COVID Archives - Page 6 of 10 - Ramblin' with Roger

Nov. rambling: systemic oppression

Rebecca Jade touring with Dave Koz!

Scientific American: People Who Jump to Conclusions Show Other Kinds of Thinking Errors; Belief in conspiracy theories and overconfidence are two tendencies linked to hasty thinking

Homelessness: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

Data Debunks Insidious Myths About Immigration

Freedom Isn’t What It Used To Be

In Re-Analysis, Ivermectin Benefits Disappeared as Trial Quality Increased; Andrew Hill, Ph.D., received death threats

Fox News host who told the audience to get COVID vaccine reads hate mail on the air

Ted Cruz Criticizes Big Bird for Getting Vaccinated and Satire from The Borowitz Report: Oscar the Grouch Cuts Ties with Ted Cruz

The high cost of living in a disabling world

A Brief Overview Of Systemic Oppression – Lynae Vanee

Ahmaud Arbery suspects’ trial defense taps a racist legal legacy

Ed Gainey, who will be Pittsburgh’s first Black mayor and Aftab Purevale, picked as Cincinnati’s first Asian mayor, and Michelle Wu, Boston’s first woman and first person of color elected mayor

Requirements for travel into the U.S.

The Greatest Unsolved Heist in Irish History

A spite fence in Virginia Beach

Walking America part 5: Breezewood

Balance

Self-compassion can help build a more balanced, healthy perspective

Mispronunciation: why you should stop correcting people’s mistakes

How To Get Rid of Lots of Old Books

Now I Know: The Luggage Loophole That Isn’t and How to Brew an Economy and The Swampy Loophole in the Georgia Constitution and The Costume That Was a Trick and The Odd Depths of Preserving Plutonium

Hiker lost for 24 hours ignored calls from rescuers because of an unknown number

Why Avocados Still Exist

Forbidden love. A new comic strip, about corn. Sort of.

We fed the hungry with ONLY 7-Eleven Rewards points.

R.I.P.

Aaron Feuerstein, known for paying Malden Mills workers even after the factory burned down, has died at 95

The Rise and Fall of Mort Sahl, the Comedian Who Revolutionized Stand-Up

Former VA administrator and US Senator (D-GA) Max Cleland died at home. A savage political attack suggesting that he was “soft on the war on terror” caused him to lose his Senate seat in 2002. A live grenade dropped by a fellow soldier in Vietnam had robbed him of three limbs.

I neglected to acknowledge the death of Diane Westwell, one of our loyal ABC Wednesday contributors, on 20 September 2021. She was a very sweet person.

Greg Hatcher, a founder of Atomic Junk Shop and Brianna’s Nerd-Dad has died

The Weirdest Way The Earth Can Kill You

MUSIC

Nightbirde Sings Psalm 88

Music from The Lord Of The Rings, arranged for solo piano by Leiki Ueda

Coverville 1377: The Beastie Boys and Beasties Episode and 1378: Led Zeppelin IV: 50th Anniversary Album Cover to Cover

The Mighty Rio Grande – This Will Destroy You from the movie Moneyball.

The Ghost Rejoins The Living – Freezepop

Rachmaninoff’s Isle of the Dead

Sara Lee – Liza Minelli

While You Wait For The Others – Grizzly Bear

I’m Looking Through You – MonaLisa Twins

When “Man of 10,000 Sound Effects” Blew The Audience Away With His Voice Guitar

Mozart Doesn’t Make You Smarter

Paul McCartney re: You Gave Me The Answer – ‘The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present’

Dave Koz and Friends Christmas Tour 2021 with Richard Elliot, Rick Braun, Jonathan Butler, and Rebecca Jade!

Going to church together, or not

Live! In person!

My wife and I have usually gone to church together over the past 22+ years. But often, we didn’t sit together, as I was usually perched in the choir loft while she was sitting in the congregation. The exception was during the summer when the choir was usually off. She really liked it, but it felt somewhat foreign to me.

Then there was the pandemic. When our service returned on Facebook beginning March 22, 2020, it was us sitting together watching a screen together. And we’d do communion together, either something my wife baked that weekend or a cracker to eat, homemade grape juice, or Nine Pin Cider to drink.

But we would be on separate computers for the adult education class. We had different ZOOM styles in terms of when to be on mute. For me, it was almost always, when I wasn’t speaking. Also, I found that couples on the same ZOOM screen are harder to hear/understand and especially more difficult to see.

On June 20, 2021, we began the in-person church, and we both went through the summer live, except once when we were away.

Risk assessment

So it’s curious that now we’re doing church differently again. We both go to adult ed online. But then I go to church in person, while my wife has decided to go back online. She’s teaching kids, most too young to be fully vaccinated yet, whereas I really don’t see that many people.

I was having a discussion about COVID and risk with a friend. It reminded me of a comment to a recent Weekly Sift article. “When there’s a threat with no end in sight…, we need to also measure risk against the reward… Eating in a restaurant is risky, so I won’t eat inside just any restaurant, but I will eat inside my favorite restaurant. Not because the risk is lower, but because the reward is high (in my case). For other people, it might be that you’ll spend time in a small room for a long time with vaccinated family but not with vaccinated strangers.”

My choir met at church on October 14 for the first time in 19 months, and we sang! All full vaccinated, masked, and distanced – it was difficult to hear the tenors – but we sang. And we didn’t suck! It wasn’t for the service, yet, but maybe we’ll record something in the next month or two to be used.

Rule of thumb: when there is both a remote and face-to-face option, I’ll almost always opt fr the latter. But I never mock other people’s more cautious approach.

All my shots: COVID #3 and more

Tdap

Yes, I’ve got all my shots. In the month of September, I received not one, not two, but THREE vaccines.

1. The influenza shot.- “The best time to get a flu vaccine — which reduces the risk of serious flu-related illness, hospitalization or death — is any time between September and the end of October, the CDC suggests.”

I’ve been getting the shot every year for over a decade, after getting the flu kept me in bed for about a week.

2. The Tdap (tetanus, diphtheria, pertussis) shot. As I noted here, I had stepped on a nail in 2000 in my then-new backyard and got my first shot probably in decades. I got another one in 2010. As my old pal, Diane suggested, “Sometime (around 2000) pertussis was re-instituted in the ‘adult’ Td…” Pertussis is also known as whooping cough.

But I didn’t get the shot in 2020 because my doctor, who I had seen only once that year, for my physical in September, didn’t want to subject me to two sore arms. This year, I was given a choice; two sore arms now, or come back later. I opted for the former. And it wasn’t bad at all.

Booster

3. A third “booster” dose of the Pzifer vaccine

I had briefly struggled with whether I, as an entitled American who can readily receive the shot, should get a third dose. Much of the world hasn’t been able to get any vaccine.

The conversation in my head sounded rather like when I was a little kid and told to eat the beets (canned beets were AWFUL). Some parents, I don’t think mine, would say, “Eat these because there are people in China who are starving.” And the kids’ retort would suggest that they’d gladly send their veggies to Peking.

Of course, that wasn’t and isn’t physically possible. The current administration is dedicated to buying and sending vaccines abroad. But as this CBS News story about Lesotho notes, “Battling COVID in Africa takes more than vaccines. It takes ‘flying doctors,’ and even they need help.” If I thought my third shot was taking away someone else’s first shot, I would have gladly forgone it.

Musing

Ultimately, I decided to get the extra dose because of the news that the Pfizer vaccine, which I had received in March, appears to be less effective over time than the Moderna. And I’m over 65 and overweight, plus over 700,000 Americans have died of the disease, so that’s an affirmative.

I received my first two doses at a CVS about a mile from my house. This time, I went on the CVS website and found I could walk to my local pharmacy 0.3 of a mile away. They wanted a little more info this time, such as both my Medicare and my Rx insurance numbers, and telling of my reaction to the previous shots. But the process was not onerous.

No reaction to the third shot, other than a little soreness at the injection site, same as the second dose.

Optimism: is it always good?

After I had written about my melancholy/depression, I allowed that my default position about events is not optimism, but pessimism. My friend Cee had heard the benefits of optimism.

And indeed, if you Google “Is optimism good?” the first thing one might find is this quote from Kids’ Health: ” Optimism Is Healthy. It turns out that an optimistic attitude helps us be happier, more successful, and healthier. Optimism can protect against depression — even for people who are at risk for it. An optimistic outlook makes people more resistant to stress. Optimism may even help people live longer.”

So it’s settled. Wait a minute. The next article is a 2015 piece from the Washington Post stating that “Researchers have found a really good reason not to be an optimist.” It references an NIH study.

That Wapo article: “Optimism isn’t merely unhelpful at times—it can be demonstrably counterproductive. Telling someone ‘you can do it’ when they actually can’t doesn’t change the outcome, and it makes them more likely to exert time and effort on a fruitless task. There might be no clearer example than the fact that optimists spend more time looking for Waldo, but are no more likely to find him.” But the piece allows that pessimism is not curative either.

Ben Franklin

I had mentioned to Cee that I had long been attracted by a portrayal of Ben Franklin, on, of all things Bwitched. His character [said]… that “he always going through life expecting negative outcomes so that when something positive happened, he would be pleasantly surprised. It was a punchline that was supposed to be funny – the canned laughter told me that – but, to me, it made SENSE… ‘Perhaps I’m an optimistic pessimist — prepare for the worst, but when the very worst doesn’t happen, I’m pleasantly surprised.’”

I’m more vulnerable when I’m optimistic. I’m thinking of someone in a particular position who despised the action of a perpetrator, and rightly so. When they were in the same situation as the previous villain, I was optimistic that they, remembering how crummy they felt, would act differently. Nope, they performed the same damn way. As bad as the mess was, it was my optimism that bit me in the butt.

This is why, for instance, I’m not disappointed in politicians anymore. If they end up being better than expected, I’m pleased. But if they have feet of clay, well, what did I expect? I suppose this sounds cynical, but it tends to regulate my highs and lows, which in the main, works for me.

So the fact that I was optimistic that we’d be out of this damn pandemic by now is why I crashed emotionally a bit. This commercial really spoke to me.

Getting thru the rest of the pandemic

For MY sake, people, PLEASE get your damn shots!

How am I going to get through the rest of the pandemic? Eighteen months after it hit our area, I have found the need to analyze the ups and downs of my mental health.

Thursday, March 12, 2020: Last choir rehearsal to date. The next day, sensing things would shut down for a while, I took out seven Marvel DVDs (which I didn’t watch for a few months). The church was canceled that Sunday.

Sunday, March 22: Church started on Facebook, with the pastors, their older daughter, and one church member. The music was previously recorded from past services. An ersatz experience, but better than nothing. It got better over time, with section leaders and a handful of others taping music specifically for the service. BYOC – bring your own communion, often Wheat Thins and my MIL’s homemade grape juice.

April: Starting to feel a bit isolated, I started to call people on the telephone, two per day until Memorial Day, Then one a day until August.

April 22, 2020: My father-in-law died, unrelated to COVID. His three surviving children were with him. No service at that time.

Mid-August to early October: Worked the Census. Did I feel totally safe going door-to-door wearing a mask? Why no, but it was important work.

December: Missing the chance to sing at church during Lent and now Advent sucketh.

I’m not throwing away my shot!

January 2021: There are a couple of vaccines out there. When will I get mine? When will I get mine?

February: When will I get mine? My wife got her first shot.

March: I got both of my injections, my wife got her second and my daughter got her first! Yay!

April 6: I went out to eat, outside, with three of my oldest friends, Carol and Karen and Bill, plus Karen’s old friend Michael. Besides being happy seeing them, this was incredibly liberating.

May 1: our daughter tossed her parents out of the house so she could clean the room. So her parents saw the tulips in Albany’s Washington Park, hung out at Peebles Park, saw the waterfalls at Cohoes, which despite it being in Albany County, I hadn’t seen in 30 years and my wife had never been there. Then we went to a small Lebanese restaurant and ate… INDOORS. There was only one other party there, but still. Radical stuff.

June 21: First day of IN-PERSON church worship! Hallelujah! Masks in church, but the coffee hour in the parking lot.

But then…

Just as I thought we were coming out of it, the country, and indeed my county, was experiencing upticks in the infection rates. So it felt as though every other plan that I was involved with was being altered.

I know I’m hardly the only one. Massive Science noted last month. “The past six months in the US provides a clear example of how vaccine complacency works, showing how over-optimistic assumptions about vaccines can lead to the elimination of other precautions too quickly. “

So, for instance, “Saturday, October 16 was supposed to be Young@Heart’s triumphant return to the stage in our hometown. And then came the Delta variant. Suddenly, it was – once again – no longer safe for us to rehearse together and perform live in person.” they’re doing the virtual thing.

The Friends and Foundation of the Albany Public Library has changed its Literary Legends gala plans from about 150 people indoors and unmasked to 75 people, vaccinated and masked, a more difficult task.

I had hoped that, after a year and a half of not singing in the church choir, surely we’d be back together. Alas, no. And there are myriad other examples, from performances limited to funerals still postponed. And we’re in the situation in large part because… well, you know why.

Not so funny

I know that there are “Funny Vaccine Memes To Get You Through The Rest Of The Pandemic.” They are so NOT working for me. (And to be honest, some of them I just don’t get.)

So I’ve become angry, even enraged, by the situation. Now, anger doesn’t last in me. But sadness does. After railing against the inanity, I’ve felt melancholy at best, or likely depressed.

I’m trying to discover remedies. Reading books won’t help, because I can’t focus on them presently. No video of more than about seven minutes can hold my attention. I read the lifestyle tips ad nauseum, which are just not attainable at present. I’m not sure of the solution; I’ve opted against medicating with alcohol.

A few months ago, I sought the service of a psychologist. It was remote, and it didn’t “take” for me. I’ll probably seek that route again.