I Get Sick
Anybody keeping up with the news has to be aware that this year has been bad for the flu. Many people have been getting the flu and it's been strong. I know more than one person who has been hospitalized because of it. Up until this weekend, I had been blessed with a flueless winter. That changed on Friday night, or so I thought. I felt tired so I stayed home to watch the Illini basketball game. I started feeling worse, hot, sweaty. I looked in the mirror and my face and neck were flush. I ascribed these symptoms to witnessing the horrible basketball being played by the Illini. I went to bed and lay there feeling sort of feverish.
I woke up Saturday feeling fine. In fact, I felt good all day Saturday.
Halfway through Sunday was when things turned again. At first, I thought my nausea was caused by the refs handing the Patriots another trip to the Super Bowl. It soon became obvious that my condition was not the result of the NFL being rigged. I got a fever and became achy and tired. I went to bed and fell into a restless sleep.
TO BE CONTINUED….
I Get Tired
I remember a few years ago everybody worried about people become depressed by reading social media. I think they even came up with a term for the condition. People would read social media and see the perfect lives people claimed to have on facebook or pinterest and then feel bad that their life didn't live up to that perfection. I have never experienced that on social media. In fact, my experience is largely the opposite. Social media seems to be a place where horrible, dishonest, hateful, bigoted people go to proudly proclaim their dishonesty, hatefulness, and bigotry while having pissing matches over who is the most dishonest, hateful, and bigoted person. I have a friend who described the comment sections of blogs/news sites as ignorance or idiot aggregators. I don't remember the exact wording. It seems that all of social media has become idiot aggregators.
This rant was brought on by me reading the comments to an online article. The article was poor. It contained factual errors and had the general lack of quality that infects most online reporting. I went to the comments hoping to see someone correcting the errors in it. I think I managed four comments before closing the tab in anger. The first comment was vilely hateful. The reply comments were people trying to outdo the hate of the first comment. I had to shake my head and just wonder if these people had any self-awareness. Did they have any conception at all of how horrible they sounded? This happens to me at least once every single day.
My problem might be that I use reddit and twitter a lot. A solution would be for me to just not read this stuff, but then I would lose the easy access to me feeling smug superiority to others.
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