Local Man Who Just Got His First Dose Of The Vaccine So Glad “Things Are Back To Normal Now”
It’s pretty safe–like, triple-mask safe–to say that most of us are gosh darn over the pandemic hellscape of the last year-and-counting. It kind of feels like being a kid in the backseat of a minivan on a road trip with your family. Every time you ask “are we there yet,” your mom threatens to “turn this car around right now,” except your mom is the US government and she actually does turn the car around (over, and over, and over) until eventually you start to wonder if she has any sincere intentions of making it to the destination or if this is all a sick purgatorial joke. Anyway, vaccines make it seem like maybe perhaps we might possibly have the end in sight, but some of us might be jumping the gun.
“I just feel like I can finally breathe again, you know?” said senior and Bajas regular Jake Peters. “I got my first dose of the COVID vaccine yesterday and it’s like, finally I can do pretty much everything I’ve kept doing for the past year but now I can post about it on my Snapchat story guilt-free. The haters–namely my roommate, the pharmacist at Walmart and also the CDC–might say that I have to wait for a ‘second’ ‘dose’ and then wait ‘three’ more ‘weeks’ to be fully immune, but I’m more of a glass half full kinda guy. Last night me and the boys went to the most crowded bar we could find to celebrate our return to normalcy and raised a few glasses. Our arms were still sore so it was a bit of a challenge, but we had to celebrate somehow!”
“I think whatever’s in that Moderna stuff must have gone to his head,” said Peters’ roommate and hostage via biological warfare James McKay. “He seems to feel very...liberated. I mostly just hide in my room to avoid whatever he might bring home but it’s not like I’m safe here. He’s been drinking our orange juice straight out of the carton as an exercise of his newfound freedom and going ‘it’s okay, I’m vaxxed.’ I tried to explain that you can’t gain immunity a day after your first of two doses and he says you can’t ‘with that attitude.’ I also tried to explain the whole orange juice thing being gross, panny or not, but that didn’t go very well either.”
“Back to normal” means something different to everyone, but the truth is that we’re not there in any iteration quite yet. Pre-pandemic “normal” was still pretty wack, it’s important to mention, but a return to that is still pretty far away. That said, we should all probably still follow basic rules of hygiene in the meantime. No fingers in the peanut butter unless all of your roommates consent.