I've been thinking about Ignaz Semmelweis a lot lately!

Background on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis

And also thinking about COVID and despair! See also: https://zeroes.ca/@pip/111083273411021431

To try and summarize what I've been thinking:

1.) It can feel really, overwhelmingly distressing to see what's happening now and it can be easy to feel like "things never change, it's always people wanting to maintain the status quo, and those trying to fix things are attacked for it"

and

2.) Semmelweis died tragically (and ironically; of an infected hand while he was institutionalized), but the efforts and innovations of Ignaz Semmelweis have doubtlessly improved many things for many people

So, I have found it frustrating, demoralizing, seeing fewer masks in public around me, sometimes being given condescending or perplexed looks for wearing a mask, having people I thought were friends decide pretending things are fine is better than taking care, but!

I try to not burn out. This is not a sprint. It is a marathon.

Hoping that in the decades to come, people will be looking back at the early 2020s like, "Haha, no, really, people weren't… WASHING HANDS… as a way to prevent an airborne illness? Like, it was know COVID was floating through the air, but people were doing something that helps prevent disease spread by physical contact? And like, there were attacks on people for wearing PPE? Sounds fake."

And in the meantime I try to

- Avoid the disease

- Avoid being pathologized for AVOIDING A VIRUS THAT CAN NOT ONLY KILL BUT CAUSE LONG TERM IMPAIRMENT AND FLOATS THROUGH THE AIR IN TINY BITS OF MOISTURE SIMILAR TO THE WAY CIGARETTE SMOKE SPREADS

- Avoid despair about the ridiculousness of everything

Because it's one thing to be in denial about the reality of the nature of COVID's airborne spread and its actual severity (HELLO, THE S IN SARS-CoV-2 STANDS FOR SEVERE), but acknowledging this reality won't fix things if we just despair or become resigned.

And it can be so hard! Just doing what you can to deal with the immediate situation may be all we can do with our emotional/financial/energy resources! This is not to try to guilt you if you haven't been "active enough".

But I've seen people have this kind of attitude that's like "well, humans are idiots, obviously COVID is airborne and bad, and humanity is getting what it deserves because people are bad and stupid, and since we all may die of plague anytime let's do what we want!"

I've also seen, "I can't do anything about it, there's no point in trying, it's too big."

Despair can eat away at us, but we can work on resisting it. Even if we give in some days, this does not mean another day won't come when we can push back against it.

Even if we can't make health authorities publicly acknowledge reality, even if our family and friends and others around us seem to disregard the reality of COVID's danger and how it spreads, even if we can do no more than get by day to day, we can try to push back against our own despair!

RESIST DESPAIR!

To do so is not nothing!

#COVIDisNOTover #COVIDisAirborne #COVID #SARSCoV2

Joseph Plateau died #OTD in 1883.

He was one of the first people to demonstrate the illusion of a moving image. To do this, he used counterrotating disks with repeating drawn images in small increments of motion on one and regularly spaced slits in the other. He called this device of 1832 the phenakistiscope. via @wikipedia

#art #AnimationHistory

I mean, you knew this was coming, right? <;

#GoodOmens #GO #GoodOmens2 #GO2 #Shax #MirandaRichardson #Wisesnail

In Spain we call the fascists 'fachas'.

Today Guillermo Fesser (journalist) gave a perfect explanation in a tweet (post?) of our concept of 'facha':

The fachas are called fachas for being classist with their compatriots, racist with immigrants, arrogant with foreigners, sexist with women, thieves with the public treasury, liars with the history of the Franco dictatorship and greedy with their employees.