BC and AC.

 

Today is my Two Doses + Two Weeks Day!

I am now fully vaccinated! I would like to thank my family, my friends, the staff at the weird grocery store pharmacy where I got my shots …

Sooooooooo … now what?

I’ve expressed a little anxiety here before about what this next part is going to be like. I’ve moved around enough that I know it takes me about six months to settle into a new place and I had lived here almost exactly five months when Quarantine started 13 months ago. I guess this means that my counter restarts? Does it reset to zero? Or does it reset to five months? Does it actually reset at all? Or do I have to wait until the rest of society comes back online?

The thing is, aside from some work people and a few friends 90 minutes away in the Bay Area, I don’t really know anyone here. I live in basically a company town suburb that isn’t walking distance to anything really. The town I “live in” is actually a short drive away and doesn’t have a lot to recommend it in terms of nightlife or meeting people opportunities. Monterey proper is about a twenty minute drive and while there are some bars there that I like, they’re less fun to go to alone. 

I’m not trying to complain. The area is beautiful and I am lucky to be here, but I’m trying to adjust to the reality that from here on out, when I feel lonely, I’m not going to be able to blame that on the pandemic. I now have to blame it on me.

As much as i have enjoyed living a varied life that has taken me to live in lots of different places, each time I’ve moved it has felt like I lost people along the way and as if my circle of people has gotten smaller and small until this past year when it was reduced to just me and the cat. Which is too small. But what do I do about that now? I worry a lot that I will just never be able to add to it again and that it will simply remain this small until I end up dying alone one night and then my cat eats my face off.

It happens. In fact we know it happens a lot.

This is what I do though; the stoic in my goes immediately to the worst stuff, that way I can be ready for it, but it is also probably some kind of anxiety doom-loop that is about more than the fact I’ve read some Marcus Aurelius, but we don’t have time to get into all of that right now.

Even though I am working today and have a lot to do, I am going to try to shift into a lower gear than normal and I am going to try and spend some time thinking about what a good day this is. Two doses + two weeks! That is a big big deal. Today, for just this one day, I am going to just live in this one day and try to feel good. For all of us life is going to be broken into Before Covid (BC) and After Covid (AC) and I might reasonably be able to think of today as my first After Covid day. That is a cause for hope.

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