Just a gross, tired elephant seal creating a stack of snot-soaked tissues

So, I have RSV. And why? Because I piddled around and didn’t get the vaccine in time, and now I am slammed flat. I’ve had covid, and this is entirely worse. Although, I did have four covid vaccines before I contracted it, so I got the watered down version. But I got the full-force version of RSV and it is brutal.
Get the vaccine, people. It’s not worth feeling this bad. I have done little but lie in the recliner and create a pile of snot-soaked tissues, and coughed so violently that I tore my exterior oblique muscle, and every cough or nose blow feels like a machete in my side.
Nonetheless, I have managed to do a few things this week while in the throes of the plague:
📖 Read “Good Omens – The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch.” Liked it. 👍🏼
📺 Watched “Good Omens” on Amazon Prime, seasons 1 and 2. Liked both. 👍🏼👍🏼
📕 Started reading “The Curator” by Owen King and became so annoyed with its cloying preciousness that I shoved it into the return slot at the library.
Yes shoved.
Hated it. 👎🏼
📱Played 37 levels of Candy Crush until I became tired of winning. Ha. MAGA double entendre intentional.
Liked it. 👍🏼
📺 Watched two episodes of “The Outlander” on AP, got bored and fell asleep. Didn’t hate it but also didn’t like it. However didn’t not like it as much as I didn’t like the book. At least there were sexy, diirrrty Scottish men in kilts. 👍🏼 If only they’d killed off the wifty woman in a white dress who of course trips and falls when chased, I might have stuck around. But no. Clearly this was all a ruse to get me to endure another hate-you-until-I-love-you romance.
Sidenote: I loathe romances, even when they’re all dressed up as historical fiction. When I attempted to read the book, I could tell by the end of the early chapter where a potentially interesting sexual encounter was instead metaphorized (not a word, I just made that up) by a meaningful soak in a hot tub at sunrise that “The Outlander” was going to be a stinker, like a turd in said hot tub, and that this was another frilly, insipid, predictable romance that would make me scream and bang the book on the coffee table.
Conclusion: 👎🏼
📺 Watched THREE episodes of “A Discovery of Witches” (take that, Diana Gabaldon!), got so annoyed mid-episode three that I shut it off. The only thing I dislike more than romances is THIS plotline: “Woman is born with magical powers that she resists all her life until a certain dark, mysterious, masculine hero/vampire/werewolf/dragon comes along and romances her into releasing her repressed witchy powers.”
Oh COME ON.
How many times can these leftovers be reheated before we scrape them into the garbage? 👹
And REALLY COME ON: This entire sad, tired, overdone stock plot is just one big allegory for the big, virile, rock-hard-faster-than-a-sneeze strong man finally bringing the frail, frigid woman to orgasm. TaDAHH! 🎉
I wish I had a thousand vibrators to hurl at every writer who keep reheating this plot and calling it cuisine. Think of something new, for fuck’s sake. Like — repressed witchy woman decides brooding, obsessive man is more annoying than a yeast infection in July, transforms into a dragon, and chomps his head off. And then pukes it up because it tastes like three-day-old boiled okra. That would be a plot twist.
And it concludes with Lady Dragon ordering a Rabbit and a shit ton of AA batteries on Amazon and settling into a comfy life with more cats and cognac, less testosterone.
I would watch that series. Or read that book. Without my coffee table having to look over its shoulder.
And yes, I also attempted to read “A Discovery of Witches” awhile back and shoved it into the mouth of the library return bin. With malice.
Discovery of Witches. Didn’t like it. 👎🏼
📺 Watched countless streaming episodes of “The Office,” commercials and all, through one eye while under the influence of codeine cough syrup and abject misery, slept through most of them but that’s okay because I know most of them by heart and don’t judge me because that is the only happy place in the world since Neflix ripped Schitt’s Creek from our still-beating hearts and “The Office” is visual Xanax and don’t I deserve this one, small joy in my life?
Don’t I?
Liked it: 👍🏼
📱Started reading the latest Louisa Morgan novel on Kindle, “The Ghosts of Beatrice Bird,”  and hoping it doesn’t evolve into another bullshit, sad, trite, “At first they loathed each other and, yadda yadda yadda, discovered they were madly in love” romance story! 👹
Don’t do it, Louisa, don’t do it! You are one of my favorite authors! Don’t make me shove my Kindle in the library return slot!
(And also, yes, I also watched serial episodes of “Seinfeld” through one eye when Comedy Central was being too much of a whore to run “The Office” back to back. Bonus points for you if you got why I mentioned Seinfeld.)
New Louisa Morgan novel: a tentative 👍🏼 so far.
⌨️ Wrote a fan-girl email to author Catherine Raven, gushing over her book, “Fox and I” because that is about as divine as writing gets, and my appreciation for her writing is only slightly greater than my jealousy. Brava, Catherine, Brava. 👍🏼
Odds and ends:
🥣 Beyond shoving books into the library return bin (my only outing in 7 – count ‘em 7 – days) I managed to make quickie soup yesterday, and create the quarterly newsletter for Horseplay over a span of three days (it’s only one page, double-sided, with large print, and as a former newspaper editor, I should have been abled to fart that much in two minutes) and sometimes shower when I suspected that even though I had no ability to smell, I probably smell-smelled, and out of concern for both my cat and husband, I showered. 👍🏼
Other than that – I have managed to do nothing than other than lie around like a gross, tired, hacking, despairing-but-also-cranky elephant seal clinging to the edge of life so as not to topple into the precipice of eternity. Which is a challenge, as flippers don’t have claws.
Summary: Get the vaccine. It’s not worth it.

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