No Masks On (My) Campus

Not in the offices, anyway. We still have to wear them in the classrooms.

Well, um, praise God. I think.

Uh.. Free at Last. Free at last?

I am once again free to show my ugly face around campus again, and it feels…

Strange.

We went maskless on…uh. last week (?), I think, and it took me a couple of days to get use to it. I kept walking into spaces where everybody was maskless and wondering what was wrong with them? it doesn’t help that the copy room was days behind us in adapting. I walk in there, bare-faced and they are still covered, and I wonder if I should be, too, wile I’m in their space. Shod I keep carrying masks. No?

No one has to stop wearing masks on campus (or anywhere else), if they don’t want, so there are few holdouts, hear and there, defiantly ignoring the new policies.

Like anti-maskers, in reverse.

It figures.

How soon before a store employee gets jumped for asking someone to remove their mask?

The city buses have not transitioned, yet. We are still wearing masks, still social distancing by sitting one person for every two hairs. It has been a nice twelve months, not having to sit next to other people, not having to worry about the next person on the bus plopping down next to you, crowding you up against the window – not having to pay bus fare.

The Metro (buses) stop social distancing, though, on Monday. I don’t know when we lift our masks.

But, it is a shame, in a few ways’. I have to start shaving, regularly, again. I have to stop talking to myself. When you are wearing a mask, o one can see your lips move. I have to control my facial expressions. No more sneering at fashion victims.

The days of ample personal space are gone. We’ll be standing cheek to jowl before you know it – on the bus, at the store, in lines everywhere – and this bizarre period in world history will fade into the past, with 9/11 and and HINI and SARS, slowly, with canyon-deep scars and endless ripples.

But, I will miss it, you know, in a way. Parts of it. The personal space. The nearly-empty campus. The un-crowded streets. The peace. The quiet.

Even pandemics have silver linings.