Ho Ho Ho My God You Have Got To Be Kidding Me

First thing's first: I do not have COVID.

It's a fairly mundane thing to say, if maybe less mundane than it used to be prior to the surges cycling through the Greek alphabet at a rate... well, we don't really have a rate at which we get through classical languages in the United States to compare it to. Greek and Latin are the purview of well-dead robe-fetishist civilizations and English boarding school toffs holding on to other archaic ideas we should have all set aside along time ago, like aristocracy and yeast extract as food.

My family as been extraordinarily lucky through this whole experience, which is a pretty obvious point to make given that the signal for things going poorly is human death. But there's plenty of signal points along the spectrum of the COVID experience short of expiration: fever, joint pain, respiratory failure, organ failure, gastrointestinal distress, sleeplessness, hallucination, headache, light sensitivity, loss of taste and smell... and that's not even touching on the non-physical cost to the unfortunate host, meaning social isolation and (for the huge numbers of us in this country with absent or substandard healthcare or hourly-rate jobs) economic distress. If I keep it down to just myself and my three offspring, I honestly can't fathom how we've come this far without more disruption, even moreso when you consider that one of us works at a Starbucks.

None of the four of us believes in any Jesus stuff either, another infection we've all luckily avoided, but because we're European-devolved American people, we do still participate in Christmas stuff. I will say this was the first year I avoided putting up a tree at all in all my time as an independent adult, so that I felt was consistent with my antipathy for religion and capitalism separately and the gross fusion of those two antithetical things that seems to be the underpinnings of all of American culture. Yet try as I might, the lure of family and fellowship were draws enough to put me in my sister's home on Christmas Eve, with all the homey trimmings of soft Christmas music on Alexa speakers and a Honeybaked(tm) ham.*

By Sunday, I was standing at another, smaller gathering (just me and two other friends), reading a 15-text explosion I'd ignored as we'd watched Captain America: Civil War. The slow reveal from my sister that she and several others who were present that Friday were ill and had tested positive for COVID was more dramatic than the film, but only because I'd already seen it. COVID is a head-turner, but remember that part at the airport? When Spider-Man shows up? And he does all the quips? And the Ant-Man turns all giant? And Vision lasers Don Cheadle in his robot suit chest and he dies, I think? Wait, probably not "dies." It's been a while since I've seen it and we didn't make it to the end. The COVID thing kind of drew the focus for the rest of the afternoon.

So since then I've been off to have my sinuses swabbed and locked myself away in my home as I awaited an automated email telling me how the rest of my vacation was going to go. I'm off until Monday 10 January, my longest consecutive leave break of the year, as I do every year around this time. I was considering having to spend it in feverish isolation, either alone or co-quarantined with one or more of my sick adult children. But even then, as I've been vaccinated and vaccinated and vaccinated a third time, the prospects were more tedium and frustration rather than intubation and cremation, so, I'm happy to say, it could have always been worse.

I found out yesterday it's not even that bad. Somehow all our tests were negative. Again, we slipped our heads from the noose, though even that's too dramatic as a metaphor. The end of the year is the right time to be reflective and engage some level of gratitude. COVID hasn't taken from us anything we can't get back, which is more than hundreds of thousands (if not millions, considering the survivor families left behind) of Americans can say. It doesn't seem fair, but anthropomorphizing the results of a virus spread is exactly how you end up assigning yourself "brave" for ignoring the basics of hygiene, public health and just the root-level decency of living in a society with other people. I'm lucky, and I know I am. Not only has it missed us, now it's even fucking with something as objectively evil as college football. It doesn't seem fair, but I'm not one to turn down a gift, especially at this time of year.

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*I want it to be clear that the music was not playing on the ham at any point. I assume we're only two or three Christmases away from Bluetooth-capable meats, however.