Icky. Somehow I managed to pick up a case of the flu, I'm presuming I caught it Friday night, if you hang around enough new people, you'll all share your germs eventually. I suppose it's fine, you have to toughen up your immune system somehow, though in retrospect I didn't get a flu shot this year.
I'm doing a fairly good job weaning myself off soft drinks, I haven't had any coke or Dr Pepper in my fridge at home for a few weeks. Caffeine being somewhat addictive I'm doing ok, I still have my morning milk and coffee, but I guess I'm getting less phenylalanine in my diet. As a placebo I've switched to drinking a lot of fruit juice, which unique to the US, comes frozen in little cans which you make up with water. I also cooked up something which I've found to be uniquely American, “Hamburger Helper”. It's usually a mixture of pasta and sauce which you add to mince to fill out a meal. It's the little things which you notice, like the almost complete absence of flavoured milk.
Another plug… Astrocappella Physically correct songs about astrophysics. Major geekiness factor, particularly if you like space related topics.
9:40 pm – In case of emergency, buy duct tape…
This link is to an article from Kuro5hin. The title is somewhat explanatory, “Otherkin: A Short Introduction”, but if you're not familiar with Otherkin, think non-human souls in human bodies. Given that the K5 crowd are generally not that open to radical ideas such as this, the article was trolled and generally torn to shreds, Otherkin being dismissed as delusional and possibly a danger to themselves. Right down the bottom is this post which I think is a very well written rebuttal of the rather more specious arguments.
Of course for me, this post raises questions of “What is Mainstream culture?” and by inversion, “What is Fringe culture”? I mean, how do we claim something as one and something else as the other? Mutual assent? By simple definition, mainstream culture is the dominant local variant of whatever we are discussing. Some people love to deride Mainstream culture, but is it any less valid than fringe culture? I think that like ethics there are very few (if any) rules to go by.
Well, over the last few days I've scored the daily double, hay fever and a summer flu, hence the intro line. Yesterday I woke up still sick from the flu, and as the day progressed I was coughing and sneezing much worse than usual. At lunch that I went over to the Union Building and grabbed the first antihistamine I could find, Diphenhydramine. I knocked back some of the tiny pills and they seemed to work alright for a while, but slowly I just more and more detached from work and following that, my body. It was somewhat dreamlike, but unpleasant as I was still sick, but now I was sick and high. I kept a meeting with my boss, and the first thing he mentioned was just how strongly my eyes were dilated. This was obviously not a good sign, so we pushed on with the meeting and I went home not long after we'd finished. The effects wore off eventually, but now maybe I understand how people feel when high on Dramamine (aka Gravol, dimenhydrinate) as they both have analogous chemical structures. Either way it was decidedly un-fun.
This morning was at least somewhat better, this was good because I had to get up at 7 am for an 8 am lecture on the new mass spectrometer. This finished about midday and after that the day went slowly downhill. The weather was really nice, but there was a lot of pollen and Cotton wood “fluff” in the air, and I'd lost my voice overnight. Hence by 5 pm I'd come home and here I'll stay.
