Tag: covid

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New Humor Piece up at Little Old Lady Comedy

Happy 2021, er’ryone!

You have probably noticed that many schools are returning to in-person school this week. As a teacher, I have an “inside” view on the transition intel, and I can tell you this is a very messy, challenging, confusing, brain-breaking, and downright frightening experience for teachers and administrators. Teachers are NOT getting paid extra for all the additional hours they are putting in to figure out how to transition to in-person learning, not to mention the medical bills we are all incurring due to the stress.

Since the COVID pandemic, I have begun to write satire because it allows me to talk about difficult subjects in a palatable way. That is how this piece, inspired by our school district’s transition to in-person learning, was published yesterday at Little Old Lady Comedy.

THANK YOU to our teachers and administrators on the frontline, who are sacrificing the health and safety of themselves and their families in order to be with their students in-person. And thank YOU for reading!

Please enjoy my latest comedy piece, Lakeside Elementary Invites You Back To In-Person School!

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Art by Sharry Wright, Game of Clue Covid edition 2020

Humans have been naughty to the earth, and earth has sent us to our rooms. If my blog posts could get as many shares as the coronavirus, I’d be stylin’.

The house next to my daughter’s kindergarten teacher has put up signs saying THE END IS NEAR and REPENT OR GO TO HELL. Under those a smaller sign reads Glacier Walk B&B. If I can avoid either of the first two, I’m totally going to stay there one day.

The spiders have come out of hiding, and so have the people. It’s like the Fourth of July around here, except without parades. Even the most reclusive are reemerging, sometimes as The Dude in bathrobe and beards, sometimes as Mad Max in Burning Man goggles and Manic Panic hair.

My apocalyptic look consists of a blazer and penguin jammies—business on top, party on the bottom. Perfect for the endless Zoom meetings. I drape a wildly patterned scarf over my head and across my bespectacled face. Twisting curls of scarf dangle down on both sides like a Hasidic Jew. 

The scarf keeps unraveling, but I can’t touch it because my fingers have just touched the handle on the school door. By the time I leave school, my scarf has unraveled so much it has fallen off my head and wrapped itself around my throat, practically cutting off the air. This is the whole reason I am trying to avoid the coronavirus in the first place.

When the mask I ordered from Euphoria Festival Wear came, I figured I could finally nail this quarantine thing. I strap it on, and feeling like a boss dystopian fairy, march my sexy mask to the grocery store.

My breath fogs up my glasses, and soon I can’t see anything. When I take the glasses off to clear them up, my mask starts slipping. I heard you aren’t supposed to touch your mask with germy fingers, so I put the glasses on my head to pull out the hand sanitizer, causing my glasses to fall on the grimy floor.

When I bend over to pick up my glasses, my mask falls off. Here I am, juggling mask, glasses, sanitizer, and groceries like a Rube Goldberg Pandemic machine of what not to do, struggling to remember which hand is the contaminated one, which one is clean, and I still can’t see because I’m blind as a bat with coronavirus.

So much for protocol, and so much for quarantine chic.

. . .

About the artist:

Sharry Wright started making collages two years ago as a poetry exercise. “I was trying to write a group of poems as collages,” she says, “using a collaging method to generate them— and thought I’d try some collages that might work as visual poems. Instead, I ended up with these tiny flash fiction stories about my family, and lately with a pandemic theme.”

You can view more of her work on her Instagram page, link here.

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Sandra Cisneros says that “poets are in the professions of transforming grief into light.”

On some level, we all feel grief. In Eastern medicine, they believe that grief settles in the lungs. I have asthma, so I find this particularly interesting. I wonder how grief has affected my lungs, and how poetry could possibly help excavate stuck grief.

Covid-19 is a respiratory disease, so perhaps we need to pay attention to the connection of grief and lungs. I wonder how poetry could help us excavate our own grief. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could all clear our lungs and heart from grief, and transform it into something beautiful and tangible?

Poetry– metaphor, truth– help us do that.

Write on.

Photo by Karim Manjra on Unsplash