You can’t see it because it’s in my purse and I didn’t think to take it out before I took the picture, but I also have a Doctor Who wallet. It has various forms of ID for us, insurance cards and what have you… and it has my membership card for The Satanic Temple as well as my organ donation cards, which are actually so old and have been carried for so long by me that I’m going to have to tape them up at some point to continue to hold them together. As the younger generation likes to say, I’m that committed. My library card’s in there too.

Outside of my purse, there is my necklace from The Satanic Temple, which Bub likes to fixate on for some reason. I’ve taken to keeping it in my purse because that is the one place that he will not try to steal it from if he sees it somewhere in my room… why he does that, I’m still not sure. I keep an inhaler in my purse separate from the inhaler that I keep around the house so that I am never without an inhaler should I need one when I am not home, and to the right of my inhaler is my Subtl Beauty cosmetics stack. Below that is the N95 bivalve face mask that I’ve had for awhile… one of them, at least. I take the face mask out of my purse before I leave the house to remind myself to wear it, and I put the face mask back into my purse when I am back home so that I am never in a position where I need to wear a mask and do not have one. Not pictured in this picture is my Subtl Beauty brush. I’m falling in love with makeup that you can (re-)apply when out traveling.

On the outside of my purse is my Black Lives Matter enamel pin and a she/her pronoun badge, which my non-binary and trans friends actually encouraged me to get and put on my purse as an ally when I wondered whether it would be “too much of a reach” to show allyship in this manner. When I asked some of my friends if it would be appropriate to show allyship in this manner, the answer was overwhelmingly yes.

The school district that I live in did not plan out how many Internet hotspots and laptops to get students in need, even though parents (or guardians) needed to fill out three forms expressing interest in one or both of them, and that counted actually showing up to their child’s school to fill out an additional form. Because of this, and the fact that some students were not able to complete assignments because they did not have one or both of these items, the district decided to open their doors a week earlier than they had originally intended to for those who wanted to send their students back to school for in-person instruction. The superintendent here has practically been chomping at the bit to fling the school doors back open and resume instruction, and he’s actually had to be prevented from doing so by executive order from the governor and order from a judge within days of planning to do so. Needless to say, I do not trust this district or the decisions that they make about children at all because they have made it abundantly clear that their primary motivation is securing federal funding by having their doors open, even — especially — during a global pandemic that has claimed the lives that it has. The district says that interested parents can continue to have their child participate in virtual learning if they want, but that doesn’t make the whole thing any better.

The fact that they are, and have been, desperate to fling their doors open during a global pandemic is what bothers me about all of this. This is how desperate this district is about securing access to federal funds…

And this is how desperate this country is as a whole to “get kids back to school” and “get back to work”.