There's already enough paranoia about bugging out and hunkering down — must we add prions?!

I'm reading this advice about "go bags" and "stay bins" in The New York Times:

No matter where you live, every home should have a “go bag” and a “stay bin.” The go bag is what you grab when you have to leave the house in a hurry, whether to get to the emergency room or to evacuate because of a fire or a hurricane. The stay bin is a two-week stash of essentials to be used in case you have to hunker down at home without power, water or heat. In the event that you need to stay put instead of flee, keep a stay bin in your home. Use a large plastic bin or a similar container to set aside the essential items for a two-week prion....

Prion?!

"You walk into a crowded grocery store. A shopper has coronavirus. What puts you most at risk of getting infected by that person?"

"Experts agree they have a great deal to learn, but four factors likely play some role: how close you get; how long you are near the person; whether that person projects viral droplets on you; and how much you touch your face.... Whether a surface looks dirty or clean is irrelevant. If an infected person sneezed and a droplet landed on a surface, a person who then touches that surface could pick it up. How much is required to infect a person is unclear.... As long as you wash your hands before touching your face, you should be OK, because viral droplets don’t pass through skin."

From "Surfaces? Sneezes? Sex? How the Coronavirus Can and Cannot Spread/What you need to know about how the virus is transmitted" (NYT).

Now is the time to learn how to be one of those ultra-disciplined individuals who do not touch their face.

I went to Whole Foods the other day, and I was resolved to be a person who does not touch her face. It's hard! The reflexive, casual touching of the face is so much a part of life. It's not as ingrained as breathing, but it's on the level of flicking your hair back or crossing and recrossing your legs.

I googled "how to stop touching my face," and I got another NYT article: "Stop Touching Your Face!/It’s a quirk of human nature that we touch our eyes, noses and mouths all day long. It’s also a major way we pick up infections like coronavirus," by Tara Parker-Pope.

Only humans and a few primates (gorillas, orangutans and chimpanzees) are known to touch their faces with little or no awareness of the habit. (Most animals touch their faces only to groom or swat away a pest.) German researchers analyzed the brain’s electrical activity before and after spontaneous face touching, and their findings suggested that we touch our faces as a way to relieve stress and manage our emotions.

So... reduce stress? But if we're motivated by worrying about a diseases, we're adding stress. And thinking about not touching your face makes you want to touch your face. Parker-Pope offers some practical advice: Have a tissue to use instead of your bare hand. Wear makeup that forces you to think about not smearing it. Use moisturizer and eye drops to fend off itchiness. Wear glasses to make it harder to get at your eyes. Wear gloves. That made me think of one of my own: Rub your fingers on a hot pepper.

Here are some additional ideas at HuffPo: have some other things to do with your hands (like holding a little object to fiddle with), put Post-It notes on your computer screen ("Do not touch your face"), get together with co-workers and others and monitor and call out each other ("You're touching your face!"). That last idea made me think of this: Convince yourself that touching your face is disgusting, like picking your nose. Gah! I wrote that and immediately leaned the entire left side of my face into my hand.

Another idea from HuffPo: If you catch yourself touching your face, you stretch out the fingers of the offending hand and hold them like that "for no less than 2 and a half to three minutes." That's so much trouble that you'll want to avoid it.

And here's an idea from L'Oreal, the skin-care company (concerning itself with acne, actually): When you feel tempted to touch your face, substitute another activity, like snapping your fingers or folding your hands. This inspires my variation: Play Here is the church, here is the steeple...

Are you happy because you are generous to your spouse?

Or are you generous to your spouse because you are happily married to him/her?

I should just say "her," because this article, in the NYT is surely aimed at women, who are invited to think about whether their husbands are generous enough. There's a study cited, naturally, but the study did little other than correlate self-reported happiness with answers to questions about how often the spouse performed acts of generosity.

I love this from the comments at the Times:

Someone should do a study of how many thoughtful writers in the NYT have jobbed out their own fine judgment to a "study" in the past, say, year. David Brooks, a fine and compassionate writer, is just one leading example among many.

This article is in the same vein. We should do this or that, be this way or that, "in order to" make our marriages work better, or whatever.

Generosity is a profoundly natural human impulse. What has happened to bury that natural impulse?

If I bring my partner coffee IN ORDER TO make our marriage better, then it isn't really generosity. It's simply mutual self-interest. Another dreary arms-length dealing. Instrumental and conditional "love" is no love at all. Love brings coffee because it brings coffee. It needs no empirical study.

What if someone acts generously on the expectation of better "results" that don't happen? Then what? Kindness can make a great difference, but only if we come FROM kindness, rather than trying to get TO kindness by justifying it with empirical studies.

Even the most profoundly spiritual things are, in our society, subjected to the utilitarian slavery of statistical studies. The minute we say "in order to", the conversation is over. We are simply acting as machines made of meat. We are ignoring the spark of the divine in everyone.

That spark yearns to fetch coffee and do a million other kindnesses. Forget the metric-worshiping statistical STUDIES! Listen to your heart!

Boldface added.