Monday night. Must Mondays be so morbidly mundane?..

The end-of-year shopping season is approaching, and that means things are getting busier at work. That’s one way to fast-forward through this pandemic: when there’s stuff to do and deadlines to meet, the workday mostly flies by.

I’m curious how this is affecting folks who lost their jobs but receive unemployment benefits. At least I have this work distraction: what about those who have enough money to pay their bills but no work in addition to not being able to go out and socialize? They must be having an entirely different experience… I’d like to get to that point in life myself, someday (infinite leisure!) but ideally without the world ending outside my window.

There are probably others out there who keep similar daily logs… A post on Reddit had inspired me to start this online diary, such as it is. There ought to be other chroniclers out there, if only a handful. I wonder if I’d be up to reliving this pandemic through someone else’s eyes, though: that would only highlight the sheer horror into which we’ve all slowly descended.

In covid news… Well, the absurdity continues. In the most basic terms: Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, tested positive for covid earlier today. She deliberately refused to wear a mask in the past, so there’s no telling how many journos she’s infected. (As far as I can tell, the White House strategy – such as it is – is to avoid masks and just do daily testing. That’s a reactive, not a proactive approach, and it’s no surprise that it failed.) Trump might have suffered the manic side effect from the steroid he’s taking: he posted a lot of ALL CAPS tweets in the morning, had his doctors lie for him some more (they refuse to tell when his last negative test was…), and then discharged himself from the hospital after just three days.

He then went back to the White House, dramatically removed his mask, and appeared to wheeze from that short walk. He really does seem to be on a mission to troll everyone as much as possible, because he posted a brief video where he implied he got covid on purpose, to be a leader, and told people not to be afraid of the virus. This is going to get people killed… Of course, he didn’t wear a mask, so he exposed everyone in the room as well.

Even though we don’t know when exactly he got infected, we do know that covid symptoms come and go: a bad stretch is followed by a good one and then a bad one again. He’s not out of the woods yet, and if he has to be rushed back to Walter Reed in a few days… Well, that’d be ironic, if nothing else.

And now I’m off to read the 17th book in Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files series: I forgot that it got released last week, and it makes for a fine distraction from this horrific reality TV show taking place on every news outlet. Stay safe, folks.