I might as well make this a seven day streak, right? Maybe longer, but a week is an obvious goal to set. I was dreading the last post but was pleasantly surprised when it worked out okay.
As an update to that: I did call today and ask for an antidepressant. Reading the information about the drug escitalopram made me anxious: I’d have to wait about a week to feel any positive effects from the drug? Well shit. Why did I wait so long to give it a shot? Once again when your mood is shit and all you’re picking up from the world are bad vibes, you want relatively instant relief. It’s the impatience in me again; upon deciding on a course of action I hit it hard. Deciding to try an antidepressant and having to wait to even see how it’ll play out is terrible. Patience though. Everything worthwhile takes patients. But I do hate waiting.
And if anyone has any experience with escitalopram feel free to let me know what I’m getting myself into. I’m terrified I’ll lose my mind or something.
Yesterday my throat felt irritated. Swollen in a way. This is unusual when I get sick. My usual mode of sickness is this: sore throat leading to aches and a possible fever that develops into snot, phlegm, and coughing. This feels different. I awoke today feeling especially shitty: kinda achy and with my throat even more swollen than yesterday, but still not the painful scratchiness that is typical. I’m trying to play the mental game here — maybe I ache because of rock climbing a few days ago — and fight the idea of being sick in the first place. I’m not giving into it. As for my throat, I did quite a bit of drinking, vaping, and cigarette smoking this weekend. On Sunday in an attempt to escape the house, I ended up at a local park listening to music, writing, and occasionally screaming along to the music. Maybe that’s why my throat feels like shit, because I’ve been abusing it so much.
I’ve been on edge the past few months anyways. People at work are being decimated by sicknesses and there seemed to be two general types making the rounds. One seems to be a flu bug; this took a few coworkers out of service for over a week. The second was a stomach/digestive bug cursing them with diarrhea, vomiting, and a general feeling of impending death. To be honest I’d much prefer the later; I hate week-long diseases and had plenty of it with my two bronchitis cases last year. No, give me the terrible vomiting and shiting and I’ll power through it.
An obvious mention to COVID-19, the dreaded coronavirus, is required here. I’m not really worried about catching it — it still seems rare enough to not worry about — but sometimes I do think about it. I think there was a case in Chicago a few weeks ago, 60 miles away, and this made me feel slightly on edge. As time has passed cases have creeped closer to where I live in Rockford, Illinois, but I’m still not worried about it.
I think the disease has like a 1 or 2% mortality rate, which isn’t trivial, but if I did catch it I’d be happy with my odds. 1 or 2% is a high risk of death in the grand scheme of everyday life. Imagine if you had a 1% chance of dying everyday: that would be terrifying! I’ve also heard that the death rate is higher in kids and the elderly, and I’m comfortably in between those two age groups. While I’m not the healthiest person I do have a beast of an immune system. Somehow I haven’t gotten sick while working around diseased people at UPS for the past two months.
It’s interesting to think that I’m not worried about a 2% chance of death if I did catch coronavirus. It makes sense though. Back in my options trading days I would routinely put thousands of dollars on hail-mary plays that had like a 60% chance of failure. This didn’t both me (until I lost all the money) so a 2% chance of death kinda makes sense to not worry about, at least for me. I don’t think I’m very good with the whole ‘risk management’ thing.
Speaking of stocks and disease, coronavirus fears have totally ruined the market in the past week and half. I think the S&P 500 is down like 15 or 20%: one of the worst weeks since the 2008/2009 meltdown. In fact I think I read somewhere it has been the worst week since that time. And somehow I called the top of the market and didn’t get destroyed by the meltdown. It had been going up for the past three months for no fucking reason at all, so feeling kinda iffy about it all I sold a large chunk of my $SPY ETF holdings and invested in a bunch of inverse funds — if the market goes down these inverse funds go up. It’s a win-win! And nearly as soon as I did this the market tanked. I kept the hedges low so didn’t really come out ahead or anything, but the fact that my account has stayed nearly level during a week-long meltdown is something to note. I did good for once.
Everything Sucks 
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