Farewell 2020

At long last 2020, the oddest, saddest year of my and I think most of our lives, draws to an end. Everybody else is writing their year-end reflections so I might as well pile on. 

More than anything, I am overwhelmed by sadness and survivor's guilt, admixed with plenty of gratitude. Our family all been fine, well-fed, space to spread out in, plenty to read, internet working, wealth and business buoyed on a ton of money printing and people getting fired up about markets due initially to a lack of other entertainment, then sustained on a rising tide of newly minted genius millionaires, like the guy I read about in the Journal the other day who made a couple of million dollars in Tesla, so he took out an equity line on his house and bought more. Good luck with that.

Like many, I miss seeing people and talking to new ones, i.e. people I haven't met before. In particular I miss stores and retail. I like making small talk with cashiers and people showing me where things are on the shelves. In a best case scenario, that's where America's pot melts, where people get out and speak to one another, develop confidence and people skills and find new career paths. I know that's more easily said than done, but it does happen, and at the very least the process of interaction humanizes both parties.

Admittedly, I didn't get to that many stores before the pandemic because I am so busy working or exercising or reading or blogging or whatever, but I suppose that's what makes them special. My one or two trips to the mall or pet store each year can be sort of magical.

Having everything delivered to the house doesn't offer the same degree of social interaction. Delivery people are universally scrunched for time, they have full trucks. I'll bet they have metrics associated with delivering a certain number of packages (if so, I certainly hope they have compensation incentives). Sometimes we have a quick opportunity to say hello and thank you to their back as they go back up the stairs toward the street, but usually not. It's zipless.

Here's to a better 2021.

Uncharacteristically busy

Usually this week between Christmas and New Year's is pretty quiet, a time I can spend looking forward to the New Year and thinking. This year, not so much. There is year-end money pouring in from here, from there. A new client couple on their way in the door during what was a quiet week for the higher earner of the couple.

So I have been working. I've barely had time to take care of my own family's stuff and get a little exercise. Such is life.

I realize this isn't particularly interesting to read, but I am committed nonetheless to blogging a ton so I can get in as many posts as possible this year, because my readers have been clamoring for more. Just clamoring, I tell you. Bedtime.

Tech people in public service

In finance and other industries there is a long tradition of people moving from working in the private sector to working in government. While often derided as nothing more than a "revolving door" to enrich people and entrench the interests of specific industries, it's often motivated by a sincere desire to serve. After all, once you have a certain amount of money, for normal people the incentive to keep enriching onesself diminishes. This diminution is offset, admittedly, by a number of factors mixed in different measures in individual psyches: fear of major reversals, innate competitiveness and mild psychopathy, and a belief in the public mission of one's own particular industry. But still, many people accept pay cuts and enter public service, and often their motivations contain or are dominated by noble elements.

I'm not sure I see a lot of examples of this in technology just yet. Tech people have given lots of money away, for sure, with Bill Gates in the lead and MacKenzie Scott nipping at his heels rather determinedly. Indeed, those two have pretty much defined the debate around what philanthropy should look like.

But I'm not aware of many tech people actually entering public service and putting their back into using the public sector to bend the needle of history in the right direction. The recent Solarwind hacks on the US government by a state actor -- almost certainly Russia -- really indicate how much we need some to do so. Probably it is happening and I just don't know about it. How many Teslas can one buy, after all? Most likely, many of them are put off by the crazed bureaucracy of government, which is like the worst old timey waterfall project management paradigm on steroids, when they have all moved to agile (if that doesn't make sense to you, look it up using the search engine of your choice). But they need to get over that. The USA will never be Estonia in regard to e-government, but we could be a lot better, and there are plenty of tech people with plenty of money who could help.

Vignettes

Coming along Lake Shore Lane, across the street from Woody and Harriet's house, I saw a young girl in the driveway with what was clearly a new skateboard, one of the really cheap, plastic variety, just like the kind I snapped up somewhere in the southwest in 1976 (Santa Fe) and then had promptly taken away from me when I rode it inside the grocery store on what turned out to be a very slippery floor and -- having no experience whatsoever with skateboarding -- quickly sent projectile-style into a display of some kind of stuff, maybe a freezer case. I had no idea they still made those. In her case, the board itself was a very bright, electric blue, and it matched her shirt. It was pretty awesome.

Just then, across the street from me, came a young supermom type, pushing a couple of toddlers in a jogging stroller with another kid, maybe 6ish, trailing along behind them on a bike. My first thought was "where is their slacker-assed dad?" Then I realized that around here he might be somewhere working on a COVID therapy or up on an ER or something. You never know. 

Then I came past Bob and Emily's, where Bob was hitting a tennis ball against the garage door. He is pretty serious, played at least high school if not college tennis. No slacker. I had just seen that he had a court scheduled out at the Farm the next day when Z and I are supposed to be over there. He said he's taking his 12ish-year old daughter out there. Gotta love it.

The puzzling competition

One quasi-holiday tradition is doing a puzzle together, usually over at mom's house. In years past I haven't really participated, but the pandemic has drawn me in to the pastime, and rather enjoyably so. This year Leslie had the very clever idea of buying a puzzle and sending it around to everybody.

Natalie, Mary and I have been working on it, and have made a lot of progress on it. To set the stage, back in the summer there had been a puzzle I had picked up at Staples early in the lockdown period which was a pretty difficult one. I ended up doing maybe 95% of it over a week or so of evenings, during which I made a lot of progress developing methodology.

So this time, I feel like I'm the mother-fucking Puzzling Man. When I see them making progress, part of me wells up from within and wants to get in on the action and show my puzzling mastery. Which is ridiculous, really nothing more than a typical male desire to dominate, for absolutely no reason, in a pretty much counterproductive way.

I was reminded of a time, probably back in '86, when after Hilary graduated a group of us went off to Shelter Island and stayed at Janet Goodman's house. As a sophomore I was an outlier amongst all these seniors, so just being invited of course made me feel super cool. At the house they had these old bikes and somewhere down the hill there were tennis courts. Hilary and I borrowed the bikes and went down to hit tennis balls, something we had never done together, I don't think. So there we are hitting, and she goes "you're so competitive!", in a way that didn't seem like a complement. I'm sure I was subconsciously trying to hit winners, or maybe the ball was just in a place that so invited a winner that I couldn't resist it. I probably tried to dial it back at that point in time, but... we get pretty hard-wired to push for victory. It's hard to fight it. It doesn't always end well.

Christmas Day

For the first time in, I don't know, decades, we are in Chapel Hill for Christmas. Probably the first time ever as a family. We had been sweating the problem of how to celebrate the holiday safely with mom and Matt when Mary had the brilliant idea, somewhere around noon yesterday, of having them for dinner last night (when it was warm but rainy and loud from the huge volume of water passing over the dam) instead of today, when it's cold for sure. I of course had a little bit of a hissy fit when Mary proposed changing it, but I got over it in about 90 seconds, called up mom, and they came over.

So we have a lot of little bags under the tree, filled with little doubt preponderantly by books. I have a huge stack of books to be read, and of course magazines too, which come into the house much more quickly than I can read them. But I'm still a little excited to see what I got, even though I know they came right off my Amazon list. Fact is, I half forget what I put there.

It's also interesting to see what the kids will get. I peaked at their lists, but had little time to focus on them. This is always the way, and it gets worse every year as my business gets better and my professional responsibilities expand. Mary does all the Christmas shopping and pretty much resents it, but I have to earn all the money, so I have precious little time to shop. I wanted to go to Flyleaf to pick up some books, specifically for Natalie, who could use having a little greater depth and variety injected into what she reads -- particularly pre-WWII fiction and especially 19th century and before, but Mary wouldn't let me go because we were trying to manage down COVID exposures (we thought mom and Matt would be coming inside) and because she had books preordered from there for me. Oh well.

Looking out into 2020 and beyond, I have some thoughts... but I guess I will save them for another day because I have now written my statutory three paragraphs and am trying to post as close to daily as possible. Sayonara, suckers.

Reading Heschel

For some time I have been reading Heschel's Man is Not Alone in the mornings, after meditation, sit ups, and push ups, with my coffee. On the one hand, it's a great book, full of much wisdom. On the other, I feel like so little of it sticks to my brain. I read a couple of pages at a time and think "I really need to come back and reread this in the future." Part of it is just pandemic fatigue and change whiplash. I also think part of the problem is that like Kierkegaard he's such a smooth writer that you want to underline everything, but the world isn't like that. You can't have it all be dessert. The mind can only process so much aesthetic pleasure before it starts discounting the experience. For the same a cheeseburger tastes so delicious when you haven't had one in a while, but not if you had one yesterday.

Update from the court

The score today at the farm was 4-6, 6-2. Z and I have been splitting a fair amount recently, though admittedly he's been winning a bit more than I have, on average.

Today I did well to fight off a spate of negative self-talk about midway through the first set. I forget what the catalyst was, it really doesn't matter, but my mind latched onto something off-court, something professional, a small risk with which I have concerned myself this week, and I put that together with a few crappy backhands and my mind was off and running into the gutter. But I pulled back and kept the set close.

Obviously, the second set went much better, particularly in that I avoided self-sabotaging myself with a lot of stupid things, such as the false bravado that leads me sometimes to go for stupid winners when I feel like I have a margin for error. Overall, I'll take it. And, unlike Sunday, I did not fall on my butt while backpedaling to try to dink back one of Z's lobs. It still kind of smarts back there from Sunday.

Pretty sure I only had one double fault.

The Fire Next Time

Despite being somewhat literate, I had never read any James Baldwin. As part of my reading exchange program with Natalie (wherein she devours mystery and other novels and I peck away at things from her shelves) I bought and read this slim tome recently.

Slim but not light. Without trying to synopsize the book or its core messages, I should just say that there is a reason it falls within the canon of Baldwin's major works and that it almost certainly bears re-reading, which is why we can all rejoice in its slimness. As a white person in America, there was much to ponder.

I will read more. First, I've put out the Baldwin documentary I Am Not Your Negro as suggested family viewing.

End of the semester as anticlimax

At around 10:30 last night, shortly after Graham and I finished watching another episode of Columbo, Natalie hit send and submitted the last paper of her junior year at Yale. What an anticlimax. This kind of thing should be punctuated by a little joyous excess with one's friends, who hopefully have done much the same thing around the same time. A last round of drinks and fun before getting organized to head to the airport or the interstate to get home for the holidays.

Instead, she just pressed a button. It is very sad how much is being taken from our children by this pandemic. The rhythms of their lives are being inexorably altered. I have told Natalie that she should be open to planning a year of whatever in New Haven, waiting tables, working some middling job around the university, to have some of the fun she should have had as a student and to firm up friendships. I need to reiterate that offer.

There are times, I will confess, when I am disappointed in what she's studying. It sounds all too much like what the Right lampoons universities for: an undifferentiated morass of interdisciplinary neo-Marxist, post-feminist, intersectionality claptrap. But at the same time I see that she works really hard, learns a lot, reads an incredible amount, does good things in her extracurriculars (which is more than could be said for me) and that her heart is in the right place. So I try to go easy. I just need to plug gaps where I can and accept that the world changes.

And to return to the second paragraph above, when I bemoan how much is being taken from our children, I am well aware that it pales before what is not offered to so many children at all, and that many kids from less fortunate households are being hurt by the pandemic even worse. I'm thinking of any household where there's not a lot of space to spread out and not a lot of books and a culture of learning, so black and brown kids but also rural ones as well as just flat out philistines and troglodytes. That's what we need to work on going forward, and there's lots of work to do.

Numbers and competition

Those who have known me for a while will recall that I have long had a facility with numbers. When I was very young, it was mostly expressed in memorizing them, first lists (largest cities, longest rivers, batting averages, points per game, multiplication tables, etc.). I avoided them for a couple of decades before wending my way back to finance as a career.

COVID has given us all whole new flocks of numbers to herd, and herd them I do, though as the pandemic has worn on I've learned to manage my exposure to them, because I realized that I was susceptible to their influence, even infectible by them. So I look at them only once a day, in the evening, as part of my shutting down ritual.

But one thing I cannot escape is the tendency to use them as a mode of competition. How are blue states doing vs. red states? How is NC doing vs other states on various metrics? US vs the world (generally I'm looking for somebody else doing almost as bad as us to lessen our shame). Orange County vs. other counties and states. Generally I have to recognize that this is not healthy. I shouldn't want to be beating the rest of the world at COVID, we should all be trying to just beat the damned thing.

Slightly out of control Christmas tree shopping

Having stayed off of Facebook and also hiding out from most news sources except for the Journal and the Economist (since I find if I even look at the NYT or WaPo I see the op-ed pages and am in danger of getting riled up -- mostly out of agreement), I was late to realize that there was a shortage of Christmas trees. We have also done a shitty job planning to give presents this year, almost unforgiveably, since we're around the house all the time and Google has mostly been working -- with the exception of yesterday.

So when I headed out on Friday to find one, I was determined and a little desperate. First I went down the the mall, but the TROSA place wasn't there at all. Next I went up on Estes to the Amity Methodist Church place that has been selling trees since the dawn of time. They were completely out, but there was a guy there doing something, so I pulled in. As I pulled in, a black dog got up from in front of where the car was and came around to say hello. Frankly, I hadn't seen the dog, and probably got closer to him than I should have. The guy -- who had come out to post signs telling people where trees could be had (thereby earning, most likely, my business for the rest of my days) -- looked at me a little funny, I think, probably because I had gotten too close to his dog which was, you must know, a five-month old puppy and the friendliest dog ever.

He said they had trees at Southern Village and also down near Brown's Automotive on 15-501 headed towards Pittsboro, so I headed to Southern Village first. Sure enough, they had some trees, but there was nobody there to take my money. So I went into this cafe across the way and asked the woman in there if she knew when they would be in to work. She was clearly a little annoyed, and said she didn't. As I left the store, I looked back and saw that there was a big sign in very brightly colored chalk saying people were supposed to stay outside and order using their phones. I had blown right past it. Whoops.

I went back south on 15-501 and found the other place. They had a good tree, but the guy said I needed to pay cash (though he was happy to hold the tree). I went back to an ATM and got cash, but on the way back I had to make a U-turn. While doing so, I didn't really cede right of way to a guy pulling out of a filling station (there was some ambiguity, admittedly), and he honked at me.

The point is, as I'm sure you can see, that because I was a little anxious about possibly not having a tree this year -- when the disruption of so many core Christmas traditions really makes the tree seem important -- that I was basically out of control. It's a good thing I didn't hit that sweet puppy, or get in an accident, and that the barista didn't kick my ass (she didn't look like she was playing around). Oh well. I'll do better next time.

Oh, the Places We'll Go, if we can get our shit in gear

My subscription to Barron's, like so many of our subscriptions, is both a bane and a curse. The flow of periodicals into this house never ceases, and distracts from both the reading of books, the writing of blog posts, the cleaning of grout in showers, exercise, sleep, etc. Though it doesn't slow my consumption of ~60 minutes of TV and half an hour of soccer highlights every night.

But I do try to read them. Today I was reading a series of interviews of a variety of fund managers and economists etc. about what they think the future will look like. The last question asked of each of them is "Where do you want to travel when all this is over?"

Good freakin question, and it has get my mind to working. For some time I've had two key mental destinations, both of them in the former Soviet Union: the mountains of Georgia and Lake BOf aikal. Though, honestly, when I think about Baikal, if the world were really my oyster, I'd extend the trip to embrace all the great lakes of the post-Soviet world: Lake Sevan in Armenia, Lake Issyk-Kul in Kyrgyzstan, Lake Ohrid in Macedonia, and Lake Baloton in Hungary. I've already checked out the smaller but magical Lakes Bohinj and Bled in Slovenia.

Of course, to do this would mean pretty much quitting my job, but I don't need to do it in one trip. But I do need to get organized to do it at all if I'm to hope that any of my immediate family will join me, before they get settled into the grind of their own lives and careers.

Then I go and Google it and see that Putin is considering restricting tourism to Baikal because of environmental depredation. Which I can totally see. 

A Burning, by Megha Majumdar

This summer 2020 novel had a beautiful cover and fairly jumped off the shelf at me at Circle City Books in Pittsboro, so I snapped it up for a cool $10. I think I must have seen a review of it somewhere, because her name was familiar, though it's her debut effort. On the one hand, I'm glad I didn't the full cover price, whatever it was, $20 or so. On the other, it was worth what I paid for it.

Majumdar, a native of Kolkata who went to Harvard and then Johns Hopkins, plants her book midway between the gloss of New Yorkerland and -- in her effort to hew to the varying stylistic registers her three overlapping protagonists, who come from different strata of Indian society -- something a good deal fresher.  

It builds slowly, then accelerates, in its tale of one character falling as a sacrifice to a collective need for vengeance, while two others rise. Throughout, she meditates on the destructive power of masses, whether brought together by new means (social media) or old (physical crowds), and on the difficulty of maintaining ideals while trying to first survive, then thrive.

Upon reflection, it would probably have been worth paying retail for it. I'll keep an eye out for her.

Being in the group

This morning I had signed up to speak at an AA meeting, which would be the first time I "qualified" (as we used to say in NYC) in a couple of decades. I was all ready to go, then the meeting leader said someone else was speaking. It was a little confusing. Fortunately I hadn't bothered to really write anything down, since I had only 15 minutes to speak and that's really nothing when you're telling your whole alcohol and recovery life story.

But I did have a moment in there where I was like "what the fuck?" Part of my desire to speak to this group was really to introduce myself to it better. I only started going there with any regularity 6 months or so before COVID kicked off, so I was figuring that telling my story would integrate me into it better. Being inexplicably passed over at the last second like that brought back feelings of rejection from younger days.

But then it also reminded me of how I've been able to handle rejection over the course of my life. I've become pretty good at walking away from a group of people where I'm perhaps not altogether welcome (or just perceive that to be the case) and settling in with others. Plus I do pretty well by myself. I have plenty of toys, plenty of things to do. In reality, even in this period of lockdown, I've never lacked for activities, only time. Even as I type I'm supposed to call my mom and coordinate going for a walk. The sun is shining and it's going to be a lovely day.

Now I'm signed up to speak the day after Christmas. The odds are pretty good that I won't be hung over, so it should be fine. 

On "Being a Writer"

On Saturday, an old friend called me up. He asked if I'd be willing to read something he had written and share thoughts on it. It just so happened that I had just finished reading a chapter of a challenging book and was about to make a cup of coffee before starting something new, so I promised to read it immediately.

It was an essay on a timely topic -- the War on Christmas placed in a deep historical context (I won't give away his punchline just here), very well written, geared towards a general readership publication like The New Yorker or The Atlantic. I spoke to him the next day and we discussed submission pathways -- people we knew in common from Yale at each place. Yesterday he called during the day to say it had been accepted for publication at The American Scholar, then he called back around 10 in the evening to say that the literary editor at The New Yorker had shown interest and he was having bird in hand vs. bird in bush anxiety.

I am, of course, rather jealous, but mostly really happy that he is getting this validation. But it also raises the question in my mind about being a writer. While we were talking he thanked me for some minimal suggestions I had made about specific word choices and we discussed the craft of writing. I said I didn't really often make time to read things by people who didn't really trouble themselves with writing well, but then I thought about the blog. On the one hand, the Grouse is an exercise in staying limber in my writing, just getting things down "on paper" and keeping at it. On the other, I can't spare the time to really go back and do quality control. Which makes me endlessly grateful to those of you who take the time to read it somewhat regularly.

One time a few years ago I was leaving an Al Anon meeting and a woman I was talking to said something about "being a writer." Naturally I asked about things about where and what she had published, and she was taken aback. She hadn't really published much, she just wrote. Which is cool. It's a free country. Who am I, or anyone, to say what it means to be a writer?

ESG and the Republican squeeze out

I was reading in the Journal about how Starbucks has appointed a Black woman as Chair of its Board. And a most impressive one at that, Mellody Hobson of Ariel Investments. This comes within a flurry, nay a veritable blizzard of ESG actions on the part of various players throughout the corporate world, including yours truly.

I have been tempted to go back to Milton Friedman and review his classic arguments around the primacy of shareholder interests in corporate governance, the idea that it is the business of business to make money.* This revolves around the idea that you have a vigorous public sector acting in the public interest counterbalancing the for-profit sector. 

But then Republicans have been trying to squeeze the government from all sides, arguing that it has been too big and dysfunctional, that more should be left to the private sector. They argue -- citing de Tocqueville -- that the unique character of America's voluntary associations should provide for many key social support services. But that hasn't worked at scale. Charitable giving remains stuck at 2% of GDP, many people are working too hard just trying to get by in their silos to give back much, however much they would like to. In a sense, a true granular division of labor across the economy where every actor focuses on enhancing returns for herself doesn't provide for much giving back, an inherently lossy activity.

So acting for the public weal has been pushed back onto for-profit entities, for better or worse. 

* I was interested to learn recently that Friedman had a very influential TV show "Free to Choose" on PBS, and I see on YouTube that he showed up on Phil Donahue's show dispensing soundbites of grandpa-like crotchety wisdom. This bears investigating.

Money for towns and states

Right now stimulus talks are hung up for a couple of reasons. One of them is that Democrats want aid for cities and states, which are said to be hurting because of revenues crimped by the drop in tax revenues due to the coronavirus (actually, a note from Nuveen says that state revenues are down much less than they were projected to be in March-April, though I can't find aggregate numbers for cities).

But they're planning to send out more stimulus checks to everybody, which to my mind is just silly. I don't need the money, nor does anyone else who has participated in the updraft of the markets and the burgeoning work from home economy. There is tons of money in bank accounts and brokerage accounts belonging to individuals and corporations. 

Municipal bond issuance is up, but the total amount of outstanding munis hasn't moved much because cities and downs have been calling bonds issued at higher rates and refunding. There is demand for more munis, but the issuance cycle is a little slow. 

Really, in principle municipalities should be getting creative in funding their needs. Why not arrange lines of credit where necessary (banks are hungry to lend) and then go out to their communities and ask for money to maintain services? Set up 501c3s and hoover up $ to fund needs. That way they get the money but taxable income is reduced and the federal and state governments don't. Is it because elected officials weary of always asking for money? It's one of the things that keeps them connected to constituents?

There are probably good reasons that they don't, but I don't know them.

Blank canvas

Putting together my task list for the day, which is really an ongoing task throughout the week but something that gets really serious around 8:30 am, I see that today is a particularly blank canvas. Which is not to say that there's not stuff to do, there always is. I could work all day, every day, no problem. But there isn't that much that's particularly pressing.

Which I think really should tell me that I need to be sure to step back and focus on longer term processes that I have been pushing back for some time: managing my mailing list and sketching out a newsletter or two. That is an aspect of my business I really need to focus on more. If I am going to be writing, it might as well support my business. More importantly, I guess, if I am going to be writing, it might as well be in a way that benefits my clients. In some sense, no doubt the blog does that in that it keeps me centered and with a proper orientation towards the long term, which largely protects me from the winds that might buffet me and lead me into poor decision-making.

On the subject of the task list, I am reminded of what a professor I'll call Dan said many years ago in an Al Anon meeting, about how he has gotten to the point where he has dispensed with task lists entirely and just goes through the day doing the next right thing. He is a zen master. I need to go back to the meeting where I used to see him regularly. Much wisdom.

The end of all this

Yesterday I looked down at a stack of books on my floor and my eye latched on to Angus Maddison's The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective, one of the books I finally started early in lockdown, but into which I have made little headway. It occurred to me that if I don't press further into it now, before a vaccine arrives, I may never do so. Not that I am under any illusion as to the speed with which I will get a vaccine. It won't be very soon, nor should it be. But still.

That is one book I think I should make a special effort to press forward with. The guy has a pretty astoundingly unique perspective on history, pretty much the longest view possible.

In that I guess it's fair to say that Maddison serves in many ways as a model for my practice, where my goal is to lengthen and broaden people's financial horizons. To the extent that I can get people to do that and to take the most important steps for themselves and their overall, long-term happiness, the day-to-day vacillations of the stock market become almost meaningless. Moreover, when people are really focused on the things that are really important to them, they tend to fritter away less money on little bullshit.

OK. Now it sounds like I'm writing marketing materials. I should just read the damn book. And today, I should turn my attention to my task list cuz I gotta meet Z on the court at 3. 

Aches and pains

When I was in for my physical a few weeks ago the doctor recommended that -- along with my normal diagnostic bloodwork -- I get a shingles vaccine. "There's only about a 50/50 chance you have symptoms like fatigue, shivering, nausea, etc.," she tells me. Thanks but no thanks, I said. I'll clear my calendar before I go in for that one. 50/50 is non-trivial odds. Then I went home and told Mary and she informed me I had to get it because shingles suck so bad and supplies of the vaccine have been low at times. So I scheduled it for yesterday late in the day.

After I checked in at the doctor's office, the pleasant nurse took me in an examination room and was getting me ready for the shot. We were having a quick discussion of it and she told me that most people don't get sick from the shot but that most people were sore after getting it. I told her that I was highly susceptible to psychosomatic symptoms and she goes "Aren't most men?" We had a good laugh at that one.

The fact is, I am a little sore this morning but it's completely trivial compared to the day to day soreness I have continually from doing sports and exercising consistently, and particularly compared to the clearly tennis-related pain in my right shoulder, about which I really should have asked her. I had just been given a clean bill of health on the shoulder from my two office mates, each of whom has a PhD in some sort of science, one of whom is an athlete. It's not a rotator cuff injury, and I have plenty of range of motion. Still, I might have asked the actual medical professional in the room if I hadn't been fixated on the whole vaccine side effects question. Sigh.