I had one of the most significant days of my life on Monday. I declared my major as political science, which I knew from the beginning I would do but still it's a big deal. I got a major advisor (my college spells it “adviser” — fucking nasty. Although I think grammar is descriptive rather than prescriptive, I'm going to make an exception and say that is just incorrect), who is pretty cool. And I got the biggest double in my dorm during room draw. April 17, 2023, is one for the history books.

Naturally, the world doesn't want me to get too happy, so I immediately got sick on Tuesday. It's just a cold, but it still sucks. I think the worst thing about getting sick is that your sleep quality plummets. Your body is sore and your mind is sludge.

Speaking of sludge, did you know that the content on TikTok (and Instagram Reels *puking emoji*) where the bottom half of the screen is Subway Surfers or some ASMR crap and then the top is Family Guy or Young Sheldon — did you know that content has a name? It's called “sludge content”. I think that's entirely fitting. I'm gonna make a Wikipedia article about it. Oh, another thing about me is that I generally use logical quotation style / British quotation style, and I will stay on this hill until I die.

Anyway, about getting sick. I wonder if humans will still have to deal with the common cold in the future. Or will this annoyance stay with us until our fucking extinction? People getting sick with mild illnesses like colds is actually a huge cumulative harm. Something like half of all work absences are due to colds. Absent the capitalist productive mindset, even though a cold isn't bad in the grand scheme of things, the frequency at which we are affected by it makes it actually a big deal.

I know the difficulty of curing the common cold comes from the fact that there are hundreds of strands that differ from one another, and further differ over time due to mutation. And we do have medication to fix the symptoms — although it's really hard to tell if medication is working. Has anyone else noticed this? Because medication is so slow to act, it's hard to develop a cause and effect relationship in your mind. Other variables have been introduced. It's hard to compare your current experience post-medication to your experience pre-medication because that latter experience is no longer in your working memory.

When I was sick with COVID a few months ago, one of my professors wouldn't let me Zoom into class, even though I told her COVID was affecting me like a cold. She said that we, as a society, have devalued rest and have overvalued relentless exertion of ourselves to the limit. I thought that, in context, this was fucking stupid. How much exertion does sitting on a Zoom call realistically require? But I took these words to heart and did close to nothing for the week I was isolating. I recovered fairly quickly.

I have gotten sick yet again, this time with the perennial cold. I can't take myself out of school, but I'm presented with a new paradigm now that I'm in college. I can sleep 13 hours a day. I can stay in my room and abstain from activity, except for walks — to and from class, to and from meals, for fresh air (though on 4/20 that is difficult). I can stay on top of everything — at a basic level — and still get a lot of restorative rest.

I'm mostly over my cold now. If I give it one or two more days, it will be gone pretty much completely. This is crazy to me. My experience with colds in high school was miserable because they would each last for two, three weeks, if not longer. This cold lasted for less than a week. I hypothesize this was mainly because, while in high school, there was no way to rest for longer than a day without falling insanely behind. I couldn't sleep for 7 hours, let alone 12. And if it was during a hell week, you were screwed.

My high school has little incentive to change this because everyone is still working. But the amount of misery this requires is astronomical. If I had a more serious illness, I would have been really screwed. There is an argument that being sick for unnecessarily long periods of time because you're working actually hurts productivity more than just biting the bullet and resting sufficiently for a few days and getting back to normal. But my high school couldn't do this, because they don't just value productivity, they value the hierarchy that keeps order. To allow students to properly rest at their discretion would require providing the independence, flexibility, support, and welfare that would necessarily disrupt the school order.

This is really significant. To maintain this order, schools sacrifice students' health and well-being. Understanding my three-week colds requires an understanding of the school structure, of which my sickness was a product. Who knows how many sleepless nights or gallons of snot or sludge classes were unnecessary. I feel robbed. You should too.

btw I had this realization as I was pissing