Path planning

One would think that the pandemic would put a lot of things on hold. Unfortunately (here in the US anyway) that isn’t the case, it just makes things harder to do because everyone expects you to perform at a higher rate now that you’re not commuting to school… how the hell that works is beyond me.

Things have gotten complicated due to the pandemic. I’ve been designated essential one day then stopped from coming in the next. We’ve had restrictions imposed on our human research and have had to figure out how to live in this backwards new world where half the people want to pretend like nothing is going on. Where over a thousand people are dying a day from this and that isn’t enough. We demand bodies in the streets and until that happens, fuck it.

This rant brought to you by the letters F and U. Also by a request from my PI. He means well and as always I need to qualify what I’m about to say with I absolutely love my PI, both of them are great and that’s not my problem, my problem is with the system, with the government, with our lack of response to all the death. Because we can’t press pause no matter how many deaths we have, I’ve been tasked to figure out my degree plan in the pandemic.

Basically I’ve been asked to come up with the milestones I have left, give a time frame for me to hit each of them. It feels a little surreal to have to do that when we’re dealing with all of this, but we don’t get to stop and so here I am trying to plan for the future. In a perfect world I would be graduating in two years. With the pandemic I’ve lost almost half a year of work, we’ve been limping along as best as we can, but certainly it isn’t full speed ahead like we were doing.

I just don’t know what the future has in store and it’s hard to plan or even want to plan with all the death and indifference. At this point I would prefer if the people not caring were out celebrating all the death, it would feel more real than watching people be indifferent about it.