COVID-19: reflections on Day 4 of the crisis

Firstly, I just have to apologise for my long absence ... 17 October 2018 was my last post, and here 1.5 years has gone past. It's been a tumultuous time, filled with the lowest lows and the highest highs, and yet here we are ... 19 March 2020. Things are getting more tumultuous than ever.

So what's brought me to post now? COVID-19 ... aka Coronavirus. In South Africa we're sitting on Day 4 after the President declared a National Disaster following the global spread of COVID-19, and its growing impact in South Africa. That was Sunday evening, with around 48 "infected" in South Africa. Now it's Thursday evening, and we're sitting at 150, but the true number is most likely way higher (we just don't have enough test kits - and the government is most likely trying to avoid mass panic anyway).

Everybody calls this an unprecedented time, and it certainly feels that way for me. I heard the phrase "worst plague in 100 years", but don't quote me on that. I think that's really the thing about COVID-19 that is so difficult to navigate: telling the genuine facts apart from the outdated data and outright "fake news" (another recent phenomenon).

I felt this special time warranted a snapshot in time of what it's like living now. Of where I'm at.

Things are moving quickly. Yesterday my company had already released a Coronavirus Business Plan detailing its new corporate policies surrounding everything from travel restrictions to how to apply to work remotely. I did the latter immediately and got my approval today. Tomorrow when I wake up, I start work from my PC at home: armed with Google Hangouts for videoconferencing and a VPN to get onto my server, I'll need to make it work.

This week has been a flurry of trying to do "normal" work, alongside COVID-19 related tasks. I'm a project manager in an advertising agency in Pretoria, so that's entailed liaising with suppliers of sponsored events to enquire what their event plans are (most events are cancelling after the president declared a ban on gatherings of more than 100 people), briefing in urgent social media and other communications, helping forge electronic communication channels between myself and my client (in-person meetings are a luxury nobody is indulging in anymore), and generally just hoping that nobody I'm meeting has been to Italy (Gauteng DOES have the highest infection rate in South Africa - so I'm at ground-zero).

Let me not forget the panic buying. Stories about people stocking up. Then evidence in the local stores of long queues and people loading shopping trolleys to breaking point. Me joining in one lunchtime on a limited budget and walking away with this (not the biggest haul in the world - but hopefully enough to buy time in a true crisis). All the basics: tinned tuna and pilchards, instant noodles, my favourite cereal, long-life milk, bottled water, and some other odds and ends:

I feel obliged to mention for the sake of history that people are so afraid of running out of toilet paper that everybody is over-stocking on it and the stores are reportedly all out. I haven't checked on this yet ... I need to check that out this week and see if I can get some more. In case. Apparently it's all New Zealand's fault because they import toilet paper from China, so when COVID-19 locked down Chinese imports then they found themselves in a ... err ... sticky situation. South Africa manufactures bog roll so we should be fine. Should be. But apparently shelves are running empty there too, of that most priceless commodity.

It's just another painful reminder that we're all human. People are afraid. They're angry. They're tired. They didn't ask for this, but now it's here, just as we start to tip over into the winter chill and were emerging from the darkness of Eskom's national loadshedding problem (I can only hope that the me in the future reading this doesn't still have electricity shortages).

Where to from here? In South Africa, we're most likely going to see COVID-19 cases spiking. I fear for our industries which are most affected: hospitality and entertainment are being wiped out overnight or forced to retrench most of their staff. You can't move a bar experience online (maybe the new business model is to ship alcohol to clients and they can get drunk together over a video-call ... but getting drunk alone and vomiting over your keyboard most likely won't have the same appeal).

There are rumours of province-wide shut-downs, if not country-wide shut-downs. Families will be broken apart. People are being retrenched. We're still trying to find the humour in it, and there are COVID-19 memes everywhere ... but they're just not funny anymore.

The ONE upside, if any, is that COVID-19's worst symptoms for most people are a fever and dry cough, and you get better in two weeks with no medical intervention. For 2% of people (mostly the old and infirm) there is a harsher downside: death. Nobody has died yet in South Africa, as far as the media knows. Yet.

I like to think that this is better than an Ebola-type virus, which would strike people down with blood running out of their ears and noses, with guaranteed fatality in most cases. At least that, right? Maybe this is just a trial run. Maybe it's an opportunity for a bit of that "Blitz spirit" (World War 2) in a country as divided as ours. Maybe it's going to drive a deeper political wedge between people, when COVID-19 enters the townships and the poor cannot afford to stockpile or access private medical healthcare. Most likely that, in fact.

So if the above demonstrates nothing else, it's just how all over the place this is, and this is just for me. Stories are swirling around out there, with every more bizarre headlines. And maybe we're all going to get Coronavirus. Maybe we have to. Maybe it's better that way. Maybe we should be deliberately infecting ourselves rather than trying to distance ourselves and just prolong the agony. Two weeks and you're either dead or alive and able to continue life (although some people CAN apparently get reinfected).

Hope. We have hope. I have hope. We will survive. Some of us will survive. Most of us. I think. I hope. I plan. I work. I try.

“Hope” is the thing with feathers - (314)

BY EMILY DICKINSON

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -

That perches in the soul -

And sings the tune without the words -

And never stops - at all -

And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -

And sore must be the storm -

That could abash the little Bird

That kept so many warm -

I’ve heard it in the chillest land -

And on the strangest Sea -

Yet - never - in Extremity,

It asked a crumb - of me.

Things they don't teach you in school

In an increasingly networked world, how strange it is to find ourselves so frequently isolated.

The problem, of course, is that we aren't taught to network with each other. Our parents outsource our networking to teachers, and our teachers just try and ensure that none of us choke to death on an eraser on their watch.

Social networking, ironically, encourages the same form of isolation. Facebook, for all its might, is possibly the single most damaging social networking tool I know: yes it will help you find your long-lost friend and that aunty who will like your pictures, but how will it help you find people who will challenge your ideas, people who need you in their lives, people you can fall in love with?

Facebook is fantastic for keeping touch with your existing social circles, but it fails spectacularly when it comes to meeting new people, or having real-time debates. Twitter is marginally better, except who uses Twitter anymore except for children and people in the Middle East who're organising rallies all the time (apparently)? 

By an anachronistic stroke of luck, I discovered real social networking online in 2008, in the form of Internet Relay Chat (that's a whole separate story for another day). Even then, it was abundantly clear that most of the people left on IRC (and there weren't many) were in their late thirties and forties, and remembered it from its heyday in the '90s ... at which time I was in my teens, and my family didn't have a PC in the house, never mind a 56k dial-up modem.

IRC, for anybody not familiar, is moderately complex to use by modern 'point and click' standards, but the principle is dead simple: users connect to chatrooms that are hosted on IRC servers, and those servers record and send plain text chat messages (both public and personal) instead of websites. It's real-time, and although your 'client' (the programme you use to access the IRC server) might save all the chat messages in text logs, nobody really reads those: just like real life, you're either there and participating in the conversation, or the moment is gone and ancient history.

The magic, then, is two-fold: 1) You immediately get access to a pool of human beings connected to the same chatroom as you, from around the country or around the world (depending on the type of server you're on); and 2) The ball is entirely in your court what you SAY to these individuals, and how you react to them.

The reason why I am STILL going back onto IRC in the year of our lord 2018 is precisely the same as it was ten years ago: there's just nothing like the possibility of having actual conversations (both group conversations and one-on-one) with people you'd most likely pass on the street and never share more than a momentary glance with otherwise.

While society seems to increasingly isolate us into our individual worlds of cellphone screens and media consumption (TV, movies and staring blankly at other people living their lives on YouTube); IRC forces us to connect. If nobody says anything, then they'd just be sitting there staring at a blank screen.

And so people DO speak up. Social barriers dissolve. And (if you're lucky) real connections are formed. 

I won't lie to you and say that all debate on IRC is highly intellectual. I won't even lie to you and claim that most of it is emotionally uplifting. The vast majority of it is pretty much the kind of small-talk you'll hear with a bunch of strangers in a bar, only nobody's drunk (well some are) and they're all listening to their own music.

Like anything else in life, however, it becomes what you make of it. I've found repeatedly that it's an amazing icebreaker ... just milling around in chat until you find somebody whose chat style gels with yours, and you continue the conversation in private. Before you know it, you've made a friend you wouldn't have imagined you'd ever have: maybe somebody 15 years older than you, maybe somebody living 1 200km away, maybe somebody with some wildly different views than yours, but ... a real, living human being, and you're not just shouting at each other in a bar but having actual conversations.

Again, I feel it's important to stress that IRC isn't this magical place where unicorns live. It's just a blank screen, and a very loosely moderated one at that (although most rooms will have admin teams who will try keep conversation just this side of an outright fistfight) ... and because all the input comes from humans, a lot of that input is filled with anguish, anger, petty frustration, egotistical-driven grandstanding, or wild jealousy.

And love. Real, unadulterated, knock me over a feather, how is this even possible, love.

I met my first girlfriend on IRC, on a general 'chat' channel. I met my wife on IRC, on a trivia channel of all things (where a computer programme asks general knowledge questions and the people in the room try to answer correctly before anybody else). My theory is that it doesn't matter where people who have a strong connection meet, that connection will jump across distance and mediums like an electric spark jumping between two wires.

That doesn't mean I'm advocating IRC for lonely hearts. For a lot of the reasons mentioned, it's actually a spectacularly bad place for that: it is filled with groups of jaded people tired of being endlessly flirted with, and other groups of people who just endlessly flirt out of habit rather than desire. Somewhere in the middle are the normal, everyday people ... and talking to them might help you see problems in new lights; feel better about your shitty life; or just laugh when everything else is bringing you down.

And so IRC for me is caught in this weird twilight state: it is a dying technology platform (with a very low-grade form of cancer given its longevity), and yet it also contains unadulterated human connection that is found absolutely nowhere else in our always-on, always-consuming (and hardly ever publishing) world.

Personally I'd love to see IRC receive better marketing, so more people are even aware of it. Maybe what it needs is a transition of its core tenets to a new technology platform (Virtual Reality-based chatrooms already show all the benefits of IRC with additional body language and physical interactions not possible on text-based IRC). Heck, if there's a passion project I'd ever love to attempt, it would be to reignite social networking on a mass scale using an IRC-type platform to encourage people to truly connect with each other.

If you haven't experimented with IRC, there are so many gateway drugs. The easiest way of getting on is simply via your website browser, using platforms like www.chat27.co.za (South African) or www.dal.net (international server). Pick a username, connect to a channel, and plunge in (just type "/list >15" to get a list of chatrooms with more than 15 people connected to it at that time). Once you get hooked, you simply download your very own dedicated IRC client like www.mirc.com ... and the rest is history.

If there's one parting thought here, it is this: gaining confidence in online chat is a crucial life skill that translates perfectly into the real world. How do you start a conversation? How do you resolve conflict? How do you keep stringing together words in a way that somebody else will actually want to read them? What do you have to give to the world, and what do you want in return?

Crazy footprints and my life

As I grow older, I'm starting to enjoy dancing around the oldest existential questions. Can anybody else relate to this?

You know the Big 2 (and their two corollaries):

1) Why am I here (and what am I meant to do)?

2) Who am I (and what do I want)?

Now just like everybody else on this little planet of ours, I've gone through about a million different answers to those two simple questions ... to a point where it starts to look a bit like this when I think about it:

You know this feeling? It's like everything you've ever felt about something starts to overlap, and as your mind skims over the old worn footpaths again and flips between them trying to find new meaning ... it can all get a bit confusing/frustrating.

So what got me thinking about this tonight was this video, which I love an inordinate amount:

https://youtu.be/B9FzVhw8_bY

That video, for me, speaks to who I want to be (and therefore indirectly to who I am). It's quirky, irreverent, aesthetically appealing, original ... and I identify with all of that. This is what I want with life: fun, and to make beautiful things.

This is the real reason why I haven't gone off into the great blue yonder to start a business doing something I don't want to do. I know I want to have independence, but I also know I want it to be doing something I deeply enjoy and that means something to other people too.

In this disposable society we live in, I can't think of a single career that is fun, connects to people emotionally, and enables a reliable form of income for entrepreneurs. Standup comedian maybe, but from the behind-the-scenes I've seen of real standup comedians they're always on the road and behind the laughs is frequently a very calculated approach towards playing the audience that doesn't work for me.

So yeah, I guess I'm still trying to figure out what I want to do with my life, and there's a strong likelihood I'll always feel this way. Welcome to the human condition, right?

A rose by any other name...

If anybody ever asks me why I want to leave South Africa, here's a simple answer.

Exhibit A:

Exhibit B:

Oh but that's not so bad, my more liberal readers will cry (those not in South Africa). Apartheid, Nelson Mandela, social change, blah blah blah (I'm allowed to be flippant about it if I've lived under this flavour of 'democracy' for 23 years).

Yes very well, but let me present Exhibit C:

And that's it, don't you see?

Firstly, if you want to do it, just come out and say it. Say "no whites welcome", why not. You think that dressing it up with other names makes it better, or somehow politically correct?

Secondly, there's the very key fact that white South Africans make up less than 10% of the population. Nobody's exactly sure how much less, but as that graph demonstrates white South Africans are emigrating, dying or just fading into irrelevance.

Which would be fine, except when you get continual reminders in public job advertisements like the ones I've shared above that if you're white you shouldn't even dare apply for some jobs.

WTF, really? It's like holding a townhall meeting, and then putting up a sign "freckled redhead Asians not welcome". Is it really necessary? How hard would it be for recruiters to just ignore applications from less than 10% of the population (I sure as hell know it'd make me feel better).

Instead South Africa is this country where race has been weaponized. A lot of people will say a lot about reverse racism, but the truth is that the recruiters who posted those job ads may well be white themselves (makes you wonder - were there any Jews helping the Nazis run the gas chambers?).

And that's just one of the reasons why I want to leave, but probably the biggest. The country has become like a big mean bully who keeps punching the little kid and then trying to make out that the little kid is running into his fist all the time.

Come in, Home Base

Has it really been more than a year since my last blog post here? That blows me away.

Blowing me away even further is that I could practically repost my last post here, word for word: I'm in another new job, it's been an extremely eventful year, and the elusive 'aha' moment of my life that I can still sense is just around the corner is tantalisingly not only out of reach but also out of sight.

And so I keep going. On December 19 I turn 32, which I guess is what explains all my pent up frustration: I'm getting to that point in my life where the rockets blasting me into outer space are either going to overcome the inertia and get me there, or else I'm likely to blow up on the landing pad.

Melodramatic much? Yup. Everything has its seasons, and this may not be full winter but it's pretty damn chilly for me.

However, even in the midst of the chill, sometimes one can see a scrap of wisdom that grabs you by the ears, shakes you around a bit, and deposits you a little ... maybe not wiser, but at least a bit more determined to see it through.

Not like there's a choice, but hey. Like I always say, if life were easy, everyone would do it.

Here's the scrap of wisdom I saw just tonight, written casually onto the window of a shop in a mall selling sporting goods:

Some marketer probably googled 'motivational quotes'. Well hell, it worked. It didn't get me to go into the store and buy a pair of sneakers, but it got my attention and left me feeling that I WILL be ok after all.

I will, because I am. Because I must. Because I want to.

Because this frustrating, too-long story, isn't over yet. Thanks Rango.

Just stop it

A lot has changed since I wrote my last post here (back in May???). I've changed jobs, changed careers, moved cities ... and just generally had my plate full of all sorts of real and imaginary fears and doubts.

If this time has taught me anything, it's that one doesn't truly appreciate the value of confidence until it feels as if it has disappeared like fog on a summer's day. Try as you might, sometimes it won't come back ... and it's a journey.

But then I saw this video, and I think it's extremely relevant (it's something I've already been telling myself with differing levels of success over the past few months).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ow0lr63y4Mw

The hardest part is just letting go. We know this, we've always known this, and yet it's often so hard just to believe it, right?

So join me in listing whatever negative habits have been kicking around in your brain, and just commit to shouting 'Stop it!' whenever they crop up.

Stop it!

Take five minutes out of your day

This video's core message is so simple, and yet so beautiful, that I just had to pass it on.

Youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7XhrXUoD6U

We all feel this one simple truth: truly look into somebody's eyes and you start to see them on an emotional level, not just through your usual filter of preconceptions. Yet everything in this world is geared towards breaking eye contact: media distractions, fears about mixed messages, insecurity, anger.

So many missed opportunities for authentic connections with the only people sharing this lonely planet with us at this specific moment in time *sighs*