Yesterday was the day. I received my second dose of Pfizer vaccine. Number-ologists used their Babbage's Difference Engines to calculate that I should be 92.7% infection-resistant in about 7 light-cycles.

This doesn't mean I can go hog-wild and breathe on everyone, because it's still not clear how contagious I might be if I get exposed and get slight, unnoticeable viral replication in my body before my own immune system clears it out. 

And of course...the mutations. All those poor saps espousing herd immunity as if evolution wasn't a thing. Let's get herd immunity for the flu, they might say. Oh wait, it's not mutating beyond the ability to ever achieve herd immunity? Who could have seen that coming? [Evolution looks askance from its comfy armchair in the corner.]

After my shot, the twins came over and watched Ridley Scott's Alien. They enjoyed it. On Saturday, we will watch Aliens, aka Alien 2: Electric Boogaloo.

All this movie watching is giving me the urge to get a larger TV. No, I tell myself, ya don't need a larger TV. Yes, I say back, I know I don't need it, but I want it." Then I fight myself or try to distract myself by reminding me that I want a greyhound and hey the cost of a large screen OLED TV is probably enough to get a greyhound. 

Today's experiment is that I brought beans and rice for lunch. To give me more energy on my afternoon exercises. It's a bad experiment because it's been 24 hours since my shot and I'm much more likely to have some symptoms of tiredness, chills, and headaches. I feel fine so far. Although I am lazy so any excuse not to have to work out today is probably enough for me to curl up in bed. Then again, I have a reputation to uphold in the online multiplayer community. As the guy who's not very good but damn if he isn't foolishly consistent.

Did I dream? I did. 

My nephew came to me for relationship advice. Some excerpts:

"You're setting up a conflict in which someone wins and someone loses. There's not always a right or wrong. And if there is, sometimes you have to let someone be wrong. Because being right is enough."

"Yes, and that is your burden. At this point, you want to say these things so you feel better. Even though it won't make anything better. Probably worse." 

"You're not letting go, not really. You're going to alter your behavior to gain some small peace of mind."

"If you did get back together, you're likely going to be just as stressed and unhappy because the two of you don't have a way to communicate."

"It's hard to make progress in a relationship when the person can't think about themselves and why they do what they do."

"So you're not letting go, you're choosing a different kind of unhappiness. One with more potential. Yes, you've tried all you can. All that you can that might actually work. There's probably long-shot stuff you can do, but it probably won't work and just make everyone think you're crazy. Because that kind of stuff only works in the movies."

This is a little out of context, since half of the dialogue is missing. I've been thinking of scanning in my old high school journals for my own reference. I remember the though process pretty well. Romantic ideas are odd because they still tend to expect that people are purely rational. I would have to refine it and say that yes, they are generally rational; just not good at understanding the true cost of things. Like if you got paid five bucks a day to only take freezing cold showers. Might sound like easy money, but when you're hungover and need to get ready for work on a winter morning, no amount is probably enough.

We're not always who we think we are going to be.

I think I'll start bringing my lunch to work again. Some rice, some beans. See how that affects me, and then go from there. Mmm...lunch.

There is, perhaps, some measure of success in how much time one has to devote their mind to that which they wish to think about. My day consists mostly of using my mind-juice towards thinking about work stuff, and then finding moments to not think about work stuff. 

Then there's some of the more mundane activities that don't really require much thinking at all, and I can run through them without giving them my full focus. I wouldn't say my mind is free. More like my mind is idling, or coasting out of gear.

I've been thinking about greyhounds. Watching videos of greyhounds playing in snow, running in parks. I do like to watch them run.

Some military jets flew by today. I'm by an airport so I hear regular jets all the time. The military jets have a distinctive roar that is almost a shriek. 

Takes me back to the days of throwing bags at the airport. So loud. So very loud. Now that was an interesting gig. Did rather remind me of the military. 

Back to mind mine.

I don't know how I've made it this long in my life without consciously thinking about the band Heart. I've heard and enjoyed their music. I've even played their songs on Guitar Hero. Then there's an episode of Bob's Burgers in which Gene sings "Alone" and now I'm catching up on decades of their music videos. 

Ann and Nancy Wilson are the coolest.

Unrelatedly, surely there's an alternate world where people are forced to toil in creative artistic endeavors and they, in turn, dream of a world where they can perform meaningless drudgery that is of no consequence and not everything they do is a window into their soul.

Facebook reads everything you type, even if you don't publish it. At least that's what I've heard. Word on the street. Probably Blogger does too. That autosave function is a triple-edged sword. 

It's probably a treasure trove of bad jokes. 

It's not something I would like to see of my own writing. I would have great interest in such a visual representation of some novels. Watching a page of say, I don't know, Moby Dick being hammered out. 

It would be a novelty, not so much a deep insight into the writing process. Personally, I think of something, write it out, look at it, and then edit it or move on. 

Most times I skip the first step entirely. And the third step. That's when I'm writing happiest. Or emotionalist? Really it's that I have no objective. Nothing I wish to happen in my mind, or anyone else's. Hence the digital rubbish heap of bad jokes being hauled away on an electronic barge to another continent that still has room for all the e-waste. 

Oh, that's right, I was thinking of how useful it might be to share my years of writing with my brain doctor. Might be of minimal value. Except for the algorithms that could measure word choice and whatnot, grammatical and spelling errors, as a measure of mental decline. Or incline. Maybe I get smarter, better, eloquenter. 

As a self-critic, I would have to make the algorithm account for me getting less interesting overall and how that would reflect in my writing. See, for example I said less interesting instead of less conflicted. Conflict makes for interesting stories, which is maybe why I would find myself less interesting. It's not a negative. There's also the other aspect of being open. Heart on my sleeve, that sort of thing. Do I feel less open? I'm not sure. I want to say yes, but there's also that, honestly, I feel like I've said so much before, and I don't like saying things again. 

Probably I'm not able to accurately judge that about myself. You're up, Algorithm. Do your thing. 

Sometimes I promise myself I will keep my mouth shut and then I don't. There's a story about that, someone on a quest to capture a magical being from somewhere, and the being (which is usually harmless) can't escape their bonds unless the person speaks. So the person is carrying the being down from their mountain or whatever in a basket or something and the being starts telling a story. By the end of the story, the person forgets themselves and speaks their opinion on the story. Then the being escapes.

I think the key to this is that the being is harmless, or at least of no threat to the captor. Perhaps the element of real harm coming the person might be enough to get them to keep their mouth shut.

Perhaps not. It doesn't seem to for me.

At least on these Zoom meetings I can keep myself muted. Easy. 

I'm tempted to write about my weight. I've kept steady on my daily exercise, and I'm not on a diet, other than limiting meat. For Sir Attenborough. I'm at the lowest weight I've been in more than a couple years. And my legs are hella strong. These gams be walking machines. 

It's tough, though, that my body really wants to gain back the weight. I can see where I spent a week in New Orleans where I gained ten pounds in seven days. I wasn't even eating as much as I wanted to. It's just the way things are now. 

The strength of muscle and cardiovascular health still benefit, despite the number on the scale. I have an allegedly smart scale that measures muscle mass and water and stuff as well as my actual weight. I try to pay attention to those more. It's not a perfect instrument, but I figure I can still track trends. One interesting thing is that it says I have a higher-than-average bone density. Um, cool? I can sustain more crush damage, I suppose. Plus 5 resistance to blunt weapons!

It's another beautiful day. Feels like the beach. A beach of doom! Which is just as nice as any beach can be, except for the end bit.

I'm wary of my music preferences algorithms. Sometimes the app says "Hey, listen! It's your favorite song, want to hear it?" And I'm like "I don't recognize this song." There was never anyone explicitly saying that the algorithm wasn't also trained to lie to you. Beep bop boop, you should like this because I say so, beep bop boop.

And now I move on to other things. There are futures to consider. 

I haven't checked the political news website today. I checked my regular news feed, and NPR of course. I let that be enough. There's a wariness that comes with not paying attention to the minutiae and other day-to-day bickering. And yet, it's nice to have a general unease instead of the specific sampler platter of anger.