Grigory Lukin.com

Friday night. Time to party it up! (But solo and at home and responsibly, this being a pandemic and all.)

Today I consumed the last multivitamin from the bottle I started a year ago. I remember writing this post at the time: a little time capsule from myself to myself. I measure life in bottles of vitamins… A year ago, I was a different person. The world was a different place. I still live in Toronto’s suburbs, I still have the same position at the same job, but the rest… I wouldn’t have guessed that by the time I eat that 365th vitamin pill, I’d be a seasoned pandemic survivor with a small hoard of PPE. I wouldn’t have imagined that over a million people worldwide would die of a virus that hadn’t yet existed when I bought those vitamins. I wouldn’t have considered that I’d run off with that special someone to three different towns in rural Ontario and Quebec, always trying to stay just a step ahead of the virus.

This new bottle has 250 vitamin gummies. It says to consume between 2-4 per day. That should last me 125 days, until late February. I know I say this a lot, but nevertheless, I can’t stop wondering how different the world will be by then. How different I’ll be. How many unimaginable things will come true… Chances are, it’ll be more of the same: more infections, more deaths, more lockdowns. Regular life will remain on hold. No real-world dating or meetups, but perhaps some more self-improvement, both physical and intellectual.

But then again… Who could have imagined that 2020 would have the worst pandemic since 1918? Granted, the only ways 2021 can get wilder than this is if there’s a nuclear war, or zombies, or if aliens land and ask to see our (hopefully new) leader. Anything can happen, though: the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan is heating up, and some nuclear powers might get involved. A zombie virus is a stretch, but weaponized rabies? Easy-peasy. And as for aliens, the Pentagon has been declassifying an awful lot of of reports whose conclusion amounts to a big ol’ shruggie emoji when they describe strange objects encountered in the sky. So yeah, let’s knock on wood and hope nothing wilder is in the works, eh? (Though with luck, the nuclear war will wipe out the zombies, and the benevolent aliens will help clean up the fallout – and maybe the global warming while they’re at it.)

In self-improvement news, I might have to go out and buy more weights soon. I won’t post the exact figures because they’re a bit laughable, but over the past month or so, I’ve been able to benchpress dumbbells 50% heavier than when I’d started this whole exercise thing. Ditto for the slow and steady progress in my chin-up routine. I’m slowly getting back to a somewhat healthy weight after months of self-neglect, so that’s something.

In covid news, yet another suburb of Toronto (the York region) has gone into modified stage-two lockdown, just like Toronto itself did a few days ago. I dropped by the local Costco to pick up more protein powder and chicken earlier tonight: this was the first time I’ve seen a line to get into Costco. It was approximately a five-minute wait, with an airport-style line and little barriers. There was a cop car with the siren on parked in front of the entrance: I can only assume there was a fight or a violent anti-masker. Perhaps both. A sign at the entrance said they’ve sold out of toiler paper, paper towels (aka “sponge towels” in Canada), Lysol wipes, and toilet paper.

I guess folks are panic-buying again. Some plague profiteers probably made a bundle if they stocked up on the basics when things briefly got better a few months ago. I know that history repeats itself, but must it do so in just six-month intervals? Come on, history, you can do better than that. On the upside, things were pretty civil inside, though the six-foot distancing rule stopped being enforced ages ago. I’ve got enough snacks, food, and drinks (the local non-alcoholic apple cider is delicious!) to last 10-14 days. I imagine things will get even wilder next time I venture outside…

Have yourselves a safe and socially-distanced weekend, y’all. Make the most of it, will you?

Thursday night. I’m trading this and the next two Thirsty Thursday for one sober October, but that fourth Thursday – that’ll be pretty epic.

I’ve spent the evening playing around with my shiny new toy – Echo Show 8. It’s pretty amazing how much progress digital picture frames have made over the years. This thing is a supposedly immortal tablet thingy that’s slightly bulky but can play videos, show you pictures, and do all sorts of Amazon Alexa stuff. I’m looking forward to having it light up the room when the alarm goes off tomorrow: it’ll be either fun or ridiculously unpleasant. Stay tuned for more in the exciting lockdown adventures! Heh.

On a more serious note, after I uploaded pictures of my favourite art, I’ve set up a never-ending slideshow on that 8″ screen. This has the potential for being somewhat distracting, but it’ll definitely brighten up the dull routine.

I’m playing the pandemic game extra-cautiously (in case you haven’t gathered as much on this 216th day of my indoor adventures), which means spacing out grocery store visits as much as possible. Seeing as I’ve just run out of fresh fruit, meat, tea (not the tea!), starting to literally scrape the bottom of my big tub of protein powder, and I’m down to my very last multivitamin pill… Yeah, I’m gonna have to brave the wild wild world of suburban Toronto tomorrow and hope for the best, eh.

My Apocalypse Beard has gotten long enough to chew on, all classy and suave-like.

In covid news, this is pretty funny: after all the gyms got closed for 28 days in Toronto, the locals started invading the gyms in the suburbs. There are news stories, suburban folks complaining on social media, etc. Some gyms have started carding the newcomers to make sure they’re locals and not those big-city slickers with their high likelihood of being all infected-like. (I don’t know what’s up with the southern twang either, but it feels appropriate when discussing the hilarious “big city vs tiny town” dynamic. Yeehaw, eh?) That was pretty predictable, and yet here we are. Lockdown don’t work all that well if they’re geographically selective, and the GTA (the Greater Toronto Area, not the Grand Theft Auto) is one big ol’ area. I bet the owners of the closed Toronto gyms are mighty upset about all this.

Chris Christie (New Jersey’s former governor) has been discharged after spending a week in the ICU. Just about everyone knew that the cover story (spending a week in a hospital “for observation”) was nonsense, but that’s the world we live in now: white lies reported as transparent news. Christie survived despite having multiple factors that were against him. He released a statement that stressed the dangerous nature of the virus and advised everyone to wear masks. That’s entirely different from Trump’s approach: after leaving the hospital, he called his infection “a gift from God” (I am not making this up), and now he’s back to walking around without a mask and calling covid “Chinese virus.” …interestingly, some epidemiologists claim that the synthetic antibodies he’d gotten will not last, and may in fact leave him more vulnerable to reinfection. That’ll be pretty ironic if he just keeps getting sick after continuously and blatantly disregarding every single precaution out there.

Folks in the future who won’t have lived through this pandemic will have no clue how crazy all of this really was…

Wednesday evening. The optimist says, “It’s Wednesday – only two days until the weekend!” The pessimist says, “Ugh, two more days of this crap.” It’s only the realist who asks, “Who is this Wedne? Why do they have their own day, and are they coming to reclaim it?”

Le sober October (or octobre sobre, if you will) is going well so far: it’s strange to chug coke instead of cider with my lunch. Combined with the absence of ginkgo biloba (which, as I understand it, as an upper), my days are a lot less exciting. Just… flat and steady. No more feeling like my brain is in overdrive, a bit less spontaneity and eloquence, but feels okay on the balance. Is that what I was like in my early 20s?.. Fascinating.

Xgf says she’s feeling better, but she also has a history of withholding important information because she doesn’t want to worry people. On top of that, she’s reluctant to go to the hospital and get tested for covid because her parents said the mandatory quarantine would inconvenience them. It’s pretty remarkable to see such American attitudes here in Ontario. They’d fit right in at one of Trump’s rallies. After all, if you don’t test, you won’t find any new cases – according to him, anyway.

Amazon’s Prime Day sale is about to end. I remain a filthy bourgeois consumer and not the enlightened post-scarcity guru I occasionally roleplay as. Heh. In addition to the instapot and that video game, I’ll also get an 8″ Echo Show and a long string of high-tech Christmas lights. The latter will make my room a little more cozy, since this will be a long lockdown… The former is a digital picture frame with benefits: something to entertain myself with, as well as a way to watch online news broadcasts. (That’s kind of a novelty by this point, since so many of my peers have pivoted from watching cable news to listening to podcasts.) Here is hoping I won’t hoard any other stuff in the months to come. When I eventually move, I’d rather travel light.

In covid news, Washington Post published a story on the Great Barrington Declaration. It’s nice when high-level publications arrive at the same conclusion as yours truly – a fun little ego boost, if nothing else. The epidemiologists they interviewed said the declaration represents the views of “epidemiological fringe.” Heh. Even more interesting, some journos discovered a link between the Declaration folks and the Koch brothers, whose agenda has always been to make money at all costs. The big downside right now is that the veneer of legitimacy from the GBD gives them credibility (if you don’t look too closely) and lets them push their agenda. They’re lobbying Atlas and Azar in the White House, and it looks like Florida’s aggressive reopening campaign was motivated by the same thing. This has a lot of potential to get mighty ugly.

Meanwhile, France is getting an actual curfew: in Paris and eight other major cities, it’ll be in effect from 9pm till 6am. It’s projected to run for 28 days, and it’ll likely get extended further. France isn’t doing so hot: their official death count is 33,037. With one-third of their population being confined indoors for a whole month, things will likely get rowdy. The French are far more passionate about their protests, so… covid riots? I think we’ll get covid riots. That’s one of the few things we haven’t seen in 2020 yet, so that’s bound to happen. I wonder if curfews will be instituted in the US and Canada as well. If so, that’ll probably be at some point within the next four months. Pour one out for all the poor extroverts, eh?

Tuesday night. It’s taco Tuesday, and I’m all out of taco shells. Tragic, I know.

Whelp, we finally did it. Amazon’s Prime Day sale got delayed by three months but it’s finally on. I was about to pontificate on how happy and content I am that I don’t need anything that’s on sale today, but then I saw a nice instapot and a fun video game from last year… Hey, I never claimed to be perfect.

Xgf is down with something. Probably just a cold and not covid, but she hadn’t told me she was feeling under the weather when we hung out three days ago… (She thought she was just running low on sleep.) Now she’s got some fairly bad cough and I have a tickle in my throat which I refuse to acknowledge. On the upside, the O2 levels seem fine, and we both wore masks while hanging out, so this miiiiight be nothing? This cold/flew/sniffles/plague season will be a lot of fun. (It’ll also be pretty ironic if after all the months of being a knight in shining armor, it’ll the former damsel in distress that’ll get me infected. Gotta love those postmodern fairy tales, eh?)

In covid news, there was a fascinating supercluster right here in my neck of the woods. Hamilton, a town near Toronto, has a downtown spin studio that technically followed all the guidelines: the bikes were 6′ apart, equipment was cleaned, and masks were required before and after exercising. (Or so they say, in any case.) Well, looks like all the sweat and heavy breathing in spin classes generates enough viral load to go around: 44 spin enthusiasts (spinsters?) tested positive, there are at least 17 confirmed secondary infections connected to those 44, and there might be as many as 100 people altogether who got sick because of this cluster. There’s more information over here. This may become as notorious as the choir outbreak a few months ago, and this shows why keeping the gyms open is not the best idea right now, or until every gets vaccinated. Here is to home gyms and staying safe while getting in shape…

Saturday night. The first night of the eighth month of the first year of covid.

I slept 10 hours, treated myself to my weekly Tim Hortons drivethrough meal, and spent a few hours playing video games with xgf after driving two hours to her little town and back again. Not a bad day, all things considered.

Two more days off before the slow inevitable return to the work routine. I’m not sure if I’ve written this before… One has only so many stories. Once upon a time, when I was a lowly warehouse grunt doing manual labour, I worked four days a week, 10 hours a day, and unless there was optional overtime, I’d get three-day weekends more often than not. I remember being exhausted from having so much time off. (I was mostly single back then.) Ahh, to be young and stupid, eh? The work wasn’t intellectually challenging in any way whatsoever (which is why I ended up writing a bunch of e-books as an intellectual diversion), but it was simple, and honest, and physically stimulating. Sometimes I miss those days. Now three-day weekends are a rare treat, though not as rare as back in the US.

…this really makes me wonder which aspects of my present life (pandemic notwithstanding) I’ll end up being nostalgic about five, 10, or 200 years down the road. (I aim to live to be 1,729 – so far so good!) I already know there’ll be hardly any salmon in the future: it’s already expensive, and given everything that happens to their habitat… It’ll probably be a rare luxury within a generation. There’ll be other unexpected outages or plain old shifts in personal preferences, I’m sure. The stock Instagram answer is, of course, to enjoy every minute of every day and every bite of every sandwich, but really, who has the attention span for that? Heh.

In covid news, worldwide cases are accelerating. Over the past three days, there were a million new covid cases worldwide – a new record. There are far more that have gone undiagnosed, of course, but even with the imperfect and shoddy methodology the world currently has… That’s still an awful lot. It hasn’t even been a year since the first reported case, and here we are. This winter is gonna be a wild ride, and the social inequities playing out after vaccines become available… Stay safe and stock up on popcorn if you can, folks.

Friday night. When humans make the outside world completely inhospitable (viruses, pollution, ozone layer going bye-bye, horrific climate, etc), in the world where “going out” is literally no longer an option, will our descendants perform the silly weekend rituals of their ancestors and wonder how different our lives were?

One of my favourite things about Canada (aside from adding the fancy “u” to random words) is all the holidays they’ve got here. There are 13 main holidays as opposed to the six or so in the US. Canada’s Thanksgiving is on Monday, so this is yet another awesome three-day weekend. (With another one coming up just a month from now, in honour of the Remembrance Day.) If nothing else I say convinces people to move here, then maybe the overabundance of long weekends will.

Today’s culinary adventure: just completely giving up on trying to scrounge enough carbs and munching on a bunch of almonds instead. Flipped my carb and fat ratios completely, but hey, as long as I get the right amount of calories, enough protein, and all the sleep in addition to the exercise, it’s all good, right?

One upside of my highly visible pullup bar in the hallway, weighing my food, and blending all these protein shakes is that my landlords are starting to slowly (so very, very slowly) warm up to the idea of monitoring their nutrition and eating healthier. They’re both in fine shape and do some cardio, but there’s no such thing as being too healthy during this pandemic.

Somewhat related, one big upside of being a non-crazy, non-violent sort of prepper (as opposed to your typical wannabe-Rambo in the US) is being prepared for multiple contingencies. Had a bit of a throat tickle this morning, but I knew exactly where my oximeter and thermometer were (as well as all the batteries), and everything turned out fine. I can’t imagine I’d have any peace of mind without an objective way to measure my vitals.

…and by the way, folks, if you don’t have an oximeter of your own, I can’t recommend it highly enough. That little $25 gadget will tell you when it’s time to skedaddle to the nearest emergency room, and it just might save your life should you be unlucky enough to catch covid.

In covid news, the US is still doing its weird crazy thing: full seating allowed in Florida’s sports stadiums, more crazy covid tweets from Trump (he made it a full week without relapsing – good for him, I guess), and a white-bread Michigan militia got busted for trying to kidnap the state’s governor. It looks like they were very unhappy with her decision to initiate a lockdown earlier this year. That does not sound like a functioning democracy… Speaking of which, more of my US friends are reaching out for advice on moving to Canada. One of my friends, who lived in Arizona, just found out that she got purged from the voter rolls, even though she’d been in the system just a few weeks prior. Might have been a database glitch, might have been something far more sinister. The very fact that sabotage is a probable explanation means the fundamental element – the faith in the system – is no longer there. I hope at least one of my Canada-curious friends makes it over here.

In more local news, Toronto and two other parts of Ontario are entering a new modified lockdown. It’ll last for 28 days (insert your “28 Days Later” jokes here), during which there’ll be no indoor dining, bars, gyms, theaters, etc. Weddings are still okay, as long as they stick to 10 people indoors or 25 outdoors. I expect a lot of anger from the locals who have already lived through one long lockdown and got a brief taste of freedom – which, of course, fucked everything up. (And that’s why we can’t have nice things.) It’s interesting how fast Doug Ford pivoted from “I can’t let people’s businesses die!” to freezing everything for almost a month. I guess he finally got those numbers he asked for. Too bad he couldn’t see the writing on the wall earlier. I hope this lockdown works, because all indicators show Toronto getting to the same disaster we saw in New York back in March: full ICUs and insufficient hospital space.

Here is to even more indoors time, and to more distracting hobbies. I’ve just started bingewatching “Ozark” on Netflix – it’s fascinating to find a well-made show where the protagonist is a fellow financial analyst. Stay safe out there, folks, and make the most of your weekend.

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?