Today I ran four miles. Fourth run in a week, following almost four weeks of not running. So this, I guess, is brought to you by the number four. It’s interesting how quickly you can come into and out of phase with running. And I am not, by nature, a runner.

Or a model. Or a photographer. But my hair game is on point.

Last weekend I noted that the night before I celebrated the 45 minutes where my hair was at it’s most presentable peak of long-short. Now we enter into the short-medium phase which lasts an inordinate amount of time and offers no good looks. But you’ll wish for those days when medium-medium arrives, should it come to that.

Yes, I too need a haircut. No, it isn’t really bothering me that much at all. Mileage varies, and I’m fine with that. We can all roll our eyes at one another, which is a great way to take in the grandeur of our sans-haircuts, our home-haircuts and our “I just couldn’t wait another minute to see my barber/stylist” contemporaries.

One day I realized that, despite my lights and my green screen and everything else my webcam still shoots at a pitiful 720, and that meant that slightly longer hair and formerly nice shirts with tiny spots on them were back in play again. That’ll do for now. I’m not even ironing the shirts. Oh, you see wrinkles? No, my wifi is just seizing up.

Besides, no one is looking at my hair, they’re concentrating on that typo from my last email. I dashed off a note last night related to one of today’s Zoom calls. I consulted it this morning to make sure I had the meeting topic well in hand. And that’s when I found the typo. It was one of those where there are two words that sound the same, but mean wholly different things and when you use the wrong one you look feral and uneducated. Never mind that I was still corresponding at 8:01 p.m. There was an obvious error and it will now shame me for all of my days.

I talked with a history professor who has built out a food program at the university and, this summer, they’ve collaborated on creating a meal and delivery service. There’s a lot you can’t get to in an interview like this, but if you look up Carl Ipsen‘s research interests this all make sense.

And it’s a small scale effort, relative to these big food banks staffed out by the National Guard. But the man brought two or three different units of the university together, even as it scaled down in a pandemic. And from that they created an effort that feeds 70 or so meals a day, and counting, to members of the campus community? That’s something.

People doing things, like the famed chef who’s creating that menu that Ipsen talks about, the people preparing the food, the drivers bringing things in from farms and food plants … people taking the initiative of the moment and making it productive, they’re going to be the unheralded glue of all of this. We’ll talk nurses and doctors and truck drivers and shelf stockers, and we should. There are also a lot of other people doing a lot of good, big and small. We’d all do well to acknowledge them.

That’s much more inspiring than the tiresome binary argument over Covid etiquette.

Decency is not in short supply, the mention of it just doesn’t get the lift that jerks do. This is not a new phenomenon, and we’d do well to think of that, too.