mar 27

Um, yeah. Tiger King. ?!?!?!?!? God bless America.

The first two posts on my instagram feed were RIP tributes to COVID-19 victims. A friend of a friend died and a celebrity died. More of these to come, I suspect.

A few days ago, I received an email from the University of Oregon (well-deserved spam from a recent googling of college options for Bowen’s PSAT scores and GPA) and they are not requiring SAT or ACT scores for fall applications. That is kinda cray. I imagine other colleges and universities will follow suit. Without completion of AP classes and exams and no standardized test scores, the evaluation process for colleges looks to be very different for the class of 2020. The corona effect.

I feel like all of this is a unique opportunity to try things we might never have tried before. Besides a pandemic, what could’ve shaken up the college entrance process? Rich people going to jail for photoshopping their kids’ faces on waterpolo player bodies? Paying SAT test proctors to correct wrong answers? Nope. That kind of thing didn’t seem to fundamentally change the process, but maybe coronavirus will? Maybe we’ll find/finally prove that leveling the playing field yields extraordinary-ness.

I also think a lot about how the workforce will change. On March 5, my grad school program put on a conference about “the future of work.” The following week, they were like, well, we didn’t realize the future was coming next week! I think lots of people are discovering unexpected work productivity at home. Jeff hated working from home pre-corona. But I think it’s growing on him. He’s into wearing jammies all day, listening to music super loud without headphones, and the 5:30pm hot tub appointment vs the 5:30pm bus ride.

I wonder if lots of people will realize they’re perfectly capable of cleaning their own homes or cutting their kids’ hair or bathing their dogs. Hair dye is flying off the shelves.

Meanwhile, the president continues to prove himself an inept leader, making a nonpartisan crisis partisan. It’s disgusting.