Wednesday night. So arbitrary.

Earlier in my quest to get to my baseline self, I decided to cut down on caffeine. I was making do with one cup of coffee (later replaced by black tea) with breakfast, followed by lots green tea throughout the day. Well, it turns out green tea has caffeine in it too. Ho hum. Starting today, I’m going full-on cold turkey – and ye gods, my head is killing me.

I’m pretty sure I’ve had caffeine every single day since I was a child. (Black tea is really big in Russia.) My body probably has no idea what the hell hit it: Tylenol has just barely managed to knock it down a bit. It’ll probably go away completely in a day or two: I’m curious what that’d feel like. And just because I’m human and want to have some beverages other than water, I’m going with chamomile tea, which tastes a lot better than it smells.

More phone conferences at work, and ever longer days…

In covid news, a pork processing plant in Iowa allegedly disregarded every covid safety measure, encouraged its employees to work while sick, and the plant’s management used to bet money on how many employees would catch covid. This is just so unbelievably, cartoonishly, mustache-twirling evil… It’d be over the top in any work of fiction: editors would laugh you out of their offices and readers would roll their eyes, and yet here we are. Here it is. This is our world, and the alleged events happened all the way in April. Who knows how many other heinous scenes like this took place all over the US, all over the world, this whole year. The worst part is that the wrongful death lawsuit against Tyson Foods, even if it’s successful, will not result in prison time for any of the factory’s management. At best, there’ll be some monetary compensations, and no lessons will be learned…

This virus is doing a fine job of shining light on every single aspect of humanity.