25 Questions About…

1. Didn’t have to. Had the kind of dad who would just let you stay home if you felt like it. This led to quite a few incidents where I almost didn’t pass grades due to attendance.
4. I believe he’s out walking the dogs right now.
8. Go To 4
9. Not for that
10. I barely trust doctors enough to take care of me. Just lock me in my room until the virus or myself dies.
11. When practiced properly, yes. However, we have a significant portion of the population that is coming unglued at the lack of social interaction, and will likely spark wave after wave going forward. This isn’t as partisan as people like to think.
12. For the most part. I go to the grocery store more often that I probably should, but that’s because I’m an idiot that doesn’t know how to plan ahead as far as groceries go. I do it during later quiet hours and have become intimately familiar with masking and sanitizing. I’ve abandoned walking the dogs at parks because people flocked to them the second the sun was visible again. I not only don’t go into work, but actively create solutions to keep others from going, so I feel like that’s a nice balance.
13. Again, if it was done properly and pushed down from the federal level. A monthly stipend that wasn’t means-tested would have gone a long way to making this work. Not providing for people who were already barely making rent when this all started was only going to escalate anxiety. I’d expect more random violence and theft the longer this continues. There’s an argument that minimum wage workers who were laid off are actually better off now, but you have to consider how far down into the earth’s crust that bar was buried to begin with. The people that are really fucked are the ones making between 30k-40k a year. The working poor just outside the reach of any social assistance. MAGA chuds gonna MAGA chud, but make no mistake that people are hurting in ways not seen since the great depression and the inability to earn while the government finds new and exciting ways to be ineffective is a huge piece of that. Consider how bad it was for the lower class 3 months ago. It’s a hundred times worse now. Those who can work, are getting the “Lucky to be able to work at all” spiel and anyone who speaks up about safety or compensation is painted as ungrateful or unpatriotic. Meanwhile, they found money to pay for seemingly endless flyovers across the country despite cries that they just can’t afford to take care of the people in it.
14. Fucking nope.
15. I mean, it’s going to mutate to some degree. We’re just rolling the dice this shit doesn’t get worse the longer we let the slow burn go.
16. Any ideas of a mass produced vaccine within the next 5 years are a pipe dream. They kill it like the first SARS or they don’t kill it at all, and I really, really doubt the ability of even the most capable leaders to pull something like that off at this point.
17. Oh, yeah. After 6 months of the economy being sad, they’ll say fuck it and take the death toll as an acceptable loss to save The Money. It’s going to be so bad. Toss that 3% death toll out the window. The worst hit counties in Michigan are over 10%, which is a higher death rate than the first SARS had.
18. Stonks, until the very moment Not Stonks and then Never Stonks Again. The crash will be a sight to behold.
19. I’ve learned a lot about the the theory of it all, and retained maybe .01% of that, but given that the entire thing is controlled by the exchange market equivalent of The Matrix, it means so little to the average person.
20. Look, you couldn’t make me care about that shit in college, and I’m not about to start now.
21. No, but I did stare down a kid wearing a confederate flag mask to the point he did a 180 and walked to the other side of the store with his head down. The stupidity is breathtaking and multi-layered.
22. Not about protecting you. About protecting others. Your odds of getting infected with a mask on near a person with COVID-19 is about 70%. Your odds of getting infected if they have a mask on too is under 2%.
23. No, but Americans should long ago have adapted that behavior. That there was resistance to it even with the pandemic from the federal government down to your neighbors is a sign of how shitty we get when there’s even the least bit of inconvenience.
24. Yes, I have watched 28 Days Later.
25. Fuck, I don’t know why we’re not threatening our neighbors with flame throwers right now.

(Bonus Question) That is where the brain is, yes. Mental illness is entirely dependent on brain chemistry. There is a baseline you get through genetics, and it’s modified by experiences. Fun fact, my kid has both ASD and ADHD. A neat thing that happens when you have a kid with ADHD is that you naturally self-diagnose as you compare everything they do to what you do. A lot of adults that get diagnosed with it did so after their kids were. My brother-in-law is textbook ADHD, so we always figured there was some genetic history there for our kid. Once I got into therapy, I started to feel like I had it to along with a myriad of other issues, so I had the complete psych work-up. Turns out, I don’t have it, but I do have symptomatic ADHD that goes with my general anxiety disorder, so as my anxiety increases, my brain chemistry matches someone with ADHD. You get super aware of it happening once you realize what it is. So between my brother-in-law’s ADHD and my almost ADHD, there’s a solid history of it to draw from. Another neat thing is that as my kid has gotten older, his negative behaviors as they relate to the ASD have started to remind me of the things I witnessed from my father who I’ve spoken about before here as being a massive piece of shit. So that’s created this wide open question of whether there’s a history of autism on my side of the family (some of my brother’s behaviors could possibly fall under this, too), and whether or not my father should be given a pass on some of the things he did (Me: Fucking nope. Sister: Yes, all of it, but she’s a psych major so whatever.). There’s also this weird thing in my family where we’re all fucked up, but naturally very intelligent. My IQ test put me in the 92nd percentile, my brother took the SAT in middle school and pulled like a 1450 or something on it, and my kid’s IQ is likely to be extremely high when it’s properly tested based on his testing from a few years ago. I honestly believe my father blew all of us out of the water. He dropped out of school in the 8th grade and spent time when I was younger doing computer programming as a hobby. He also spent the vast majority of my life unemployed and drunk out of his mind between instances of severe child and spousal abuse, my brother was in and out of therapy through middle school and high school due to threatening violence towards other students, and I’ve literally watched my kid throw a book case across a classroom as I entered it. Oh yeah. I’ve got some thoughts on mental illness.