Clearly every man, woman, child, and probably dog, cat, credenza, and area rug in North America will be infected and made miserable by this year's headline-grabbing flu bug, and since I am a person with very little contact with other people and especially little contact with large groups of people, it is a virtual certainty that I will be among its earliest and most agonized victims. On the news, dour footage shows scores of people waiting in snaking lines for a shot from the dwindling supplies of vaccine, although they could just as easily be waiting to buy concert tickets or waiting for the new Krispy Kreme franchise to open, CNN could use just about any tape lying around of people waiting in line, we'd never know the difference. They could use file footage of Soviet bread lines and it wouldn't matter, all lines are alike in their uneasy mixtures of excitement and resignation, eagerness and anticipation of crushing disappointment. The news that this year's approved vaccine contains no protection against the viral strain responsible for 75% of the epidemic's infections has apparently had no effect on the number of people clamoring for a dose, just as the knowledge that influenza is caused by a virus will have no effect on the number of people burdening the healthcare system with demands for pointless, massive quantities of antibiotics once they get sick.

I may be a cranky, querulous patient when I'm sick, but I do have a sort of left field stoicism about it. Once I come down with something I tend to sigh excessively and childishly demand attention and cinnamon toast to beat the band, but I don't demand much else, I especially don't demand to feel better immediately, unlike many people I don't run to the doctor every time I get a little sick. Otherwise healthy adults should learn to suffer quietly at home more without bothering others, as no one likes to be around sick people with their litany of repetitive complaints and unpleasant fluid noises and mountains of soiled tissues and general aura of infection. I always hated it at work when someone would drag themselves in when sick with unasked-for heroism, as if everything would simply fall apart without them (keep dreaming), and then all fucking day the Caring Crew, twittering armies of those mostly female "nurturing" types, would go on and on with "oh Kevin, you should go home!" and "go, go, take care of yourself, we can hold down the fort," ad nauseum, like they're reading it off little teleprompters hidden in their purses, while Kevin never quite explains why he's not going home and just sort of sticks around. When the flu is going around half the people in the office slip into their appointed neurotic roles, on one side the professional victims and sympathy-sucking attention seekers, and on the other the cooing crazy-eyed mother hens with their glints of hysterical smothering concern. These two groups feed off each other like vampires in the workplace setting, Munchausen and Munchausen by Proxy locked in orbit around one another in a bizarre dance of opportunistic madness.