Covid on Campus, Netflix's 'The 100' vs Hallmark

 

Well, it’s started. Covid is on our campus and is rearranging our lives. First it was two people then it spread to four and then it took the entire bridge club out of action and our Life Enrichment Director started canceling stuff hand over fist. Those with symptoms have to quarantine themselves in their apartments until they get a negative Covid test. Those who were exposed to someone with symptoms must get tested every day for five days and are asked to wear masks during those five days of waiting to see if they come down with Covid. Our dining room is like a ghost town because so many people are getting take-outs.

They had a vaccination clinic on campus yesterday for anyone who still hadn’t gotten the latest Covid and flu vaccines and it was well attended, I heard. I got my shots last month but it was interesting at the dinner table last night listening to a woman who took one look at the application for the clinic shots and decided not to get them because, “They want to know too much about us!” I saw the application in our daily email and it was the standard questions everyone everywhere will ask so they can bill your Medicare and/or private insurance company. And while several people including her husband tried to tell her that, she flatly refused believe it. So I mentally checked her off the list of people I’ll be sitting next to at book club, dinner, parties or lectures until flu and Covid season is over. I joked that I wish the powers that be should make us all wear our vaccination cards around our necks so we'd know who skips getting them, and someone else took that idea to higher level and added that they could color code them like the state does with are car license tabs.

I also checked off the list sitting near known Trump supporters. As our most vocal Trumpette said this week, “Covid is just a bad cold with a new name!” I beg your pardon, Dumbass, colds didn’t killed millions of people worldwide at the beginning of the pandemic. Oh, the things I would like to say and don’t. She tells everyone she’s never had Covid, been sick with a bad cold but go over it. “It was nothing.” I did have the guts to call her a Spreader, though, after she said she'd never been tested for Covid. “If you’ve never been tested then you don’t know if you had it or not. That makes you a Spreader.” I learned those lines from my niece and I was proud I had the guts to use it. 

This year, people have been reporting how easy Covid was to catch but that their symptoms are cold-like. That’s no excuse for not getting the vaccines. It’s because of the vaccines that Covid variations are getting weaker and/or our immune systems are getting stronger. One couple here, though, was an exception. They’ve been sick and off the grid for five whole weeks. They’d been tested many times over that time frame for Covid and various other viruses but nothing has shown up. They described their symptoms as “Sleeping Beauty Meets Apathy.” All they wanted to do is sleep, and had no energy or desire to fight the fog in their heads. Listening to them at dinner I started worrying about myself because lately I’ve been falling asleep every time I sit in my La-Z-Boy. When I voiced this out loud someone laughed and told me that’s just old age catching up with me.

We’re not under a mask requirement to be in public areas. Yet. But before the winter is over I’ll bet we will see its return. Visitors aren’t being logged in for contact tracing either which I’m happy about not having to do every time I visit my brother. But I will gladly comply if it means the Activities Calendar doesn’t keep getting events crossed off. This morning the monthly birthday party bit the dust and I always enjoy the musical entertainment at those. Even Mahjong got canceled because the woman who taught us all how to play also plays bridge and is still in the "spreader phase" of Covid.

Between Covid taking away my fun stuff, my frustrations with Google and Bloggers, the clown show going on in our House of Representatives, two terrible wars in the world and now another mass shooting spree, I finally resorted to doing what I usually do in situations when I feel helpless. I found myself a post-apocalyptic Netflix series to watch. I know, it doesn’t make sense that watching or reading about how people survive (or not) in a post-apocalyptic world somehow helps me to put things in prospective. But it does. My problems get smaller by comparison and they remind me that it’s the strong that survives, the ones who don’t give up. I got this way because both my parents were good at pointing out, "It could be worse" when I did stuff like skin a knee. "you've still go a leg."

In the past week and a half I’ve binge-watched the first three seasons of The 100. It's about a group of 100 teenagers from a detention center who were born, raised and lived on The Ark, a space station built after a nuclear disaster that fried our planet. The Ark is dying and the teens were sent down to see if earth is inhabitable. Of course, it is and they soon find out there are pockets of societies who are descendants of people who never left earth. Here in real time there are so many bat-crazy things going on but at least I can go to bed at night and not have to worry about people living in a domed city who’d hunt me down, drain my blood then give me to the Cave Reapers to finish me off. You can't get that kind of reassurance watching those Christmas Romance movies on Hallmark. 

Yes, it's that time of year again and one day like magic a switch will get flipped in my head---soon I predict---and I'll be trading the post-apocalyptic junk in for the promise of everlasting love. Three of Hallmark movies doesn't make a binge but that's my score as of right now and already I see a pattern emerging of overworked mom's learning how to knit. That's product placement at work but no one does product placement better than Hallmark. Last night's movie revealed a brother and sister separated by adoption 50 years ago had both written, never send but kept Christmas cards they wrote every year to the other one. That script was a shoe-in to sell to Hallmark. Don't you just love how cleaver some people can be? Hallmark wants a Christmas card in every movie, I've give them 100!

Until Next Wednesday. ©