Why Colds Happen

Here is my theory on why we get colds.

Every once in a while, your brain gets tired. It needs a little break. So it wraps its self (and thus your entire head) up in a nice cuddly snot blanket. This explains why your ears and nose and throat are affected.
It also explains why you seem to think and process more slowly when you have a cold; it takes time for information to pass through the snot barrier, either to enter or exit.
Every time you blow your nose, a little bit of your brain's snot blanket is blown away, until finally there is almost no blanket left, and your brain becomes fully functional again.

Cold

Cold as in I have one. And cold is in, it is.
The high today is 57F. Yeah, yeah, that's not cold for some of you. It's cold for me!
Also, I have a cold. Rather than being unhappy about that, I'm trying to be thankful to my body that I have gotten sick a lot less frequently this year than last.
Not a lot has been going on... I've been doing some paid personal assistant work for friends of mine. School is going along well; I will be able to start seeing clients around the beginning of the year. I'm a little nervous about the marketing aspects of it all, but it'll come.
I probably have a torn meniscus in my left knee. Since the pain is tolerable and not constant I will be treating it through supplements, diet, exercise, massage, et cetera. I'm not bothering to even get the conclusive MRI to make sure I have it; it's not like any of the treatments I'm doing would be bad for me even if the meniscus isn't torn. An MRI seems unnecessary. It does increase my chances for arthritis in that knee, but not even an MRI or the corrective surgery (which they probably wouldn't do for me anyway as my knee is functional and the pain isn't terrible) would take care of the arthritis risk.
Still doing the Renaissance festival, through November 21. That's not taking as much out of me as it did last year, which is cool. I'm skipping it this weekend though, due to the cold (the flu-like cold, not the weather cold).
I think that's about it for my random update.

The Future of America

Sometimes I can get pretty down about the country I live in. We do a lot of things, as a global entity and as a culture, that I'm not very proud of.
Election days are often days when I am not excited to be American, in the end.
But today I read this essay and started feeling hopeful again. It's by the son of a guy I went to high school with. His name is Eli, and he's 12 years old. This is what he has to say:

We are in a country of political and economic decline. We have put ourselves on the treacherous road to becoming a fascist country. In the way we are living, the environment has become devastated. We are cutting down all the trees... we are dumping trash into the ocean... While we may not be responsible for this we are not doing enough to make a difference, and/ or possibly change our ways. Not enough effort has gone into fixing this nation. We have truly become a self destructive civilization. While all this could have been fixed a while ago, it seems we are only too late. What have we truly given to the world? War, debt? Is that all we are? Cannot we become maybe a more peaceful nation, or perhaps one who has not caused harm to others? While we owe money... billions of dollars, the national debt continues to soar. We now depend on that funding, and if that funding was pulled, America would crumble. We would be no longer the land of opportunity, or freedom, but where people are trying to escape, trying to rid themselves of the responsibility of fixing this nation. We are lost. We, the people... we were the people, but that ideal has changed. Our democracy as a whole has been differentiated from other countries around the world. I am not saying that they are correct. They are almost as correct as we are. But we can do much better. We can fix America... But, it cannot be just us. We have to have more support. We need to help, and we need help to save our nation.

 

 

bleh

What a totally bleh day. It's gray and rainy and chilly out. I'm vaguely ill with some kind of achey, congestion kind of deal. I'm tired. I'm unmotivated. In fact, my current facebook status (which is rather clever, if I do say so myself) is:

"I sound my lethargic yawp from the couch cushions of the world."

So yeah. Bleh. It'll pass of course. But meanwhile, bleh.