I haven’t left the house since my last post, or have I? I think I did. I went to get a refill of fluoxetine. Who knows what that is without looking it up? It’s generic Prozac. It’s not how I think of it, but I should learn to. That’s what it says on the bottle. I didn’t do a count but only one person I passed was wearing a mask until I had crossed Mosholu Parkway. Instead of getting used to masks people are getting used to living with COVID-19. They figure if they don’t think about they won’t die or pass it on to someone what will.
I had to Facebook snooze two friends yesterday. One routinely makes pro-Trump, frequently racists posts. I don’t unfriend him because I want to hear what the other side of the political divide has to say. Of late it’s been too hard on me so I’m taking a break from him. The other friend I snoozed is on the other end of the political spectrum. The problem is that like Trump with Antifa he thinks he can blame people he doesn’t like without any evidence other than not liking them and will be vehement and use slurs against them. It is a mindset I will never get, being so unaware of your own prejudices as to take them as facts.
I’m finding that my toleration for people’s transgressions is decreasing. I’m trying to respond by interacting with them less rather than calling them idiots. This is not just politics; it happens on my baseball trivia group more than anywhere. How am I supposed to deal with someone that thinks HR/SO means home runs plus strikeouts not home runs divided by strike outs? The person that said that, said that they studied math in college. The slash (/) has always been a standard symbol for division or fractions, which are the same thing. My blood pressure went up writing that.
I had weird dreams this morning, an entire set in which I was doing or making up algebra problems. One of the most fascinating things I’ve read in scientific studies of dreams, is that variations of the same dream over the course of a sleep is the norm. You keep rerunning it with slight variations. If I had been making up algebra problems all day as I did when preparing to teach or for a test I could understand it. But I wasn’t. But just as I did in real life I made sure that the answers were integers. Sometimes they were part of word problems and I had to make sure the answer wasn’t negative. The thing that makes it more difficult in dreams is that I don’t think I can do calculations in my dreams. At least I can’t remember ever doing one and getting the right answer.
I now right entries over the course of hours, even days. I’m going to try and finish this tonight and write again tomorrow. Let’s see if I can do it.
I can write about dinner. This was exciting, I made a country style rib for the first time in months. I cooked it in the air fryer of course. What I tried different this time was rubbing it with paprika, cayenne, and garlic powder before cooking, and then serving it on a mini-sub roll with barbecue sauce. As expected it was perfect. Cook it for 15 minutes at 350ºF, turn it over, and cook for another six minutes. It will come out tender and juicy.
Yesterday’s phone conversation was with Genevieve. She is my only friend that will correct me on the difference be venomous and poisonous. That naturally came up in the conversation when I called centipedes poisonous. I need a friendship where that’s an organic part of the conversation. We also talked about pangolins and meerkats. They’ve gotten a lot more publicity of late, do all my friends know what a pangolin is? If not I’m not telling you; You’ll have to look it up.
I just got annoyed at someone in my Facebook Bridge group. He doesn’t know the difference between saying “people are” and “all people are.” I need to talk to a real live human friend. I haven’t met today’s quota.
Wise Madness 