Blogging on a Friday night, for the first time in a while, with some semi-random thoughts.
1. Writing: I am an undisciplined wretch.
I’ve blown off Meet the Larssons the last few weeks, and recently started writing Project Hometown, which needs a much cooler working title. I did a lot of work outlining it over the winter, and I think I’ve got a good sense of where it’s going, but the actual writing isn’t coming as easily as I remember the first few chapters of Meet the Larssons did. Part of it is that I haven’t taken much concentrated time for writing, just short bursts. Maybe I’ll take a couple of hours over the weekend.
2. Does anyone else smell bacon?
A kid in Unfocused Girl’s class apparently has swine flu (aka “the 0ther wh1te meat”-itis; I refuse to change the name to “novel flu” just because the p0rk council is all twitchy. As an aspiring writer, I’m offended by that, and concerned that people will stop buying books out of blind, unreasoning terror. I’m not worried about Unfocused Girl, because she is, like The Tick, nigh invulnerable, and almost never gets sick.
Have you heard about the crazy people having swine flu parties to get their kids sick now, before the fall when (they think) it’s going to mutate and come back in a more dangerous form? The idea is to get your child sick with the presumably weaker spring strain of the disease, leaving them with some immunity to the fall strain. There’s so much wrong with this it’s hard to know where to start, but for me the issue begins and ends with two questions: how do you know H1N1 is going to mutate into something worse? and if it does, how do you know it won’t mutate so much that your child’s immunity becomes useless? Seriously, just say NO to stupid DIY medical experiments on children too young to give informed consent.
3. Hey, there’s a spider in the bathtub.
Not anymore.
4. Another rocking Unfocused Family Friday night around the laptop.
I like hanging around with the kids on Friday and Saturday evenings, but I’d like to get them to bed a little earlier at least once in a while on a weekend so that we might have time to watch a movie. I think it’s been over a year since the Siren and I watched a video together without the kids.
I’m not saying I need a campaign of people telling me to sit down and watch a movie with my wife, like with the “take her out to dinner” comment blitz a few months ago (I hope she finished paying you all off, by the way). I’m just saying, we have a bunch of DVDs we haven’t seen yet, and I could be watching one with my lovely bride instead of talking to you.
The Unfocused Life 
I’ve heard of chicken pox parties, but not swine flu parties. I’ve heard the thought that it would help to get it now. But, as you said, who knows what it’s going to do next year. I think it will make flu shot time next year interesting.
Chicken pox parties make sense in that, once you have it, you’re immune forever (usually) and are immune from shingles which is a similar virus. But the flu? No. It just mutates and changes every year which is why we need a flu shot each year – because the strain is different. Like Nancy Reagan, just say no to swine flu parties.
Yeah, it’s nuts. Meanwhile, by deliberately infecting themselves and their kids, these goofballs are ensuring the faster spread of the virus.
Just when I think people can’t get any stupider, somebody proves me wrong.
I remember chicken pox parties. My mother hosted the one for our neighborhood. It was evil. When I was sick both my sisters were too… no special attention in that.
I can’t even imagine trying to make a child sick on purpose. I still have the flu my daughter brought home from school and passed on to me. She kept assuring me it was swine flu. Now I can only hope she’s right. Not like I want to go to a doctor’s office and get tested, though; not unless it turns bacterial.
I don’t understand it at all. It’s the flu — it changes all the time, that’s the point. And I suspect these parents are in for a rude surprise — the parents at the chicken pox parties had probably had it themselves, and weren’t going to get it again. The parents at these swine flu parties are going to be home with miserable sick kids while being sick themselves.