Prophylaxis!

My exciting activity for the day: I got a flu shot. This is actually the first one I've had, despite the fact that my employer offers them for free every year. I usually come up with some excuse, but the fact is, I just really don't like needles. And I figure, hey, I'm not actually all that likely to get the flu in any given year -- I come down with it maybe twice a decade if I'm really unlucky -- plus even getting the shot is no guarantee you won't get the flu, anyway, as you could always catch some weird strain they didn't vaccinate for. Might as well play those odds, right? Well, maybe... although the odds of crashing on any given car trip are also fairly low, and I was still glad enough to hear about all those airbags and crumple zones and things my new car has. And the more I learn about vaccination and public health issues, the more I'm coming to realize that not getting vaccinations for infectious diseases is -- and please excuse the corny turn of phrase -- bad citizenship. After all, if I catch the flu, I might want to die, but if I don't catch it, I can't pass it on to someone vulnerable who might actually die. Which can happen to people with compromised immune systems. So, I went and got the damned shot. It literally took five seconds and barely hurt, other than making my bicep kind of sore, so the fact that I've been wussing out of it all this time is really rather embarrassing.

(On an only very slightly related note, while I was driving in to get my shot, my new car reached its first 100 miles on the odometer. Yay, milestone!)