The whole world
        Today at work I rang up hundreds of alt-right Christians who decided they needed to kick off hours of Trump-centered prayer with eight dollar lattes. During my shift, I adjusted my mask and thought about how, with my tough luck, I managed to show up on the day with the most infectious crowd imaginable. Then, I thought a little longer. Really, there was no difference, no difference at all between these people and anyone else in the museum when it came to COVID. They weren't wearing masks, but neither do the amateur art critics with their 50 dollar museum gift-shop scarves. Neither does anyone in my organizing meetings. Neither do any of the leftists, the liberals, the sick or the healthy in my life.
The early 2020 Ozark pool party and the early 2024 As You Are queer rave, two mass-infection events whose receptions have differed only by the fact that we didn't know, then, what the virus could do. We know now. And because we do, we consciously and with absolute certainty look the other way.
        It sucks. There isn't much way around that word. It sucks and it's here forever. Among other things, I am not a personal fan of patients' "loss of neurons and connections between neurons ... lesions deep in the white matter of their brains ... [and] rapid structural and functional brain deterioration after COVID-19 infection" (NIH; Doubey, Souk et al. 23). Nor am I big on the considerably greater risk of strokes (Markus and Brainin 20), psychosis (Moccia et al. 23), dementia (Rudnicka-Drozack et al. 23), and DNA and cell cycle degradation (Panico et al. 22) which are also attributed to the disease. It seems, though, that in our failure to prevent COVID from becoming endemic, we have taken it as a sign that we lost our chance to save those who could have been, so now we must watch all those who could still be die. I don't intend to preach, but it does seem like a bad thing to me. And when I look at history I can't help but think what difference it would have made if more people had said too much rather than nothing at all.
        We are going to kill a lot of people. That is the truth. We have to start there. The conversation has to start there. But it doesn't end there. I want whatever's left to prove me wrong. I want to be wrong, so badly. I don't want to feel like I'm holding the trolley lever any more, even though every academic paper, every obituary shows me that I am. Or if not me, then someone who caught it from someone who caught it from someone who caught it from someone who gave it to me who gave it to someone who... I also do like my life, and I don't want to die too early if I can help it.
        Am I wrong? I don't want to spend these years of my life like this. I want to show my face and see my face and I want to go places. I want to go to the club. I want to go on bad dates and make six-hour friendships and live without feeling like my whole body is folding in on itself from the weight of that damn lever. Because, really, I know it doesn't matter what I do; most people have made their choice, and there is no part of my life I can cut out and offer up to change that fact. But isn't it worth trying? I don't know much about Judaism, but one saying that I love is, "Whoever saves a single life is considered by scripture to have saved the world." Every life is kind of its own world, in a way. Everything it knows and has known, everyone who knows and has known it, it's all a whole world in there- in those neurons. I don't want to be the reason those neurons break apart and burn out into a forever darkness before they were meant to. I don't want to kill that world, and all it was.
        Still, am I just giving up my own world for nothing? Should I willingly toss these pieces of all I want to be into the void just because others have no choice but to do so? I could afford to really live these years, I think, even if it did some damage; but there are those who cannot, because of what the world has already put them through. So I'll ask again: tell me that I'm wrong, somehow.

10/12/24

Bad Projects
        When any art student can't think of an idea for a piece that will satisfy their professor, the gut instinct is to make something on a "raw" or "vulnerable" theme. Maybe for pity points, maybe to compensate for a lack of effort on the technical level by hinting towards an effort on the emotional level.  
        Happening now with my second project. These photos are a comically half-assed yet flagrant attempt at slamming the theme into the face of the grader ten times over. It feels like a parody of itself. Ah, well, what else can you get done in two weeks and no desire to have made this body of work in the first place? Frustrating, but at least at the bottom of the well you're likely to find at least a B-. Maybe one day I'll give this theme the dignity it deserves.

10/9/24