Zoombies

The dictionary tells me that I can describe someone as a zombie if their face or behavior indicates "no feeling, no understanding, or no interest in what is going on around them".  Well, I've certainly seen a few zombies in the classroom over a few decades of teaching.

But thanks to COVID-19, I now feel qualified to add to the zombie section of the dictionary.   After collecting many hours of data, I can confidently identify someone as a Zoombie if all cues traveling across Zoom -- the once just a video platform but now emergency on-line teaching rink -- fail to indicate interest, understanding, enthusiasm, or engagement of any kind.  While it is challenging enough to accurately judge student engagement when students are sitting in the classroom in front of me, it's next to impossible to make those kinds of judgements when students are scattered in the wind, hiding behind blank thumbnails or head shots taken at a time when education was much more ordinary and smiles were far more commonplace.

On the one hand, the Zoombies are a terrible threat to my teaching prowess (ha).   While normally I would feel comfortable taking a few cracks at how profoundly exciting the engineering topics I teach are (not), it's nearly impossible to be funny while teaching engineering via Zoom.  Most attempts at humor zoom in one ear and out the other.   And, for me, the unfortunate consequence of having humor fall flat time and time again is that I have become the professor that I swore to never be.  With the greatest of ease, I too have become someone who can put students to sleep as quickly and effectively as many of my professors did during my undergraduate education.  This newfound talent makes me cringe and cringe again.   But, the cringing I do... I do with my video turned off, so that if a student just happens to be paying attention, he or she can't see me fold under the weight of my own self-acknowledged boring delivery. 

All is not lost with the emergence of the Zoombies however.  The lack of any human activity emerging from a gallery of thumbnails on my computer screen is at its best -- devoid of distraction.  And, undistracted, I can take a deep dive into Nerdville and stay there.  Focused and immersed in one equation, derivation, or another, I make far fewer mistakes than I would in an ordinary classroom.  Without facial cues, emotional expressions, and other indicators of what's going on with my audience as my lectures, examples, activities, and other stabs at engagement ebb and flow, my head is almost entirely occupied with delivering content at a steady, accurate, and clear pace. 

Woo Hoo!
I may put 'em to sleep, but I sure don't fill their dreams with technical errors.

On a sincere and serious note, though, I would like to apologize to all my Zoombies for putting you to sleep (well -- to those of you who actually woke up to attend class in the first place).   I appreciate that your thumbnails feign interest and that you log into Zoom at the appropriate time to simulate attending class.

But, most of all, I'd like to thank the Zoombies that come to office hours.  In office hours, I am blessed with web cams that are much more frequently turned on than left off.  And, as the questions and interaction ebb and flow during office hours, I see that you are not Zoombies at all.  Instead, you are as I suspected -- human beings striving to learn and committed to doing well even during this odd Zoom-centric life we find ourselves navigating together. 

Not so Unusual

When on-line church services first began hitting the "airwaves" in early March, watching the Pastor preach on Sunday morning to an empty sanctuary while I absorbed the wisdom of the message in my pajamas was nothing less than really weird. 

That's not to say that I was one to spring out of bed on Sunday morning, burst out the door, jump in the car, and bound into church.  Mornings just weren't my thing and weekends made them even less my thing.  But, more often than not, I managed to roll out of bed on Sunday morning and make it to church kind of on time and rarely for the early 9 a.m. service.  I always sat in the back, preferably partially hidden by a post, so that if I succumbed to my body's desire to continue sleeping the morning away, the Pastor was less likely to notice.   And my propensity for napping in the morning had little to do with Pastor's message.  Mornings just weren't my thing. 

As we headed into on-line delivery of sermons, messages, inspiration, communion, worship, and a myriad other aspects of church life that for my entire adult life had taken place in person, I found a few reasons (mostly superficial ones) to enjoy the transition.  I really enjoyed the part about sipping hot coffee in my pajamas while taking in the sermon and worship, but the rest took some adjustment. Sometimes during on-line services (shame on introverted me), I enjoyed not having to greet the person next to me.   But more often than not, I missed the interaction and the connection that could only come with physically being present in the sanctuary and coffee hour after church. I missed in-person lessons, Sunday school, and the irreplaceable feel of live music and singing that seemed to make it oh so much easier for the holy spirit to fill my often wandering and distracted heart. 

By Easter Sunday, on-line church was part of our weekly routine, although it didn't always get delivered on Sunday morning. Pre-recorded video was more likely to finally make it onto our daily schedule in the evening, and sometimes even waited until Monday to be viewed (shame on undisciplined us).   We weren't avoiding Christian living.  But, I imagine we were not the only ones struggling to keep up a structured daily routine during stay-at-home days that increasingly blurred into one another.

Easter deserved to emerge from the blur, so we awoke on Easter Sunday, dressed in some semblance of Sunday best, and took a seat before the computer.  It was not so unusual anymore to walk into cyberspace to see Pastor.  And to his credit, Pastor had become funnier over the past weeks, learning to preach to an empty sanctuary and bring humor into the whole process and procedure.

Today, Pastor spoke of the hope that Easter brought to the world in the miracle of the resurrection.  He spoke to how unusual it was that on this day, we would not be with our families, celebrating Easter together.  He reassured us that isolation would not go on forever, and soon, we would be back to what was normal and usual, celebrating holiday with our families. And, the loneliness of this Easter would become just a sad memory in the landscape of our lives.

As he spoke, a wave of melancholy rolled into my heart, filling every corner and giving me a lot of pause.  Because -- this Easter was not so unusual for my husband and I.  On Easter and most other holidays, we would eat dinner in our house alone -- my husband's family would as usual be busy with other things and my only surviving relative, my sister, was thousands of miles away.   Families would come together and celebrate, deferring friends to other more ordinary days.  As best as we could, we had adapted to the loneliness and the sadness that came with Easter and the other annual holidays that arrived while we were in the Pacific Northwest.

Of the many changes in lifestyle and daily activities that came along with the COVID-19 pandemic, loneliness on Easter was not a change at all.

It was simply routine. 

Torture by Pizza

I have spent several weeks collecting data.   Now, I am certain.  It is not just my imagination.  It is true.... The number of pizza commercials on TV has skyrocketed during April 2020.   

It might be my pizza-starved imagination that sees the cheese as creamier, the toppings as more plentiful, the veggies as more vibrant, the dough as tantalizingly fresh and fluffy.   Even the pepperoni and hamburger are starting to look appetizing.  And to add to my COVID-19 lockdown-induced delusions, pizza is now starting to look like, on top of all its other appealing attributes.... healthy.  

As I stare mesmerized at the television and as the multitude of toppings float languidly down the screen onto the waiting abundance of cheese below, the mere 30 second commercial seems to transform into a minutes-long event.   Toppings of every shape, size, color, and caloric content appear, appealing to every last taste bud.  Fresh, hot pizzas are attached to smiling faces offering to deliver pizza in a flash... contact-free and safe from COVID exposure.     

Jolting myself out of my semi-hypnotic state, tearing my gaze away from the screen with all of my willpower, I gaze sadly at some point in the distance that is nowhere near the TV screen.   With each passing day, I have come to realize the gruesome reality of this stay-at-home situation.

It is Torture by Pizza. 

While Dominos, Papa Johns, and cousin companies reach out to America to provide pizza-induced solace in this public health emergency to those who have a phone and credit card in hand, their well-intentioned, profit-driven marketing has forgotten one thing:   their delivery area is limited.

While generally content and extraordinarily grateful to be living in the woods on an island while under stay-at-home orders from our governor, I have come to realize that someone should had the sense to block these commercials from our island.    A pizza block on all satellite, cable, and other TV transmissions onto the island would have been most helpful to preserving my mental health.

Indeed. 

Back to staring at all that cheese....

NOTE:
Frozen Pizza does not count.