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a jab in a windowless office
Thursday, April 20 2017
Late this morning Gretchen and I drove with the dogs down to New Paltz so that I could get a yellow fever vaccination. Gretchen and I would be flying to Uganda later in the summer, and in order to secure a visa to enter that country, one must have received a yellow fever inoculation. Gretchen had one as a tiny baby and again in 1990, so she's good for life. But I still needed mine. You may remember earlier ill-fated attempts I'd made to achieve my yellow fever visa requirement. After further research, Gretchen came to the realization that the easiest way to get it was to drive down to a clinic in New Paltz called Passport Health and pay just shy of $300, $100 of which was for a mandatory "consultation." As with everything else in American healthcare, it's racket designed to extract money from wallets, and such things will probably only get more tawdry after four years of Trump. But there were no convenient alternatives, and at least there's good spaghetti to be had in New Paltz.
Passport Health lay somewhere inside a faceless boxy building with no apparent front entrances. After some snooping around, we found a door to a stairway down into a basement. While walking down a featureless hallway that reeked of fresh cheap paint, we heard a voice call out to us. A plump trollish woman sat alone in her windowless office waiting for my arrival, and she assumed that the sounds in the hallway were from her 12:20 appointment. She was correct.
Gretchen left me to my appointment, which would supposedly take 30 to 45 minutes. But I was eager to hurry things along as best I could. It turned out that the "consultation" was mostly an effort to upsell me on other inoculations. Uganda is in the tropics within the overlapping ranges of many diseases. This was all spelled out in detail in a special binder that had been prepared just for me. The diseases were listed one after the other, complete with colorful maps of where they constituted a threat. The trollish woman went through each of these one by one, saying that I might want to get a shot for this or that. "Uh huh," I'd say, occasionally adding that I was there for one thing and one thing only: a yellow a fever vaccine. At one point I lied and said that I'd be traveling with someone who used to be a doctor for the World Health Organization. (Gretchen's father used to work for the United States Public Health Service, which is a different thing.) Any time I was asked if I wanted to do something or have something, I said "no." There was a whole worksheet avoided with this strategy. "Wow, you're my fastest ever," the trollish woman exclaimed as she prepared my shot. It was a live yellow fever culture that had to be revived in saline solution and then injected subcutaneously in my upper left arm. The fluid was surprisingly unpleasant as it went in, but then it was over and I was done. I called Gretchen, who was amazed at how quickly I had managed to make it. She was down on the rail trail with the dogs. We decided to meet at the Plaza Diner, which was within easy walking distance for me.
We got what we always got, and both the spaghetti and minestrone soup were actually even a little better than usual. The fries were about the same, which was excellent. It may not've been the most nutritiously wholesome meal, but it felt good going in.
I managed to get back to my workstation only ten-minutes late for the daily videoconference.
In our Slack.com-based communication system, I made a point of joking constantly about it being 4/20. I might not be the biggest pot smoker in IT, but I am the most outspoken. I've talked about it freely from the start while others have been more hesitant for obvious reasons. Slack recently launched a feature where it is possible to attach an emoji (with some text) to your profile to represent your status, and so all day a green "420" emoji (which I'd made custom) was my status. It bears mentioning, though, that despite the fact that I now have a small cache of reasonably-good marijuana on hand, I didn't actually have any today. (I'd had a little last night though.)
I'd been slow to wash last night's dishes. Tonight as Gretchen did an unusual thing (prepare the same dinner she'd prepared the night before: marinated tempeh for the making of tacos), I finally washed those dishes. We had a brief-but-amusing conversation on the subject of boring couple names. Ray & Nancy is pretty boring, but so too is Michæl & Carrie. Chris & Kirsty is terrible. But the blandest, most ordinary one of all is Susan & David. From there, I riffed on the subject, bringing up Ozzy & Harriet and Mork & Mindy. Romeo & Juliet is pretty cool pairing, if it didn't come with so much baggage. I wondered what it would be like to be named Romeo and then just happen to start dating someone named Juliet. Would it just be normal for other couples? "Romeo and Juliet are coming over; they say they're bringing a bottle of wine."
Tonight Gretchen and I snuggled with Charles the Cat on the two beanbags and watched the first episode of the third season of Fargo. Part of the fun is seeing how the various archetypes are revealed. The story is always fundamentally the same, which keeps things engaging from the start as various bad decisions quickly multiply and metastasize. It's also a visual treat; as Gretchen pointed out, the cinematography is consistently amazing.
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