— पांच हजार एक सौ उन्नीस —
I went out for dinner with Alexia last night. I probably shouldn't have. Of course, I still have a rationalization, of sorts! We went to Aviv, the truly delicious falafel place just a few blocks north on 15th Avenue, and there were maybe six other people there eating. I'll call that a "small gathering." It was indoors, yes. If any one of those diners had Covid, someone else likely got it. I went to choose the table in the far back, as far as we could get from other diners. I actually wore one of the KN95 masks Tracy gave me months ago, only taking it off for the ten minutes or so that I spent actually eating. The restaurant's entire staff, of maybe four young women, all had masks on too, and I think they were all KN95s as well. This was reassuring on the part of the staff, at least, particularly in comparison to when Shobhit and I went to get takeout from Palermo Pizza a couple of weeks ago, when easily half their staff were just walking around with their masks either pulled below their noses or fully under their chins. They literally might as well not have any masks on at all.
I'm getting increasingly uneasy about Alexia's attitude toward it herself. I already mentioned when she came over last Friday to watch the series finale of
The Expanse with us, and she actually said, "We're all going to get it eventually. Let's just get it done." And she mentioned again last night over dinner that she has basically stopped "being afraid" of it and has just gone to living her life. To her credit, to a degree anyway, she is double vaccinated and wears masks where mandated. On the other hand, she clearly takes a "when in Rome" approach depending on where she's at; she had gone to visit her dad in San Antonio for like a month last year and when I asked if she wore masks going around to places there, she said no.
She took her mask off at the table before our food came, and I just said nothing. When it comes to her, I'm fairly neutral about it, like, whatever. We were in a restaurant where this was expected. But, after I did not take my mask off until the food arrived, within a few minutes I think she got kind of self-conscious and put the mask back on.
I can't really account for why I was so easily and immediately swayed into agreeing to go to dinner with her. I even told her last night that I had been actively avoiding restaurants during the Omicron surge. I wasn't even "swayed," really; she texted me asking if I wanted to join her for dinner at the falafel place and I said sure. This was my first time "dining in" at a restaurant since I went with Dad and Sherri to Emperor's Palace in Olympia on Christmas Eve—nearly four weeks ago. At the time, fully knowing Omicron was ramping up, we were averaging about 2,000 daily cases in Washington State. As of right now, although it's finally starting to go down again, we are still averaging 16,000 or so daily cases. (Side note: at Christmastime, King County, by far the state's most populous county, was accounting for about 50% of those cases; as of now King County is accounting for less than a third of statewide cases.)
Jesus Christ. I probably should have looked up and considered those numbers last night before agreeing to go out for dinner. Well, it's over and done now. I suppose
that's what accounts for my agreeing to go so easily: I wasn't thinking about where the hard numbers are.
And this is the thing. Being probably only barely past the peak of Omicron, it's starting to feel like everyone and their mother is getting Covid. Among the podcasts I listen to, just yesterday Amy Miller, a favorite comedian, was a guest panelist on
Doug Loves Movies and said she had just recovered from getting it at a New Year's Eve party she had decided to go to. Just this morning, Mark Maron revealed on his
WTF podcast that he got it, after fully two years of panicked, frequent testing and having a large arsenal of at-home tests. Now, bear in mind these are also comedians, who have opted to continue touring and working even during Omicron, which means standing unmasked in a room full of people who, while masked most of the time, are still unmasking to eat or drink. Maron has spoken many times about how he's frequently in rooms where there is no doubt there is "a soup" of Covid in the air. Honestly it's more of a surprise that he didn't get it sooner.
But also! More people I know personally are getting it. My eldest niece has it now, I discovered just yesterday. I found out by reading this post she shared on Facebook:
Honestly this is the most effed up sickness! These symptoms are unexplainable. You have to go through it to understand what im talking about. For me it's more neurological. My Brain feels like scrambled eggs. When I try and walk I feel like a new born giraffe. Water literally tastes like poison. I have blurred vision. My sense of smell is all fucked up. My mouth is tingly and numb. I lay down and I start feeling better but stand up and get knocked on my ass. Pretty much ready for it to be over 😭
I even showed this to Alexia last night over dinner. "Oh yeah," she said. "Some of my drivers are out sick with covid, and 'covid brain' is definitely a thing."
I had never seen a description quite like this, though. I must admit it spooked me a little. Who the fuck wants to get that sick, and in such a weird way? I should ask Tracy if she also had "covid brain." I just know she said she was sleeping ten hours a day and was laid out for about a week.
I need to unpack a couple of things about my niece's post, though. The first thing is something both she and Tracy had in common, and I think this is crucial: neither of them had a booster shot. Knowing that the boosters create an immune response exponentially stronger than even the first and second vaccine shots, I have little doubt that this makes a gargantuan difference. Now, I'm not saying I want to get Covid or anything, but I would still expect to get far less sick if I caught it, because of the booster shot. Although my booster happened months ago now, in early October, which may weaken the protection somewhat, but still puts me in a far better position than I would be without it.
When it comes to Tracy, she had tried to get a booster at one place some time ago and they told her she was not eligible because she wasn't immunocompromised. The rules about that changed not that much later, though, and Tracy just never got around to trying again, which I suspect she somewhat regrets now.
As for my niece, to be perfectly frank, I think of this as a bit of karma. This woman spent
months in 2020 posting about her disbelief in the efficacy of mask wearing, and then spent months in 2021 posting about her refusal to get vaccinated. She only finally got vaccinated, and copped to it, when she sent out the Facebook invite to the family for ZooLights in late November. I suspected then that she really only finally got vaccinated because so many places were starting to require proof of vaccination.
I hadn't seen a post on her Facebook page specifically confirming she had Covid (as opposed to just being sick), so I went yesterday to go back a bit on her page. Just to posts earlier she had shared this:
Damnit, we tried to take all the right steps to avoid it and we still fuckin got Covid 😭 possible the weirdest sickness I've ever experienced
In the many comments under that post, someone did ask how she was feeling and if she had been vaccinated. My niece responded,
feeling pretty terrible. Yes we did ended up getting the Vax. Eventually you will not be able to do anything without it 🙁
. . . aaand there it is. I had merely suspected it before, but this was confirmation: the only reason she did it, really, was because of how restrictive it was becoming not to be vaccinated. Not because she felt it was essential for the public health, an argument she would never, ever listen to. But, as I said from the start: whatever works. Vaccine mandates work. Tell people they can't go to restaurants or concerts without it, then they'll suck it up and do it.
Also: "We tried to take all the right steps to avoid it"? What transparent bullshit. I wanted so badly to post a response to that, but I refrained, knowing it would be counterproductive. But, consider this: my niece waited so long to get vaccinated, only getting it this past November, that she isn’t even yet
eligible for the booster shot. I bet you anything she's not even thinking about this. Had she gotten vaccinated months earlier, she could easily have gotten a booster shot by now, in which case she may have still gotten Covid but probably would not have gotten nearly as sick. She might not even be sick at all right now.
By the way, this news about my niece was worrying to me, and I immediately texted my dad, to find out if they had seen her recently. I knew New Year's was too long ago for them to have gotten what my niece has now, but it was possible they had seen her again. (Thankfully, Dad and Sherri are both boostered. Sherri even said over New Year's, "I'll even get another shot, I don't mind." Shit, neither do I!) Dad responded fairly quickly with the text,
Have not seen her since new years. And we are fine 😊
I'll tell you what was my biggest takeaway from
that text. My dad is using emoji now! What will the world bring us next?
Anyway. The news about my niece yesterday, and then Mark Maron's revelation this morning, was a bit sobering. I have to keep in mind that even if we are finally past the peak, and daily case counts are going down again, that doesn't change the fact that it will still be weeks before the case rates are back to pre-Omicron levels.
I will say this though, and I don't care how many times I'm repeating it: booster, booster, booster. It's making all the difference right now. Even among breakthrough cases, the sickest people are the ones who have not gotten their booster shot.
As for me, it seems, I continue to lead a charmed life. I'm fully aware that I'll only have a charmed life until I don't anymore, and things can always change on a dime. I have been insanely lucky in all this, not to mention deeply privileged. I'll just enjoy the luck as long as I can, I guess. The does not mean throwing caution to the wind, though. Even that is something done by degree, I suppose. I like to think I make informed decisions, and most of the time I genuinely think that's true. It was not true of my decision to go out for dinner last night. I'm not saying, necessarily, that I still would not have gone. But, I made the decision in an uncharacteristically uninformed way, quickly deciding to go without really thinking about the numbers and the risks. I need to get that back in check.
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— पांच हजार एक सौ उन्नीस —
When I posted yesterday, I only wrote about Shobhit and I taking some time in the morning to go attend the grand opening of the PCC Downtown store. I never mentioned anything about the previous evening, Tuesday evening. I walked downtown, listening to Dire Straits's 1985 album
Brothers in Arms on my AirPods, and met Shobhit on the waterfront on his way down from his work. We then went shopping at Costco. Exciting stuff! Aren't you glad I updated you?
I then spent much of the rest of the evening, much as I did last night, updating my completely fucked up playlists in Apple Music. Now that I've subscribed to both Apple Music and iTunes Match, though, I have much greater freedom in this regard than I've had in a long, long time. I've now reconstructed a good ten or fifteen of my playlists, and, having learned a hard lesson from history, I have saved backups of each one on my hard drive, which now makes it very easy to restore them if something happens.
A continued frustration is that if I create or edit a playlist in Apple Music on my computer, it will not update properly on my phone. It drives me crazy. But, I finally figured out that if I update or edit or create playlists on my phone instead, they update to match within moments, if not instantly, on my computer. Why the fuck this only works in one direction, I have no idea, but whatever. At least now I know what I can do to make it work. I reconstructed three playlists from the past couple of years that had been made in the wake of my mom's death in July 2020:
For Mom, a playlist of songs that remind me of her for myriad reasons;
Dreaming of Jeanni: The Wendy Bird - Soundtrack, which collects the 12 songs I used for the memorial video of the same name that I made for her in 2020 (about half those songs are crossed over with the
For Mom list); and
In Memoriam, which is just more generally themed on grieving the passing of a loved on. I really like all three of these playlists.
I also created a new one on Tuesday night, inspired by the listening of
Brothers in Arms: I called it
1985-7, which is just a collection of my favorite hits from just those three years. I have several albums I really like from those years that are just one album from a band whose other albums I never really listened to, so it makes for a nice collection of pretty narrow specificity in terms of release dates.
— पांच हजार एक सौ उन्नीस —
[posted 12:59 pm]
