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I couldn't sleep very well last night. There were a few different reasons. Our rabbit, Puckles, has this thing where he'll suddenly run into a sneezing jag in the middle of the night. Sometimes, it wakes me up and I really worry about him. I've looked the symptom up on a website and found that it might be a respiratory infection. We've already taken him to the vet, who prescribed a course of antibiotics that didn't seem to do much beyond make him lose his appetite. So, we had to feed him this kind of apple and kale slurry that he really hated. It was an awful two weeks. Anyway, it didn't work and I'm reluctant to take him to the vet again -- we don't really have $300 at the moment. So, we just have to deal with it.
Ryan can sometimes snore, too, and when we're cuddling in bed it's right by my ear. Also, he's a goddamned furnace; it's easy to overheat. Also also, I got to thinking about the job hunt and Coursera, and how close I came to actually getting that job. My brain just started to ruminate and I couldn't stop it.
So, I got up and listened to the Chernobyl podcast. We watched the first episode yesterday, and boy howdy was it a doozy. The host of the podcast (Peter Sagal of "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me"!!) said that it felt like a horror movie, where characters were being stalked by a killer that only we could see -- and that really hits the nail on the head. With the benefit of hindsight we see that each person who goes into the reactor core, or who even just touches the door, picks up the graphite from the control rods that have been blown outside, or lingers in the radioactive ash falling down half a kilometer away -- all of them are going to be very, very sick soon. It's terrifying, watching the workers at the station and the firefighters dealing with something they have no idea will come with awful consequences.
Another frightening thing about that first episode is the immediacy and totality of the denial. The shift foreman(?), Dyatlov, can't believe that the core has exploded and commands multiple men to their deaths so they can do things that are impossible (like manually inserting control rods that have been blown all over the outside). Even as multiple people come back to him saying that the core is gone, he refuses to believe them. Even the radiation readings -- 3.6 roentgens per hour, which was the highest their dosimeters could go up to -- were used to prop up that denial. Once they got stronger ones, both of them maxed out immediately.
The first episode takes us to the morning after the explosion. Soviet brass in an underground room decide to cut the phones of the station and town nearby to prevent the "spread of misinformation", even as dozens of people are succumbing to acute radiation sickness all around them. Meanwhile, everyone in Pripiyat is going about their business like it's just an ordinary day. As a child walks to school, a bird falls from the sky and dies on the sidewalk behind him.
It's intense, powerful stuff that scratches the itch of the kind of environmental horror I crave. I think I might have just found my new obsession.
Anyway, this week I'm going to try to work on being a bit more consistently productive. I've plotted out a schedule for the first few days but I'm already like, way behind. :) That's fine; it's a good data point about how I actually roll. It turns out, left to my own devices, I'm generally not ready to get into it until about 9 or 10 AM.
Ryan can sometimes snore, too, and when we're cuddling in bed it's right by my ear. Also, he's a goddamned furnace; it's easy to overheat. Also also, I got to thinking about the job hunt and Coursera, and how close I came to actually getting that job. My brain just started to ruminate and I couldn't stop it.
So, I got up and listened to the Chernobyl podcast. We watched the first episode yesterday, and boy howdy was it a doozy. The host of the podcast (Peter Sagal of "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me"!!) said that it felt like a horror movie, where characters were being stalked by a killer that only we could see -- and that really hits the nail on the head. With the benefit of hindsight we see that each person who goes into the reactor core, or who even just touches the door, picks up the graphite from the control rods that have been blown outside, or lingers in the radioactive ash falling down half a kilometer away -- all of them are going to be very, very sick soon. It's terrifying, watching the workers at the station and the firefighters dealing with something they have no idea will come with awful consequences.
Another frightening thing about that first episode is the immediacy and totality of the denial. The shift foreman(?), Dyatlov, can't believe that the core has exploded and commands multiple men to their deaths so they can do things that are impossible (like manually inserting control rods that have been blown all over the outside). Even as multiple people come back to him saying that the core is gone, he refuses to believe them. Even the radiation readings -- 3.6 roentgens per hour, which was the highest their dosimeters could go up to -- were used to prop up that denial. Once they got stronger ones, both of them maxed out immediately.
The first episode takes us to the morning after the explosion. Soviet brass in an underground room decide to cut the phones of the station and town nearby to prevent the "spread of misinformation", even as dozens of people are succumbing to acute radiation sickness all around them. Meanwhile, everyone in Pripiyat is going about their business like it's just an ordinary day. As a child walks to school, a bird falls from the sky and dies on the sidewalk behind him.
It's intense, powerful stuff that scratches the itch of the kind of environmental horror I crave. I think I might have just found my new obsession.
Anyway, this week I'm going to try to work on being a bit more consistently productive. I've plotted out a schedule for the first few days but I'm already like, way behind. :) That's fine; it's a good data point about how I actually roll. It turns out, left to my own devices, I'm generally not ready to get into it until about 9 or 10 AM.
