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How is the coronavirus pandemic affecting your life right now? Tell us about your experiences, feelings, and thoughts.

Sitting on quite a lot of anger and something else, a feeling of betrayal, and that "moral injury" often talked about these plague days. A friend wrote me, blithely asking, "so I'm volunteering to distribute food. Am I agriculture? Or food service worker?" And as we are both Kaiser members and live in California, I knew immediately that she was referencing the questionnaire that Kaiser sends to determine eligibility according to prioritized groups for the vaccine, which is still not in abundant supply right now in CA, and still not getting equitably to groups like agricultural workers in the Central Valley, and food service workers in restaurants. In the Bay Area, poverty is an emergency now. People live in their cars and deliver for Doordash. And this woman who is not rich, but comfortable, asks me, for what...? Permission? To assuage her nagging sense that she is lying? In response, I said, I would be careful about misrepresenting that. She replied, "not misrepresenting. I'm volunteering." This does not make you a food service or ag worker, I answered. And then, there was a little silence between us. Until a few days ago, when she wrote me, "call now! CA will be vaccinating everyone over 50 starting April 1st." So I got on hold to Kaiser, and during the time I was on hold, remembered my overdue glaucoma appointment, something I don't want to do unvaccinated, because...moral injury again...the medical assistants in that department let their masks hang under their noses. And I ask the advice nurse about this, and she says, in her judgement, I have a chronic condition, and should be vaccinated, and I say, I don't want to skip the line, and she assures me I am not. So I write my friend to tell her I am getting vaccinated, and she expresses indignation that I am cutting the line, when I'd made it so clear that I cared so deeply about that. And so, we are not friends now, and she is one of a handful of folk who have fallen away from me during this time. Glaucoma as metaphor: the pandemic is like the glasses I got after my diagnosis; I noticed one part of the lens was sharper, just this one lower right part of one side of a pair of glasses. My sight is sharper, changed, in the presence of these people, who gossip about lying for the shot, who cheat, who denied or minimized the danger, so they could have this wedding, or that Thanksgiving feast. I can't look away. A lot of times it's my own self I can't stand the sight of, as inward-gazing is also a nasty pastime of this past year. But the friendships, they are fewer, and I'm still deciding if that makes me lonelier.