— चार हजार नौ सौ पैंतालीस —
Things are really moving forward for us this week.
I'm going to start with yesterday, because that was the day I accompanied Shobhit to his first dose of the Pfizer vaccine, at the Amazon Headquarters vaccination center. The whole experience was kind of a trip, especially when we wound up in a huge, second-floor conference room that was roughly the size of a gym, full of long lines of tables manned by nurses giving shots, effectively an assembly line. I should have taken a picture—I even saw at least one other guy in line taking one—but I never did, perhaps because I was too preoccupied with our "strategy" in the truly long-shot hope that I could maybe get a leftover dose at the end of their day, as Shobhit scheduled his appointment in one of the last shots of the day for that very reason. Anyway it was quite a sight, and made me feel like I was in a scene of a disaster movie. The upside of that feeling is that it would be a scene near the end of the movie, when things are getting better and people are feeling hopeful.
I probably haven't been around so many needles in my life. There had to have been many hundreds of syringes in that one room—hell, maybe thousands, given the number of nurses (or whichever profession the workers might be in) and how many each of them used over the course of the day. There was probably close to a hundred of the vaccine workers alone.
Shobhit managed to book his appointment late last week, thereby changing my expectation that I would get mine before him after all. We had been notified on Tuesday last week that as of Wednesday, all staff would be eligible—even office staff. I was already on the FindYourPhaseWa.org wait list, and after we did not get any of the expected follow-ups on Wednesday that I thought might be specific to PCC staff, I joined a couple of others, including one specific to the City of Seattle. These ones were easier to join when I answered the questions slightly differently, as a "grocery store worker." I even had a close miss with that City of Seattle the next day, on Thursday, getting an email telling me there were appointments available this week at three specific places. The bummer of it was that the email was received at 10:17 Thursday night, after I had gone to bed, and once I saw the email Friday morning and clicked the provided link with eager excitement, by then all available spots had already been booked. Dammit!
I think it might have been that very same day that Shobhit managed to book his Sunday appointment through Virginia Mason—the hospital we both use; it's where our doctor works. The thing is, I had tried filling out their qualification form already, before the new qualification parameters were expanded on Wednesday (which included grocery workers), and what Shobhit took too long to understand, always assuming I had just done something stupid, was that I couldn't just say "I work in grocery" before Wednesday; all the forms did was offer a few specific industry options and ask if I work for any of them. If not, it said you did not qualify.
After yesterday, I realize now I could have just lied even then and still gotten my shot without being questioned. No one double checks your profession when you finally get to the front of the actual vaccination line in person. I wasn't comfortable lying to that degree, though—although I will confess that I wound up fudging the truth a bit on the forms yesterday.
The point is, I learned the hard way that you really need to
re-join these waiting lists, filling out the forms again that now have new questions on them, once the new qualified groups of people are released. This was how accompanying Shobhit through all this yesterday, even though it did not result in my getting a shot yesterday, still proved useful: the many short conversations we had there made me realize I should fill out the FindYourPhaseWa.org questionnaire again, which I did while we were in the "holding area" after Shobhit got his shot—they make you wait at least ten minutes before you can leave the building—and this time, after answering the questions as though I were a grocery store staff person, I got the page notifying me I was qualified. It included a link to a web page listing many options with open appointments, and I was later booked at another downtown place even closer to home, just a few minutes after I had even left the building. I am scheduled for my first Pfizer shot on Thursday afternoon.
That was how I ended this entire excursion yesterday, which honestly made it worth doing; it may have taken me much longer to get to these realizations otherwise. We just didn't get to what we had hoped, which was for an actual shot for myself in addition to Shobhit. Shobhit really hoped it would make a difference to them that I was also already on the Virginia Mason waiting list (it did not), and we were told multiple times that they were booked for more people yesterday than they actually had doses for, so my getting any "extra" shot just wasn't going to be a possibility. I think Shobhit had this in mind because of all the stories we've heard of people not coming to their appointments and locations winding up with extra doses at the end of the day that they had to dole out to anyone quickly or else they would go to waste. But, I think that scenario is far more common in more rural, or even suburban areas—downtown of a major city, not so much. That's not really much of a surprise.
Shobhit took an extended lunch for this and drove straight from work, and I walked downtown from home to meet him there. I arrived first on the Seventh Avenue side of the building, since that was the street in the address in Shobhit's confirmation email—so, at first I told him via text that there was no line, just a few people waiting around outside. I did see volunteers asking people walking by to make sure they had an appointment, so clearly they were trying to keep tabs on that. But, then I walked up the staircase between the two giant Amazon buildings, and there I found the front of the line that indeed did exist. And it also extended . . . clear down to the end of the block on 6th Avenue, and then around and halfway down the block on Lenora.
Given the huge number of people administering shots in that huge, gym-sized conference room (with a gargantuan screen on one wall showing the digital time, with a sort of rotating slideshow of serene-like video clips behind it), the line still moved surprisingly quickly. Shobhit got the car parked, and by the time he joined me in line I was about halfway toward turning the corner back around to 6th Avenue again. And even after Shobhit joined me in line, although it kind of happened in fits and starts, there would be minutes there where we all moved forward quite steadily. I don't think it was even ten minutes before we reached the front of the line—well, the front before entering the building, anyway.
There were two people together right in front of us in line at this point, two young women, and when we reached the front of the line before volunteers would let people inside the building a few at a time, the woman on the right peeled off and said goodbye. I was like, "I don't know what to do," and Shobhit just said, "Just come in with me." So I did, and no one challenged us. Right inside the front door they had everyone stop on a marked spot on the floor for a temperature check, with a device that was, amazingly, several feet away and a few feet higher in the air than our heads. We went through turnstiles in the building's main lobby and then waited in line again, approaching a woman with a sign reading HAVE YOUR QR CODE READY—which, of course, I did not have. I got kind of nervous at this point, but when Shobhit approached the young lady who was scanning the codes, he asked her the same question he asked several people: he'd say I was his husband, I was already on the same Virginia Mason list he had been on, might there be any extra doses at the end of the day. This was actually the one woman who was not immediately like, "There definitely won't be," and instead she was more like "You never know, it can't hurt to ask," and she gave me a red paper wrist band that basically gave me a pass to accompany Shobhit through the rest of the process. My band clearly still indicated something different, as Shobhit's wrist band was neon green.
So then we made our way in the line up an escalator to the second floor, and this was where we went into the roped line area with switchbacks—not crowded, though; still markers on the floor for six feet distance. (And absolutely everyone in a face mask, of course. And this would probably be the least likely place to find idiot mask deniers.) It was in the middle of
this line that we encountered four workers with iPads where full registration actually took place. So again, I just walked with Shobhit to his person, who once again said there was really no hope for me getting a shot that day. It was at the end of this portion of the line that we entered into the aforementioned giant conference room, and I stood next to Shobhit as he received his shot. I looked away, and was careful not to look directly at any of the other syringes all over that room. Shobhit brought up my hope for getting a dose to the lady giving him his shot, and again to another lady in the holding area where we had to wait ten minutes—and I got my qualifying confirmation page on my phone from FindYourPhaseWa.org.
The lady in the holding area suggested we talk to a particular woman on the other side of the room on our way out. In fact, she even stood with me to talk to this other lady, who was the first person to be this explicitly clear about it: "We have registered people today who won't get their dose." As in, they overbooked. I do feel bad for any of those people. So finally, at that point, Shobhit was convinced I would not be getting a dose there on that day. Still, it was . . . worth a shot! Har har.
On our last turn before going down the down-escalator, Shobhit was asked if he wanted to take a selfie in a designated area for just that. He quickly said no and kept walking, which is kind of too bad. I probably will on Thursday, although my appointment is in some other, different downtown facility. Shobhit just isn't the type to do that kind of thing, although it would have been nice for him to make an exception here. The challenges of finding open appointments aside, I really don't think you can have too many people sharing online that they got the vaccine without any fears of it. Resistance to it is not just futile, but outright dumb, unless you have legitimately clinical issues with it, which the vast majority of people resisting it do not.
I should pause for a moment to acknowledge my privilege in all of this. Would it have been as easy for me to get all the way through that line without an appointment if I were brown or black? Maybe. But the likelihood would still be undeniably far lower. And then there's the fact that I "fudged" the facts a little when it comes to my being a "grocery worker." The email last week explicitly told us that
all office staff qualifies under that umbrella, but the phase finder questionnaire gets pretty specific: one question even asks for clarification, if you work in a grocery store are you able to maintain social distancing at all times. I said no, because I can tell from experience working Thanksgiving week shifts last week that it is not possible. Even though, of course, I am not at all likely to be working in a store again until
next November (and still I half-hope to get out of it this year by taking a trip to Palm Desert to visit Faith). So, the morality of my means of getting this appointment is dubious at best. My only defense, weak as it may be, is that this is all but explicitly encouraged by people at work: you qualify, they basically told us; get an appointment however you can. Well, I've got one.
Also: it's the Pfizer one, which is my preference. I do love the idea of the Johnson & Johnson one with only a single shot, but its efficacy rate is also far lower. The Pfizer one is exceedingly high, and I now have time to even get the second shot, three weeks later, with plenty of time before my Birth Week, which will give me a very welcome sense of added comfort and security. Even though touring State Parks is an outdoor activity, which is still safest, I can still feel safer, say, in some cases carpooling with a friend to some of the more distant parks. The Moderna one has a four-week space between the shots and would be cutting it much closer, and if I have any kind of reaction to the second shot, I prefer it not happen in the middle of a vacation.
I wonder if the volume of people at the one I go to on Thursday will be as huge? Given that yesterday was at Amazon headquarters and this one is in the Medical-Dental Building—hey, that's where Stephanie's acupuncture practice is! I haven't been in there in ages—I suspect not.
— चार हजार नौ सौ पैंतालीस —
— चार हजार नौ सौ पैंतालीस —
I suppose now I can tell you about the rest of my weekend. I watched a lot of stuff, including
three movies in as many days that I also reviewed (plus a fourth one I watched with Shobhit that I did not review), all of them again found by going down MetaCritic's list of best-reviewed movies of 2021 until I found titles that were either VOD for a reasonable price or available on a streaming platform with which I already have an account. The movies I reviewed on Friday and Sunday were VOD; the one on Saturday is on Hulu.
Friday was the Ivory Coast film
Night of the Kings, which I gave a B+. Saturday was the documentary by Eritrean-born, Italian-American Gianfranco Rosi,
Notturno, shot over three years in Syria, Iraq, Kurdistan and Lebanon. It probably speaks more coherently to people far more familiar with the nuanced history of the region, none of which is explained in the film which is more of a mosaic portrait of an area; I gave it a solid B. Yesterday I watched and reviewed the French elderly-lesbian romance drama
Two of Us, which I liked a lot: another B+.
Much later last night, after Shobhit got home, we watched the movie streaming at no extra cost on Prime Video,
The Vast of Night, which I had on my list for months, but when I saw that it was nominated for Best Special Effects, I moved it higher up on my priority list. Then, once done, I was baffled by its nominated. It had all of two, maybe three effects shots. What a genuine reflection of the weirdness of the year 2020, as any of the more effects-laden films were shelved so they could still be shown in theaters sometime in 2021. I remain pretty convinced
Tenet will win that award. I'd say
The Vast of Night is a better movie, though. It has shades of
Close Encounters of the Third Kind, although of course it's nowhere near as great as that classic.
— चार हजार नौ सौ पैंतालीस —
And! I have finished with the editing and uploading all of my old home video clips. The very most recent photo album to be added to was
Danielle and Patrick's wedding, from late April 2005.
Thus ended the roughly 13-year era of my slaphappy use of home video recording, between 1992 and 2005, although there's a quasi-dry spell between 1995 and 1998. Still, I do have at least one home video event from 1995 (Christopher and Katina's wedding), 1996 (a video project made with my Spanish class in college), and 1997 (Mom and Bill's wedding). Then I got my newer camcorder in 1998, which I used extensively, mostly at family holiday gatherings, for the next seven years.
A friend gifted me my first digital camera around 2003, a hand-me-down after she bought herself a newer, better one. And for the next few years, I was so focused on the lack of limits on digital photography, which now did not necessitate developing film, that I just stopped using the camcorder. It wasn't until smartphones came equipped with video capability that I began taking video clips again, which I never did again do anywhere near as much as I used the camcorder in those early days. But, I certainly use it enough to give me plenty to work with in my endless video projects.
And that’s what being done with all this uploading has freed me up to do now; I'm already finished with two nine- or ten-minute video collections, one intended to be a gift within the next couple of months, the other a video history of the fruitcake people in the family have gifted each other for the past twenty years. Its history got complicated when Britni ruined the original one in her malfunctioning freezer in Hawaii in 2011, 13 years after it was originally gifted in 1998; it then had a temporary replacement of a porcelain naked lady whose breasts were salt and pepper shakers, which lasted all of two or three years. Then I just bought a new fruitcake to restart the tradition in 2016, and my video or photo records of it end upon Ricky receiving it for Christmas 2018—conveniently, exactly 20 years after it was first given as a gift.
So, what to do with it now? There are two problems with that fruitcake as it exists now. First, I went out of my way to buy it from the same company that sold the first one, the problem being that they no longer sold one as small as the original, making the new one about twice the size, taking up arguably too much space in anyone's freezer for an entire year. I should check again to see if they have a new one that's smaller again, which I think would make it a lot easier for people to keep the tradition going. Second, there is the fact that Ricky addressed it to James, my cousin Toni Marie's husband, for Christmas 2019—and to this day I don't think he knows it was give to him. He and Toni never came in to Olympia for Christmas that year, like they had many years prior, and who knows if they ever will again. Apparently Sherri did tell him there was a gift waiting for him, but I don't think he ever came and got it. And all of three months after Christmas 2019, the pandemic hit, which meant there was to be no passing of the thing between
anybody for Christmas 2020. The "new" fruitcake (now around a good five years) has been in Dad and Sherri's outside garage freezer ever since, and I think I may just grab it when I'm in Olympia for Easter. Then I will ask James who he wants to have it next, and just address it myself; I don't want to give it to him yet again, as I think his name should only be on it for the 2019 line (all the names are written on the box), with "covid write-off" written for 2020; and I think someone new should get it for 2021. So once I have it, I'll probably message him, and see what he wants, although I have a couple ideas for suggestions. It would be kind of funny if he just gave it to Toni Marie, so it would just stay at their house (in which case I'll literally mail it to them), or maybe we can just give it to, say, Angel—the only one of my Western Washington immediate family who has never gotten it. Can she be trusted to keep it safe for a year? In the past I'd have confidently said no, but maybe she could be now.
We have a lot to think about with this fruitcake!
— चार हजार नौ सौ पैंतालीस —
[posted 12:31 pm]
