3/10/2021

i received the second shot of the pfizer vaccine on monday afternoon. it is now wednesday morning, and i am still feeling the residual effects of that dosage. i basically have been lying on the sofa since monday evening, and with small interruptions in that (like making breakfast for me and my son, or washing the dishes), i pretty much have not moved much. i had a fever and chills, and felt very lethargic and stiff. there was a bit of congestion happening around my throat and nose, so my voice started to get this resonant sound, and i often had an itch that forced me to cough a dry cough...

...somehow, i had hoped that i could use these two days to catch up on things, but instead, they have been a legitimate absence from work due to incapacitation... well, it's a good thing that i did request these two days in advance. i can't imagine working through some of these symptoms...

*****

i don't know if i mentioned it earlier... on friday evening, our family had gone over to waikele, to their food truck thing, and ordered stuff from rinka. on the way back, i think i started a discussion about the whole dr. seuss fiasco going on. i wanted to hear my daughter's take on the issue, since she just did a national history day project on dr. seuss, and his racist caricatures of the japanese before and during world war ii. i guess (as always) i got too impassioned about my perspective. i mean, i wanted to clarify that, in certain instances, i felt that it was not necessarily good to attempt to "erase" the past, and that, instead, we should contextualize it, meaning, we should release the original material, but perhaps add some sort of marginalia or other notation to educate the public about why something is problematic in our current perspective... BUT i wanted to qualify that this didn't apply to things like confederate flags, because those were purely about racism, and had no other culturally redeeming value about them. they were basically symbols of racism writ large. i guess when i brought in the confederate flag thing, i could feel my daughter rolling her eyes, and my wife cautioned me to stop... that's when i went on this whole tirade about how, yes, i got the hint, and that i would shut up and not share my views from here on out. it was really very childish... i don't know if it's happened to you, but i kind of watched myself, knowing it was immature and babyish for me to go on this tirade. i knew this, but i couldn't stop myself. i kept digging myself further and further into a hole. i said something about how i didn't even manage to talk to my daughter very much in a week (i think i said that i could count the times and even the words i spoke to her on one hand), but that i would endeavor to shut up and self-censor my views even more... i also talked about canceling the birthday party thing my wife was planning for me the next day. again, really stupid, babyish behavior...