SARS fallout

My friend Michelle, in Bakka yesterday.


Now that Toronto isn't going to be ostracized after all, or at least not officially, the city is struggling to lure back tourists as well as its own people. Several of our favorite Asian restaurants report an 80% drop in the number of customers in recent weeks because of the SARS scare. :-( I wouldn't be surprised if a number of smaller businesses went under before all this is over.

I also started noticing another disturbing trend. A few weeks ago, for example, I was riding the Toronto subway system. I sat down across from a Caucasian woman, and a minute later she had gotten up out of her seat and moved to one at the far end of the subway car. We were the only two people in car. For a few seconds, I was confused. Was I having a worse hair day than I thought? But then I realized: I was Asian, and even though I showed no SARS symptoms heck, just being Asian made it clear that I was a potential SARS carrier, right?

Fortunately most people in Toronto are more rational than this.

Moving on to more positive news:

My technonerdboy husband sat down with me last night and helped me solve some of my current ViaVoice and Eudora problems. The Spam filtering problem in Eudora was not the fault of ViaVoice, and Jeff also showed me how to hook up AppleScripts with ViaVoice. Once I know more about what AppleScripts can do, I'm hoping to use ViaVoice to help me even more.

And even more positive news: looks like my arms are gradually improving again, yay! I'm not in constant pain anymore, or have not been since the weekend. For a while there, the tendinitis seemed to be getting worse. My main challenge now will be to resist the temptation to start doing things normally again; I'm pretty sure that had something to do with my relapses before.

May/2003 comments: Read | Post | LJ