01. I’m currently at a 3 and 4 (note: I reckon 7 and 8 are around the wrong way – surely taking the time to put your drink in a pineapple comes before the glass?)
02. England’s Arts Council has launched a £160M relief fund and Germany has rolled out a €50 billion aid package for artists and cultural businesses – it seems appropriate given that books, television, and live-streamed performances are keeping the majority of people entertained/ sane during this crisis. So far, the Australian response has been shameful…
03. If you’ve read Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe (and if you haven’t, you need to), you’ll know that a play, Cyprus Avenue, about a man obsessed with Gerry Adams, makes an appearance. You can watch it for free for one month.
04. I’m not using this time to make my kids do school work (sorry if this upsets teachers). I’ve hardly been able to do any reading myself – I simply can’t concentrate for long. So, if I’m feeling anxious, I’m sure my kids are too. This – Why You Should Ignore All That Coronavirus-Inspired Productivity.
05. COVID-19 grief-lit- That Discomfort You’re Feeling is Grief.
06. Why Gen-X are the masters of social distancing. It’s all true.
07. Economies of scale.
08. Starting a puzzle club at the beginning of the year seems almost prophetic now…
09. Funniest COVID-19 tweet to date? This:
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Cyprus Avenue is amazin but very, very dark. I loved it. Can I be all stages of Kath within the one day?!
I’m a (retired) teacher and I’m not upset at all.
Of course it might be different if there are Year 12 students on deck, but if they need to be made to do schoolwork, well, they’re going to fail anyway, if not this year, then in their first year at uni.
My parents had a relaxed attitude to school. We travelled a lot, and sometimes, well, school just wasn’t all that convenient. So we didn’t go. Our home was painlessly educational anyway: we all read books and talked about them incessantly. We loved writing so we wrote newspapers, Last Wills and Testaments, plays to inflict on our parents, letters to far away relations that we didn’t really know, and long impassioned entries in our diaries. We listened to beautiful music, and we played games like Monopoly and Scrabble and cards and jigsaws. And we fooled around in the garden.
What we did not do was watch TV because we didn’t have it till we came to Australia and even then we were only allowed to watch it before dinner and only after we had done our chores and taken the dog for a walk.
It won’t hurt your kids to do what we did for six months…
I loved that tweet, too. Along with several others I know, I seem to have responded to covid-19 by baking. This week my partner asked me not to make a cake – I’m surprised the reverberations of that request didn’t reach you in Auistralia given his passion for the sweet stuff,particularly the homem made variety.
Never been so proud to be a Gen Xer 😉
As you know, I’m with you on the school work. The extent of which it’s even getting mentioned at present is just telling each boy to accept the email invites into their online classrooms for next term. The. End. Next term is a new term and we’ll make a plan then.
Things change so frequently at present, everything from how to shop to how many people you can be with. Very much trying to master my inner ‘go with the flow’ at present.
Definitely number 3 for me at the moment, but I was number 7 two days ago…number 2? No. Bypassed that one!
I’m currently ricocheting around between 2,3, and 7,9…
That Gen X article – I feel so seen 😀
Mostly I am pretty good during this experience but I must confess that by the end of the workday my mind is scrambled so I am at a 9.
Love this!!!! I’m almost at the COMATOSE stage. I do not drink so I can’t blame it on alcohol.