For most, if not all of us, life has been completely upended lately. Some of us are stuck in the house with our whole families -- maybe for the first time ever. Others are working on the front lines against the coronavirus outbreak, afraid to go home to our loved ones at all.
Friday on "In Conversation," we focused on what it's been like for you. How is your life different now, and how are you coping with the changes? Have you come up with strategies that you want to share, that might help someone else? Are you freaking out? (Because sometimes we're freaking out.)
We kicked off the show by talking about something big that’s changed in a very intimate space in our homes: the bathroom. When this whole thing first started, we started seeing posts online with empty toilet paper shelves in the stores, and most of us assumed people were hoarding it. Then the stores put a purchase limit on it… and there still wasn’t enough.
To talk about why, we turned to Jim Luke. Jim teaches economics at Lansing Community College in Michigan, but earlier in his career, he was the business planner for a large industrial distributor. And they distributed toilet paper. So Jim was the perfect person to help us get to the... bottom... of the issue.
Later in the show we spoke with marriage and family therapist Tiffany Farmer, with Best Life Louisville. Tiffany gave us advice about how to listen to the good anxiety (that tells us to wear a mask), but tune out the bad anxiety (that tells us life is pointless and we're all doomed).
In the midst of (gestures vaguely) all this, WFPL welcomed a new arts reporter, Stephanie Wolf. Stephanie moved to Louisville from Colorado, so her life was already undergoing big changes before the outbreak. She was packing up to move just as the first cases were being reported in Colorado. On today's show, Stephanie tells us not only about how the arts scene has been impacted by coronavirus, but what it was like to drive across the country... with a baby... and a dog... during a global pandemic.
And WFPL's Ryan Van Velzer chats with Damir Huremović, who wrote the book on the psychiatry of pandemics. Literally, the book is called "The Psychiatry of Pandemics," and it just came out last year. Ryan talked to Damir about what happens in our psyche during viral outbreaks like this, and why time seems to have no meaning now (tl;dr, time gets weird when you're experiencing trauma, plus we're out of our routines).
Listen "In Conversation," with guest host Jonese Franklin, in the player below.
Listen to the show:
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