Cover Your Bases 11
8/9/2020 COVID-19 Nomads: Feeling our way in the dim light of the dark.
Photo from Art News, Life Just Continues to Go On’: Photographer Stephen Shore on Why It’s Okay to Take Normal Pictures During Abnormal Times, by Taylor Dafoe.
This week: A reflection on something personal and reflective, like feeling our way in the dim light of the dark. In a few days, I leave for a friend’s house for a week, and my partner returns home--we are separated so I avoid potential COVID-19 exposure while she spends time with a family member who came back from a big trip with lots of people. Many people are engaged in this dance right now: my friend whose housemate is a front line worker; a colleague whose housemate got COVID-19 while they were away; another friend with an adult child at home.
And you know what? There is no good guidance.
If you have COVID-19, or you’re exposed to someone who does, CDC, State, and County protocols are clear. But if you’re looking for advice on how to assess risk around a potential exposure--you’re on your own. Yes, you can observe a strict two-week quarantine, and yes, you can hope the test result is accurate, but what do you really know.
READS AND THINGS TO WATCH
The Fixed Stars by Molly Wizenberg This brand-new memoir by Orangette food blogger Molly Wizenberg became a book that I sampled the day it came out, instantly bought, and then could not stop reading. A memoir of Wizenberg’s transition from a heterosexual mom, married to a man, to a more gender-fluid, queer-identified wife to a different, non-binary partner, it’s a heart-stoppingly acute story of someone finding a new version of themselves they did not anticipate, and a wonderful story of self-discovery and sexual fluidity.
One wonderful element of the story for me was Wizenberg’s growing awareness that loving women meant loving people who could embody aspects of both masculinity and femininity, vs. being butch or femme. I also valued the way she described the split from her husband and their work to remake their family as parents and friends, not romantic partners--it’s messy and hard, but not toxic--and her telling does not look away from the hard stuff. HIGHLY RECOMMEND TO EVERYONE.
Bonus: Molly W in conversation with novelist Emma Straub via Powell’s Books:
In My Skin, Season 1, streaming on Hulu: OMG this is good.
This 5-part TV series blew me away. Another show I could not stop watching. The writer is Kayleigh Llewellyn, a Welsh creative who grew up with a bipolar mom, just like the girl in this story; the director is Lucy Forbes, who directed another show I loved, The End of the F**king World. This series is so well-acted and acute that it resonated for me with my own long-ago teen years. A great watch.
WAP, Cardi B, and Megan Thee Stallion: See for your own self
OMG, this is amazing! Brilliant, bold, and so dirty, this can’t look away celebration of female sexuality and power blew my mind. The music is based on an old House Music track, Frank Ski’s “Whores in This House, but Cardi B takes it to places I could never have imagined. Check out some of the lyrics and make sure to watch.
COVID-19 Reads and info (and my emerging news habits)
So, I am now on a Twitter diet and abstaining from too many opinion pieces about COVID-19, our government, the election, and the impact of systemic racism on our country.
What I’ve come to is that I can absorb a fairly unlimited amount of factual data, but reading articles and tweets that have headlines like The Cut’s Joe Biden’s Fantasy of Female Submission: The Democrats have completely botched this VP pick, have brought me to Nope, I just can’t read this stuff anymore. Here’s what I am reading, and getting value from:
New York Times, 12 People in a 3-Bedroom House, Then the Virus Entered the Equation, by Conor Dougherty, with the subtitle: Overcrowding, not density, has defined many coronavirus hot spots. Service workers’ quarters skirting Silicon Valley are no exception. This brilliant piece lays out how race, class, and housing come together to make many service workers so vulnerable to being infected with COVID-19--and how thin the safety net and resources are addressing the problem (or failing to address the problem.) This is a writer to follow if you are not yet doing so.
Politico, California sorts through coronavirus data as glitch stymies policy decisions, by Victoria Colliver. A data failure and an unrecognized web security certificate expiration in late July resulted in a lack of lab results coming into the California Reportable Disease Information Exchange, known as CalREDIE. But, according to the Politico report, the even bigger issue is that all California counties have no reliable data--and 38 are frozen on the state’s monitoring list— because of challenges hospitals now have as they transition to a federal reporting system required by The Trump administration. 8/9 Update: Just fixed, but still.
More about sourdough (and food in general)
The Cut/NY Mag, When We Were Bread Heads, by Matthew Schneier. What did we want from sourdough? And did we get it after all? “In its way, sourdough uncertainty came to function as a proxy for a more overarching anxiety about the pandemic”.
Grub Street, Life After Sourdough What are we going to do now? by Rachel Sugar. The best thing about pandemic sourdough is that it’s actually two hobbies: making sourdough and reading trend pieces about how other people are making sourdough. This article is hilarious and Sugar is a writer to follow.
“I’m trying to find a new project,” I told my mother. She suggested I have a baby. I decided to make ice cream.”
Longreads, Marmalade, a very British obsession, by Olivia Potts. Why do Brits love their marmalade?
“...the tricky, maddening nature of marmalade is precisely why people love making it. It’s a bit like sourdough: if you’re going to get into it, you have to really get into it.”
And also, my fav, an alt-sourdough story by Tejal Rao, so good!
You made it this far, here is something nice: Margaret Glaspy and Julian Lage: They are both wonderful musicians, they are a couple, and here they make music together, sometimes:
Hey—Thanks for reading #11. #12 hits next Sunday.
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