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There’s nothing like a government official firing all of the C.D.C. vaccine panel experts from the advisory committee to get you to schedule your overdue shots. I had been moving “get my shingles vaccine” from to-do list to to-do list, putting it off because I didn’t want to feel crappy all weekend.

But this weekend was the perfect time to kick off a two-shot plan because I could get them Thursday morning, feel crappy by Thursday night, lose Friday to soft moaning from my bed, and then still have the rest of the weekend to feel weekend-y vs. achy. I will sacrifice a random weekend in September for the second part of the shingles shot.

In addition to the shingles vaccine, I layered in my pneumococcal vaccine, too. And I got blood drawn. I like to stuff as many dreaded tasks as possible into a single visit.

The shingles shot hurt going in (I didn’t feel the pneumococcal one at all), and then my arm hurt for a few minutes. Then, the pain went away by the time I was walking to the car. Then I got home and felt exhausted by noon, though that could also have been the fact that I was off-schedule with my coffee consumption. I worked late a few days that week to make sure that I had only easy tasks left for that day. I wasn’t up for a lot of thinking.

I took Advil at noon when my arm began to throb with pain. Treating the pain may have preemptively impacted other reactions. But in the beginning, I mostly felt… slow. I was thinking slowly. Moving slowly. I felt like I was mentally and physically moving through gelatin.

That all changed around 10 pm. I pulled on a sweatshirt in 90-degree weather because I was shaking from chills. I was exhausted, but I couldn’t stay asleep because I felt so terrible. I woke up on Friday feeling washed out from a lack of sleep, but overall fine. It set me up nicely for the moaning-from-bed portion of my plan. Until I started to actually feel terrible in the afternoon, dozed on and off, gave up and went to sleep at 9:30 pm, woke up a few times, but reset to normal by morning. Nausea + chills = horrible way to spend the weekend but happy I’m protected against shingles and pneumonia.

My main advice is to do the shot leading into the weekend or take off of work the rest of the day/next day. But do it. It’s a few hours of suck (10 pm to about 4 am, for the worst of it for me) for a lifetime-ish of protection from something much worse.

There were so many great parts of this Substack, so read the whole thing, but the part that stuck with me came about halfway down the page.

She tackles the sentiment: “I wish I could do that.”

I hear myself constantly say it, and I hear others too—particularly when it comes to talking about languages … As though…learning Spanish were akin to wishing you had been born an armadillo. It’s actually something you can do!

But then she reveals the truth: “Often, what I realize, is that I don’t actually wish I could do that thing. Not really. The truth is: I don’t want to! And that’s fine!!!!”

I think we’re conditioned to think that we need to put into action the things we want (that can-do, make-it-happen attitude), but she encourages people to pause and think: (1) can you do something about it beyond wishing and (2) do you actually want to or are you okay not taking action? Or can you be involved in a passive way (e.g., watching movies in Spanish with subtitles to hear the language without committing the hours to learning it)?

I’m trying to catch myself when I use the term “wish” and say what I really mean.

Anil Dash usually makes me think, and his recent essay on Internet consent points out the lack of consent in the online world. You have the illusion of consent in the sense that pop-ups come on the screen and ask if you agree to cookies, but there are still thousands upon thousands of times when your data is compiled and used and sold without understanding that by using or buying or entering spaces, you’ve technically (but usually unknowingly) consented to this situation.

He points out that in the beginning,

It was so broadly understood that you would respect the visitors to your site that you didn’t even have to ask their permission because there would be a massive user uproar if you were to do something so hostile as to surveil them or track them.

And then, of course, everything changed. His example about how your data is tracked and sold feels even more absurd when you consider his example: It would be as if a restaurateur wrote down everything you said while you ate your meal and sold it to another store. It has nothing to do with the food. It has everything to do with using the consumer.

Go read the whole thing.

This is a beautiful piece of writing. So many things So Relatable writes speak to me — her blog post about losing her dog got me through losing Beorn — but this in particular got under my skin.

She writes about having a singular dream and angling her whole life toward it. Sound familiar, friends? You grow up thinking you will do X, you do everything you can to achieve X, it feels like you may even be close to achieving X. But you don’t. And then you need to figure out what comes next. She writes:

I needed time and space to figure out if the dream I’d been clinging to for over 20 years was still possible, still relevant. And if it wasn’t, I needed to figure out what could take its place.

She’s talking about publishing, but I think it’s applicable to many dreams that are out there that are beyond your control. Even though she found a path forward where she could be creative without the publishing gatekeepers, she feels the weight of the old dream:

But that old goal still hung heavy over my head, and it made every step toward something new feel like failure. I was ready to loosen my grip on the past so I could reach for something else.

She is such a talented, smart writer. She always makes me think, and I’m grateful that she keeps resharing the lessons she has learned.

I really liked this framing of looking at your life like a video game. If the boss battles are the big things driving you through life (career, relationships, etc.), then it follows that any good game contains a few side quests.

Matt Rutherford defines that as “a mini-adventure that sparks energy and creativity—without the pressure of success or failure.”

It’s all about zero-pressure projects that may (or may not) grow into something meaningful. The point is not to try to make them meaningful. When you do, you’ve moved it from a side quest into something much heavier. He gives you 20 side quests you can start today if your mind is blank.