My wife went grocery shopping to stock up on staples that we didn’t get on our last giant trip. The total was ridiculous, as everyone knows.
But the thing is, everything we needed was actually there. It’s been years since we could get our full list.
One more small step back to some kind of normal.
In our continuing return to normalcy, today we’ll be going to H-Mart for the first time in over two years. We’ve bought some stuff online in that time, but those options are limited.
I suppose one of us could have gone individually any time during the pandemic. But that’s not the point of an H-Mart run. The point is to make it a big family affair and spend like $500, and then you go, “Oh, shit, we better not do this for another six months.”
Anyway, we’re out of everything. It’ll be fun.
I’ve been reluctant to go unmasked and start doing stuff again. But when I think about it, it’s not because I’m actually afraid of getting Covid. Not anymore. I’ve been vaccinated and boosted, and so has my family. And the case rate here is okay.
What’s really holding me back is that so many people around us are just honestly awful. They took off their masks before the pandemic, then they showed us just how little they care about us or anyone. There’s no going back. I can’t make nice with the devil.
I have no idea how to interact with the unvaxxed and the Trumpers. I don’t. I know they want me, my family, and my friends dead. They’ve said as much. They’re proud of their hate. They hold us in such low esteem that they’d rather see the country burn than let us vote.
Taking my mask off and going out in public isn’t an admission of failure or weakness or anything. But it’s been conflated with all this other bullshit and now it feels like I’m taking a step back and pretending we aren’t living amongst monsters.
I’m not comfortable with it yet, but at least I recognize it and can dissociate that from the mask. That’s sorta like progress.
If you stumbled on this and happen to be a Trump voting anti-vaxxer, just please try for a minute to picture how you look to us. I’m not going to try to change your mind, you’re already too far gone. Just know that every mouth frothing face you make, every conspiracy theory you spread, every picture of guns and cops you post to social media – it doesn’t make you look patriotic. I know you think you love your country. But you look like a lunatic. You are the person rambling on a street corner that we all avoid. We aren’t afraid of you because of your ideas or your integrity. We fear you the way we fear serial killers.
At least I can lose the mask. For now.
Not the first time in this pandemic that I’ve said it. But hopefully it’ll stick this time.
I’m not quite at 12-step alert level, and I don’t want to be. So let’s hope I do better this time.
After years of surgery, recovery, and Covid, things are finally lining up so that we can just go enjoy ourselves for an evening.
Unless things spike again. In which case, fuck everything.
Our county may be stupidly full of denialism and needlessly fighting mask mandates… but at least we were able to get more KN95s for the kids.
I’m backsliding into depression so bad that even my ray of hope is couched in the pandemic. Why is it that the less energy we have, the angrier the anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers get? Do you people have nothing else to wake up to besides your rage? And if that’s all that’s left, do you even know who exactly you’re planning to die for?
Ugh. Just keeping my fingers crossed my kids stay safe. They deserve far better than this shit.
I was looking at news on Omicron and realized I wasn’t filled with terror so much as annoyance. And idealistic part of me thinks that should be depressing and feels like defeat.
But really it’s serenity. There’s relief in accepting the uncontrollable disasters and ills of the world. I have done literally all I can do to stop the spread. The dumb choices my conservative neighbors make are their own, and I’ve chosen to excise them from my life.
Which means there’s no guilt or shame remaining. Omicron will come to my doorstep, too, same as the variants before it. We’ll be as vigilant as we can, and the vaccines will give us some protection. This is how it works.
Life is normal again. I guess it’s time for cake.
Still struggling for positivity this week. But you know what would really suck to have on top of general malaise and disaffectedness? Total body aches and a pounding headache that keep me in bed.
Like, I almost always want to stay in bed all day, but the fact that I don’t have to is a minor victory. I’ll use this freedom to… probably do more fucking laundry or something, I guess.
About fucking time.
This country has got some SHIT priorities, man. It took more than a year into the pandemic for anybody in the fucking braintrust to think, “Gee, maybe this world-changing bullshit that affects everyone is interfering with the continued livelihood of kids, too. Let’s work on their vaccines, also, maybe?”
Why wasn’t that the FIRST fucking thing they thought of? Why weren’t they developing this shit in parallel? Were you motherfuckers not aware that kids are walking petri dishes?
And you’d think after the total horseshit roll-out we had for the adult vaccines they would’ve learned their lessons, like maybe we shouldn’t treat vaccine registration as some random-ass free-for-all that’s maybe kinda required maybe pretty please? But no, registering kids for their vaccines was still a total clusterfuck with websites that you have to constantly F5 and clinics you have to phone-bomb in cut-throat competition with all the other sane parents out there, out of fear of the many, many insane parents.
And there’s still all these dumb sons of bitches in charge that somehow, beyond all comprehension, think that Americans don’t want to fix all this bullshit. I’m looking at you, Manchin, you useless elmer fuck.
But whatever. We’re here now, with appointments for both kids for Friday morning to get their first dose of Pfizer. That puts us well and truly in a good spot by comparison.
Don’t think this means I’m forgetting any of this bullshit. This country has royally shit the bed, and 40% of us specifically. I will absolutely never forget, and I am nowhere even fucking close to forgiveness.
Still. We have our appointments. That’s one tiny glimmer of hope.
We bought it last July during peak Pandemic. The original plan was to fill in the fast food sized hole in our hearts, as we hadn’t been anywhere to get french fries for months on end at that point.
And while we did make fries with it a few times and loved the results, I had feared it was gonna be one of those fad buys that would just take up space after we burned out on it. Lord knows we have too much shit in our kitchen already.
More than a year on, we do actually still use it at least a couple times a week. Just not really for fries. Unless I have the energy to chop and prep them. Which I don’t, on account of being alive.
Turns out the real selling point of the fryer is that it’s just a really efficient oven for short-turn heating. Like whenever the kids want chicken nuggets. The microwave makes them soggy, and the oven takes like 40 goddamn minutes including preheat time, and all that energy is just wasted because you’re not cooking anything else with all that heat.
So we just dump that shit in the air fryer and it’s done in half the time. It has a high power draw, but it does its job fast and then stops, so it uses less electricity overall.
All this time I let the marketing to my inner gourmand lead me, but really it was my inner cheapskate that wanted this relationship.
Today Is Worth It Because... 