Grigory Lukin.com

Saturday night. I’ve made peace with the fact that we all live in a satirical article (likely written by The Onion staff binge-drinking after the 2016 election), and yet the news never fails to surprise me.

The big rally scheduled in Tulsa ended up half-empty, and the overflow stage didn’t get any action. The interesting part is that six of Trump’s staffers helping out with the event tested positive for covid. Fortunately, since he claims the virus isn’t a big deal, he should be safe.

Meanwhile, Florida is setting a new daily record with every passing day… One of my sisters lives in New York and has a condo in Miami. She didn’t get out of New York in time when the pandemic spread there, but her family has been lucky so far. It really is a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” thing in her case, given the virus’s spread in those two cities.

An old friend of mine reconnected with me recently. He moved back to Reno after having his own share of adventures… Among other things, we talked about DuoLingo: he sent me a friend request through the app, and I got blown away when I saw his progress. He hasn’t skipped a day in two years, and covered an impressive amount of Spanish and – for some reason – German, while also flirting with Norwegian. It’s a fun app, and now I have a mild competitive/envious urge. Did you now that the French word for “yuck” is “beurk”? Heh.

Xgf’s neighbours were having a barbecue earlier today, so we moved our weekly hanging out day to tomorrow. (My landlords also brought four friends and relatives to celebrate the fact that they didn’t catch any fish earlier today.) There wasn’t a lot of social distancing going on at either gathering, so we each stayed inside. Here’s hoping a) nobody was sick, b) nobody will cough at us tomorrow as we go hiking, and c) there are no more shootings next to xgf’s house. Modern life is weird, eh.

Thursday night. The downright depressing covid news keeps on coming, but the sheer mass of it has made banality out of what would’ve been horrifying before the pandemic.

Media outlets no longer post how many people die each day, though there sporadic reports of some states, some cities getting more cases, more deaths. A few days ago, even the bare-minimum official death count managed to exceed the US death toll in World War I, but that was also mostly ignored. What’s really strange is that masks themselves have become a political issue. The fundamental scientific knowledge of airborne disease is being dismissed as some liberal conspiracy, a sign of cowardice, and so on.

The divide is particularly interesting on the state level. California governor Gavin Newsom has issued an order calling for mandatory mask use. There are, of course, lots of exceptions – if you’re walking, running, dining 6′ away from the staff, etc. (I would love to see servers toss plates and coffee at their shitty patrons.) On the other hand, Nebraska governor Pete Ricketts said that counties that require masks in government offices will not receive federal covid relief funds.

If this were a work of fiction, no self-respecting editor would allow such blatant partisan prose to be published. It’s too much on the nose, too ridiculous to be believed in. I heard that some of the contemporary accounts from the last days of the Roman Empire are so bizarre and outlandish that historians think they were just exaggerations – fables designed to make a point about the political decay. Some think that all of those stories, weird though they may be, are true. I think our own age will be remembered the same way: just far too many random happenstances, all unbelievable and stranger than fiction. Heh… There’s a chance that if someone reads this blog far enough in the future, they’ll think this was an exercise in creative writing, embellished here and there with my own imagination. It’ll definitely be easier to accept than the fact the world has turned into one giant satire, if only for a while.

If Kurt Vonnegut were still around, he’d have a blast.

It’s Wednesday evening, and I’m a bit of a prophet. There was a rather big reorg at work a few weeks ago. I’d immediately predicted that there would be many departures on our team. The newbies I spoke with were aghast, but they had to admit I was right when the fourth person announced their departure earlier today. (Well, technically, the third and the fourth announced that simultaneously.) Now, in addition to being the oldest Amazon employee in Canada (I joined before Canada was even launched), I’m also the fourth-most-senior person in Canada Finance. Heh… That’s somewhat amazing, considering I transferred in only 14 months ago. This world – it’s very strange. Of course, every crisis is an opportunity, and being at the top (even if it’s for all the wrong reasons) will definitely have its benefits.

The lawyer ferrets at work are still working hard on my application for permanent residence. HR friends at work came through with yet another final piece of paperwork, sooooo – any day now, maybe? With my luck, my PR application will take either a couple of weeks or the entire six months to get processed. We’ll see.

I chanced a trip Walmart today, face shield be damned. It was peculiar to see most people wearing masks. (~70%, I’d say.) Granted, some of them wore their masks incorrectly, without covering their noses, but hey – an attempt was made. I see no rhyme or reason for the different mask adoption rates on my admittedly infrequent visits. My best bad guess is that everyone is alarmed by the covid-related news coming out of the US. There were no coughers this time around.

The supply chain breakdown is making itself known. Ground beef is still roughly the same price, but regular AAA beef is far more expensive than I’ve ever seen it. I snagged some for $31 CAD/kg, or $10.35 USD/lb, which is rather excessive. (If you’re reading this in the future, it probably costs even more. Sorry for destroying the world for y’all, eh.) This is probably not related to shoddy manufacturing practices, but one of the cans of cider I bought sprang a leak (that never happened before), and now I have a blueberry cider-flavoured trunk. Heh. (Note to self: my half of the freezer can fit exactly seven pizzas.)

In covid news… Today, social media had a genuine damn glee party over the reports of a Florida woman who went to a bar with her friends (the number varies between 10-15), after which they got covid. Apparently, she works in healthcare, though it’s unclear what she does. Many blame and laugh at her, yet she was merely following the government’s instructions: when the US reopened, everyone got the cheery all-clear signal, as if the virus had gone away. Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, is refusing to shut down the state, even as covid cases keep climbing. It’s the government who is to blame, not its people. (As someone originally from Russia, I say that a lot…) In broader world news – the president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, and his wife, Ana García Carías, both got diagnosed with covid. I wish them well. Trump’s Tulsa rally is still scheduled for Saturday, June 20th, and that alone is likely to become a super-cluster.

If you’re reading this in the future and can’t figure out what the hell we were thinking… If it’s any consolation, I have no idea either.

Saturday night. Spent the day hanging out with xgf again: she’s doing better but not great. She recently swallowed her pride and called the local volunteer group that delivers groceries to people with disabilities or compromised immune systems. (And she has both.) After the groceries are dropped off, you just transfer the total amount to the volunteer through Interac – a really cool (and free!) money transfer system everyone uses in Canada. I’m not sure if that group existed before the pandemic, but nonetheless, this is a great example of random acts of kindness in the world.

Xgf was also worried about catching covid and developing severe symptoms (to the point of not being able to get out of bed), since she lives by herself. Her frame of reference was some random person on Reddit, who said hospitals won’t admit you unless you’re in critical condition. My arguments to the contrary didn’t help, not even when I mentioned that a rural hospital in Quebec gave her top-notch treatment (including a brain scan) when she had chest pains. After 10 minutes of back-and-forth, I called Toronto’s health department.

The person on the other end of the line confirmed that treatment (such as it is) is available to everyone, and that hospitals will definitely provide help if the patient’s condition is bad enough. When I asked for details, she said that only 52% of ICU beds in Toronto were occupied. She also said that although 81% of acute care beds were occupied, there were always overflow options. That seemed to make xgf feel better, if only for a bit. She comes from a strange background… Just the other day, her mother (who moved here from Poland) said that a Polish surfer on Instagram (heh) said the virus was a hoax, and she believed him because he always such positive and heartfelt things…

It’s hard to describe the strange reality we’re living in, when surfers from landlocked Eastern European countries are listened to for their medical advice; where volunteers go grocery shopping and spend their own time and gas to help those in need; where there’s simply too much news for any one person to digest, and many end up reverting to their previous worldview and biases.

A couple of days ago, Ontario rolled out the plan for 10-person social bubbles. Your own family, plus another family, plus however many people it’d take to get to 10, can all hang out together – as long as nobody joins another bubble. If at least one person cheats on their bubble, and if one bubble develops a covid infection, the overlap may infect others. This isn’t something that can be enforced, and judging by all the large groups we saw in the local park today (it was picnic weather), many will likely ignore it. Still, as bad ideas go, that one isn’t too terrible. It’s an attempt to give some semblance of order to the chaos that would result if everyone just gave up. We’ll see how that plays out.

And meanwhile, only four weeks to go until my hopefully relaxing vacation. Just 20 business days, and they fly by so fast… In exactly 28 days, I’ll be sleeping in my rental car at some highway rest stop, halfway to Thunder Bay, the amethyst capital of Ontario. I can only wonder how different the world will be 28 days later.

Friday night. If I were less honest, I would’ve said how much I miss going out on a night like this – but, to be fair, most of my evenings before the pandemic were just like this: finish up work, play some video games, stream some TV shows, maybe read. The main difference now is that I’m saving a whole lot of time and money on my commute, and that I’m not going to the gym after I leave work. (I miss the gym…) And to be fair, after this whole mess ends, my routine will likely stay exactly the same, give or take a few minor differences. People always default to their baseline, eh?

I’m still celebrating the invitation to apply for permanent residence. That plan has been in the making over four years. Even in February 2016, I knew that a country that would even consider Donald Trump was a country that had something very wrong with it… I never could’ve foreseen his victory on technicality, or the mess he’d make, or the once-in-a-century pandemic. (I hope there won’t be another one like it anytime soon, but my hope could be wrong.) I tried transferring first to the United Kingdom, then to Poland, then to Canada, then to Australia, and then to Canada again. It took five tries and three years, but I made it out. And now, 14 months after I got here, I finally have the permanent residence within my grasp. It’s an indescribably amazing feeling, having your long-term stratagem play out just as expected.

…and meanwhile, in the US, approximately 1,000 Americans die of covid each day, but you wouldn’t know it if you watched most media. It’s almost as if people are fooled into thinking that all is well now, that it’s safe to come out, that the virus is behind us, just like a particularly persistent news story that just wouldn’t go away but finally left us at last. Part of it is just human nature: people are likely tired of waiting and self-isolating. Restaurants are open again, and the weather is great, and why the hell not, eh?

My own resolve wears thin sometimes: I would love to have some of those scrumptious Tim Hortons egg&bacon sandwiches, or go to my favourite Egyptian restaurant that’s just a few minutes away. And yet… That’d be a phenomenally bad idea, even if Ontario has just had fewer than 200 new cases for the first time in quite a while. Oh well. I guess I’ll just have to get better at making beans and/or eggs.

Enjoy the first night of your weekend, fellow pandemic peeps.