Observations: COVID Positive? Who me?

Today is the last day of my ten-day quarantine. One of my players had tested positive for COVID-19 two weeks ago, which meant that the team had to quarantine for 10 days. I decided to take advantage of the new testing kiosk at my local pharmacy and take my first COVID test.  Of course, I thought of it as a new experience that comes with this new COVID era. I never thought I would test positive. Positive test it was. I was completely incredulous. I didn’t have a fever, my oxygen levels, courtesy of my online investment in a Pulse Oximeter showed that my oxygen level averaged well above 95%. My sense of taste and smell were still intact. No sore throat, just a cough that recurs every winter for as long as I have been an adult. I questioned the woman who called me, and she assured me that false negatives were more prevalent than false positives and that I should plan on staying home for ten days.

Luck would have it that a series of winter storms rolled through the area, so I wasn’t going to go out anyways. I had food in the fridge, and I was able to discover the wonders of online grocery shopping and anonymous deliveries. I was lecturing to my class through Zoom sessions and everything that I did was easily taken of online.

Except.

I was missing my twice weekly volleyball practices with my team; their quarantine ended a full week before mine did. I missed coaching my knuckleheads something fierce, something that I expected but I did not expect how much I missed them. So, lesson one: I am still passionate about coaching volleyball.

Many people have described their own quarantine experience as pure misery. Being deprived of human companionship was devastating to my friends who had the misfortune of experiencing the same situation as I was about to experience. I knew it would not affect me as badly as it affected them, as I was an introvert by nature and I had accrued an immense To Be Read book pile, so I was not short on entertainment. I didn’t even come close to reading all that I had wanted to read. Lesson two: no matter how much time you may think you have to read; you still don’t have enough.

I did miss the conversations that I had with my coffee klatch group. To be fair, they had also decided to cancel a few of the meetings for the sake of the aforementioned winter storms. I made up for my missed conversations by sending them emails and links to articles that I would have brought up as potential conversation topics during our twice weekly ninety minutes of whirlwind sessions of conversational daring do and intellectual high wire act. Lesson three: you will always  yearn for intelligent conversations with your friends.

I was extremely fortunate in that I was asymptomatic through out my quarantine. There were some coughs and sniffles but the big news with my COVID experience was that it was no drama. The only salient effect is that my circadian rhythm is way off, I couldn’t get a continuous night of sleep. But then again, I was having a hard time sleeping through the night before I tested positive for COVID.

Unlike some people I know who survived the virus, I refuse to examine the chronology of my illness in complete hindsight and pontificate about the wisdom of my approach towards dealing with the virus; I know different, I know I dodged a bullet. Through some miracle of genetics or just sheer dumb luck, I avoided the worst of the punishment that could have been. I am grateful for my unaffected health, I am appreciative of winning this flirtation with disaster, and I am in awe of the powers of ambiguities, uncertainties, and randomness of our world which somehow came down on my side of the equation. Lesson four: dodging the possible by skating along the edges of the probable is very sobering.

There were moments of sheer terror as I experienced a number of  temporary symptoms that threw me into instant panic. Coughs, moments where I thought my forehead felt warm, or moments where I started to sneeze repeatedly. Every time I thought it was time to pay the piper the symptoms went away. I lived in a constant state of vigilance for the first five or six days of the quarantine, always having to pin my ears back at the first sign of abnormal bodily functions. But it never came. Lesson five: living every second of the ten days of quarantine as if you were under the sword of Damocles is a crappy way to live life.

I developed a ritual of texting my early morning vitals to a number of friends. I lived for those return texts of affirmation and happiness from these great friends, it is amazing just how I came to look forward to these tenuous connections to the world outside my house and the affirmations from those that care for me. Lesson six: affirmations from friends are better than ice cream when you are COVID positive.

As the end of the quarantine period came up, I began to feel a bit of guilt, about my asymptomatic status. I am not asking to getting beat up by the virus, I am not asking to suffer through the numerous pains and punishment that many others have suffered. I certainly don’t relish the thought of going into the hospital and hovering between life and death. But still, I keep wondering: why me? Why was I so lucky? One of my close friends lost her sense of smell and taste, she started suffered migraine headaches, and chronic fatigue. Yet here I am, someone who is ill-prepared physically to battle the virus, and I got away with minimal symptoms. You start to wonder about genetics and the serendipity associated with epistemological  uncertainties. I really don’t want to figure out the ins and outs of calculating the probabilities of my being where I am, but I still wonder. Lesson seven: no matter how good you have it; you will always feel guilty to not having had it worse.

Once the state of Ohio receives your positive result, they send your information to social workers and they contact you and basically tell you how to count the days of quarantine and what to do, what to avoid, what is OK, and what is forbidden. My case worker called, and we started chatting. I asked her a million questions and she patiently answered all of them, reassured me if I became nervous or borderline hysterical, and calmly gave me resources to contact. She walked me through the if-then scenarios thoroughly; indeed, she told me to keep the number on my caller ID handy so that I could call her back if anything came up. I called her back a few times and wonder of wonders, she played volleyball collegiately and she coached club volleyball. Who would have thought? Lesson eight: there are volleyball people everywhere you look, and by and large, they are the good people out there.

As my quarantine is coming to a close, my friend asked me what I was going to do when I leave the house for the first time in ten days. I honestly don’t know. First of all, I probably need to shovel the driveway as I had not bothered to do so through a few days of snowfall, so I might be stuck for a few more involuntary days. I may take a little drive around town, enjoy running errands, enjoying grocery shopping for the first time in ten days, even if I have become dangerously enamored with having my groceries delivered. I may even call one of my many favorite restaurants and order take out. I am not going to start eating out in person, not yet anyways. I am hoping to look upon the outside world with new eyes and experience every experience with a new perspective. Most of all, I will be thankful.

Book Review-The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr

The Shallows made many people’s must-read list when it first came out in 2010. All the movers and shakers in the tech world recommended it. I bought the book a few years later but never got around to reading it. A good friend recently read it and recommended it highly, which piqued my interest again.

First, Nicholas Carr is an excellent writer. He organized the research that illustrates and explains the thesis of this book very well. The chapters are organized to build progressively upon his thesis and each other as he leads the reader through his thoughts.

The key topic of the book is the subtitle: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. Carr cites Marshall McLuhan often, and McLuhan’s thoughts on the medium: how the medium affects what we think and know is a well cited point. What Carr drives at with his thesis is that the medium also shapes how we think, which is a subtle, insidious, and transformational change in our cognition. One key point to remember is that we humans have a very adaptive mind, our cognition is so flexible and nimble that it does not take much to alter the way our minds learn and accept the changing modes of communication. It is a human trait that has served us well throughout our evolution and has gotten humans out of trouble many times. It is our cognitive flexibility and adaptability which makes human so successful at surviving for so long. At the same time, it is also a reason for concern, because as we adapt to the evolving modes of communication, our cognition and our habits will never be the same and we will never return to our previous state of cognition. One important point that Carr makes clear, as he references McLuhan, is that the new medium is not just an addition to the old medium, and the new medium won’t ever leave the old medium alone. The new medium will forever change and affect how humans interact with information.

Carr begins the book with some excellent general historical background on how human modes of communication had evolved. Starting with the Greek philosophers and their dependence on oratory as the only means of communicating ideas to their audience, through the evolution of the written language, to the western discovery of the printing press and the mass production of the means of passing on knowledge. He explores the ideas of the Empiricist versus the Rationalists, laying out the arguments for and against each and explaining how the reality is a synthesis of both rather than as an either/or proposition.

One of the more fascinating explorations is Carr’s discussion of the  invention of the map and the clock to illustrate his point. The advent of the map gave us an essential and efficient means of navigating the known world, the projected representation of the three-dimensional reality into two-dimensional map gave humans an easier means to navigate through the world, yet it also robbed the humans of their skills at visualizing the three-dimensional reality. It was the same argument with time. The clock gave us a more locally precise means of tracking the days, months, and years but at the same time, it chained us to the yoke of the clock, so that this artifice which was just supposed to facilitate our perception of the fourth dimension had irrevocably changed the way we think and how we deal with our reality. Time was no longer an artifice, a construct, it became reality.

Carr dives into many human inventions which had changed the way we live and survive in this world. How the addition of spaces between words, a significant change from the scriptum continua of the early literature, changed the way humans think. The word spacing freed the human mind to think and explore their thoughts deeply. As a parallel he talks about the effect that the hyperlink serves to disrupt deep reading and deep thinking. One thing he makes clear is that the hyperlink is yet another artifice that was employed to facilitate more in-depth explorations of the ideas imbued in the particular piece of reading, but our very adaptable and curious brain will inevitably shatter the once monolithic focus that we had developed through deep thinking and spurs us to chase after the shiny, glittery hyperlink, because we are curious. While this is an unwelcomed distraction, it also created an even more unwelcomed development: it trained our cognition to accept this kind of perusing as the norm. So it is that we are less able to concentrate, read and think deeply, and delve into complex and coupled concepts. This is an irreversible effect.

Carr pursues this line of thinking in the latter chapters of the book as he explores the contemporary brain and how we complain of distraction, yet at the same time we are unable and unwilling to quit the habit of juggling many pieces of information at once, even though we know, through psychological experiments, that the human brain is not capable of processing in a massively parallel manner, contrary to what has been believed for years.

Carr will intersperse personal asides and digressions to illustrate his points. These digressions were helpful in making his point for him as well as clear up many points. At the same time, I wonder if these distractions are a tool that Carr is using to make his point in a more meta manner.

At the end of the book, Carr explores the Church of Google and their vision regarding their future, and by proxy, the future of how we, the Google using public, are faced with; how our modes of cognition and thinking will evolve as the internet very quickly and organically changes us.

I will say that I became disturbed as I read the book. In the end however, despite the bleak dystopian future that Carr had painted for us, I finished the book thinking positively, as I now know, through this book, what is facing me and what I need to do. Whether I do what is necessary or whether I succeed in maintaining the best parts of my former cognitive habits is yet to be seen, but at least I know what the enemy looks like.