I also said, too many times to count, "I'm sorry, you're the first person I've actually spoken to today" to many a cashier or someone who wishes me Good Afternoon whilst out on a walk towards town to do that shopping, or whatever, after my attempt to engage with them started with a bit of a croak or other verbal mis-step (too quiet, too loud, a lisping mispronunciation, the sudden realisation that my mouth is too dry
or wet to vocalise a spontaneously desired phoneme...) and
maybe mumble on about how I've been wrapped up on my keyboard most of the day (<mime's keyboard usage... realises it's ambiguous whether QWERTY or piano-style, but ultimately decides the ambiguity is acceptible and maybe even interesting...>).
That was pre-pandemic, and really it hasn't changed much for me, in that regard. Today
I have mostly been coding, gaming, editing wiki pages and pondering the mathematics behind the game of my own that I will probably never even complete. Nothing more than a precautionary clearing of the throat has been vocalised, and yet a few thousand (at least) words have gone out towards regular conversational acquaintances who I may or may not have ever met IRL (and then this, if you consider it to count).
I've become wary of crowds, perhaps (I was previously able to bustle through a shopping-centre crowd or sit on a packed bus, obviously those things went away to various nevessary degrees and I'm not dying (figuratively or literally) to jump into such mosh-pits right now) but not people in general. If it weren't for the rain currently battering my windows I might have already walked into the nearest shop (donning my mask prior to entry) and bought some semi-essential supplies for the next few days. This evening (whatever the weather) I shall dine at a house up the road a bit (it has effectively been my 'bubble' since before bubbles were officially a thing) and if I haven't actually needed to speak before that point I shall then start to do so. Ironically, that'll be the most relaxed part of my day.
Yes, I think I can be alone in a crowd and also feel crowded when alone. But all the othe extremes can apply too. This is not at all to bemoan my state of being (neither do I state it proudly), I'm just setting it down on 'paper' as an alternative to doing anything else useful[1]. I'm sure everyone inhabits all these phase-spaces at times, perhaps with different balances and different intensities (actual or perceived).
And I feel myself lucky, generally. If I'm not normal then I feel I 'pass' as normal. Those who actually know might think me reclusive and/or overly outgoing (maybe both!) but the casual passerby might not think much of me other than wonder at the hat I'm wearing, and the not infrequent random social good morning/afternoon/evening on the path over the hill towards the next town over may care little about the hat, just wonder what particular style of music I play. (I don't!) Those unluck enough to catch me around noon might get me hastily correcting myself when checking the time and finding my greeting wrong, and they probably get far more out of me (verbally) than most others on a typical day.
But get me in a meeting (real or virtual) in which a point-of-order seems necessary about why a particular proposed change to documention
doesn't actually say what the revising author thinks it says then I can bend earholes with the best of them, ye ken?
So, yeah. To drag this back to the thread-subject... Mask on (indoors/sufficiently enclosed areas, possibly outdoors if a crowd appears, not in my own home/bubble-space, not generally when the nearest person to me is a yodelling-distance away or we pass each other on opposite sides of the trail while I attempt to not fuss their excitable pooch) and that works for me and is within (beyond, in places) the rules. I'm perhaps lucky that way, by circumstance and temperament and all that jazz.
I think I reported, early on in this mess, having
pre-pandemic, seen an asian (oriental) student, in the nearest university city, standing in a deserted alleyway just off the busy (traffic and pedestrian) main road having pulled down his facemask (an affectation from prior SARS/MERS events he may have experienced, or just an anti-smog thing, from a home-city far less clean-aired than his current abode) just so that he could smoke! Incongruous at the time. Less so now. But still amusing. He would have looked odd at the time (or exactly as odd as the rest of his transplanted countrypersons, who had not yet become comfortable to go bare-faced), but not these days. Or for forseeable future. Even when not obliged to mask in the open air, there will be some who will.
edit: While I'm here to fix a typo anyway... Hopefully that masked (when not filling lungs with tar!) student won't be more discriminated against, like they were in early-days/slightly-before-lockdown times. It sounds like he, or I, would be targetted by some elements of society these days. But not commonly so around here, at least.[1] Does anyone know if there's a term for shapes that are partially concave (such as a cresent or gibbous moon, for the sake of argument) but possess a(t least one) point within them from which the vector to a tracing point moving around the perimiter never goes retrograde? i.e., in a radial coordinate system, d(theta) never goes negative in a suitable first derivative description of the path.
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Topic: Untamed Virus Containment Thread:COVID-19: Lurking Omni-Flu Edition (Read 496122 times)