• Welcome to SportsJournalists.com, a friendly forum for discussing all things sports and journalism.

    Your voice is missing! You will need to register for a free account to get access to the following site features:
    • Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
    • Access to private conversations with other members.
    • Fewer ads.

    We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!

What will you take away from COVID-19?

Sorry to read about what happened to your eye! (I was typing as you posted. And edited out the stupid quetion.)

I'm sure I would have heard every bad pirate joke if I'd been out and about. There were a few people who called me "Dread Pirate Oscar" on a zoom chat. For creative professionals. A sometime collaborator let his feelings be known when he stuck a banana in his ear. I hope this tradition continues when things get to Catskills levels.
 
Shoot forgot the obvious - how precious "normal" can be - how much hard work and effort it takes to maintain "normal" and how hard it is to get back to it if its lost.
 
I have accepted it as permanent. It was damaged when I was in a car wreck in 2007 and suffered a blowout fracture of my eye socket. My wife was much more seriously injured, in ICU for a month afterward. Anyhow, between her being in the hospital, my not quite understanding the implications, and delays for getting more imaging and the Christmas/New Years holidays, by the time in went to surgery my torn eye muscles had healed into a knot. The surgeon tried to tease them apart but was not successful. I saw two other eye surgeons including the department head at UAB and the best offer I got was "I can do three surgeries and get you to the point where you have standard binocular vision as long as you look straight ahead and don't move your head or your eyes".

I knew what eye surgery was like by then, and I passed. I live with it pretty well mostly. There are a few things that I simply can't do any more. Shooting pool is out. Shooting guns is difficult but possible if I had to. Depth perception is not an issue driving, but it's a pain to do any sort of close in detail work. I'm nearsighted, and I get my best overall vision with the patch and a contact lens, but the lens makes anything close hard and reading all but impossible - which leads to me pushing up the eyepatch, closing my good eye, and reading with the bad eye, which earns me some very odd looks from time to time.

Most of the time anymore I wear glasses or when around the house I go uncorrected. My brain has learned to mostly disregard the feed from my right eye. It's a PITA but livable.

Shrug. Could have been a helluva lot worse. My wife suffered far worse injury than I did.
 
As to what I've learned, I suspect that my wife and I will wear masks out in public during cold and flu season. It was really nice to get through winter without colds, bronchitis, or flu.

I learned, as we all did, that there are countless ignorant, opinionated, and selfish people among us, including our families.

I've always been politically aware, but never as motivated and pissed off about it as I was during the Trump presidency.
 
Way, way back in the cretaceous, I took a class on public discourse taught by a former speechwriter for Gerald Ford. She said in response to questions about the failed states in the news at the time that the social fabric in place to keep countries from falling into chaos was perilously thin. Most of the people who heard her thought she was exaggerating for effect.

She was not a conspiracy theory loony and really didn't give a wet slap about party lines. She was talking in real terms about tiny cracks in civility that showed underlying problems. A couple of decades later, in 2005, I would see Nashvillians literally crippling the city by hoarding gas when there was no reason to do so. Every time a news story about the Middle East breaks, the signs go up at the pumps an hour or so later. They're out of gas and don't know when they'll get any more. Go north to Kentucky or south to Murfreesboro, and everything is fine.



The hysteria over masks, teepee, and vaccines is not surprising at all.

At some point, I'll write how that class nearly cost me my graduation at Western Kentucky because the transfer auditor had never seen the word "rhetoric" before.
 
Last edited:
I've always been politically aware, but never as motivated and pissed off about it as I was during the Trump presidency.

So sorry y'all had that struggle. (Once again, typing and taking a phone call while you posted.) Wow. That Mrs. Nootch does her creative work in spite of all this is impressive.

My biggest frustration is dealing with people who want everyone to "just let it go." They're also the "he's your president" crowd from the previous administration.

I'm learning it's possible to be angry about my own life being interrupted and my prospects abbreviated and still be angry about all of the unnecessary misery so many have faced over the past years.
 
oscar, if one was cynical before this misadventure then there was no way in heck of being less so, at this juncture.

We are governed by fools, from top to bottom. That's the takeaway.
 
So sorry y'all had that struggle. (Once again, typing and taking a phone call while you posted.) Wow. That Mrs. Nootch does her creative work in spite of all this is impressive.

Knitting and crochet and the like she can do while sitting in a recliner. I'm often her hands in "fetch me" mode. She's also a sit at the 'puter/use the ipad girl.
 
Respect can't be faked. A working set of facts can't even be agreed upon. The stage needs certain strings cut, curtains drawn and new actors for a lot of this to be fixed.

Bobcat Goldthwait wrote the line for Robin Williams' character: "I used to think the worst thing in life was to end up all alone. It's not. The worst thing in life is ending up with people who make you feel all alone."
 
Bobcat Goldthwait wrote the line for Robin Williams' character: "I used to think the worst thing in life was to end up all alone. It's not. The worst thing in life is ending up with people who make you feel all alone."

Gee, where have I seen this?
 

Latest posts

Back
Top