Swine flu: Conspiracy theory?

I'm not really worried about the swine flu, which is weird, because I keep thinking I'm going to get a blood clot to my brain and have an aneurism and die on the spot, so it's not as though I'm not irrational or think I'm invincible. Maybe it's that when SARS hit, I really did not change my habits at all; I took the subway, went to class, went to work, went to grimy bars and kissed lots of boys. On the lips.

Ooh. How naughty.

Did Purell even exist back then? I don't think so. I don't remember using it. And I survived.

Side note: Do you know what Purell's slogan is? I'll tell you.

"Imagine a Touchable World."

Awesome. Sounds like the name of a George Michael song.

At my friend's work downtown, the company sent out a statement saying you can't have more than five people in a meeting at once. Which means that that they had to conference call people in another board room, just to have a regular meeting. It's kind of ridiculous, but at the same time, it's kind of scary.

To keep myself sane, I tell myself piggy stories. Like when I was in grade school I had a teacher who wore pig clothes, pig accessories, and carried pig accoutrements (like her lunch bag, umbrella, etc). It's a weird sight on its own, but see a woman in all pink piggy items every day in a school that is otherwise a mass of green plaid and it's even stranger. A lot of kids made fun of her. I'd like to say I didn't, but I'd by lying. Come on, pig paraphernalia? You'd have made fun too. That's what twelve-year-olds do. Then one day she told us that the reason she was so obsessed with pigs was because her heart stopped working and she got a pig valve put into her body. And so, a pig saved her life.

I felt like the biggest jerk ever for making fun.

I guess it's not that weird to wear pig clothes when you compare it to having part of a pig inside of your body. I wonder how she feels about pigs right now.

When I played baseball, one of the girls on my team had a pig as a pet. She'd bring him to all the games. He was black and had the shiniest coat ever and walked on a leash.

His name was Pigmalion.

No it wasn't. But that would be an awesome name for a pig, no?

My sister was set to go to Cabo last weekend. I emailed her in a panic to ask her if she was still going to go. She wrote back immediately to say that she was already in Mexico and it was a ghost town at the resort which meant she was living like royalty. (Royalty that's about to get piggy flu, I couldn't help but thinking). She said people were running for their lives to catch the last planes out of Mexico and that they were crazy, that it's the flu not a plague. She finished her email by telling me she thought it was a conspiracy by the US government to take our minds of the recession.

If that's true, I think it's working, though does that mean the people who have died are actors and are laughing. Ha ha ha, those crazy North Americans. They think we died from flu from a pig.

They made a movie about this sort of thought process in the 90s. It was called Wag the Dog, remember?