Grigory Lukin.com

Wednesday evening. Another step closer to the weekend, eh?

I spent a couple of hours at a nearby medical center, getting a clean bill of health (hopefully, anyway) ahead of what I expect to be my Express Entry invitation to apply for Canadian residence. It wasn’t quite as bad as I’d expected: there were few fellow patients, and almost all of them wore masks. The only cougher was a maskless old man, but then again, that might have been a wheeze after climbing the stairs. The medical battery consisted of the usual cursory blood pressure and lung check, a TB X-ray (it tickled), and a fair amount of blood taken out to test for HIV. (What happens to the applicants who test positive, I wonder…)

One of the people prodding me was an archetypal snarky old doctor:
“Are you married?”
“Nah.”
“Good, that means you’re free.”

Heh…

The results should get uploaded within a few days, and with any luck, the Express Entry drawing in a few days will get me to the final step of the process. With my 522 score, I should be a shoo-in, but you never know.

Things are getting worse in the US: some reports claim that 83% of Arizona’s hospital beds are occupied. There are over 2,000 active cases in Texas. Canada ain’t perfect either: a family gathering in BC led to 15 new infections. On the bright side, scientists in Copenhagen developed a vaccine that works on mice. It’s far, far too early to celebrate (unless you’re secretly a mouse reading this on a tiny mouse laptop), but that’s a step in the right direction.

And now to stream more Walking Dead to pass the time in this dystopia…

Monday evening – another day, another loonie…

One of the stranger things about the current stage of the pandemic is the rapid rise of the stock market over the past few weeks. Even junk companies that have no positive news are getting swept up in the rally. (And that’s despite the announcement that the positive unemployment data released on Friday was flawed.) Part of that was due to the fact that some traders were shorting everything in sight, and they had to cover their positions. The bigger part is that there’s some irrational exuberance due to the US (as well as Canada) opening up for business once again.

I would be lying if I said the stock market rally didn’t benefit me, and I seldom lie. Still, some part of me wonders if all these hope-fueled gains will get reversed in just a month or two, once the second wave of covid arrives. In a way, it’s a bet: pandemic versus the future. If I side with pessimism, I should cash out and brace myself for more bad news. If I choose to be an optimist, at least just this once, I’ll ride the stock market’s rally into the bright tomorrow. To quote Robert Heinlein, “Don’t ever become a pessimist… a pessimist is correct oftener than an optimist, but an optimist has more fun, and neither can stop the march of events.” I think I know which way I’ll go.

And meanwhile, even by the most basic official count, the US had more covid deaths so far in June than in the entire month of March…

Saturday night. Hung out with xgf again – normally, in a sane world, we’d give each other far more space after the breakup, but this world is neither sane nor normal. Aside from a gal pal and myself, she doesn’t have anyone else who can come over and spend time with her. (While wearing the PPR and maintaining proper distance.) This cognitive dissonance doesn’t make her a happy camper, but she needs human contact, and it’s the least I could do. We went for a fairly long walk through a semi-wild park in Toronto, had a homecooked dinner, and finished by going to a local gelato place. (She’d never had it before, and there was a high-ranked place right around the corner.) And, of course, video games. Lots and lots of video games.

When we drove past a few TTC train cars, we noticed something disturbing. Only one person on each train car wore a mask, and there were 15-20 people inside. If even one of them had covid and had a coughing fit… People still try to socially distance and wear masks in public, but there are bottlenecks that seem almost perfect for super-spreaders.

In other covid news: New Delhi’s crematoriums are getting overwhelmed, and they’re bringing back the old tradition of funeral pyres out in the open… Brazil has completely stopped reporting its official death toll and case numbers: earlier, they stopped covering that information in evening news reports. Now the government site is no longer being updated at all. Those are all just the official numbers that might not account for comorbidities, folks dying at home, etc… It’ll keep getting uglier. Right now, most of the news in the US and Canada is about the ongoing protests – and while that’s most certainly newsworthy, that drowns out all the other developments around the world. I have a feeling there’ll be some highly disturbing pictures or videos coming out of Brazil very soon.

Friday night. I don’t mean to come off as a guy with a drinking problem, but this was the third bottle of champagne in as many nights. Either the stock market is entirely irrational, or I’m a goddamn genius at stock-picking, or both. (Or neither?) Today I passe yet another threshold toward my main goal, and like I’d promised myself, that was a cause for celebration. (To quote a damn good movie, “when you break a promise to yourself, things can get a bit dicey.”)

It really is macabre that with everything happening elsewhere in the world, and especially in the US, I’m celebrating. Then again, it’s not like there’s much else I can do right now…

In covid news, the southern states that opened up (Arizona, Texas, Florida) are seeing ever-increasing number of covid cases. That was to be expected…

In personal news, the lawyer ferrets have submitted the permanent residency paperwork on my behalf. A week or so from now, I’ll find out whether I’ve been invited to apply for PR. And then… Then I wait up to six months for my application to get reviewed, but after that – that’s when things will really get interesting.

Happy weekend, my fellow plague-dodgers.

Thursday night, and yet another workweek’s almost done. Time flies by so fast when you work from home… No new faces or office chatter, just the same old environment. Not that I’m complaining, mind you: I’m saving plenty of time and money now that I’m not commuting.

Lawyers from work had a welcome update: they’ve finalized all my documents, and they’re ready to submit my permanent residency application. The next Express Entry draw is in a week, so this timing is perfect. Once I get an invitation to apply for PR, the rest should be a formality: wait a few months, and then I’m officially a Canadian. (And from what I understand, I’ll be able to apply for citizenship in April 2022.)

It feels ridiculously inappropriate to celebrate, but my investments have also being doing quite great. I’ve passed another milestone today. (I know, it’s odd to have two of them back to back.) More champagne to celebrate.

Xgf is adjusting to the basement life, though her sleep cycle seems to be affected by the lack of sunlight. She’s making up for the lack of social contact by organizing the hell out of that basement apartment, and doing things like comparison-shopping for the greatest planner/organizer out there. Hey, we all have our hobbies.

In covid news, some of the Las Vegas casinos reopened for business earlier today, at the strike of midnight. People were lined up to gamble, even though it was a Wednesday night. If you’re reading this further down the road, try to find Vegas videos dated June 4th, 2020. It’s downright surreal to see card dealers and dancers with their entire faces covered by masks. Interestingly, some of the early proposed designs didn’t come to pass: there are no plexiglass dividers between gamblers at the casino tables, and masks for customers appear to be merely encouraged, not mandated.

There’s more speculation on the nature of the eventual vaccine. Seems like every pharmaceutical company out there is trying their hand at it. It’ll most likely be a two-dose vaccine, with a month or so between the doses. (Covid may mutate fast, unlike, say, measles, which stays the same forever and requires just one shot.) I wonder if it’ll come out late this year or at the beginning of 2021…

It’s Tuesday night, and the first proper thunderstorm of the year is raging outside. I’m not above admitting that I’m experiencing some fairly severe anxiety over everything happening in the US right now. It’s funny – I left Russia when I was 16, and I never followed its politics since then. It’s been over a year since I left the US, and I can’t stop worrying about it. (On the upside, I spent less time following the presidential primaries than ever before. For a political science major, that’s a pretty big achievement.)

The violence in the US is escalating: last night, helicopters in DC flew just above the ground, terrifying the protesters. People on social media are posting about being pulled over, the police pointing weapons in their faces and detaining them without charges in giant groups. (Hello, second wave.) Today, there are armed men who wouldn’t say who they work for (only that they’re “with the Justice Department”), there are soldiers with bayonets attached to their rifles, there are more videos of brutality. All 50 states are protesting. A cop in Las Vegas got shot in the back of his head – he’s currently on life support.

…this won’t end anytime soon, will it?

In covid news, the Democratic Republic of the Congo is having a remarkably bad year. Ebola is back, with two separate outbreaks happening at the same time. On top of that, there’s a measles outbreak. And on top of all that, there’s covid. Sitting here, in my giant rental room with all the basic conveniences, I can’t even begin to imagine what it’s like to dodge not one but three separate viruses at once… There are reports that the Afghan Taliban’s leader died of covid. If so, that’d make him the first major geopolitical figure to succumb to the virus. (For a while there, there were rumours of Kim Jong-un’s death.)

…at some point, perhaps within a year, this will all get resolved. Some police accountability reform will pass in the US. A viable vaccine will get developed. The world will calm the fuck down. The lost jobs will return, though the universal basic income will get adopted by some parts of the world. The stock market will recover. I’ll get my permanent residency and become a real Canadian. All shall be well. But here and now, there’s nothing at all to be done: merely going outside and trying to be helpful could make you not merely sick but an asymptomatic spreader, the virus’s pawn. So here I am. Sitting. Writing. Future-leaping. I’ll try to distract myself from all the news by deep-diving into some TV show: it’s been a while since I watched Walking Dead. Perhaps some artsy gritty dystopia that’s objectively worse than this reality (thus far, anyway) will do the trick, if only for a while.

Stay safe out there, folks.