To say I was not OK for most of 2021 would be an understatement. It was my Annus horribilis. I developed temporary heart arrythmia, my cat of almost 19 years died, governments were oppressive, business took a dive and people were generally just HORRIBLE - including friends, family, teachers and other government officials, work personnel,…
To say I was not OK for most of 2021 would be an understatement. It was my Annus horribilis. I developed temporary heart arrythmia, my cat of almost 19 years died, governments were oppressive, business took a dive and people were generally just HORRIBLE - including friends, family, teachers and other government officials, work personnel, random people; you name it.
I still had my sanity because my hubby and I are on the same page, and a few of my patients were, too, but otherwise it was the worst year of my life. I home-schooled the kids, I closed my practice in early 2022 and my hubby & I decided to quit our jobs of 16 years, sell our property and move 1000km away! I had to fight to seemingly just lose a few things, but better to lose my business, home and lame people in my life - by choice in the end - than to lose my bodily sovereignty, my own family and my sanity!
I never want to repeat 2021. But it DOES repeat in some ways because now I know what people are really like: now I know what stuff they're truly made of. And that does NOT sit well with me because it makes me very distrustful of a positive future. So now I somehow try to figure out ways forward for myself and my family knowing 99%+ of teachers & health professionals have been jabbed, most other workers have been jabbed, most people still have NO IDEA, the economy is failing and things are basically just screwed. Great time and place to raise your kids, hey?! :-(
I relate to a lot of that. So sorry about your cat. I believe mine was murdered by my neighbour in 2022 - hence, 2022 was my Annus horribilis. That's when I realised that, though Solzhenitsyn points out the line between good and evil runs through all of us, some are more inclined to act out the evil than the rest of us. Some of them are neighbours. Some of them run corporations, institutions and the world.
I'm so very sorry to hear about your cat! I couldn't imagine someone killing my cat! She died in my arms, in bed with me, of old age. But to have someone take away her life like what happened with yours?? Horrible beyond words :-(
Good point about all the types who might be inclined to act out evil more than others...
My wife just about left me because I said that we were at war and there was every chance of it impacting directly on us. We're fine now, she's more radical than me in reality. I just get to voice it.
We'd had 3 months apart. I'd been in Melbourne for business (Nov - Jan 2020) and then two weeks in Auckland in "isolation" so had shit food, a shit refrigerator & shit conditions such as not allowed outside (middle of hotel) in the sunshine without a mask. I think NZ at that stage had not been so bad except for those coming back in. So not only the normal getting used to each other after running your own show for 3 months but also added covid tyranny with different experiences of it (by May 2022 NZ was much worse than Oz, even Victoria). I'd also had nothing more to do than to read up on what was going on and watching the local covid gaslighters on Twitter. So I guess I was a bit further down the road.
Ah, women. The true female brain is a strange beast. Luckily for my hubby, I have a 'low' female brain (if it were on a scale, it'd be just on the female side of the 'crossover' section that lies between male & female brains), so I wouldn't get upset if someone gave me an honest answer if I were dumb enough to ask "do I look fat in this?!"
Perhaps your wife has more of a female brain than I do...it's quite likely. Most females do!
People haven't been rational these past few years. Even a lot of the unjabbed have been a bit unhinged.
I'm glad you've come out the other side, hopefully not TOO scathed....!!
Oh, the wailing and gnashing of teeth, because I have not been able to escape the atrocity that is the city for a gentler existence elsewhere. As my circumstances are, I am stuck in the suburbs, and living only on the sufferance of others, moreover, because I possess not the means to escape. COVID-19 was rolled-out just as I began picking myself up again from the collapse of a career, and as a consequence of my inability to comply with crime, I am left destitute. That is why I do so admire and envy (in the best way possible) you and those who like you stick to your principles and find another way.
On the other hand, I'm still in great shape, and actually, I'm in or near as great as my shape (health, fitness) has ever been, so I got that going for me, which is nice.(*)
(*) with full and just acknowledgements to Carl Spackler.
Hey, being in great shape is fantastic! Good to see you still have control over your own body, regardless of your financial situation! Well done (for sticking with Carl Spackler!)! :-)
Thanks for the compliments, by the way. We got a good price for our property which has meant we've been able to do what we're doing. Sold it ourselves, too. Would've had $100K less in our pockets using a local agent! Bought land 1000km north at a good price a year before we sold. Hubby is currently building our house as an Owner-Builder and with any luck, we'll be moved in early next year. Of course had we not moved we'd be well and truly debt-free by now...but we'd also be living through freezing winters along with cold springs & autumns. I hate the cold! 16 years of it. Finally got the shits with it. We'd been thinking about moving somewhere warmer before covid, but that hideous year of 2021 nailed it for both hubby & I. We just HAD to move!!! There was literally nothing keeping us there.
But it wasn't easy doing all this. There was so much stress pulling it off - and there's still stress! I don't think many people would have the gumption to do what we've done, true, but when you gotta move, you gotta move, right?! If something is THAT important to you, you MAKE it happen!! At least that's how things seem to roll in my world! :-D
Perhaps I make it seem easy, but it's been a long hard journey, with a lot of research thrown in there. It's been years in the making. We need to give our kids a future, and we couldn't do that where we were. And at least where we now live we can grow food all year round and the trees all blossom twice a year!
Unlike you, though, I was my own boss (still am, but I'm not really working these days, by choice!). With 12+ years in town and a good name, even though business dropped off due to covid, it still paid the bills. JUST some weeks, mind you. Plus hubby was working (mostly from home, just the way he likes it!), so we were OK financially.
I had a sign on my work door asking my patients to take off their mask before entering my room - and they all complied. But I wouldn't have been able to work if they all wore masks. The sheer stress of being surrounded by masked sheeple would've driven me over the edge. And it was a shit-fight to get that sign sorted at the place I worked in (multi-disciplinary practice). Still, where there's a will there's a way. I am very flexible and imaginative when I need to be, and very stubborn when my morals are on the line!!!
Yep. It was the only way I could work. Masks are insanity. Chiropractic wasn't a mental asylum last time I checked!! :-D
I also put that info in my SMS reminders for my patients so they had a chance to cancel beforehand if they wanted to wear a mask. Only one person cancelled because of it; EVERYONE else took off their masks. Between the SMS & the sign, I barely had to mention it, which was good. It was a VERY stressful time for me (and loads of others, I am sure, but at that point, I had to be rather self-focused and just try to keep one foot in front of the other!).
Funny thing is, although I meet occasional health professionals who refused to wear a mask themselves, I know of no-one else who actually asked people to take their mask off before entering the room. I've met those who gave patients the option to take it off or leave it on, but I went further, I suppose. And I did this because I was super duper stressed and anxious and this was the only way I could manage to see my patients! However, given masks are ineffective for illness transmission, but they're great at reducing your O2 whilst increasing your CO2, as well as bacterial overgrowth, I personally think I was doing people a favour. Plus I couldn't see their faces and might miss facial winces if they were in pain!
I do think people mostly only complied, though, because I was their long-term practitioner and they liked me and my care and knew I was stressed about masks (I took a month's stress leave in July 2021 because, well, I really needed to!!). Had I been a new practitioner in town, I don't think I wouldn't had much compliance with that sign...
But yes, I had it up, and people complied. So there's at least ONE health practitioner I know with sense - ME!
I had discussions with a doctor fairly early on about how crazy it all was. He told me about a friend of his on a bus into Brisbane quarantine being screamed at from the streets for being lepers basically.
On that topic maybe it's time to turn Typhoid Mary into a saint.
"Funny thing is, although I meet occasional health professionals who refused to wear a mask themselves, I know of no-one else who actually asked people to take their mask off before entering the room. "
Well, let's face it, many of the "health" professions are amply-remunerated. The corporate pharmaceutical medical complex has all but ensured compliance by the operators within it for precisely this reason. The hard part required the creation of a debt-as-wealth financial system, one where the only money is all the money that anyone is allowed to accept, and it all is a complete fiction as the "expression of a balance sheet liability" of a bank which, if you take it all the way up, is the Bank for International Settlements. Once this is in place, then it's trivially simple to appeal to human pettiness, vanity, and stupidity and dangle lots of that money in front of them so that they will, like trained circus animals, dance for you whatever gigue or gavotte you order them for their treats. True, humans are a little more sophisticated than ponies, so they can't be rewarded just with sugar cubes for treats, but all that moolah gets them into Porsches or, better still, Teslas which have become the du jour assertively-ostentatious vanity-gratifying motorised conveyancer, as well as into fancy houses, glamorous holidays, and multi-million dollar investment portfolios, which admittedly are a little more complicated than sugar cubes, nonetheless when taken along with the negative motivator of punishment through expulsion and hence deprivation of all that filthy money, these kinds of human-appealing treats fulfil the same role in the punishment-reward system of they mesocorticolimbic circuit in the mesolimbic dopamine system in the brain.
Lots of cool words in there ;-) I'm glad your spleen is happier now that it's vented ;-)
And yes, humans are dumb, and easily swayed, and once they have nothing else to lose, they will literally dance for sugar cubes if that's what it takes to get some food into their system!!
"And yes, humans are dumb, and easily swayed, and once they have nothing else to lose, they will literally dance for sugar cubes if that's what it takes to get some food into their system!!
So sad."
The thing is, the ones that complied or went along to get along, were not trying to get some food into their systems. That was most definitely not the adversity they were facing.
They complied to remain at the trough and continue gorging themselves.
That's the really sad thing about it, and I can't imagine a more trenchant indictment on them and their humanity.
Yes, you're right! I was just talking with my hubby recently about how it wasn't even as low as APATHY with all this covid crap, because people had to actually make appts to get jabbed, then actually go out and attend their appts to get jabbed! Apathy didn't even come into it. This was way more sinister than not giving a shit. This was, as you said, utter compliance so they could remain at the trough and continue gorging themselves.
Honestly, what job is so amazingly brilliant that you'd do crazy, potentially life-threatening things to keep it?!?! NO paid job is worth that! So it obviously wasn't to keep their 'jobs', was it? No, it was so they could maintain the status quo; so they could keep clinging onto whatever rung they were on on the social ladder.
Kind of worrying how much people lie to themselves, isn't it?! :-(
Moreover, there are PLENTY of ways to maintain one's status quo without endangering one's life! Perhaps people lack imagination, or forethought, or hindsight, or just sense. Our species might as well be sheep in the paddock now. We've certainly earned the Gold Sheep medal!
Thank you for sharing your wonderful story. I appreciate how hard it was, but it seems you and your husband have the gift of knowing the right timing, and of making the judicious choice.
Ha! I'd hardly call it a 'gift' - but I suppose that's one way of looking at it! Keeping your pulse on the general tenor of things and using your gut instinct, but also your research skills, is indeed useful! It just hasn't always felt that way...
I had distances a bit wrong. My Uncle used to work for Channel 7 in Brisbane and said he was rung by the bosses in Sydney once to get his arse up to Cairns in an hour. He had to tell them that he was further away from Cairns (by about 800km) than he was from Sydney.
To say I was not OK for most of 2021 would be an understatement. It was my Annus horribilis. I developed temporary heart arrythmia, my cat of almost 19 years died, governments were oppressive, business took a dive and people were generally just HORRIBLE - including friends, family, teachers and other government officials, work personnel, random people; you name it.
I still had my sanity because my hubby and I are on the same page, and a few of my patients were, too, but otherwise it was the worst year of my life. I home-schooled the kids, I closed my practice in early 2022 and my hubby & I decided to quit our jobs of 16 years, sell our property and move 1000km away! I had to fight to seemingly just lose a few things, but better to lose my business, home and lame people in my life - by choice in the end - than to lose my bodily sovereignty, my own family and my sanity!
I never want to repeat 2021. But it DOES repeat in some ways because now I know what people are really like: now I know what stuff they're truly made of. And that does NOT sit well with me because it makes me very distrustful of a positive future. So now I somehow try to figure out ways forward for myself and my family knowing 99%+ of teachers & health professionals have been jabbed, most other workers have been jabbed, most people still have NO IDEA, the economy is failing and things are basically just screwed. Great time and place to raise your kids, hey?! :-(
I relate to a lot of that. So sorry about your cat. I believe mine was murdered by my neighbour in 2022 - hence, 2022 was my Annus horribilis. That's when I realised that, though Solzhenitsyn points out the line between good and evil runs through all of us, some are more inclined to act out the evil than the rest of us. Some of them are neighbours. Some of them run corporations, institutions and the world.
I'm so very sorry to hear about your cat! I couldn't imagine someone killing my cat! She died in my arms, in bed with me, of old age. But to have someone take away her life like what happened with yours?? Horrible beyond words :-(
Good point about all the types who might be inclined to act out evil more than others...
My wife just about left me because I said that we were at war and there was every chance of it impacting directly on us. We're fine now, she's more radical than me in reality. I just get to voice it.
Eesh. That must've been awful!!
It's not really fair that those who voice their opinion (and people are invariably thinking the same thing some of the time, anyway) get fried for it.
Glad she's come to her senses!
We'd had 3 months apart. I'd been in Melbourne for business (Nov - Jan 2020) and then two weeks in Auckland in "isolation" so had shit food, a shit refrigerator & shit conditions such as not allowed outside (middle of hotel) in the sunshine without a mask. I think NZ at that stage had not been so bad except for those coming back in. So not only the normal getting used to each other after running your own show for 3 months but also added covid tyranny with different experiences of it (by May 2022 NZ was much worse than Oz, even Victoria). I'd also had nothing more to do than to read up on what was going on and watching the local covid gaslighters on Twitter. So I guess I was a bit further down the road.
I think the trigger was that I said something like "they're coming after us"
Ah, women. The true female brain is a strange beast. Luckily for my hubby, I have a 'low' female brain (if it were on a scale, it'd be just on the female side of the 'crossover' section that lies between male & female brains), so I wouldn't get upset if someone gave me an honest answer if I were dumb enough to ask "do I look fat in this?!"
Perhaps your wife has more of a female brain than I do...it's quite likely. Most females do!
People haven't been rational these past few years. Even a lot of the unjabbed have been a bit unhinged.
I'm glad you've come out the other side, hopefully not TOO scathed....!!
Not unscathed no. But yes out the other side.
You truly are heroic, and I salute you!
Oh, the wailing and gnashing of teeth, because I have not been able to escape the atrocity that is the city for a gentler existence elsewhere. As my circumstances are, I am stuck in the suburbs, and living only on the sufferance of others, moreover, because I possess not the means to escape. COVID-19 was rolled-out just as I began picking myself up again from the collapse of a career, and as a consequence of my inability to comply with crime, I am left destitute. That is why I do so admire and envy (in the best way possible) you and those who like you stick to your principles and find another way.
On the other hand, I'm still in great shape, and actually, I'm in or near as great as my shape (health, fitness) has ever been, so I got that going for me, which is nice.(*)
(*) with full and just acknowledgements to Carl Spackler.
Hey, being in great shape is fantastic! Good to see you still have control over your own body, regardless of your financial situation! Well done (for sticking with Carl Spackler!)! :-)
Thanks for the compliments, by the way. We got a good price for our property which has meant we've been able to do what we're doing. Sold it ourselves, too. Would've had $100K less in our pockets using a local agent! Bought land 1000km north at a good price a year before we sold. Hubby is currently building our house as an Owner-Builder and with any luck, we'll be moved in early next year. Of course had we not moved we'd be well and truly debt-free by now...but we'd also be living through freezing winters along with cold springs & autumns. I hate the cold! 16 years of it. Finally got the shits with it. We'd been thinking about moving somewhere warmer before covid, but that hideous year of 2021 nailed it for both hubby & I. We just HAD to move!!! There was literally nothing keeping us there.
But it wasn't easy doing all this. There was so much stress pulling it off - and there's still stress! I don't think many people would have the gumption to do what we've done, true, but when you gotta move, you gotta move, right?! If something is THAT important to you, you MAKE it happen!! At least that's how things seem to roll in my world! :-D
Perhaps I make it seem easy, but it's been a long hard journey, with a lot of research thrown in there. It's been years in the making. We need to give our kids a future, and we couldn't do that where we were. And at least where we now live we can grow food all year round and the trees all blossom twice a year!
Unlike you, though, I was my own boss (still am, but I'm not really working these days, by choice!). With 12+ years in town and a good name, even though business dropped off due to covid, it still paid the bills. JUST some weeks, mind you. Plus hubby was working (mostly from home, just the way he likes it!), so we were OK financially.
I had a sign on my work door asking my patients to take off their mask before entering my room - and they all complied. But I wouldn't have been able to work if they all wore masks. The sheer stress of being surrounded by masked sheeple would've driven me over the edge. And it was a shit-fight to get that sign sorted at the place I worked in (multi-disciplinary practice). Still, where there's a will there's a way. I am very flexible and imaginative when I need to be, and very stubborn when my morals are on the line!!!
"I had a sign on my work door asking my patients to take off their mask before entering my room ...."
LOVE IT!!!!
Yep. It was the only way I could work. Masks are insanity. Chiropractic wasn't a mental asylum last time I checked!! :-D
I also put that info in my SMS reminders for my patients so they had a chance to cancel beforehand if they wanted to wear a mask. Only one person cancelled because of it; EVERYONE else took off their masks. Between the SMS & the sign, I barely had to mention it, which was good. It was a VERY stressful time for me (and loads of others, I am sure, but at that point, I had to be rather self-focused and just try to keep one foot in front of the other!).
Funny thing is, although I meet occasional health professionals who refused to wear a mask themselves, I know of no-one else who actually asked people to take their mask off before entering the room. I've met those who gave patients the option to take it off or leave it on, but I went further, I suppose. And I did this because I was super duper stressed and anxious and this was the only way I could manage to see my patients! However, given masks are ineffective for illness transmission, but they're great at reducing your O2 whilst increasing your CO2, as well as bacterial overgrowth, I personally think I was doing people a favour. Plus I couldn't see their faces and might miss facial winces if they were in pain!
I do think people mostly only complied, though, because I was their long-term practitioner and they liked me and my care and knew I was stressed about masks (I took a month's stress leave in July 2021 because, well, I really needed to!!). Had I been a new practitioner in town, I don't think I wouldn't had much compliance with that sign...
But yes, I had it up, and people complied. So there's at least ONE health practitioner I know with sense - ME!
I had discussions with a doctor fairly early on about how crazy it all was. He told me about a friend of his on a bus into Brisbane quarantine being screamed at from the streets for being lepers basically.
On that topic maybe it's time to turn Typhoid Mary into a saint.
LOL!
"Funny thing is, although I meet occasional health professionals who refused to wear a mask themselves, I know of no-one else who actually asked people to take their mask off before entering the room. "
Well, let's face it, many of the "health" professions are amply-remunerated. The corporate pharmaceutical medical complex has all but ensured compliance by the operators within it for precisely this reason. The hard part required the creation of a debt-as-wealth financial system, one where the only money is all the money that anyone is allowed to accept, and it all is a complete fiction as the "expression of a balance sheet liability" of a bank which, if you take it all the way up, is the Bank for International Settlements. Once this is in place, then it's trivially simple to appeal to human pettiness, vanity, and stupidity and dangle lots of that money in front of them so that they will, like trained circus animals, dance for you whatever gigue or gavotte you order them for their treats. True, humans are a little more sophisticated than ponies, so they can't be rewarded just with sugar cubes for treats, but all that moolah gets them into Porsches or, better still, Teslas which have become the du jour assertively-ostentatious vanity-gratifying motorised conveyancer, as well as into fancy houses, glamorous holidays, and multi-million dollar investment portfolios, which admittedly are a little more complicated than sugar cubes, nonetheless when taken along with the negative motivator of punishment through expulsion and hence deprivation of all that filthy money, these kinds of human-appealing treats fulfil the same role in the punishment-reward system of they mesocorticolimbic circuit in the mesolimbic dopamine system in the brain.
(yeah, I am venting my spleen)
Lots of cool words in there ;-) I'm glad your spleen is happier now that it's vented ;-)
And yes, humans are dumb, and easily swayed, and once they have nothing else to lose, they will literally dance for sugar cubes if that's what it takes to get some food into their system!!
So sad.
"And yes, humans are dumb, and easily swayed, and once they have nothing else to lose, they will literally dance for sugar cubes if that's what it takes to get some food into their system!!
So sad."
The thing is, the ones that complied or went along to get along, were not trying to get some food into their systems. That was most definitely not the adversity they were facing.
They complied to remain at the trough and continue gorging themselves.
That's the really sad thing about it, and I can't imagine a more trenchant indictment on them and their humanity.
Yes, you're right! I was just talking with my hubby recently about how it wasn't even as low as APATHY with all this covid crap, because people had to actually make appts to get jabbed, then actually go out and attend their appts to get jabbed! Apathy didn't even come into it. This was way more sinister than not giving a shit. This was, as you said, utter compliance so they could remain at the trough and continue gorging themselves.
Honestly, what job is so amazingly brilliant that you'd do crazy, potentially life-threatening things to keep it?!?! NO paid job is worth that! So it obviously wasn't to keep their 'jobs', was it? No, it was so they could maintain the status quo; so they could keep clinging onto whatever rung they were on on the social ladder.
Kind of worrying how much people lie to themselves, isn't it?! :-(
Moreover, there are PLENTY of ways to maintain one's status quo without endangering one's life! Perhaps people lack imagination, or forethought, or hindsight, or just sense. Our species might as well be sheep in the paddock now. We've certainly earned the Gold Sheep medal!
Thank you for sharing your wonderful story. I appreciate how hard it was, but it seems you and your husband have the gift of knowing the right timing, and of making the judicious choice.
Ha! I'd hardly call it a 'gift' - but I suppose that's one way of looking at it! Keeping your pulse on the general tenor of things and using your gut instinct, but also your research skills, is indeed useful! It just hasn't always felt that way...
I guess you went north rather than south. How's Rockhampton?
Ha ha, we didn't go THAT far north! We're in Kyogle.
I had distances a bit wrong. My Uncle used to work for Channel 7 in Brisbane and said he was rung by the bosses in Sydney once to get his arse up to Cairns in an hour. He had to tell them that he was further away from Cairns (by about 800km) than he was from Sydney.