Friday links! What’s your excuse? edition

So it turns out mono is the best disease ever. You can’t really do anything about it besides rest and drink fluids, which I was doing anyway. Other than encouraging you to look at pictures like this on the internet, the symptoms are not that bad, but it remains a name-brand illness. When you say you have mono, people pity you like, immediately. I’ve been using it for everything. Late to the movie? Mono. Haven’t shaved in nine days? Definitely mono—too tired, skin weak. Thirty-four, jobless, unmarried—how do you think I got mono in the first place? Today is Friday, and I’m pretty much taking the day off for reasons you can guess. Today’s link-round up is half-assed—some might say mononuclear—and smug. I’m ill, literally, and every stupid thing I do is okay because of it. What’s your excuse?

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Sweet vindication

El mono!

Last night I found out that I have probably had mono for the last two months, which is what I get for living as a cad. To paraphrase Wayne Campbell, I thought I was just really bored. It was a weirdly satisfying diagnosis, and not only because mono is the one where you don’t do anything. I was pleased to learn that the last several weeks of lingering illness and PoS syndrome were not just in my head—in fact, they were in my lymph nodes—and that my mysterious illness is something college students get and not, you know, Crohn’s Disease. Mono is bad news, but it’s specific news and I know what it means. I submit that the possibility of a problem is often worse than the actual problem, and knowing what hit you invariably softens the blow. On that note, here is an article that pretty well demonstrates the much talked-about growth in income inequality over the last twenty years. While certain parties warn us of the impending socialist welfare state, the USA has progressed toward a less even distribution of wealth at a more diligent rate than at almost any time in our history. And you thought we were just bored.