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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The Month that Just Won't End.

YESTERDAY I GOT MY SECOND SHOT!

That’s it though, I don’t want to celebrate too much because when I woke up this morning I saw that the Johnson & Johnson roll out of vaccines has been “paused” apparently over concerns about blood clots. To date something like 6.8 million J&J shots have been administered and there have only been six reports of possibly related blood clots.

I know this is how safe science is supposed to work, but damn, that is just a kick in the gut. Having no special knowledge about any of this, I know that when the EU briefly paused their AstaZeneca roll out over concerns about blood clots, they determined that the occurrences of vaccinated people with blood clots was actually lower than in the population over all, so I’m hoping that a similar type of determination could be made in this case. Fingers crossed.

Maybe things had been seeming to be getting slightly better lately and maybe that is why the J&J thing has hit me so hard this morning. I’m a big fan of thinking about second and third and fourth order effects and the ripple effects this could cause in the supply chain and in the culture could really be significant.

I’ve been concerned for awhile now that America isn’t actually going to reach a herd immunity threshold, basically because we are a nation of anti-science assholes, and this is not going to help matters any. People who were on the fence about vaccines because they only believe in handguns and healing crystals, will now have yet one more data point to misunderstand. The irony of course being that a pause like this over six possible blot clot occurrences should actually INCREASE their trust in the way science and medicine work specifically because when there was even a whiff of a problem, the distribution was stopped so more information could be collected. That is the sign of a system working, not the sign of a vaccine failing.

It is also a bummer that no matter what this means the overall vaccine distribution will be slowed to at least some degree and that means we may not hit those optimistic thresholds we’d all been hoping for; July 4th barbeques and life looking normal-ish by Fall. The pause means this whole thing could stretch on longer and we’ll be stuck in this situation where some people are vaccinated and others who want it aren’t and that is not a good recipe for anything.

Here we are in April of 2021 and yet it turns out we still are not as done with March 2020 as we’d thought.

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Periodization.

 

This will be a short post because I am a little behind schedule this morning because I had to shave my head this morning because even though I usually do that on Sundays, I couldn’t yesterday because I was working.

That’s life, right? Because … because … because …

Just a long series of interrelated events. I’ve always felt that the way Americans learn history in school is kind of misleading because the study of history relies on a concept called “Periodization” which basically just means that we slice history up into nice little clean segmented pieces. You have the fall of the Western Roman Empire and then that chapter ends and a new one starts called “The Dark Ages” and then that chapter ends and you have one called “The Renaissance” and then that chapter ends and you have one called “The Enlightenment” and then that chapter ends … and so on, even though that’s not really how any of that happened. It erases the messy and overlapping parts about because and because and because. By the way, the Dark Ages never happened and the Renaissance also kind of didn’t, but we don’t have time for that.

Anyway, later today I will get my second Covid vaccination and I’m very excited about it. A couple of weeks from now I will (hopefully) be at the beginning of a slightly new version of this life. It will take awhile before the difference will be noticeable, because I’m still going to mostly social distance and will still wear a mask because I am trying to be a responsible person because I think that in a society we do actually have a responsibility to one another because if that isn’t true, then what are we even doing?

Soon I will be able to take a deep breath for the first time in 13 months because I will be vaccinated. Soon you will be able to say that too because you will be vaccinated. And then we will all be able to take a deep breath and look around at the world we return to and maybe we will do a better job with it this time … because we came so close to losing it.

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Not Quite Yet, But Soon.

So yesterday I got my first shot of the Covid vaccine! I live in California and work in higher education, the vaccine tier for education in California opened up March 3rd. I felt really conflicted about it, I wish they would have prioritized elementary school teachers. Even though a medical program, I can do most of my work from home. The first week or so I was a little less intense than I might have otherwise been about trying to hunt down an appointment, on account of feeling kind of guilty about my own eligibility, but then last week I stumbled onto an appointment via the county website and I took it because Dr. Fauci says we should all get vaccinated as soon as we can.

The anxiety I was feeling yesterday morning largely dissipated as I had to go through the rigmarole of driving to the pharmacy and waiting around in my car for my appointment time. Everyone was super chill about the whole thing. The pharmacy was in the back of a kind of dumpy Safeway grocery store, which seemed odd. I think they only did one vaccination each half an hour, so there was no line or anything. It felt word to get my shot — this thing that will kind of change my life, at least in the near future — and then walk out into the bread aisle.

I felt fine afterward. On my drive back I made a pit stop at the beach (I live in the central coast) and I walked up to a bluff and looked out at the roiling windswept ocean and I cried a little bit for a minute.

Then I came back here to my little apartment and logged back into work for the rest of the day. 

I felt fine, but by quitting time I was completely exhausted. Like eyes drooping exhaustion. Right after work, when I would normally go for a run, I dumped my body onto the couch and took an impromptu nap for more than an hour, which is a thing I rarely if ever do.

I felt tired as I made dinner and then eventually went to bed a little early. And then, this morning I overslept by a damn hour and a half. 90 whole minutes, which is really a thing that almost never happens. Today I’m still tired and feeling kind of run down. I don’t feel bad or anything, just so very tired.

Apparently fatigue is a common side effect, but mostly after the second shot. Of course, this could all be due to the time change, so I’m not making a big thing out of it.

Today as I’ve been working, I’ve also been thinking about so sort of small, safe thing I can do soon. My second shot is April 12 and it’s supposed to take about two weeks for the vaccine to really kick in after that, which would mean that about the end of April/beginning of May I could maybe sneak away for a weekend to … I have no idea. I won’t do any real traveling until more people are vaccinated and I don’t intend to visit friends of family until they are also vaccinated, so no matter what it turns out to be, I’d probably still be alone. 

But maybe around the start of May I can get a pretty little AirBnB someplace with a nice view and just for a night or two be someplace that isn’t my apartment. In the last year I have only spent a single night away from here. 

What I would really like is a nice tall hotel, someplace with a bar. I don’t even need to go to the bar, but maybe I could order a drink from room service and sit on a balcony and drink it slowly.

I could also do that here in my home, but that’s not the point.

What I really want though is to be around people. I miss people so very much. I’d like a fucking hug, thank you very much. That will come in the next few months, as more vaccine tiers open up and more people can get their shots. And then after that, soon we’ll be able to travel again and I can get one a plane again with just my backpack slipped under the seat in front of me and put this whole godforsaken year behind me. 

Soon. Not quite yet, but soon.

I’m grateful to have made it through this whole pandemic thing so far. I’m grateful that so far my family has made it through and that so many of my friends have. Just a little while longer. We all just need to hang in there a little while longer.

Soon, we’ll get back to something like normal soon. 

Not quite yet, but soon.

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Not Going to Miss My Shot.

This will likely be a short post today. I’m feeling some anxiety. See, today I have an appointment to get my first Covid vaccine shot. I am SOOOOOOOO happy about that. Yesterday I did a dry run and drove out to the pharmacy (because it is in a place I had never been before) and it seemed easy enough.

So why the anxiety?

I’m not sure.

I want so badly to see people and hug people and be in the same room with other people (I have been quarantined alone for 12 months), but I think I have a little fear about what the return to life will be like. This past year has been terrible and so incredibly lonely, but I had only lived here about 5 months when quarantine started and I had just barely started to settle into a life. I don’t really know anyone nearby and I didn’t have the chance to — you know --- make friends or do anything more than think about dating. So I think the anxiety is maybe tied up with the fact that when quarantine ends I will have to do the soul numbing work of trying to build a life.

Maybe that will be easy (I think people will want so much to be out in the world, meeting new people, and going to parties, etc.), but maybe it won’t be.

Obviously I will have some time to work all of this out, so I know in my brain there is no point in worrying about it right now, but I’m still feeling the anxiety in my body. 

Obviously I’m over-thinking.

Obviously.

I’m so happy to have gotten an appointment and I’m so happy to be one small part of getting our entire society safe and back to normal, but what is normal going to be next? I think I am a little afraid that I have gotten used to how lonely this past year has been and so maybe I’ll just continue to carry that loneliness around. The thing is, that right before quarantine, my “normal” was pretty lonely. I don’t want to go back to that normal. I want a better one. I have no idea how to do that.

Ironically, I kind of had the proper skill set for staying home, I’m not sure if I still possess the skill set to go out in the world and meet people and make small talk and even god-forbid, try to date.

So yeah, I think that is why I am feeling this way this morning.

That being said, I imagine I will feel much much happier five hours from now when they are injecting me with that sweet, sweet mRNA vaccine! I will get this done today. I will make Dr. Fauci happy. I will do my part today. I’ll worry about the next part after this part.

Wish me luck!

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