Had no idea why. Woke up tired, felt listless and unmotivated the entire day. Mrs. Fungus decided she wanted fajitas, so I took her to Reuben's, and I really didn't want anything. Skipped the usual nachos for an appetizer and had a quesadilla, and ate about half of it; had maybe two fajitas before I filled up.
Flopped around the rest of the day; mostly I played WoW. Nibbled on a few things here and there but otherwise ate very little. Finally, I gave up and went to bed when Mrs. Fungus did, and took half a Xanax to quell the sensation of not being able to breathe.
Here's the thing: when you're sitting there breathing the way you always do, and you're not gasping for air or panting or anything but just doing the normal slow respiration you do when you're at rest--if you feel like you can't breathe it is a symptom of anxiety. If you really aren't getting enough oxygen you will breathe faster and deeper; if there is something wrong with your lungs such that you actually need more air moving through them, that will happen automatically. But when you're breathing nice and slow, and not very deeply--about like you would if you were falling asleep, maybe--you are not actually short of breath.
It's anxiety. My earliest anxiety attacks were like that: I'd be laying in my Dad's bed watching cartoons on his TV on Saturday morning, and had a sensation of discomfort in my chest. Felt like I needed to yawn. So I'd yawn, and it wouldn't go away, and then after a bit the show would catch my attention and I'd forget about it. After being diagnosed, I recognized it for what it was.
I was just "blah" enough that I didn't take the hint earlier, but when it came time for my pills I figured, Oh. Might as well take half of one of these, too, and did so, and hit the hay.
Half an hour later I was wide awake and hungry.
Anxiety. Of course. Half a tablet of Xanax relieved it just enough that I got hungry, which woke me up; and in fact I had to take another half-tab in order to get to sleep, because now I was experiencing the full-on heart-pounding and mind-racing symptoms I've come to expect from a typical anxiety attack.
So: next time I feel listless and have no appetite--
But the result of all this is that today, naturally, I am feeling logy and sleepy, because while Xanax works wonders for acute symptoms, it also has a strong sedating side-effect. *sigh*
* * *
It's always amusing whene anti-gun people try to talk about the technical details of guns, and get them completely wrong. No, an AR-15 does not fire a .50 caliber bullet. As awesome as that would be.
* * *
"Why shouldn't we allow you to have a bazooka or drive a tank down the street?" Asked Robert Francis "Beto" O'Rourke. His intention was to move to reducto ad absurdum because of course the government would never allow that, right? So that means the government should also be able to ban "military-style assault weapons".
Where it falls down, of course, is in the question of practicality.
Personally, I'm all for private ownership of whatever sort of weapons a person can afford to own. If you want an F-16 armed with Sidewinder missiles, why not? Or an A-10 with a fully-stocked ammo bin? Bazookas, grenade launchers, machine guns, tanks, cannons--whatever.
In practice, of course, very few people can afford large weapons. But there is no reason--other than government's desire to have a monopoly on force--for law-abiding citizens not to be able to own machine guns or whatever they want.
People with the right kinds of firearm licenses can own grenade launchers etc right now, of course, but I'd like us to return to the days when you could walk into a gun store and buy a machine gun and walk out of there with it the same day. Shall not be infringed. That's the right which is (supposedly) guaranteed to us by the Second Amendment.
* * *
It is very difficult to amend the Constitution, by design, which is why I also am not worried about this. 24% is one-quarter of the population, which isn't near enough support for banning guns to make the requisite amendment happen.
* * *
"If the mainstream media were doing its job, Rush Limbaugh wouldn't have one." He wouldn't be necessary.
"If the mainstream media were doing its job, Donald Trump would not be president." Again, he wouldn't be necessary.
It's important to remember that President Trump is not a cause but a symptom. We have President Trump because the Republican party was not doing the job its constituency elected it to do. The GOP consistently worked against the interests of its voters, always promising it would do what they want but then finding excuses not to, because what the GOP leadership wanted was not what its voters wanted. In many cases it was the exact opposite. Example: TEA Parties. Example: the repeal of ObamaCare.
* * *
They're a bunch of leftists; what do you expect? People on Mackinac Island crying about Vice-President Pence traveling in a motorcade on an otherwise "motor-vehicle-free" island.
Motor vehicles are banned on Mackinac Island, except for:
Police carsIn other words, the only people who can't drive cars on the island are, pretty much, civilians.
Ambulances
Fire department vehicles
Snowmobiles (in winter)
Construction equipment
Service equipment
So, yeah--typical anti-Republican outrage. A fiver says that if Hillary had done the same thing during her campaign there wouldn't have been so much as a peep about it from these shitheads.
* * *
I really don't care about this issue. You'd think I'd have an opinion, but I don't. I do agree that when speaking English it makes more sense to go with given name and then patronymic (or family name) but I can usually tell a Japanese person's given name from his family name and don't really give a poot about the order.
...though I will admit it seems pretentious to me, to give the family name first, for some reason. As if the person talking is smugly asserting his superior knowledge of Japanese culture.
Oh well.
* * *
178-year-old travel company Thomas Cook abruptly goes belly-up and some 600,000 travelers are stranded as a result.
Wow.
* * *
This is why I don't believe it when the eco-doomsayers say we only have twelve years to save Earth. They tend to be wrong. Like, every time.
Related: Graphic sums up how much plastic in the ocean came from the United States. It then further shows us how vanishingly small the percentage is that is the result of Americans' use of plastic straws.
0.004%.
While at the zoo last Thursday, I had occasion to use a paper straw. It was...inefficient.
* * *
This is why "racist" has become devoid of meaning. Except as a leftist dog whistle.
* * *
This is really long but I found myself reading all of it. I don't know how much of it to believe--if any of it--but it certainly makes for compelling reading.
It talks about the causes of World War Two, and what actions the Allies took that led to the war being shaped the way it was. It further discusses how historians who tried to explore these alternate explanations have not been merely discredited, but erased from the discussion, almost entirely. The questions they asked remain unanswered.
* * *
I have been saying this for rather a long time.
The universe is a gigantic multidimensional scuplture. Time is one of those dimensions.
Because our bodies are chemical in nature--because the processes that enable experience and cogitation are sequential--we necessarily experience this universe as a series of three-dimensional "frames". Time does not pass, any more than length or breadth or depth do. We're just made to function this way, to experience the universe in this fashion.
The only way for the human soul to experience the universe is this way; the bodies that allow us to connect to the terrestrial planee are the source of this limitation. Even though the bodies themselves are actually stretched across both time and space, like "long, pink worms" as Heinlein said in his short story "Life-Line". But, again, we experience them only as three-dimensional slices.
Our sense of time is limited to recollection--again, by design.
* * *
We have people coming today to--finally!--clean 54 years' worth of dust rhinoceri out of the ductwork. With the spare room emptied of crap, all vents in the house are at last fully accessible. It's about time.
* * *
But once they leave, I may collapse. We'll see.