Me too!
Glad to hear the change of heart from the family, Squeegee.
Happy they came around. It can be difficult to make it real without some formal ceremony, and a collective remembrance and mutual consolation is important.
I got my 1st Pfizer shot today. Looking forward to my second in three weeks.
Assuming we may need to get yearly ‘boosters’ in the future, am I always a Pfizer guy now?
Having to stay with one brand of vaccine for life seems high doubtful to me. No more so than for flu vaccines, I wouldn’t think. But I have nothing authoritative to support that assumption.
Interesting article in The Atlantic today about the coming move from isolation and cocooning back into the marketplace. Looking forward to it? Yeah, sort of. Sometimes. Maybe.
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The prospect of vaccination shocked my COVID-19 life out of its constrained yet predictable rhythm. I work from home; I wear pants without buttons; I spend Friday nights watching a movie or doing laundry and Saturday nights Zooming with friends. This little world is equal parts dull and intense; everyone I know is sad, exhausted, antsy, and resigned. I can’t wait to leave these confines behind, and yet this world is mine. The people who populate it care about me—they are happy to hear from me, even when I have nothing to say except how hard everything is. The dangers are monumental, but I mostly choose when I confront them. It’s both suffocating and a sanctuary.In the same way that not everything about “normal” life should return, not everyone is ready to rush headlong into a world reopened. Making sense of this nebulous non-time will take a while (though efforts are already under way). The continuing losses—of life and livelihood, of routines and community, of trust in the future—are so immense and terrifying that they sometimes seem incomprehensible. Yet the emotional healing required for post-COVID-19 life are things a vaccine alone can’t provide. And despite the tragedy and horror, not every aspect of the pandemic has been terrible. With distance and reflection, those of us who were able to hunker down during the pandemic may even come to cherish the shelter of COVID-19 life.
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My isolated world has been “dull and intense,” not necessarily in equal parts. I’ve always been an introvert, but this level of isolation – sheltering 100% alone 24/7 – is more alone time than I ever wanted. And yet, something in me resists taking on outside obligations and subjecting myself to other people’s expectations again. COVID has been a good reason (not just an excuse) to avoid stuff you didn’t want to do anyway. I would like the choice again about whether to go out or stay in. And I may still choose to stay in.
Disclaimer: This casual look at status change, of course, does not address (and is not meant to slight or disrespect) those who have lost loved ones, jobs, homes, etc. That’s a different and much more harrowing conversation.
My kids need to get out. They need more activity. Too much of this has been wasted time in their lives. I should think that applies to me as well. And the rest of us. Just because we can isolate ourselves doesn’t mean we should. We’ll have eternity to be in blissful, splendid isolation, being dead and all.
I don’t disagree, but at the same time, I don’t want to go back to the old normal, either. Unstructured family time has its own value, and I realize h now we didn’t have nearly enough of that.
Depends where you are in life. I’m a single dad. They do get unstructured time with me, and I added a few things, but mostly it was a loss. Grade school kids don’t need more screen time, and they got lots more of it through remote learning. They also need to be building out social skills and relationships, and all of that was taken away. We’ve gotten through it, but mostly it’s a big loss.
Honestly, do we need to be encouraging people to do less in person bonding? Society is already heading that way now, it didn’t really need an extra push.
I guess I just realized we weren’t doing enough family in person time: every weekend day was a play date or a practice or an enriching visit to a museum or something. Or I was gone because I had to work all Saturday, so I kept Sunday action packed to “make up” for that.
Weeknights were so short, everything we did was something that had to be done, or I was too tired to do anything.
Guilt free time to just chill with my kid has been really good for our whole family. I don’t want to stay like this, but I don’t want to go back to how it was, either.
No, you’d just be wise to follow the vaccination course outlined by the vaccine you take. If you’re getting Pfizer or Moderna then you’d like to get that second shot within 4-8 weeks. You could probably go 12 weeks or longer without it, but there’s no data on it, which makes that a potentially risky proposition, particularly with new mutations. But there’s nothing that says you can’t go out and get a new and improved J&J vaccine in the fall if that’s what you want.
Consider the kids who lived in Europe or Japan during WWII. 3 or 4 or 6 years of absolute hell. Scared of invading armies, scared of incessant aerial bombardment. Limited food. Then the secret police show up.
It sucks. But if we all spend 18 months semi-cooped up and move beyond this mess, it’ll be but a footnote to our complete lives, whether we’re presently 5, 55, or 95.
Sure is seems like forever to a 5yo. And nobody wants to watch their kids suffer even a smidgen. The happy news is although they may be a little damaged by this, so will all their peers. So they’re not being relatively handicapped in the eventual competition for happiness, good jobs, etc.
Kids are simultaneously fragile and amazingly resilient. The kids who survived WWII went on to rebuild the whole damned world, and a lot better than it had been. 15-20 years from now when they can vote or work, they may be a lot more intent on ensuring the next pandemic isn’t managed solely according to rank stupidity.
Can you mix and match vaccines with respect to how many doses and what type or do they need to be consistent?
I don’t know - I have a basic working knowledge of this stuff but that’s a question for someone who’s got some expertise in vaccines.
What is the point of this? Are you saying all those WWII kids came out just fine so suck it up, buttercup?
I’m saying have a sense of perspective and show a little mental toughness. What we are going through now is peanuts compared to what so many have dealt with before.
It’s far from optimal, but it’s also far from unsurvivable. Don’t let bitching about the cosmic unfairness of it all increase your very real burdens. So yeah; buck up & suck it up buttercup. Life’s a bitch then you die. Make the best of what you have; it’s only 10x-100x what all of humanity 100 years ago could only dream of.
Yeah well, he didn’t say his kids wouldn’t survive, so maybe take it down a notch. This isn’t as bad as the Rwandan genocide either, but it doesn’t really help to bring it up.
My comments have nothing to do with that issue.
I am addressing the issue of coming out of COVID, it being safe to resume former activities, and people still opting out because they’ve gotten comfortable with sheltering in place.
There may be some people here who thought they were overburdened with society and that sheltering in place was a welcome break. I don’t hear that from my friend group, but I will allow that some may feel this way. I truly believe that while valid, this is a minority position in present day society.
I feel that many people are already highly isolated, and that the necessary sheltering in place may exacerbate those trends. I don’t find that a positive development. The discipline of socialization is helpful to many, many people.
I will give an example. Someone stays in reasonable shape through their gym membership. The membership is a trigger for their continued attendance and participation in a relatively healthy lifestyle. COVID made the gym no longer safe for a time. The gym membership is cancelled. The individual lacks the self discipline to exercise on their own at home, and they get out of shape. By the time it’s safe again, they are used to being out of shape, and despite their health suffering over time, they never go back to the gym. I consider this a negative secondary consequence of sheltering in place.
I consider these developments far more important than priming the pump of nostalgia for sheltering in place. This is my opinion.
See, it’s a very common sentiment in my circles. Not that people don’t want to go back into the world, but the sheer grind that we used to have doesn’t sound attractive. My students aren’t eager to go back to being at school or commuting from 7-7, plus hours of homework and extra curricular work. My teacher friends aren’t eager to go back to working till 6 or later, and a couple Saturdays a month.
And the commute! I still go to work every day, but it’s 25 minutes there and 35 minutes back, instead of 35 min there and 45 min to an hour back. I cannot tell you how much I dread losing that time each day.
With remote schooling, I leave work when school ends (430) and am home by 5. In before times, I left school at 6 (tutoring, clubs, etc) and got home at 7. Not gonna lie, losing those extra two hours a day with my family will hurt.
Huh, that’s really interesting, because at the college level it seems like it’s almost exactly the opposite. Yeah, there are fewer campus events I’m supposed to go to, but online teaching means basically no breaks or time off – there are constantly new discussion board posts to read and comment on, new e-mails from students coming in, new video lectures or voice-over PowerPoints to record (or old ones to update), new chunks of the course to build, students to remind to do this or that, etc. It’s monotonous and exhausting in ways that classroom teaching just isn’t. And, from what I hear from students, online courses require more work from them as well (and are particularly hard on the ones with marginal writing proficiency, since much of what would be class discussion in a normal course now has to be done in writing).
Granted, my “commute” is a two-block walk and I still come in to my office every day because sitting on the sofa with a laptop is hard on my back, so saving driving time isn’t really a factor…