Eileen Young

Posted on August 21, 2020 by Eileen Young · 3 Comments

DAY 5 – Realizing the impact of racial trauma on Black Americans

For today’s Racial Equity Challenge, one of the three options was watching the below video:

The blurb was:

Watch an interview with Resmaa Menakem, on his book My Grandmother’s Hands, Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. This is the first self-discovery book to examine white body supremacy in America from the perspective of trauma and body-centered psychology.

Which meant of course I had to watch it. Because this is going on my public/professional blog, some context to that: I have probably-PTSD (on top of other brain problems, my brain is an adventure), and I help moderate an online mental health forum with a couple thousand users. One of the books that gets mentioned a lot is The Body Keeps The Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk, so that’s my familiarity with trauma and body-centered psychology.

And, additionally, from talking to a fair number of people with PTSD, I’m familiar with one of the really under-discussed aspects of PTSD: digestive problems. Sometimes formally diagnosed as IBS, sometimes more intermittent and manifesting as “Well, the good news is it’s not organ failure” when someone shows up at Urgent Care/Emergency Room/Campus Health Center with what gets eventually diagnosed as stress-induced gastritis, food poisoning, or an eloquent shrug and a discharge (sometimes with saltines and apple sauce (the health center people were really nice)).

At this point of the pandemic and working with FEMA data and trying to do work towards my dissertation and other grad school stuff, I’m now –

Well, I know enough of what’s going on that I shouldn’t need to go to the ER again, and this video was definitely an intriguing prospect. In an example of the kind of blindness that white privilege affords even the well-meaning, I’d never thought of the impacts of institutional trauma on bodies. One of the other challenges for today was this article on how racism can cause PTSD.

Menakem discusses Black bodies, white bodies, and “blue” bodies – the impacts of institutional racism on police officers – and how everyone needs to find a way to work through their trauma.

I don’t have many other thoughts on today’s challenge, other than a vague sense of injustice that froyo is a stereotypically white people thing. It’s got probiotics in. Those are important, when you’re dealing with trauma’s effects on the body, and so froyo would do more good for the people experiencing more trauma from racism.

Posted on August 20, 2020 by Eileen Young

DAY 4 – Talking About Race is Challenging for Some. Here’s Why.

Today’s challenge was worded politely, but it’s 100% about white fragility. Because we do that whole thing. Particularly white women, moving the conversation to be about sexism. So I as a white woman feel a bit awkward about it!

But it’s important to sit with my awkwardness. That’s one of the things I’ve internalized in trying to work against and through my own white fragility as I’ve grown as a person. I still have kneejerk reactions to race conversations sometimes, but I can usually manage to catch that reaction, and acknowledge the feeling and see whether it’s something I actually want to act on. And working on this, on trying to separate feelings from speech and actions, has helped me figure out why I have these feelings and if I think the reason is stupid enough end up not having them at all – or only very mildly – when they would be inspired by a conversation.

This has led to the very strange circumstance where racially charged conversations are one of the few circumstances where I actually can refrain from running my mouth. Most of the time. It’s a work in progress, as we are all works in progress.

There was also an accompanying quiz for one of the challenge items, and I am perpetually a sucker for quizzes. I took it on my phone while waiting for my tea to steep, so no screenshot today, but I scored under 10, which comes out to ‘not as full of white fragility as you could be, go read the book to work on it.’ [sidebar: while trying to find a non-Amazon link to the book I found this fascinating article by John McWhorter in the Atlantic about it]

Actually, never mind, no longer a sidebar, because one of the other challenges for today was a list of 28 ways to be racist that I guess comes from the book.

The White Knight or White Missionary.
“We (white people) know just where to build your new
community center.” Or “Your young people (read youth
of color) would be better served by traveling to our
suburban training center.” Or “We (white people) organized
a used clothing drive for you; where do you want us to put
the clothes?”
REALITY CHECK + CONSEQUENCE:
It is a racist, paternalistic assumption that well meaning white
people know what’s best for people of color. Decision, by white
people, are made on behalf of people of color, as though they
were incapable of making their own. This is another version of
“blame the victim” and white is right. It places the problems at
the feet of people of color and the only “appropriate” solutions
with white people. Once more the power of self-determination is
taken away from people of color. Regardless of motive, it is still
about white control.

And this is one of the places where I do get hung up. Because I’m genuinely an expert in some things, and working on both deepening and widening this. If I were unilaterally declared Dictator of Houston Zoning (please someone make me Dictator of Houston Zoning), I’d very quickly be making maps of places where people couldn’t live or companies had to stop dumping or . . . Anyway, the point is that I have immediate and drastic plans for if I ever suddenly, magically, have enforceable authority over the city of Houston. Houston gets picked on specifically because it has absolutely no zoning laws as is.

And that would be based on expertise and flood maps. But I’m still white, and a fair chunk of the population of Houston is still Black. So that’s an uneasy scenario because of that dynamic. But the water doesn’t care.

And I think that’s the gist of it, being in disasters. You can try to build back better in a more equitable way, you can try to structure relief so it doesn’t perpetuate racist systems, but the hazard is colorblind. The systems we have put more POC in the paths of hazards, which is terrible, but “hello you are going to be underwater next week and can’t live here anymore, here’s some cash” is something that probably needs to be said anyway.

Posted on August 20, 2020 by Eileen Young

DAY 3 – What is Privilege?

One of today’s challenges was a Buzzfeed quiz on privilege.

You live with 37 out of 100 points of privilege.

You’re not privileged at all. You grew up with an intersectional, complicated identity, and life never let you forget it. You’ve had your fair share of struggles, and you’ve worked hard to overcome them. We do not live in an ideal world and you had to learn that the hard way. It is not your responsibility to educate those with more advantages than you, but if you decide you want to, go ahead and send them this quiz. Hopefully it will help.

Which I think is wildly simplistic, because intersectionality is a thing. Me being white has had a lot more influence, I think, than my depression, or sexuality, because a lot of stuff is something you can choose to disclose. Skin color isn’t something you can choose not to disclose in a face to face setting.

Posted on August 18, 2020 by Eileen Young

DAY 2 – Understanding and Reflecting on our Racial Bias

Today in the Racial Equity challenge we’re looking at implicit bias, including a clip from the Van Jones show.

https://youtu.be/C-GPBq-gGjY

I’m always a little concerned about implicit bias, because I don’t like not knowing what my brain is doing. I know I use heuristics a fair amount, and on purpose, but the goal of that is to just do things faster, and I want to not recapitulate broader societal nonsense within my own heuristics. Like, the goal is to be Will Smith, not another white woman calling the cops.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3hAVT2sDqQ

The goal is always to be Will Smith, tbh

Part of today’s assignment was to do an Implicit Association Test. I did, as you can probably gather, a Skin Tone Association test. I’m a little uncomfortable with having any preference at all, because terrible parts of my brain still believe that it’s possible to be a creature of pure Reason. I’m cautiously pleased that I’m at least more likely to extend benefit of the doubt to people who are more at risk if cops are called.

Posted on August 17, 2020 by Eileen Young

DAY 1 – Reflecting on our personal racial identity

I’m participating in the Delaware 21 Day Racial Equity Challenge, so I’ll be posting probably the next 21 weekdays about this. I’d like to be a better anti-racist and ally to my BIPOC colleagues, and this seems like a constructive step.

Today’s questions:

When did you first become aware of your racial identity?
What messages did you learn about race from your school and family?
Did those messages align with what you’ve seen in your life?
When has how others perceived your racial identity affected how they treat you?

I’m white, so I had the privilege of not developing much of a racial identity until late in high school. I just didn’t really think about it. I grew up in a very white town in Canada. I spent some time with local First Nations elders growing up, because my mom worked on a Masters of First Nations Studies and wrote a book on some of the local cultures and intersections thereof.

I remember thinking vaguely that it was racist that all the Chinese people in Barkerville, the Gold Rush historic site near where I grew up, were forced to live in Chinatown because everyone else was racist, but I didn’t think about it in context of “everyone else” being white, or white like me. I remember when my great-uncle died when I was 7 or 8 that I was surprised that the man who eulogized him, who’d been his best friend for years, was Chinese. I don’t remember if I had a feeling other than surprise about it, but I think I probably had some racist expectations that people were mostly friends with people who looked like them, despite multiple cousins who were Métis.

This was despite my immediate family being fairly firm that you treat people as people, you treat individuals with respect, and their stories/backgrounds/identities as valuable. My mother tends to approach life as an ambulatory set of eyeballs with unfortunately high-maintenance scaffolding, but she – and my dad, and my stepmom – trained as a journalist, so you respect (and extract, and document) people’s stories. But that approach also tends to elide reflection on your own race. My dad told me about how the majority-black Bay Area blues community was incredibly important to him as a community and emotional support after the messy divorce that meant he had to leave Canada and didn’t get to see his kid. But, for obvious reasons, that was later.

Moving to the US was different. I think the first time I was really, sharply, aware of race and how it impacted my treatment even in a progressive town, in a high school that “didn’t track” students, was when I took a class called – something like Women and Society? I was taking mostly college-geared classes, AP Statistics and Biotechnology and Shakespeare, and needed my social studies class for my junior or senior year. And the social studies classes weren’t split up like the math classes with their levels or the English classes with their levels of ambition. So I realized, walking into that class the first day, that this was more Black students than I’d seen in any of my classes the entire rest of the year.

And this was late in high school, where we were mostly picking classes based on college prospects and advisor recommendations, and it hit me that this meant that these students weren’t being encouraged to aim for 4-year universities like I was. I was angry.

In general, people tend to treat me well because of my race. I’m also fat, and a woman, so there are complicating factors, but I’m white, and have a white-sounding name. But the worst thing I’ve ever worried about when pulled over by the police is that the driver would get a speeding ticket. For the speeding that they were definitely doing. I think some of my colleagues of color have been slightly wary of me as a potential collaborator or ally or friend because I’m white? But I can’t say that’s not justified, having seen some of how they’re treated, and I don’t know how to alleviate any of that wariness without being weird and pushy in ways that are significantly weirder and pushier than I think anyone would be comfortable with.

Which this might help with! Who knows.

Posted on July 14, 2020 by Eileen Young · 1 Comment

Surviving Virtual Conferences (with ADHD)

This is going to be a structural adventure. All expandable sections should be taken as parentheticals and footnotes that are still conscious of the fact that comments, also, go at the bottom.

I’m currently attending the 45th Annual Natural Hazards Workshop. I attended it in person last year, and it’s virtual this year, and some of the common threads are passionate, involved, and incredibly kind people who are involved in the science and policy of disasters.

More of why it’s important to me

It’s the first place I presented a professional academic poster, and where I’ve met incredibly nice people and been able to talk to them about their ideas and research. It’s also where the DRC’s alumni reunion is, every year, because it’s one of the big conferences for disasters – and one that, by dint of effort, structure, and the strict banning of acronyms, is host to practitioners, policymakers, academics, and the great conversations that can come of them being in the same room. So it’s important to me to attend for several reasons, including the fact that the people I talk to there are almost uniformly incredibly nice and make me feel hopeful about the world.

This isn’t the first virtual conference of the year, and won’t be the last, but it’s the one I’ve most tried to engage in, and so the one that’s inspired this tweet.

I need to find (or write?) a guide to surviving virtual conferences with #adhd. #HazWS is full of the nicest people in the world, with cool and important ideas and research, and I’m really struggling to stay engaged just because of the medium.
— Eileen Young (@Eileen_Young) July 14, 2020

The ADHD is newly diagnosed this year, but given that Zoom Fatigue is something growing in people’s awareness, I don’t think even those of use with ADHD are alone in the struggle.

ADHD is an adventure, y’all

I was initially screened in third grade, when I would finish my tests in class and then talk to people and be helpful and generally be cheerfully and politely disruptive. The psychiatrist, on rotation in my small Central British Columbia town, decided I didn’t have it.

I got through high school with okay grades and weird coping mechanisms (to be enumerated later), flunked out of college the first time because of untreated depression, got my shit together to the tune of running my own business and training as a paramedic, finished an undergraduate degree, finished a Masters degree, went in to see a psychiatric nurse to have a prescriber for my continued use of antidepressants, and 5 minutes into our consultation she just kind of cocked her head to the side and then pulled out an ADHD assessment.

Turns out, at 30 years old, I have moderate inattentive-type ADHD. I sometimes have imposter syndrome about that! Because my roommates have ADHD, too, but it manifests differently. In high school, I most of the time had two part time jobs, multiple clubs, an active social life, and an online writing group. The month I did Emergency Medical Responder Training I also worked solid weekends, studied, and finalized the bi-annual launch of a literary magazine. I did my makeup for the launch I was MCing on the bus to the location after work. I’ve had people who genuinely like me describe me as, variously, a shark, a whirlwind, and a hurricane.

I’m still working out how much of that is my personality and how much of it is literal decades of overscheduling as an ADHD coping mechanism. I also realized that the whole thing where I keep my laptop with me at pretty much all times is also a coping mechanism. I realized this in the middle of, during some tech issues that meant I was in class without my laptop, going on a 10 minute rant about the way Calvinism had contributed to problems with the National Flood Insurance Program. Sorry, Dr. Kendra, and I hope at least it was amusing.

. . . mostly I don’t have imposter syndrome that much anymore.

So, during this lunch break, some recommendations, tactics, and coping mechanisms for getting the most out of virtual conferences.

Thrivewithadd.com has this guide on survival tactics for Zoom meetings generally, but meetings and conferences aren’t quite the same beast: this workshop can’t really be an email. Additionally, it doesn’t matter as much whether you as a participant are dressed professionally: if you’re in the audience, you don’t have video on most of the time, and if you don’t want to turn it on at all you can ask any questions you have in chat.

Dr. Jenn Trivedi suggested taking notes by hand.

Not sure if this would help at all, but I've been taking notes by hand. It's been helping me stay more focused on the Zoom calls and helps me not be just staring at a screen 100%.
— Dr. Jennifer Trivedi (@JenniferTrivedi) July 14, 2020

I’ve successfully embroidered through one conference (I had a little belt bag with my embroidery kit, it was badass and a great conversation starter), and knit sometimes at conventions. Having my hands busy definitely helps!

But I also run into trouble with ‘Oh, they’re messing with PowerPoint, I’ll just check my email real quick,’ and next thing I know I’m resurfacing because someone’s voice just called for one last question. Which is suboptimal.

One answer would be splitscreening, ideally with the conference on the main monitor and whatever else on a secondary monitor, but that still leaves the problem of my primary attention just. Wandering off. There is also the issue of I am on my laptop on the couch, and do not have a secondary monitor handy.

So! An itemized list of things I’m going to be trying once lunch ends, some of them based on evidence or prior suggestions.

Taking notes by hand
Continue crocheting the All My Exes fingerless gloves I’ve been working on
Continue the embroidery that’s been sitting abandoned by my chair for months
Continue the very simple knitting I’ve been working on that keeps my hands busy but doesn’t require a pattern or paying attention
Keeping Zoom on one half of the screen any anything else on the other half
On breaks, going outside to water the plants, so I’m definitely taking a break from staring at screens.

Posted on April 4, 2020 by Eileen Young

Letters from home

Why did I end up sticking with this particular naming scheme? No idea. But I guess I’m rolling with it.

Classes started up again this week. It’s nice to have structure, even though I’m a bit overwhelmed by all of the Zoom calls. I’ve stopped going to some of the professional development calls, because it’s just . . .

I’m an extravert. I like working from the office because there are people to chat and I run into people at the Keurig and we can keep up with each other. I live with other people – more people than I ever have before, right now, but I’m deeply uncomfortable living alone. I like being around other people. But wow this is so many Zoom calls, this is kind of too many people. It’s like a high-volume meeting day except every day. The only upside* is that I can do so from the comfort of my own home.

But the sheer volume of contact means that I’m finding it incredibly relaxing that Tristan and Alexis are currently on Flour Quest.

Maybe I should back up. Today Tristan and I needed to go pick up prescriptions at Walgreens.

I wore a scarf over my face for part of it, because that’s following CDC guidelines. Tristan didn’t. The Carrs, when they went to pick up our CSA share, also didn’t. Which makes it feel a little pointless: a household is as susceptible as the least cautious member. But I wasn’t the only person in Walgreens with a mask: they’re apparently becoming more normal. And they had safe distance slots for queueing marked in tape on the floor, as you can see above.

But we still needed to actually go, because controlled substances such as a couple of our prescriptions cannot be sent via mail. This seems generally problematic, because immune compromised people can still need medications that you currently need an ID to pick up. Hopefully we’re not all going to be sheltering in place for much longer, but I do think that it’s something policy would do well to address.

So we went to pick stuff up, and got Subway while we were out: ordered online, then only me going into the store, staying as far as possible from the only other customer there, who was in as representative of his family, with two kids waiting in a truck outside.

When we got home, Alexis and I got talking about bread. Our CSA share, we get bread as an add-on, but I think we’ve also both been seeing everyone making their own bread on social media. Alexis has sourdough starter on the stove: I hadn’t noticed it before. But it should be ready by midweek, which is when we’ll probably be out of our other bread. And I’ve been wanting to make bread, though I’m nervous as I don’t think I’ve made yeasted anything before. So we talked a little about that, and then came to the realization: we’d go through flour really fast if we started making bread, and there have been shortages. King Arthur Flour, which is what Alexis really likes, is several weeks backordered on most of their more popular flours. I went through their website as Alexis went through grocery websites, seeing where we could get flours. But King Arthur is down to just flours that aren’t suitable for most breads, because we are far from original in this idea.

I think it’s really worth noting that a lot of shortages right now aren’t due to panic or mismanagement: they’re because people are at home. There’s a great article on Medium talking about the fact that commercial toilet paper is not what’s selling out now. Likewise, people suddenly eating lunches at home (for themselves or for kids who normally eat at a cafeteria) are using a lot more bread in sandwiches, and people with a lot of free time and energy and boredom are looking at shelves that are light on bread and deciding to make their own. People are, in many cases, more bored than worried. And bread is an ideal antidote for people working from home in that it is a staple that takes a lot of hours where you need to be nearby but not necessarily paying a lot of attention. Also you can Instagram it.

Alexis doesn’t care about Instagram, but she does care about bread. So she and Tristan (because Alexis doesn’t drive) hit on the idea of going to the local Asian grocery, as we’ve both heard about them generally being better stocked right now. The plan was, if flour couldn’t be found in the grocery store a mile away, they’d head across town to the Asian grocery, and pick up flour and maybe more Lysol wipes so we can sanitize stuff that comes into the house more thoroughly.

So it was very quiet for a while.

But now they have returned, triumphant, and later this week we should have sourdough.

*This is a lie: another upside is that no one can see when I’m playing games on my tablet the whole meeting.

Posted on March 23, 2020 by Eileen Young

Letters from privilege

I’ve been spending a fair amount of time on social media recently – as, I think, have we all – and I’ve noticed a lot of family-oriented posts from my colleagues with family. Which makes sense: family is important.

But I’m also thinking about how family is going to make a difference in what everyone can produce right now.

I’m a disaster scientist: this means that not only am I expected to do the general academic productivity thing, but that right now, while we’re all in quarantine, might be one of the defining moments of the careers of every cohort with me in the Disaster Research Center. The ability to engage with research right now is going to be massively important. But it’s going to vary, for a lot of reasons that have nothing to do with dedication or interest.

So first, a preview of the way my life is regularly organized, with the help of my roommates and adviser:

I live with several people. Sometimes this bugs me, because I’m an only child and apparently that never goes away, but it means that my bills are low because they’re shared.
I have an involved adviser, which makes everything about my academic career more straightforward and less nervewracking
I have guaranteed funding
My adviser is mostly retired, and my funding comes from an outside grant: office politics are utterly irrelevant to my life if I want them to be
I live about a mile from campus, near a shuttle route: commuting under regular circumstances is a non-issue
- Not just that, Tristan drops me off in the mornings
Tristan does the laundry. All of it. Every Sunday they’re in town. It’s predictable and I don’t have to think about it ever.
Alexis does most of the grocery shopping
Alexis also does most of the cooking
Tristan and Alexis are both brilliant and writers and willing to read my essays and give feedback really quickly
Duncan keeps the kitchen clean and cleans the living room once a week
The cats and bearded dragons technically belong to the Carrs, so they do all the animal care except when I refill their water fountain

I’m not saying this to brag, though I know it can come off that way: my life is pretty much optimally structured for me to do well academically. That’s on purpose! My brain is sometimes extremely terrible (for which I have medication and a full spectrum light), and so for times I have to fight my brain, not having to fight my environment really helps. The tremendous people in my life have entered into a conspiracy of ease.

This means that, during regular times, I’m moderately productive and definitely overinvolved.

During this period of isolation? All of that list is going to matter more. Additionally:

We have a number of computers such that everyone has their own, even with my current technology adventures
There are no children in the house. Children are important, and they’re quite literally the future, but no one has to care for them or look after their health or educate them while school is shut down. This is the biggest gap people have been talking about, that I’ve seen, and no one in this house is engaged in the work and noise of helping the development of a whole person.
Tristan is working the regular amount, because data centers are essential services.
Nick is working more than usual, because Target’s flex crew does online orders. Apparently he’s getting hazard pay and unlimited overtime. So this, too, means both quiet and work orientation in everyone’s attitude.
My contract continues to pay me.
I’ve worked from home before. For years. I’m used to the scheduling and the changes in mindset and the ways I need to orient myself.
My family is all fairly far away and mostly either taken care of or not in a circumstance I can help with anyway.

I spent about 8 hours yesterday coding data for my new Covid-19 related side project. Tristan hung out in my room and wrote and we listened to a podcast, then Tristan helped with preliminary sorting of some of the data when I clutched my face and screamed at the realization that after starting the day at 235 emails and processing 50 or so to end up at 232 emails (I appreciate all the data people are sending me, I just also am slightly overwhelmed).

I know this data, and some of the other stuff I’m working on, are probably going to lead to publications. But I’m also intensely aware of just how much privilege and deliberate ordering of my life and assistance from other people have gone into my ability to be productive. And I firmly believe that people caring for children or family members right now and people dealing with financial or environmental uncertainties due to the various shutdowns shouldn’t face any kind of career slowdown because their circumstances are different and they had other things to do than write. But I don’t know how well the academy will accommodate this.

I hope it does it well. A conspiracy of ease should not be a requirement of academia in general.

Posted on March 20, 2020 by Eileen Young

Letters from Redesign

This is Jo. She’s not quite sure about this room that she thinks just magically appeared.

Posted on March 18, 2020 by Eileen Young

Letters from (poorly maintained) Quarantine

We were running out of rice. We were running out of rice, completely out of milk, and a little low on butter because the two other stores my roommates had hit up were out. There are five of us, all adults, including a 20-year-old guy and a 22-year-old guy who takes daily 5-10 mile walks. We have a galley kitchen. Stocking up on sufficient food has been a bit of a project.

But I also spent the morning having more computer adventures (now solved; I have a frankendesktop, a police report, and three extra HDMI cables) and Tristan was off for the day, while Alexis is in official office hours and desperately trying to get OISS travel approvals for students with plane tickets tomorrow, so Tristan and I ran errands. Tristan now keeps hand sanitizer in the coin area of the car, which we used liberally after every stop. Walgreens to drop off a written prescription, the comic book store to pick everything up for Alexis because it’s going to close for a while and they wanted to not have holds gathering dust while it’s closed. Then: Costco.

Before you even line up to go in, there are signs.

Instead of the usual entrance, they have pallets stacked up to form a hallway where you wait, because they’re limiting the number of people inside at once. Everyone in the line was keeping a wary distance from each other. Conversations were quiet, as if noise itself would carry contagion. A few people in line wore surgical masks and gloves, but not many or most.

I lined up alone, in large part because Tristan hates grocery shopping, but also because Tristan has to go to work: I can work from home, and theoretically can still do statistics at things if I become ill. The final reason is that I was also deeply curious about what Costco would look like: I’ve been hearing about runs on toilet paper, people fighting over the last Lysol wipes, Costcos that are wiped out wastelands. It’s also a bulk store, perfect for stocking up, and one with a supply chain that I think works well as an indicator for how we’ll do when the social climate settles.

There were employees shepherding every part of our entrance, including one person whose entire job was sanitizing shopping carts and setting a few at a time aside directly where incoming shoppers could most easily grab them. Incoming shoppers were also directed to them when allowed in the store, and watched like hawks by other door employees – all of whom were keeping their social distance.

It’s a well-ordered machine, but eerily silent compared to normal days.

When I went in, all the shelves were full. The shelf with all the bagels was actually more full than I’m used to seeing it, which was nice: I snagged a couple bags of everything bagels, because the nutrition shakes we normally have for breakfast are delayed in their shipment. So I did what amounts to a regular grocery shop at Costco, but skipping most of the produce: we picked up plenty at our scheduled CSA pickup last week, and have another one this week. The farm store when we went was quiet, but I think now more than ever supporting local agriculture is important, and they’re still open and packing CSA shares.

Of course, a regular grocery shop at Costco when you’re almost out of rice involves getting a 20lb bag of it, along with a 3lb jar of minced garlic. Which should be enough to last out our isolation.

And then I washed my hands very, very thoroughly.