Monthly Archives: October 2023

Easing towards the baseline…

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It wasn’t a great summer for reading. Honestly, it wasn’t a great summer for anything. From July through September, I had no attention span to speak of. “Long form” TiKToks pressed my abilities to focus. Anything I was trying to get done had to be taken down in extraordinarily short chunks. For someone who normally had the ability to sit down and lose three hours reading a book, it was not an ideal arrangement. Books that would have normally gone back on the shelf inside a week lingered on the nightstand for a month or more.

I’m happy to report that October, even though the 10 days of the great plague, has shown decided signs of the situation improving. I’m nowhere near back to form, but I’m at least finding it possible to sit down for an hour at a clip and really get into something. 

I knew I was off my stride, but I’m just now beginning to realize just how far off I was feeling. I don’t mind telling you that I spent a lot of the summer in full bore worry mode – concerned about my health, wondering when or if I’d stop feeling like hot trash, scared that it was just going to be what post 45th birthday life was going to be. 

None of my issues have really gone away – or even yet been properly diagnosed – but I find that initial fear of the unknown is increasingly giving way to annoyance. I can only assume that’s a positive sign since annoyed is practically my universal default setting. Maybe I’m starting to ease back towards the baseline. 

I’m doing everything the medicos have told me to do, so aside from “wait and see” and showing up for more follow-on testing when it’s called for, it’s well past time to start dragging myself up off the mat… even if my head is stuck firmly on playing out all the possible “what if” scenarios. 

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. COVID-19. I’m well into my second week of the Great Plague now. The worst of the symptoms have slowly resolved, though I’m left with some nagging sinus stuff and the fact that the least physical effort leaves me something between worn out and exhausted depending on how long I’ve pushed myself. I know there are plenty of people, some of whom could be reading along now, who cling on to the notion that this plague is “just a cold.” Bullshit. It didn’t hit like any cold I’ve ever had over the last 45 years. It didn’t hit like the flu, either. This bitch was decidedly different and uniquely unpleasant. I’m just glad I ducked it until the third year of its age, when I the medicos had lots of research, a pipeline full of antivirals, and real treatment protocols to call on.

2. The House Republican Caucus. I’m sorry, I know many of my friends are dyed in the wool Republicans. I was one for a long time… but the Republican members of the House of Representatives are, if I can sum it up in a simple phrase, a bunch of absolute chucklefucks. They’re chowderheads. Asshats. Week after week they’ve proven themselves unfit for service in sustaining the world’s oldest republic. I wouldn’t trust them as a group to house-sit for a weekend, let alone run the United States House of Representatives. I don’t know what other message we could reasonably be expected to take away from their utter failure to do so much as select their own leader over the past three weeks… and then when they managed to get this basic function done, they selected an election denying, religio-extremist, insurrection cheerleader to carry the Republican standard. Jesus wept.

3. Self-realization. I love being at home. There’s virtually no place I’d rather be at any given time than hanging out here with Jorah, Anya, Cordy, and George. Nothing new there. In the last two weeks though, I’ve learned that my love comes with an unexpected caveat. While I’m happy enough being at the house when I’m doing it of my own free will and accord, when I’m doing it because I’m participating in a period of quarantine, I’m thoroughly annoyed by it and my mind regularly wanders to things that my quarantine is preventing me from doing. Seriously. I have a running list of places to go and things that need doing that I haven’t been able to farm out or have delivered. I don’t suppose I should really be surprised that I like doing things on my own terms and chafe when doing them under the smallest amount of duress. It’s practically one of my defining character traits. Still, this minor discovery was somehow surprising.

The second week of COVID…

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It’s the second week of COVID. The good news is that I seem to have avoided hospitalization or death. That’s absolutely a win.

The bad news is that I still largely feel like chewed dick. Yes, it’s absolutely a better grade of crud than I was enjoying at this time last week, but I’m still hacking, wheezing, sneezing, and generally sounding like a plague carrier. I’m not the kind of company you’d want to come take a seat at your dinner table. 

It’s a busy week at the office and I tried to be a good remote trooper today, but by noon all I could think about was closing my eyes and having a good rest. I hung in a while longer, but don’t expect I did myself or anyone else much good after that point.

I usually manage to power through these sicknesses. There’s no time for a man cold when there’s animals that need tending and a household to run. My brush with the Great Plague though, has been a pointed reminder that sometimes you’re going to slow down whether the spirit is willing or not. 

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Meds. One of the fun parts of being on the new blood pressure meds is that it puts most common decongestants on the embargoed list. If there was ever a motivation to get my weight down and off the prescription medication, it’s 100% so I can take a goddamned Sudafed and a shot of NyQuil instead of just raw dogging cold and flu season with hot beverages and an occasional spoonful of honey.

2. Covid. There’s been a time or two I’ve felt worse, but my week with Covid is definitely ranked. From the raging sore throat, to rivers of sinus drainage, to sleep no longer being a thing I do in any appreciable block of time, it’s just unpleasant. Add in the 36 hour saga of trying to get some antiviral meds and this third week of October is going in the books as a shit week of what has already been a shit year.

3. Protestant guilt. I’ve hoarded sick leave since the day I started working for our wealthy uncle. Last time I looked I’m sure I had something like 1800 or more hours of it on the books. So far this week I’ve taken 23 hours from that total. So why the good old fashioned Protestant guilt? Despite having more than enough in the bank, I know that my being out this week means there’s mostly been one guy doing what three of us were doing a month ago. I hate knowing he’s getting dicked over because I finally walked into the viral buzz saw. Admittedly, even if I were there I wouldn’t be capable of doing more than warming a seat while trying not to hack up my left lung. I hate that when I get my feet back under me there’s going to be a hellacious backlog of whatever came pouring into my mailbox this week. I feel badly about all of it… but I’m keeping in mind that sick leave is one of the more valuable components of my total compensation package and I’d feel even worse for not using it.

Positive…

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After almost three years and every available vaccination and booster, it looks like the Great Plague has finally caught up with me.

Yay. I’m thrilled. 

I don’t have anything particularly witty to add here. I’m currently feeling like I’ve got a something between a mild to moderate head cold. My throat is sore and my nose is running more or less non-stop. I can sleep as long as I don’t mind doing it while sitting more or less upright. 

I dialed in to a video appointment with Hopkins “virtual care” team and got my marching orders. 

The plan for now is that I’ll be holed up here at the house for at least the next five days… in hopes that years of boosters will, in fact, be effective at “preventing the most severe outcomes from a COVID-19 infection” as or friends at the CDC so casually put it.

Fingers crossed.  

Not What Annoys Jeff this Week…

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I generally reserve the length and breadth of this space on Thursdays to bitch and complain about whatever three things have most agitated and annoyed me over the week. In what’s probably an unprecedented move in 587 editions of What Annoys Jeff this Week, I’m not going to do that.

Instead, I’m going to use this few minutes to single out a single, anonymous person who saw the flare I sent up last week and immediately took the time, long after duty hours, to respond and start the great machinery of the bureaucracy in the direction of fixing what has been a seemingly simple to fix, yet lingering problem now for over a year.

Most of what happens in the belly of this great green machine goes unnoticed and unremarked. Such is the nature of the bureaucracy. I don’t suspect any of us ended up in this line of work because we needed a lot of external praise… but as the saying goes, when you see something, you should say something.

So, nameless bureaucrat, thank you for taking up a cause that wasn’t necessarily yours – certainly one that could have been staffed to someone else. What you do and how you choose to lead doesn’t go unnoticed.

Thoughts at fifty down…

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The internet is chock full of sites about weight loss, exercise, and healthy eating. You don’t need to worry about this turning into one of them. Everyone wants to tell you about their “weight loss journey,” or how happy they are, or how it’s been the most wonderfully transformational experience of their life.

Yeah. I’m definitely not one of them.

As of late last week, I’m down 50 pounds. My reasons have nothing to do with looking better or giving much of a damn about having transformational experiences. My sole motivator is doing whatever is advisable to keep my heart from attempting to race out of my chest for no apparent reason while I’m sitting in the living room watching television on a random Wednesday night. Full stop. If we arrive at a final diagnosis that doesn’t include weight as a contributing factor, you can rest assured that I’ll go on a burrito, and cheesesteak, and lasagna eating binge the likes of which the world has never seen.

The simple truth is, I don’t feel any better. I don’t feel more energetic. I certainly don’t feel “transformed.” What I do feel is just about constantly hungry. I also feel mad as hell that recipes I spent 20 years perfecting are now in the ash heap because the “appropriate serving size to stay within your caloric goals” is a 2-inch by 2-inch square or 1/2 of a cup. 

If you happened to think my mood was a bit surly before, well, this new, lighter Jeff is just wandering around looking for a reason to pick a fight. 

Look, if you’re one of the people who gets thrilled and excited by this sort of thing, more power to you. I’m envious. For me, it’s more an experience to be endured while I ponder if what I’ve given up is worth the few extra unpromised miles I may or may not tag on the end of the trip. 

In time, maybe I’ll get to acceptance… but just now, I’m perfectly happy to sit here stoking the low-grade rage. 

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Operating one man down. The bosses don’t want to acknowledge in any meaningful way that we’re a man down – working at 66.6% strength with 100% of the day-to-day work they still think should be happening. Of course, that’s before whatever additional surprise “hey you” random shit and odd jobs come oozing in over the side on any given day. There might have been a time I’d work myself into a nervous breakdown trying to keep up, but let me assure you those days are long gone. The wheels will come off where they come off and I won’t lose a minute of sleep over a slow-moving accident that management had months to avoid. 

2. Failure to accept defeat gracefully. Look, sometimes you can plan a party and due to timing or circumstances, or because people had a really shitty time at your last party, no one gives any indication of being interested in showing up. Once you’ve exhausted all the options, called in the favors, and done everything you can do to get people interested, you really only have two options when you’re three weeks out and only have a score of people signed up. You either cancel things in a controlled, methodical way that creates the illusion of some reason other than you couldn’t convince anyone to come to your party, or you accept that you’re doing $100,000 of planning to put on a show in an empty auditorium. Either way. At least no one will be able to say I didn’t warn them.

3. Broken encryption. We have a group mailbox in which I spend half my time working. For the last six months or more, though, the encryption certificates for that mailbox have been invalid, so any time someone sends us an encrypted email, we have to stop what we’re doing and ask them to either send it unencrypted or send it to our personal mailbox. Then, sign off the group mailbox, sign into our own, and forward the message. It’s not hard, but it’s a time suck and fucks with the basic workflow of the day. The fix to this is an easy one, just requiring us to forward some paperwork over to the IT trolls. We’ve raised it to management on more than one occasion… but bosses being bosses have decided that they don’t want to do that because they have a “better way.” It’s one goddamned simple fix to make life in this cubicle hell marginally better, but it’s too hard to do. It’s about to become my newest workplace obsession and I’ll be talking about it in every forum possible until it gets fixed, I retire, or they fire my ass.

The future of mindless scrolling…

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I recently bit the bullet and signed up with Mastodon. I’m not saying it finally happened because Elon Musk went through the convolutions of trying to rebrand Twitter overnight and he’s increasingly using the platform as a mouthpiece for Russian propaganda, but it’s absolutely a contributing factor.

I’ll freely admit that I have gotten spoiled by Twitter’s ability to aggregate most of the information that I want – especially in the breaking national and international news and pop culture categories. Whether that ends up being enough of a reason to stick around remains to be seen. 

I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that my screwing around trying to set up my account on Mastodon didn’t raise (or reinforce) other, larger questions about my consumption of social media. I wonder if there’s much actual value beyond self-advertising and self-aggrandizement to compulsively flicking from Facebook to Twitter to Instagram to Threads to Mastodon – especially as the social media universe further fragments. I wonder if perhaps it’s time to descope my online presence rather than continue to add to it. Of course I’ve been wondering about that for a long while.

It’s a question of value added. Am I getting more out of these platforms than I’m sinking into their upkeep and maintenance. With a little honest self-reflection, the answer to that question is probably no. They’re all burning up time that I could likely reallocate to some higher purpose.

I’m not going to launch into a screed about mindfulness or any of that nonsense. There are times when pure, mindless scrolling is precisely what’s called for… but maybe it would be for the better for me if it were happening just a little less frequently. Whether I’ll do anything about that or just let inertia carry me along, though, remains to be seen.