June is the new September, September is the new January, and Covid is the new Covid.
Back in March of 2020, I started writing the Corona Dailies (see “I have a bad feeling about this”) to document my experience of living and working in the blossoming global pandemic. They went along well for a few months but, unlike Covid-19, kind of went away after a while.
Now, as I head into yet another semester of teaching from home, a renewed focus on mask wearing, and the rise of the delta variant, I feel it is time to reconsider the daily plague journal.
I’m giving a presentation next week about strategies for remote teaching in semester three of the Covid. Everyone has mixed feelings about the situation—we are simultaneously exhausted by Zoom and elated by still teaching from home as infection numbers begin to rise. So, since I am writing about this moment, I must consider what to call this moment.
In the first version of this blog, I used the refrain “in the corona” to refer to the light and the pain and the clarity of the pandemic.
But now, I must decide if I should refer to this new phase as Covid, post-Covid or Covid-post-Covid. Perhaps they seem the same, but they are quite distinct locations that stem from the same place, but give us different trajectories.
Covid, post-Covid is the next version of the same thing. It is Covid again after finishing Covid. We have been there and we have done that—this is just phase II. Like coffee, post-coffee, it is more of the same, but hopefully, this one wakes me up.
Covid, post-Covid is a do-over. Remember all that stuff you were going to do with all that time? Remember the language you were going to learn, the clutter you were going to purge, the blog you were going to keep? In the Covid, post-Covid, you have the chance to do it again. But this time, you will do it right—you’ll prioritize what’s important and act before it’s too late. You’ll focus your efforts on what you really want. You’ll get the shot, wear the mask, not die.
Covid-post-Covid stands on its own, boldly akimbo in its hyphens. Covid-post-Covid defines its own time and is indifferent to your plans. Covid-post-Covid is both the result of, and irrelevant to, all that stuff you didn't do. Covid-post-Covid is the gate and its keeper. Covid-post-Covid is inevitable.
In the Covid-post-Covid, even if you had done what you didn’t do, it wouldn’t have changed anything.
If Covid, post-Covid is a second chance; Covid-post-Covid is a failure of Calvinistic momentum.
Inertia. Gravity. Flow.
Which gets me thinking about the delta. Delta—the triangle of sediment sieved from the banks of a river and delivered downstream that makes the unusable, bountiful. Neither the desert of the Nile nor the marshlands of the Mississippi would fuel imaginations were it not for the delta. Without it, we would not have the epic romance of the ancient world nor the New Orleans blues that gave us rock-n-roll.
And as we all knew before it blew our minds, the delta is the universal symbol for change, the triangle the symbol for caution.
Fanned by the delta, I shall proceed with care.
