Yesterday was Day 8 of the self-quarantine.
I sleep comfortably but erratically during the self-quarantine days. It probably is a confluence of many factors: our recent return, the body's adjustment to the new normal, the high-variance weather which could be sunny, rainy, or dreary. The coolness of the weather and the lighting somehow is a signal to the body to hibernate. One could argue that the 14-day self-quarantine is really externally imposed hibernation.
I am not sure whether people subject to this self-quarantine should actually work. I think we should just let this people have the vacation they really deserve. It is not the holidays when you meet family members you really could not give a shit about (along with all the baggage, both physical and mental). It is also not a vacation with friends. I think it is a welcome reprieve from the bullshit everywhere. Of course, we are not really immune to the bullshit from everywhere now that we have the internet (but at least we can silence it). I was hoping that people could be enlightened enough to think of this self-quarantine period as a way to catch up with the parts of life left behind (a lot of movies curiously are built around this theme). From an “economic” point of view, I like to metaphorically think of the staggered self-quarantine process as Calvo “pricing” in action. And I will leave it at that.
After 3-4 days, the marinade for the böfflamott was complete and I cooked this Bavarian dish for the first time. Funnily enough, I have never tasted it before. I encountered this dish a while back in Germany, tried to order it, but was not available during that day. I have not been able to catch it since. I really do not know what to expect but I followed a Bavarian cookbook for this. So at this stage, I was supposed to simmer the marinade with the beef cubes, then make the sauce/roux, and then push sauce through a sieve. After that the beef cubes are combined with the filtered sauce. I expected it to be sour (which is the common theme of most our cooked meals these days) but was missing the sweetness and mellowness of the onion, carrot, and celery root. But not so bad overall. Though non-standard, I plan to have this dish with some leftover pasta and perhaps some of the potatoes which will arrive in about two days. Finally, 10 kg of potatoes! Time to make those fries and potato pancakes. Or as Malory Archer would put it to her Irish super asking for a better Christmas gift (Malory gave a potato), “So, once again you’re left with the classic Irishman’s dilemma: Do I eat the potato now, or do I let it ferment so I can drink it later?”
Yesterday was quite eventful. On top of the böfflamott dish, I read the classic paper by Nelson and Plosser (1982) so that I can teach it for the course I am giving in the next few days. It was an informative paper and not very complicated and has some statistical references that I am glad to have stumbled upon. I also spent time scouring for alternatives to Chinese video streaming/video creation/video lecture deployment apps. My argument is that once things become operational, the whole system will fucking lag and online classes will even become more of an annoyance and an unwelcome distraction. So I spent time scouring apps that work within China and read privacy policies. These policies are difficult to read and I had to balance privacy concerns with expediency. I was able to finally find one that works relatively well with GDPR protections to a certain extent. I tried the session with my TA and it was working smoothly. By Tuesday, we will be deploying it with more people across different time zones. We will see how it would go.
Yet another eventful aspect of yesterday is the sudden increase in activity in WeChat groups due to the kinks in the online delivery of courses. I am somewhat drawn to the increase in activity. It is like watching a trainwreck or clusterfuck and at the end you are unsure if you have gained anything.
That's it for now. I leave you with some very good lines from the recently concluded BoJack Horseman (which everyone should watch, if ever you are in a quarantine). One of the characters, Princess Carolyn, is the embodiment of mentorship and leadership that is not idealized. She is flawed, broken, but has strong belief in others and is actually there. She gives a timely piece of dialogue in the finale:
“People have short memories. It’s the best and worst thing about people.”