design-newyork.com

I went and got my first vaccine shot and it was a super-weird experience. I don’t know what it’s been like where you live but here it’s been a real Walmart-on-Black-Friday situation to get an appointment. You get on the New York site at 6:00am and vigorously hit refresh because new locations appear every day. One day I saw there was a spot available at the Westchester County Center a mile from my house so I sat on hold for one hour, one full hour, to be told the spot was gone. It’s been like that since vaccines became available. My sister K loves a challenge so she wrestled with the website for two days and got me a shot at the Javitz Convention Center in Manhattan which is very much not a mile from my house but this is not the time to be picky. I went down to the Javitz in an Uber. It was a rainy misty day so everything looked monotone and gray, that’s an important detail. I went in and that’s when the dystopia really kicked in. The Javitz is all glass and silver metal, and that combined with the misty skyscrapers made it look like the world was in black and white. Plus there are no trees up against the river so one could imagine that all plant life was gone. I took photos. I did not doctor these in any way.

Why did they cover the giant TV screens like it’s a Jewish memorial? That is really not helping the vibe. The National Guard in their camo uniforms checked everyone’s paperwork and IDs and organized them into lines. I felt like it was 1938 and I had to pack up everything and flee Poland.

To add to the vaguely nightmarish element there was the Soothing Lady On The Loudspeaker saying things like “We have been verified to have the best cleaning protocol” and “If you feel ill, have a fever or are coughing, please go home and reschedule” and the most creeptacular “Remember, we’re all in this together.”

Luckily everything moved as smoothly as anything. I was shocked. Considering how long they had to pull this together it was amazing. I was in and out of there in under a 1/2 hour and that’s including the fifteen minutes I had to sit in the observation area. We’ll get there.

First, before I went downstairs I was taunted by this closed food kiosk in the lobby. That’s like all my favorite foods in one and it’s not open. Cruel.

From this point I wasn’t allowed to take pictures so these are other people’s shots I found on the internet. You waited in long lines separated by stanchions in rooms so big army people come up to the line to walk you to the next available table. Each table has a cheap floor lamp and when the table is available the person working there turns on their light. It’s the only way to communicate in a room that big. In case you’ve never been in the Javitz Center, the rooms are astonishingly large. This is a pic from Comic-Con. Look at the room. It goes on forever.

So that room has about 100 tables with lamps and you get escorted to one. That person checks your printout that says today is the day to get your shot and you show your driver’s license to prove you live in New York and then you go to the next gigantic room. More stanchions and then you go to your table where you get your shot. This is nice – as you’re getting your shot in your chosen arm, there’s someone else at the table filling out that card everyone has taken photos of on social media. So the second you’re done you can leave. So, so well-organized.

Here’s where the bad choice came in. You then go to an observation area where you sit in chairs for fifteen minutes in case you have an allergic reaction. They, quite graciously, had musicians playing off to the side. HOWEVER, it was a string quartet and they were playing soft gentle dirge-type music which gave strong Titanic-going-down energy which is not at all the emotion you want. You can’t leave for fifteen minutes, you’re waiting to see if your throat closes and there’s this gloomy “Gentlemen, it has been an honor” thing going on. But then you’re done! And they automatically schedule you for your follow-up shot. When I went back yesterday I took surreptitious photos. Here are the tables with the lamps.

And here is the observation area. This time there was a harp, a flute and a viola. Really lovely.

Now my arm is really hot and ouchy but that’s good because that means my body is fighting. Hopefully this works and I can hug people again.