I mean I won’t deny that
(1) I think about places I go much more than places I don’t go and
(2) when push comes to shove I don’t want to be inconvenienced forever to protect a very small number of people
But I do make an effort to keep my opinions balanced. Like if I was the first one to get vaxxed I wouldn’t have said back in November lol let’s stop masking and if I were high risk I don’t think I would feel appreciably different about this currently
cringe
All evidence points to it being very unlikely.
I understand, but are you going to prevent your kids from playing with a ball in the driveway in case they are dumb and chase it into the street? Are you going to stop your kids from riding bicycles or driving cars eventually?
All those things are magnitudes more likely to cause issues with your child. Actually your child getting ill from covid is magnitudes more likely than getting ill from the covid vaccine.
Like I said, it’s not rational. Cultural norms dictate things kids just do. The ride bikes in the street. They do backflips off swings. Play football. Swim in the ocean. All magnitudes more dangerous than COVID. Yet deaths from these things are psychologically either someone else’s fault (driver hits them with car) or a failure to protect (they drown). But if you asked a group of parents who the biggest “failure” of a parent is, the one whose child just drowned, or the child who died from a 1 in 100 millions reaction to a medical trial their parent enrolled them in, I bet a lot of people who think the parent who put their kid in the medical trial is more at fault for their kids death than the parent who was playing on their phone while a rip tide took their kid out to sea, because that’s not something kids normally do, and the harm was induced by the parent, not just a failure to protect.
This is kind of a fucked up conversation to have in a thread where people have said their kids are enrolled in the trial, but it’s an interesting psychological phenomenon that I think many of us have felt.
I, along with the rest of the UK, Europe etc. sent my kids to school throughout the pandemic but I never volunteer any of them for a medical trial.
If they run after a ball into the street, I’d already told them not to trun in the street and let the ball go, so I can live with myself.
Trials not underway yet so how can you be so sure?
We don’t need to do a thing to protect vaccinated people in grocery stores, come on man. There is some very small level of risk, such is life man.
But…but…I want to people’s SMILES.
I mean, at least he’s honest and just coming right out with “I don’t really much care about anything other than my own comfort”. And he certainly isn’t alone, even among people who will claim to care more about the greater good.
He’s also not the 1st here to do that this week 
and we’re supposed to be the sensible forum.
Wait, are you saying that we are supposed to care about people other than ourselves?
THAT’S SOCIALISM!!!
I mentioned it. Watching it for more details, but not super concerned. Half good news in that it seems like all the vaccinated had very few or zero symptoms.
Different post, but lol at Biden donating vaccines to Covax before kids get vaccinated in the US when keeping a Federal mask mandate in place is too much to bear. US will have like a 3x stockpile before they donate Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. Hope the world isnt waiting on that.
Oh I got shot #2 yesterday, my arm is less sore than it was with #1 but I’m a bit more sluggish this time. Nothing else of note.
No it wasnt, it was in response to the WHO request.
Yes because masks are such a massive burden for those who have lived a burden free pristine life.
I really feel for you guys. Certainly such torture.
My heart bleeds for you and your massive inconvenience and turmoil you have suffered in silence.
How easy my life supposedly is or isn’t has no bearing on any of this, what are you talking about?
I’m sure I can get a few more miles out of these car tyres too, I mean what’s the difference over a couple of car lengths when braking and its not as if I hard break more than twice a year anyways.
The part that I’m struggling with is that Ohio (and other places, I assume) seems to be on a trajectory towards:
So I look at that “and” in your statement and I’m wondering how much weight it’s carrying.
So my gym wasted no time in emailing us to remind us that their mask regulations absolutely will still be in effect until further notice, which is good. I expect even if they lift the statewide mandate here in NJ (which Murphy seems like he’s in no rush to do), local businesses are still gonna require em until sometime during the summer.
In any given area, though, I think once one or two businesses of a certain type (stores, restaurants, whatever) lift their mask requirements, the rest will fall like dominoes, nobody wants to lose all the anti-masker business.
ah done with both shots for a month now, very relieved, very happy :) I’ve never had memorable reactions to vaccines but got a rough ride with moderna #2! Fine at first then clobbered that night, 103-104 fever for eight hours, delirious haunted brain, zero sleep, zero dignity, can’t imagine what upstairs neighbors thought. Fever down to 102 the next day but replaced by an all-timer headache for three more days + nausea; in the end I was useless for 84 hrs and the last embers of headache smoked in right eye for a week.
worth it! And I now enjoy Windows premium support if I speak my social security number slowly & directly into my shoulder. No but honestly I hope the time gap between these shots and future boosters helps mitigate booster side effects because that was the most busted up I’ve felt in forever. (For me moderna #1 was standard btw.)
brutal year but not gonna dwell on that here and anyway nothing happened to me that was any different from you. My normal life was pretty active and then one day I had almost no human contact for thirteen months, which still hasn’t exactly sunk in. Long story, but the extreme stance was because of ancient/vulnerable parents. It was for sure lonely but I can’t say it was the worst, I mean for starters we’re all talking to each other by typing on magic rectangles that are invisibly linked to servant machines tumbling through literally outer space to beam us Bach fugues and waffle recipes and the most believable well-lit porn in the history of carpal tunnel, not to mention that most of our homes also have a firmer and a softer pillow, and plumbing, and a refrigerator that sometimes has ice cream sandwiches—my point only being that we’re not exactly in the dungeons of William the Conqueror.
it was also an immense help that my family was rational—one of the threads that really got to me was the thread about dealing with hypnotized family & friends, and all I can say is that my heart has been going out to yall the entire year. If I had to juggle how unnerved I am by the world with bonus anxiety about my closest relationships, oh god this would be much worse.
But there’s always worse! To put one sentence out there: my friend has had six family members die of covid, one cousin, one grandparent, four aunts & uncles. When people call covid a hoax and trash us for wearing masks, I know how exasperated and dazed and flailing it makes me feel, but I can’t imagine how it might make her feel. I care a lot about human nature and why people believe in obscene things, and in some ways I thought that I’d spent my life preparing for cognitive dissonance and tribalism to play out at scale—but no sir, nope, when the world goes deranged it turns out we’re all stuck on the same bus.
This post is too long again, so two last things
(1) To everyone posting in this thread, thank you! Truly, thank you sincerely. For me this thread was daily bread in an empty year. In some ways the footprint of a site like this seems small, but some of the ideas I picked up in this thread I passed to dozens in my circle, who I know passed it to theirs, and after four or five of those boosts then dare to dream, something you posted here could show up in a buzzfeed listicle or papal bull.
(2) I know this isn’t news to anyone here, but we’re about to have a hideous decade; Humpty Dumpy fell off the wall and Humpty Dumpty for a long time now has been a denver omelet, and all the king’s men moved to wyoming to form a militia and those patriots can only stand in a circle shooting paintballs at each other for so long. I’m optimistic about way down the road, but we’re clearly careening towards some historical yikes, which I don’t say lightly. The world is molting and the United States is gonna stay on edge until the country changes its fundamental sense of itself—it’s the beginning of the end of a collective identity crisis that started at least fifty years ago and sure seems like it’s disintegrating into some species of war.
which is probably also worth it? Which I also don’t say lightly. But I’ll end this indulgent dumb post on a different note. For me one of the lessons of the past year has been about self-preservation. It’s that whenever I let my thoughts go full doomporn full steam ahead, when I surrender completely to the temptation of the gravity of the drain, when everything I think & say starts to harmonize with the prehistoric foghorn call that has been lately doing laps around the world, then man it can sometimes feel like I’m losing the whole point of this.
please don’t get me wrong—the drain we’re circling is a righteous drain, and since its event horizon is absolutely in our rearview mirror then yes, bring it on, because we aren’t the fuckups who lose the game theory game ten thousand times in a row, so count me in, come what may, let’s go
But while I’m weathering and/or eagerly participating in the 2020s, I’ll also be trying to give myself an occasional hall pass to take a breather for an hour here and there. Call it a mental health break, call it a half-measure, call it privilege, call it whatever you want, but I know that I need to defend some patch of green headspace that allows me to occasionally sit among friends or trees or books to equilibrate. To occasionally hang with people without also feeling some moral imperative to always torpedo everybody’s vibe by pointing out how preposterously fast we’re going, and that our brakes burned out a hundred miles ago, and the road ahead is about to start curving like shoelaces
We just had a terrible whole year. But now it happens to be May, and people’s porch doors are clacking open, and it seems ok to pretend that things at least feel a tiny bit better exactly right now. Sure it’s an illusion; we know the second law of thermodynamics never takes a coffee break, we see how some of society’s proudest jenga is absolutely coming down—and thank god for that, it’s about time. But we don’t get the luxury of flipping ahead in the 7th grade textbook to read the details of our undoing, and from here, meaning from the inside looking out, there is no looking out, we’re just marooned and pelted and drenched by all the bad weather we made. I’m a pretty happy person—I didn’t earn it I’m just tuned that way—but this mess bums me out more than I ever dreamed possible. But I absolutely can’t mope about it nonstop like I have been, and I don’t think I’m rationalizing when I say that I’ll be a better ally for whatever 99% of gruesome rumpus I’m signing on for if I also reserve 1% of the time to feel like myself and try to reconnect with the wonder in the world
Huh, I wonder if this post contained five mixed metaphors or if it was more like nine hundred. And all of it just a typically long way of saying that I hope there’s a day this summer where I’m playing something ridiculous like kickball and I’m with my friends—who for the most part are acting like fools but who are permanently my friends—and who I owe the occasional courtesy of doing whatever it takes to stop my stupid brain from dwelling on the existential folly of playing kickball in the mouth of pandemonium, and to set aside my own fear & grief & guilt & vampire stakes for a fucking afternoon to instead pause and feel the sun and how happy life can seem when second base is a keg.