I did the most ordinary of things today. I hopped on the subway to go pick up some books from my office, swinging by some shops on the way for specialty groceries Italian and Japanese, and met a friend for a chat on a bench on Union Square. At school I bumped into a colleague I hadn't seen in a while and heard her news: she just got married!
Except of course this is one of the most extraordinary thing I've done in months, triggered by the first day in a month that the building housing my office was briefly open. The colleague came back to NYC for the same reason. In Pittsburgh since Easter she expects to be there through Christmas.The campus seemed frozen in time. My office was as I had left it (a relief, actually; in the past my windows have leaked, and we've had
some pretty impressive storms lately). But the empty spaces in classrooms and public areas were creepy, a ghost town.
It's indeed creepy to consider that it will stay this way through the end of the year, class and campus communitas displaced to the suburbs of zoom, which we have to hope get close enough to what we do to satisfy students, and teachers too. I felt acutely the challenges of virtual campus community.My friend and I talked about the things we've learned in our zoom exile - things we hope to carry with us going forward. Focusing on them can help us experience this moment as more than one of loss, especially as it's become clear (in the words of our provost) "we have to take the status quo off the table as an option" for the future. What's next?!
