On Covid

-she's back, back, back again.

In case none of you has realised, I live in a suburb filled with mid cafes, countless wannabe fitness influencers and a fuck tonne of anti-vaxxers. The only people I see wearing masks are the elderly Asian folk who used to own this suburb before it got gentrified and became the poor man’s South Yarra.

When I go to the local Chemist Warehouse, full-grown humans with drippy noses and unmasked faces sneeze all over the place with their whole body while waiting to fill their prescriptions. It takes all my willpower not to pick up a can of Glen 20 from the aisles and spray them down.

This is where I go to buy my masks and RATs.

Gross.

If I could, I would Glen 20 any surface before I touched it, but that would be insane, right? RIGHT?

I try to do the right thing. I am vaccinated to the eyeballs. I wear a mask when I remember. I sanitise myself. I sanitise everything I touch after I touch it at the gym. I change out of my street clothes as soon as I get home and have a shower. If I am even a little bit sick, I cancel all my plans for fear of passing it on. I do a RAT every time I feel gross, or before going to an event. I don’t kiss anyone hello, but that’s cos I never did. Don’t touch me. Ew. NO TOUCHING!

And yet, I got Covid.

Again.

Apparently, it is everywhere.

In the spirit of doing the right thing, I tried to self-report my case. While I know that the messaging around Covid has completely disappeared due to capitalism, I didn’t think that the government would be so negligent that they’d remove community tools like self-reporting pages. But they did. Instead, it redirects to a page on how to deal with having Covid, as if the entire country hasn’t contracted it already. Well done. Nice job. They’re really forgetting about all the people at risk and just letting it rip, huh?

I guess stimulating the economy is more important than human life.

While it wasn’t mandatory to isolate, I did, because I am not an asshole. Plus, I didn’t have a choice. For 12 days, I was dumber than a bag of bricks and only had the capacity to crawl from my bed to the couch. Showering felt like running a marathon. Composing a simple text was like I was trying to explain Schödinger’s thought experiment about quantum physics. I am not too proud to admit that the majority of my responses to people last week were just “hahahahaha.”

In those 12 days, my greatest accomplishments were:

1. Watching all of The Good Wife

2. Making congee

On the first point, I may have been in the same room as the television while it was on, but my brain was so scrambled I couldn’t tell you what the show was about. Did I sleep through most of it, soothed by the sounds of privileged white people being put out by minor inconveniences? You bet I did. All I got from it was Julianna Margulies being cheated on by Mr Big. A law firm. A tech company that isn’t Google. Bitcoin. Rich People Problems. Alan Cummings isn’t gay. Choices (said in Tatianna’s voice). Slap.

No wonder it went for seven seasons. Absolute trash. Brilliant stuff.

As for congee, it was the only thing that I ate for a fortnight. When I wasn’t eating congee that I made, I was eating congee that friends left at my door. If you are what you eat, I am overcooked rice with random bits of protein suspended in it.

As a low-labour, high-reward food, it’s great to make if you’re incapacitated. And as a lazy person on my deathbed with a pressure cooker, it was a piece of piss to throw together.

Anyways, I know I said I’d never give you a recipe for congee, but having Covid for a third time has softened me. So, stay safe, mask up, get vaccinated (don’t forget about the flu), take care of each other and eat congee.

Pressure cooker pork and century egg congee