be a nurse working at home, how it is to be a wife of a smoker who works in a nursing home when an invisible killer attacks the immune compromised and elderly. So, I continue to pour out my thoughts into a Google Doc in case one day someone is wondering what it’s like to be a college student during a pandemic, to have a strained relationship with an older sister who lives in a different house, and to have started a new relationship two weeks before the United States entered a state of emergency.
I want to thank Sara Jackson for giving me a starting point for this project. Without her class last year, I would not know where to begin for this publication. Also, thank you for taking the time to meet with me to discuss your own work and insights into material culture and identity. Also, thank you to Whitney Owens for not only responding to my email, but taking the time to talk with me about the work the Cincinnati Museum Center does. You provided wonderful examples of the good museums can still do. Finally, thank you to Sarah Fuller for taking the time to edit my writing, not once but twice, during a pandemic and all the craziness surrounding it.
Potluck 101
Is this what the next generation will read, looking for any sort of comfort from those who went through a pandemic, similar to what we ask from those who went through a world war? Maybe someone will find inspiration in my words for their current situation. Though, if I’m being quite honest, I do not think I would find comfort in the words of a woman who admits to not showering and to wearing the same underwear as yesterday. There are many routes my writing could have taken. I could tell you where I should be in this moment or maybe what I should be doing or thinking, and how the world should be spinning, but that does not change the way things are and it does not help me feel any better about the way things are. This is what I truly wanted to contribute to this journal. I wanted my voice to reach more than those living in my house.
I’d like to apologize to my classmate for the times I was not fully present at our Webex meetings. To be perfectly honest, I wrote this during one of those meetings.