[AKN #122] I got sick and it sucked quite a bit
Sup homies?
So bad news. I have long flu.
More accurately, I got flu and then a sinus infection in succession.
But I prefer to say long flu because it rolls off the tongue and makes me sound like more of a victim.
And as you know, I love casting myself as the victim.
Which brings me to my next point.
Let’s come right out and say it…
This is a brutal outcome for someone who very responsibly got the flu shot this year.
Now, scientists will tell you that I was simply on the wrong side of chance.
Getting the flu was a “game of probabilities” and I was “unlucky.”
They are, of course, correct.
But that doesn’t stop me from emotionally feeling like its total bullshit.
In fact, my caveman brain is demanding I stop writing right now and make cave drawings about how we should prosecute Fauci.
That feeling comes from the fact that we don’t naturally think probabilistically.
Our minds are wired to think in deterministic terms.
So my initial reaction follows the logic:
I know I got the flu shot and then I had a bad go if it with the flu. Therefore, the flu shot was pointless this year.
Of course, this logic is flawed.
I cannot determine if the flu shot was unnecessary without knowing what the reality would have looked like if I didn’t get the flu shot.
Presumably it would have been worse! Maybe that version of me gets hospitalized...
But we don’t know that for certain because we can’t rerun the experiment.
Sample size = 1.
I can’t travel into the parallel universe where I didn’t get the flu shot. I’m not America Chavez in “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness”…but if I was Ms. Chavez, I would hop into the parallel universe where my movie didn’t exist. That would be the most ideal outcome for both the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the general Universe Universe at large. Cause Dear God was that movie a fucking dumpster fire.
So in lieu of having the ability to warp space time, I instead look to analyses to tell me how effective the flu shot was.
Those analyses tell me “the flu vaccine had a 49% efficacy rate in Chile.” Which I think is good?
I don’t know. I don’t have a good intuition for what efficacy rate even means. But sounds like some people didn’t get hospitalized because they got the flu shot while others got hospitalized regardless of what they did.
I would much rather have cause and effect with 100% certainty. Much easier to understand.
But rarely are you able to perform an action and guarantee yourself a result…unless you decide to watch “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery”, in which case I can guarantee you that you are going to want to spoon your eyes out after wasting 139 minutes watching a tired critique of the tech industry. We haven’t seen a lazy satire where Hollywood brings out all of its stars to perform in a story that validates its insular worldview and jerks itself off for over 2 hours since “Don’t Look Up.”
Anyway.
Like I was saying, getting sick is a hard pill to swallow. Literally. Like your boy is on a course of antibiotics right now to kill the bad bacteria taking up residence in my sinus cavity.
Evicting billions of those bitches with my anti-bees as we speak. Z-Pack gang, for life!
Unfortunately, billions of good bacteria have also been vanquished. Yep, we lost a lot of good men in the war on sinusitis. And apparently some of them were serving critical functions like “digesting my food.” Good Lord is my tummy in knots…which feels awful, sure, but not quite as awful as walking into Whole Foods and buying probiotics.
Like let me paint the picture for you.
I’m in Whole Foods. A profoundly frustrating place to spend any amount of time because everything is $8 more than it should be and they actively sell “The Modern Guide To Crystal Healing.”
It takes a bit, but I finally find the speciality refrigerator which stores all the probiotics. Yes. It has it’s own refrigerator…
Now I don’t know who is in charge of marketing, but let me tell you, every probiotics company has decided that the ONLY metric that matters to the consumer is total number of bacteria in the bottle.
THIS IS A TOTALLY MEANINGLESS STATISTIC TO ME.
Why don’t you just write “this bottle will make you poop good” or something in plain fucking English?
So I’m standing there reading completely nonsensical phrases like “50 billion bacteria inside each bottle!”
Like bitch, how you know that? Did you count?
I thought about drinking it right there and going straight to the return desk and saying “excuse me there were only 40 billion Lactobacillus in the bottle I drank. I would like a refund.”
That will show the 16-year old cashier who only works this job because his parents are trying to instill a strong blue collar work ethic in their son.
I’m joking of course. I raised zero ruckus.
Instead I sheepishly paid $36 dollars for 300 billion bacteria and rationalized it by saying “well actually $12x10^-11 per bacteria is a total steal…at bare minimum it was a way better deal than my new book, Crystals for Beginners.”
Now this is usually the point of the newsletter where I say “On to the newsletter!” and we go through a few fun links.
But I’m not going to do that today. Just gonna sign it off now and say Happy New Years to all you homies.
CLOSING TIME
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Disclaimer: Opinions expressed are strictly my own. Who else’s would they be?
New Year, Same Us <3
K.Rapp