Welcome to the new reality

A few rambling thoughts on this new reality thing that you can call covid social distancing, or stay-at-home. But don't call it lockdown. That word sounds too scary, says the prime minister, and might cause people to start hoarding food again. We are merely in stage-three-social-distancing, containment phase.

Rambling thought number one: It doesn't really seem fair that I am still waking up with migraines every two weeks. The world has changed, migraines. Don't you understand? You are supposed to stay home. But the caffeine pills will hold out. I can still chase the migraines away at the cost of my sleep.

Number two, I am so very extremely lucky that my work ports almost seamlessly to online. At least, I think this is lucky? I was not assigned to teach this semester, and my research doesn't require much equipment. Finishing up papers requires only a computer, some scratch paper and pens, the internet, and a working brain. Of those four required items, the working brain part is the only bit that isn't consistently available from home, although the internet occasionally flickers under the weight of Remote Everything. But the brain is tricky. Not only did the migraines apparently not get the memo about staying home, but the brain is worried. It isn't used to this.

On the other hand, I found in the first week of panic and distress that the only thing that could soothe the brain was immersing it gently in a cold bath of mathematics. Other former interests couldn't hold it down. I couldn't put it into a novel -- too stressful. I couldn't watch movies -- too stressful. Endless scrolling through Twitter could keep the brain occupied, but not soothe. But if I ripped that brain away from Twitter, I found I could make the hours go by in quiet peace while creating convoluted mathematical figures and ironing out arguments in proofs.

Unfortunately, because my work ports almost completely seamlessly online, I haven't been able to immerse myself in mathematics for more than a few hours at a time. All the meetings I had Before have been ported nearly seamlessly online. I have six research students this semester who I meet with one-on-one for an hour or so each, plus a group meeting, plus a seminar. And now my administrative meetings are picking up again. Promotion Committee, moved online. Referee report due. You can write reports in a crisis, no? Application for a workshop in 18 months, composed with Optimism that sometimes seems misplaced: Optimism that in 18 months, there will be no travel bans, and there will once again be Funding. Mentoring meeting, online. Response required from me on behalf of the women in maths group, emailed. And so it goes.

I miss my office. I have huge physical whiteboards in my office with eight colours of markers, and my students and I usually fill them all each meeting. Now we're trying to do the same thing with a screen. Luckily the university has been generous with support. Even the brand new graduate student, who moved here from Brazil just two weeks before this mess started, has been given a tablet computer on loan, so we can decorate whiteboards made of glass and light and internet with peace and calm and mathematics.


Honestly? I dread the student meetings. I see them approaching on the calendar and I dread them. These students, they are mine. I need them to be okay. Who else will help them immerse their brains in the cool and soothing bath of mathematics, if not me? I am afraid for them, in this crisis. They are single. Some live with roommates, some with family. But some are completely alone, even in a new country. And others have health challenges that didn't get the memo, like my migraines, to stay away, stay home. I see them one-on-one only once each week, and I worry that I won't have the right things to say. I dread that. But then we meet up, and I ask them about their project, and we draw lines on the screen in coloured lighted pixels, miracles and mathematics, and the hour goes quickly. They are resilient, these grown up people who call me supervisor. I don't know if I can ever take on students again, though. The worry is heavy and real. And my brain is only just managing.

What of my own family, cocooned here with me? Tim has been working remotely for decades now. He has a posh setup in the third bedroom: sit-stand desk, ergonomic chair, window looking out across the park. He is a superhero: Remote Worker Man, with the power to conduct work via light and glass and internet from any time zone around the world. I've taken the bedroom, spare monitor, card table. And Jonathan? He has taken the kitchen and living room, and another spare monitor for connecting the tablet we bought him for high school. (Yes, there were two spare monitors in this house before anyone had heard of corona virus, due in no small part to Tim's superpower.) Jonathan has made his own schedule, his own routine, which, funny enough, includes downloading and working through old mathematics exams. He has found his own peace in mathematics in a crisis. But he commented the other day that he probably sees us less now that we're all at home, because we sequester ourselves in our rooms with Work, ported seamlessly online, and miss the morning and afternoon commutes, the relaxed evenings. I think we need to be more careful about eating meals together, taking walks together. Exercising together. We are a Unit. We need each other.

There are more random thoughts to be had, floating through this caffeinated brain of mine, but this post is long already. And the prime minister warns that there are at least six months of cocooning ahead of us. That means there will be plenty of time for more random thoughts.

I leave you with a picture from yesterday's morning run: Yellow tree, harbinger of autumn.

Day 0

Yesterday was our last day at work/school for an indefinite amount of time.

Goodbye for now, ordinary day. Some photos to remember you by.

Sunrise.

Walk to the train station part 1.

Walk to the train station, part 2.

Walk to the train station, part 3.

Train station.

On the platform.

On the train.

Watching the city fly by.

Hopping off.

Shuttle bus.

Arrival on campus.

Jonathan off to his school.

And I turn right towards my building.

Along the Rainforest Walk.

Monash University art, GCF and maths buildings.

Enter from the geology rock garden.

My lovely office, with its math books...

... walls of whiteboards...

Big window.

I will miss you, ordinary day, usual space.

But today, I'd rather be here at home.

Day -1

It's official: Schools will be closing in Victoria on Tuesday. This comes as the number of new cases keep increasing: 28 Thursday, 51 Friday, 67 Saturday. And the third confirmed case likely due to community spreading.

That means Jonathan's last day is tomorrow.

That means my last day is tomorrow.

I'll meet Jonathan in the afternoon with an extra large bag, and we'll empty his locker. And carry everything home on the train, because we still don't have a car, even in a pandemic.

"It's irresponsible to be taking the train these days," said a colleague last week, whom we used to see regularly on our commute. Just one of several irresponsible behaviours we have perpetuated since January. 

It's ok. The trains and buses are pretty empty these days, and smell of disinfectant when we hop on them in the morning.

"Do you smell that?" I asked Jonathan on Friday morning. "It smells like cleaning."

"It smells like coronavirus," he replied.

I'll wear a mask. I'll wash my hands when I arrive. Jonathan will wash his hands. I won't meet anyone in my building. I'll shut myself in my office until Jonathan is ready to go. Meetings by Zoom.

The current estimates are that we will be shut down for six months.

We're ok. Not great, but ok. We didn't panic-buy food. We don't have a one-year supply. But we have a couple of months of supplies. And the Prime Minister reminded us on Thursday that Australia grows food for 75 million people, with a population of only 25 million. There is no reason for the food supply to be disrupted. We'll be ok. Still, we'll slowly -- not in panic -- buy an extra bag of flour, an extra jar of oil, as we can. A little more each time we go. We'll be ok.

We get to shelter-in-place adjacent to a 100 acre park. For at least a little while, we can walk its paths if we stay away from others. If we are completely confined, we can watch the seasons change from our windows.

You see how ok we will be?

Why, then, do I feel like weeping?

Not this year: or Covid-19

Every year since we moved here I think I may have written a post about the Grand Prix, which is held in a park within walking distance of our house. One weekend per year, we are bombarded by noise. Oh the noise noise noise noise! There is the whining of the cars as they zoom around the track. Then the boom of the fighter jets flying low over the crowds. The buzzing of the antique planes. Tickets for Sunday's race are well out of our price range, but back in 2016, just to say we did it, Jonathan and I paid for general admission tickets for the Saturday qualifying race:
http://clownandpoker.blogspot.com/2016/03/australian-grand-prix.html

This year, the Grand Prix opened as usual on Thursday afternoon. But by Friday morning, they were told by the Victorian Health Minister that crowds would be banned from attending. And the people on one of the teams tested positive. So the race was cancelled. Just like that.

***

Tim has spent two weeks of every March for years and years and years watching March Madness basketball in the US with a friend. He had tickets to fly out at the end of this week. And then things started looking sketchy and unhealthy in the US. Tim called on Monday to inquire: what would be the penalty for cancelling his airline tickets? A $300 fee. So he decided to wait and see. He called again on Wednesday. No fee. Tickets cancelled. So no March Madness for Tim this year.

But wait! By Thursday, we found out there would be no March Madness for anyone this year! Madness!

***

The situation is changing so rapidly, we don't know what to think. Someone on Twitter posted that watching a pandemic spread is like watching a car wreck in slow motion. Classes were delayed a week at Monash, and then moved to online-only for the first week of the semester. But currently students are still scheduled to come back on Monday for face-to-face instruction. That's going to put thousands of people back on the buses with me and Jonathan. I'm worried.

***

I'm not the only one worried. My Head of School (like a department chair in the US) skipped a couple of important meetings to try to get our department ready for university closures.

***

Easter events, sporting events, all cancelled.

Jonathan and I have been sharing articles about exponential growth, and the effects of quarantine and social isolation on the death rate. There are clear practices that keep the infections down to a level that hospitals can handle.

Why haven't they cancelled school yet?

***

We were paying very close attention to the horror coming out of China a few weeks ago, when I was still trying to decide if I would re-book my tickets to Germany. First just Wuhan was shut down. Then all of China shut down. Tim's Shanghai office was shut down. Work-related travel to Australasia was cancelled.

At first it was just those coming from China that were bringing the disease to Australia. Then two people from Iran tested positive. Travel from Iran shut down! Then Italy. And now nearly all the new cases have come from the US. Shut it down! Shut it down! The virus is growing rampant and unrestrained in the US. Why are we still letting them in?

Today we had our first confirmed case of community spread. It has been confirmed that the disease is no longer contained in Australia. That changes everything in this country. And possibly nothing. Back to school on Monday. Just without the buzz of the formula one cars this weekend.

***

My throat hurts.

Last week

Last week, with coauthors, I put a 44 page research paper up on a preprint server, based on work we had been doing for a few years. It's the work I describe in this movie, which my university made about me back in November:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnaEG0BpRos

The next day, we submitted a grant proposal to the Australian Research Council. Their rate of funding is low, but we've been funded before. I hope we're funded again. We won't know until November or later.

And then a couple of days after that, I finished a draft of the textbook I've been working on, off and on, for about ten years. On Friday, I also posted it to a preprint server. I'll submit it for publication in about 1.5 weeks now.

Also on Friday, letter in hand, I showed up to take an Australian citizenship interview and test. And I passed. Now I only have to wait for an invitation to a citizenship ceremony, when I will be sworn in as an Australian citizen. I'll keep my US citizenship as well, so I can pay taxes in two countries for the rest of my life.

Then Saturday morning I was up early thinking about faith, but you probably already heard about that one.

In any case, it was a productive week.


Yes, I am kind of exhausted.

On faith

I was contacted last week about writing a faith-affirming essay to be included in a volume for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormons).

I cannot write the essay they want. Instead, I would write this one. 

***

In November, in Philadelphia, an atheist from Israel asked me, a Mormon from Australia, if I believed in God.

And I said I did not know.

"Ah, so you are agnostic," he said.

"No, an agnostic thinks that no one can know if there is a God. I just personally don't know if I believe in God today."

***

God has spoken to me. When I was a young teenager, I felt a wash of the spirit after reading the Book of Mormon for the first time. A few years later, on my own and lonely, I asked God if he would please send me strong visiting teachers, to be my friends. And God told me that that wasn't going to happen; I needed to build up my resilience to loneliness. Once I asked God if I could go on a date with a crush, and God smiled and said sure, but nothing will come of it -- this guy isn't for you. And once, afraid and alone on an overnight train from Germany, I asked God to please send me someone -- a girl -- who spoke English who could help me make it to the airport on time in the morning. God sent a girl about my age to my rail car, who was on her way to be an au pair in Ireland. But she had no idea how to get to the airport. So I found the way for both of us. God was laughing with me then. He was telling me that I needed to recognize that I was capable, and step up to help others.

Those were all small things. What of the bigger things? My Mormon faith told me that women should never work outside the home. And my mother testified that that was true. And my grandmother testified. Women were meant to sacrifice their talents to their husbands and families. When I received several full scholarships to PhD programs all over the country, I asked God if I should sacrifice these gifts? Even without a husband? Or choose a PhD program? But which one? And how to choose? And God was silent. In anger, months later, I asked God why he hadn't helped me make the decision. And God told me that he trusted me to make hard decisions. He trusted me.

***

How could I not know if I believe in God, when God has spoken to me so many times?

God spoke to Lucy Walker. When she was a young teenager, after the unexpected death of her mother, a religious leader more than twice her age sent her father away on a mission, and invited Lucy to live in his home, like a daughter. Soon after, he told Lucy that God commanded her to be his plural wife, in secret, and she must agree overnight to the union or she would be damned. Lucy spent the night in prayer and agony. But in the morning she was visited by peace and light and a sure understanding that the man was a prophet and she would be his plural wife. When you and I read this story, we recognize classic child abuse. Lucy saw it as the pinnacle of her religious experience and the foundation of her testimony. God told Lucy to marry her abuser.

God spoke to the young men who used civilian airplanes as weapons, and killed thousands in September 2001. Those young men sacrificed their very lives for God, knowing he would bless them with a glorious afterlife. But you and I know they were only terrorists.

Who is this God who speaks, condoning child abuse and murder?

***

I grew tired of being angry. I grew tired of having to give different answers to my child's questions every Sunday after church. I knew all the right answers to the Mormon temple recommend interview questions, but I could no longer with integrity give the right answers simultaneously to question number three, affirming my belief in the restoration of the Mormon church, and question number nine, was I honest. So I moved jobs. I let my recommend lapse. I still attended, played the organ, taught the women's meeting. Tried. But grew tired of being angry. I grew tired of the fact that no one cared if I came. They cared if my son came. They cared if my husband came. But even though my son and husband only came because I came, no one cared about me, the woman.

So one sunny summer Sunday afternoon, waiting for the tram to take us home from church, my husband responded to my anger with his own quiet words. "You don't have to keep going. Maybe it's time to take a break."

And I looked him in the eye and said, "Maybe it is."

***

God has spoken to me since my Mormon temple card lapsed. One afternoon, walking home alone from work in the park near my apartment, I argued with God privately, a one-sided conversation in my head. How could I continue to support the Mormon church, I asked God, when their policies towards their people were so cruel? When they willfully suppressed the talents of their women and the futures of their LGBTQ members? When they had been on the wrong side of every social issue since the nineteenth century? I told God that I couldn't fit in that space anymore, not unless my heart was torn out and replaced with a completely different heart.

"That's it," said God. "You need a new heart."

***

How does one obtain a new heart? Does one stay up all night praying, like Lucy? Or does one sacrifice one's life, like a terrorist? What about the things the Mormons say to do? To read scriptures, to pray harder? Those things have I done all my life, and yet I have this heart here in my hands. Jesus said to the young man in that situation to go and sell all and give to the poor. But I have a family to feed. And a husband who wouldn't let me.

Perhaps one takes a step back in life, to pause. To think. To evaluate. And then one keeps moving forward. Because God won't make the hard decisions for you.

In July, visiting my parents in the Mormon community where I grew up, I attended church at my Home Ward. My former young women's leader spoke. She related her experiences as the wife of a missionary. As she spoke, I felt the Spirit descend upon me, thick and tangible, and I knew I was in a good place, and this was where I belonged.

Simultaneously, I received a Revelation. This Spirit, this tangible, physical, physiological response, was a superpower of evolution. It led the teenagers from broken homes to face their empty futures, abuse, self-inflicted death, with peace and light and understanding that they were serving a Higher Good. That this would be how they Mattered. And their tribes, their clans, their people -- they survived and belonged and grew closer and powerful with the sacrifice of these lesser people. The Spirit is a massive evolutionary advantage for the homo sapiens.

***

I used to speak to God daily. But my prayers have changed. I don't want to speak to God the disappointed father. If there is a God, I hope he still trusts me.

***

Here, at the end of this essay, I think a little about my readers. Some readers will see my anger and my pride and shake their heads in judgement, and know that I am wrong to step away. And those readers are correct. Some readers will see the abuse and the irrationality of religion and shake their heads in judgement and know that I am right to step away. And those readers are also correct.

I am not agnostic. I know that people can know that there is a God. Lucy knew. The terrorists knew.

I just don't know if I know. And I cannot trust the Spirit.

For now, I have to walk forward within the constraints of my life, and act with integrity and morality. And initiative. More initiative, I think.

This is my faith.

Thank you for inviting the essay.

The seven horsemen

In January 2020, we had visits from the seven horsemen of the apocalypse.

First, in early January, fire. The bushfires in Australia raged so far out of control that they made international headlines, accompanied by pictures of burned koalas, and kangaroos jumping away from raging infernos. All our friends abroad, from North America, Asia, and Europe, wrote and hoped that we were safe. We were. Although only a few weeks before, I had spent hours pouring over airbnb listings of holiday homes, trying to decide whether to take our vacation in January in the areas that were now covered in flames. With those places now evacuated, we were happy we had not made a booking.

Next, poison. Although in Melbourne there were no fires, for a couple of weeks the winds blew toxic smoke to settle over the city. The air quality became worse than in Bejing. Tim bought masks to protect our lungs. We stayed inside as much as we could.

Third, the sword. The war-mongering leader of a country in the northern hemisphere massacred an Iranian official, leading the world to the brink of war. With commercial airplanes being shot down over Iran, I pulled out a globe and very carefully chose airline tickets for my conference in Germany in February that avoided Iranian airspace altogether.

The next week, ice. Our suburb was hit by torrential rain. A few miles away in the suburb of Caulfield, golf-ball sized hail fell from the sky. Sidewalks and roads flooded. Trams were cancelled. Homes and vehicles were damaged. And the storm didn't even put out the bushfires, since it swept south from Melbourne rather than continuing east where the fires were still raging.

The following week, mud. Far away in the centre of the country, windstorms swept the red desert sand into massive clouds. The clouds blew with the ferocious wind for miles and miles, until high in the air, they hit a wet cold front coming off of the southern ocean, and rained down on Melbourne. We heard the pleasant sound of rain falling all night. But in the morning, sidewalks, cars, and plants all had a fine coating of mud on them.

Sixth, disease. A new virus had been spreading only a short 12 hour flight north of Melbourne, in China. It finally reached Australia and a few other countries. Global panic ensued. In China, the city of Wuhan was locked off. One of Tim's colleagues in China was among the last to get out before all the trains were stopped. Soon after, Shanghai was also shut down. Tim's office in Shanghai received strict notices not to come in, at all. Work from home. Don't go in the streets. Shut the elevators in high rises so people weren't tempted to go out. Remember those airline tickets I carefully purchased to avoid Iran? I had chosen flights with a stopover in mainland China. The flights were cancelled by the airline. And then even Monash University shut their doors and moved the start date of the semester back a week, with requirements that the first week of classes involve no face-to-face meetings. Online lectures only.

And finally, the week after that came the seventh horseman of the apocalypse ... school. Jonathan started a new year of school.

I hope February is less eventful.