Feeling Positive. Well, yes and no.

In the morning day before yesterday I still wasn’t feeling too great and I was still walking around the house in a mask, which may or may not have struck one or more members of my family as a little over-dramatic. In fact, it’s possible that one daughter may have implied that I was being a bit of a hypochondriac. Well, I showed her and tested positive a few hours later.

Of course I got my positive on my busy work day, but luckily I was able to get an earlier-than-usual start on my workload and I managed to push through until the early afternoon, when I took a pile of medicine and went to bed. Here’s a selection of my medicine:

So, first, yes, chocolate counts as medicine, and also, I managed to score some Paxlovid. Because I read Twitter with all the worst-case-scenario “40-year-old marathoner in ICU” and “I can’t walk up a flight of stairs and all my food has tasted like sewage for 2 years” tweets. However, I’d managed to miss any rumors about “Paxlovid rebound,” which is apparently a thing where after your 5-day course, you feel a little worse again and get more infectious and is supposed to be rare, and “Paxlovid mouth,” where your mouth tastes absolutely terrible. That’s supposed to happen in, like, 6% of cases, but I am extra lucky, because I’ve got it. It’s sort of like if you took a pill that you’re supposed to swallow and instead you crushed it up and dissolved it in water and then took a big mouthful of water and just kept that flavor in your mouth all the time. It is really pretty gross. I mentioned that my mouth tastes terrible, and daughter who didn’t voice suspicions about my hypochondria asked me, “Have you tried brushing your teeth?” Ummm…. yes!! Aren’t these daughters old enough to realize that I’m not stupid? Jeepers!

Brushing my teeth works for about the time it takes to brush my teeth + 30 seconds. Mouthwash works for as long as I’m swishing +30 seconds. The rest of the time it’s been gum and a lot of Jolly Ranchers. Cute W got me a package of the red flavors, and I’ve had one in my mouth more often than not for the last 48 hours or so. They are tasty and effective in dispelling the grossness, but they are not quite big enough. If it were possible, I would like to be wearing a retainer like this one in which all of that pink is a cherry Jolly Rancher. I do thank my lucky stars, at least, that Jolly Ranchers have evolved from a brick shape to a barrel shape, so there are fewer harsh corners to navigate. Cute W is a little worried that I’m going to choke on a candy in my sleep and die.

We’re going to try some fruit roll-ups next, I think.

Besides the yucky mouth, yes, I’ve got a headache and a sore throat and I’m tired, but this isn’t too terribly bad. It’s actually a little better now that I know I’m positive and I can just surrender to not doing very much, as opposed to when I was feeling bad and still trying to be a productive citizen.

But, lord, it’s a depressing time to be idle, isn’t it?

Another gigantic school shooting. I don’t have anything new to say. I’ve written posts before, like from 2012 right after Newtown, from 2018 after M’s high school lockdown, and a little later fleeing a middle school lockdown with J and attending a parent meeting about the high school lockdown. And I know that at one point I wrote about the time I was driving a carpool and the girls were talking about the best hiding places at the school for if a shooter came, and they’d clearly all given it tons of thought, and it seemed pretty obvious that incidents or no, none of our kids are getting out unscathed. My search efforts for that post (“We’ve already failed” and “closet in art room” and “mental health crisis”) were close but not quite on target enough to find that one. It’s floating around here somewhere.

It is just generally frustrating that we have these big, terrible problems with obvious solutions that aren’t happening. There is one student activist from Parkland who’s been tweeting that they really think things are going to be different this time, that it “feels” different, and I’m like, “Oh, honey, I wish,” but I have very little faith right now. I just went to a rally in support of abortion rights and I had a big ol’ poster about the many ways in which we are failingchildren, and I didn’t even bother mentioning school shootings because that one is so incredibly obvious. I mean, any time you see a pro-choice rally there are multiple people proclaiming that if only each uterus were an AK-47, it would be free and unregulated.

Our kids are not okay. And it’s not just the kids who are actually murdered or injured or eyewitnesses to trauma. It is every child who sees that we don’t care enough about them to ensure that they are safe going to school and that they’ll have a habitable world to live in as adults.

And it just feels like so many things are so, so obvious and we keep not getting anything done. Not to mention that there are tons of people railing against everything that feels so obvious to me. I was at a grocery store recently and a guy in a pick up had a crazy collection of bumper stickers –at least 5 boob-oriented ones, and lots of support for guns and the former president, and a “no hablo f%$ckt@rD” bumpersticker, and I. . . I just don’t understand at all. How can people’s opinions feel so cartoonishly, outlandishly wrong to me and yet apparently they are sincere? If I had more energy I’d be calling politicians or planting native plants or doing something as a coping mechanism to make me feel like I’m adding another pebble to the side of the Good and Just side of the scale. But right now, I am sick, so I am listening to stupid romance audiobooks and sucking on Jolly Ranchers until I fall back asleep.