Cimorene

There's nothing for bringing home how truly different it must be to be an extrovert like seeing what they say about lockdown.

I've reached and gone through the seasons of David Mitchell's radio show (Unbelievable Truth, BBC Radio 4) recorded during the '19-'20 lockdown, and it really struck me as surreal how big a deal specifically the staying home and not seeing people part evidently was for these people. Obviously lockdown was a big deal for everyone, but for us it was more because of the logistics and the, you know... global pandemic raging outside.

The idea of being bothered by not going out and not seeing people is quite funny to me. (I do eventually reach a state of social understimulation, or at least I have in the past, after like three months or so of hibernation perhaps, but it doesn't really feel like I'm bothered by loneliness, it's more like "I would quite like to see one of my friends.")

I mean, not only do deviations from the base state of never going out sap my and waxjism's energy and executive function, requiring a whole recovery period each time and sometimes multiple days to work up to the ordeal in advance, but in general it happens to us by accident not infrequently that we forget to go out and do anything or see anyone for an extended period without noticing. Like oh, I guess we haven't left the house or bought anything but groceries for a few months, eh? Oh yeah, heh. And that seems like an even bigger contrast to the picture painted by these professional entertainers. (Obviously I noticed this about lockdown at the time as well, but it's a bit more concentrated perhaps when you have a group of comedians joking about it together. And I suppose performers are more extroverted than the average.)

Wax and I missed the intended four-day weekend over Easter, but we are both reasonably healthy and we have a three-day weekend now for May Day on Monday! Which means Sunday is Walpurgis, Valborg in Swedish, or Vappu in Finnish. This is the carnival holiday where children get rainbow mylar balloons, streamers, and noisemakers, and the traditional foods include home-fermented mead and funnel cakes (Finnish funnel cakes are tiny and hard, not big and soft like the fair food in America; you can't buy them fresh at all, they come cold and already a bit stale to my tastebuds at the grocery store, made by bakeries). This is the most Carnival of Finnish holidays, that is to say, in terms of public disguise - silly hats are the main thing but also some masks - and in terms of public drunkenness, which is not, admittedly, THAT weird in Finland anyway, but definitely it's traditional to go to outdoor gatherings and drink outside, and then go have a picnic on May Day. There are two traditional picnic spots in Turku, depending on whether you're Finnish or Swedish speaking, but idk about here in Pargas.

This will be our first one in Pargas where most people weren't somewhat cautious due to covid still. Finns have COMPLETELY given up thinking about it or masking now, as a result of the terrible failure of public health messaging and policy. (As we know, outdoor gatherings are not a big risk unless you're extremely closely crowded, because ventilation is the main thing that impacts risk of infection, but that level of understanding was never going to be widespread no matter how good the public health messaging had been. And as it is, the public health messaging has completely stopped, but they never really moved beyond "WASH YOUR HANDS".) Anyway, last year there was still a dampening of public events in effect, which continued to affect outdoor ones as well as indoor ones Because, but that's over with now. Woooo.

Anyway, Wax and I have been sick, so we're looking at a bunch of vacuuming and mopping that are way overdue, as well as like three baskets of dirty linens, that we should probably finish. But Wax is also knitting the last little bits (pockets) of her niece's birthday sweater and then we have some sweaters to block, which is much nicer to look forward to. But in spite of that, we somewhat optimistically planned three extra-tasty dinners and two days of Skåne yeast pancake breakfasts.

Also, we're getting up early on Sunday to go fetch Anubis🎉 from the breeders'! We're looking forward to seeing him, but we're not looking forward to being "cat divorced" (as Wax put it) due to completely separating Anubis and Tristana from even seeing each other again. (And I feel sorry for Tristana's forthcoming stress.) This move isn't necessarily permanent, although of course we HOPE things might go better this time around. He isn't ready for stud work yet, so he can't be fixed, so even if things go well he'll probably be going back to them for a while for that later. He's just out of their house right now because they're playing host to Tristana's mother (and Anubis's aunt) for the birth of her next litter of kittens (she has an adoptive family but they are not prepared for kitten-birth duty).

Anubis has previously made an impression on judges at a few cat shows that our breeders took him to, so even though he doesn't like being shown they decided to try another one.

That's what we knew in advance of the cat show the weekend of April 1. Anubis is a huge handful of kitty and he can be quite resistant when he doesn't like things, but for the most part he isn't much of a fraidy cat. I mean he did run away from the bunnies when he first saw them, admittedly, but still, we weren't really expecting the full extent of how much he didn't like the cat show! Which we saw because I said I wanted to come to the cat show. I've never been to one before, and I was curious about what it's like.



I've never seen a dog show either, but I have seen animal judging for cows and rabbits in the 4H tents of an American state fair. The details are fuzzy now, but I saw a bunch of rabbit judgings - I guess a cousin or my aunt was helping in the tent? - and some judges examining some cows in our walks around the other tents, and I thought they were fascinating and funny, and I was looking forward to seeing the cat judges interacting with the cats. Sadly, the cat judges were mostly pretty silent, and when they did talk we couldn't hear them because the "hall" at the "conference center" in Turku is more akin to an aircraft hangar and it would've been impossible to hear anybody who wasn't practically yelling in your face with even a quarter as many people as were present. So that part wasn't that entertaining, but it was still interesting to see how it works and I really enjoyed seeing the huge variety of different cats up close - which is to say, in person, from a meter or so away; mostly you don't get to interact with them because of the noise and the crowds. So I wouldn't want to do it again, but it was a fun enough time.

As you can see above though, Anubis hated it, and that's almost an understatement. He was clearly way too overstimulated, perhaps by the crowds and noise, or perhaps by the strange animals - none close enough to touch, but of course he could see and hear and smell them. He didn't come out from under his blankie voluntarily the whole time, and had to be manually put into and taken out of the carrier for all the judgings. A friend of the breeders' who is a vet tech did the showing, and you see her holding him in the collage. He spent most of that time trying to hide, typically by crawling/burrowing into her shirt/under her boobs/behind her elbow, and his attempts to escape (and verbal complaints) were repeated. The judges were both very impressed by his other qualities and charmed by him; the first judge said right out that she would've nominated him to the judges' favorites round which leads to Best in Show except that it would obviously be so stressful for him.

This is likely to be his last show ordeal though. Anubis's mother, who was their bestest most beautiful and perfect queen, had to be fixed for her health after only one litter, all boys, and Anubis was the best of those, so they plan to find a few stud agreements for him in the hope of getting to keep a daughter, and ribbons and awards from cat shows look very good on his CV/dating profile so they could be valuable in making those arrangements. He's still not fully adult yet, so it's too early to make the agreements, and until there are a couple of litters he can't be fixed, and all the aggression problems we've been having with him are most likely related to the fact that he's not fixed yet, even though he is having his hormones suppressed by an implant. Perhaps not fully suppressed? There isn't as much data for the use of hormone suppressing implants in cats - they're usually used for dogs.

So after the show Anubis went home with the breeders for a little vacation - the agreement was two weeks, but they're keeping him a little longer because it's going well at their house (that is, he's fitting back in with the kitties he was raised with) and they hope to give him a little longer to forget whatever crazy/murderous ideas he's got about Tristana.

Also I apparently caught covid at the cat show - the first gathering with crowds either of us has attended without masks since 2019! But like I said, aircraft hangar, and obviously air-conditioned; I would've expected the ventilation to be good there, and although there were tons of people, we weren't forced into strangers' personal bubbles. But I got sick two days later, and Wax got sick two days after that, and we haven't fully recovered yet (Wax has maybe got a tiny bit of her sense of smell back but she's still got an unpleasant cough and a runny nose. I just have very irritated sinuses, not necessarily even sinus congestion. We're both back at work).

Seems highly unlikely that either Wax or I will be better by tomorrow. We both have sinus congestion and coughing; she thinks not fevers.

Every time I swallow there are several little pops in my ears, not like altitude changes but very tiny. Presumably my eustachian tubes are being pressed intermittently closed by swollen sinus tissue. There's a headache, too, but they don't feel exactly connected. But when I get up I keep feeling like oops, need to be horizontal again! So. Idk.

I had a sore throat last night but woke up feeling better, so assumed it was an allergy attack. Then today I went to Turku for a meeting and got worse and worse the whole time. Finally I just got a bus straight home, stopping to pick up an antigen test and painkillers on the way. It's covid!

Going by the onset, I was probably exposed at the international cat show Saturday. We went with the breeders and Anubis, and it was the first cat show I'd seen (I was going to make a post about it yesterday, before the sore throat). Another member of our party also got sick, so perhaps it was a super spreader event.

My symptoms are pretty mild, well within the bounds of normal cold and flu season, if a bit atypical.

Ha... ha.

Also I keep meeting people who have no way to know if they have recently had the plague or a cold because antibody tests aren't reliable and when you're vaccinated it's perfectly possible to have really mild symptoms, and the health centers won't give you a proper test unless you're, like, hospital-admission sick, or working in healthcare. If your job requires them you can get them through your work-provided healthcare, apparently, but otherwise, you just have to guess.

So one of the guys at the Turku office had a PROBABLY cold but he has to not go to some kind of conference event just in case?? and one of our board members had no other symptoms but a mild sore throat for a couple days, but then he lost his sense of smell again so ... some kind of reaction image here. Yay. Basically, everybody has been exposed to someone who is infected if they're going out in public regularly, I guess, because that makes 1 maybe and 1 probably just for my interactions and I typically meet like... max 3 people per day, 5 days a week.

Also the board member I see the most often gave the whole board a speech last week, to my absolute (sarcastic) delight, about how surgical masks provide comparatively very little protection to the wearer (true) and are supposed to work by protecting other people FROM the wearer (true) and hence are only really effective if everyone around you is wearing them in a crowd because you don't know who might be affected (true) so therefore you're just wasting your time if you're the only one in the place wearing one (...) and that's why she tells everyone to only wear one if you have cold or allergy symptoms (😒😒). Another board member joined me in arguing that it also serves the purpose of demonstrating support for the concept of mask wearing, in reference to the fact that it feels socially really weird to be the only one wearing one etc. But then a bunch of people murmured "Mmm," and the subject got changed.

I know the reason commuter buses are full is that people have to work and study in the big city, but I'm still really annoyed by rush hour crowds. WHY are all these CHILDREN and TEENAGERS and YOUNG ADULTS and EXTRA PEOPLE making the bus stop at every stop and giggling and filling up all the seats. Ugh. Also, why aren't P3/N95s better at filtering out people's perfume?

Thank you so much to everybody who left best wishes on my post last night! it was like a lovely hug to wake up to. 😊

I'm... uh... bewildered and delighted to report they already sent my dad home from the ER. After initially declaring it covid pneumonia, I guess they did a bunch more tests and decided it was just bad influenza instead!

Influenza is more severe for spinal cord injury patients, like pneumonia, because

• spinal cord injury inherently compromises the body's ability to temperature regulate, so fevers are more dangerous - they can do more damage by getting hotter or staying hotter for longer and can be harder to control



• spinal cord injury removes control of some of the muscles in the torso - even for paraplegics with low T injuries, but my dad's injury is C5/C6, at the base of the back of the neck - and thus compromises their ability to cough, so fluid in the lungs is a severe risk, which is why any sort of respiratory infection is a concern (because of its likelihood of turning to pneumonia). Assisted coughing is a thing for this but it's not perfect.

But of course, it's less dangerous than pneumonia. They'll have done tests or given him medications for the symptoms if necessary before they let him go; they wouldn't've sent him home if they thought he had a dangerous fever, or dangerous fluid accumulation in his lungs.

Dan Olson of Folding Ideas just dropped a new video on YouTube that's a 2-hour deep dive into NFTs (the stupidity! the scam! the nightmarish memes and the bad computer-generated art!), and the context of the 2008 financial crash. I found it very satisfying to watch, like all his videos, although the subject matter being so unavoidably heavy sort of reminded me even more about our dystopian present, not that I had forgotten or anything.

Really, though, 'dystopian' seems like a dated term - a term inevitably rooted in the highly context-dependent concepts of historical progress and an almost Star Trekian (Enlightenment, I guess?) sunny view of history and human nature. Aside from the historically unprecedented climate crisis/climate bubble/global warming threatening apocalypse, all the other disheartening aspects of current reality are recognizable and/or foreseeable outgrowths of the same human nature, circumstance, and historical forces that have made life into a struggle against oppressors for all of human history. Capitaliism and globalization have accelerated all kinds of bad trends and empowered all kinds of bad actors, leading to a lot of clusterfucks that weren't necessarily possible before, but they're still the same assholes taking advantage of anything they can in the same predictable ways. I don't think 'dystopian' is really a concept he leans on in his video; it's just a word that's leapt to my mind a lot to describe various trends and forces making reality a living nightmare, and this is just my train of thought about that.

I keep writing paragraphs and deleting them. I guess there's just so much free-floating anxiety and so many different things to be anxious about that it actually occupies a significant amount of brain power just like, trying to organize them mentally and remember them, let alone deal with them in any sense. Wax has been going through a bad period of anxiety lately, even physical symptoms, and it's almost laughable to talk about "why" you're anxious. I suppose the question is if anything has changed recently that could be a proximate cause of a spike in anxiety, because in the broader sense - not even existentially, like global warming or nuclear apocalypse or whatever, but like... just nationally and locally and even personally because we're living through a deadly pandemic on top of everything else and it's been going on for years and we're also mostly topped out on rage about corrupt and ineffective leadership not even taking the most obvious steps to ameliorate it - we're all topped out on anxiety, so burnt out of it that if you could permanently run out we probably all would have. You can't, which is probably a good thing when it comes to like a survival mechanism, but on the other hand, you can't just live forever at peak adrenaline, and it's getting harder and harder to differentiate threats and... triage your emergency processing power? Mostly there's not anything we can do about any of the HUGE things we have to be anxious about, not even the ones that threaten us personally in the day to day. Although next month I think we can get our (first) boosters: the SOLE exception to this! Here's hoping some corrupt EU politicians wake up to reality or the vaccine apartheid otherwise breaks before we need the next set.

🏥 My dad said he's supposed to get out of the hospital now that his blood pressure and body chemistry have settled. I'm keeping fingers metaphorically crossed though because of the amount of times they've turned out to let him out a couple of days before something else went wrong. Still, probably a positive sign.

🐈 Tristana seems to be feeling a LITTLE bit better, but we bought her some OTC stomach-soothing medication after a phone call with a vet. Apparently we can expect her digestive system can be affected up to a week by whatever upset it.

💉 Wax and I both have vaccination appointments within the next week. I will make an effort to see my friend in Turku as promptly as possible thereafter, but mostly not much will change. Emotionally, I'm still stuck on the fact that the new variants are evolving so fast that they expect everyone to need new boosters for them within a year or so already, and at the rate the vaccine is not rolling out to the rest of the world thanks to the EU and UK blocking the TRIPS waiver, the probability that the variants will evolve sooner is rising constantly.

🌿 My second week at this work practice is almost up without the manager finding time to either give me the new trainee materials or find someone to walk me through them, which is a bit bemusing but not really upsetting as I'm still having a fun time and being quite useful in the garden department - and learning stuff like how to water and prune a few types of plants and some more names for some plants in various languages (often including English, because people always talked about gardens around me without me paying attention except to a few favorites, so I recognize lots more images and names than I can match together even in English, and then I've had some years of being exposed to the Swedish names from Wax and her mom but the Finnish names are usually the most relevant ones now, although there's still about half the customers speaking Swedish when they come in). I'm going to try to see him tomorrow and ask about shelving and warehouse stuff and pricing and all those things though. I do want to learn them.

📝 My wrist is feeling a little better and I let myself write for about five minutes yesterday to test out a new ink sample, but it's not actually in the clear so I'm still not allowed to draw.