So I haven't posted in a while, sorry. As you may have noticed, the posts this year were mostly coming in two flavors: the ongoing saga of Marvel Comics: My Untold Story, and the numbered COVID-19 diary installments. I reckon I kind of burned out on both of them.
Let's start with the pandemic, which around the last time I posted about it kinda felt like it was on its last legs! Oh how blissful that ignorance was. I think that at a certain point I felt like I was in the lowest-risk group and therefore lowest-priority for getting vaccinated at all, and I made my peace with that. I was working from home, not socializing in person, social distancing, masking in public, fine, fine, fine. Then I did get vaccinated and it felt like, well if I'm vaccinated they must be getting down to the lowest-priority round of vaccinations so we're almost done, right? They also opened up the vaccine for ages 12 and up so the little guy got jabbed, too, so more than half the family was innoculated. Surely lowering the approved age range to 5 and up, or all ages, or whatever, was right around the corner? It's kind of hard for me to believe it, but in May I took the little guy and the little girl out to the movie theater to see Black Widow on the big screen. We wore masks, and I was relying somewhat (for the little girl's sake especially) on the idea that most people in the theater would be vaccinated, but it felt like a manageable risk, like flying on an airplane; sure you might crash but probably not.
And then the Delta variant, and the surge in cases and deaths, and the inability to get the irrationally vax-hesitant to get over themselves, and here we are four months later and things are not OK. Maybe they were never going to be OK, maybe we were fooling ourselves, but they definitely aren't now. And it sucks, and it's exhausting, and I feel like I had committed to riding things out and was relaxing with the sense that the ride was nearly at its terminus and then, surprise MFers, once more around the bend, this time diverting onto a completely new track. Lousy disjointed metaphor, I know, but that'show everything feels, lousy and disjointed and I can't be bothered to make better sense of it. To be clear, I'm not being nihilistic and advocating abject surrender. I am once again (after never really stopping?) working from home, not socializing in person, social distancing, masking in public, and all that. So is my family. And we're waiting for the ages 5 and up approval of the vaccine, but even after that we'll keep following the recommended guidelines. And a lot of other people won't follow them, because they are selfish idiots and ... I can do what I'm asked to do, but I can't be bothered to, on top of all that, make sense of how we got here and why some people have made this way harder than it needs to be.
All three of our kids have gone back to school, masked, in person, five days a week, which is good for them in terms of their social and emotional health, at least. They actually started on August 12 so we are coming up on a solid month and so far, so good. I've gotten multiple messages from the schools (each of them goes to a different building now, elementary intermediate and middle school) saying there was a COVID-19 case in the building, which is less than ideal, but on the other hand those letter have all said "individuals who were in direct contact with the diagnosed case have been notified separately" and I haven't gotten any of those messages, so praise be for small blessings. It's just dumb luck, though. We do what we can and take what precautions can be taken but there's no way to exert any real control over the situation. The big question is, will there continue to be one-off cases here and there (one a week or so?) which are caught quickly and then quarantined, with children's natural resilience keeping things from exploding, OR will things balloon until they get to the point where the schools have no choice but to shut down, send everyone home with laptops, and do what they did throughout 2020-21? I am fervently hoping that it is the former, but again, no way of knowing, and no way to control the outcome. We're strapped in for the ride and there's no way off.
So a few steps forward, a few steps backward - now Shang Chi is the MCU joint in theaters and I have NOT taken my kids to see it. I want to, sure, but it feels like a bigger risk than it did in May, and not worth it, not as any slight against the movie itself, just the whole ... gestures broadly at everything going to hell in a handbasket.
So yeah, I don't really feel like blogging about life as we live it in month 19 of COVID-19, because it's a huge bummer, so that's the macro-level. But, hey, this blog has always been just as much (if not moreso (definitely moreso)) about the minutiae of pop culture I'm into, so maybe I could post about that, micro-level? Clearly I'm not in a great place right now because I honestly started to feel a little burnt out on Marvel Comics: My Untold Story in specific and also on pop culture in general because ... it's all kind of same-y?
Don't get me wrong, I love superhero comics and I always will, I will never be part of the chorus of voices lamenting that "everything is a Marvel movie these days" first and foremost because I know that's not actually true. And secondmost because I love the Marvel movies so I feel no particular contrarian urge to rail against them. They make me happy like a Five Guys hamburger, sure I know you can't live on burgers all the time but a good one sure does hit the spot more often than not. Still, as I turn to my most comforting brainfood in this time of public health crisis, I not only indulge I outright gorge. It occurred to me recently that for a while now I have been:
- watching every episode of What If...? as they come out on Disney+ (after having done the same with WandaVision, Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and Loki)
- reading a Spider-Man graphic novel my brother loaned me
- watching Legends of Tomorrow right up until Constantine showed up, at which point I wanted to start watching it with my wife, so I switched my alone-time viewing to alternating between the Boys (based on a superhero comic) on Amazon Prime and The Umbrella Academy (based on a superhero comic) on Netflix
- listening to not one but two different weekly podcasts that retrace the early output of Marvel Comics in the 60's month-by-month
Anyway, as always ever since the heyday of near-daily posting on this here blog, these things are cyclical. Hopefully there will be more posts sooner than later as I get inspired to talk about things and keep this old relic alive.
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