Meanwhile, I got to say "boobs lab", a class in my new gen ed that's become infamous, in front of Mayo clinicians and Rita Charon today. My friend B teaches the class, they run experiments on breast milk donated by our lactating colleagues. B was my co-presenter today, she's a health economist so this whole humanities world is new(s) to her, but she is zealous like a convert. Why was my graphic literature class talking about hand washing back in January? Cz Covid was coming out of Asia, so I knew it was gonna be racist rhetoric time. I had NO IDEA, but I invited B into my class to grow hand germs on bread with me and my students. She got the bread from Dicamillos, a luxury that I will never take for granted again. A couple months later, after our students had wondered what the fuck does bread and hand washing and breast milk and reading comic books about AIDS pathogens and playing rounds of Pandemic in class have to do with each other or anything (??), the answer(s) became brutally clear. The pandemic is oddly great for humanities work. If you can hack drinking from a fire house of urgent relevance all day. Humanities are like the delivery drivers of higher ed, you had no idea how fucked you'd be (you already were) ..
