Thank God, it’s Sunday!

It’s Sunday. Finally. I’m glad this week is over. I had a bit of a fever for the past couple of days and it finally got better on Friday, which I’m pretty happy about. The fever got quite bad at one point and I was nearly packing up to go to the hospital… but then it got less bad, so that’s good. More than that, though, I frankly wasn’t the most productive person this week and it sucks. Today I just wanna ramble about this week and yesterday in particular.

Now, productivity is something that isn’t really all that required for me at the moment, given that I only have one university exam left with plenty of time – for this semester, of course… but I’d still like to publish more reviews and do more things. I frankly have been slacking off lately and the fever didn’t help the matter at all. When Risk of Rain 2’s DLC dropped, I spent a lot of it playing with a friend but due to timezones, we’d start in my evenings, meaning that we’d stop around 4 AM my time. That’s my fault obviously so I’m not complaining… Not at all actually given that I was super excited for this expansion and I finally got to play it, so that’s great. I love the DLC. But when you do that “play until 4 AM” thing once or twice in a row, you seriously screw over your biorhythm – and your sleep schedule. Yup, it was fucked again. Now, I’m writing this post on Saturday the 5th and I didn’t sleep last night as I planned on staying awake to reset my sleep schedule again… So, I don’t actually know if I fixed the sleep schedule. (Remind me to add an edit here.) My point, however, is that it’s very unhealthy for you when you do that, so don’t be like me. Don’t pull an all-nighter followed by staying awake all-day without any naps or whatever… Also, caffeine is bad for you. The energy drinks I had and the amount of Coca Cola and coffee probably aren’t too good for me… But maybe I’ll be back to being a morning person starting… now? I don’t know? I hope so?

Oh, and Saturday was rough. I was ready to go and visit my uncle for his birthday for a few hours when my parents actually informed me that they’d come as well. So, I visited my uncle and my parents were late and that was bad because my uncle and his wife are a bit tricky to deal with, in my opinion. My uncle’s wife or I guess my aunt still uses Facebook – which isn’t bad in itself… but she also follows questionable pages that spread fake news in facebook-post-like manners. Easy to share without much effort to actually research anything. My point is that she’s against the Covid Vaccine. It was developed way too fast and something about it being manufactured. My uncle is technically very intelligent but he also got caught up in those questionable sources that state that “there are too many humans” and because of that “vaccines sterilise people” so that there won’t be as many children in the world anymore. The fact that our population here in Germany is actually getting older and older with not enough kids is apparently completely irrelevant. The world leaders want fewer humans, obviously, because that means… less tax money… Wait, that doesn’t make sense! Once they start talking about the topic, it just never stops and my uncle just keeps on going for ages… and he just eventually doesn’t even understand what he’s arguing about. We were talking about vaccines and he’s suddenly talking about how our genes get changed, which is just wrong… and then he talks about other stuff and when I asked him back then what his point is, he just didn’t know. 

Well, on Saturday, I visited him for his birthday because family is important and he asked me about the university stuff and I told him about my new-found interest in where languages are from and he started talking about how English is based on Latin and German which I’ve heard about for the first time… and then I tried to just change the topic 

like Illyrian (which I read up on) and he started talking about history and how Greek’s society didn’t really exist or something… and he rambled on and on… and it all made basically no sense because he’d “quote” people but when I asked him about sources or where he got that information from, he wouldn’t be able to explain it at all. He “forgot” their names but what I learned and studied is apparently wrong, just like that. Similarly, most historians have apparently no clue… and doctors don’t have a clue either. I apparently measured my fever wrong because the way the doctor said I should do it is wrong. The doctor from the hospital that I called has only a medical degree after all in contrast to my uncle’s lack of a degree. “No degree” is better than “a degree”, I guess?

And it’s frustrating because this passion I found out gets belittled in a way. When your nephew talks about this new hobby, you may wanna ask about it or humour them or maybe even give them more to work with. “Oh, that’s interesting, have you heard about this historian yet?” would have been totally fine for the conversation… but his monologue kind of went into the “You’re wrong and here’s why” rhetoric that is just incredibly frustrating to deal with. The same goes for politics, for instance, or for climate change. When I said that Germany had droughts in the past years that the country hasn’t seen in hundreds of years, my uncle said that the data must have been falsified. When I said that Laschet (back then before the election) is demolishing a whole village for a coal plant that we don’t need, my uncle argued that we’d probably need the coal – otherwise Laschet wouldn’t do it, right? When I said that coal power needs to end by specific years and not in 2050 or whatever, he argued that there is no problem with coal power because we’ve always used coal power and we never had a problem with it.

And most of the time, I then just end up shutting down completely because it just makes no sense at all when he’s talking. It’s frustrating because he was this super-intelligent person and now he’s an anti-vaxxer who pulled his children from school because he doesn’t want them to get vaccinated against Covid. My cousin (7 or 8 years old btw) says stuff like “I hate vaccinated people” because they just don’t know better. It’s incredibly weird to see that happening and it’s worrying as well. Luckily, it got colder and I was able to escape the history lesson by asking if I could take him up on that offer to bring me a pullover while I call my parents to ask when they’d arrive. We’d “talk about it later”, I said, and then we just didn’t talk about it later, which was good, because it doesn’t make sense to talk about a topic that only one party is interested in. I told him that I’m not educated enough for this topic and I have no clue what he’s talking about when he’s saying that all languages are connected because humans all come from one place or something… and he talks about how this was proven or something but he doesn’t have any sources of any kind… and I just frankly never cared about where the “first” human came from because it doesn’t matter to me or rather it doesn’t interest me. Instead, I’d rather want to talk about something else but that request gets ignored because… idk.

My point is that I somehow made it through that evening thanks to my parents finally arriving and I left around 8:27 PM to catch my bus to the train station and so on… Yes, I could have in theory slept over at my uncle’s but frankly, I don’t think I could deal with that mentally. It’s so incredibly hard to deal with people that went way too deep into the rabbit hole, to the point where they think that vaccines make you sterile and that covid is fake or whatever… or to the point where they even believed (at one point in the past; potentially not anymore tho) that the government is faking statistics about deaths and infections to stop people from demonstrating and using their freedom of speech.

Anyway, I survived Saturday and I’m frankly exhausted. I can’t wait to just pass out in bed after scheduling this post. Sorry about the rant but anti-vaxxers are just exhausting to deal with when they’re in your relatively close family. I can understand how people get into that rabbit hole but I don’t know why people get just so hung up on the most complex and stupid conspiracies… I mean, Occam’s razor. When asked about sources, there are none for these conspiracies but when confronted with sources against their conspiracies, those sources obviously are fake news. It’s incredibly stupid and annoying. And while I’d always try to not argue with people, it’s hard to just avoid these people when they’re literally related to you… and I don’t even argue with them anymore but it feels incredibly upsetting and annoying when someone monologues so much about something that makes so little sense. Anyway, that was today’s shitpost. You’re welcome. Have a nice Sunday.

This post was first published on Indiecator by Dan Indiecator aka MagiWasTaken. If you like what you see here and want to see more, you can check me out on Twitch and YouTube as well. If you find this post on a website other than Indiecator.org, please write an e-mail to me. Thank you!