For months, I couldn’t stop worrying about what the fall was going to look like at Camosun. Were there even going to be enough students enrolled at the college to keep the lights on? How was productiveness and material absorption going to be affected with all these Zoom calls?
While the answer to the latter may be worse than I feared some days (Zoom burnout is real), in general, this term has been going pretty smoothly.
Without humour, I’d have shrivelled up and died long ago. In all honesty, we may not recognize just how bad we miss being at work or school until we’re there; I certainly have, if nothing else, missed the social interaction. I can only talk to my cats and the lampposts for so long; it’s nice to be able to make chocolate chip pancakes in the middle of a lecture (background noise for scrolling Instagram, anyone?), but the cold truth of online classes feels like a larger metaphor for almost everything that’s going on in the world. There is some good to our current situation (being forced to slow down has its benefits) but there is also so much bad.
Spin around in your chair 50 times, then try to type. It doesn’t really work. That’s sort of what we’re all going through: the colossal scope of reality is a bit nauseating, because we all have our heads to the grindstone. We’re just buckling down, trying to keep more or less to ourselves, get through to the other side, and just get the work done. Why? Because most of us intuitively know that complaining about it will only make us seem like that person, and we don’t want to be that person.
We’re dizzy, a little lonely, and sure not feeling whole. I think I can safely say that we’re a little pissed off as well, and not quite sure what or who that malice is directed at: COVID-19, the government, the fates, our partners, ourselves.
Welcome to the groove. If you’re too dizzy, take five, then get back down to it. Go deep, devour distraction and the constant half-there-half-gone feeling of cognitive dissonance.
It’s life.