Habitual

Insert Scumbag Steve meme here – states intention to post more frequently; disappears for a month. That is a thing that happened and I don’t really have a good explanation for why. Nothing much seemed post-worthy.

Since the last update, the major piece of news is that the extreme house cleaners came through and extremely cleaned the place. This is not to say that the place is extremely clean, but it is extremely cleaner than it was. Functional, even, which has made living somewhat less complicated.

With the theme of un-complicating things in mind, I am working on developing some self-care habits. I’m sure I have lamented previously in these e-pages about my lack of skill in the self-care department. This is, of course, the result of running myself ragged for twenty years or so while trying to behave as if I was an unlimited resource. Which is, more or less, how I ended up where I am now.

Currently I’m working on some very complex habits, like remembering to eat, take my meds, and brush my teeth. I’m hoping to move on to more advanced topics soon, so if anyone has any good tips for taking care of oneself, please feel free to share. Or don’t. Either way.

I feel like I should put this here

I stumbled across this kind of randomly while wandering around the internets and, for a couple different reasons, thought I should share it.

As mentioned previously, I’ve had the pandemic right up in my face pretty much since the beginning. I’ve watched it spread, wax, wane, wax again and, most significantly I think, I’ve dealt with essentially nothing else in my professional life. My therapist pointed out to me recently that when you’re that close to something, it tends to look very large. Sometimes disproportionately so.

I am by no means downplaying what’s going on. We’re still really not in a good place when in comes to case numbers, rate of spread, and available hospital resources. Models are predicting that the omicron surge will peak in 2-3 weeks with close to 1,000,000 new cases per day in the United States. Keep in mind, too, that the official counts are still, very likely, drastically undercounting. This graph is wastewater analysis from Boston showing the increase in viral DNA in sewage. The spike from omicron completely obliterates the spikes from all the other surges we’ve seen so far suggesting that there are likely significantly more cases than have been recognized;

All that said, we have come a long way from the beginning and there is still hope that we can survive this with something that looks more or less like modern society relatively intact.

Now we come to what brought me here today;

“Your Local Epidemiologist (YLE)” is written by Dr. Katelyn Jetelina, MPH PhD—an epidemiologist, biostatistician, professor, researcher, wife, and mom of two little girls. During the day she has a research lab and teaches graduate-level courses, but at night she writes this newsletter. Her main goal is to “translate” the ever-evolving public health science so that people will be well equipped to make evidence-based decisions, rather than decisions based in fear. 

The most recent newsletter is entitled “There is good news” and is worth a read. Things are bad but they could be worse and they will get better. Eventually.

Anyway, read it and feel some momentary relief from the doom that I’ve been spouting.

https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/there-is-good-news

Remarkable self-awareness

Again stepping away from the cancer doom-and-gloom for a moment, I ran across the above comment in a libertarian discussion forum. I thought it perfectly encapsulated the thought process of the overwhelming majority of self-identified “libertarians”, especially the mental gymnastics required to somehow be wrong about everything all the time.

For those who can’t effectively see the tiny text, it reads as follows;

We’ve spent years with the position that we didn’t need the state to force us to behave. That we could be smart and responsible without having our hands held.

And then in the span of a year, a bunch of you idiots who are definitely reading this right now went ahead and did everything you could to prove that no, we definitely are NOT smart enough to do anything intelligent on our own, and that we apparently DO need the government to force us to not be stupid.

All you had to do was either get a shot OR put a fucking mask on and stop getting sick for freedom. But no, that was apparently too much to ask. So now the state has all the evidence they’ll ever need that, without being forced to do something, we’re too stupid to do it.

So thanks for setting us back, you dumb fucks.

Edit: I’m getting called an authoritarian bootlicker for advocating that people be responsible voluntarily. Awesome, guys.

Some Rando on the Internet

Several people, myself included, have mentioned that movies like Jaws have to be re-evaluated in the light of the pubic and especially political response to the pandemic. I have never had much faith that the general public will behave responsibly, even under the most extreme circumstances, but I always raged about how unrealistic Jaws was because the mayor of the town refused to close public beaches in spite of the fact that it was nearly certain that more people would be killed by the shark. I couldn’t imagine anyone being that stupid and shortsighted. I think it’s pretty clear now that many (most?) politicians would opt for the easy, expedient solution that is beneficial in the very short term even if it means worse political fallout in the medium- to long term. Like keeping businesses open because “ERMAHGHERD TEH ECONOMIES!” even though that means thousands of people will die a few weeks from now.

All this goes to explain why we’re looking at yet another Covid surge and could potentially be seeing 200,000 new cases per day nationwide again by October.

Keep wearing your masks.

Edited to add;

Or, and stay with me here, it is just possible that some of us don’t wish death on people with whom we disagree politically. Crazy to think, huh?

This pandemic is never going to end.

edited further to add;

Life’s Little Victories

Just so that this isn’t all doom and gloom, and also because I really do think it will be good for my mental health, I intend to sprinkle in a few of what gentleman cartoonist Keith Knight refers to as Life’s Little Victories.

My first entry in this category is something that genuinely made me do the full-on Keith Knight “YES!”.

Mashup artists The Kleptones have a new four part album called OV ER LO AD. It’s 135 tracks, clocks in at just over 8 hours and since I just found out about this a few minutes ago I haven’t had a chance to listen to it. However, The Kleptones double album Uptime/Downtime remains in the top three on my list of best mashup albums of all time (the other two being Girl Talk’s Feed the Animals and The Dirtchamber Sessions by The Prodigy) so I’m expecting great things.

Best part; you can download all four parts FO’ FREE!

OV

ER

LO

AD

Share and Enjoy.

Edited to add – I still haven’t listened to the whole thing but the first few tracks on OV are good. Like really good.