Stuff and decoration

I don’t know about you, but nowadays it takes me at least an hour to leave my home.

First of all, I need to find my glasses, keys, purse, mask and outdoor-clothes, and then I need to do it all again.  By the time I have everything ready, I’ve forgotten what it is I’m going outside for, so I must look for the note I wrote to myself earlier, to remind me of what it is I think I’m doing.  It’s an endless and thankless task which requires a great deal of patience and strength.

Once I’m outside I am disorientated. 

The outside floor needs a different type of foot covering to what I’m used to, and the temperature is changeable. Sometimes there is water in the air which falls onto my head straight on or sideways in, and often there are others in the outside too.  Sometimes I try to communicate with them, but they can’t hear me through my mask, so I gesture with my hands and eyes instead.  I grunt and point wildly at the goods I want to purchase in the shops, and I have difficulties with money and numbers. 

I’ve always had trouble with numbers and like many young girls, I found maths at school challenging.  In particular, I found the types of problems we had to solve a little distracting, especially the ones that looked like this:

If John has 2 apples and Jane has 8 apples, how many apples do they have altogether?

I was always too busy wondering who John and Jane were to worry about how many apples they had.  Where had they come from and why did they want so much fruit?  Were they baking a cake, or did they want the apples as weapons and why didn’t they want any bananas?  Sometimes I would want to warn Jane that by sharing her apples she would be complicit in the patriarchal oppression of all women, and that she would be better off keeping her own.  In fact, I wondered if his name really was John and if he was hiding one or two apples in a basket, boat or bathtub later on in the textbook?  How many apples they had together was the least interesting question you could ask about them, but that didn’t help me at all in the maths examinations. 

Another person having difficulties with numbers this week was the current President of the United States, and the IRS is still waiting for him to pay up that bill.  He and his current wife claimed they had the virus, but most of the world disbelieve them.  Did they lie to get out of the Biden debates, questions about the pandemic or to stop Pence gaining in popularity?  Or did they do it to distract from the leaked tapes of Melania asking, “who gives a fuck about Christmas stuff and decoration?”

Thank you Melania, thank you. 

I’ve been using her words all week as an antidote against all the things I hate and worry about. It’s wonderful and you should try it and I’ll show you how it works:

Who gives a fuck about corona stuff and decoration?

Who gives a fuck about zoom fatigue stuff and decoration?

Who gives a fuck about work stuff and decoration?

Who gives a fuck about climate stuff and decoration?

It’s hard to accept that Melania and her husband are just Homo Sapiens, like us. 

Not long ago they were both microscopic unfertilised eggs in the bodies of other adult females, and then one tiny sperm found each of them.  If those sperms had been tired that day, the Trumps would have missed out on existence and this would be a paragraph about the migration patterns of Monarch Butterflies instead. 

I think about eggs a lot.

Once I was an egg in my mother’s womb, and she was an egg in her mother’s womb.

And she was an egg in her mother’s womb.

And she was an egg in her mother’s womb.

All the way back until there were so few of us that you, me and the Trumps were the same egg in the same woman’s womb.  It’s not that we’re interconnected or loosely related, we’re versions of the same.  We are symmetrical Mandelbrot’s, enticing, well-formed fractals, reproducing themselves into infinity, and then we’ll start again.

Here in Ireland we had our own trouble with numbers this week too. 

Our government couldn’t decide which level to place the population on, so they leaked some documents to gage public opinion and finally decided on Level Three.  It’s like playing a game of poker with an untrustworthy drunk who’s been on acid all afternoon, and we’ll see the results of this strategy in 10 – 14 days.

If school A have 100 pupils with 1 virus, and school B have 200 pupils with 2 viruses how many deaths will it take before the politicians accept that there’s a contagious disease in our society that we have absolutely no control over, because we chose not to resource the health, education, and housing sectors? 

In addition to thinking about eggs and numbers and the innate corruption of the politicians in power, I’ve also been thinking about the Neanderthals.  They were the last species of humanoid to become extinct of course, so I’ve been wondering what the mood was in the camp on those last evenings. Were they sad and wistful and wondering what went wrong?  Were they hopeful that our species, at least, would do great things with our language abilities and tools?  Were they dreaming of the Uffizi Gallery, the moon landing and the possibilities of heart transplants?  Or did they simply think, “who gives a fuck about the future of Homo Sapiens stuff and decoration?”

I guess we’ll never know.