I have pretty long hair, and I just pull it through the bottom strap and brush like normal. I wish I could post photos online publicly to show you, because doing my hair through the straps this way I don’t think I look any different than usual and I am very particular about how my hair looks. I think you can definitely do cute hair with head straps.

That’s right, thank you for the corroborating links. I was assuming this poster is in the US; I can’t speak for elsewhere. I am simply distrustful of “I can’t do it because it’s expensive” when my family has lived on less than ~$20k USD yearly in the equivalent of low-income subsidized apartments for the last 3 years and we make use of these stockpiles. Unless one is actually homeless and destitute or living in the periphery, treated with the severity the disease deserves, there are resources available, and I have very little grace remaining after 6 years.

No. There are packages of 440 surplus on Amazon for less than 40 dollars that are resold by medical suppliers due to being unused or close to expiry (which does not mean they don’t still function, only that the elastic may be weakened and decaying). This is what my family uses because we live in poverty. We don’t get sick anymore. There is no excuse.

It should not be controversial to say “it is now always raining, and we need to take umbrellas everywhere,” but it is and it is across every political tendency. This is the new normal no matter what anyone says, and they’ll be forced to confront sooner or later that getting sick is bad, actually, and there are very accessible things to be done about it indeed on an individual level that can grow to institutional and systemic change. The latter will not happen without the former. The world changed in 2020 and we are not changing with it. That is a recipe for disaster.

I get it that’s hard to accept, idk, giving up your (unprotected, so most) of your social life because you wear a respirator and that you will have to do it forever, but for me it ties in with the otherwise completely scientific ML analysis I have of the world.

This is 100% the correct, materialist analysis, yes.

I go outside and if not harassed I get treated like a weird outcast, which I am used to because of my politics, but I really do not see how to enagage with such people.

I don’t, not anymore, except maybe to poke holes in their flimsy reasoning to the extent that my mental capacity allows at any one time. Imani Barbarin says that her politics are “the disabled,” and that’s where I’ve landed after all of this. To any “leftist,” “communist,” whatever that tries to tell me they’re building the revolution without a mask, I say “good luck, chum” and leave. Their movement is doomed, and eventually they will figure that out or they will die. I am determined to survive either way and no one is going to stop me.

Every escalation currently happening makes complete sense as a consequence of the world cosigning eugenics after a year or two of half-assing SARS-CoV-2. When you consent to that scale of abandonment, nothing matters anymore. We are on our own.

Do you know about this disease? Do you know what it does? What it is currently doing? Do you know that there is no cure? Why are you not so afraid of it? Why are you not trying to avoid it? This is baffling to me.