Thank you to everyone who emailed me and asked me about my welfare. I’m fine! My family is fine. I just needed a break from the internet for a bit. I mean, it never stops. It’s so therapeutic to delete Twitter from your phone and just stop checking it. The amazing part about the toxicity of Twitter for me, is it’s the people who I choose to follow who end up driving me nuts at different points. That twitter timeline is just terrible. Unlike blogs (almost extinct now) or websites where you can choose when to visit, the twitter timeline is just a hodgepodge of terribleness that never ends. Don’t feel like hearing about politics one day? TOUGH. Sick of hearing about Tucker Carlson? OH well. Here’s your timeline full of left wingers posting about the latest racist rant that constipation face has to say. And yes, liberal blogs (including this one) fall for the trollish right wing noise machine too. But I’ve always found that more easily avoidable than the algorithms that are the driving force behind Twitter/Facebook/whatever else is popular at the moment.
But enough about that. What have I been up to?
Magazine subscriptions. I’ve gone old school and subscribed to about a dozen print magazines. I haven’t had a print magazine subscription in years. I doubt I’ll keep most of these past a year (and who knows how much longer we will even have this option) but it’s nice actually reading ink off of glossy paper. Being able to focus on an article without clicking on a link or being interrupted by an email really can soothe one’s mind. What did I subscribe to?
The Smithsonian
The New Yorker
The Economist
Scientific American
Bon Appetit
Astronomy
Harper’s
Vanity Fair
Wired
The Atlantic
And I’m sure I’m missing a few more. The introductory offers are a bargain although stay tuned for my post next year titled “the hell of trying to cancel a magazine subscription”. But that’s next year.
As for Covid-19? My wife and I are vaxxed thrice. Team Pfizzle! If they ok a booster for a fourth round I’ll be first in line. We are masking on public transportation and in stores. But we are also living life. I got to the office a few days a week now. My wife flies for a living. We try to take the appropriate cautionary measures but I really don’t want to do another curbside grocery pickup again as long as I live. We’ll probably travel sometime in the spring or summer.
We’re at a very strange part of the pandemic that I hadn’t expected. Back in the spring of 2020, everybody was on the same page (by everybody, I’m talking about rational, science believing people. Non-Trump voters) where we were pretty much all working from home, social distancing, doing the best we could to flatten the curve. But now, it seems that everybody is at a different level of comfort. There are a lot of variables regarding health, immune issues, age, etc. But everybody has their own personal bubble they have become accustomed to. And there seems to be a lot of judgement as to what others are doing, or not doing. It’s a steep learning curve that we are all just stumbling around trying to figure out. It doesn’t help that the CDC’s guidance has been fairly terrible throughout this whole ordeal.
I’m going to resume posting again. I’m going to try to post less political stuff and more interesting things but I don’t know how possible that is given the current world climate. I’ll probably just stick to what this blog has always done best, give a little window of things that I find interesting at the moment.
Hope everybody is safe and healthy.