May
21
To My Daughter, For Her Graduation

Tonight is my only child’s high school graduation. I am so very proud of my girl.

We learned a week ago that Fort Payne High School would be having an in-person graduation commencement ceremony after all. This seemed unlikely just a week ago as we remained on lock-down to contain the community spread of COVID-19 novel coronavirus. But then Gov. Kay Ivey said “Open ‘er up” and the floodgates exploded under the accumulated pressure of thousands of people eager to leave their houses.

Tonight, I hope you’ll indulge me as I gush about my favorite person in the whole wide world: my daughter Miranda.

I’m not getting to parade her around as the best of my creations, so I am indulging myself a bit in trumpeting how wonderful she is here in this space.

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May
17
Parallels between the Titanic and the Pandemic of 2020

I’ve become an avid reader of history. It occurred to me that, from historical accountings, the tragedy of the RMS Titanic is a near-perfect metaphor for the catastrophic pandemic we are experiencing 108 years later.

When the doomed ocean liner struck an iceberg on April 15, 1912, the crew faced a difficult reality: The vessel they arrogantly deemed so safe that “even God can’t sink her” was going to fill up with water and plummet to the bottom of the ocean.

There weren’t enough lifeboats because they presumed they’d never need them. Ships that size could carry up to 48 lifeboats, but Titanic only left port carrying a total of 20. This was only enough capacity for 1,178 – about half the number of 2,224 passengers and crew on board.

Employees of the White Star Line faced the inescapable inevitability that thousands of people who had entrusted them for safe passage from Ireland to New York City were going to die horrible deaths suffocating in the icy waters of the North Atlantic.

As you might recall from watching the classic Academy Award-winning film about it, the crew feared a rush on those lifeboats if word got out about it, so they LIED to the passengers in second- and third-class while the first-class passengers leisurely made their way onto the lifeboats. Many of the lifeboats were only partially loaded, with a disproportionate number of men left aboard because of a “women and children first” protocol.

 

 

The Titanic disaster was met with worldwide shock and outrage at the huge loss of life, as well as the regulatory and operational failures that led to it. Public inquiries in Britain and the United States led to major improvements in maritime safety.

Similarly, there are sure to be Congressional hearings into the failures that have led to the unnecessary deaths of tens of thousands of Americans and the overwhelming of our health care system’s supply of Personal Protective Equipment, or PPE.

Just consider all of the parallels…
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May
13
My pandemic story

I’ve had a week I wouldn’t want to repeat.

On Thursday, a friend I’d just seen on Tuesday notified me, as part of contact tracing, that they were being tested for COVID-19 because a family member caught it.

I got both the swab test (ouch!) and the antibodies test on Friday. I was isolated in quarantine from other human beings for nearly five nerve-wracking days packed with panic attacks.

After experiencing chest pain, I had to take a tranquilizer to distinguish whether I was having a panic attack, a heart attack or COVID symptoms. I somehow managed to get work done from home despite it being nearly impossible to concentrate.

I’d been so careful, going straight home from work and sharing information with others on how to protect themselves — yet I still looking this damn monster straight in the eyeball. I was angry. I was sad. I was exhausted with all of this.

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Apr
29
A New Hope, Hopefully

Will April 29, 2020 go down as the day that we turned a corner? Or a temporary blip on a long timeline of misery?

As I write this, there is reason to feel some optimism after a couple of months of bleak headlines about death and economic collapse. Like those first rays of warm sunshine after a cold and wet winter, I crave a true, real springtime with the social component it brings.

A New Hope

There’s a drug called Remdesivir made by Gilead Sciences Inc. that has shown some effectiveness in treating the COVID-19 novel coronavirus. Gilead said Covid-19 patients taking its drug Remdesivir had a speedier recovery than patients taking placebo in a large U.S. government-funded study. The company didn’t release detailed data showing the magnitude of the benefit, saying federal researchers would do so later.

Remdesivir, by the way, is a nucleotide analog, specifically an adenosine analogue, which inserts into viral RNA chains, causing their premature termination. In 2015, the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) announced preclinical results that Remdesivir had blocked the Ebola virus in Rhesus monkeys. The drug was rapidly pushed through clinical trials due to the West African Ebola virus epidemic of 2013–2016, eventually being used in people with the disease.

Dr. Anthony Fauci from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases was so impressed by the study results that he touted the effectiveness of the drug.

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Apr
25
Lessons in Political Spin from One Insane Week in America

Political spin fascinates me. In 2013, I earned my Master’s degree in strategic communications, plus I’ve always had a keen interest in politics. I’ve attempted to stay out of most discussions of politics because I end up losing friends because people don’t realize they’ve brought a knife to a gunfight when they attempt to influence me with rhetoric that doesn’t ring true.

I try to dig a little deeper and be a skeptic of all sides. The conservatives have given me a lot more digging here lately.

My purpose for writing is not to suggest who you should cast your vote for in November. I won’t insult your intelligence with any suggestion that you lack the cognitive ability to reach your own conclusions once you have all of the information. I know you are smart; you’re reading my blog, after all!

In my blogging, I merely offer insight as a professional marketer and strategic communicator. And, oh boy, this week in political rhetoric sure offered powerful and rare insights into how the machine works.

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Mar
31
How to make money modeling on the Internet

I had hoped to continue doing photo shoots over the next several weeks as our society waits out this pandemic by self-isolating to decrease the rate of community spread. I had so many goals and things I wanted to accomplish, photography-wise, this Spring and Summer.

We would probably be fine if we observed the 6-foot rule. I imagine a lot of models and women generally are saddened by the situation but relieved that men finally have a reason to respect their personal space.

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Mar
13
Coronavirus – A preventable disaster unfolds

Like strong armor that will protect you as long as you aren’t stabbed in between the plates, this pandemic is revealing some gaping vulnerabilities in our society.

Ideally, our federal government should have taken notice in early January when a novel coronavirus was detected in China and started killing people over there. We needed containment measures then.

They should have started the process of mass-producing test kits to quickly diagnose it at the first signs of illness rather than waiting until the outbreak arrived on our shores. We could have “nipped this in the bud” early, as the saying goes.

We could have avoided widespread fear and imposing of “social distancing” policies that are ruining basketball season and canceling that concert you’ve been looking forward to since you bought the tickets in October. Tom Hanks wouldn’t be self-quarantined in his hotel room.

And the stock market wouldn’t be in a free-fall if markets felt confident that we were ahead of the curve, proactive instead of reactive.

Unfortunately, that’s not what happened.

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Dec
31
Goodbye 2010s, Hello 2020s

When I reflect on the 2010s, I recall a decade of feeling helpless in the face of tragedy and reacting with anger and determination to regain some control.

Face it, the 2010s sucked. But especially sucked for me in particular.

  • The company I worked for was sold to another company that laid me off at the end of 2012.
  • Unable to find work, I assumed thousands of dollars of student loan debt to further my education in 2013.
  • My brother died in May 2014.
  • I was diagnosed with Sleep Apnea and started having to use a CPAP machine in 2016.
  • My wife left me and filed for divorce in 2010, triggering years of loneliness, animosity, and legal battles.
  • After the divorce, I was left with a house full of clutter and had to throw things away. I had accumulated items since 2001, had items from my Chattanooga apartment, items from my closed studio. Then my sister moved in. This meant throwing away or giving away so many things to which I had sentimental attachments.
  • The global war on terror really hit home when five men were shot and killed by a man just down the road from the office where I was working in Chattanooga.
  • My friend Don and a very nice lady I was dating named Dawn both died of cancer in 2017.
  • Once my coworkers found out I was turning 50, they began treating me differently. They presumed I was much younger.
  • This year was a particularly hellish way to bookend a miserable decade. Sickness, financial and professional struggles, a family crisis that left me feeling helpless.

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Nov
05
Once More Unto the Breach

If you are following me online, it’s eventual you’ll see that I am returning to my old stomping grounds, the place where my career first began. It’s been a long, twisting road — a very rocky one for much of 2019 — but I am happy to double back (or triple back, in this case).
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Sep
30
Raging Against the Dying of the Light

“Every time when I look in the mirror,
All these lines on my face getting clearer.
The past is gone.
It went by, like dusk to dawn.”
– Aerosmith

I don’t want to grow old. I refuse to “go gentle into that good night” and will “rage against the dying of the light,” as Dylan Thomas put it.

I  define “oldness” as a crescendo of blandness, diminished enthusiasm for life, less arousal/passion, and heightened fatigue. So set in our ways that we can no longer open our minds to accept we don’t know it all.

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Copyright Steven Stiefel 2018. All Rights Reserved