Left-Handers Day
Yes, the blogger is a proud southpaw. (Never mind the 2014 label; the year is irrelevant.) There are some interesting ambidextrous nuances: for example, I can also throw hard right-handed (baseball and football), bat right-handed, and eat right-handed, as well.
I can echo most of what this lady mentions here. I have a typical hooked handwriting style that practically guarantees the left edge of my hand is smeared with pencil lead or ink stains after writing.for any period of time. As to finding a left-handed desk, the second paragraph in this post describes what happened when, in real life, I took back my desk, the only one in class, before a grad school final from a coed using the seat to prop up her feet. Let's just say I saw something unexpected during the confrontation that made it impossible to concentrate during the first few minutes of the exam.
(On a side note, there were more weird experiences involving aggressive women during my graduate fellow days at UH than during my 5 years as a full-time college professor (well, I remember one disgusting thing done by a hostile coed at UWM, which I won't discuss here); to give a minor example, I don't think I, as a socially inept nerd, even knew what footsie was. So I'm sitting at the front of graduate macroeconomics class at the start of my MBA program; at the left of me was some 6-foot blonde I didn't know. All of a sudden, in the middle of class, I feel this bare female foot digging inside my left pant leg and start stroking up and down my shin. No, I didn't reciprocate; I froze, thinking, what if the professor saw what was going on and called attention to it. And a similar thing happened 2-3 years later from one of my COBOL students. She and her friend came during office hours in a suite with two other open cubicles. So I'm debugging the closer student's COBOL program at my desk (probably the least sexiest thing to do in the universe), when déjà vu. I thought to myself, "Oh, shit! What am I supposed to do now? No one is going to believe me, a single white dude and a teacher. Maybe if I ignore it, she'll stop." Eventually she stopped, and I could overhear her tell her friend after they left the office, "Ha-ha! Did you see me turn on the teacher?" What was I supposed to do? File a claim, and she files a counter-claim, falsely accusing me of some impropriety? Who are they going to believe? I was earning my doctorate; I couldn't afford to rock the boat. Maybe this type stuff is more common than I think; it's just I've personally never heard it.
(I've never dated or been sexually inappropriate with any current or past student, co-worker, etc. If I were to write what happened, you would probably think I'm lying, because I've never heard of these things happening to other academics. But then there was this grad psychology student I had befriended at UWM (she was running a statistics lab I needed to use to run LISREL, a stat package I was using on a research project), who mentioned a psychology prof who she said kept her after class one day to complain her breasts were too large and distracting to other class members. [I don't even say the word 'bra' in mixed company.] This lady always dressed modestly, like heavy loose-fitting pullover sweaters. Oh, don't get me wrong; some immoral activity in academia does go on. I had a Latino faculty friend at UTEP, and one of the stories going around on the grapevine was the college department needed to get in touch with him one day, and the coed in his hotel room answered the phone. Some of the fellow MIS professors I've known were pretty creepy. This other UTEP faculty member bragged while at Texas Tech, he had slept with a well-known MIS academic (both grad students at the time); I guess he was trying to impress me, But what I remembered most about this conversation was how he joked about it: "It was Lubbock, man; what the hell else is there to do in Lubbock?" I have no idea why people tell me weird shit like this; it must be my Howdy Doody face.)
COVID-19 Shutdown Diary
Well, one of my social media feeds indicated confirmation of airborne transmission of the novel coronavirus, like up to 16 feet away from an infected patient in a study from the University of Florida.
The media almost seems to celebrate any statistical milestone, like hitting the 5M infection confirmation or more than 1000 deaths daily. The media coverage seems highly biased trying to blame Trump for the pandemic. Let me be clear: testing was bungled on Trump's watch; earlier, more widespread testing would have made the crisis more manageable. His rhetoric has been undisciplined, incompetent and counterproductive. But there's a lot we are still learning about the disease and its spread by asymptomatic individuals, others made awful decisions like putting infected patients into highly vulnerable nursing homes, etc. People also have to take care of themselves and exercise prudent steps in limiting their exposure to riskier conditions and engaging in mitigation steps like wearing masks, social distancing and washing themselves. Certainly Trump's pushing aggressively to reopen businesses and schools hasn't been helpful and could have aggravated the circumstances.
It's hard to generalize, but here in MD the second wave seems to be in the initial but unconfirmed stage of tapering off; I talked to my youngest brother in the far suburbs of San Antonio and he indicated that closer to the south Texas border there are some hospital capacity issues but San Antonio can handle the overflow.
The situation is still bad, especially for older, at risk people like my Mom. In her case, living in Texas, it's more difficult at this time to schedule in-person doctor office visits; she's not crazy with the concept of virtual visits, and there are some things you really can't do well virtually which aren't Luddite but reflect current limitations of the technology (e.g., various health statuses: blood pressure, weight, oximeter, breathing/lung checks; checking reflexes, dexterity, etc.; various blood tests, medical imaging, etc). My Mom needs to see a specialist, and right now that's isn't happening under current constraints (although I think it might happen if she was in Maryland.
