How Young People Are Preparing to Party in 2021
After Noori Merchant, 23, got her first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine, she reached out to he friends to make travel plans for this summer.
“I’m going crazy. Like, I’m going absolutely nuts,” she says. “I don’t want to get to the point in my life where I’m tied down from family, from work, from whatever, and I didn’t make the most of my youth. So I was the one who was like ‘we need to hang out, we need to hang out.”
Her friends told her they needed to get their shots before they could hang out again. So she’s waiting on that. In the meantime, she’s preparing by practicing her dance moves in a skin-flaunting sequinned top with a silver tulle skirt she hasn’t worn in forever in her Washington D.C. home.
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I Want the Pandemic to End /I Don\’t Want the Pandemic to End: Two Perspectives
When Anika Chandok’s Bakersfield middle school shut down last spring and her classes went online, it felt like the beginning of an adventure. “I was in my pajamas, sitting in my comfy chair, “ the thirteen-year-old recalls. “I was texting my friends during class.”
“Then I received my academic progress report. I was an A and B student before the pandemic and now I was failing three classes.” Anika gathers her wits and shakes her head, trying to clear her thoughts.
“The academic slide left my mother in tears. My mom insisted I create to-do lists and moved my workspace into the guest bedroom to pull up my grades.” Pausing to take a sip from her water bottle Anika looks at her therapist Laura Mitchell Moore who gives her an encouraging nod.
The Trauma of Returning to the Work Place
Anil chews on the stub of the pen with which he was writing as he reviews the email from his boss: Since all employees at the healthcare start-up, he worked for had been vaccinated, the corporate bigwigs had decided that a return to the office could safely be ordered.
Re-entry date: May 1
Feeling a rising tide of panic rush upward through his spinal cord and into his brain, Anil can’t stop the thoughts going around and around in his brain like the bullocks they used in his father’s village to turn the water wheel. “I won’t be able to spend time with baby Arya anymore. How will my wife manage without my help?”
The Gold-Digging Women of The British Raj*
Princess Brinda Devi’s heart was like the black hole of a coal mine—it was so dense that there was no room for light, and so deep she was afraid it would suck her in. She told herself she pitied Stella, but heard laughter answering her—how difficult it was to deceive yourself when you had known yourself a full thirty-nine years.
She had a servant summon Stella to her sitting room in the afternoon when the Prince had gone to a Royal Heads of State meeting. When Stella came before her, Princess Brinda did not speak, but rose from the Divan and removed Stella’s sari palav from her shoulder, as if in welcome, so she could study the girl.
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Calling all #writers #authors #poets #dreamers:
I was incredibly lucky to be interviewed recently by the founder of the “Women in our Town” podcast based in Canada. Check out the article for tips for writers and those who aspire to be published.
The Doctor Who Got Fired For Using Left-over Vaccine*
The Georgia doctor looked at the clock ticking loudly on the wall in his office, with a staccato, steady beat. Twenty minutes past 5 p.m. He had six hours.
Now that a vial of Covid-19 vaccine had been opened for his last patient on this blustery February day, he had to find ten eligible people for its remaining doses before the valuable medicine—more precious than liquid gold, he’d been told—expired. In six hours.
Scrambling, the doctor made house calls and directed people to his office outside Savannah. Some were acquaintances; others strangers. A bed-ridden octogenarian woman. A mother with a special-needs child who used a ventilator. A man in his 80s with dementia.
The Unequal Scramble for Vaccines
As soon as Los Angeles County began offering Covid vaccines to residents 65 and older, Sonia Khatri, whose non-profit agency ran a medical clinic, noticed something different.
“Suddenly our clinic was full of white people,” said Dr. Khatri, the head of Asha Kiran, which provided services to the poor. “We’ve never had that before. We serve people who are disproportionately colored—Indians, Pakistanis, Mexicans, some African-Americans.” She adjusted the steel-rimmed thick eyeglasses on her nose, which everybody said made her look like Gandhi.
\”I feel responsible for my son\’s death\”: the surge in Student Suicides
Baljeet Kaur saw the way they looked at her: at the funeral service, at the temple—which smelled of ghee and of underarm sweat—where a small congregation gathered after the cremation. When they came to the house carrying covered casserole dishes and potted plants. The hushed whispers, the looks of reproach, the pity on their faces. They looked at her as if they were surprised that she was still here on earth, still able to stand, and walk and breathe. Often they did not even meet her eyes or they looked away when they did as if her pain might be contagious.
“Yes, I am a mother to be pitied.” She wanted to yell and scream until her throat bled.
Elderly and Anxious: Desperate to get a vaccine
Rajeev sat at the six-drawer wooden desk that he had bought for twenty dollars at a thrift store when he’d moved to California some three decades ago. It was made of oak and at one time had been a sturdy piece of furniture, probably purchased for some fashionable den or office space in someone’s home or workplace. Now it sat on a threadbare Kashmiri silk rug with one of its legs propped up on two old record album covers of Muhammad Rafi—considered one of the greatest Indian film playback singers—that had once belonged to his father.
He took a big sip from the steaming cup of masala chai that his wife had brewed for him and prepared to go into battle.