or head out for pizza, and end up home by 8pm feeling like we'd had a full night out.

All that ended, of course, in 2020. Other than a few mostly-outdoor visits during the vaccine honeymoon^[1], we haven't been back to a bar since, and every day I miss that experience of lazily sipping on the latest Negroni variant while merrily chatting with someone who an hour ago was a total stranger to me.

For Liz, that experience was wrapped up inseparably with the particular flavors of happy hour, during which bars served cheaper drinks off a special menu to draw customers. Happy hour drinks are usually well-known classics such as a Manhattan, and they're usually substantially less fancy than a cocktail bar's primary menu. They'll often use only "well" ingredients, the inexpensive stuff that the bar buys in bulk to form the backbone of cocktails that are then made more flavorful with higher-shelf ingredients.

So when that's where Liz's mood takes her, I put away my high-end vermouth and adulterate my usual mixing whisky. Sometimes an excellent experience calls for mediocre flavor, and I try never to let my pride get in the way of mixing the right drink for the moment.

Joey Fox posted on itsairborne.com

My 6 Favorite HEPA Filters & Air Cleaners

2. Classic Corsi-Rosenthal Box

The classic box fan CR-Box was invented during the COVID-19 pandemic and is THE most cost effective method to clean the air. They have been shown to be remarkably effective and outperforming most commercial HEPA filters on the market. It can also be scaled up as there have been many CR box builds where entire schools came together to provide one per classroom.

…

This article is legitimately helpful, but I'm mostly posting it because I find it extremely amusing that (at least as of a year ago) the best-in-class air filter by cost and among the best overall is literally just taping a bunch of filters to a box fan yourself. Hilarious and easy on your wallet! But what's even funnier is Joey's #1 recommendation:

Joey Fox posted on itsairborne.com

1. PC Fan Corsi-Rosenthal Box

The PC fan CR box was a recent invention to find a method to achieve high clean air delivery rates with very low noise. Noise is the greatest limitation of in-room air cleaners and PC fans are the best option to address it. There are no other air cleaners on the market that have the capability to supply 150 lps of clean air at 35 dBA. Nothing comes close.

…

The only thing better than than taping a bunch of filters to a box fan? Taping them to a bunch of PC fans instead! Granted the ones linked here are a little more sophisticated than that, but elsewhere on his site Joey presents one that absolutely is just fans and tape:

Joey Fox posted on itsairborne.com

The Mini PC Fan Corsi-Rosenthal Box

…

Shel Raphen posted 28 September 2024 on shelraphen.com

Kol Tzedek Synagogue and Masks: A Call for Accountability

This was the last community space where I felt fully included. This was the last community space where I could meet a new person by chance, and not have my mask be a social barrier. In other community spaces, people do not try to socialize with me. Unmasked people avoid me so long as I am wearing a mask. I have conducted experiments. During times of low-transmission, I have experimented with taking my mask off in community events where people previously had ignored me despite my generally outgoing personality. Suddenly, everyone becomes very interested in talking to me. People welcome me to the space as if I am new. I tell people that we had actually met before—multiple times, in this same space. They ask where I had been this whole time. I tell them, right here, the whole time, wearing a mask. At the next event, I will put my mask back on, and those same people will go back to ignoring me when I greet them by name. Kol Tzedek was the only space where this was not an issue, because everyone was wearing a mask.

[...]

I wish we could have negotiated. I wish we could have agreed to compromises. I wish it was not just a venting session where fifty disabled people cried in our own ways and a middle-aged cis woman took notes with a blank facial expression. I remember at one point, she asked me why I do not simply attend virtual services. I am grateful for the existence of virtual services in this world, but to suggest that they are comparable to an in-person community space is a joke. If virtual services were just as good as in-person services, then why don't the able-bodied people just attend virtual services? Why did I donate hundreds of dollars to fundraise for an expensive new ADA-compliant building for the synagogue? Why would I give 5% of my annual income to a local synagogue just to attend virtual services? There are plenty of free online options I could have gone to instead.

…

Shel's essay about her former synagogue rescinding their mask requirement for services and in doing so effectively barring their disabled community members from full participation is painful to read, but it's also one of the best articulations I've seen of the grief and alienation of being disabled^[1] during a pandemic. This experience is particular to the Jewish community in Philadelphia, but at the same time it is one of a pattern of moral failures that have been happening since the pandemic began and people en masse started facing the immediate question: are you willing to sacrifice your comfort to give other people space to exist?

This is a rawly emotional post that slides towards despair at the end, and I do want to put back on that. I don't at all blame Shel for feeling that…

Emily Dupree posted 29 August 2024 on emilysdupree.substack.com

The Invention of Memory

I think most people stabilized their warped sense of time by other means. Instead of accepting that the pandemic continued on, that we failed to contain it and so would need to incorporate its ongoing reality into the stories we tell ourselves about our own lives, they instead transformed the fantasy of after into their reality. After the pandemic, after the lockdowns, after our world ruptured. They were able to interrupt the prolonged uncertainty that the pandemic had brought to all of our lives by erecting a finish line just in time for them to run through it. And as they ran through it, celebrating the fictional end of an arduous journey, they simultaneously invented a new before. This is the invention of memory.

The Pandemic became something temporally contained, its crisp boundaries providing a psychic safeguard to any lingering anxieties around the vulnerability and interdependence of our bodies that only a virus could show us. No longer did it threaten to erupt in their everyday lives, forcing cancellations and illnesses and deaths. It was, officially, part of The Past. And from the safety of hindsight (even if only an illusion), people began telling and re-telling the story of The Pandemic in ways that strayed from how it all actually went down. It was a way to use memory as self-soothing.

…

This is an intense, touching piece on the way people's minds have been shaped by the pandemic, and the way that shape is in turn determined by their—our—failure en masse to handle the reality of the pandemic. It's another way of looking at the same issues I was driving at in COVID Denialism and Disability Justice, and I similarly found it helpful to bring myself some calm (if not closure) to the pain of seeing people act so heartlessly.

Solid chance this is my last selfie to go out on "social media" as such, and so I hope you'll forgive a bit of nostalgia. Posting selfies, especially early in transition, was hugely important for me. For most of my life up to that point I had regarded my looks with suspicion if not outright hostility, and the selfie became the medium through which I began to take ownership of my appearance and develop a sense of style. The first time I looked at a picture I'd taken of myself and realized "oh. I'm hot" was a huge milestone for me.

Posting selfies to social media was an inseparable part of this. As my style became something I actively put effort and care into, having people appreciate it became a reminder that that work was doing something. It wasn't the dreaded numbers, it was the people: people whose taste and style I also saw and appreciated, people who I was friends with and people I just saw around.

When COVID began, I went from taking and posting selfies almost on a weekly basis to nearly not taking them at all. I no longer felt I had any reason to dress up. Wearing lipstick felt foolish when it would just get ruined by a mask. I wasn't getting any new clothes, because I hate having to remember to send back online orders I don't like. My trademark blue hair was growing out, because even after the vaccine made it feasible to be masked indoors with strangers I couldn't bear the pain of trying to find a salon that still required them. I didn't realize until my roots had overtaken me how much the blue had become a part of my self-image, how much it hurt to look in the mirror and not see the self in my heart.

Little by little, I pulled myself out of that hole. Although the pandemic is very much still present and I am very much still taking precautions, I found ways to allow my sense of style to flourish in between those precautions. I'll put on lipstick just because I feel like it. Liz took careful measurements so I could do online shopping with minimal risk of send-backs. Every now and then I'll even strap on a P100 respirator and go to a physical store. I asked around and found a local salon that not only still requires masks, but is queer- and disabled-owned.

And I started taking selfies again. I took selfies to give myself a reason to care about my appearance again. I took selfies as a reward for putting in the work to make myself look and feel good. I took selfies to send to friends, I took selfies to flirt, I took selfies with pals, I took selfies at beaches and forests and birthdays and the precious few weddings that were safe enough for me to attend. I took selfies to remind the world that I existed, and to…

This is a post whose seeds have been bouncing around in my head for years. I always intended to write it up and publish it on Cohost, and so the twilight of that storied website seems like as good a forcing function as any.

In this post, I seek to understand and explain the pervasive phenomenon of COVID denialism from the perspecitve of disability justice, specifically as someone who remains extremely cautious and anticipates doing so indefinitely. It's not intended to excuse this behavior—denialism is actively harmful to everyone the denialist interacts with and fundamentally eugenicist in effect whether or not in intention. But understanding and even empathizing with people who believe falsehoods and do harm can be valuable, especially when they make up such a huge portion of the world and for many of us are inescapably part of our networks and communities.

COVID in the Social Model of Disability

The first crucial thing to understand is that, if you're at least on board with the basic idea that COVID denialism is a pervasive problem, COVID-19 has already disabled you. Even if it didn't give you long-term side effects, even if you're lucky enough never to have caught it, you have been disabled by it. Or to be more precise: you're disabled with respect to COVID-19. The specific agent of your disability is the society that subjects you to snide remarks and outright harassment for wearing a mask, that closes off opportunities for social interaction and employment to you, that makes it impossible for you to exist within it without putting your health at risk.

This is an analysis based on the social model of disability, a major branch of disability theory that emphasizes the way disability is created by a society's failure to provide accommodations for certain bodies and minds rather than intrinsic aspects of those bodies and minds themselves. To use a lightly clichéd example: my severe nearsightedness doesn't function as a disability, because I exist in a society^[1] that accepts it as "normal" and provides easy access to socially unremarkable assistive devices (glasses), or even invisible assistive devices (contacts) if I so choose. But my sleep disorder is a disability—society doesn't consider it "normal" in the same way, and so it's seen as my personal failure and I have to work to make sure it doesn't affect my relationships^[2] or employability.

Using this model, if you exist in a society that has accepted the uncontrolled spread of COVID-19 as normal, the attempt to avoid catching this disease is itself a disability. Society is organized to systematically deny accommodations like mask mandates, sanitizing ventilation^[3], lockdowns and contact tracing, and free access to vaccines, prophylatics, tests, treatments, and protective equipment. Depending on the specific activity and your risk tolerance, public existence while taking reasonable COVID precautions ranges from requiring serious equipment and preparation to being outright impossible. Even if your body isn't any different than it was in 2019, you…

When Cohost goes, with it goes the era of my life I spent on social media. Now that I've tasted the rich fruit of what's possible, I'll never be able to go back wholeheartedly to a site where my timeline is constantly deluged with the latest atrocity, where there's no room for me to write an essay, where I can't even see and share porn. I have loved ones I've followed since before we were even friends whom I won't follow anywhere anymore. It is, inescapably, a paradigm change in how I use the internet.

And in many ways, that's fine. Social media brought me many good things, but even before Cohost I was getting deeply sick of the Twitter model. This is not an intrinsically necessary mode of human interaction, and in a lot of ways it's better not to have it at all than to have it in an unhealthy form.

But. But. There's still a pandemic, deep as world may be in denial, and even with all the mitigations and precautions available it's still an order of magnitude harder to spend time with people in person and another again to enter new spaces and make new friends.

While I've been grieving Cohost, this is something my heart keeps returning to. This was the last great space where I consistently made new human connections. And the way the world is right now, I don't know what can replace that, not just in terms of technology but in terms of life as a whole. The world is so much smaller to me than it was five years ago, and so the loss of a deeply valued space hurts all the more keenly.