Posts by Jonah

The first year we were married, I worked in an un-airconditioned warehouse in Oklahoma City while my husband worked his way through flight school. Whenever I was having a bad day, my husband would put on Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, and it never failed to cheer me up. Despite being in the same city as The Flaming Lips, we never saw them live; we certainly never could have afforded tickets to one of their concerts, as I made just over the amount that would have qualified us for food stamps.

Seventeen years later, after moving to Colorado and after going a year without attending a live concert due to the COVID pandemic, we finally bought tickets to a Flaming Lips in Oklahoma City for their final space bubble concert, for a night we happened to be in Oklahoma for a Formula Vee race.

We’d reserved a hotel room within walking distance of the venue so we didn’t have to worry about parking our truck and trailer hauling the race car. Normally, this would have meant we could both drink at the concert and then walk back to the hotel, but it turns out there is no open bar at space bubble concerts. We did walk to a nearby restaurant and enjoyed several craft beers ahead of time. My husband ordered an enormous antipasto platter that we couldn’t finish and two pizzas, including a surprisingly good brisket and poblano pepper pizza. (“Tyler would tell us to order it,” he said, referring to the economist Tyler Cowen’s advice to order the most seemingly out of place item on a menu, because there is probably a good reason it is on there. Fortunately, the pizzas only came in one size, so that I didn’t antagonize my husband by order the largest size, per engineers’ advice.) The antipasto platter included some roasted broccoli, which I couldn’t help trying. I will point out that I resisted eating all of the roasted broccoli, which I really wanted to do. More on that later.

The concert tickets said that doors opened at 7, so we made our way over to the venue around 7:30. “Doors open” meant we could collect an envelope with wrist bands and then stand in our assigned rectangle chalked marked into the sidewalk out front. We were in row 2, bubble 2. I have to say that having a place to stand and not having people on either side of you in a regular line was nice.

We each got wanded. I was instructed to just take the things out of my pocket that would set the wand off, and I responded that probably all of it would set it off. Out came the usual (wallet, sunglasses case, money clip, fingernail clippers, lip balm, phone) and two items in the deep pockets of my BDU trousers brought especially for this concert: a pulse ox meter and a CO₂ meter.

Around 8:15 a guy came out and explained to all of us what would happen next and encouraged us to use the bathroom NOW. At 8:30 we finally went inside. The floor of the venue was covered in deflated plastic bubbles. Row 1 were still getting into theirs.

We followed the people in front of us almost all the way to the far side of the room and found our bubble. We stepped through the unzipped slit and pulled the plastic up around us and over our heads. This was pretty claustrophobic. But right then a staff member with a leaf blower started inflating our bubble. We zipped up the zipper so only the tip of the leaf blower was sticking in our bubble.

The bubble filled up with air quite quickly, and we zipped up the zipper the rest of the way as soon as the guy with the leaf blower pulled it out.

We were now alone in a bubble with some stuff at the bottom of it. We could take off our masks!

This whole time an instructional video was playing on a screen on the stage. It explained that we had a little battery operated fan, a bottle of water, a commemorative bandana, a towel, and a sign (on the other side it said, “IT’S HOT IN HERE”),

There were some also some glasses that made the lights look cool.

The last item in the bubble was a wireless speaker with which the fan caused interference when run next to it.

Pretty much immediately after closing the bubble, it became uncomfortably hot, and we took off our flannel shirts. At this point, the carbon dioxide meter began alarming, so we had to turn the alarm off. Pretty soon the carbon dioxide stopped displaying anything but zeros. We finally figured out that it wasn’t malfunctioning but that it had reached a CO₂ level so high that it couldn’t show a reading.

But once the concert started, it was easier to put up with how uncomfortable it was in the bubble. The band started playing from inside their individual bubbles, and confetti and beach balls dropped from above.

An advantage of being in the bubble was that we didn’t get confetti in our hair or get bonked in the nose with beach balls. We did have fun trying to punch our bubble at exactly the right time a beach ball was landing on it to launch the beach ball back into the air.

The band started off with a great song to start the set, “Race for the Prize.”

Two scientists are racing
For the good of all mankind
Both of them side-by-side
So determined

Locked in heated battle
For the cure that is their prize
But it’s so dangerous
But they’re determined

Theirs is to win
If it kills them
They’re just humans
With wives and children

Upwards to the vanguard
Where the pressure is too high
Under the microscope
Hope against hope

Forging for the future
But to sacrifice their lives
Both of them side-by-side
So determined

This song was released in 1999, and I’ve listened to it multiple times, but tonight it made me think of Dr. Katalin Karikó and Dr. Lisa Jackson.

Wayne Coyne, the lead singer, emerged from his bubble to hold up a couple of custom balloons.

Wayne had to get a new bubble every so often to sing in because his bubble kept fogging up. Ours started collecting condensation as well, thus the towel provided.

The leaf blower guys came by regularly, and they would mercifully aim the leaf blower at each of our faces, which felt so good. We only requested more air by holding up our sign a couple of times.

It was during one of these fresh air feeds that I couldn’t hold it in any longer and let loose the result of eating the broccoli earlier. So, yes, we were then trapped in a bubble with my fart.

The worst part was when the concert ended and we had to wait for all of the people in the back to exit first, which made me rethink the wisdom of getting a bubble in the second row. At some point our little fan had stopped, so I tried fanning with the sign, until my husband said, “That just causes you to produce more carbon dioxide.” Still, we were checking our oxygen levels with the pulse ox meter, and our oxygen levels were fine.

Still, it was an amazing experience, and I’m so glad to have done it. I also never want to do it again.

The band played a song off their new album, but most of the concert was their old hits, including several songs from Yoshimi. The sound quality was predictably not good, and I’m not sure that our portable speaker played anything but canned applause (you couldn’t really hear the people in the other bubbles). I don’t know if I can explain why I enjoy Yoshimi so much. A bit part is the lyrics, which are often sad but hopeful at the same time. (They also played “She Don’t Use Jelly”, which possibly has the most vapid lyrics of the entire 1990s.) The hit song off Yoshimi is “Do You Realize,” which, of course, they were going to play. But having lost someone important in my life five days previously, was especially poignant.

One, two, three, four

Do you realize
That you have the most beautiful face?
Do you realize
We’re floating in space?
Do you realize
That happiness makes you cry?
Do you realize
That everyone you know someday will die?

And instead of saying all of your goodbyes
Let them know you realize that life goes fast
It’s hard to make the good things last
You realize the sun doesn’t go down
It’s just an illusion caused by the world spinning round

Do you realize?

Cliff Bennett died today. He and his wife had just sold their home in Georgia and bought one in Arizona to retire and be near their youngest daughter and youngest grandchild. But both of them caught COVID-19 around the beginning of the year. His wife recovered. Cliff was admitted to the hospital, eventually intubated and put on a ventilator, then given a tracheotomy. In February he was transferred to a rehabilitation hospital to try to wean him off the ventilator. But then he had to return to the hospital with a fungal infection and sepsis. He recovered from the infections, but his lungs were too far gone to be able to survive off the ventilator for long. His family made the difficult decision to take him off the machines keeping him alive on Saturday. He had been so healthy before catching Covid that his body lasted until today.

Cliff was my dad’s best friend, the principal of my small church school, later my pastor, and the officiant at my wedding. He and his wife agreed to be in my mom and dad’s will to take care of me and my siblings in case something happened to them while we were still children. Cliff had an astonishing ability to talk to and listen to anyone. He loved shopping for antiques, entranced by the story each little treasure held. He seemed to love all things old: old music, old movies, old baseball, and old pickup trucks. But maybe most of all old friends.

My favorite part of school as an elementary student was when the whole school would gather in assembly (there weren’t that many of us), and Cliff (back then Mr. Bennett) would read to us. He would read long engaging books to us, one chapter at a time. Sometimes he would read shorter pieces, and I’m pretty sure that’s where I first heard “Casey at the Bat”. The job of principal obviously called for being serious a lot of the time, but when he’d get to an especially funny part in a book, he’d try to keep reading while starting to uncontrollably laugh, before eventually having to stop, catch his breath, and exclaim, “Oh, me!”

I think it was Cliff’s first e-mail address that was tinkertoeverstochance, and he loved explaining its meaning. It was a baseball announcer call whenever Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers, and Frank Chance performed their signature double-play while playing for the Cubs between 1902 and 1912.

Baseball’s Sad Lexicon Franklin Pierce Adams

These are the saddest of possible words:
“Tinker to Evers to Chance.”
Trio of bear cubs, and fleeter than birds,
Tinker and Evers and Chance.
Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble,
Making a Giant hit into a double-
Words that are heavy with nothing but trouble:
“Tinker to Evers to Chance.”

I think I have to disagree. These are not the saddest of possible words.

I had another visit to the Lynn Institute today. This time was just to give them some blood, two and a half vials, which is apparently all my vein wanted give up, according to my phlebotomist Angelica.

My study administrator told me she had some very interesting news. She said she would know more on Friday but she had heard it on good authority that our vaccine trial was going to be phased into a crossover study, meaning that we would be receiving two injections of whatever we hadn’t received the first time around. So if I got the real vaccine, I’d be injected with two shots of the placebo. But more importantly, if I’d received the placebo, I’d get the real thing. She said she thought this would happen around the end of April. Since the timeline of me getting a vaccine through normal procedures means I might not get one until summer or even fall, that’s pretty darn good news!

Also, Novavax’s previous trial showed nearly 90% efficacy, which is really, really good!

And now I have a correction to post about a previous blog entry. Another member of this household has also entered into the Novavax trial, and I was informed that it turns out the syringe I was injected with was covered in sparkly blue tape. The stuff inside is clear. So no protomolecule for me after all.

Today I had an appointment for my second injection for the Novavax vaccine trial. I go to the clinic a couple minutes early, but I had to wait quite a while because, as they told all of us waiting in the waiting room sitting as far apart as possible, one of the participants undergoing the injection had passed out. But it wasn’t because of the injection. She passed out when they were trying to draw blood. According to one of the employees, “She said she looked away but then she heard the needle pop through her skin, and that’s when she fainted.”

This time I got an injection in the other arm, but it was the same injection as last time: a 2/3rds chance I got the vaccine, a 1/3 chance I got saline. I gave urine and blood again and had the world’s shortest physical by the same doctor as last time, who said, “She looks excellent,” to which I replied, “Why, thank you!” This time I couldn’t see inside the syringe to see if it was the same weird blue color. This time Bobbie seemed to really jab it into my arm, which hurt pretty good. Just like last time, my arm started burning right about five minutes after the injection.

Tonight my arm is sore, though not a whole lot. It’s throbbing a little.

I go back in two weeks to give more blood.

I asked when the trial would be unmasked, and they said they didn’t know. They said that if I get a chance to get a real vaccine, to call them first and they’d let the cat out of the bag.

This clinic has also been conducting Moderna trials. In the waiting room beforehand and in the clinic break room where we had to wait for half an hour before we could leave, just in case we had an adverse effects, there were other people there who had been in the Moderna trial last year. They had received their first injection in August and their second in September. Today they were informed that they had received placebos and so they were given the real Moderna vaccine today. I asked a lady who had just gotten hers if the real one felt any different than the placebo injections, but she said no. She had been convinced that she had received the real vaccine last year, but it turned out she didn’t after all.

My phone’s web browser Chrome likes to show me news stories it thinks I’d be interested in reading (it’s convinced I’m obsessed with Star Wars, The Expanse, Phoebe Bridgers, and asteroids, so what’s what most of the articles are about). Day before yesterday it popped up an article from KRDO saying that phase three trials were being conducted in Colorado Springs for a new COVID-19 vaccine.

So I Googled the name of the company Novavax and Colorado Springs, and the website that popped up offered to let me take a survey to see if I were eligible to participate. For this particular trial they only want participants who meet certain criteria of having a greater risk of becoming infected with COVID-19. Examples include:

Racial minority (nope)

Live in crowded conditions such as shared housing (nope)

Be an essential worker in close contact with the public or other workers (not really)

Are 65 or older (not yet)

Have underlying medical conditions

I checked the list of underlying medical conditions, since I’m pretty healthy. Turns out one of the conditions is being FAT!

At the end of the survey, it said that I appeared to qualify and to call a number with a (405) area code.

The next morning at 8 a.m. I called the number. The woman who answered asked me the same questions that I had answered in the online questionnaire and told me that I qualified for the trial. “Can you come in tomorrow?” “What time?” I answered. She said 11 a.m. and gave me the address. I asked what the sign on the door said, and she paused and answered, “I’m sorry, I don’t know. I’m in Oklahoma City.” I guess I didn’t have to wait until 8 a.m. to call.

This morning I showed up at a doctor’s office at 11 a.m. I had to fill out a bunch of paperwork, then I was ushered into an exam room. For the next two hours, a stream of different people came in to ask me detailed questions about my medical history, perform a physical exam, request urine, measure my height, take my weight, take my blood pressure, take my blood, and finally administer an injection.

A woman in blue scrubs came in. “Hi, I’m Bobbie!” she greeted me. She asked me which arm I wanted the injection. I chose my right arm, and she said my second injection in three weeks would be in my opposite arm. “You are participant number 25,” she said, reading from my chart. Then she uncapped a syringe holding what appeared to be filled with a substance that I can only describe to be a florescent shade of navy blue. It reminded me of the protomolecule from The Expanse (maybe I am obsessed after all). She swabbed my right upper arm just below my shoulder and gave me a quick jab. I hardly felt anything at all.

This vaccine trial uses a lab engineered spike protein to try to teach your body that spike proteins like the one in SARS-COV-2 are bad. 2/3rds of the participants are given the vaccine, and 1/3rd are given a placebo of saline. I got paid $150 for my visit today, and I get more money for each additional visit (one in three weeks for my second injection, one a week after that, and then once every six months for the next two years). Well, at least I got a gift card that I was told money would be added to.

At this point, I finally got to leave my personal exam room and was taken to the clinic’s break room where a clinic worker was sitting with a laptop on one side of a conference table and a stylishly dressed middle aged black woman was sitting on the other side. I took a seat as well, and the clinic worker instructed me to download an app onto my phone called Patient Cloud and register an account and read the instructions in the app. This was tricky, because right then the clinic worker started recounting a hilarious TikTok video to the other trial participant with scene by scene detail while I was trying to read some very dry instructions.

“My arm stings!” I exclaimed, interrupting the TikTok recantation. “How badly does it hurt?” asked the clinic worker, clinically, suddenly typing into her laptop. I glanced at the other trial participant to see if any sign of agreement appeared in her eyes, but she just continued to sit there pleasantly. “It only stings a little,” I answered. A bit later I added, “My muscle hurts!” “How badly does it hurt?” asked the clinic worker again. “Just a little,” I answered.

The clinic worker took the blood pressure of the other trial participant and then told her she had not had an adverse reaction to her injection in the last 30 minutes so she was free to go. Then the clinic worker made sure I had completed my first two surveys on the downloaded app. She gave me a thermometer and a ruler and told me to take my temperature and measure any rash that may appear at my injection site and record the results once a day in the app. She took my temperature and blood pressure again and then, satisfied with the results, told me that I could leave.

This particular vaccine is probably not as effective as the Pfizer of Moderna vaccines. On the other hand, it only has to be refrigerated, not kept at super cold temperatures. At this point I think I probably got the vaccine instead of the placebo, but I don’t know when they’ll tell me. Supposedly, according to Colorado vaccine plan, I get to be in phase 2 if I did get the placebo (though it is unclear if I’m an essential enough worker to be there anyway).

Tonight my right upper arm hurts, like when I get a flu shot, except worse. Not enough to bother me, just enough to notice.

I have never been so excited to have a sore arm.

(No, Bobbie didn’t have a New Zealander accent.)