Pandemic Diary

(a limited series)


This is a curated collection of lightly-edited excerpts from my daily journal. These are observations, my commentary on those observations, notes to myself, and other things I might want to remember about this period. It’s not everything (sorry — you don’t get to see everything), but it’s a lot.

It started as a pandemic-only collection, but I soon realized the picture would be artificial and incomplete if I didn’t include the context of cultural and racial and political tension that has been so intertwined with the pandemic, so those entries (and some others) are here now, too. And some life-as-usual, because despite everything, there really has been more of that than anything else.

Warning: politics ahead. I wrestled with this, and considered excluding the judgmental bits, and anything that might possibly offend anyone, but I decided to value honesty and disclosure over discretion. (More on that here: “Should I publish about politics?”) If this offends you, I’m sorry. But I call it as I see it.

This isn’t journalism. I’m aiming for personal understanding, not balance (see “Let me think about it”). And don’t expect coherence or continuity (that’s not my goal here)…


 
Yesterday’s run (and pandemic opportunity)
Jeff Calvert Jeff Calvert

Yesterday’s run (and pandemic opportunity)

...the current situation in our world has given me the opportunity to do that... I can put together a long term plan that isn’t interrupted by tapers or recoveries or race efforts.

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Jeff Calvert Jeff Calvert

Pandemic yes, but...

...but get over it, don’t let it dominate your life more than it needs to. Stop the constant reading about it, stop compulsively checking... stop saturating your mind with it.

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Jeff Calvert Jeff Calvert

Pandemic generation

if you don’t remember life before and life after this pandemic, your view of the world will be fundamentally different... this is the closing event-of-formation for Gen Z

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Jeff Calvert Jeff Calvert

Pandemic ideas

...what if we — the public, our government, society in general — took the climate crisis as seriously as we’re taking this pandemic? Maybe this is a model for, or a prelude to, that.

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Jeff Calvert Jeff Calvert

Long-haul pandemic

...the right answer is to not bank on any particular scenario, try to be prepared for all of it and try to be flexible and accepting of the fact that flexibility is the only real way to be prepared…

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What happens next?
Jeff Calvert Jeff Calvert

What happens next?

…this insatiable need to read more and more about it, which is really just an immense curiosity about What Happens Next. There’s a morbid but addicting fascination in watching this play out…

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Jeff Calvert Jeff Calvert

Believing in the pandemic

It’s a necessary suspension of disbelief, and it must be widespread, ideally universal, and it’s hard to achieve that. And it’s not hard to understand why some people would question it…

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Jeff Calvert Jeff Calvert

Get back to work

I have to accept that there’s nothing I’m going to read about the pandemic in the next half-day that will make a difference in our situation or change the way I should use this day.…

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Jeff Calvert Jeff Calvert

Pandemic diary

…this pandemic that’s about to sweep across us is something we’ll talk with our grandchildren about, and the observations that capture now, in real time, are the ones that will be most valid…

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Jeff Calvert Jeff Calvert

Pushing our luck

...one last weekend before we go completely into crisis mode where we hunker down at home and do absolutely no unnecessary travel. I don’t know if this rationalization is valid or not…

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Jeff Calvert Jeff Calvert

We’re overreacting (but we’re prepping)

I’m thinking of this as a wake-up call for some of us, as a dry run or dress rehearsal for others, and as a good trigger reason for all of us to figure out just how we handle things, how we should handle things

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Jeff Calvert Jeff Calvert

Late-night writing (is it worth getting up?)

…that knowledge that the words in my head were at least potentially good ones, and the certainty that they would not persist — was strong enough to get me out of my warm bed and…

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Jeff Calvert Jeff Calvert

This coronavirus thing

But now there’s this coronavirus thing threatening to spread across the land, killing people in its wake, and I’ve started to think again about whether I should really make this trip south…

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