"We don’t know if it is going to ever be over... I will be masked up for many, many years... There are too many unknowns."

"I would give anything just to hold someone’s hand. People need other people. You need human contact to survive in this world.... [My daughter] said, ‘Mom, I already had COVID, so I don’t think I need the shot.’ I said, ‘Yes you do. You could get COVID twice. I know people who have gotten it twice... She’s just — I mean, you can’t really do so much. I said, ‘You’re not gonna see me until you’re fully vaccinated. Because you’re not gonna come up here and kill me.'... I get winded very quickly because of my heart issue, and it’s very difficult for me to breathe with a mask.... But I will not take it off.... The only time I will ever take the mask off is when I hear there are zero deaths, and it stays that way for a couple months, and there’s no new infections.... But I highly doubt that is going to happen anytime soon."

 Said Robin Argenti, a 57-year-old woman, quoted in "The Forever Maskers" (NY Magazine). 

FROM THE COMMENTS: Rosebud writes: 

This woman sounds very much like someone I know and love, and probably like someone that any reader knows and loves. Somehow she has moved from "afraid to die" to "afraid to live". She may be alive, existing, but not living in any sense other than living in fear, in my opinion. It's too bad she has done her own personal algebra and determined that living in fear is greater than just living, but she's welcome to her conclusion. Living in fear leads to dying just as certainly as living does, and for most of us living is greater than living in fear. We need to be welcome to our conclusions as well.

AND: Sean writes: 

"I would give anything just to hold someone’s hand." This is the quote that struck me. Because the words are entirely contrary to the actions of the speaker.

I'm also 57 and live in Upstate NY. I know a few people like Robin Argenti. People who have gone over the edge due to Covid. She's not willing to give "anything" just to hold someone's hand. She's obviously not willing to take the slightest risk and she's not alone.

Although the article lacks this detail, I assume if she's been making demands of family members to get a vaccine before she's willing to meet them in person that she's been vaccinated herself. So, you have a fully vaccinated person unwilling to meet someone who has already had Covid, even masked. The danger from such actions is exceedingly small.

I sense from the article the people quoted are fearful, totally risk averse, and also unable to assess risk objectively. The ordinary activities of life carry risk. There are fatal accidents everyday, both out in public and at home. There's never been any certainty, for anyone. Yet she's going to wait for Covid deaths to be zero for months on end before going out unmasked?

Feeling terrified and helpless is no way to go through life. I blame the media because fear sells and they've been selling it hand over fist for going on a year now. Fearful people are compliant. Now that Trump is gone and Covid is waning, they'll be looking for a new boogeyman. Climate Change perhaps.

"Languishing is a sense of stagnation and emptiness. It feels as if you’re muddling through your days, looking at your life through a foggy windshield."

"And it might be the dominant emotion of 2021.... In the early, uncertain days of the pandemic, it’s likely that your brain’s threat detection system — called the amygdala — was on high alert for fight-or-flight. As you learned that masks helped protect us — but package-scrubbing didn’t — you probably developed routines that eased your sense of dread. But the pandemic has dragged on, and the acute state of anguish has given way to a chronic condition of languish. In psychology, we think about mental health on a spectrum from depression to flourishing.... [W]hen you’re languishing, you might not notice the dulling of delight or the dwindling of drive. You don’t catch yourself slipping slowly into solitude; you’re indifferent to your indifference.... When you add languishing to your lexicon, you start to notice it all around you...."

From "There’s a Name for the Blah You’re Feeling: It’s Called Languishing/The neglected middle child of mental health can dull your motivation and focus — and it may be the dominant emotion of 2021" by Adam Grant (NYT). 

According to the article, the antidote to languishing may be flow. But there's not much in the article about how to achieve flow, so I'm not going to make this post about flow. This post is just about noticing languishing. It's one thing to understand the concept of flow, another to get into that state. I think it requires doing things that you have some skill at and where you have good feedback that you're are operating with skill, and neither bored nor overly challenged. If you're sitting home enduring lockdown, do you have something to do that could work that way?

(To comment, you can email me here.)

"Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said Thursday people will 'likely' need a booster dose of a Covid-19 vaccine within 12 months of getting fully vaccinated."

"He also said it’s possible people will need to get vaccinated against the virus annually," CNBC reports.

Raging innumeracy of the Covid kind.

So if the small pox vaccine is 80% effective and 100 people go to the store, 20 people will leave with small pox. Got it.

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) April 11, 2021

FROM THE EMAIL: Hari succinctly highlights the problem:

For every 100 people who fly, 100 could die in an airplane crash.

The word "could" carries all the weight.

Justice Kagan makes a watermelon wisecrack: "[T]he law does not require that the State equally treat apples and watermelons."

That's from the dissenting opinion in Tandon v. Newsom, which came out just last night. 

I'm amazed to see the gratuitous insertion of watermelon in a Supreme Court case. It's a play on the old "apples and oranges" expression generally used to assert that things are too different to compare to each other. To switch from oranges to watermelons is to say these 2 things are ludicrously different, because watermelons are even more different from apples than oranges are. They're so large. 

It's not hard to get the idea, just as it was not hard to get what Joe Biden meant when he said "This makes Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle."Eagles are bigger than crows. Watermelons are bigger than oranges. But Biden was talking about something he wanted to portray as racial — the new Georgia voting law. The Tandon v. Newsom case is not about race but religion: Did California discriminate against religion when it banned religious gatherings in private homes? The question depends on how California treated other gatherings. Did it treat like gatherings alike?

From the majority opinion:

This is the fifth time the Court has summarily rejected the Ninth Circuit’s analysis of California’s COVID restrictions on religious exercise. It is unsurprising that such litigants are entitled to relief. California’s Blueprint System contains myriad exceptions and accommodations for comparable activities, thus requiring the application of strict scrutiny. And historically, strict scrutiny requires the State to further 'interests of the highest order' by means 'narrowly tailored in pursuit of those interests.' That standard 'is not watered down'; it 'really means what it says.'

Kagan's point is that all those exceptions were for activities that were not comparable — they were the apples in comparison to which the private-home religious meetings were watermelons. In that view, no strict scrutiny is needed, because there's no discrimination in seeing apples as apples and watermelons as watermelons. 

Is the fruit analogy helpful? Is the watermelon joke worthwhile? If race were anywhere in the picture, the mention of watermelon would provoke outrage. But the sensitive topic here is religion, not race. Nevertheless, I would have thought that racial sensitivity is so great that you'd never mention watermelon in a court case unless there were actual watermelons in the facts of the case.

Here's the NYT article by Adam Liptak, "By 5-4 Vote, Supreme Court Lifts Restrictions on Prayer Meetings in Homes/The court shifted direction in cases on Covid-related limits on religious services after Justice Amy Coney Barrett replaced Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg." 

The Supreme Court late Friday night lifted California’s restrictions on religious gatherings in private homes, saying they could not be enforced to bar prayer meetings, Bible study classes and the like.... The majority said California had violated the Constitution by disfavoring prayer meetings. 

“California treats some comparable secular activities more favorably than at-home religious exercise, permitting hair salons, retail stores, personal care services, movie theaters, private suites at sporting events and concerts and indoor restaurants,” the opinion said....

In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor, said the majority had compared in-home prayer meetings with the wrong kinds of activities.

***

There is no comments section anymore, but you can email me here. Unless you say otherwise, I will presume you'd enjoy an update to this post with a quote from your email.

I've been monitoring men in shorts for a long time, and I have my standards... my evolving standards...

So what am I to make of this?

Ron Paul spotted wearing a pair of Daisy Dukes for interview https://t.co/r8GO4XbFEP pic.twitter.com/IghHvrOGp2

— New York Post (@nypost) April 7, 2021

At the link:

The 85-year-old Libertarian inadvertently gave the glimpse of his liberally cut short shorts in the last seconds of a video chat on political issues with host Doug Casey. The men had finished discussing the future of personal liberty, when Paul rolled his chair back from the camera and showed just how much liberty his tiny jeans allowed his slightly tanned, thighs to enjoy.

First, I'm more bothered by the comma after "slightly tanned" — "his slightly tanned, thighs." My guess is they had another adjective after "tanned" but they took it out for some reason. Maybe it was "slightly tanned, skinny thighs" or "slightly tanned, hairy thighs" and they backed off, ashamed of their body shaming. "Tanned" was okay, but the rest — I imagine they decided — was the kind of judgementalism that could get them in trouble. But the telltale comma remained.

Second, I'm going to give Ron Paul a pass. It's a totality of the circumstances analysis: 1. He's 85, so I give him extra room to find whatever ways he can to greater physical ease. 2. He's at home, not out in the world displaying disregard for the aesthetic experience of others. 3. He didn't intend his lower body to be seen, but he refrained from outright nakedness or mere underpants. 4. He's a libertarian, so his theme is freedom, and the shorts express his idea of freedom (though if I were looking for freedom in a pair of shorts I'd pick something more pliable and flowy). 5. He amused us.

***

There is no comments section anymore, but you can email me here. Unless you say otherwise, I will presume you'd enjoy an update to this post with a quote from your email and I'll identify you with your first name only. 

IN THE EMAIL: A reader named Julie writes: 

Best men in shorts post to date! Not only has it been a funny little joy for us all to have you share this shorts obsession with us for years, but also because we COVID weary souls in our home offices totally relate with Ron Paul. I spend hours every week in video conferencing, often with executives I have never met before. Whenever the mood at the start of a video call is bright enough and I am looking for an ice breaker, I make a joke of the fact that my professional on-camera blouse does not match my fraying sweatpants off camera. EVERY SINGLE TIME the professional on the other side reveals a similar predicament and we have a good laugh. It's become a new form of rapid trust building.