Feigning Ignorance

My wife's oldest brother came over for lunch today. Everything started out fine. But then he asked us about our vaccine status, and things veered off course. He reacted in surprise, bordering on horror, at the fact that we haven't taken the shot. But I managed to save the day once again by feigning ignorance to the whole situation. This worked fine back on May 17, and worked just as well, if not better, this time around.

My brother in law started off by sharing his personal experience. How great it all was. Then he continued on his own volition to talk about the fact that the vaccine isn't 100% effective. There're three thousand vaccinated people in hospital with the virus, he explained. I encouraged him to elaborate. I thought it was like 97% effective, I said. No! Nothing is that effective.

He went on to elaborate about the need for booster shots before touching upon something that my older brother had touched upon himself. Never before has the entire world engaged in such a large scale vaccine experiment. I was tempted to challenge my brother in law about the apparent lack of any contingency plan, but there was no point in extending the charade. We all ended up agreeing that there's something odd about the way we're reacting to what is little more than an unusual flu, with mortality rates roughly in line with what we've been getting every year since forever. The conversation ended at this point, allowing us to go onto other topics.

It seems that I'm being rewarded for my low profile. My publically pronounced scepticism on Facebook from a year ago are but distant memories. Hence, I can engage in this kind of stunts, and get the conversation back to something more pleasant and immediate. In the case of my brother in law, we ended up talking about ways for him to promote his art. He told of an old account at Saatchi Art that he's planning to revive. That's great, I told him. He should put all his art onto that website; not just four pieces. Then he can reference the sight whenever someone asks, and I can do the same when we have guests over.

My guess is that he'll sell more art directly through his personal network here in Porto than through Saatchi. But he may one day get his well deserved breakthrough. Nothing is impossible.

Fishes by Guilherme Castro