I’ve tried to keep out of the whole swine flu (now H1N1) hysteria, but this morning I heard something that made me extremely nervous. Bear in mind that I’m a serious hypochondriac, and am terrified of weird diseases and getting sick and dying. It scares me to no end to hear people panicking on the news and all around me, but I’ve been fairly level-headed so far. I even kept my cool when a kid next to me in the dining hall was talking about how he got back from Mexico two days ago. And I didn’t start wearing a mask when people were talking about swine flu in Vernon (30 minutes from UConn).
"Ok, if you live here, here, here, here or here, you're going to die. Probably."
But this morning my roommate Ari called me to tell me that there was a confirmed case in Stratford, the hometown of my roommate Marcella, who is there right now. I called Marcella to tell her the horrifying news, but to my surprise she had already known and wasn’t afraid. “Can you wear a mask, just to make me feel better,” I pleaded. She laughed and told me it was fine.
THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT.
And on a certain level, I know it’s fine. But I can’t get the idea out of my head that if I get this flu, I’m going to die. I know many people feel the same way, which is why there’s such a panic. But out of the hundreds of people who have the flu now, I don’t think the percentage of death is terribly high; it’s a killer virus in the sense that pneumonia can kill you, though mostly the elderly and young children die from it, or those with weakened immune systems.
Still, I’m afraid. I keep having dreams of quarantines, zombies wandering the streets and pigs running around biting people. I’ve been drinking Emergen-C exclusively and trying to avoid public places. Even now I have a headache and I’m starting to worry it could be the harbinger of illness.
The near future.
Should I be worrying this much? Of course not. But I blame the media for my overreaction. If you’re going to constantly report on a story about a virus spreading across the United States, you have to be prepared for stirring up some chaos. I’m guessing in the coming weeks the news will be reporting that swine flu isn’t as deadly as first thought, and things will go back to normal. People will forget, as they did with avian flu, SARS, malaria, yellow fever. It will become a thing of the past, though it will still exist as a threat. For now, though, I reserve the right to worry. It’s just in my blood.
Robin
I will admit that I first started watching Lost because of Lord of the Rings. That might not make sense to most people out there, but it did to me: Domanic Monaghan, who played Merry in the famous trilogy, was a prominent cast member in a pilot that, as far as I knew when it began, was about a plane crash.
I’ve stuck with Lost through thick and thin, hungrily watching each episode, waiting for clues and researching online message boards. I followed all the viral videos and websites, the subliminal hints hidden in each frame, things that most people might not pick up on but the online Lost fan community did in a second. There’s the essential Lostpedia, a wiki-site containing most of the knowledge about the show that exists. There’s lost-tv, which contains an always useful message board. I’ve followed them all, faithfully taking mental notes and remembering tiny details.
Blacklight picture from the hatch.
I was dumbfounded and unbelievably intrigued by the Dharma Initiative and the Others; they were such a mystery to me I couldn’t even begin to wrap my head around their mere existence or presence on the island. Walt’s supernatural powers drove me crazy with questions of why and how. Desmond and the machine he controlled filled my thoughts all the time, constantly questioning what he was doing. What did the stations mean? What was that crazy blacklight writing all over the wall in the hatch? Why were the animals stamped with the Dharma logo? Who was Charles Widmore? Who was Marvin Candle? What the hell was going on?
I might not have known what was happening, but I was hooked. I breathed and slept Lost and spent my free time online searching for answers. I went through every single aspect of the “Lost Experience,” and immersed myself in the mystery. I dove deep into the oddities of the Hanso Foundation Website, part of the “experience” (which has now been officially dubbed a “game”), and tried to decode its meaning. I watched all of the “Rachel Blake” videos and followed along.
There was even a fake book with a fake author, all a metaphor for the show. There are mysteries Lost has never even bothered to explain to us, things they’ll probably never explain to us, but that’s been okay with me. What isn’t okay is that the show has completely lost its shit now. I get it, the whole time-travel thing. It’s exciting, it’s weird, whatever. But it explains too much. It’s a catch-all, just as if they had shown Desmond waking up at the beginning of this season saying, “thank god it was all just a dream.” I don’t want the answer to everything to be, “oh, they could time travel. Duh.”
Never forget!
I do feel to some degree that the show “jumped the shark” after they left the island. They were never supposed to leave; I say “supposed” not in the sense they mean on the show, I mean to maintain any mystique they weren’t supposed to leave the island. They were supposed to deal with being on the island and the mysteries it held. I don’t care about Juliet and Sawyer, I don’t care about Miles and his ability, I just want answers and more mysteries and answers and more mysteries. I never want to stop being confused and enthralled by the show, and I don’t want to feel pissed off at the end of every episode, saying, “but they can’t do that!”
At least we know who Marvin Candle is. And at least we know who Charles Widmore is. But who is Alvar Hanso? What is the Hanso Foundation? What was that giant foot of the statue? What’s up with all the different stations around the world? I never wanted to know what the smoke monster was. I just wanted it to keep working its magic. Just the same, I never wanted to know about a lot of things on the show that they decided to reveal; by doing so, they chose to ignore the more important questions I still had. Lost, I’ll never forgive you if you blame every single thing that’s ever happened on the show on time travel. You don’t get a free pass on everything that you made up and wanted people so desperately to become invested in. Now that we are, those of us who stuck around through the hard times deserve better from you.
Robin
internet interest 