on catching COVID in 2022
I have COVID. I found out on Wednesday, when two lines showed up on one of the tests Joe Biden mailed me. One line means you don’t have COVID, two lines means you do have COVID. I saw two lines because (as previously established) I have COVID.
I’ve spent most of the past two years attempting to avoid catching what I called “The Thing” because I didn’t want to name The Thing that killed one million Americans. Think about that number—one million—and then look at this chart I stole from Wikipedia.
Those are some of the most horrific wars America has gone through and I wouldn’t minimize them for a second. There have been around 650,000 American combat deaths across every war America has participated in, ever, meaning COVID killed more Americans in two years than literally every war.
We should be mourning, every day, but we don’t. We want everything to feel normal again.
TV shows and movies are, with a few notable exceptions, doing everything they can to write around COVID. This is an instinct I understand. I don’t want to watch things set in 2020, or 2021. I don’t want to see characters in masks, or characters struggling with the mental health aspects of social isolation. It’s too real to look at. I want to move on. We all do. But that same desire to move on means we haven’t processed the scale of what happened. Maybe we can’t process it.
So I want catching COVID myself to mean something, but to be honest I’m mostly just sleepy. It just sucks. I spent most of last week in bed, watching TV when I had some energy and sleeping when I didn’t. I bought my laptop up here, thinking I’d write at some point, but I didn’t. I slept.
I’m lucky. I’m health, young(ish), vaccinated, and boosted. We’re blessed to be at a phase where COVID is more annoying than life threatening for most people. I don’t take that for granted.
And I’m starting to feel better. I’m trying to avoid feeling some kind of abstract need to be “productive”. The people in my life are telling me to rest, for which I’m thankful. I hope you all stay healthy, and find ways to rest whether you’re sick or not.
Things I wrote
- Gmail is kind of a mess. Here’s how to fix it. Wired Google wants to constantly remind you about Meet and Chat but you don’t have to put up with that.
- How to figure out what streaming service a show or movie is on. PopSci “Remember video stores? They were annoying because you had to leave your house and potentially talk to a human, but they had a big advantage over the streaming services of today: everything was in one place.”
- How to migrate from Substack to Buttondown. Wired I linked to this already but I’m still very proud of this lede, even if some people want it changed.
Things I did
- Slept
- Watched TV
- Quarantined from Kathy (who kept her distance) and Mira (who kept trying to get into the room)
