My first dose...

 

Today, the Wall Street Journal reported on “vaccine envy.” An interesting new phenomenon which spotlights the envy one feels when their spouse (or anyone they know) has successfully been vaccinated - and they have not. I recently received my first dose of the Moderna vaccine. This hasn’t surfaced in my house but the world outside our home here on Long Island seems to be rife with issues stemming from a frustrating inability to book vaccination appointments. We’ve become aware that this stems from a lack of supply. I have always felt fortunate to work in a profession that I love and that is meaningful. Educators have been prioritized during these early stages vaccination effort and working in schools during the pandemic have offered new challenges.     


I received my first dosage of the Moderna vaccine and I cannot say enough about the fluidity of the process from end to end. It was elegant and caring. A big thanks to all the healthcare and other essential workers who are making this possible and under unprecedented challenges. The vaccination site was Nassau Community College. I began my post-secondary education at “Nassau” twenty years ago and so I made the nostalgic choice of taking Merchants Concourse to Endo Blvd. Not seeing any obvious signs or activity for why I was there in the first place, I decided to take Perimeter Rd. to the other side of the campus. I learned the hard way that “Perimeter Road” no longer truly meant “perimeter” for the average driver. Had I looked over the paperwork I had with me, I might have seen that it said “enter at Charles Lindbergh Blvd” but I’m not sure my decision would’ve been different if I had - I am a believer in the power of nostalgia. I crave and enjoy it and my choice was deliberate. I have vivid memories of the walks to and from different buildings on the campus, the freezing cold of the winter wind felt the same as it did on my walk to English class. A younger version of myself feeling mixed emotions of frustration and wonder in facing the unknown.     



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

“When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once...“

I can’t tell you exactly what James Joyce meant by that quote but it leapt off the page at me when I read it this afternoon in  Dubliners . As promised Joyce is at times hard to digest but I felt that his efforts at telling these stories of people in Dublin, Ireland was motivating. So, I thought I would tell some of my own from time to time on this platform So I recently (today) decided I might take up blogging and then I remembered that I already had a blog that has been just sitting here dormant where my wife and I left it many years ago. Of course, a good deal of life has happened since. We now have three children and do far less international travel. One thing directly impacting the other. We are both still educators and I have now been a school administrator for just shy of a decade. We have run marathons. We have completed advanced degrees. Sadly, we have lost loved ones along the way. One thing is for sure, however. We have grown through these experiences. Over the years I h...
Read more

Robin Hood vs. RobinHood

 Like so many, I’ve become interested in this week’s stock market news. The frenzy is the outcome of the sudden high volume of trading in companies largely thought to be, to put it nicely, bargain stocks. But it is also a reflection of the varied perspectives on what it might mean for the future of trading. The Wall Street Journal reports that GameStop rose 68% this past Friday. Something hedge funds did not anticipate. I actually purchased some GameStop stock - I also already sold it. This had absolutely nothing to do with taking with some kind of anti-Wall Street stand. I like to think of myself as a casual swing-trader of sorts and have had an on-again/off-again relationship with my E*TRADE account for almost 20 years. There are also some traders that saw RobinHood as revolutionary in, for example, eliminating commissions on trades.  But make no mistake, this is not Howard Pyle’s “Robin Hood.” This is not the legendary medieval leader of a merry band of outlaw disrupters, m...
Read more