Today is Day 3 of the self-quarantine. Actual food that can be cooked into better dishes finally came. Boxes of frozen beef and frozen chicken wings arrived. Eggs also came. So it was time to eat something a little less gruel-ish. Funny that gruel is sometimes used to describe severe punishments.
Breakfast: One can of canned tomatoes, 4 eggs, six slices of leftover chorizo and some edam cheese both left in the refrigerator for a month already. Mixed them together. Looked horrible but still tasty.
Lunch and dinner: Cooked a bigger meal called chicken adobo. This dish is a traditional Filipino dish that uses vinegar for stewing. In China, frozen chicken wings are sold in a peculiar way. There are three parts of the wing: the extremity, the middle, and the root. The extremity is the least meaty part but the most enjoyable part if deep-fried. The middle has the “ulna and radius” look. The root is the one attached to the breast part of the chicken. I used a kilogram of the chicken wing roots for the dish. As I have a white vinegar shortage, I used the a mixture of vinegars: white and balsamic. I also needed an onion (but our onions have not arrived; strictly speaking onions are not needed in adobo) so I used the remaining onion powder lying around. For the “rice”, we used the leftover congee from Day 2.
The day was spent catching up with messages left by friends and students from long ago asking about the China situation. It is always good to catch up. I think this is useful to do in these times. Not to sound negative but say what needs to be said while you can.
After that, I was prepping the setup of software (R, R Markdown, and MikTeX) for the course that I am teaching. It was a mix of screenshots and handwritten notes and instructions on a 1280x720 slide. I uploaded it to Slack and I also installed a LaTeX for Slack plugin (which is quite functional and seems to be privacy-respecting at least based on a reading of their privacy policy). I used xournal and a Wacom tablet for this purpose. I did not use video here because one of our students lives in a country where internet access is restricted to almost nonexistent. So, I let the students do the setup on their time. The important thing is that they already know that there are three deliverables by the end of the week or so. I think the deadlines in this situation have to be a bit softer because, at the end of the day, students are responsible for their own learning. We have to trust them to do what needs to be done. If they don't do it on time, then they have revealed their preferences. To me, this revelation is a good thing for everyone concerned. I think some of my colleagues might think I am to laissez-faire.
Next, I had a 1.5 hour mobile telephone call (finally used up the 100 free minutes I have on my shitty cellphone plan) with our program secretary. We covered aspects of the upcoming work for the semester that has not officially started. Things are in limbo with respect to planning: when should students come back for the semester? I am a hopeful pessimist and I plan for worst case scenarios (or some would call them worst case Ontarios). I believe that we should plan as if the semester would be skipped totally even if the semester could eventually start somewhere in the middle of the period. It feels like that as trained economists, we should be drawing up contingencies. Tomorrow, I am going to spend time working out some contingencies so that there would be some anchors.
Of course, I can feel the futility and the absurdity of the situation at the ground level. Should life continue as usual? I can make this even more negative. Should we continue the charade, knowing that things could get worse? Being positive or “psychologically balanced” are not the issues I believe. At the end of the day, we need distractions even if the distraction is actual rest and relaxation. A friend of mine used to say, “Idle minds are the devil's playground.” The statement might not be hers but it made an impression on me.
Part of the university effort to provide some distraction is to release online resources to do some learning, or to study, or as the Chinese call it: “学习” (xue2 xi3 or xue2 xi2?). To me, the term is a curious phrase in these times. I prefer “读书”， literally “reading book”, which also means studying. I would argue that it does not matter if the book is physical or involves mixed media. I wonder why there is a change from “读书” to “学习”. So, recently, the university library solicited a list of reading materials from faculty members to provide some learning opportunities for students. I sent my pick but have yet to find my choice in the list (two lists are already out and perhaps my choice was a little bit too on the nose). But a learning opportunity that is underrated is watching old TV series. In these times, I recommend MASH from the 70s. I think the show has an interpretation of what is happening at the ground level.
No day of self-quarantine is complete without our two temperature readings. There is a redundancy again because the “burning cloud app” I had to fill up also requires sending temperature information. Too much reporting that somehow feels uninformative give sampling variation and measurement errors. The latter is definitely not of the classical sort. But I am relieved that I do not have to be subjected to the “thermometer gun”. The thermometer that the guards and ground-level staff are using is handheld (much like a Star Trek phaser). They target the thermometer near your forehead (unclear how near it should be) and a light is emitted to do the reading with an accompanying sound. Somehow I feel anxious because the only thing missing is a bullet. There is also variation in the manner in which the thermometer is used. Could we actually target the wrist?
That's it. I leave you with some words from Ecclesiastes 3 (NIV). In particular, 3:1 and 3:5 —
3:1 There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens:
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3:5 a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them, a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing, ...