With Delta in the air!
Note windows : aggressively opened by me.
There are students going down with Covid now in D’s school. The teachers there are all unvaccinated. Thank God that he, at least, has had the first one…
Happy Wednesday !
my commute to work today
Filed under Flowers
The Black Narcissus 
Are they testing who might survive the apocalypse?? I don’t get it.
All this stress….. it’s hateful.
I had to be very firm at work today.
When I arrived, all the windows were shut.
Is it remotely comprehensible to you?
I personally don’t think I am overreacting.
Nepalis don’t seem to get social distancing either. They are getting good at masking since the horrifying current Second wave (and perpetual 2 month lockdown) but I still have to ask people to keep their distance.
Social distancing is completely impossible on urban trains. Masking is impeccable. I just so badly – desperately- for air to also circulate to mitigate things. You can see in the video how wide open they are : they should all be like this, all the time but they are mostly just modest little gaps. I will never understand it ( nor the fact that people plonk down next to each other).
So bored of it.
But you and D got your shots, right? That should be some reassurance at least. I’m with you on the ventilation. Lots of air!! Especially in summer there’s no excuse.
We have had the first one, which has improved my mental situation. But if I hadn’t flung them open in desperation, the ventilation would have been totally insufficient.
People are worried about being ‘hot’.
Er…….
USE YOUR FUCKING BRAIN
Oh my. I am so terribly worried now. Please tell D to keep all windows opened that he can and to distance himself from everyone as much as possible at his school. So glad you keep opening those windows!!!!
I am a crusader.
What fucks me off beyond belief is the fact that although it is the end of term, and thus they could easily wind things down, although the students are currently at home (for a day! and none of them will get tested; it’s just a kind of superstitious ‘let’s be cautious’ type of catshit, the teachers are required to go in for the remaining three days. Just in case people don’t understand:
1. If students have Covid, given that children are more likely to be asymptomatic, this means immediately that there is a high likelihood that quite a lot are infected. Not necessarily, but it is hardly a stretch of the imagination.
2. No one is vaccinated; only D has had the first shot, because I got my act together and made it happen. This means that you have 65 teachers all sitting in a big teachers room; yes, as he told me last night, there are some doors open – some fully, some a ‘modest gap’, and yes they are masked, but common epidemiological sense would dictate that to be on the safe side, everyone should just isolate from now; it is their summer holidays anyway – what difference would it make? No: you have to ‘look responsible’ and ‘diligent’.
To me this is utterly stupid.
From a purely selfish point of view, he ‘only’ has to endure three more ridiculously pointless days, and then is off for five weeks. We have the second vaccination together on Sunday July 26th – many of the other teachers have received the vaccine coupons from Kamakura City Office but as there is not enough vaccine available because the government is totally incompetent, they have no guaranteed date yet. Many are in their 40-s – 60-s, surrounded by students who practice ZERO social distancing. No students do. It is like the picture I put up here, all crowded together on the train; it is like that at ALL TIMES.
AAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGH
fuck this!!!!!
I would literally go insane there, and I do mean that with the utmost honesty. I really don’t know how you both do it. I just couldn’t, I couldn’t.
Lately I have been incredibly irritable. I am not normally an easily-irritated person. I have also felt generalized deep anger, just walking around feeling pissed-off.
I think it has to do with shit like this. (Plus other stuff happening in the world that really pisses me off. More than that. Worries the living hell out of me.)
The teachers at Duncan’s school are all unvaccinated. And the kids are coming down with COVID now. Case numbers are rising in Japan ever since the Delta variant has been on the loose. And it’s far more transmissible than anything we’ve seen. Japan might have nearly all Delta variant cases by August, according to some scientists, which means this slope is hellah slippery. And Japan’s two-shot vaccination rate is under 20%.
I am not happy about this!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (I get positively apoplectic, actually, thinking about it. And yet I’ve been taken over with this compulsion to doomscroll, which doesn’t help.)
No, Neil darling, you are not overreacting. (I might be slightly, on your behalf, because this has been going on for so long now, this global shit show, and I’m sick of it.) I am counting the days until you young lads get your second jabs. Not a nanosecond too soon.
I need this reassurance.
Ya see, what you are saying is clear and logical. And that is what I need to hear, as I am constantly made to feel at work and elsewhere that I am some kind of weirdo who is being overdramatic about it. I am not. Not even slightly. I am just looking at the facts you state here, and reacting to them. Other people ARE NOT CAPABLE OF DOING THIS.
This is also why I am also going around in a state of permanent irritation and fury – it seems the only appropriate reaction. HAving said that, this morning I turned my yang – I am SO YANGY at the moment, like a human orange pomander studded with nuclear cloves, that I just danced my ass off in the kitchen for an hour and felt slightly better. I am going to ROAR through today, flinging open windows left right and centre- today will be my very last day of ever being in a windowless classroom and I am going to just get through it. Roll on the 26th!!!!!
And thanks so much for this. I need it I need it!!!!!~!!
Glad to be of service, my love.
XX
One other excellent point to consider. Take this in.
There are teachers who refused the vaccination.
We are in Fujisawa.
The Olympic Sailing is in Fujisawa at Enoshima beach on July 25th, the day before me and D get the second vaccines.
There are therefore obviously all the contingents from around the world, Peru etc, a lot of severely affected countries, presumably in the vicinity.
But they sit in the teachers’ room with the windows closed.
I will never be able to understand it.
It’s a really precarious situation! Why don’t people put 2 + 3 together?
WAIT. WHAT?
THERE ARE TEACHERS WHO REFUSED THE VACCINATION??????? IN THE MIDDLE OF ALL OF THAT??????????
DON’T GET MY BLOOD BOILING.
I sympathize with you, Neil, truly. I get crazy with all this anti-vaxxer activist BS, the religious zealots believing that god will keep them from getting sick, the virus deniers, the anti-maskers, the sociopathic heads of state who call it a little flu and keep their economies up and running with no restrictions. . . and I personally have virtually nothing to worry about. I’m safe with Ric in our little Sunshine Coast cocoon where we haven’t had a case in the community for weeks now and everyone is cautious and ultra-compliant. And we’re fully vaccinated, like the majority of us. Compared to so much of the world, we’re bullet-proof.
To be you and D., in the heart of it right now, on public transit, in the classroom — glad to hear that’s ending — it has got to be a whole lot more crazy-making. Like, to the tenth power crazy. I have to remember to reassure myself that Japan is, with all the idiocy/denial/conformity, still doing relatively well. Very well, in fact.
Just remember you’re not in the clear until two weeks after that second jab! Quadruple-mask, guys!
Sigh.
What to say ?
I do understand people who are hesitant about having ‘unknown’ substances injected into their bloodstreams : here it is more ‘vaccine hesitancy’ than ‘anti’: some female students are worried about pregnancy issues/ birth defects in the future. Plenty are worried about side effects because Japan being Japan, I truly don’t think that the full horrors of Long Covid and intubation have been properly discussed. Teachers say ‘I don’t know anything about the vaccines ‘ which leaves me speechless.
Ultimately it’s all about xenophobic exceptionalism. If the government had accepted Pfizer and Moderna’s mass trial results like everyone else did, we could all have been vaccinated a few months back and would be in the middle of an exultant Olympic summer. Instead, Japan had to do four months of ‘extra tests’ ‘because we’re special’, ( HOW could the administration NOT have sped up things, knowing the Olympics were around the corner?!!!!!!) just out of a moronic sense of overcaution, and this lame, spectatorless but still ultra dangerous shitshow is the pathetic result. I hate politicians.
I remember what you’d written earlier, too, about the layers of bureaucracy, about the hesitancy to put a foot wrong, make a mistake, make the wrong choice, be responsible for it. That stuck with me.
I share your view on politicians.