think positive
Okay, so the president and First Lady are COVID-positive. The news came out overnight, and even though Shobhit was awake, in bed and looking at his phone when I went to bring it up as I was getting ready for work this morning, he did not know it yet. I got to be the one to break the news to him. He was positively giddy within minutes. He almost immediately went into pipe-dream mode: hoping both President Fuckwit and Pence would become incapacitated, thereby putting Nancy Pelosi in charge, who could then withdraw the nominee for the Supreme Court. I mean, keep dreaming. It had already been reported even then that Pence had tested negative; Shobhit countered that it can take days for the virus to be detected. Well, that point is just as relevant to Joe Biden, who also tested negative. Biden certainly had a sensible response to the news on Twitter.
The chances of the president dying of this are exceedingly slim; he's the president, after all, which means—fair or not—he's going to have better health care at hand than anyone else in America. Shobhit also noted that Boris Johnson in the UK had been hospitalized for something like a month. What would that do to the election if that happened to the president, I wonder? A U.S. election has never been postponed, but I suppose there's a first time for everything. Still, doing so would clearly be incredibly difficult, so there's that. The candidate has no need to be present in any particular place for voters to be able to vote, after all.
There won't be any Trump campaigning in person for at least two weeks, that much is clear. There is a fair amount of debate about whether that will hurt or improve his chances, and I suspect the former. Whatever the case, I am ready for November 3 to have come and gone. Or more importantly I suppose, January 20.
Shobhit worked until 8:30 last night, and he only wanted to watch something light after he got home, so we watched three episodes of season two of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Prior to that, I got 37 minutes into the insanely critically acclaimed film The Souvenir on Amazon Prime Video, and holy shit is that movie dull. I welcomed it when Gabriel interrupted with a phone call, although for some reason my phone did not actually ring, so I only saw his voice mail and I had to call back twice before I actually got him on the phone.
We discussed parameters of the "Movie Draft" we decided to do, in the style of those being done on the Big Picture podcast. We settled on 1999, and we're going to get together virtually Sunday evening to go through it; Lea will participate as well. I'm looking forward to it.
I just got done with Friday Office Zoom Meetup #9—the last one to be done on a Friday; they're being switched to Tuesdays next week, in the interest of choosing the one day each week it seems the most office staff might actually be available. Many people just don't have the availability on Fridays; most of Merchandising is out in stores on Thursdays; people often are crammed with meetings on Wednesdays; Mondays people just tend to be busy overall after coming back to work after the weekend.
We discussed all this stuff in the "Meet-up Planning Call" I had been invited to on Monday afternoon earlier this week. I was the only one not from SE&R on that call. Eventually we all agreed to switch to Tuesdays, and thankfully, we also settled on not making the calls any more formally structured.
Today's call was one of the most sparsely attended, although I suppose technically the total in the end was five people—only because Adrienne got on for like, one minute, just to let us know when she would send out the change announcement to the office via email this afternoon. So she hardly counts. And actually for several minutes at the start it was just Rebecca and me, but then, surprise surprise, Claudia joined! So that was really great to see her. Not long after she got on the call, Andrew joined, using his phone while in the back room of one of the stores. I always enjoy seeing him.
We talked a lot of politics, in the end, and the conversation wound up so compelling, particularly between Rebecca and Andrew and me at the end, we actually ran a few minutes over. So that's the reason for the timing of my posting this DLU today. But now I really need to get back to it and try to get some real work done this afternoon. Then I get to go meet up with Tracy at Volunteer Park at 5:30, which I'm really looking forward to.
[posted 1:10 pm]