BRAIN CHIP AT WORK

Last time I wrote I lamented that brain fog and low energy was keeping me from fully mentally engaging in my life.  I think it's still here.  Days of the week run together,  each day is over in a flash, months fly by at hyper-speed.  I think part of the problem is the task Hub and I have set for ourselves this summer -- tackling the long and rather overwhelming "to do" list of major, long-procrastinated household and garden projects while still trying to carve out personal time, activist time, and increasingly, social time.

Let's talk social time.  I swore that post-Covid Times I would not go back to a calendar full of socializing.  And, in fact, I have not.  But even the addition of 2 or 3 things a week is feeling like a lot.  I've had several coffee dates with friends; my weekly breakfast with my bestie has resumed (although she and I agreed last time to reign that back in to maybe every 3 weeks and resume our lengthy phone conversations in between); our large friend group is resuming our monthly potluck and topic discussion; Hub's monthly Men's group is meeting in person again -- this week at our house, so that impacted me since I stay away during their sharing time (it's confidential); we see family, of course, although not as often as in the Before Times, but we went to a 4th of July party at Son One's house and Son Two and Lovely DIL brought us dinner this week....  Anyway, I've got stuff going on now and frankly it's a bit disorienting.   But how long will this last?  It feels, also, like a brief moment in time...

Because,  it happens that the Covid 19 pandemic did not 'disappear like magic'.  Locally numbers are on the rise for hospitalizations and deaths; vaccine breakthroughs are being documented.  Nationally the numbers are even worse with the CDC director yesterday proclaiming we have a "pandemic of the unvaccinated".  Which, I admit, royally pisses me off!  "Vaccine hesitancy" is a thing we hear about daily, and I guess I have some compassion for the many folks who are nervous about needles,  have heard things  that trouble them and are not sure, or who still don't have easy access to getting the vaccine (this mostly in poor, rural areas of the country).  

But it's the "vaccine refusal" people who gall me -- the ones who still think it's all a 'hoax' (600,000 people in the U.S. have died!!!); the conspiracy theorists who believe the vaccine is full of evil that will do any number of horrific things to our bodies and society and with the vaccine something is being implanted on purpose by some nefarious governmental enemy; the ones who are politically opposed seeing vaccination for Covid as a Commie Libtard Conspiracy and the Deep State taking over their pathetic little lives.  (Looking at the maps on the nightly news, one sees the sea of Red Republican-controlled states as those with the highest Covid numbers and extremely low vaccination rates; our state, thankfully is Blue and 70% vaccinated).

The problem, of course, is not just they can do as they please and the consequence falls only on their own shoulders.  The problem is that as the virus is allowed to spread, it mutates.  It adapts.  It keeps growing and changing to invade with more contagion and doing more damage more quickly.  And when we vaccinated rub elbows (or shop at Costco) with the unvaccinated, the virus smacks up against our immunized bodies and starts to make inroads into bypassing our revved up immune systems and gets a foothold.  We might not (yet) get as sick; we might avoid the hospital, or even death, but how long until that is no longer the case?  We are all threatened just because millions of people refuse a life-saving shot in the arm.  It's nuts.

The country is fully "open" now with no restrictions on masks (mostly) or gatherings -- life back to "normal" (more on that in a different post).  The unvaccinated are still supposed to mask, but they never did so what are the chances they will follow that polite ask? Yesterday the CDC recommended even the vaccinated should go back to wearing masks indoors in public, remembering to physically distance.  L.A. county has re-instituted a masking policy for all.

I've never stopped wearing a mask indoors in public (groceries, etc).  I've been to a couple of coffee shops maskless, but I've felt weird about it.  I returned to my beloved yoga studio for one in-person class and 2/3 of the way through got a bit panic-y.  Our friend group met in person, outdoors, no hugging.  We are all back to being a wee bit cautious after a brief post-vaccine time of hopeful abandon.  (Plus, regular sickness has returned -- I know people with bad colds and puke-y "flu" and I don't want to catch those either!)

I didn't intend this to be yet another Covid post, but that's where my foggy brain went anyway.  I guess living in a pandemic, for me a life-altering experience, is still taking up some brain cells.  Or maybe the Deep State has implanted a Covid-focused chip that will forever be thinking of and reacting to this historic worldwide disaster.  We'll see.

At least, that's the view from here...©

Photo Credit:  Map appeared in Fortune Magazine 7.2.21