Sunday 25 January 2004

Pic of the day: Screenshot from anime Narue no Sekai. "It's OK." Actually it's a bit more than OK, but I concede that it may not be so easy for everyone else.

Still alive

Not much to say that hasn't been said before. Well, I guess there must be some, but it would be too much stress trying to wring it out right now.

The pain in my right side has slowly been returning. I don't think measuring my blood sugar will change that in any way. I don't know what will. But it is not debilitating right now, I can pretty much live my life as usual.

***

At least I haven't got the chicken flu. From what I read it seems to be the same strain that hit Hong Kong in the late 90es and made the island kill off all its chickens, thus limiting human deaths to only a handful. This time it has spread to like 10 countries, but it seems slightly less aggressive right now. Of course, the problem is that it could crossbreed with the common flu virus. All of them are closely related. You know how a virus breeds, right? It is not like any other living organism – in fact, there is some doubt as to whether it should be defined as living at all. Instead of dividing like cells do, it reprograms our cells to mass produce more viruses. If one chicken flu and one common flu virus infected the same cell, there is a pretty good chance the pieces for new viruses would get mixed up. This may be good, as in the combination might not work. Or it may be horribly bad, because it might result in a new viable flu virus that nobody has antibodies against.

Of course, I foretold that SARS would lay waste to the world as well. I still have no idea why it just shriveled and died when the summer came. It was not quite under control at the time ... there were scattered outbreaks in China and Canada. But they kinda stopped. Weird, in a good way. Not that I'm not thankful. I like my life. I may be a loser, but I am a fairly content loser. I guess it would be nice to be able to sing in choir and make love and drive; then again other people might like to write, master a few languages and understand how society works. We can't all get everything, I suppose, not with life being so short and so narrow. But let us be grateful for it while it lasts. There's not much we could do without it!