Category — Uncategorized

I started reading a newsletter, only got a paragraph or two into it, and already started saying, “YES! To all of this!”

“I’ve been frustrated by some of the dismissiveness on social media, people saying you shouldn’t worry about it if you’re vaccinated, because ‘we’ll all get it at some point, it will be mild, and you’ll be fine.’ That might be true for people who are otherwise healthy and vaccinated. But it is not necessarily true for many other at risk populations.”

First of all, I still don’t want to get COVID, even if it doesn’t land me in the hospital. If my choices are sick or healthy, I would choose healthy. Every. Single. Time.

Friends who have gotten mild cases have seemed miserable — happy that they’re not in the hospital but still achy and exhausted and frustrated that they can’t smell or taste anything. And then there are the emotional side effects: missing events, missing work, or worrying that they got another person ill. I am happy to get creative so I can keep living life but not put myself or other people at risk if it means also not getting sick.

And then there is everything else Nisha says: What about our shared humanity? Caring whether or not other people are in the hospital? Caring about whether medical staff is overworked from overflowing hospitals or whether hospitals are unable to treat other people because they’re so busy dealing with COVID?

I care.

We managed to get through the pandemic with only a handful of cases at the school until now. We’re notified each time the school is notified about a case, and there have been three letters since the kids returned to the school in September after being out of the building for 16 months.

Go us.

And then a few days ago, we received a letter listing 13 cases. All in the same letter. They were one after the other.

A day or two after that, another letter with another 14 cases. Different from the ones before because they list the dates the person was last in the school and the date they tested positive.

The twins told me that people are missing — a lot of people are missing; sometimes half their class. And it isn’t clear if those people are missing because they’re sick or got their booster or are choosing not to re-enter the building with active cases in the community.

The horse is out of the barn at this point, so they’re still attending school. The cases seem to be mostly on the sports teams where they take off their masks to play or from Thanksgiving dinners where people gathered and took off their masks to eat. It’s a testament to mandatory masking in the classroom that more people aren’t ill. Thank you, masks.

But it’s nerve-wracking to get the letters. Even though they’re fully vaccinated. Even though they’re almost boosted. Even though we’re fully vaccinated and boosted. None of that matters when you see the long list of positive tests.

The kids walked into the house and said that they smelled gas. I had been in the house all day and smelled nothing, but they were insistent that they smelled gas. So we called the gas company and they sent out a man with a very cool gas-detecting tool, and he assured me that we had a gas leak. Somewhere.

“Where is it?” I asked, frantic, because I thought the house was going to explode ANY SECOND.

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” the man assured me.

“Is it the oven?” I questioned.

“Do you have a gas oven? That looks like an electric oven.”

“It is. It’s an electric oven.”

“No,” the man said patiently. “An electric oven cannot suddenly turn into a gas oven and become the source of a gas leak.”

We went down into the basement where his machine starting going bananapants, and he found the gas leak immediately — the new furnace. The people who installed it didn’t tighten a screw. It was so loose that he could turn it by hand, and that was where the gas was leaking.

“Come here,” he said. “I want to show you this.”

“I can’t,” I told him. “Because there is a cricket.”

“Where is a cricket?”

“On the floor. Between us. On the floor.”

“I don’t see it.”

“It is there. Right there. It is on the floor. Look on the floor. Between us. On the floor. Over there. Right there! That is a cricket. And I cannot see the gas leak thing because of the cricket.”

“Do you want me to take care of the cricket?”

“That would be amazing because I’m terrified right now,” I admitted.

“You do realize that the cricket was already dead,” the man told me as he picked it up, saving my life.

“I don’t think so. It moved. Very slightly. But it moved at one point while you were looking for it.”

He did not tell me that I was wrong. Because he’s smart. He showed me the gas leak. He fixed the gas leak.

“So how far away were we from the house exploding?” I asked.

“Oh you’d need like 50 times that amount of gas for your house to explode. You’d smell it outside if you were in a situation where you had such an enormous gas leak that the house would explode.”

“So we were super close,” I told him.

He once again didn’t say anything. I like to think that it’s because he was too busy thinking about the myriad ways he saved my life.

As I lay on my side, shivering under the blankets after my booster shot, all I could think about was that I had to close my rings.

Every day, my watch gives me three goals: a calorie-burning goal, an exercise-minutes goal, and a stand-up-and-move goal. These goals are all fairly simple to hit on a daily basis because I do yoga every morning and walk in the afternoon. I’ve hit these goals for over 260 days, and I was not going to let a freakin’ booster shot ruin everything.

I exercised through the first shot, and I exercised through the second shot, and I was going to exercise through the third shot if I had to lie on the floor and pretend to swim on the carpet for 20 minutes. (I’m not certain the watch would believe that I was in the water and give me credit, but in my feverish brain, this felt like a solid plan.)

I ended up getting up and walking in place with my eyes closed for ten minutes, the smallest goal you can set on the watch. I faced the bed just in case I fell over in the middle of it. It was torture, but I did it. And I won. I beat the booster shot that tried to make me break my ring-closing streak.

Not on my watch, booster shot, not on my watch.

[Get it?]

I found a lot of comfort in this study that found that people are thinking about you. It’s the opposite of that false-sounding platitude we tell people that they shouldn’t worry because no one is paying attention to them. We’re all paying attention to ourselves.

Except we’re not.

We know that’s not true because we are thinking about people. And we can’t be the only ones doing this while everyone else is not doing this. We are wondering about people. So it is comforting that I am not the only person thinking about (and googling) old friends and wondering how they are or thinking about past conversations.

Vice unpacks the study:

Across eight experiments involving over 2,100 people, social psychologists Gus Cooney, Erica Boothby, and Mariana Lee found that we regularly underestimate the frequency with which others are thinking about us. People assume it’s one-sided when they dwell on social interactions and conversations; in fact, others are thinking about them, too. The researchers called this gap between how much others actually think about us and how little we assume they do the “thought gap.”

I found the whole article both interesting and, at times, comforting.