I first returned to campus in January before the Spring 2022 semester actually began, because I (correctly) thought nobody would be in the shared adjunct workspace so I could use it as a private place to work. At John Jay English, there are lockers that adjuncts can use. My mug and box of K-cups were right there where I had left them, and I still had a “March 2020 Writing Center Workshops” handout in my mailbox.
My ID wouldn’t let me through the turnstiles, even though I had uploaded all of my vaccine paperwork to CUNYFirst. It took several visits, a trip to the Wellness Center, and a Wellness Center staffer calling her friend who had been in a similar situation to ask what they had done, before I could get it fixed. Turns out that as a graduate assistant, I count as a “visitor” to John Jay rather than an employee, even though I AM also employed directly by John Jay as an adjunct, so there was a separate place I had to upload my vax stuff as well. It was very frustrating.
In my classroom, they had implemented a lot of ventilation stuff — some kind of portable filtration machine is next to the board, there’s a wall fan, and the regular HVAC vents in the ceiling are on high all the time. That made me feel good from a covid perspective, but I’m autistic and as a result have some auditory processing problems, so it’s become a huge access barrier in my teaching — I can’t hear my students!!! I have to ask them to repeat themselves sometimes 4 or 5 times, and it’s frustrating and embarrassing for all of us.
I still haven’t been back to the Graduate Center in person. My last day there was 2 years ago tomorrow (tomorrow is March 12, 2022). I already knew it was likely going to be my last day on campus for a bit, since they had just announced that CUNY was moving online the day before, but I was doing some work in a student lounge between my therapy appointment (which was a little ways north of the GC) and my chiropractor appointment (a little ways south of the GC). Then I heard a rumor that the MTA was going to shut down entirely due to covid (it didn’t, but it freaked me out). So I cancelled my appointment and went “apocalypse shopping” instead. Specifically, I went to several stores on 34th street in hopes of finding a bluetooth headset I could use for working from home. I didn’t find one. One of the stores I went to was the Target across from Macy’s. While I was there, I also went to buy a bunch of Dayquil and Nyquil to stock up in case my partner or I got sick. A lot of it was already gone. When I was trying to decide which products to buy and how many I should get, there was a man beside me doing the same thing. He asked me for help reading the labels so he could also decide what would be best. Those bottles of medicine are still in my bathroom cabinet, still mostly full and now covered in dust, since my partner and I have been fortunate enough to not get covid (that we know of).
Other object-based reflections– my mom and my grandma made a lot of masks with fun patterned fabrics- thanksgiving and christmas patterns, snowflake and penguin patterns, etc. Now with Omicron and the importance of N95 masks, I don’t get to wear my fun masks anymore.
The pandemic has robbed me of time with my cohort, many of whom I am close with. It’s already sad that we would only get 5ish years together, as funding runs out and some of us graduate and we hopefully begin to get jobs elsewhere. But the pandemic started partway through my 2nd year, and now it is partway through my 4th year. Some of my friends are comfortable hanging out in person again, and others are not, or they’ve moved away from NYC due to the ability to work online. It makes me sad.
Submitted by:
Olivia Wood
