Boring.

 I'm ready for Christmas to be over.

Yes, I know it's August.

My aunt and grandma love to play the Hallmark channel...every...waking...moment... And it's been that way for over a year now. I spend a lot of my day at my grandma's house if I don't have to go out, which means that, even though I'm doing other things and not watching the TV, I'm consuming Hallmark channel for many hours a day. Every day. Over and over and over again.

Because you see all the same movies. Over and over and over again.

Everyone who watches/has watched/has heard of the Hallmark channel knows this, though. For every one movie, there's 20 that have the same female lead. 50 of them have the same storyline. All of them have the same male lead.

Oh...wait a second. They don't. Sorry. I just have a hard time telling the difference between the men. 

Except for Niall Matter when he grew that...thing on his face.

Christmas is Hallmark's prime money-making time, so they'll do anything they can to extend it as long as they can. It's a lot easier to write Christmas romances than it is to write a romance every other day of the year. Having their meet cute on Christmas practically writes itself!

Or, rather, someone wrote it once, and 99% of Hallmark's movies use it with different faces, different names, and a twist. Gasp, he's the one who loves Christmas and she's the work-a-holic? Gasp, they were high school sweethearts but they BROKE UP?! Gasp, look at all the cheeky references to this other classic piece of media everyone knows about even if they haven't seen the movie/read the book/followed the media drama. Oh my goodness, he's secretly a prince?! What's a small-town girl to do?! She is not worthy!

My mother walked into the room and said "It's like they recycle the same storyline. It's another royal family and the commoner they fall in love with."

It made me think of the fanfiction tropes I used to love so much... The royal and the peasant, the brooding dark bad boy who's actually a sweetheart, lovers who got separated for years only to meet again and rekindle their romance. The kind of fanfiction tropes that everyone loves so much that they become overused. They go from frequent to annoying to infuriating to brain melting.

Fandoms, especially hordes of raving, uncreative fans can run the cute tropes into the ground by oversaturating the blogs and the fanfiction websites and the chat rooms with the same thing over and over and over again.

Hallmark is its own fandom and it's running any good things it had going for it into the ground.

And don't even get me started on Hallmark Movies & Mysteries. 

God, it's no wonder I've gotten 20% stupider over the past year.

"Please to be stopping with the breaking bones..."

 The fact that my fiancée has to ask this of me, even in jest, is not a good sign.

I'm clumsy. That's just a fact of life for me. Leaning back in my chair sends me sprawling head-first into my bookshelf. Practicing Tae Kwon Do in too-small of a space leaves me with broken toes, too insignificant to do anything about other than limp for a while. 

I quit Tae Kwon Do after a couple of years, partially because of my poor feet.

Kicking a wall during a temper tantrum led to a significant broken toe that landed me in a boot for a while. Putting on my socks while standing up led to me breaking my knee in three places. 

The car accident that caused my disc protrusion wasn't my fault - a truck rear-ended my tiny Taurus - but still.

And now, my most recent injury...after a week of hard physical labor, from picking up tables and carrying them over my head out of a desire to please not make that awful dragging noise on the floor again to just using the Rug Doctor a little too aggressively, I sprained my thumb.

And then went rafting at midnight under Cumberland Falls.

Look, it's still not my fault. I was getting out of the raft just fine, thank you, except that while I was halfway out, the raft started floating down the river.

I lost my balance and caught myself by shoving my sprained hand a few inches deep into the densely packed sand of the riverbank. I was wearing my brace, and thank goodness for it, because if I hadn't been, I probably would have done a worse number on myself.

I have an avulsion fracture in my thumb now. 

Awaiting a call from a specialist.

"Me no speak Celtic...no can do, miss."

 "What's he mean, 'Celtic'?"

"Welsh. You sound welsh." 👀

This is an oddly specific moment in a specific episode of Doctor Who. An episode I haven't seen for years, I might add. I hadn't been on ADHD medication at the time, so most of the episode's plot escapes me. I remember it was "the Pompeii episode" with the Tenth Doctor and Donna, and that's about it.

The context:
The TARDIS has programming that affects how its passengers perceive written and spoken word. Donna notices a written sign and complains that it's in English, to which the Doctor explains that because of the TARDIS, she's actually reading in and speaking Latin. She knows a little bit of Latin, so she tries to say the Latin phrase she knows to a random street vendor. 

I assume what happened is whatever she said in Latin was translated to English, because the street vendor responded, "Uhhh...me no speak Celtic...no can do, miss." 

Why am I remembering this moment? Well, for the past two weeks, we've been studying ancient Rome in my World Civ class. During the lecture last week, my professor said something that triggered this little memory about Celtics being one of the several peoples that Romans called 'barbarians'. 

You know where my priorities must lie, because my first thought was not, "Oh, okay, let's write that down in my class notes." No no. My first thought was, "Oh, THAT'S why the Doctor said that so quickly to Donna! That guy was calling her a barbarian and Donna Noble would NOT have taken that lightly!"

Mhm. 

I swear I am a good student.

Even if it doesn't seem like it.

I'm even receiving the Student Success award from my college next week, I'm such a good student.

We just won't tell my teacher that I was thinking about Doctor Who instead of her very engaging lecture in class last week.

COVID has screwed me up

 I caught COVID just after Christmas, and tested positive on the first of January. Great way to start out the year, right? I felt decent on that first day, even drove home from urgent care singing along to pop punk in my car. Nothing unusual. 

And then I woke up on the 11th and realized classes started on the 10th. 

Obviously, a lot happened during those ten days, but I don't actually remember a lot of it. I remember being miserable. I remember changing my mom's bedsheets for her and complaining that she was going to get me even sicker (she also had COVID). I remember that I survived on NyQuil and cough drops. I remember being so emotionally unstable that I thought my grandmother was mad at me and cried for a half an hour (she wasn't mad at me). 

I was so delirious I forgot to order my textbooks for this semester, ordered them late, and had to email my teachers to let them know I couldn't actually do my homework for the first week of classes...or like...come to class... I actually fell asleep in my favorite teacher's class (World Civ, which is unlike me, because hi I'm a history major) because I took NyQuil and That Was A Mistake.

You know Puffs Plus tissues? They're the really soft tissues infused with lotion. They're supposed to be good for your nose, so you don't just rub it raw when you have a cold. Well, when I woke up, I found three empty boxes of those tissues, a half empty one next to my bed, and a terrible rash under my nose where I've been blowing and blowing and rubbing and rubbing. So now I'm slathering my face in petroleum jelly and cocoa butter to try and alleviate that pain, because apparently even the gentlest of lotions make friction burns sting like crazy.

Also, I've been blowing my nose so much that I just have a constant nosebleed. Not my usual recurring nosebleed, no. It's just constantly bleeding. 

My sense of taste hasn't come back yet, either, not completely. 

COVID swept through more than half of my family of 10, and none of us had the same symptoms.

• My cousin Johnny has muscle and nerve problems, and that's mainly the type of symptoms he suffered, aside from the tell-tale cough and fever. 
• My mom has all of the health problems, and she experienced all of the symptoms listed on the sheets you fill out at the doctor's offices. 
• Johnny says his mother, who has vision problems, experienced double vision for a solid week when she caught it. 
• My uncle, who is diabetic, ended up in the hospital with his blood sugar so high they put him in the ICU. 
• I have had sinus issues my entire life. All of my symptoms were from the shoulders up. And I had every last one, right down to the "trouble assessing". I even had an ear infection so bad that my ears still hurt, even though I finished the antibiotic weeks ago.
• My grandmother had cancer. She recently went through a rough round of chemotherapy before her surgery to actually remove the cancer. She caught COVID, too...but she doesn't have any base health issues, so she coughed for like four days and then she was fine.
• My great-great aunt, 84 years old, who hardly ever gets sick and is healthier than anyone else in my family, was around all of us when we were infected-but-not-yet-showing-symptoms, and around my grandmother as she was sick...and she just didn't get sick at all. Nothing. She's fine.
• Johnny's little sister, Chloe, didn't come out of her room for almost three weeks after he got sick unless everyone else was already locked in their rooms for the night. Smart girl, because my aunt and uncle followed along on the Sick Train. She's a master of evasion. Didn't get sick at all.

This disease is so weird and terrifying. It attaches itself to your base health problems and cranks them up to 10. If it's a dangerous health problem, like diabetes, it's really easy to wind up in the hospital (especially if you don't get your vaccine, you paranoid maniac). If you don't know you have a health problem that COVID can drag up to the surface, you're in for a nasty surprise. It might even trigger some chronic health issues you weren't experiencing before and leave you to deal with it for the rest of your life. 

I'm still coughing. You know how it goes - when you get sick and you have a bad cough, it never wants to go away. I've held onto coughs for months after getting well again. It mostly is bad when it's cold outside...and unfortunately it's been frigid. I inhale and it feels like someone's stabbed me through the lungs with an icicle. It's a mess.

I still have this morbid curiosity about COVID and the ways it affects different people. I'm not even a scientist or a doctor, nor do I want to go into those fields...but I can kind of see why someone would. 

It's late. 2 am. My sleep schedule has been destroyed and I really need to fix it. I blame that on COVID, too...because for a while after getting my mind back, I was just sleeping all day. So now I go to take a sleeping pill, listen to Epona's song so that I can get it Out Of My Head, and try to sleep.