Dizziness, chills and a roaring headache.
Those could be symptoms of love-sickness, appropriate for Valentine’s Day weekend. But they’re not. Instead, they are my body’s reaction to the first dose of the COVID vaccine.
Don’t misconstrue this to mean that I’m sorry I received the shot. I’m not. If anything, I’m grateful that my job as a teacher qualified me for protection. I recognize that many people who want and need the vaccine haven’t yet been able to secure a place in line.
And I’m definitely going back for the second dose in a few weeks. I’ve heard and read that people who actually have had COVID — as I did in the fall — have a stronger reaction to the first dose and a more muted response to the second. For people who have never had COVID, these reactions are reversed — fewer side-effects after the first dose, more after the second.
In reality, what I experienced weren’t side-effects. It was, instead, my body responding to the vaccine in a way anticipated and intended by its makers. My immune system was learning how to deal with the virus. Because it had already done so once before, for real, some of the antibodies still in my system reacted more violently — they didn’t walk away from the bar fight, but instead took it outside for a good thrashing in the alley, so to speak.
The vaccine was an important step toward normal, and one I was glad to take.
***
I must confess, however, to confusion and saltiness, to borrow a word from the younger generation, over how inequitably Ohio’s public schools have dealt with the pandemic. It’s a microcosm of the way the nation’s schools have handled COVID and a reflection of the mismanagement from the federal level on down over the past year.
In some districts, students have not been in face-to-face classrooms since last March. A condition for receiving the vaccine was a promise by these districts to resume in-person learning, at least in a hybrid model, by March 1.
The March deadline has received pushback in some quarters because many teachers won’t have received a second dose of vaccine by then.
Meanwhile, districts in our area have been in session and in person one way or another for most of the school year, with only a few weeks of remote-learning to help stop community spread.
I understand decisions are made by each district, so differing circumstances came into play. Local control is essential.
Still, with the majority of Ohio’s counties designated red (level three, very high exposure and spread) since the Public Health Advisory Alert System went into effect — and with some counties, including Stark, reaching purple (level four, severe exposure and spread) at various points — it’s difficult to imagine the criteria for all-in, hybrid, and all-remote differing so much by district and county.
Surely it isn’t that more conservative, red-leaning (in the political sense) communities are less concerned about students’ and teachers’ health and more willing to tolerate the risk of spread than more progressive, Democratic-leaning communities. Or is it?
Regardless, it is hard for educators, like me, who have been in the trenches throughout this school year, scrubbing desks and gerrymandering seating charts to keep something close to six feet of space between students, to understand why some districts are allowed to delay face-to-face contact not only until vaccines are fully administered, but ventilation issues have been resolved.
And now, right on cue, come concerns about “loss of learning” and the need for remediation — longer school days, summer classes, and the like. Gov. DeWine says our kids are only young once, an observation that is as heartfelt as it is pointless.
Let’s hope wiser heads prevail about extending an already interminable-feeling school year for Ohio’s students.
Yes, kids are behind based on arbitrary, adult-designated standards. But they are also surviving a pandemic, with all the social, emotional, and financial trauma that entails.
Time enough when the dust and virus settle next school year to fret over what they’ve lost educationally. This year, let’s celebrate what they’ve endured and how well they’ve survived.
And let’s open up more conversations about safety and equity, examining why health risks to students and staff were more tolerated in some places than in others.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
Sunday, February 14, 2021
What I don't know about football would fill this column
I hear there’s some big football game this weekend.
No kidding, I had to look up which two teams were playing. I also had to find out which Super Bowl it was. LV, for those who like Roman numerals; 55, for those who don’t.
As part of my extensive research, I learned Tom Brady will be the quarterback for Tampa Bay and why that’s significant — because he’s old for a football player, but young for most everything else.
I also learned this is the first Super Bowl where one team, Tampa Bay again, will play in its home stadium. Oddly enough, they will wear their road uniforms.
I assume the Tom Brady info is well-known enough that nobody will be impressed if I drop his name into a conversation. But the other two factoids might gain me an appreciative glance or two, assuming I talk to anybody who cares about football, which during a pandemic is even less likely than it would be otherwise.
Still, old habits are hard to give up.
Years ago, when I worked in sales, and everything was testosterone and football, I used to bone up on a few gridiron facts every week. I figured I needed to know one talking point on Friday and maybe two on Monday to make me effective.
This was necessary because I recognized the importance of sports in general and football in particular to American life. Tell a customer you don’t like football and they make all sorts of assumptions about your life, patriotism and manhood. From there, you’re only one interception away from losing a sale to the rival team.
It wasn’t that I hated football. I just didn’t watch it or have the slightest interest in it. To this day, I doubt I can name more than four or five professional franchises. If I did, chances are good one or more of them would be a basketball or baseball team.
In the pre-internet era, my screen pass — see, I know some of the lingo — required advance legwork. “Boy, I can’t wait to see the Browns face off against the Steelers at 4 p.m. Sunday on NBC,” I might say, because it was easier to glean such information from the TV listings or a radio commercial than from the sports pages, which were filled with cryptic columns of numbers that had all the meaning of runes carved into a cave wall to me.
Then I would listen attentively to the news on Monday morning, memorizing a few scores and maybe one key observation from some commentator to pass off as my own, usually some gobbledygook about the defensive line looking anemic or a bungled call that should have gone the other way.
I didn’t know what I was saying and I didn’t care. I couldn’t — and can’t — visualize any part of the game. If you showed me a video of dogs cavorting in a park and said it was fourth-and-inches, I wouldn’t have the slightest idea how to contradict you.
To be honest, I doubt I fooled too many customers. After all, what other salesperson rushed through their doors and rattled off yardage stats like Robby the Robot on crack, trying to spit it out before he forgot it?
Maybe they liked me or maybe they actually wanted what I was selling. Or maybe they were playacting like I was, thinking they had to sound erudite about football when talking to the wan and doughy sales guy who sauntered into the business a few times each month wearing a trench coat and ponytail. (My sense of style in the ’90s was even more deficient than my football knowledge.)
It’s sad to think of people faking their way through a conversation because they’re afraid to be more authentic, but I guess that’s ’Merica. Or capitalism. Or both.
These days, I’m more likely to be honest about my football failings, especially to my high-school students, who find my lack of understanding about the game to be funny. And humor is a disarming weapon. When they’re laughing at me, their defenses are down, and I might score a touchdown by getting them to think critically about an essay they’re reading.
Nevertheless, it is kind of cool to think of Tampa Bay wearing their away uniforms at home, even if I don’t know what color those uniforms are and have already forgotten the name of the team they’re playing.
Maybe I’ll tune in for a little while on Sunday, just to find out.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
No kidding, I had to look up which two teams were playing. I also had to find out which Super Bowl it was. LV, for those who like Roman numerals; 55, for those who don’t.
As part of my extensive research, I learned Tom Brady will be the quarterback for Tampa Bay and why that’s significant — because he’s old for a football player, but young for most everything else.
I also learned this is the first Super Bowl where one team, Tampa Bay again, will play in its home stadium. Oddly enough, they will wear their road uniforms.
I assume the Tom Brady info is well-known enough that nobody will be impressed if I drop his name into a conversation. But the other two factoids might gain me an appreciative glance or two, assuming I talk to anybody who cares about football, which during a pandemic is even less likely than it would be otherwise.
Still, old habits are hard to give up.
Years ago, when I worked in sales, and everything was testosterone and football, I used to bone up on a few gridiron facts every week. I figured I needed to know one talking point on Friday and maybe two on Monday to make me effective.
This was necessary because I recognized the importance of sports in general and football in particular to American life. Tell a customer you don’t like football and they make all sorts of assumptions about your life, patriotism and manhood. From there, you’re only one interception away from losing a sale to the rival team.
It wasn’t that I hated football. I just didn’t watch it or have the slightest interest in it. To this day, I doubt I can name more than four or five professional franchises. If I did, chances are good one or more of them would be a basketball or baseball team.
In the pre-internet era, my screen pass — see, I know some of the lingo — required advance legwork. “Boy, I can’t wait to see the Browns face off against the Steelers at 4 p.m. Sunday on NBC,” I might say, because it was easier to glean such information from the TV listings or a radio commercial than from the sports pages, which were filled with cryptic columns of numbers that had all the meaning of runes carved into a cave wall to me.
Then I would listen attentively to the news on Monday morning, memorizing a few scores and maybe one key observation from some commentator to pass off as my own, usually some gobbledygook about the defensive line looking anemic or a bungled call that should have gone the other way.
I didn’t know what I was saying and I didn’t care. I couldn’t — and can’t — visualize any part of the game. If you showed me a video of dogs cavorting in a park and said it was fourth-and-inches, I wouldn’t have the slightest idea how to contradict you.
To be honest, I doubt I fooled too many customers. After all, what other salesperson rushed through their doors and rattled off yardage stats like Robby the Robot on crack, trying to spit it out before he forgot it?
Maybe they liked me or maybe they actually wanted what I was selling. Or maybe they were playacting like I was, thinking they had to sound erudite about football when talking to the wan and doughy sales guy who sauntered into the business a few times each month wearing a trench coat and ponytail. (My sense of style in the ’90s was even more deficient than my football knowledge.)
It’s sad to think of people faking their way through a conversation because they’re afraid to be more authentic, but I guess that’s ’Merica. Or capitalism. Or both.
These days, I’m more likely to be honest about my football failings, especially to my high-school students, who find my lack of understanding about the game to be funny. And humor is a disarming weapon. When they’re laughing at me, their defenses are down, and I might score a touchdown by getting them to think critically about an essay they’re reading.
Nevertheless, it is kind of cool to think of Tampa Bay wearing their away uniforms at home, even if I don’t know what color those uniforms are and have already forgotten the name of the team they’re playing.
Maybe I’ll tune in for a little while on Sunday, just to find out.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
Less art, more directions in online recipes
My wife is a no-nonsense person.
One impractical part of modern life she rails against are recipe websites with flowery descriptions of food, accompanied by long, rambling love letters about how “everybody” the cook knows was wowed by the results.
“This is a venerable family tradition,” a typical entry might read, “and the results are a taste-tempting dish that looks as scrumptious as it tastes.”
Another site might opine about the challenges of making home-cooked meals in a time crunch and on a shoestring budget: “Here is a little something that can be whipped up between taking the dog to the vet and the kids to soccer practice. It’s possible most of these ingredients are in your cupboards already.”
I can tell from two rooms away when my wife is scrolling through these sites because she shouts, “Just tell me how to make it already!” (Expletives have been omitted out of deference to an all-ages audience.)
To erstwhile recipe writers, here are some tips from an intensely practical cook.
First, most souls who go online to look for recipes do so in a low-grade panic. The guests are coming tonight, the house needs cleaned and a menu prepared.
Protracted passages about how a recipe was smuggled by mule and body cavity along enemy lines in some banana republic might make for compelling television or a suspenseful novel. But they only get in the way of finding ingredients and determining if macaroni and cheese from scratch is viable or if swallowing one’s pride and buying a box mix is the way to go.
(For me, the path-of-least-resistance guy when it comes to manual labor — including slaving over a hot stove or oven — the box mix is always preferable, but I digress.)
Secondly, put the ingredients near the top of the page. Of course, a photo of the finished dish deserves star billing, but the ingredients should come immediately after. If you must share the biographies of Aunt Ida and Uncle Sid, who toiled over the exact ratio of salt to dough for almost 18 years in their SoHo flat before birthing a pretzel bundt cake that enthralled heads of state in several European nations, do it at the bottom of the page.
On the topic of ingredients, if anything needs to be set back for later, make a note of this at the top. Few things in the cooking realm are more maddening than learning you’ve added one too many cups of flour at an early stage and created a viscous mass more likely to terrorize Steve McQueen in a 1950s sci-fi movie than serve as your family’s dessert.
This next recommendation might strike some as cynical, but recipe writers should think like inexperienced people who seldom do more than boil water or cut slits in film before putting TV dinners in the microwave. If they were more skilled, they wouldn’t be trolling the dark web for something as simple as a recipe for barbecued chicken.
At least in my experience, if it can go wrong in the kitchen, it will. A few weeks ago, I tried to make brownie waffles. The video accompanying the recipe was deceptively simple: Mix togetheringredients from a box of Betty Crocker brownies, heat the waffle iron, pour and wait.
The results in the video looked wonderful. The brownies slid out of the waffle iron more smoothly than lies from a politician’s lips.
My waffles, not so much.
Maybe I overfilled the waffle iron or didn’t use enough cooking spray. Whatever the reason, the mix sloshed over the top when I closed the lid, oozing into the guts of the device and down the sides before flowing across the cupboard like frothing flood water. When I tried to remove the waffles, everything stuck to everything else.
The cleanup was as much fun as you might imagine. I can still smell brownies whenever I make a traditional waffle, an olfactory ghost in the machine.
Surely the recipe writer could have anticipated such a mess and added a warning, maybe in place of the gushing summary about how the cook’s family gave a standing ovation, the queen knighted the recipe’s creator and the pope canonized her.
In the meantime, my wife and I would be thankful to anybody who can point us toward a site with just the Cliff’s Notes and none of the autobiographical fluff.
Less “author, author!” and more “entree! entree!” please.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
One impractical part of modern life she rails against are recipe websites with flowery descriptions of food, accompanied by long, rambling love letters about how “everybody” the cook knows was wowed by the results.
“This is a venerable family tradition,” a typical entry might read, “and the results are a taste-tempting dish that looks as scrumptious as it tastes.”
Another site might opine about the challenges of making home-cooked meals in a time crunch and on a shoestring budget: “Here is a little something that can be whipped up between taking the dog to the vet and the kids to soccer practice. It’s possible most of these ingredients are in your cupboards already.”
I can tell from two rooms away when my wife is scrolling through these sites because she shouts, “Just tell me how to make it already!” (Expletives have been omitted out of deference to an all-ages audience.)
To erstwhile recipe writers, here are some tips from an intensely practical cook.
First, most souls who go online to look for recipes do so in a low-grade panic. The guests are coming tonight, the house needs cleaned and a menu prepared.
Protracted passages about how a recipe was smuggled by mule and body cavity along enemy lines in some banana republic might make for compelling television or a suspenseful novel. But they only get in the way of finding ingredients and determining if macaroni and cheese from scratch is viable or if swallowing one’s pride and buying a box mix is the way to go.
(For me, the path-of-least-resistance guy when it comes to manual labor — including slaving over a hot stove or oven — the box mix is always preferable, but I digress.)
Secondly, put the ingredients near the top of the page. Of course, a photo of the finished dish deserves star billing, but the ingredients should come immediately after. If you must share the biographies of Aunt Ida and Uncle Sid, who toiled over the exact ratio of salt to dough for almost 18 years in their SoHo flat before birthing a pretzel bundt cake that enthralled heads of state in several European nations, do it at the bottom of the page.
On the topic of ingredients, if anything needs to be set back for later, make a note of this at the top. Few things in the cooking realm are more maddening than learning you’ve added one too many cups of flour at an early stage and created a viscous mass more likely to terrorize Steve McQueen in a 1950s sci-fi movie than serve as your family’s dessert.
This next recommendation might strike some as cynical, but recipe writers should think like inexperienced people who seldom do more than boil water or cut slits in film before putting TV dinners in the microwave. If they were more skilled, they wouldn’t be trolling the dark web for something as simple as a recipe for barbecued chicken.
At least in my experience, if it can go wrong in the kitchen, it will. A few weeks ago, I tried to make brownie waffles. The video accompanying the recipe was deceptively simple: Mix togetheringredients from a box of Betty Crocker brownies, heat the waffle iron, pour and wait.
The results in the video looked wonderful. The brownies slid out of the waffle iron more smoothly than lies from a politician’s lips.
My waffles, not so much.
Maybe I overfilled the waffle iron or didn’t use enough cooking spray. Whatever the reason, the mix sloshed over the top when I closed the lid, oozing into the guts of the device and down the sides before flowing across the cupboard like frothing flood water. When I tried to remove the waffles, everything stuck to everything else.
The cleanup was as much fun as you might imagine. I can still smell brownies whenever I make a traditional waffle, an olfactory ghost in the machine.
Surely the recipe writer could have anticipated such a mess and added a warning, maybe in place of the gushing summary about how the cook’s family gave a standing ovation, the queen knighted the recipe’s creator and the pope canonized her.
In the meantime, my wife and I would be thankful to anybody who can point us toward a site with just the Cliff’s Notes and none of the autobiographical fluff.
Less “author, author!” and more “entree! entree!” please.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
QAnon followers face reality on Inauguration Day
Hard to imagine a small but vocal group of Americans rooting for a declaration of martial law ahead of last Wednesday’s inauguration, but they were, nonetheless.
Some followers of QAnon, the focal point for a series of baseless conspiracy theories positioning Donald Trump as a valiant defender of the American dream against an alleged “deep-state” and a coven of Democratic pedophiles, hoped for President Joe Biden in handcuffs and a second term for the 45th president on Inauguration Day.
All by noon, apparently. (The afternoon and evening would have a lot to live up to.)
NBC News and the New York Times both reported on QAnon followers and their real-time disillusionment. “Wake up. We’ve been had,” wrote one in a QAnon chat group after the inauguration went off without the expected political parousia. “Anyone else feeling beyond let down?” moped another.
It didn’t take long for some to shift their prophecies to an unspecified date in the future. Those nominally in charge of prophesying for the movement have apparently learned their lesson: In the world of conspiracy, being too specific is a liability.
Scoffing at crazy stories of nefarious deeds in the basements of D.C. pizza parlors would be easy if we were talking about just a few lost souls howling in the wilderness. But one central QAnon influencer has more than 100,000 followers, a not-insignificant number of people.
How dedicated these adherents are to the cause is a matter of some speculation, of course. They may well pick and choose among the more outre theories espoused by their leaders, who trade in memes and innuendo, sharing and amplifying the same cyber screeds.
Like grazing through an all-you-can-eat-buffet, some followers may support only QAnon positions about election fraud. Call them the My Pillow faction, after CEO Mike Lindell, photographed leaving the White House last week with a document that referred cryptically — or not-so-cryptically — to the invocation of martial law.
These same followers may not subscribe to the Satanism and cannibalism charges. Or maybe they do. It’s hard to say.
At any rate, their disappointment would be funny if it weren’t so tragic. Anybody who’s ever had their heart broken by unrequited love, been passed over for a big promotion or new job, or realized they were just one number away from winning the lottery knows what QAnon folks are feeling this week.
Like those deluded warriors who stormed the Capitol building, believing they would be seated at the right hand of the Trump father that night and basking in his reflected glory but instead found themselves on no-fly lists and/or in custody, these poor QAnon expats must now return to sepia-toned reality after a brief, haunting glimpse at a Technicolor Oz.
Shades of the Ancient Mariner, they rejoin their lives “sadder and wiser” for the experience.
Unless they don’t and aren’t.
An ongoing concern is whether some of these lost folks will be recruited by groups of white supremacists, who will feed off this disillusionment and radicalize them within an even more dangerous and violent cause.
The best antidote to all this is decisive action by the Biden administration, not to deal specifically with QAnon or white supremacists, but rather to move with alacrity in bringing the pandemic under control, providing further financial relief to those who need it, and working diligently to prove the new president will be a leader for all Americans, not just those who voted for him.
Some money in the bank and a sense of purpose are the best bulwarks against disillusionment. And not just for QAnon followers, but for all of us.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
Some followers of QAnon, the focal point for a series of baseless conspiracy theories positioning Donald Trump as a valiant defender of the American dream against an alleged “deep-state” and a coven of Democratic pedophiles, hoped for President Joe Biden in handcuffs and a second term for the 45th president on Inauguration Day.
All by noon, apparently. (The afternoon and evening would have a lot to live up to.)
NBC News and the New York Times both reported on QAnon followers and their real-time disillusionment. “Wake up. We’ve been had,” wrote one in a QAnon chat group after the inauguration went off without the expected political parousia. “Anyone else feeling beyond let down?” moped another.
It didn’t take long for some to shift their prophecies to an unspecified date in the future. Those nominally in charge of prophesying for the movement have apparently learned their lesson: In the world of conspiracy, being too specific is a liability.
Scoffing at crazy stories of nefarious deeds in the basements of D.C. pizza parlors would be easy if we were talking about just a few lost souls howling in the wilderness. But one central QAnon influencer has more than 100,000 followers, a not-insignificant number of people.
How dedicated these adherents are to the cause is a matter of some speculation, of course. They may well pick and choose among the more outre theories espoused by their leaders, who trade in memes and innuendo, sharing and amplifying the same cyber screeds.
Like grazing through an all-you-can-eat-buffet, some followers may support only QAnon positions about election fraud. Call them the My Pillow faction, after CEO Mike Lindell, photographed leaving the White House last week with a document that referred cryptically — or not-so-cryptically — to the invocation of martial law.
These same followers may not subscribe to the Satanism and cannibalism charges. Or maybe they do. It’s hard to say.
At any rate, their disappointment would be funny if it weren’t so tragic. Anybody who’s ever had their heart broken by unrequited love, been passed over for a big promotion or new job, or realized they were just one number away from winning the lottery knows what QAnon folks are feeling this week.
Like those deluded warriors who stormed the Capitol building, believing they would be seated at the right hand of the Trump father that night and basking in his reflected glory but instead found themselves on no-fly lists and/or in custody, these poor QAnon expats must now return to sepia-toned reality after a brief, haunting glimpse at a Technicolor Oz.
Shades of the Ancient Mariner, they rejoin their lives “sadder and wiser” for the experience.
Unless they don’t and aren’t.
An ongoing concern is whether some of these lost folks will be recruited by groups of white supremacists, who will feed off this disillusionment and radicalize them within an even more dangerous and violent cause.
The best antidote to all this is decisive action by the Biden administration, not to deal specifically with QAnon or white supremacists, but rather to move with alacrity in bringing the pandemic under control, providing further financial relief to those who need it, and working diligently to prove the new president will be a leader for all Americans, not just those who voted for him.
Some money in the bank and a sense of purpose are the best bulwarks against disillusionment. And not just for QAnon followers, but for all of us.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
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