Linguist Geoff Nunberg says it’s common for citizens of democracies to express concerns about the government. But the term “deep state” refers to something more nefarious – and conspiratorial.
There’s this big influenza epidemic this year. This has been the worst flu season in like 8 years I believe and the ER rooms have been flooded with patients.
But I don’t have the flu.
I have acid reflux and if you’re not familiar, its when your belly gets bloated, you hiccup nonstop and other symptoms like chest pain and what not. How it comes about, there are a variety of reasons as to why mostly with if you eat too much greasy food, eaten something different from your normal diet, etc. Its been a week I’ve had it and the hiccups and bloating have gone down immensely but that chest pain is still there and very uncomfortable. People keep telling me to go to the hospital but I hate going for:
Unhelpful
Long wait
Expensive
And that’s exactly what I got from it. I waited 4 hours to receive only a max of 10 minutes of actual face to face interaction with a doctor, a trash doctor, a higher dosage of the medicine I am currently taking, and a $100 copay bill.
I could’ve stayed home and suffered for all of this
[image id: tweet posted on january 19, 2022 by @/rianaelyse that reads:
“while i am grateful for the tests, i was unaware that it was 4 per household. as a family researcher, this racially disproportionate policy will lead household dense families (often of color) to make tough + risky decisions other won’t, especially as essential workers.”
For the past year and a half I’ve fixated on this feeling that no one can truly know anything about this time. My family and friends have never visited. If they did, their visit would be a vacation, revealing very little about my grind every day and my solitude. My experience is solitude, more than anything else. I’m alone all the time. I’ve developed many habits to accommodate myself always being with myself. The same country, town, apartment, every place would change completely if I brought people from elsewhere into them. My students can’t know much, for the inverse reason. They don’t know anything about the place where I came from. I can only convey so much. The thinking behind the choices I make in lesson plans, methods, references, jokes, clothing must be so shadowy to them. Something something Georgia peaches Martin Luther King Trump? When they ask why I’m here desperate feelings of immobility, lack of options in a rural hometown, student loan debt, nagging desire and instinct get watered down into “I always knew I wanted to live outside of the U.S. after college.”
Now I feel sad every day for everything no one else will ever know and I will never know either, because I forget everything and so little in the future will bear any relation to the present. Even now it feels like I am nowhere. I’ve always felt this way on trains here but the feeling is overflowing into other places now. On trains, you miss all the proper cities and see only unmarked places, just fields, empty construction sites, horizons. The stations at each stop are nowhere, too. They have broken windows and analog clocks. One of my clearest memories is of the time when it snowed two feet over a weekend in October, when Julia and I waited for a train to Veliko Tarnovo that never came. It was stuck in snow on the tracks, we guessed. No one could tell us anything about it even at the information desk. In the nowhere inside the station we bought hot chocolates from the coffee machines. There were no lights on. The light from outside was cool and white, reflected by the white snow and white lace curtains on the windows. We waited for about forty-five minutes.
As I am sad I also feel that it’s potentially annoying to write about the sadness of being the exclusive bearer of some knowledge and/or being funded by a grant to live abroad for two years
