I've Been Stabbed

Between last week's post about travel during COVID and this week's post about the transitional space between first and second vaccination doses (we'll get to it), we've definitely fallen ass-backward into a theme this month of Living During The Plague Year. I don't really do themes, not since 2017 when my planned monthlong Louis CK retrospective series suddenly became a monumentally bad idea.

The idea since then has been to wing it, which fits because that means I put exactly as much work into this as it seems like I do: haphazard first drafts banged out in between long stretches of being distracted by things in other browser tabs. The amount of time between thinking up the last sentence to the previous paragraph and then successfully pasting in the link is too embarrassing to publicly state, but I learned way more about marmosets than I intended.

Winging it means grabbing whatever pops up and shoving it squarely into this round hole, so it shouldn't be a surprise that the topic keeps coming up COVID again and again. I'd prefer to be tired of it's presumptuous ubiquity and ignore it in a sanctimonious huff, like I did so successfully with hair metal and all the Friday the 13th movies, but unlike either of those things, it keeps insisting on actually killing people. Since, as it turns out, myself and my family and all the people I know and love all fall into the "people" category, it defies disinterest, usually by punishing those who dare try it.

So like those of us not infected with conspiracy-theory brain worms* or general Republican-ism, I've been hunkered, waiting for access to that sweet mRNA mad-scientist virus-poisoning vaccine that shouldn't, by any reasonable reckoning, exist this quickly. It's not that I'm eager to get out and do stuff (that was never my jam in the Before), but I'm certainly down with the prospect of returning from the Ralphs of a routine Sunday without a full Silkwood scrubdown.

Yesterday when the county I live in opened up vaccines to everyone 16 and over, that meant it was finally time to join the immunized herd. I stood in what used to be a department store, climate controlled to temperatures conducive to handling antimatter for some reason, two separate times,* once for myself and later with my last remaining minor child, accommodating his school schedule. The fact that we went to get his immunization after he got out of a physical school with other non-yet-immunized kids is a confused rage-post for another day.

For the record, I feel like I should say that I did NOT try to get my second dose when I went back the same day with my kid. The appeal of the convenience of it was overwhelmed by acknowledging that I only took one biology class in my whole life; it was a fudge class for non-biology people called "Disease in History" where the main feature was the professor dressing up in full stage costume and doing accents when he talked about Dr. German Guy Whomever who discovered where, like, cholera comes from or whatever. How well did I do in that class? I changed it to pass/fail instead of taking a letter grade, that's how well I did. I learned enough to know I shouldn't be consulted (even by myself) about how vaccines or diseases work.

So now I'm waiting. My arm is sore and I have a headache, but I'm at least on the road to Not Dying of COVID. Which is something, as this time last year, literally all of us were potentially on the road to Probably Dying of COVID. Some of us still will, probably mostly in Florida, but there's an end. I'm half way to it.

---

*The only cure for that seems to be death as well, sadly. It certainly isn't reasonable conversation.