Covid In The House
KNOCK KNOCK, WHO’S THERE, CORONAVIRUS, CORONAVIRUS WHO
Grant is on his seventh day of quarantine after testing positive for COVID-19.
(I am sharing this with you with his permission, naturally.)
We are both double-vaccinated. I tested negative. His symptoms are not severe, and he is past the worst of them. He says his sense of taste and smell are returning, but he went through a weird and terrible period of being unable to meaningfully differentiate between beer and LaCroix.
I wanted to tell y'all how it happened because I think it's important to let folks know this, especially among my beloved sphere of science-affirmers and pro-vaxxers.
Two weeks ago, we went to a weekend-long house party getaway with some friends. Every adult in attendance was double-vaccinated. There were ten of us in total.
We all were feeling pretty safe and secure against the risk of Covid, because after all, we're all double-vaccinated. Risk felt low. And we hadn't seen some of these folks, or been on a weekend away like this, since pre-pandemic.
It felt like a much-needed mental health break, and we were happy to get to go, happy to get away, happy to see folks, and pretty unworried about the risk of Covid because it just felt kind of remote and unlikely. Having decided to do the weekend, we all really wanted to enjoy it.
And we did.
It was a delightful 48 hours of food, laughing, paddleboarding, learning what a gooey duck is (because one of our friends DUG ONE UP ERUGUGHHH) (no gooey ducks were harmed in the making of this beach memory) (I have learned it’s actually spelled “geoduck”) (if you watch the video I linked to above, which I do not necessarily recommend, I hasten to add that you should of course avoid reading the comments), games of fetch with two dogs who did not want to stop swimming, and hours of karaoke.
A perfect, deeply needed holiday.
A few days after we got home, five people tested positive for Covid.
Five out of ten vaccinated people.
I don't know about y'all, but 50% is... a way higher number than I would have assumed possible.
Especially given that we followed the (phase three!) B.C. government mandates and waited to gather like this until it was officially allowed again, only gathering inside with people we knew had been double-vaccinated.
We assessed our risk as pretty low, in other words.
Of the five COVID-positive folks from that weekend, no one experienced severe symptoms.
But we all thought the vaccine was a bit more of a silver bullet against the infection than it was. The vaccine is a silver bullet against serious complications. It is a no-brainer to get the vaccine.
Which: thank you, scientists.
I sympathize with everyone who is, like, over it with the pandemic at this point. We really need mental health breaks. That's important too. I am glad we went on the trip. I don't think folks should sit home. While we’re here, in between major lockdowns (?), everyone should live their lives in whatever way makes best sense to them, and feel as good about it as possible. (Within reason and IF you are vaccinated. If you are medically able to get the vaccine and refuse it, I have literally nothing to say to you.)
But the pandemic is also not going anywhere. Who knows what 2022 holds. I just want to alert the vaccinated that precautions — and boosters, when they come available — are still a really great idea. I've learned the vaccine is wonderful, but it isn't magical. We're all still pretty vulnerable.
Our friend L. called us this week to hear how Grant is feeling, and I told her that it all has a faintly ridiculous and shame-inducing quality, feeling compelled to admit that, after 18 months of such careful, careful caution and abstention, we then basically created a super-spreader event, and we got the Covid. She said she remembers that same thing from when she was diagnosed: “Like, it’s really pretty simple what you’re supposed to do. Don’t leave the house, don’t get the Covid. And then you have to go around to everyone and be like, ‘Hey guys, guess what, I left the house and I got the Covid.’”
Ultimately, I’m happy to say that everyone I personally know is doing their best. That is really all you can ask of a populace.
SLEEP-SCREAMING
Three times in my life so far, about once a decade, I’ve awakened from a nightmare by screaming.
Out loud, in real life.
It happened for the third time last night.
Has this happened to you? I don’t know how common it is. It is at once a humiliating and highly dramatic way of waking up. The scream often comes out as a bit of a strangled half-scream, not the full blood-curdler you imagined you were doing in the dream as the shark bit you/ghost caught up to you/talking clock from Beauty and the Beast entered your bedroom naked, somehow.
Even though the scream is not a full scream, I cannot stress enough that it is still very much enough of a real scream to awaken both you and also Grant and Woodrow, or whomever your personal fellow bedroom inhabitants are.
As soon as the scream happens, you are wide awake with a rapidly dawning understanding of what has just occurred, so you don’t even get to enjoy the usual comfortable “oh, it was all just a dream” relief. Instead, you spend those post-waking seconds trying not to die from embarrassment.
Then, later, of course, you have to tell exactly what was so scary about the dream, and you start feeling more and more foolish with every word.
Because it’s a dream, all the details that seemed so frightening — “it was you, but also not really you, because you were this sort of melting head, and then everything you pointed at was melting also, like a bad acid trip” — just end up sounding Addams-Family kooky instead of mortal-terror inducing.
Happily, Grant is a physician, so when I got around to the part that actually made me scream (“I thought I was already awake from the everything-melting nightmare, and then I felt a weird presence, like, fly INTO MY LEFT EAR and yell ‘SHUT UP’ really loud,”) he simply nodded sagely and said “hypnagogic hallucination” and we got to have a satisfying scientific discussion about that.
I’M IN THE WRONG 🎶 STORYYY 🎶
A few weeks ago, Grant and I were at dinner with two friends, who are not musical-theatre people. Grant, I should say, is also not a musical-theatre person, except for by proxy when I make him interact with things like Schmiggadoon! and I suspect he secretly sort of enjoys it, and when he starts singing “One Day More” around the house and making up his own lyrics.
But hold on, I need to back up and tell you about Grant’s car.
Grant had a car issue for several months running where he’d get in the car and it wouldn’t start. This happened repeatedly. When he initially took it to the shop to investigate, they told him something was draining the battery, but they couldn’t isolate what.
They replaced the battery, but it kept happening. He eventually bought a self-starting jumper cable set to use whenever this happened, which got to be like once a week.
He kept bringing it back to the Ford dealership where he got it, and they kept being like, “It’s a mystery!” and throwing their hands up comically while charging him hundreds of dollars to not know anything.
That went on for several months.
Finally, they kept the car for a two-day period so they could run every diagnostic they could think of.
They figured out it was the stereo system causing all the problems.
It turns out, wayyyyyy back in 2014, someone* got a CD stuck in the CD player.
* culprit to be identified as the story unfolds, not to worry.
The car had been repeatedly trying to eject the stuck CD ever since.
Now, at one point, Grant and I both knew that there was a stuck CD that kept trying to eject itself, but this issue eventually faded into background noise, that way things sometimes do, in life, and we forgot about it completely.
But every now and then, the stereo would get a burst of energy and get stuck in a loop of trying to eject the CD and being unable to. Apparently, if this goes on for seven years, it messes up the battery permanently and drains it.
The Ford dealership’s fix was to pull the whole stereo out and replace it.
At which point they were able to finally eject the long-unejected CD.
It was Into The Woods.
(Original Broadway Cast, since I know you’re wondering.)
Anyway, I’m telling you that story so that I can tell you this story:
Grant spun that entire anecdote for our two non-musical-theatre friends one night over dinner, and there was great general hilarity, and then one of them said, “So whose CD was it? What’s Into The Woods?”
I said, “It’s a Broadway musical, so it was mine.”
Ahem.
AND THEY SAID (I swear. This, verbatim):
“Oh, so it’s YOUR fault!”
And I was like, “<head explosion emoji>” and “Let me just tell all of y’all real quick how that comment would have POSITIVELY SLAYED if a different sort of crowd had been sitting around this table,” and they all looked at me bemusedly. I stopped short of singing the song for them, but only just.
It feels like the right time, though, to admit that I went through a teenage phase where I decided to learn all five parts of “Your Fault” in order to perform it, for my own amusement, in my bedroom, alone. I also learned “Rock Island,” a.k.a. the train song from The Music Man, in the same format. (For reasons I don’t understand, no one has ever hired me to recreate these performance pieces on stage, which feels like a real missed opportunity for posterity.)
Lastly, this newsletter is to serve as official and binding notice that the Ford Motor Company, or else the ghost of Henry Ford himself, and I am not fussed about which, owes me a new Into The Woods OBC recording, stat. Joanna Gleason or GTFO, truly.
STEELER? I BARELY KNOW HER
Look at this subject line from the Pittsburgh Steelers, who keep worming their way into my email inbox with this nonsense.
Lord grant me the confidence of the Pittsburgh Steelers spam email campaign manager, am I right? Why am I on this mailing list? Whoever signed me up for this as a joke really got impeccable ROI on their prank, because I have tried like 70 times to unsubscribe from this list, and it just keeps coming back.
At some point, I have to assume I will have to eventually give up and become a diehard Steelers fan.
(This joke would be a whole lot funnier if they were not still employing the rapist quarterback. I looked it up in order to make a “hey, didn’t they used to have a rapey dude playing for them,” but it turns out: he’s still there! in the year 2021. Gross. Happily I have learned not to expect anything better from our beloved National League o’ Football.)
COLLECTING ALL THE THINGS
Amassing collections is something I’ve done my entire life.
Right now:
Plants. Crystals and stones. Books.
Previous incarnations of me have collected:
Indigo Girls memorabilia, vinyl records, musical instruments, everything Victoria’s Secret made in the late 1990s, stray dogs, art supplies (I think I might be back in an art-supply collecting phase now, actually), and My Little Ponies.
And books. That one’s here to stay.
I’ve also, though, run many mental collections. I loved memorizing every Miss America back in the 1990s at the height of my pageant fandom, to the wonder and condemnation of my friends who were forced along on that journey with me. At various other points, I’ve memorized presidents, poems, the periodic table, entire musicals, world countries and world capitals.
I read Cannery Row a couple months ago, and the hero of the story is Doc, a guy who, like me, makes collections a constant priority, and a career facet.
I learned when I did my Clifton Strengths a few months back that there’s a name for the urge to collect and catalogue. It’s called Input, it is #1 on my list of 34 strengths, and it suits writers, who depend on a wide array of experiences and awarenesses in order to write things that are relevant and useful to a large portion of society.
I love that. Obviously. But.
With everything light, there is a shadow. And Input can look like, and feel like, hoarder tendencies.
I don’t even know which is more potentially harmful: the physical collections or the mental ones. I’ve adopted minimalism practices to force myself to deal with the former, and meditation practice to help me deal with the latter.
Those sorts of forced ways of dealing with things can work well. I love to pretend that I am good at discipline and goal-setting and such. I know I have a lot of people fooled in this regard. The thing I am naturally good at is willpower. My discipline is actually kind of terrible. I hate admitting this to you, like letting you in on a dark and embarrassing secret. Yes, friends, I’m a once-a-decade sleep screamer and my discipline is non-existent.
It’s true: I would much rather laze about eating crackers in bed and reading novels. MUCH RATHER. Put a book into my hands and something salty I can compulsively munch while reclining. I want nothing else in this life.
But I know that I won’t feel good about myself if I do it for one day, much less a week, so I’ve set a bunch of rigors in place to force myself not to do it. Willpower to follow a plan. That’s it. Maybe if I stick with this long enough, I will become disciplined.
It is work and work and work to keep resisting the resistance. But it’s good work. The book “The War of Art” by Steven Pressfield is a MUST-READ if this is a thing you like to work on. It makes all the resistance feel less personal, less problematic. It’s just one of those things our brains sometimes do. I’ve learned we have the power of choice, and that’s everything.
So the collections will continue. It’s nice knowing this is just the way my brain’s built, and that I have power over how it’s going to get expressed.
QUOTE OF THE DAY
It seems important to add this, given that I just told you all I want to do is eat salty things and read books: Sometimes I do actually allow myself to do that. Not to worry. Here’s something I heard today from London Writer’s Salon:
"Rest is not idleness,
And to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer's day,
Listening to the murmur of the water,
Or watching the clouds float across the sky,
Is by no means a waste of time.”
– John Lubbock
WE LIKE THE MOON
I love the sky. I love the moon and the sun and the early morning. Sometimes I feel so doubtful about my newfound spirituality, so much so that I struggle with naming it spirituality without appending an eyeroll, but in these sorts of moments, I can see things pretty clearly — spirituality is, for me, just about awe in the grandeur of natural things around us. The moon, tiny olives popping out improbably on our tree situated here in plant hardiness zone 7, millions-of-years-old crystals you can hold in your hand. There is nothing wacky or false about it, and 5:30 a.m. has a way of making everything profound.
It's hard because, like, some pseudoscience is awesome and some of it really sucks. I want to blame everything that goes wrong on various planets, but I also love vaccines. Modern life is so complicated!
LINKS FOR YOUR LIFE
You must, just must, read this story about a grieving family’s 20-year search for meaning post-9/11.
Here is a brain that grew rudimentary eyes because this time period is not horrifying enough already. (actually it’s pretty cool that this happened but still also extremely horrifying and gross. stuff can be two things, y’all.)
This video about Maya Angelou’s work routine is an inspiring uplift, should you need one.
They said it couldn’t be done, but lookit here, something heartwarming from Reddit. A group of people rushes over to prevent a carnival ride from tipping over. (Relatedly: did y’all ever ride a Gravitron? Precisely how traumatized were you?)
Get into learning about procrastination. You can do this instead of doing any work, and still feel like you’re moving things forward! Inception!
I am positive that, as creepy season approaches, you would like to learn about the Iron Age dagger buried under the foundations of a medieval house just uncovered in Scotland.
On that same tack, here are 15 urban legends from around the world.
1. So sorry about your COVID rake-to-the-face. Glad everyone is relatively okay. If it makes you feel ANY better, I think we'll soon be transitioning from pandemic to endemic, ie. just learning to live with a risk of catching 'rona. Maybe you're just a trailblazer in that way!
2. Ugh, just when I thought I was done reading the newsletter, you threw 50,000 words about 9/11 at me. Soooo good, though. The mid-article cameo by Rudy Giuliani from back when people liked him and he wasn't absolutely insane was positively jarring.
Okay, so I also learned all five parts of Your Fault in high school AND managed to teach them to four other kids in the show choir so we could perform it (I was the Witch, match) as part of a Broadway revue I created called Seasons of Love after the frigid-ass conservative military community I grew up around petitioned to stop me from producing a one-act version of Rent, which I adapted myself and had already begun rehearsals for when they shut us down. So. That being said, I WOULD HAVE DIED OF HAPPINESS AT THAT DINNER TABLE is all I’m saying here.
While bored in class, I used to pretend I was taking notes when what I was really doing was writing out the librettos of musicals long-hand FROM MEMORY. I wrote out Jesus Christ Superstar twice. I think I still have those pages somewhere, neat little packets of lined notebook paper carefully stapled together. I also knew all three and a half hours of the original un-cut version of Les Miserables, as well as Phantom of the Opera and Miss Saigon. I love the sung-through musicals so damn much.
Also, I sleep-scream way more often than once a decade, but it never occurred to me to be embarrassed about it, and now I’m a little embarrassed about my lack of embarrassment. 😅 My sleep-scream-dreams these days are usually about my partner betraying me in some horrible way. When I was a kid, they were about my mother turning into a monster and trying to eat me. And it’s odd, because I feel like I’m not traumatized enough to justify fairly frequent (and highly dramatic) sleep screaming, but apparently, I don’t give myself enough emotional damage credit.
Thank you, as always, for sending out a wonderful, thought-provoking read!