2653 Half sick

Saturday, November 7, 2009

Education does not produce intelligence;
knowledge does not convey the means to use it intelligently.

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I almost didn't go to the movie last night because all afternoon I felt yucky, and by evening I was sure I had a fever. I took my temperature, and it was 98.6. So I went to the movie.

Today the back of my nose feels dry, and I have a hot spot on a tonsil, but I've had that several times over the past two months and nothing ever came of it, so I went to lunch anyway.

I'm beginning to worry that maybe I'm a flu carrier - I'm fighting off infection constantly without ever getting actively sick - and maybe I'm spreading it everywhere I go. Like Typhoid Mary. Swine Silk? I haven't heard of anyone I've come into contact with getting sick, though.

I heard on the news that a pet cat has been diagnosed with H1N1. Some reporters are getting all excited that maybe this means that the virus is mutating faster than they thought, and therefore the vaccine would be useless. The CDC shrugs it off, on the theory that many diseases are shared with pets, it doesn't require mutation, not a big deal.

I am a bit worried because dogs and cats have a higher body temperature than humans (100.5 to 102.5), and pathogens usually multiply within only a narrow temperature range, and that's why we share few diseases with our pets. It's also why we get fevers and chills - the higher and lower temperatures are designed to make our bodies inhospitable to the pathogens. So the worrisome part is that if the virus is happy with cat temperatures, then if I get it, a fever isn't going to help a whole lot.

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I went to lunch in Pawling today, with an over-50 professional women's Meetup group. There were seven of us. I liked the bunch, even the one women I'd met before, the one who takes over conversations. I don't think she's at all aware she does it.

Like, one woman will be talking about the time she blah blah, and she'll say one word that kicks off a thought in the other woman's head, and the other woman will loudly interrupt the middle of a sentence with, "Oh, yeah, that's like when I blah blah blah", and the first woman never does get to finish her story.

That really bugs me.

I have a way to handle it. I look at the second woman, listen until she seems to be finished, and then with no comment or reaction to her story, as if it had no import, I turn back to the first woman, and prompt her, "You were saying..."

Unfortunately, I seem to be one of the few who even notices. Everyone else usually takes off from the second woman, allowing her to have completely hijacked the topic.

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Some people are upset that some large corporations have received the flu vaccine, while hospitals, clinics, and doctor's offices are still waiting. The way some news outlets are presenting it, they make it sound like the administration is showing favoritism to Wall Street firms, who already got handouts.

Those reports, calculated to fan flames, to discredit others, really piss me off.

First of all, the handouts began during the past administration, remember? This administration has been trying to stem the handout tide. For example, CIT was allowed to go bankrupt (filed last Sunday) after begging in vain for federal assistance for many months.

Second, corporations getting flu vaccines early is nothing new! I don't know when it started, but it's been going on for at least 35 years that I know of. When I worked for The Company, any time the seasonal flu looked like it might be especially widespread or nasty, The Company got the vaccine. Lots of it. Early. And they gave it to anyone who wanted it, not just high risk people.

The reason (sounds like an excuse to me) is that the country is weakened if commerce stops, so it's important to keep the workforce on its feet.

So nobody's showing any more favoritism than has been shown in the past. It's just that it suits people to throw mud this year.

I don't like it when people throw mud. Especially mud that they may have had a hand in creating, or that they ignored until an innocent target came along. We used to call those people bullies.
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