Thursday 7 October 2004

Pic of the day: Screenshot from Sims2. The meaning of this particular angle will be evident further down in the text.

A little sick

This was one of those days where you know that you should have stayed in bed. In fact, I knew this before I even got out of bed. I did not get to sleep before around 4 in the night, being a bit sick. Now I woke up around 8 and realized that I had to go to work. I already owe a lot of time for coming too late through the summer.

This comes and goes, but overall I am not able to keep up with the 90% job I have. It is usually small trifling things, like today, except today I actually worked a full day. Not even 90% but 100%. We have flexible time, so we can work less some days and more some days, within certain bounds. I am way outside those bounds, and am going to pay for it.

Luckily money is not a very big deal currently, so I don't mind all that much. Still, it is kinda frustrating. It is typically things like, I'm sick in the night so I oversleep in the morning, or my bowels are running in the morning so I can't make the one hour trip to work until they calm down. Coming a couple hours late, and occasionally not at all. I typically also spend most of my vacation days on stuff like this. I don't have actual vacations, and probably never will. (That's a lot less of a problem than it would have been if I liked to travel; luckily I hate it.)

***

I managed to get to work in time, but on the way to the bus I had discovered that I had left my Pocket PC in the cradle, where it is reloaded and synchronized. Not just the clock is synchronized, but the content as well. It absorbs my favorite news sites and some such, which I then read on the bus. Not today. You know it will be one of those days. (And to add injury to insult, I came home and found that for unknown reasons the battery had crashed in my absence, despite being connected to a power source, and had to be recharged from the mains. I told you, one of those days.)

At work I managed to do my job, which is secret but usually doesn't require me to leave the office building. I had pain of varying magnitude in the right side of my guts most of the time, sometimes less and sometimes more. It was not out in the side where it used to be last year, though. Also I felt queasy from time to time, and both of these things have continued to come and go through the evening as well.

A nice thing about this is that I eat less, which is bound to be a good thing. I am not obese, but I am still on the upper side. Pretty much all of this is concentrated in a bag on my front. I don't have much in the way of double chins, not to mention thighs. It is all handily collected in one place, where it can do maximal harm. At least this is a very very manly thing. And we all know there is nothing greater to achieve in this world than to be a man, even if it costs your life. Yes, I am overly cynical today. But the fact remains that I wouldn't have eaten female sex hormones even if I had them lying around. (Which I don't, since there in no one on the Pill in the household.)

Another unfair thing: When women put on an extra 10-20 pounds, they put some of it on their breasts and most on their behinds, which they can jiggle or wiggle respectively to make men do their bidding. But even should I manage to make my tummy bounce (I really haven't tried) I doubt this would endear me to the opposite sex. Luckily it all evens out at higher levels of fat, where both sexes converge toward shapeless blobs. There is still some justice in the world.

But I'm a fair bit from there, and not moving in that direction. Not when these bouts of queasiness come and go randomly. This particular thing has only lasted for the last couple days. I suppose I could blame it on the sausage I ate the day before yesterday. When in doubt, blame the sausage! At least I haven't hidden any of them, so no one needs to get queasy on that behalf.

***

I'm totally motivated to see a doctor one of these days. Probably. I hear that with the rapid influx of new physicians educated abroad (among them my recent best friend) there will be a glut of them, more than we need. I don't think so. I think the next election will be won, with a wide margin, by the barely reformed socialists. And they will momentarily halt the cuts in health budgets which the conservatives have pushed through for the last several years.

The center-right government is cutting with a Scottish Knife, a little here and a little there, so most public services deteriorate a little year by year. But they haven't encouraged private alternatives. Courage being the key word here, they don't have that. Yesterday they put on the table a national budget that will take more money from the poor (1% more sales tax for everyone who can't shop abroad) and give as tax breaks to the rich. Since their remaining voters are mainly the well-off, this makes sense, but we're not likely to see much of them for a while. Meanwhile the socialists will be back, somewhat more market- oriented than in my childhood, but still far more interested in spending money than earning it. Incidentally, female voters are on average quite a bit to the left of their male compatriots. Make of that what you want. I'm sick anyway.

But not too sick to get up and dance to the best of the Sims' pop music. Life is still good, considering the alternative. -- Actually I don't know that, not having tried both, but it seems a reasonable assumption. And as Shaw rightly pointed out, what a man really believes can not be ascertained from his creed but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts. In which case I don't very strongly believe that I'm going to have a fun time after my life ends. Sorry about that. Of course it might still happen, but in that case I won't be able to tell you about it. And don't get any smart ideas about spiritism. Wherever I go, I don't want to be disturbed. Disturb me now if at all. You can find the e-mail address below.