I'm not freaked out about Omicron, but I am non-trivially concerned about it, in a very selfish way. I'm not worried about my safety or the safety of loved ones or even that of society at large; I'm worried this new Covid variant is going to somehow mess up our travel plans to visit my family in a few weeks. I haven't seen them in person in two and a half years (save my brother-in-law, whom we briefly saw this summer), and we've already had to reschedule this trip once due to Covid. It would really, really suck if things get derailed again.
I'm cautiously optimistic that that won't happen, though. My hunch is that Omicron is going to cause another surge (hopefully a small one) but not put us totally back to square one. The early evidence is that it is more transmissible, but I don't think it's going to be like a whole new disease against which we have no immunization. I suspect vaccines and natural antibodies will grant us some protection against it, and in a few months we will all need another special variant-specific booster. As long as it isn't significantly more lethal for fully vaccinated people, I'm not scared of it. Even if a bunch more people contract it, if the worse thing that happens is they are bedridden for a few days, like I was in August, then that's not that bad. We can live mostly normal* lives under those circumstances, especially if treatment and testing technology continues to improve. Although, the latter is one area I think we've gotten totally wrong in this country from the get-go. We should have put resources into getting cheap, reasonably reliable rapid tests into stores. Imagine if you were throwing a dinner party and you could ask everybody attending to take a test an hour before they came -- how much would that do to reduce Covid spread and set people's minds at ease? A lot, I suspect. And we could still do it! My understanding is that there are some regulatory/financial hurdles impeding this course of action, but, c'mon, where there's a will, there's a way. Get on that, Joe!
*New normal, which could include indoor masking and/or vaccine requirements.
I could be wrong about all this, however. I'm not a virologist, and even if I was, I'm definitely not a seer, which is what you really need to be to accurately say what's going to happen. Even the experts can't predict the future with a high degree of certitude. The best we can do at this point, it seems to me, is follow the basic safety guidelines*, live our lives, and hope for the best.
*Vaccinations are still the key. I just got a booster yesterday (along with a flu shot). My arm hurts a little, and I'm quite tired -- I mean, even more so than usual -- but otherwise not experiencing pronounced side effects. My boys got their second doses on Tuesday and both felt a bit under the weather on Wednesday, but it was nothing a good night's sleep couldn't take care of.
So, I'm not worried about Omicron, I'm worried about Delta -- the airline. They keep jerking us around with our tickets, imposing huge changes to our itinerary with no other alerts than emails that could easily be snagged by a spam filter. The latest is our outbound flight now leaves Dulles at 6:00 am (meaning we need to wake up at, like, 3:30 am), and we have a layover in NYC. And this was the best we could get after S spent an hour on hold to talk to an agent -- the initial changes were even worse. The layover is what really chaps my hide. We are always willing to pay the extra for a direct flight. It's not that switching planes with a family of four is a massive inconvenience (although it is), it's that a second flight introduces so many more potential problems. We've got an hour and a half between flights, which is fine if everything goes smoothly, but that's a big if, especially around the holidays.
What can you do though? We are at the mercy of big air. Changing carriers incurs a huge financial hit (S has some sort of Delta voucher she's using to subsidize the tickets), and there is no guarantee a different airline would be any better. We usually fly United, and anecdotally, they are better than Delta, but it's not like they are devoid of delays and cancellations.
In other news, we got a new TV. It's a little bigger than our old one, but mainly we got it because we couldn't stream everything to our old TV. I bought our old one the day we brought Lil' S1 back from the hospital. (The NFL season was about to begin, and I realized I couldn't spend hours in a sports bar every Sunday anymore.) So, it was nine years ago, just before the proliferation of app-based smart TVs. In theory, it could connect to the internet and stream Netflix directly, but the only time I tried to do it, I got an error message, so we just bought a Chromecast stick and cast everything from another device. It usually worked, but there were some services that didn't allow it, and even the ones that did were buggy sometimes. It's so much nicer to have everything built-in and fast. It's one of those things, where once we set it up, it was like, Why didn't we do this years ago?
Now the question is whether or not I break down and get Hulu+ or some sort of TV subscription. I've been hesitant to do it because we already have a bunch of streaming services, and our digital antenna works quite well for the over-the-air channels. But I only have access to all the live sports I want (ESPN, TBS, FS1, etc.) through other people's cable accounts. I used my friend JY's account for a long time, but they moved to two-factor authentication, so every time it logs me out, I have to text him to text me an authorization code within five minutes, which gets annoying after a while (presumably for him to). I still have my parent's account, which is good because it doesn't require two-factor, but if it ever does, or they get rid of it, which my dad once said they might, then I might have to bite the bullet and pay for Hulu+.
The thing is, it's not necessarily the cost that bothers me. It's that I have to pay bundle prices for like the five channels I want, which is the reason I quit cable in the first place. (Well, that, and we had DirecTV, and a tree grew and blocked transmission to our dish.) Having a bunch of individual streaming services has its own annoyances, but at least you can better tailor them to what you want. I just get so resentful paying for things I never want to watch, especially when it's $70 per month, the current cost of Hulu+. Not only will I never watch the vast majority of channels that come in the bundle, I won't even watch much of those I will watch. I'd be paying all that money to put a game on in the background once or twice a week while I do other things -- just doesn't seem worth it.
One thing that is worth it: Disney+. Mainly it's for the kids, but it has a few things S and I enjoy. I'm really looking forward to getting started on this eight-hour Beatles documentary I've heard so much about. In fact, I was kinda hoping I'd feel a little shittier from my booster, so that I would have an excuse to lie down on the sofa and knock out a few hours of it. Alas, I'm well enough to be a functioning member of society. But S is going out with some friends tonight, so I'll be getting my Get Back on at some point.
Until next time...
No comments:
Post a Comment