Pandemic Progress Report 2023

It's been a while since some of my yearning posts from way back in 2020 about all the things that I was looking forward to doing again when the pandemic ended. For various reasons I've continued to be pretty careful about masking in public and avoiding places where I couldn't easily wear masks, but also, in the last year or so I've started venturing out to do some of the things I used to do before the pandemic.

Seeing friends in person was one of the first things I started doing again, but always with some strictures about avoiding eating at restaurants where possible. It took me some time to get comfortable with even eating outdoors, but as time has passed, and as the case numbers here and in Italy have gone down, I've considered the relative risks and rewards of eating at restaurants. For instance, when I met someone for a date last December, I agreed that it was better to sit inside (without masks), because it was too cold and rainy and miserable to sit outside.

Now I've started eating indoors at restaurants more often, including a few times this week and even today. I still think it's worth being careful in crowded places, and I'm also still trying to be careful of where I eat (I'd rather get Covid or some other airborne virus from a good restaurant than from Taco Bell or KFC), but it's nice to be eating food on-site again. It helps that it's still warm when it gets to my table, rather than cold from being picked up by me or by a delivery person.

Part of what changed my mind about eating at restaurants was flying to Italy twice since last summer. Going to Europe was a big thing I missed from my pre-pandemic life, and I'm happy to have managed it, even if it's always been to go to my family house rather than on my solo adventures from years past. When I went last summer I also decided that I'd be willing to eat at certain, particularly good restaurants in Rome and Turin, because they were special occasion-type places. When I went this past February, I found myself eating at restaurants and cafes even more often, and though I picked up a pretty bad cold I didn't get Covid.

I've been to pubs, but generally sitting outside. I still think that the interier of a crowded bar isn't necessarily the best place, but at least until cases spike again in the fall and winter, it'll probably be more okay than the last couple of years.

One thing I haven't done since before the pandemic, but that I could do just fine, is watch movies at the theater. I'm not particularly bothered by wearing a mask for a few hours, so going to see the latest Marvel flick or whatever doesn't feel like a burden. But... well, everything seems to come to streaming sooner or later, and even if my TV screen isn't big, it's just more convenient to watch things at home (and with access to my own bathroom). That said, while I've had to decline the last couple invitations to go to the movies, it's been because of scheduling issues, not because I was afraid of catching Covid.

Attending work conferences wasn't on that list from three years ago, but I've changed that as of this past week. It was a big tech show, with a huge and crowded expo floor, but I just wore my mask whenever I was walking around or talking in close proximity to people. It was nice to get back into that element and being able to strike up conversations. I should note that I was prepared to do it last year, but the show I wanted to go to had moved from Santa Clara to Austin, and my company wasn't prepared to pay for me to gad about out of state, so that fell by the wayside (also, I was still reluctant to go to states that were less Covid-conscious).

The thing I'm still not doing is working out at the gym. I'm continuing to look at how cases are developing, and am actually hoping to get back to the gym, but that's the dirtiest place of all the spots I used to frequent, with loads of exhalations and droplets splashing all over the place, to say nothing of the sweat and grossness. I also don't miss a lot of the people who went to my gym, like those who reracked weights badly or otherwise violated gym etiquette. The pandemic has made me more conscious of how nice it'd be to have my own place with room for a home gym, so I don't have to share workout space with jerks.

Overall, I'm glad to be getting back to something close to normal, even if it's a bit slower than most other people I know. I don't claim any specialist knowledge about Covid, virology or epidemiology in general, but I haven't bought into the narrative that Covid is over or that it's fine now that we've all been vaccinated. Rather, everything I've read about catching it multiple times makes me think that I'd prefer to avoid catching it even once, for as long as I can.

Still, life is out there, outside my house, and it feels good to be going out and doing a bit more stuff now. Hopefully soon it really will all be back to normal.

Picard Season 3 Sticks the Landing

Just a quick one this week to praise/review the third and final season of Picard. There may be spoilers after the jump, so proceed accordingly.

Reading Challenges Take the Fun Out of Reading (For Me, Anyway)

I've talked on this blog about how much I read each year (50 books per year, on average), and how much I'm reading concurrently (too much). That latter part comes out of a point in time last year when I borrowed a bunch of books from a friend and read a little bit of each every night for a couple of months, until I'd finished them all.

That unlocked some weird gamification gene in me, and I kept doing that for the rest of the year, but with a lot more books, and with books that were longer. I'd select 12 books, and plan on finishing four each month, the idea being that I'd read a little bit of each and focus the rest of my energy on the last, until I'd gone through all of them. And then the following quarter I'd choose 12 more and start over again.

Well, things didn't quite turn out that way. I still have a few books on the go since that period, which I've been picking away at. Others have been added to the selection and have been finished with more priority, for a number of reasons, but mostly because they were more interesting than the rest of the pile. And one of them went into the donation pile unfinished, because I realized, 200+ pages in, that it wasn't that enjoyable and I wasn't retaining anything.

This change in attitude has partly been influenced by a few things I've read or seen recently. For one thing, a lot of women say on their dating profiles that they want to read more, or to read a specific number of books per year. On the other hand, I read an piece in the New York Times a few weeks ago by a writer whose grandfather kept a house filled with books and read obsessively, a trait that he'd passed on to the rest of the family. This writer, by contrast, had decided to let go of this neurosis and just read for fun.

That appealed to me, so I decided to do the same, although I'm still stuck with the big TBR pile. But then I read another piece, this one in the Guardian (could've been CNET), by a writer who wanted to read more, and suggested doing reading challenges, including keeping a reading journal and setting reading targets on Goodreads or other sites.

All of this is kind of a long preamble to saying, I want to stop doing reading challenges, at least for the time being. My experiences for the last year or so have shown me a number of things about my reading habits, but the big takeaway is that if I'm reading for pleasure, I should just read in a relaxed way. Trying to read a bunch of books concurrently, one or two pages at a time, has the same effect as forcing myself to read a set number of pages each day to reach a self-imposed deadline. The effect being that I don't take anything in from the books.

My page-count target comes from the days when I'd borrow books from the library in London. I usually had four weeks to finish them, so I'd divide the page count by four, to get my weekly target, and then divide that by seven, to get my daily target. I'd then aim to read a little more than that target each day, so the amount I had to read would be less than the day before. And I'd try and hit specific goals by the end of each week to ensure that the following week would require fewer pages to read as well.

When I moved here and stopped going to the library so much, I kept dividing books by 28, so that I could finish them within a given month. I also, for reasons I don't really understand, did something similar with my e-books: I'd aim to read 5% of them each day, so I could finish an e-book every 20 days.

These numbers have started to feel more and more irrelevant as I've gone on. On Kindle, I've scaled my reading goal back to targeting just one e-book per month (the app keeps track of this, and I've also got a 240-week reading streak going, which I should acknowledge is pointless but I'm actually kinda proud of). With my physical books, I'm still dipping into them bit-by-bit each day, but I'm trying to resist the temptation to add more as I finish books, and eventually get to the point where I'm actively reading just one physical book and one e-book at a time.

Like the writer in that NYT piece, I've found that obsessively setting weekly and daily page targets has sucked the fun out of writing. I compare it with the period in 2018 when I was in London and working in an office. I read loads of e-books on the train to work, and a physical book in the lunch area on my hour off at noon. I had no distractions (ie I couldn't watch YouTube or Netflix in that office), so I just read and powered through an epic amount of books - and it all felt organic, because I was paying attention to the words rather than the page numbers.

This is what it comes down to: when I have a daily target to hit each night before bed, then I'm focusing more on getting to my goal than on the narrative, so I end up not taking anything in. I do myself a further disservice by trying to power through to my target page even when I'm too tired to really take in what I'm reading.

To be clear, all of what I've just said is about my own reading habits. I'm probably an uncommonly voracious reader, especially considering that most Americans read just one book per year, whereas I average close to one per week. My life circumstances are such that I can easily fit in an hour of reading on my lunch break, and another hour at bedtime. That Guardian article about reading challenges was written from the perspective of a mother trying to recapture some reading time for herself, which is completely fair enough.

But I do also think that some people who try to fit more reading into their lives are doing so because they think they "should", rather than because they want to. I appreciate that there are a lot of other distractions, like TV and video games, and I'm gradually coming to appreciate the idea that you should just do those things if they're more enjoyable. Nobody's grading us on how much we read or the quality thereof, so we should just be comfortable reading as much or as little as we like - even if that's one book per month.

I'm still probably going to be more interested in hanging out with or dating people who actually like books. But that's not set in stone: as long as they don't mind that I like to read, then we should be fine.