What am I grateful for this week? I got a promotion on Tuesday so that’s really exciting and honestly unexpected because this doesn't happen often. So I'm really, really thrilled about it. It just feels kind of nice to get the title of the job that I am doing. It doesn't necessarily mean that I'm getting like a mega raise, but working in higher ed, I'd be remiss if I -- I’d be ignorant if I thought I would get one, but it's -- there's something there. So that's nice. And I'm grateful for that and my bosses were wonderful about it, so that's nice. Let's see. I also won a book from Goodreads because they do giveaways and I always sign up because I always want a chance at winning something and this time I did! So that was really cool too. So I'm really happy about that. 

If you're over a certain age limit, like, we should just all swallow our pride and and know that you're not going to be as sharp as you used to be and that you probably need to just, you know, see how good you are still at seeing and at reacting. Because you could kill someone, you could injure someone. You know, who cares if you -- I'm not gonna say "Who cares about if you injure yourself?" because that's mean, but like, you know, don't think of just yourself basically. Like, think about the people that you could run over with your car. And so, you know, we've been trying to get her [a neighbor] to stop driving for a long time. Like, "Hey, maybe you should stop driving, maybe you shouldn't be driving? Maybe you should sell your car?" And she would, she would give it a shot for a little while, and then she would go back to driving because she doesn't want to like, bother people to take her places and if her -- she can't figure out how to work her phone, she can't call a taxi or an Uber. She doesn't -- can’t even like see to use her phone doesn't understand how it works. And so, like -- and she's really nice. And so like I go over there occasionally. And the last time I went and I what I saw her across the street and I was about to go grocery shopping and I went up, I was like, "Hey, I'm about to go grocery shopping. Do you need anything?" And she goes, "Oh well, can I come with you?" And I hesitated because I had planned on going -- like, I had like four things I was gonna do, and I was, I had to order in mind of the way I was gonna do it and like grocery shopping was the last thing I was gonna do. And so, I hesitated for a second to decide, oh, can I put these other things last and do the grocery shopping first? So I was like, "Um," and then I was like, "Yeah. Okay, that's fine." But she goes, "You hesitated, you hesitated. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. I'm gonna go to the grocery store like tomorrow with so-and-so, I don't need anything. I can wait until tomorrow." And…

I was talking to some people today about the fact that I found an engorged tick on my child -- horrifying. And that we had treated them with doxycycline, once we realized that the tick had been on for quite a while. And in the process of having that conversation, it was brought up that there is a lyme or plush, you know, tick vaccine that's being trialed in Europe and in the U.S. And it's in the third round of trials, so it's seemingly successful. And will be launched at some point. And as we were having this conversation, somebody that I was talking to said, “Oh yeah, I've heard of this.” There's this, basically, conspiracy theory that the pharma companies are dropping ticks, like increasing tick populations to try and push this basically. That was the context within which they had heard about the vaccine initially. And it just made me think about how nothing is accepted as a fact anymore. Like something, which should be celebrated, a vaccine to protect against lyme, which is you know, a very prevalent at this point, condition and can have some pretty terrible outcomes, you know, not fatalities necessarily, but chronic pain and, you know, all these things. like stuff you don't want. There used to be a time where somebody would be like, “Hey, the measles, there's a measles vaccine!” and the country would be like, “Oh! That's wonderful.” Generally speaking, maybe not 100% of people, but the majority, and now, it feels like any good thing, whether it's a lyme vaccine or something else is met with skepticism. And the hard part is, it's so impossible to gauge. Like have things actually shifted so much? Is it the case where a minority are happy about something like this? Or is it still true, the majority are happy there's just more conversation, more attention being given to people who, have these theories that are kind of outlandish? And all of that with the caveat that there have been times that the government. that pharma companies have, of course, done terrible things intentionally.

I can think right on top of my head of two songs in particular, where I have some pretty clear memories of where I was and the time and place, even though they were songs I’d heard plenty of times before and plenty of times after, and they were the two songs, just as I was pulling into the parking lot for my high school graduation back in June of 1994. Sorry, 1995, goodness! One was, “Mr. Jones” by Counting Crows, the other “Welcome To Paradise” by Green Day. And both of them, I think were on D.C. 101, one of the rock stations in the Washington D.C. area that was a little easier of the two main rock stations to pick up in the area based from where I was on the western side of the D.C. area. The other one was 99.1 HFS, and that was like, way over towards Annapolis, which maybe the translator was probably like somewhere in Rockville or Montgomery County or Prince George's or something, but the point being was -- anyway, 101 was easier to pick up so that was normally the rock station I listened to as I was driving in. And yeah, those particular songs, I remember from the playlist of graduation. And that graduation speech itself was not necessarily anything earth-shattering. We didn't have any viral moments, although admittedly those were a lot harder to create in the pre-internet era. The speaker had engagements on NPR at the time and maybe had written a book or two, and my dad actually remembers him more than I do, just for the fact that he could remember him clapping for every graduate, which he thought was, you know, a good thing that he did.