☀️ Today's updates 👨‍💼

Hey! Thanks for reading! Just a reminder that I wrote this some years ago, and may have much more complicated feelings about this topic than I did when I wrote it. Happy to elaborate, feel free to reach out to me! 😄

🎵 The song for this post is Birthday Boys, by Oysterhead. 🎵

Robert, Annalisa, and I

Last week, I heard that the husband of a friend of a friend, a man in his 40's, was in the hospital for difficulty breathing. This week I've got first-degree friends who are feeling too sick to do much. Humans are really bad at assessing risk that they can't immediately see, and folks I know who were quarantining pretty early are starting to show symptoms. It's getting more frightening, the walls closing in a bit. Please continue to take this seriously 🙏

On my mind: my sister is immunocompromised (CVID), though I learned recently, mostly to bacterial infection rather than viral. And as long as her treatments continue, she should be in decent shape to handle bacteria as well. The later stages of COVID-19 have a bacterial component (illustrated well by this video) and she lives in NY, with the most confirmed cases, so we're far from out of the woods.

My brother works at a hospital. He's a physical therapist, so he's not currently seeing people in care for COVID-19 specifically, but he's still in a hospital, every day, interacting and touching lots of patients. The shortages mean that he gets to wear a mask if and only if: the patient he's working with is showing symptoms (as we know, very rare) and they have a positive SARS-CoV-2 test, or have been in contact with someone who has. I'm not feeling much reassurance re: his risk of infection.

If you're reading this blog, I suspect you're doing what you can to flatten the curve. I appreciate it. Writing this out is as much to share some of my anxieties as sincere warning/advising to others. My family is more familiar with medical hell than many, and I have no urge to re-live it.

Sketch

I'm keeping off Twitter for a while, and I'm starting to feel more normal again. That said, I'm seeing the "Electicity Biscuits" story (which is sincerely charming!) several times in my RSS feed now. It brought this scene to mind, from I Love You Phillip Morriss:

The movie is merely okay, but I think about ☝ a lot. If you want to see a criminally-underwatched Jim Carrey comedy, I'd recommend Fun With Dick and Jane instead. But this scene sticks with me. Especially in mid-size communities, I know I scored a good line when I hear it back to me 3 days later from someone who didn't know I said it first 😛

Stonks

I wrote the other day how the market activity that's dominating the news isn't really impactful to most millenials, who don't own any wealth, and Luke O'Neil had a great paragraph in his Welcome to Hell World newsletter that illustrates this well:

I would like to beg the news media to stop showing me what the stock market is doing no one knows or cares what the stock market is it’s like being shown the heart rate of a small group of people on a distant roller coaster we've never been on and will never get to go on and it's like the main thing they talk about on the news for some reason.