Anne’s Diary (Page 32)

Every year, around this time, I’m always amazed by the number of people I meet who are coughing and sneezing and hacking away. I say to them, "You didn’t get a flu shot–you can get one in the drug store for around $20 now," and they reply something like, "There are dangerous nanotubes inside vaccines," or "Flu shots GIVE you the flu." When I ask them where they heard that, they always reply, "I read it on the internet." And they believed it implicitly.

There used to be a song that said, "How do I know? The Bible tells me so!" That seems to have been replaced by "How do I know? The internet tells me so."
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"Mom-ism" is something that most women find themselves doing at various times in their lives, often to their surprise.

I’m still a mom to my grown-up son, who was there for me every minute when I needed him during my hospitalization 8 years ago. Most of the time, he was sitting right by my bed, and the rest of the time, he was keeping Whitley (who was by my bedside as well) company, by doing things like urging him to go to the cafeteria to get something to eat. He let my husband sleep on his couch during the nights when he wasn’t yet allowed to set up a cot next to my hospital bed, because I was still in the ICU.
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"Halibut?" That’s the reply I got when I asked my husband a mundane question a few years ago. Whitley had an untreated burst eardrum when he was a kid, then as an adult in New York City, he walked past a backfiring car. The result? He’s pretty much deaf in one of his ears.

Every once in a while I get frustrated and send him to a hearing specialist, but he always returns with an excuse for not getting a hearing aid. Actually, I sympathize with this, because these devices are not very effective–but occasionally I get frustrated.
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I like to read several books at a time–usually a "literary" novel, a mystery novel (for times when I’m too tired to read the literary novel) and a nonfiction book. In my search for literature, I’ve noticed (especially when we lived in New York) how a certain book becomes–for no logical reason I’ve been able to discern–the "flavor of the month." Extolled as one of the "best novels ever written," it turns up in reviews, in newspaper and magazine articles and seems to be on everyone’s lips (in big cities, anyway), whether they’ve read it or not. People seem to think that if they read enough reviews, they can discuss the book (and sometimes I catch them at this).
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