And frankly, I feel fantastic. Had a big lunch yesterday, napped for a couple hours (I only got 2 hours of sleep Thursday night so the nap was probably not vaccine related,) watched some TV, stayed up kinda late, slept well. If I try to lift my left arm all the way over my head, the injection site is achy – but that’s it.

Mentally – I am still just gobsmacked at the decision by the Governor to drop the mask mandates when we don’t even have half the state population fully vaccinated. Our case numbers are looking great, but our average vaccinations per day have fallen off a damn cliff. We peaked towards the end of April and now we’re at half of that.

If he’d said, “When we have X% of the population fully vaccinated, we can drop mask mandates” – that very well could have incentivized some folks to go get the damn shot, but that carrot is gone now.

I’m still not mad that the CDC said, “If you’re vaccinated, you can safely do X” – it’s important to know what you can & can’t do, especially in private settings where you know everyone is vaccinated. But the Governor’s decision on public spaces just changes all my mental math.

I was still going to mask up until we hit better vaccination numbers, but I’d been making all my decisions based on the fact that I wouldn’t be surrounded by a bunch of unmasked, unvaccinated chucklefucks until we at least hit the majority of the population being fully vaccinated.

Now, I have to count on businesses to have an interest in keeping their employees and customers safe until we hit majority vaccination. And we’ve seen how well they do *that* without state intervention. Trader Joes, Walmart, and FML – Costco – are dropping mask requirements for fully vaccinated customers – tell me, are they REALLY going to be checking shot cards at the door? I doubt it.

If you’re thinking, “but you’re fully vaccinated and will be fully protected in 13 days” – yes, that is correct. But there is still the risk of breakthrough infection. And while I realize the risk of an infection is very low, and any infection actually being serious is insanely low – there is then the chance of my passing it on to someone at risk who is not vaccinated yet, or cannot get vaccinated. And we’re looking at a whole lot of unmasked, unvaccinated people being out and about.

My pro-mask stance has not just been for myself, but to *not* do put other people at risk. (Even assholes who *won’t* get vaccinated.)

If we lived in a society where folks actually thought about the greater good and looked out for each other, this would be a non-issue. We could count on folks who aren’t vaccinated to stay masked up until they were vaccinated – and that they would be actively working on getting vaccinated. But if we’ve learned anything in the last 14 months, it’s that we do not live in that society.