Technological Necessity

Evening falls on Santa Fe. The light is darkening to match the coming of night, the visibility in my room dwindling as minutes pass on this Tuesday evening. My need for the light grows too great to ignore, though I’d rather avoid the harshness of the overhead light as I sit down to write. Although the room’s main light irritates my senses, I still feel the need for light to set the stage on my writing space. The artificial glare of my computer screen’s white light piercing through the dark stifles my creative flow. Too deeply immersed in dark and electronic brightness creeping through it, I feel the craving of something other than the limited space of the dim. I need to see in this room that houses me against the dangers outside my door. Every corner, every vinyl figure of a princess or Marvel superhero, every necklace that hangs on the jewelry organizer beside my desk. I need them all in view, unobscured by the shadow the night imposes.

I hear the steady hum of the computer I’m typing on, its uninterrupted buzz of sound a constant of each day I spend before this machine upon which I write. I cannot feel it against my fingers, but still it permeates the room in this August of myriad emotions. Here alone with the sound and the screen, I contemplate the hum as a heartbeat for this silver and black laptop, or maybe an endless breath that sustains its existence of functioning. It is my lifeline to the greater world and the people I cannot speak to face to face in this covid-locked world. I rely so much on it and what it allows me to achieve in writing, though behind its façade, I don’t see its inner workings or what allows it to process information for me each day. I connect to it each day while spending many of my waking hours sitting in my tattered black swivel chair in front of it. I spend more time with this computer than anyone else these days and yet I’ve never thought about what fuels its on-and-off experience as an essential writing device before now.

Maybe it’s because of the video game docuseries I watched shortly before I began writing. Maybe the alchemy of circuits and CPUs is fresh in my memory, an indirect gateway to my understanding the laptop I watched the series on. I find as I write that technology is very much on my mind. I am more aware than I have been in days that this computer is keeping me sane and fulfilled during my struggle with isolation. What would I do if it stopped its constant hum? Would I fall back into a silent despair without waking for the sole purpose of writing in Microsoft Word? I suppose the various notebooks I’ve collected over the years would draw me back in so that I might reacquaint myself with pen and paper. I’ve spent so much time writing in a digital space that I feel most comfortable writing that way. I’ve given myself over to the circuits and digital byways, nearly a citizen of its LED corridors as Tron circumnavigating the electronic neon of the Grid.

I’ve reflected on my need for the laptop screen I see every day in this moment of listening to the motorized rush the humming produces. I’ve started to appreciate and fear my need for it as my fingers dash across the keys to form words before my eyes. In this moment, it’s only me, the laptop, and the Word document I type into. Behind the smudges on the lenses of my glasses, I see more than just this display of neutral-toned graphics. I see the thing that has the potential to keep me going in this pandemic. The hum intermingles with the sporadic bursts of my fingers tapping the lettered keyboard. The words in my head, my reflections, have taken shape on the very object I’m contemplating. I’ve spoken without making a sound. Though the hour grows later, I feel a tie to this moment and the space I’m occupying within the purple walls around me. My computer has been my company. Have I fallen too far into the rabbit hole crafted of code? Am I capable of distancing myself from its cyber gaze? I’m not yet at liberty to say. Only in this moment of a Santa Fe night in late August, I strike the keys, remaining in tune to the need of my device.

Before the Virus

Before the Virus

Before the coronavirus, we lived a charmed life of social interaction and the freedom to leave our houses. We took it for granted. It was the norm, the world as it had always been. No one thought anything of touching their loved ones. We came and went as we wanted. “Quarantine” was a word seldom used outside of hypothetical scenarios and isolated incidents nobody thought would ever happen to them. The world was built on people interacting, people crowded together. Gathering and interacting was always the norm.

Nobody foresaw weeks into months where we would be sequestered in the confinement of our own homes trying to avoid any risk of catching a life-threatening infection. It probably never occurred to most people that hospitals would come dangerously close to running out of necessary equipment meant to protect its workers and save lives. We thought we were safe. We thought those we loved could keep coming home to us just as they always did, that nothing like this could ever happen. No one thought life would just stop. When it did, we were so unprepared for the effects of it that for all intents and purposes, the world around us was in peril.

Socially, we were divided by the long-reaching effects of the virus. We couldn’t just venture out without a thought to what dangers there were anymore. Our only means of leaving the house came in the form of needing food and medical care in this dire time. When we left, store shelves were running empty, people wore masks and avoided nearing each other. It was like scenes out of the apocalypses we had seen depicted in movies, only real and terrifying in how much it threatened to take from us.

Before the virus, personal freedom and walking out into the world without caution were things we never thought would be lost to us. There was little to no risk of anyone becoming infected and dying from everyday contact. Our apocalypse came sooner than any of us ever expected, in a different form than the zombie movies we watched when movie theaters were still open promised in their vision of a destroyed future. We learned that things were more finite than we ever could’ve realized. We saw that in the worst of times, some people cared more about themselves than the danger they posed to others in leaving home. Pushed to our limits, we had to make sacrifices and reevaluate the necessity of things we once took for granted. We had to learn how be selfless in our actions, to put aside our need for the world as it was in normalcy just to keep those we loved and the people they’d interact with safe.

The coronavirus did more than separate us. It challenged our perspectives on a safe world where we were free. It required us to ask ourselves to let go in the name of doing what was right for society as a whole. Nothing the world had yet faced affected our way of living as much as the novel coronavirus. We lived as we wanted until it threatened the safety many thought was simply a given. Worst of all, it divided people in more ways than just the physical. Asian people saw the blame shift to them as ignorant masses treated them as carriers of this indiscriminate virus. Suspicion became the norm. Because we all lost our freedom and safety, the need for blame arose in the worst of us. The new vision of the world we were forced to take on was more divided than ever.

In the year 2020, we faced a crisis that held us apart. We closed and locked our doors, covered our faces, avoided everyone we could be distant from. We learned to let go because we had no other choice. The very notion of what it meant to be free became more precious than it ever was. Our world changed fundamentally, changing with it our view of what was necessary just to ensure everyone else’s survival. Coronavirus is a chapter in the world’s history that will be remembered for years to come. It was the pandemic that reshaped society and enforced a new normal we weren’t yet ready for. So much of how the world moves forward will be informed by the impact the virus has had. In this desperate time of seclusion, we must learn how to proceed in ways that protect everyone, our society now revolving around caution rather than the normalcy of social interaction.

Here Again

So it's been a while since I've been here. A lot has happened in this time, the most notable of which you're seeing play out all over the news. I felt like coming back to this whole blogging thing as I'm self-isolating here at home due to the pandemic. I have been lucky enough to be healthy and relatively okay during this time despite feeling a loss of freedom because of what's going on, but that's minor compared to what other people are going through. I have been watching this crisis result in amplified racism towards Asian people. Being Asian American myself, this has been difficult for me to witness knowing the division makes this so much worse on everyone.

So what am I here to talk about in this crisis? Simple. I am here to implore you not to let this crisis shape how you treat other people. A virus is indiscriminate in who it will infect. Coronavirus is not "the Chinese virus" and there is no excuse for calling it that when the name of the disease is literally all over the news. Using this crisis to scapegoat other people and intentionally divide while stoking fear is irresponsible and heartless as coronavirus continues to inflict enormous damage on the world. The powers that be trying to justify long-held racism in this time serves no purpose to the world at large other than to divide and instill fear towards people who are just as vulnerable as everyone else now. We as a society have to do better than pursuing blame when the real enemy here is the virus itself. Discriminating and casting blame is not going to help anyone.

Though I have been fortunate enough not to have this current xenophobia directed towards me, I have seen plenty of it directed towards other Asian people. It's given me anxiety over how things will be towards us if/when this all returns to some semblance of normalcy. The future is uncertain, but the racism is not going to just go away if the virus does. Now more than ever, we need to keep rational and not let this virus influence our view of others. Unfortunately, we have history repeating itself here and not enough people remaining reasonable during this time. It's something that's going to further what racial divide there was prior. I hope more than anything that the world can learn to weather this crisis without further harming people based upon their ethnicity. That is the last thing we need now.

I'll try to come back to posting here during this self-quarantine. I'm trying to be as productive as possible during this time and I feel the need to keep speaking from my own view of what is going on. Stay safe, everyone. Be reasonable and kind during this time.

Until next time,

Debbie