re upping this

 News has come out pretty consistently this morning, that while POSSIBLY the infused monoclonal antibodies are not as good against omicron once you're sick, if you are boosted? You probably won't get omicron.

And yeah, I suppose it's POSSIBLY that my hope is once again misguided (it sure felt like it was last week - after being excited to have gotten boostered over Thanksgiving, news of omicron and the possibility it could evade our vaccines was a huge crash). But maybe not? Maybe fundamentally I am safe now? Oh, I will still mask in public and it will be a long while before I eat inside a restaurant again. But I'm also thinking that a trip out to the bookstore and the big new JoAnn's in my mom's town and maybe even shoe shopping - I *really* need a new pair of brown dress shoes and I am sick of gambling online to see if I'm buying a size that fits or a pair that doesn't give me blisters.

And maybe, depending on caseload here, I might be able to consider ditching the mask, at least in lecture (where I am distant from other people).

But yeah, I admit part of my sheer exhaustion the end of this year is all the being jerked around, from hope to back-to-something-like-despair: the excitement when I heard the vaccines worked, the long wait for them to be broadly available, the excitement after I got both doses followed by the frustration when Delta hit....and then finally the excitement over getting boosted not even a week before news of omicron came out. I don't know how a person lives with that kind of thing regularly - oh, I suppose most of history, people HAVE - I am thinking, for example, of WWII and people with husbands or sons in the military in a "hot zone" and not knowing if their loved one was save for maybe weeks on end. But it is exhausting and I've not quite navigated how one lives with it.

(Heh. Also I think of the bit from It's A Wonderful Life, where St. Joseph (I think it is?) comments that on V-E day George Bailey - who was 4-F, bad ear - "wept and prayed," and how on V-J day, he "wept and prayed again" and wow, that's also how I've been in this thing - both dancing and weeping when I heard news there WOULD be a vaccine after all, and crying a bit when I got the first dose (the nurse asked me if she hurt me and I said no, it was just relief) and also all the praying for people I knew who contracted it - including a few who died, or one, whose death from another condition (a vascular condition) was probably hastened from having had it. And oh, all the times I despaired, the times I said "I am never going to see my mother in person again" or "what is the worth of my life any more, if all I am is trapped at home teaching through a cursed screen and scuttling out once a week to pick up groceries?" It's been a lot, it's been a very long, very dark night.)