Grigory Lukin.com

Thursday night. It’s curious how nights get progressively more exciting from Wednesday to Saturday, isn’t it? (Except for you, Sunday night. Know your damn place.)

Another day of zero social stimulation, aside from exchanging a couple of words with the landlords. They’re good people, but they’re baseline cable news consumers… The landlady thinks that a vaccine will come out before the US election on November 3 (because her beloved Trump said so) and that the covid cases in Canada are getting better. (That’s because it’s much harder to get a test now.) I tried to gently explain to her that that is not the case. I’m not sure she understood me. So it goes.

I heard through the grapevine that my coworkers, back at my warehouse, are worried about the effects the isolation might be having on me. I’d typically put on an extrovert mask when at work, doing some mild chatter among coworkers’ cubicles, and then relax hard after getting back home. It’s nice to know they’re thinking of me, but they completely misjudged me: I’m actually kind of digging all the alone time. The social interaction I miss is random meetups and dating, not being stuck at work.

A coworker of mine seemed to be nonchalant about covid warnings, to the point of meeting people face to face, going to the gym, etc. Now he’s feeling a bit under the weather. If that turns out to be covid (which is really picking up steam around here), that’ll be all the more encouragement for the rest of us to stay put; a harsh proof that the choices the rest us had made were not for naught.

I guess this is an objective proof that I’ve been far too busy with work lately – I missed a couple of major goalposts. Two weeks ago was my 18-month anniversary of moving to Canada. Last week was the two-month anniversary of my application for permanent residency. That second one isn’t quite as exciting, I know, but it’s big nonetheless. It means I have less than four months to go till I get my PR. That is, of course, if the pre-covid six-month timeline stays stable, etc. It’s entirely possible the whole thing will get delayed by six more months. Still, that’s a milestone.

In covid news, something genuinely funny, for once. The University of Notre Dame notoriously tried to enforce draconian measures against the students who broke social distancing rules. However, its own president, Rev. John Jenkins, appeared at the now-infamous Rose Garden party without a mask, and then tested positive for covid. The university had set up a site for students to snitch on one another for breaking covid guidelines. Instead, they all started reporting Jenkins’s blatant disregard of his own rules. Poetic justice, eh?

But wait, there’s more! According to the New York Times, “The decision not to wear a mask… stemmed not from politics but from a desire to politely blend in, as a guest at a cocktail party might remove a tie upon realizing everyone else was dressed in business casual.” That’s Notre Dame’s official position, and ye gods, you have to try hard to come up with something dumber than that. That’s more or less the polar opposite of the acknowledgement/remorse/restitution formula for a good apology. Nice job comparing the pandemic to social awkwardness, too. Kudos for the students, and I hope they finish the job and get their hypocritical overseer to step down. (With a golden parachute, though, I’m sure.) If that happens, that’ll be a much-needed success story in this weird news world.

Stay safe out there, folks – and hey, you have my permission to skip the gym until this whole thing blows over.

Wednesday night. The end of the start of the end of the week.

This whole pandemic is a fascinating social phenomenon – a global experiment none of us signed up for. (Except for those crazy brave folks who volunteered for vaccine testing – kudos to them all.) Aside from all the, you know, death and suffering and unemployment and assorted carnage, there’s a lot of fascinating stuff happening overall: experiments with UBI (universal basic income), online education, large scale work from home, etc. All those things probably never would’ve happened without the pandemic: the world was forced to take those measures, and we get to see firsthand what works and what doesn’t. (That’s science for you – when something fails in the most spectacular fashion, you can at least learn from it.)

At work, there’s now a whole bunch of coworkers who never actually met anyone on their team. We’re all just disembodied voices on weekly calls, or slightly different personalities in text-based chats. (Everyone has mostly stopped using webcam video streaming on business calls on account of it being incredibly creepy.) Things still get done, but it feels a little odd and highly futuristic to work with a remote group of people each of whom logs in from their own little anti-pandemic shelter using computers more powerful than anything they had in the 20th century. Pretty badass, in a very specific and highly geeky sort of way. Of course, then one of my coworkers’ kids screams or laughs in the background, and the whole illusion kind of shatters, but it’s still fun to make-believe.

In today’s culinary adventures, apparently there’s really not that many carbs in a fruit-filled dinner of two bananas and three kiwis. I mean, sure, yay fiber and all that jazz, but I might be the only guy in North America who legitimately has to go out of his way to carb up. Heh.

In covid news, William Foege, possibly the greatest epidemiologist of the 20th century, the man who helped eradicate smallpox, and the former CDC director (who is now 84 years old), sent a letter to the current CDC director, Robert Redfield. The letter was sent two weeks ago and was supposed to be private, but someone leaked it to the media. You can read it here. It’s short and to the point: Foege put in writing what was obvious to everyone, that the CDC became a political puppet and squandered all of its hard-won reputation. He advised Redfield to send a clear and detailed apology letter, point out what’s going on, and lead the good fight until he inevitably gets fired. (He also pointed out that in the future, the CDC’s inaction will be studied as a great example of what not to do.)

The letter was sent two weeks ago. Redfield didn’t stop being a puppet. I guess we know where he stands… He occasionally stops some of the most insane requests coming from the White House, so he’s neither a hero nor a complete sock puppet. In other words, both sides kind of hate his guts at this point. I’m curious if Trump will replace him with Dr Atlas, who is not an epidemiologist at all and who seems to be a big fan of the herd immunity model. (That’s the one where everyone except for the 1% gets sick. They must’ve been so surprised when they got infected at the White House. Heh.) Just like with everything else, we’ll see how that plays out. Pandemic patience is a virtue, eh?

Tuesday night. Taco Tuesday… Maybe that’s what that t.A.T.u. band name meant. (As good a guess as any, eh?)

It’s curious just how absorbed you can get when your entire day is filled with work, reading, eating, and exercising. The time flies by, and it’s almost as if it’s just a baseline indoor day, and not the middle of a second wave of a once-a-century pandemic.

My nutrition adventures continue. Using my sketchy little digital scale (which goes into gram decimals and probably put me on some sort of watch list when I got it) and a calorie-tracking app turns the whole process into a strange game. Fat, carbs, protein – everything is some combination of the three, but balancing them in the right daily ratio while also consuming enough calories… That results in some rather unwise life choices, such as forcing myself to eat 610 grams of plain Greek yogurt at the end of the day to balance out the macros. (That’s a lot of Greek yogurt, y’all.) I wonder how many people would take better care of their health and their diet if the entire process got gamified like this. Weight Watchers was on the right track, back in the day, but that was way before cellphones and not nearly as interactive. That’d make for a very interesting augmented reality app…

In covid news, things are still pretty hilarious at the White House. They’ve refused to let the CDC do their contact-tracing, which is really starting to look like a bit of a cover-up. More than 120 Capitol Hill frontline workers have tested positive for covid. Ditto for Stephen Miller, the ghoul behind the administration’s xenophobic policies. (I guess the virus can infect other species after all!) The guy who carries Trump’s nuclear football has covid as well. (Who would’ve thought the assigned keeper of nukes would be struck down by his own president?) Rudy Giuliani is one of the few people from Trump’s debate prep team who haven’t tested positive yet, but he coughed an awful lot during a recent TV interview… At this point, the White House alone has more cases than several foreign countries put together.

To make things even more interesting (an intersection of epidemiology and politics!), Trump vowed not to sign any economic stimulus bills until after the election. That effectively dooms millions of Americans to at least one more month of poverty. (Compare and contrast to Canada’s CERB model which gave every qualified Canadian $2,000 CAD per month.) At this point, it’s hard to say if it’s Trump’s innate stupidity or the mental side effects from his medication. Could be both, really. Either way, after doing all of his tough-guy posturing on covid to keep the stock market from panicking, that little stunt alone ended up sending it deep into the red in the middle of an otherwise fine day.

Closer to home, covid is really picking up steam in Toronto. About two-thirds of the city are showing test-positivity above 3%. Four areas of the city are showing test-positivity above 10%, which is remarkably bad. After the contact tracing stopped a few days ago, that was a de facto acknowledgement that we’re officially in the run&cover mode, as there are far too many cases. The provincial government, led by Doug Ford (think Trump, only mildly smarter and not as insane), refuses to grant the city’s request to shut down indoor dining, saying he doesn’t want to destroy people’s businesses. He’d probably have a point if they weren’t doomed anyway. (Just a matter of time, unfortunately.) He also keeps saying “show me the evidence,” which is pretty rich, given that the province stopped helping control the spread. I might have missed out on all the summer fun, but at least it’s mildly easier for me now to keep hiding and isolating. Can’t imagine how much that must suck for those who had a fun-filled sunny summer (and avoided getting sick) as they’re about to re-enter the early lockdown mode.

And to wrap this up, some hilarious covid news: a public health agency in the UK used Microsoft Excel, of all things, to track the covid data. They forgot about the row limit and, well, almost 16,000 positive test results didn’t get counted, and thousands of people didn’t get notified. They also didn’t get the guidance to self-isolate, and didn’t help contact tracers. Fun times. All the data geeks who work with Excel for a living (like yours truly) had a collective facepalm when that news story came out. I expect there’ll be more of that sort of stuff later on. The most hilarious part? The agency vowed to never do that again, and said they’ll split the data into multiple spreadsheets instead. It’s not often you see a public official announce they’re creating a timebomb. Heh…

Thursday evening. Apparently, Google can find only 68 instances of “Happy Thor’s Day” ever uttered in the entire human history. I’m a trailblazer!

Funny signs of life: yet another online conference at work, but this time with webcams. (We all stopped using them ages ago due to the creepiness factor.) I turned mine on. Moments later, a coworker messaged me with “GRIGORY! Your hair looks AWESOME!” Heh. At least there’s that, eh?

Today is the first day of the last quarter of this godforsaken year. A lot of big projects are wrapping up at long last. Some new ones are beginning. This calendar division is entirely arbitrary, of course, but nonetheless – I can’t help feeling that I’m one small yet significant step closer to my goals.

By the way, this is the last chance to download my “50 shades of yay” book for free – it’ll get back to its $2.99 price after midnight. I haven’t promoted the giveaway with any sort of energy or gusto, but hey, a few hundred people found and downloaded it nevertheless. If even one of them reads it and feels a little better as a result, this will have been worth it.

In covid news, there’s a scandal in Turkey. Their health minister has been fudging the numbers, counting only those who tested positive and had symptoms. The official count excludes the asymptomatic Turks who tested positive. The truth came out after an opposition leader claimed the real number is 20 times higher than the official count. These shenanigans should surprise absolutely no one, but they still make me wonder: how many other countries are deliberately downplaying covid’s impact, and to what extent? Future statisticians are going to have so much fun digging through all this dirt…

Wednesday night. It has occurred to me that saying “happy hump day” miiiight be able-ist. A lot of bad karma to make up for if that’s the case.

Things turned out suspiciously auspicious today, and I did not in face pull a work-related all-nighter. Well, at least this week is mildly more memorable and eventful than usual.

I’m starting to live vicariously through my landlords: they’ve made up with their son and got him a guitar tutor. (This is the part where I side-eye my own guitar, which I bought a couple of years ago and never even tuned.) Sometimes, the landlords’ daughter and her boyfriend come over and bring their cute little corgi, Royce. He hates my smoothie blender with passion. (The corgi, not the boyfriend – as far as I know, he’s indifferent to blenders.) That always makes for a fun 30-second pantomime.

Sounds like I didn’t miss much by skipping the big debate last night. The president of the United States of America refused to denounce white supremacist groups, and instead told a particularly goofy (but violent) group called the Proud Boys to “stand by and stand back.” That made them very excited because, hey, the president himself gave you a shoutout in front of the entire country. Trump apparently tried to walk that back today, but that’s too little, too late. One of my old college friends asked me earlier today, unprompted and out of the blue, if I can provide any advice on moving to Canada…

In covid news, there’s something interesting going on with cruise ships. The original CDC guidance called for all cruise ships to cease from April through this today, 9/30. The guidance was expected to get extended through February, but the White House has just blocked it. Now, under the administration’s plan, cruises can resume right after Halloween. (This NYT article has more details.) This is a completely political maneuver because a) cruise companies have some good lobbyists, b) if you let cruise ships sail again just three days before the election, you can use that for self-promotion, and c) a lot of money in Florida is made off cruises, and that’s a big part of the puzzle.

Like I said before, I have a fair bit of money invested in cruise companies: at the time, I’d naively assumed that the US would get everything under control. That turned out to be a bad and naive assumption. I guess a cynical part of me might have suspected that cruise companies would get preferential treatment. This will almost certainly be a disaster, since in addition to passengers, there are also hundreds (thousands?) of crew members, and if a single person is contagious… Well, I’m just glad I’m not in that line of work. Interestingly, this goes entirely against the recommendations of Robert Redfield, the CDC’s director. He’s a complicated figure since sometimes he acts like Trump’s sockpupper, but other times he actually stands up for himself. He got overruled on the cruise issue. I wonder if he’ll get fired and replaced with someone more compliant and less ethical.

I’m genuinely curious how the cruise resumption will play out. Kudos to all those who aren’t that stir-crazy yet. Keep it up, eh.

Tuesday evening. Talk about lame anniversaries, eh?

Two-hundred days… What an unimaginably long stretch of time. Long enough to make a premature but viable baby. If you live to be 80, that’s 29,220 days (mind the leap years), which means 200 days is almost 1% of your total lifespan, including the early childhood years that nobody remembers. What’s worse is that we’re all pretty much guaranteed to go through another 150-200 days until vaccines start getting distributed. (I’m sure the wealthy and the celebrities will get them first.) So there goes another percent of your life.

What a shitty, truly shitty and irredeemable year this is.

More long days at work. It’s seasonal, sort of, since things heat up when you plan for a new quarter. I’ll most likely end up having to pull a work-related all-nighter tomorrow. Oy vey.

Long hours lead to poor diet and more stress, which leads to more therapeutic wine, all of which leads to zero time or inclination left to exercise. Excuses, I know…

Purely biologically, I know my body will survive just fine for another 200 days, and another 200, and 200 after that, etc. I’m not as down as all the extroverts who (perhaps for the first time in their lives) are devoid of company and people to socialize with. I know there are others who have legitimate problems and issues, and need far more help than I ever will. Nonetheless, I know I’m well below my baseline. I’m not so naive as to believe things will magically get better on January 1 (and I suspect many people do, in fact, believe that) – I’m in it for the long haul. Still, I’m not at all sure what kind of person I will be by the time I get my magic vaccine shot. I know for a fact that I’ll be much hairier, and hopefully in better physical shape, and rocking an awesome hermit beard, but beyond mere physical characteristics… It’s anyone’s bet.

Tonight is the first presidential debate in the US. It starts in a few minutes. Part of me wants to watch it, if only out of habit and because my degree is, after all, in political science. The rest – and most – of me is going to deliberately not watch it. No social media, no blogs, just some book or a TV show. It hurts to disentangle myself from yet another country (first Russia, and now the US) but that’s necessary. If I recall correctly, the first two years are the hardest, before you truly begin to adjust to your new country and comprehend that the past is behind you…

In covid news, a 42-year-old man in Maryland kept throwing parties, and now he’ll spend a year in jail. This is an unusual case, but the circumstances were just as unusual. Evidently, he didn’t even cancel off the second party the police got called for. (It had over 50 people.) Blatant disregard for rules means actual jail time and national headlines, since this is the first time a state actually threw the book at someone. There’s a fair chance that he’ll appeal and end up serving far less time, but still – this is an important change in tone. I expect there to be more arrests for those who deliberately ignore public safety guidelines. Other things will change too. I’m not sure whether here in Canada we’ll ever get to the point of awarding bounties for those who report a car with US license plates, but I’ve seen multiple people call for that online.

I have a hunch that just three months from now, at the very end of the year, the world will have changed more than we can possibly imagine.