On The Brink of Hype

I caught a pretty nasty flu this week, which meant a round of feverish cough-ridden, snot-dribbling nights followed by drowsy mornings nursing a splitting headache, with occasional glimpses of clear sinuses mid-afternoon before it all began anew, like a tape loop of a bad rhythm section.

Fortunately, it wasn’t COVID. Unfortunately, it came about before I managed to schedule this year’s flu vaccine, so that’s planning for you.

Unable to focus on much of anything, I lay on my bed and upgraded all my Fedora installs to version 39 (therapeutic sysadmining is the perfect thing for when you’re constantly dozing off, since as long as you ssh in and use tmux you can pick up on it an hour later when you blink awake), watched the Portuguese government totter off into oblivion as if it were a fever dream¹, ploughed through a couple thousand pages of various books, and helped the virus kill off a few more brain cells by slumming through weird corners of Reddit like an intoxicated racoon.

A few days later, nothing of consequence appears to have broken–but, inexplicably, there are emacs dotfiles in all my machines and I have gained the ability to use magit. At least I had evil-mode to keep me honest until the fever broke.

It will take a few more days to get back to normal (and a week or so before my voice loses its newfound gravelly edge), but this year I don’t intend to waste them trudging through Web Summit–hype and Ibuprofen don’t mix, and I’d rather try to enjoy some sunlight in quieter parts of town.

I cannot help but think, however, that this fever was timely and very much in line with the whole year so far.