Saturday, December 25th, 2021, 22:24

Mood: Sore

Merry Christmas to anyone who celebrates that sort of thing. It doesn't really feel like Christmas bc Earth is dying and it was like 60f today but here we are. The dramatic pressure drop and consequent rainfall led to me getting a migraine, which I still have, but I'm used to getting those pretty much whenever it rains. I'm more pissed about the part where my face is totally broken out. I've struggled with acne since I was 12 or 13 and it just has never really gone away. I was prescribed minocycline for a year, but never took it because I was scared I'd develop some gnarly-ass side effect as karma for being vain. It's part of a long list of delusions I developed as a result of growing up in Madison, which I know are unrealistic and illogical but still feel on a really acute and visceral level anyway. "If you do anything to change your appearance to conform to mainstream beauty standards, you will be punished and turn even uglier than before." Another one, which I have met multiple people from Madison who developed this same preoccupation, is "If something bad happens to you, you caused it by not thinking positively enough. You get what you manifest." It's like being from a hardcore Bible Belt city except with new age hippie bullshit.

Siren had a good Christmas, I would say. Today was her first day where she didn't report pain in her foot nor ask for ibuprofen to control it. She's been hobbling around a lot more, much to my chagrin. I guess I can't keep her off the foot the whole time until her post-op appointment. She about gave me a heart attack all day long gimping around like she didn't just have surgery three days ago. If she busts her stitches, where are we supposed to take her? The ER? Fat chance. The ISDH is reporting 94% ICU bed usage in our district, and our hospital is still filled to the brim. The proliferation of omicron is only going to raise that number; even if the disease is milder, if enough of us get it all at the same time, it's going to hospitalize quite a few people. Wow, I really, really wish people here would just take this shit seriously.

I think the reason places like Muncie don't take the pandemic very seriously is because we simply do not have a culture that teaches people to care about quality of life. In the same way that growing up in Madison left me with a series of OCD-ish new age delusions, I think growing up in Muncie teaches people to accept a relatively low standard of living. This is a theory I could wax poetic about and already have ad nauseum for years. As a sociologist, how could we even begin to quantify or qualify this phenomena? I hate that my research interests in sociology are so diverse. I am deeply entrenched in medical sociology and disability studies, but have always found regional sociology and sociology of place to be so fascinating. I love to learn about cities and regions, and their respective cultures and social mores! There's just too much about people to learn in one lifetime. I wish there could be multiple of me so that I could do sociological research on a bunch of different topics.

Anyways I'm gonna go continue procrastinating washing my face. I really don't want to look at my face rn because of the breakouts--I legit have zits all around my mouth, cheeks, and chin, and I am not ok with it at all--and it's going to be super painful and annoying because of this migraine.

Edit, 22:59: Would anyone want me to add a vegetarian/vegan recipes section to this site and post recipes of mine? It'll totally distract me from working on my hardcopy recipe book I want to pass down to Siren whenever my flesh prison gives out, but it'd help me maybe centralize everything.