Corner of Bourbon & Division

Covid still sucks. I am marginally better than I was yesterday, which is something, at least. My sinuses are doing a funny thing where, if I scrunch up my eyes, they make a squeaking sound due to the lingering congestion. It's funny but also kind of annoying and uncomfortable.  I am, however, less congested than yesterday, so I am hopeful that this signals the beginning of the end of this ridiculous illness. Today marks two weeks since I started symptoms, so I am eager for this to be over. I haven't had an illness drag on this long since I had recurring bouts of bronchitis as a kid, and I am very over it.

Yes, I know, I am very lucky and privileged to have not experienced illness that lasted more than a few days before this, but I reserve the right to complain about this anyway. At least this bout of illness isn't as crazy-inducing as the several months of cervical radiculopathy I endured back in 2022, because that kept me from sleeping due to the pain, and Covid at least hasn't affected my sleep too badly. I've been a little short on deep sleep, but I've been getting a good 6 to 8 hours a night for the most part, and my CPAP provider just sent me an email earlier today telling me how great I've been doing with the therapy.

In unrelated news, I've been having a really fascinating conversation with a few people in a group on Facebook. We started out discussing a series of videos about the tradlife/wellness/crunchy granola-to-fascism pipeline, and now we've moved on to discussing copaganda. We started today with a series of clips from the original Dragnet television series, in which Joe Friday has to kill a perpetrator firing at him. I have had to dust off a lot of my analytical skills from my university days studying literature, and it's been a lot of fun, even if the subject matter is super depressing.

I've also been reminded of spending my teenaged and young adult years watching various cop shows like Law & Order, NYPD Blue, and most importantly for me, Due South (from which this icon is taken). Now, I'm under no illusion about what these shows are about and the role they play in whitewashing the police and rehabilitating their image, but I will wholeheartedly confess to really enjoying crime fiction of many kinds, from cozy mystery novels all the way to hard-boiled noir detective fiction. I like television procedurals like CSI and Criminal Minds, and spent my childhood reading Sherlock Holmes and watching all the various BBC mystery shows in which murderers are brought to justice. It's a really nice fantasy, in which cops aren't tools of the state and a mechanism of systemic oppression, and I enjoy consuming fiction about it. In reality, I am a prison abolitionist and think we should be heavily defunding police departments and investing that money into more robust social safety nets, but that doesn't mean I won't binge watch Law & Order when I'm sick. ;)

In news that is even further unrelated, India and Pakistan appear to be on the verge of nuclear war/mutually assured destruction. A couple of weeks ago there was an attack on tourists in India-administered Kashmir, and India has decided that Pakistan is responsible. So now India has "retaliated" with a series of air strikes in Pakistan-administered Kashmir and Pakistan itself. Pakistan has now declared the attacks "unprovoked" and has promised to retaliate in kind. The thing, of course, is that Pakistan has far less military power than India, and so the odds of them resorting to their nuclear arsenal is reasonably high if things get out of hand. Then India would likely respond in kind, and the next thing we know there's an all-out nuclear disaster in that part of the world, and the rest of us get plunged into nuclear winter.

A lot of people that I respect and who are far more intelligent and knowledgeable than me are freaking out about this, and I will confess that I can't bring myself to freak out at this point. This falls firmly into the category of "I can do absolutely fuck-all about this," and since I have no control over what happens, I don't know what to do about it. There isn't much I can do about nuclear winter, either, except starve to death along with everyone else in the Northern hemisphere. In theory I could stock up on iodine to counteract some radiation exposure, but honestly, if all of our crops and livestock get irradiated or die of cold or starvation, the iodine is a little moot. *throws up hands*

So I'm refusing to actively worry about it. Is it terrifying and worrisome? Absolutely. Will my worrying about it help the situation? Absolutely not. So, here we are. I am going to focus on what I can control, and leave it at that.

I do need to be more pro-active about contacting my federal and provincial MPs to encourage them to be more pro-active about, well, everything. I have been letting my lack of energy govern everything I do, and I need to do better on that front. I don't know how I'll manage it when I can't even pack up my own house or keep it clean, but I am not doing nearly enough to try to improve the state of the country and the world.

All righty. Work has been really busy all evening, so I'd better get back to it. Catch you on the flip side, friends!