vaccine

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

Hello, dear readers, and welcome to Thursday! It has felt like a whilrwind of a week.

Friday I headed out to the PNW to visit my best friend, because it had been too long and she’s been struggling. It was a pretty brief visit bookended by two pretty long travel days, but it was absolutely worth it to be able to hug her and hang out. It made me think more about queer community and how we look out for each other and show up for each other. I’m grateful to the friends and others who have modeled that generosity and love for me, and grateful that I have the resources to be able to be there for the people that I care about. It was hard to leave my friend, and it’s also nice to be home now that my husband and Nova are here consistently, too.

I ended up calling off from work on Monday – didn’t get home until around midnight Sunday night and I woke up with a pretty bad headache. After sleeping in and finishing my homework, I had my first session of my second fall class Monday night, which went well. I am a bit intimidated by this class, but I think it’s going to be good.

Yesterday I got my covid booster and my flu shot. So far I’m feeling mostly okay…ever-so-slightly feverish and a little achy, but not awful. Hoping I make it through the day at work.

I don’t have a whole heck of a lot else to report this week, but I’ll leave you with your weekly Nova fix:

Gratitude on a Sunny Thursday

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

Hello, dear readers, and welcome to Thursday, which I keep thinking is Wednesday…which is, I suppose, better than thinking it’s Friday. I hope you’re all hanging in there.

As of a couple of days ago, I’m officially two weeks out from my second covid vaccine and therefore as immunized as I’m going to be for the time being. It feels good to feel like I can start making some plans with (also immunized) friends again. It also feels weird. I am definitely going to need to relearn how to be social in person, and I’m sure my limit for how many people I can tolerate being with for an extended period of time has changed over the past year of isolation. (I’m an introvert, so that wasn’t a huge number to begin with…I’m a bit nervous about going back to group activities, to be honest.)

My tattoo is healing up nicely, though it’s in a very itchy stage right now. I can’t tell how much of that is the tattoo itself and how much is the hair growing back on my arm, but I’m trying to be careful about not absentmindedly scratching at it.

I don’t really have a lot to talk about this week, but let’s end this with a little list of things I’m grateful for right now:

  • I am grateful for my job. It’s still mindblowing to be in a place where I feel both challenged and appreciated, where I feel like my value is being recognized. It’s wild that I’m in a leadership position and enjoying it (not that it’s easy, but that it feels like a good use of my skills). It’s wild to have a degree of financial stability I have not had since moving out of my parents’ house.
  • I am grateful for my friends. I’ve had a lot of really great conversations lately that remind me that my people are the best people. I’m grateful for their trust and their insight and their love. I’m so glad I don’t feel like I have to carry everything on my own, or pile everything onto my husband or my therapist, but I have whole communities of people supporting me.
  • I am grateful for music. In the past couple of weeks, I rediscovered how much I absolutely adore P!nk. In college, I went from listening pretty exclusively to contemporary Christian music to dipping my toes into the waters of other options, and P!nk was one of the first artists I heard that really connected with my angsty, troubled heart. I hadn’t kept up with her music after graduation, really, but in diving into her newer stuff, it’s been a delight to see that, even though I am not an angsty college student anymore, her music still connects. We’ve both grown since then. I have immense respect for her as an artist. My current favorite track is this one (in case the link doesn’t work, or you don’t use Spotify – it’s the last song on her 2019 album Hurts 2B Human; the track is called “The Last Song of Your Life,” and it’s beautiful), but her newest singles (from the current year) are also incredible.

That’s it from me this week – keep taking care of yourselves and each other.

Resting

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

Hello, dear readers! I’m a little late posting this today because I have been taking the last couple of days off from work – I got my second dose of the Covid vaccine on Tuesday afternoon, and I wanted to give myself time to recover. So far I’ve been mostly okay – tired, a little feverish here and there, and about 24 hours after getting the shot, the joints in that arm started hurting really bad. But Tylenol and sleep seems to be helping, and I’d much rather be dealing with the vaccine side-effects than the actual disease.

It’s been a busy couple of weeks (more on that soon, hopefully), but things are good. I’ve been using this time off to catch up on some knitting. I finished a stuffed friend for my older nephew, and am slowly chipping away at a blanket for the younger one. (I’ve also been playing a bit of Animal Crossing lately to get myself off my phone/computer screens, which has been fun.)

I’m going to keep this one brief – time for me to have some coffee and make some breakfast now that I’m finally up and moving about. Tomorrow I’m getting color added to my new tattoo, and I am very excited about that! (And very thankful I don’t feel worse post-vaccine, so it should actually be manageable.)

Scattered Thursday Thoughts

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

Hello, dear readers. We have made it to Thursday. I am not feeling the greatest this morning, for what could be any number of reasons, but I’m here and I’m still strangely hopeful.

Yesterday was Transgender Day of Visibility. I updated a many-years-old post I’d done on a previous TDoV on Facebook and reposed it there yesterday…I’m not on Facebook super often these days, but sometimes it still feels important to say things. Visibility can be exhausting, though. I’m fortunate to have enough mental and emotional bandwidth most days to be okay with being an educator, but every conversation about why they/them pronouns deserve respect (and are grammatically correct, though this should be much further down the priority list than it is) and why cis people should care about the issues faced by trans people takes its toll. There are a bunch of bills in various states right now trying to restrict trans-affirming healthcare for trans youth and to ban them from sports and it’s all incredibly frustrating. (For a great perspective on the healthcare issue, see this Twitter thread.) All that said, it was lovely to see so many of my fellow trans folks celebrating themselves yesterday. We deserve to be seen and celebrated just like everyone else does.

I got my first dose of the Moderna vaccine on Tuesday! (This may be a factor in why I’m feeling a bit under the weather today.) This means I’m about six weeks from being able to hug some people I haven’t been able to hug in a very long time, and I am excited about that.

I feel like I had other things I was going to ramble about this morning, but I have a training to get to in the next couple of minutes, so I think we’ll end here for now. I hope you’re all hanging in there, and getting vaccinated, and still wearing your masks. Keep taking care of yourselves and each other, friends.