JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

I put off registering for vaccination because I didn’t want to navigate the bureaucracy and I was waiting for the other vaccines to become available. I did not want to be in a crowd (even in non-pandemic times I am socially distant). Through my friend I signed up with a private provider whose Moderna stocks are supposed to arrive in June. I have hypertension (genes) which seems to have vanished with the deadline-chasing (advantage of finally focusing on fiction), but I’m on meds and in a priority group.

Last week friends started pushing me to get vaccinated because there were plenty of vaccines, not enough people signing up for them, and it was easy. Dorski pointed out that when the vaccine lists open up it might be harder to get an appointment. If you don’t get the kind you want, just get a booster later.

Early morning Wednesday I signed up online for the vaccine in Makati, and 18 hours later I got a text informing me of my appointment on Friday.

Drogon, my eldest

My appointment wasn’t till 1120, but I was up two hours earlier than usual because Drogon was meowing for his breakfast. I’d decreased the cats’ meal portions as they’re all overweight, and they have been cooperative but cranky in the morning. I am usually ridiculously early for appointments (neurosis from childhood), so I delayed leaving the house as much as I could but still got to Fort Bonifacio Elementary School half an hour ahead of my schedule. Maybe there’d be no-shows and I’d finish earlier?

Fort Bonifacio Elementary School has impressive facilities, better than UP (though I know that’s not a high bar). The guard at the main gate took my temperature, then pointed me to the first station, where my appointment was verified and my ID checked. At the second station someone looked at my medical certificate, and at the next I filled out some forms before someone took my blood pressure. After months of being borderline low, my bp was borderline high—either my systems were showing proof of comorbidity (our vocabulary increases with each catastrophe), or I have white coat syndrome (in this case blue scrubs and full PPE). More likely I was excited: after 15 months of inertia, liberation loomed!

At the next station someone looked at my documents and I learned that I would be getting the Astra Zeneca vaccine. Whose side effects Eric Clapton had complained about. (Clapton bitching about drugs given his history: absurd.) This is not the time to be brand-conscious, but I was happy to hear I would get AZ.

Next there was a 30-person queue on nice chairs set a meter apart. At each step there were one or two city employees reminding us to keep masks and face shields on and face forward to minimize risk of contagion. We were always comfortable and in the shade, with industrial fans and open doors and windows for proper ventilation. A radio was tuned to some 80s pop divas program, because it’s not real unless Debbie Gibson is singing “Lost In Your Eyes”. Then there were two songs by Whitney Houston and I braced myself for “Indayyyyayyaaayyy” but the queue was soon out of radio range. The line moved briskly, and the lady behind me was especially enthusiastic, giving the scene the air of musical chairs at a children’s party. The lady in front of me, in skinny jeans that were perilously low-rise, moved slowly, prompting encouragement from the enthusiastic one. “Sandali lang,” the skinny-jeaned lady complained, “Nadulas ako sa banyo, masakit ang balakang ko.” And then they were exchanging medical histories. It really felt like a children’s party, with titos holding clipboards directing us at each station.

Jacob, my middle cat

It seemed to me that there were too many stations, duplicate functions, the same questions asked over and over again and the same instructions repeated like a mantra. Then I remembered that I know nothing about Filipino social expectations. The point is not to finish as quickly as possible, but to make sure everyone understands what’s going on. This entails constantly reminding and reassuring people. And in many cases, promising aging macho men that the needle won’t hurt. Because everything here is personal.

After an hour in the queue, I was in the cold vaccination room. The nurses kindly offered to record the actual jabs on the vaccinees’ phones. “Should she be allowed to get the vaccine?” a lady asked, and even with her mask on you knew she was pointing at someone with her puckered lips (nguso). The subject was a thin lady whose lower legs and feet were black—signs of advanced diabetes. “She had an operation,” the subject’s companion said, “but it’s still like that.” A nurse assured the questioner that the doctors in the earlier stations had cleared the diabetic for vaccination. “But we were sitting down, how could they see?” the questioner continued. “And you know, some people lie.” Within the subject’s hearing!

Then it was my turn. I declined video and pointed to my left arm. I didn’t even feel the jab, it was so fast, then a bandage was applied. I’d been waiting for this for 15 months, and I barely noticed when it happened.

Another queue to have our temperatures taken and oximeters clamped on our fingers. Then a blood pressure reading, then someone talked to each of us about possible side effects and handed us 5 paracetamol tablets each just in case. Why not record the instructions and play them on a loop instead of repeating the same spiel 20 times an hour? Because the personal touch is vital in Filipino interactions. Also, it was a way of keeping everyone for 30 minutes to check for any adverse reactions to the vaccine.

Buffy the ex-ratslayer, my youngest

At the next station a man with a tablet recorded my information once again. This took a while because the wi-fi signal was faint. He looked at my ID and asked if I had other ID. “What’s wrong with it?” I said. The numbers were too tiny for him to read. I read them to him. Finally I was advised to return in exactly 3 months, which seemed long until I looked up the AZ vaccine and learned that 12 weeks is the optimal period before the second dose.

And I was done. Total time spent at the vaccine center: 2 hours. I went home, had lunch, didn’t notice any side effects other than a little tiredness. I did sleep extra-soundly that night, which could be from being woken up early, or from massive relief at getting vaccinated at last.

If you haven’t registered for vaccination with your local government unit, do it now.

I know I say “brilliant” a lot, but this book is a light source in our shady times. Initially I was drawn by the premise—woman discovers boyfriend is a popular anonymous conspiracy theorist on Instagram—but I was swiftly, then happily disappointed. It veered from the direction I’d expected and went straight into my life. Our lives, for we all live in our phones now. (I’m not saying that a novel is better because it’s “relatable” or “relevant,” but it gives the reading experience a sense of urgency.)

Fake Accounts sounds like a sharp, scathing book review, the sort I seldom see anymore because everyone has to play nice (while wishing someone would do a takedown because those are fun). I thought the tone would change at some point, but when it became clear that it would be sustained throughout, I stopped to google the author. (Which is a point the book makes, that our primary relationship is with screens and I often stop needlessly to check my phone.) Turns out I’d read Oyler before—her cutting book reviews shut up the hallelujah chorus that usually greets new work by media darlings. (The outlier/dissenting opinion is not necessarily better, but reading it is more useful for brain function.)

Then it struck me: This is what the Internet sounds like. People trying to sound smarter than they are while making the reader think she’s smarter than she is. It’s hilarious, and it’s genius. Fake Accounts is a comedy of manners set at a time when people demand authenticity even as they invent themselves online.

Following her boyfriend’s death the unnamed narrator quits her job at a media company, goes to Berlin (where she’d met her boyfriend) with no real plan, and joins a dating website. Half the book is about her dates, and it’s not a series of sexcapades. We get detailed accounts of attempts to connect with potential partners and create something real—as if this were possible when her personality and history change with each encounter. One day she’s a massage therapist, the next day a classical musician, because it’s so easy to turn into someone else (and if I claim that my cat is writing this you’ll think I’m kidding but how do you know I’m not?) Later she invents profiles according to astrological signs. Astrology isn’t real, she notes, but its influence on how people behave is real. Everyone insists they’re real, but what’s real?

The narrator is observing life rather than living it, describing emotions rather than feeling them, performing a self rather than being it. Welcome to the age of social media, which promises to connect us by putting screens between us. Where you expose your innermost thoughts in exchange for attention, and the more attention you get, the less control you have over your own thoughts (Because once you’ve had a million likes, you cannot settle for half a million). Where you are the show and your life is a performance.

Spring
by Ali Smith

Suddenly I realized I had not read Spring, which has been sitting on a shelf for two years. How could this happen? My excuse is that I do not regard Ali Smith’s book as narratives but as adventures, so I save them for when I really need them (like now). When I read her books I have no idea what I’m getting into. The author trusts that I don’t need a road map—I jump in, and as I hurtle down (or up, I can’t tell) I am assailed by sights, sounds, wordplay, puns, feelings, colors, jokes, memories of things that never happened to me, so that by the time I get to the bottom (or top), I know I have been through an experience. One I cannot simply summarize it in words. If people want to know what it is they will have to read it for themselves, and they will thank me for telling them nothing.

So all the books by Ali Smith sitting on the shelf (alongside the books of her friend Kate Atkinson) merge in my memory like an art exhibit. (Note: Her novel How To Be Both comes in two sections which may be read in either order.) I retain details: the one with the artist of the cinquecento, the guy who won’t come out of the bathroom like the guests in Buñuels’ Exterminating Angel, etc. Spring is the third in Smith’s Seasonal Quartet—she’s dropped a new novel every year since 2016, and the series is unconnected but related by politics and the events of this bonkers world. How bonkers? The covid pandemic is just the latest in the series of unthinkables that have come to pass, and her punishing publication schedule allowed her to write it into the final book, Summer. I had thought the quartet was triggered by Brexit, but in an interview she said she started writing the books even before that—she is not just prolific, but clairvoyant.

Though the subjects of the Seasonal Quartet are bleak, sad, scary, the books are alive with hope, laughter, and compassion because that is what being human is, pulling joy out of despair. Spring involves a near-forgotten TV director and his late friend and mentor, a guard at an immigration detention center, a mysterious child performing rescue missions, the work of the artist Tacita Dean, the writers Rainier Maria Rilke and Katherine Mansfield, and an 18th century battle in Scotland. Like Kate Atkinson’s Big Sky, which must’ve been written at the same time, she mentions the song “Hunger” by Florence + The Machine.

While I was reading Spring I wasn’t in another lockdown hiding from 10,000 new covid cases daily, I was riding a succession of trains and then cramming into a lunch van with a lot of people on the way to an historical site. I was free and fully alive in the bizarre now. Smith has said that her goal was to capture the present moment (hence the brief publication schedule), and she does. Spring is a time machine to 2018.

Klara and The Sun
by Kazuo Ishiguro

Probably because I have been languishing in enforced isolation for 13 months, though it must be said that I am antisocial by nature and therefore comfortable in isolation as long as I have the option to go out (and at the time I wrote this I had not gone out in 7 weeks); probably because I have had to live vicariously through books and movies and place upon them the burden of liberating me from this long sentence of sameness and claustrophobia; probably because I am a great admirer of Kazuo Ishiguro and have been looking forward to a new novel from him for several years (and I disliked The Buried Giant even before I read the withering review/scolding by Ursula Le Guin); and probably because Artificial Intelligence is no longer a science-fiction concept but a banal reality (Are we not all programmed by algorithms now?), no longer something to fear (Terminator) but a potential solution to the arrogant human bumbling that has brought the world to the brink of oblivion, my pleasure (because I did enjoy it) at reading Klara and the Sun was tinged with irritation at the narrator-protagonist’s relationship with the world. I found myself wishing Ishiguro would vary his schtick a little.

To be fair this schtick is one of the reasons I enjoy his novels: the clueless unreliable narrator who knows less about what is happening to them than I, the reader, do. The once-famous artist in denial of his complicity in totalitarianism and repression in Japan, the butler constrained by class and ideas of “dignity”, and the revelation in another novel that I won’t spoil for you because it is such an “A-ha!” (not the band) moment.

Klara in the new novel is an Artificial Friend, a humanoid robot with the ability to observe, draw insight, and develop empathy with her human companions. Like the aforementioned narrators she is recalling the past, indulging in the nostalgia that colors the novel with melancholy. It is established at the outset that Klara is learning about the world by watching it and drawing her own conclusions, and her innocence and naivete are quite touching. The thing is, we know that she is an unreliable narrator. Even if I had expected it, I like having the knowledge creep up on me. We are always aware of Klara’s constraints. We are seeing events unfold and relationships evolve from the POV of a machine. Unlike the butler in The Remains of the Day, she has no sense of humanity to lose. So when she describes a tense, ugly encounter between adult humans in the manner of a naturalist talking about the mating rituals of forest animals, I hear myself telling her to get on with it. I am not in the mood for emotional distancing, it’s already my life.

Her affectlessness dulls the emotional payoff. It’s too neat and polite. Maybe I just need the chaos and randomness that isolation has shut out (though they’re there, they’re always there). In sum, good book, but too much like isolation. It’s not the book, it’s me.