I'm vaxxed and my excuses are gone, oh no

I have gotten both shots required by my boi Moderna, and next week they'll be all done percolating. I'll be a rehabilitated bird released back into the wild, allegedly ready to fly again. It hasn't fully sunk in yet.

I had the strange experience of getting a job offer around the same week the vaccine's approval was announced. I had the stranger experience of dealing with both of those developments while in Florida cleaning out my grandfather's house and grieving his death. I wasn't paying attention to the outside world much at that time, obviously, so I figured out that the vaccine was really and truly coming by catching a snippet of news at some point when my mom put the TV on to drown out our sad thoughts. I didn't have the energy to look into it, though, and had to cautiously ask a smarter friend "Is the pandemic.... like... over? Did I miss that?"

I spent November and December cleaning out the house and driving back and forth from Florida to North Carolina with my mom to drop off all of the heirlooms and memories we'd been boxing up, and also during the weekdays I worked at my new job. It was not an ideal situation. I returned to New York before the new year and then had a housing fiasco to deal with, still trying to get my bearings at my new job, and I've done so and continued to try to piece my life together and now I somehow have two shots' worth of COVID-19 antibodies in my system? It's springtime and I'm immune to the novel coronavirus and it's cool if I go on dates again?

I used to work at a job where I had to dress nice every day. In February of 2020, I kept putting off the task of taking my nice clothes to the dry cleaners, and then on March 16th I was let go from that job. So then I just had a pile of dirty clothes that I would need to pay to clean and no job to pay for or necessitate that task. When processing that the world had stopped and I would need to quarantine for an indeterminate amount of time, one of the first things I did was neatly fold up every dirty garment waiting for dry cleaning, pack them all tightly into a reusable grocery bag, and stuff it in a corner under my bed so I would no longer remember this unfinished chore.

I guess I have to go to the dry cleaners now??

Here are some other tasks I'll have to add back onto my to-do list:

• Bleach my mustache
• Look for an apartment that doesn't have mice in it
• Go back to the gym because I've spent the whole pandemic like "I can't believe how much I genuinely miss going to the gym!" but we all know that once I go back one (1) single time I'm going to immediately lapse into avoiding the gym for weeks at a time yet again
• Get new glasses
• Refill my Klonopin prescription
• Meaningfully pursue my acting career in a way that involves relying on the support and approval of others
• Make a plan for financial stability in my 30s
• Attempt to process the confusing but deeply felt trauma of the past year
• Find love

I am daunted!! I'm really looking forward to indoor dining again, though.

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