While I was out..

Hello, covid, my old friend

I’ve always joked that I’m a “limpy gazelle” when it comes to immunity. It feels like as soon as someone says “Oh did you hear Sean got strep throat?” my body thinks, “that sounds like a good idea” and somehow instantly contracts strep out of thin air.

I even had scarlet fever as a child! Scarlet fever! The olde timey one from The Velveteen Rabbit that nobody else has gotten since the days of polio and smallpox!

Wait, that’s not he point at all. The point is I have been sick, so we’ve missed a newsletter and might be late on the next one.

In the meantime, I thought I’d share this video I woke up to Youtube autoplaying the other day. I often get served ads for luxury cars in Spanish, professional contractor equipment or Chroh’s disease medicine and think, “My god, Google, I’ve given you access to absolutely everything and you still don’t know me!”

But this was a good call, it gets at a lot of the stuff I like to bring up about control and agency, but expressed by a multi Teen Choice Award winning author and professional YouTuber.

And if that intro didn’t take us far enough down Tangent Road for you, here’s a bit more brain fog stream of consciousness.

My introduction to John Green (the guy in the video) was Crash Course History. I’m pretty sure this series is aimed at high school, or maybe even middle school kids, but 30-something me discovered it one of the many other times I was sick in bed. And it got me actually interested in the subject of History.

I later found out John Green was the author of The Fault in Our Stars… but was originally famous for just being on YouTube with his brother Hank since the old JustinTV days. He’s got no background in History or any other qualifications to be doing this! He just had an unrelated platform, wanted to share the information and knew who to ask to get it (his high school History teacher). His stuff is remarkably well researched and nuanced for 10 minute, half animated videos with multiple running gags.

Which, to circle all the way back around, I was thinking about the other day when a very sweet comedian called me “my Dr Fauci” 😂

On paper, I am just as bad as any hydroxychloroquine-pushing TikTokker - I have absolutely no medical or biology qualifications, I just wanted to keep the people I care about safe and had an audience who trusted me on completely unrelated matters and transferred that trust over to pandemic-y stuff.

And this is kind of the same thing - I have no MBA, no degree in psychology or sociology. But I appreciate your faith that what I am sharing is as accurate, researched, potentially useful and not metaphorical horse dewormer!

I hope I have been a John Green in that sense.

We’ll get back on schedule within the next two weeks - see you then!

A few other random links I watched (at least 10 minutes of before falling asleep)

Taskmaster - The Sausage Arena I don’t think I’ve ever laughed as hard at anything as I did this episode of Taskmaster, and the Sausage Arena was the best part. Full disclosure: it’s funny like farts and people falling down, not like Attell or Kashian or what I hope y’all are aspiring to.
Crazy collective nouns like “a murder of crows” and a “gaggle of geese” were completely made up by this one dude in the 1400s. Though I would like “a business of ferrets” to come into usage because it’s so incongruent.
People still believe in the Loch Ness Monster, which is kind of sweet
The whole “Lilith was Adam’s first wife” thing… not so much. My teenage festival going years were based on a lie!