Carnival of Aces: Quarantine

Welcome to the link roundup for the May 2020 Carnival of Aces.  This month’s theme was “Quarantine”.  In the call for submissions, I observed that sometimes asexuality doesn’t have much to do with it, and it’s okay for submissions to reflect that. So some of these articles discuss asexuality, and some do not, and some are only tangential. Enjoy, and stay safe.

The June 2020 Carnival of Aces is being hosted by aspecofstardust, and the call for submissions was just posted.  The next month’s theme is “Pride”.  If you would like to volunteer to host, please see the carnival masterpost–the next open slot is August.

redbeard wrote, in five parts about: the anxiety, the cancelling of events, the new opportunities, the stay at home experience, and the political outrage.

I’ve stopped by the Portland and Vancouver meetups, because I didn’t have to go anywhere.  People from elsewhere can stop by Seattle’s video chat.  We can all connect and learn from one another.

vacanthands wrote about: experiencing quarantine as an agoraphobe, things they’ve been doing to keep happy, missing physical comfort, and observations from a street in Scotland.

One might think that a relationship not predicated on sex would suffer less for the physical distance. And that thought would be wrong.

Coyote proposed ideas for coordinated action on health and medical issues.

to support and advocate for universal access to healthcare, regardless of employment or marital status — especially given that, according to what we know from the community survey, aces are disproportionately unmarried and single.

Perfect Number tells us what’s going on in Shanghai, and talks about her experience living there as an immigrant.

By late February, most people at my job were back in the office- though some were still required to work from home or use vacation time because they’d traveled or because a relative from Hubei province had visited them. We all wore masks in the office. Things were getting better.

And then in early March, the rest of the world suddenly went through the exact same thing.

Rachel explains how COVID-19 feels no different, because of their already-established isolation.

But then I see people freaking out about how isolated they feel because they can’t go out to Olive Garden with their friends on Saturday and I can’t help but think “Welcome to my world, sweetheart.”

I wrote about how I lost all my free time.

In my experience, playing video games is often a low-energy activity, something I can do even if I’m fairly tired. Blogging, on the other hand, is more of a high-energy activity.  From one perspective, I’m not blogging because I’m too busy playing video games; from another perspective, I’m not blogging because I’m too tired.

Blue Ice-Tea said that who you spend the pandemic with can make a difference.

The two greatest disasters I have lived through as an adult are the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami disaster of 2011, and the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020.

Coeur d’Hermite recounts their story from the past few months.

Unlike the rest of the school year, I had my sons at home during some weeks. Every errands was torture to me. It felt unsafe to bring them, it felt unsafe to let them home alone.

demiandproud discussed various aspects of being quarantined while queer.

I forgot, for two months, I need to express gender to myself, as well. As much as thoughts sometimes need writing down in a journal to take their full form, though they already existed inside my head.

Sennkestra walks through how to start a meetup group.

However, shelter-in-place requirements don’t have to mean that all local organizing grinds to a halt – it just means that that kind of activities we engage in as local organizers need to shift.

Danielle wrote about health problems exposed by doing schoolwork from home.

As the weeks went on and the instant, motivating escape of studying in coffeeshops remained out of reach, my mind went ever slower – assuming I could find the concentration to do my required reading and essays at all – my energy levels dropped, and suddenly, getting anything done in a day was an accomplishment.

That’s all for now!  If there’s anything I missed, or if you submit something in the next couple days, let me know so I can add it in.