1.
Senioritis is hitting me, and it’s hitting hard.
Could also be the flu, my mother and sister have been sick.
Apparently it incubates for 7 days. My mother believes they were infected at Shabbat services two weeks ago. I went with them last week, right before they started showing symptoms.
And, of course, I’ve been cohabitating with them since. They quarantine themselves poorly. I worry, but figure the worry can only hurt, so stop myself when I can.
I’ve had a runny nose recently, but only when I’m in places I don’t like. In the fresh air, it’s gone. With friends, gone.
Is it flu? It could be flu.
I think it isn’t. After COVID, for months I got sick very easily. Worryingly easily. My family has never been heavy medicators when ill—we have faith in the immune system—but that taboo was broken when I shat myself mercilessly in the Dominican Republic. It was December 2023.
More bouts followed, every other month or so. Sometime around March, I threw up at 8 am in a classroom in the 700 wing after insisting to my mom that I felt fine. I wiped it up, sanitized the table, and drove home. I felt so grown up.
A couple in the summer. I lived in a dorm with a friend (whose blog remains tragically empty), and he’ll never let me hear the end of how he helped me out. Nursed me back to health with nothing more than his own divine glow, to hear him tell it.
He moved the trash can closer to my bed, and ran to the CVS to buy me a gatorade at around midnight. I’m thankful, but he’s a prick.
I’d felt the sickness coming in days before. Our whole little program group (nine of us) went out to eat together. The Jolly Pumpkin, a remarkably shitty restaurant about which people inexplicably rave. I wandered down Liberty St. in an open linen button-down and a v-neck undershirt that hung off me like I was a skeleton. Sweating bullets. I felt so grown up.
At the restaurant, I tried to stand up and slammed my head into a light fixture. Twice more, at that fucking place, the same thing has happened. Same fucking fixture, same dull throb in my skull, same ringing in my ears. Same stifled laughter and ungenuine “are you… heh ha ha… ok ha?”
Well, it must’ve done some good for me. I haven’t really been seriously sick since, I don’t think. My immune system’s bounced back from pandemic isolation. I feel invincible, and so on.
Haven’t been vaccinated, though—forgetfulness, not MAGA.
Maybe I have the flu.
2.
I write this now with a twisted-up tissue stuck in my left nostril. The season is dry, and somehow I bleed easily. My bedsheets are still stained from a nighttime episode some number of days ago. I’ve been meaning to change them, but haven’t.
Yesterday I went to East Lansing.
School is a joke, there’s no work for me to do there. Well, I need to revise a math paper. That can wait, though, it’s been waiting for a year.
I paid $30, wrote two essays around a month ago, and took a test early this morning.
The essay period was interesting. Three hours for a couple 200-worders. One serious, one less. A taste of the less:
Corned beef hash arrives, plus some gravy. We're talking about our romances. He repeats his usual line: "Quality time is nice, but *quantity* time really matters.” I make agreement noises.
It’s a fabrication, but only a small one. Based in reality, a mish-mash or something.
And really it’s true. Quality time is good with anyone. It’s quality. Quantity is only good if you really care. Sends a stronger signal, adverse selection, and so on.
Punctuality sends a good signal too. “Actions speak louder than words,” or the fancier version which is “revealed preferences are what’s real.” Does quantity time with me matter? Prove it, and so forth.
But, Goodhart’s law. Bring it up and, if it improves, you don’t know why. The signal’s lost. Catch-22… am I using that right? Never read it.
Never read much Dickens either. But it was on my test yesterday. ADS, Alumni Distinguished Scholarship. A shitty acronym but for its serendipitous rearrangement, “ASD.” Seems like those who do well on this test must have some version of it.
What was the main focus of Dickens’ works? Works like Oliver Twist, and Our Mutual Friend.
a. Plays about urban England
b. [Don’t remember]
c. Novels about rural England
d. Novels about urban England
I chose (d), still not sure if it’s right. Please sir, can I have some more? That’s Oliver Twist, isn’t it? An orphan? They only had those in the urban areas, I’m pretty sure.
Nailed what tRNA does (amino acids to the ribosomes), but flubbed the function of the parasympathetic nervous system (NOT fight or flight).
Lord help me, I took biology three years ago!
ASD, ADS.
Did I do well enough? 1000 kids, 45 full-ride scholarships. Am I in the top 4.5% of MSU Honors College admits?
3.
Have I gone on long enough yet? Probably, and yet this is all I’ve been able to write for weeks. Be a shame to stop now.
Oh, but that’s not true. I’ve had two essays to write in the past few days. Literature and Global Politics. Death of a Salesman, and the future importance of state sovereignty.
My essays used to have such form. Five paragraphs, FIDDS analysis, a clear thesis statement. Ah, but senioritis.
No, that’s not right. I always fucking hated FIDDS. By sophomore year, I was deviating. It’s just been even more unhinged lately. The essay before this one in Lit, I took an aside to describe my uncle’s former living situation in San Francisco. That earned me 5% off my Organization grade. #WorthIt.
Is it worth it to go to Yale?
Can’t be. Michigan State has such a great dining hall. St. John’s was easily the most interesting interview. Unnerving. Felt like any moment I’d slip and be caught—aha! You don’t care about the classics! You just want to care about the classics!
Is there a difference between the two? For them to decide, I guess, since I certainly was caught. Talked a bit too much about blogs and book reviews and AI. All very downstream thought. Am I only downstream of downstream?
The Huron River was frozen, for a little while. A week and a half, maybe. Now it’s melting and beginning to run again. Will it continue to? I’d check the forecast, but I like the surprise of seeing it each morning a little changed.
4.
What was I here to say?
That’s right, jocks.
I went to a sporting event. One most people would call low-key or fun or something along these lines. Club soccer, not varsity. More of a hang-out than a competition.
And yet!
I found myself at best miffed, watching them sweat and smack balls into each others’ faces.1 Maybe even disgusted.
Snobby and snotty?
Sure, but that’s not a new attitude for me. That jackass friend who healed me last summer makes the accusation all the time. Hell, it fits.
Before I went, I thought through Mike Huemer’s free will argument again. Someone on the internet found my month-old comment, and left a better one.
And at the game, I was reading about moral desert. I don’t know what my preferred answer for it is yet. But I know enough to use the warring theories in argument, and that oughta do.
The Michigan Ethics Bowl is today!
My school won the state the year before I entered high school.
We just missed the knockout stage in my freshman year.
Just missed it again in sophomore year.
Missed it very decisively last year.
This year, I’m in charge. It’s been a huge clusterfuck. We had 15 cases to discuss as a team, and just finished the last one yesterday. I wasn’t even there for the discussion. ASD, ADS.
Well, let’s see how it goes. Worst comes to worst, I can plead senioritis. Or flu.
No homo, I’m sure they’d hasten to add. But you and I know better.