All Posts Tagged as 'Survival'

When I moved to New York at 22, it became clear that an honest man would have a hard time getting a job. The nicer interviewers would get concerned and offer sincere advice, telling me that when asked about my biggest flaw, I wasn’t supposed to actually list my flaws. When I told them I hoped some employers would appreciate my honesty, most laughed. In some cases, I ended interviews early on the grounds that the interviewer and I clearly weren’t compatible. But I got lucky and was hired by an eccentric who was charmed by my earnestness. After two months as his assistant, he brought up areas where I needed to improve, and I candidly told him that I didn’t think I could do better, that I wasn’t the best person he could get for this job. I pretty much persuaded him to fire me.

After years of feeling torn between my old ways and my new ones, I got over my discomfort at participating in the dishonest world and started to see why people spared one another the truth. As I experimented with small talk, I noticed how others used honesty to establish intimacy. I’d always seen “hiding feelings” as cowardly, but for other people, the selectiveness of their honesty was what gave it meaning. They’d choose who was special enough to hear their secrets. My indiscriminate, automatic honesty had meant that I’d tell a personal story the same way to a stranger as I would to my closest friend; that cheapened anything I shared. Anyone who loved me wanted to see a side that I didn’t show others, but I hadn’t saved one for them. Immediate honesty was impatient; if I wanted people to be honest with me, I had to earn it.

Q. WFH boundaries: My husband and I are both working from home due to COVID. Things have been rocky at best. My husband works in a room that is his dedicated office. We don’t have the space for a dedicated office for me as well, so I usually work throughout the house and oftentimes in our bedroom. My husband just does not seem to understand that I am working during the day and will often walk into a room and start asking me questions or make small talk. He also will open the door if I have it closed, without knocking or announcing himself. I have tried talking to him about this many times and I have asked him repeatedly that if he needs something or if he wants to take a break to talk, to send me a text message before just barging in. He feels that it is insulting that I don’t want to talk to him and that he “has to ask permission” to talk to me.

Am I being unreasonable? Is it too much to ask that I have space to work without being interrupted? I understand that working from home means many people have fewer social interactions outside of the household, but I can’t just be available to my husband at all times during the work day. If I am not being completely crazy in asking for this, how can I get my husband to actually respect my boundaries? Please help!

Religious orders are supposed to provide spiritual guidance to those who join. But some of the women who entered Sisters Minor of Mary Immaculate (SMMI) say they faced physical and emotional abuse.

Patricia Budd, one of the former nuns of SMMI, first entered in 1995 in hopes of connecting with her Catholicism. It was at her first retreat where she met the order’s U.S. delegate, Sister Theresa Kovacs.

“It was a lot of hugs. There was a lot of encouragement,” Budd told HuffPost. “They would listen to you, and you felt really important, and you felt like you’re valued.” But soon after she joined, Budd and the other nuns realized things were not as they seemed.

“I witnessed other girls just being yelled at on a constant basis by Theresa Kovacs,” said Rose, who joined SMMI in 1995. (Three interviewees asked to only be identified by their first names.) According to Rose, a sister named Georgiana often got the brunt of Kovacs’ anger.

“It would be a torrent of the nastiest stuff you could ever say to a human being, she would say to me,” said Georgiana. “It was meant to keep people in line.”

The nuns faced strict rules. They weren’t allowed to speak to each other. They weren’t allowed to go for walks outside the convent doors.

“Basically your food is pretty much less and less,” she said. “And so, that’s pretty much like what a cult is — and break you down. That’s the whole thing. Always to break you down.”

A recent report by the Movement Advancement Project (MAP) found that LGBTQ families are experiencing disproportionate challenges due to the pandemic.

The report, based on the results of a summer survey by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, found that LGBTQ households are experiencing greater financial strain, more unemployment, and bigger struggles to balance work and childcare than non-LGBTQ households.

The report found, for example, that 66% of LGBTQ households have experienced a serious financial problem since the pandemic began, compared to 44% of non-LGBTQ households.

It also found that 52% of LGBTQ households with children have had trouble keeping their kids’ education going, compared to 36% of non-LGBTQ households that have experienced this challenge.

Healthcare has also been a huge challenge for the LGBTQ community, with 38% of LGBTQ households reporting they were unable to get medical care or delayed getting medical care for serious issues. This compared to 19% of non-LGBTQ households.

China will overtake the US as the world’s biggest economy before the end of the decade after outperforming its rival during the global Covid-19 pandemic, according to a report.

The Centre for Economics and Business Research said that it nowexpected the value of China’s economy when measured in dollars to exceed that of the US by 2028, half a decade sooner than it expected a year ago.

In its annual league table of the growth prospects of 193 countries, the UK-based consultancy group said China had bounced back quickly from the effects of Covid-19 and would grow by 2% in 2020, as the one major global economy to expand.

With the US expected to contract by 5% this year, China will narrow the gap with its biggest rival, the CEBR said. Overall, global gross domestic product is forecast to decline by 4.4% this year, in the biggest one-year fall since the second world war.

In a Q&A taken from that conversation and published on the magazine’s website on Monday, Goldman asks the reporter if Gumble suffered from “bigshot-itis.” Chung replied, “I would say so. I’d be sitting beside him, but I was invisible, and we would see him at those same celebrity golf tournaments [as Donald Trump.] And oftentimes I was invisible to him as well.”

In October, as the pandemic’s winter surge was beginning to take shape across the U.S., California’s public-health researchers and officials expressed measured optimism that the nation’s most populous state could avoid a disastrous rise in cases. During a press conference on October 19, Governor Gavin Newsom pointed to declining hospitalization rates as a sign of the state’s success, but also warned that the decline was slowing. “We’re beginning to flatten out, plateau, as relates to hospitalizations,” he said.

For a moment, such a plateau seemed like the most likely outcome. A week after Newsom’s press conference, the state had 2,991 people hospitalized with COVID-19, its lowest number since April 10. But the trend quickly reversed, and by November 23, the state’s hospitalizations had doubled to more than 6,000.

What’s happened since is a worst-case scenario. While California’s per capita hospitalization rate is nowhere near New York at its worst—with 39.5 million people, the Golden State is about twice as populous as New York—the sheer number of patients in the hospital is still a sign of how badly California is doing right now.

Worse yet is how quickly the state reached nearly 18,000 hospitalizations during its current surge. When New York reached its record, it represented a 12 percent increase over the week prior. In California, by contrast, hospitalizations are up 27 percent over last week. With cases in California continuing to rise, more hospitalizations will follow.

Things are much worse in some parts of the state than others. Southern and central California are driving the current surge: 34 percent of the state’s hospitalized patients are in Los Angeles County, the nation’s most populous by far. Yesterday, 620 people per million were hospitalized with confirmed COVID-19 there, the fifth-highest rate among California counties.

Andrew Cuomo on Sunday slammed the 'reprehensible' inaction as the United States 'continues to let in six flights a day' from Britain, where a new coronavirus strain is spreading - as more countries, including Canada, ban flights from the UK.

The New York governor told reporters: 'Right now, this variant in the UK is getting on a plane and flying to JFK. Right now. Today. Literally six flights a day. And all it takes is one person.'

Authorities had earlier said they were looking 'very carefully' into the virus variant spreading in the United Kingdom, while indicating that a ban on travel from there was not currently in the cards.

Orange County continued its streak of daily records for COVID-19 hospitalizations on Thursday with 1,519 patients, including 343 in ICU beds.

The county’s adjusted ICU bed capacity remains at zero.

The state created the adjusted metric to reflect the difference in beds available for COVID-19 patients and non-coronavirus patients. The county’s unadjusted ICU bed capacity is also dropping, and it currently stands at 9.5%.


The 11-county Southern California region’s adjusted percentage of available ICU beds dropped from 0.5% to zero as well.

Another 13 people died from virus-related complications, the county reported Thursday. The death toll is now at 1,731.

Someone asked me the other day what my favorite movie was, and I immediately said Arthur, like I always do. Then they said, “Never heard of it? When did it come out?” I didn’t answer 1981, nearly 40 years ago. At that moment I felt old, out of date, and superficially shallow.

Thus, I was not surprised by a new report from The Fenway Institute that found older LGBTQ+ adults in the state of Massachusetts have been diagnosed with depression at twice the rate of their straight, cisgender peers. It could be Massachusetts or any other state, or any other country because depression among older LGBTQ+ people is real, and no doubt much more widespread than we ever realize. I always tell people that if it could happen to me, the proverbial life of the party, it can happen to anyone. Having dealt with severe depression, and then having sought out many older LGBTQ+ people who also experienced similar circumstances, I found it remarkable that we all suffered from some sort of PTSD from our youths.

Again, not surprised that the report also found that LGBTQ+ individuals were twice as likely to fall and be injured in a fall over the past year, and I wouldn’t be shocked to hear if some of that was related to dangerous behavior about feeling alone and useless. Another woman, a lesbian, told me that she had a life-threatening operation, and has not been the same since and feels there’s nothing to live for, except her cat, who is 10. Otherwise, she is alone, without her partner who died, and without a family to take care of her. The family has made her feel shame for who she is, and she worries about being alone for the remainder of her life. Some days, she doesn’t feel like getting out of bed, and subsists on her Social Security checks, desperately afraid that she’ll end up in a nursing home left to die. We didn’t discuss it, but I’m sure she feels equal trepidation about not being able to pay the costs of round-the-clock care.

Deadly "brain-eating amoeba" infections have historically occurred in the Southern United States. But cases have been appearing farther north in recent years, likely because of climate change, a new study finds.

The study researchers, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), examined cases of this brain-eating amoeba, known as Naegleria fowleri, over a four-decade period in the US.

They found that, although the number of cases that occur each year has remained about the same, the geographic range of these cases has been shifting northward, with more cases popping up in Midwestern states than before.

Early in the coronavirus pandemic, California was celebrated as a beacon of common sense in a country on the brink.

By early summer, however, the pressure to open back up rose. Officials discovered the state wasn’t immune to the national fatigue with social distancing and mask-wearing. Amid a patchwork of haphazard rules and guidelines, cases crept up.

Los Angeles county last week passed the disturbing milestone of 10,000 new Covid-19 cases a day, and officials there fear a spike in infections resulting from the Thanksgiving holiday could send hospitalizations surging further. LA officials said that one person is now dying of Covid every 20 minutes, and the county’s public health director, Barbara Ferrer, broke down crying at a briefing while talking about the “incalculable loss” of more than 8,000 deaths.

“I am not feeling this vaccine, and I’m certainly not feeling like being in the guinea pig phase,” Rev. Emmett Price shared with me on our podcast All Rev’d Up. Like many Black ministers across the country, Price is not confident in telling his congregation to be the first in line for the vaccine.

On November 26, Walker conducted a webinar, “Where do we go from here? Coping in the next season of the COVID-19 pandemic,” where Dr. Fauci spoke to the Roxbury community. Fauci recognized our distrust in the medical system but assured the audience that the speed of the vaccine does not compromise its safety nor scientific integrity.

However, Fauci mentioned the lack of diversity in the clinical trials for the vaccine and wished more minorities were in them, stating “what’s safe and effective should not be only for whites.”

The presidents of Xavier University and Dillard University, both historically Black universities in Louisiana, volunteered for COVID-19 trials with the hopes of recruiting their students as a way to bridge the chasm between the Black community and its distrust with the medical system. Students at both schools would have access to free COVID-19 tests and a lab equipment company made a donation worth $15 million to the schools.