February 7
An unexpected side effect of being sick is that I now wake up and immediately want a cup of tea. I’d adopted the Immediate Tea Protocol while sick because it made my throat feel better, but now it feels a little like it’s turned into an addiction; I wake up and before too long, I’m thinking “Well, one cup of tea wouldn’t be too bad, would it?” Without meaning to, I’ve become a parody of a British man, fopishly craving tea at every turn. O, how far I’ve fallen.
Still. Nobody would mind if I just made myself a quick cuppa, right…?
February 6
This was almost the first day without an entry (as opposed to the days when the entries were written but for some reason didn’t post, which has happened… three times now?). We can successfully blame workload and the fact that the DC Comics news broke before I got up, making me behind the curve before I’d even gotten out of bed, always the greatest way to start the last day of the week. But now, 4000+ words, a gym trip, an emergency shopping trip to get stuff for a sick wife, and not one but two abandoned phone calls later — oh, and a couple of meals, but that should be taken as read — I am so close to putting off the computer for the week.
There’s such a sense of accomplishment at this point. The annoyances and things I didn’t get around to — which, for the second week running, is “I should’ve really done more on Tumblr” — fade into the background, replaced by a feeling that’s best described as Oh God I made it, I didn’t think I would. When every week ends feeling like you’ve narrowly escaped something by the skin of your teeth, that’s when you feel truly alive, right…? Right…?
February 5
My mental behavior over the last few weeks has taught me one, somewhat surprising, thing: no matter what is going on, or what deadlines I have going on, I apparently have to take it easy midweek. This isn’t an optimum decision for the rest of my week — it almost inevitably throws my Thursdays and Fridays into busy disarray — but it’s almost certainly what happens: every Wednesday, my brain will slow down and I’ll not manage to do everything that I want to do that day.
On the one hand, this is amazingly frustrating, because it really does mean that I end up having to do way too much in too little time for the following two days every single week, but on the other, I feel like the fact that it continues to happen no matter what my personal plans may be suggests that it’s my own mental rhythm asserting itself, and that’s got to be a good thing no matter what. (It’s just that the “what” turns out to be a relatively big deal for the rest of my week; Wednesdays are always the day where I wish I could have a do-over.)
Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s a Thursday. Turns out, I have a lot to do.
February 4
Quite why I woke up this morning with “Summer Loving” from the Grease soundtrack in my head, I don’t know, but it’s right there on seemingly-permanent rotation. Worse, it’s not the entire song; it’s the “suh-uhmer neigh-iiiiiiiights!” bit, AKA the very worst part of the song. Perhaps it’s a psychic price for waking up and not feeling sick for the first time in a week — although, by now, Kate is sick, so the house continues to be plague central. World, you make everything a little bit more difficult, sometimes.
Jimmy Carter knew how to get an audience to pay attention. In a speech given during the US President’s 1977 visit to Poland, he appeared to express sexual desire for the then-Communist country. Or that’s what his translator said, anyway. It turned out Carter had said he wanted to learn about the Polish people’s ‘desires for the future’.
Earning a place in history, his translator also turned “I left the United States this morning” into “I left the United States, never to return”; according to Time magazine, even the innocent statement that Carter was happy to be in Poland became the claim that “he was happy to grasp at Poland’s private parts.
From here.
Coca-Cola has launched its own brand of milk, which it claims will make it “rain money” for the world’s biggest drinks company.
The new Fairlife milk will cost more than twice as much as regular milk, but the company reckons consumers will be prepared to shell out more as it will contain 50% more protein and half the sugar of normal milk.
From here. It’s the end of the world.
February 3
I am an old man. That’s a story I keep telling myself in part in jest, in part in exaggerated, melodramatic concern, but it’s something that I felt for real, for once, this weekend when out for donuts with friends. The trigger was simple; while out with those friends, I didn’t check my phone once — I had it with me, sure, but beyond looking at it to check the time at one point, I didn’t look at my messages, Twitter or anything else like that. Those I was with, however, did so pretty continuously. More impressively, they were apparently having multiple conversations with people while we were talking and I didn’t even notice. I’d think we were all engrossed in the conversation we were having, and suddenly they’d drop some comment about something that had just happened on Twitter or whatever; I came home to discover that there had been an ongoing text message thread that I was part of going on the entire time, without me even knowing.
I thought to myself, this is what happens when you get older; there’s a point where you hit the level of information you’re able to deal with at one time, and that’s it. My friends weren’t there yet, they could take more in (and put more out there) effortlessly. One of these days, the speed with which I can process information will seem old-fashioned and archaic, while everyone else will be processing tens of chats in real time and virtually without giving it a first thought, never mind a second. Welcome to the future.