Friday Bitch & Brag

February 23, 2024 - The COVID Edition

Exclusive for paid subscribers: the Corinne Channel is a roundup of what I’ve been reading, watching, and listening to over the past week. This list will be included at the end of each Friday Bitch and Brag.

Looking for an older edition of B&B? Check out the index of Friday Bitch and Brag here or by clicking the button below.

Yeah, you guessed it: I have COVID. More on that in next week’s column. Put your masks on and circle up, but keep ten feet away from me!

Bitch: For a couple reasons that are too annoying to get into here, I wasn’t able to take a COVID test until late Monday (and I was sick starting February 15), and thanks to a massive screwup with Kaiser Permanente’s pharmacy, I didn’t start Paxlovid until Wednesday. Don’t know whether the Paxlovid is actually helping at this point, and it leaves the most awful aftertaste in my mouth (it's the pharmacological version of THE CALL IS COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE!), but I will keep taking it.

Brag: I am so very grateful for the kind, compassionate folks on the Flyover Politics Discord (a collaborative Discord by

Garrett Bucks

and

lyz

) with their Paxlovid insights, gentle COVID advice, and generous, unexpected Venmo donations toward vegetarian pho delivery, which is high on my comfort foods list when I am sick. Same for my good friend DJ Solid* who picked up my Paxlovid & dropped it off when Kaiser delivery got screwed up.

Positive COVID test and a bowl of vegetarian pho with bean sprouts, basil, jalapeno, carrots, fried tofu, broccoli, mushroom, and rice noodles

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Bitch: Why am I adding instructions to my Instacart orders when they aren’t being read by the shoppers? Furthermore, why does one store set their banana quantities by the pound and another by the unit? I am a writer, not a Mathlete, so if I order bananas on Instacart, I’m not going to do some sort of algebraic equation to figure out the average weight of a single banana and how much six bananas are going to weigh. My brain hurts just typing that.

Brag: Rooney has been a good little companion, watching over me and making sure I’m doing okay. He also has been much more patient about kitty cat happy hour start time (when I give the cats their treats).

Rooney making sure I stay in bed

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Bitch: Why does Microsoft make it so fucking difficult to access the stuff I am paying for?! I was going to try Outlook for managing my non-Gmail accounts, but when I tried to set it up, they asked for a PIN—and I don’t have a PIN for my Microsoft account, at least not one I can find in my password manager or anywhere else. Then there’s the bullshit that is Clipchamp, a decent little video editing app, and trying to log in using my Microsoft365 credentials, only to get stuck in a loop of password and access nonsense every time.

Brag: On Monday night, I had a nice phone call with a cousin I hadn’t spoken to in a long time. We had fun swapping family stories and trying to piece together family history. I’m hoping we’ll be able to get together later this year, maybe with other family members, and have some good laughs like our moms did back in the day.

This week on The Corinne Channel: rewatching one of the best legal dramas ever made, Wes Anderson weirdness, and that one song everyone’s talking about!