On Pins and Needles
I'm all jabbed up. I got my second dose of the Pfizer vaccine on Saturday morning. It wasn't too bad. By the middle of the first day, I felt run down and sore. Things got a little worse as time went on. By Sunday evening, I couldn't stay awake for more than 15 minutes at a time, my joints ached, and I broke out in a cold, clammy sweat from a 99.6° F temperature. This morning I woke up feeling fine aside from a lingering soreness of the arm.
On the way to get my shot, I encountered sidewalk barkers trying to get walk-ins off the street and into the clinic run by the city or FEMA or whoever is in charge of it now. The Jefferson University clinic I went to was a block or two up the road. The place was alarmingly quiet. I was one of only a dozen or so people there who weren't staff, while on my first visit there were roughly 100 other vaccees[1] along for the ride with me and a steady stream of more arriving as I left. If you need a vaccine, you can probably show up and get one without an appointment at this point. We're an odd nation devoted to firearms yet terrified of shots.
I'm now on a staycation. I took the week off because I needed a break from working. I'm glad I did, too. It would have been no fun to go from a weekend spent recovering from a coronavirus vaccine directly into Monday's corporate universe. And, unlike my last few staycations, I haven't got a long list of to-do items to get caught up on this time around. There's joyfully little on my agenda. Most of the week is wide open for me, but I can't think of anywhere to go. It's not a great time for taking trips and traveling — especially to the urban areas that I tend to gravitate toward. Even a quick jaunt up to NYC for the day seems like a bad idea right now. I don't know what I'll do with my time this week, but today I'm enjoying walking around in the sunshine, and doing not much of anything at all.