I have scheduled a measles booster for Monday (after confirming with Mom that I had only a single measles vaccine in 1972). It would be so stupid to die or even be sickened by a 20th Century disease. It would be even more stupid to find next month that I can't get vaccines because health insurance no longer has to—or is forbidden from—cover  it. Or hospitals and their associated primary care clinics will have funding withheld if they offer them so they've stopped. Or that there simply are no vaccines available because their development manufacture has been suspended in the U.S. or decimated because there's no funding and everyone's been fired.

If you think those scenarios are impossible—or even unlikely—you lack necessary critical thinking skills or have completely buried your head in the sand.

I am so angry about this for several reasons. But I'm going to focus on just one of those reasons for a moment: the small-scale economic devastation of failing to control preventable illness through vaccines and public health investment.

In early March 2020, when the COVID pandemic was just a rumor, Spouse was already 100% remote at his job, and my job had no in-office requirement, except for meetings. Spouse and I  had flown home from Tahoe over the weekend and I was in my office for a staff meeting that Monday the 2nd. At the staff meeting, I told my boss that on the advice of my father-in-law, I was going to stay at home as much as possible for a little while and would not be coming into the office at all if he was okay with that. 

Friday that week, I was supposed to meet Mom & Sister at the Art Institute, but we canceled. I went to the LBTQ Giving Circle fundraiser at Beauty Bar that Friday anyway and stopped in at the Pop Up Karaoke show down the block. But I felt weird and went home early. That was the last time I went out for a long time.

 I don't know if it was Pop Up's last show, but it had to be close to it because Illinois closed bars and restaurants for dining-in on the 15th and closed schools on March 17. 

March 17th was the day Illinois recorded its first official death—although the first reported case in Chicago was in January. The first person-to-person transmission in the US was also in Chicago, on January 30. The first recorded death in the U.S. was on February 6 in San Jose, California (a death in Kirkland, Washington on February 29 was originally identified as the first U.S. COVID-related death).

At any rate, this was early March before people really began reacting with alarm.  But it was not a big deal for me to just stay home, work from my personal laptop, cut back on the social activities for a while. I had no idea how disconnected and devastating the next year would be, but the disruption to my income, to my career, to the work-a-day lives in my household was nearly imperceptible, starting from that first casual comment to my boss that I was going to work exclusively from home for a while.

My job has never returned to in-office work, except for occasional meetings or voluntary in-office days. 

So what does this have to do with the measles booster I'm getting on Monday? And with my anger at the right-wing lunatics running the government who have canceled planning for seasonal vaccines?

I have a lot of friends who are service industry and hospitality professionals. People who manage restaurants or bars; who handle events at hotels; who run or provide the entertainment at venues (the karaoke, the live lit, the cabaret); who tend bar; who emcee. When they can't go to work, they don't earn income. They lose clients. They lose their jobs. And when they can go back to work? Those clients are not still there.

When mass-scale illness prevents them from working, their present livelihoods, as well as their futures, disappear. Their careers suffer and they may never recover.

It's not just that the next pandemic, which is likely coming, will devastate them, ordinary flu season threatens them. If they can't vaccinate themselves, they are at risk. If their audiences and patrons can't vaccinate themselves. the patrons  either stay home, reducing incomes, or they come anyway and make everyone sick. Either way, the people who work to keep the venues open and interesting are the ones who suffer both immediate income loss and diminished income potential. Bars, restaurants, clubs are still broken from the last time. What will the next time do to them? 

And it's so unnecessary.

What is the intent of withholding ordinary effective seasonal vaccines from the general population? I have my opinions on that, but my opinions on intent are unimportant because where intent is unproven, impact is not. We have seen what uncontrolled, easily spread illness does to the livelihoods and lives of businesses and business people who can't just work from home. I have seen what it did to friends and colleagues.

More than merely unnecessary to expect them to bear those risks, it's immoral. It's cruel. But it's also profoundly stupid, It's policy designed by a person without any concept of how businesses work, much less how societies, economies and governments do. 

I am so angry at this.

So I'm getting a measles booster because I can control that. Just like I got a pneumonia vaccine last month. And my Covid and flu shots every year. As long as they remain available, I'll get them. And when my insurance company stops paying for them, I can probably afford to keep up with them.

And I will because the only truth I know is: none of us is responsible only for ourself.

.

I haven't. I've been going to work each day, going to physical therapy twice a week, brain therapy twice a month, karaoke kids weekly or more, wrapping up the home renovations, organizing brunch club, trying to get back into yoga now that I'm allowed, and all the other things.

 Today I was thinking about being the part of GenX raised on media singularly derisive of compassion and "hippie" values like tolerance and peace. How even given a steady drumbeat of how loser those peaceniks were, I remain shocked and disgusted by how cruel Republicans are.

Unexpectedly, my New Year's tradition became wearing my grandmother's wedding tiara. 

Some years, my sister would steal it away, but most years, I wore it.

My grandmother was born in 1918 and I'm not sure exactly when my grandparents got married, but she was 25 when my dad was born, so 1938? 1940?

It's gotten too fragile too wear. It still has all its sequins but it wilts and one of the spires is now cracked beneath the surface. Perhaps I'll try to repair it this summer.

Happy new year.

I voted by mail at least a week ago. I like voting by mail. I used to vote by mail in order to volunteer for 866-Our-Vote, but I have not done that since 2016. Many reasons, not relevant here.

Today, I am off the internet, except for the part where all my work is done remotely. Tonight I'm hanging at my favorite bar which is running karaoke tonight, so no teevees. I suppose I'll see some returns without trying, but I'll try anyway.

I always vote. I have often canvassed. I've volunteered. But I have never enjoyed the U.S. tradition of sport in elections, and, for more than 20 years, that tradition has made me sadder, angrier, and increasingly disengaged each election. I do my research; I make my choices; I cast my ballot but I can't care. And I simply will not watch. I will not engage with the game.

It's the tribalism. It's the reactionary "they're all the same".  It's the bluster and shouting, dressing up disengagement with critical thinking as passion. It's the denigration of expertise, service and the refusal to accept that complex problems, large systems—as well as the balancing of differing interests—do not have simple or universally appealing solutions.

So I try to find things which tell me which choices acknowledge that none of this should be a game, none of it should be us vs. them. It's not bon mots, soundbites, zingers or points. It's people's lives and health and well-being. I make my choices; I cast my ballot and I disengage.

I don't know if that's right but it's sustainable in all this despair, rage, helplessness and terror.

Nos et mutamur in illis.

I started hanging around Metafilter in law school, late 90s. I was a 10ker who managed to snag an account during the wild days of sign-up windows, which were randomly open for very short periods of time.

For years, I was a monthly subscriber and a regular member of local meet-up host committee. I spent a lot of time on Metafilter, for twenty years nearly. I have remained logged-in but not actually looked at anything over there in years; early pandemic, I think, is what finally drove me away for good, including ending my subscription.

Now, it seems, the financial situation is dire and the place may shutter. Which seems about time to me. Not because Metafilter has changed—though it has—but because the internet has.

A friend (a 1ker) has always said "Never read the comments, including at Metafilter." And he's right. When I first went there and stayed, the comments were irrelevant. In 1998, the internet was random and hidden.

In 1998, you went to Metafilter because the front page was the fruit of people spending hours, clicking random links and find that place where a person posts her daily ode to today's random insect or that place where another person is documenting every published photograph of Cher's knees or a grand conspiracy theory about Violet Beauregard. Finding fabulous things you would never have stumbled across on your own. Gawping at strange obsessions. Laughing with the wonderful things people do when they are doing them for self, not audience.

This is not the internet anymore. Everything now is someone's pitch, someone's product, someone's public face. Curation not needed any longer. Whatever the internet is now, it's not random. It's not personal. Treasures are not hidden. Back then, when they were hidden, Metafilter found them and shared them. It was invaluable.

But the internet changed; Metafilter changed, more or less successfully. And Metafilter—for me—lost its purpose as it became about the discussion, the conversation, the community. I can't imagine going back.

I turned to spouse the other night and wondered out loud who was going to die next. And said I was tired of people dying. And wondering who would die next.

This was the saved draft in this app, which I have not opened since September 2021. I opened it back up today because I wanted to think about this statement "Grief is disrespectful. It shows up unbidden. It interrupts dreams, work, joy. People say it’s messy and I get that, but mostly I think it’s uncontrollable" from AHP's newsletter today.

Earlier this year, I tried to find a therapist but remote therapy did not work for me. I might try to pick up again with the woman I was talking to, if in-person seems rational, because as I talked about nothing from a safe screen-shielded distance, she interupted me to say "this sounds like you have a lot of unresolved grief."

And this is true. But as I was telling my mother the story (we were sitting in a beautiful bar at an extremely posh resort where I finally caught Covid, despite the entire course of vaccines), she asked "did she give you suggestions for how to resolve it?" and I had to say no.

So this is what I've been thinking about and where Ive landed is: there is no way to resolve grief. It's that F, hanging out in the C Major chord for the rest of your life. 

"Texas House Bill 1927 permits people to carry handguns without a permit, unless they have been convicted of a felony or domestic violence. This measure was not popular in the state. Fifty-nine percent of Texans—including law enforcement officers—opposed it. But 56% of Republicans supported it."

Fuck those Republicans. Fuck those people who don't vote against them, run against them, donate against them, protest against them. And fuck those people who don't protest them. And especially fuck the 41% of Texans who did not oppose this law.

While we're angry about things, I'll be angry about that.

Also, donate:

https://janesdueprocess.org/

https://keepourclinics.org/

https://linktr.ee/WestFundTx

https://www.clinicaccess.org/

https://thebridgecollective.org/

https://fundtexaschoice.org/

https://linktr.ee/AfiyaCenter

https://linktr.ee/FronteraFundRGV

https://linktr.ee/teafund

https://www.wholewomanshealthalliance.org/

https://www.bucklebunnies.org/

https://avowtexas.org/

Tomorrow I get my vaccine second dose. Trying to get my first dose was fraught and then I felt guilty when I won the appointment lottery--especially because it was not only just about week to wait but also was less than 2 miles from home. A bartender friend who scored an appointment a day later had to travel over 10 miles from home to get there. 

Spouse's doctor's office contacted him to schedule an appointment shorly after I'd made my appointment. Then about 10 days later the hospital associated with my gyne (but not my primary care) contacted me to schedule and appointment. Then my primary care doctor. And today. the County health department called to help me schedule if I needed to.

So the difficulty in getting a vaccine appointment, the guilt in scoring one, feels ridiculous within just a few weeks

(My vaccine was Pfizer, administered by Walgreens, which means it was done not at the recommended 3 week interval, but the easier-for-their-auto-scheduler 4-week interval. I'm not worried or annoyed by that, just noting the timeline. Spouse also got Pfizer, at the hospital, but his first shot was after mine, and his second shot before)

My nephew is a 13 year old Latino boy living in Chicago.

I walked away from the internet at the appropriate time today. I already knew that the video would show police had lied about the encounter. I also knew that I'd not be able to avoid a great deal of analysis and commentary from people I work with in the coming weeks. (It's our job)

But I just can't. How are we supposed to live in a world where adults meet children with lethal force? And even more when they have the color of law?

Scrolled past some random bit of internet "news" I am neither interested in nor have any background for about actress Margot Robie and had the idle "ugh, I hate Margot Robie" thought and came to a screeching internal halt.

I've never actually seen a movie with Margot Robie in it; never read an interview with Margot Robie; or watched a clip in a pop culture something or other. Never had a conversation with anyone about a movie she's in, or what they think of her performances. I know exactly one thing about her:

how heterosexual cisgender white men talk about Margot Robie. 

So in actuality, I have no opinion of Margot Robie, but I absolutely hate everything heterosexual cisgender white men think, say or do with their idea of Margot Robie.

How fucking tedious.