Catchup and burnout --------------------- I haven't written a phlog post for the past couple of days because I've just been so ungodly tired. I'm not even sure why. Of course there's an anxious part of my brain going "you've got a mild case of omicron that's still going to leave you brainfogged and disabled long term good luck with life, fucker" because that's just kinda how my brain works, but I really think that I'm just tired and worn down. A lot of the omicron news has been continuing to get to me as our cases are getting close to a million new a day even though schools haven't even started in earnest yet. It's the schools thing that keeps freaking me out because it feels so blatantly just about making sure parents have a place to leave their kids so they don't have a reason to miss work. I mean, look, I understand that isolation is really bad for kids. I understand better than almost anyone and, honestly, unless you had to talk to yourself all day because you didn't see anyone other than your parents for months at a time I don't really want anyone trying to challenge me on this. I want kids to be able to have places to go and ways to be social yet also be safe, but the goddamn thing of it all is that we're not doing anything to make that possible. We're just, as a nation, going "look it's in-person or nothing and nothing would be bad so..." and that's so fucking obviously disingenous. I'm scared, I'm frustrated, and not just on my own behalf but for everyone. The thing I keep getting stuck on is that omicron is hitting children really hard right now, like other strains hadn't, and we don't know if we're putting millions of children at risk for long term pulmonary and neurologic damage. It's horrifying. I feel like basically every layer of government is failing us and we're just being told that we need to shrug it off and deal. It feels like we're just vaccinated enough that everyone with power has collectively decided that the rest count as acceptable losses to keep the economy going. As though we, a country with the resources to raze the world down and build it back up again twice over, couldn't just fucking decide to give most of the country a paid holiday and enough masks for everyone.