Why am I obsessing over My Little Ponies right now? Because I have multiple underlying medical conditions, all well-managed and medicated under my doctor's supervision, and a surprising number of people say this makes it okay if COVID kills me.

Like, I have had people say TO MY FACE that if they choose not to wear a mask/socially distance and bring COVID into my home, it's my hypertension that killed me, not COVID-19.

So I am already written off as acceptable losses to opening the world back up. I have not spent the last year living almost entirely on egg whites and water to be killed because you needed to go to the mall more than I needed to live.

I always knew there was a eugenicist streak in modern American culture, but I never knew it was this wide, or that people would be this comfortable expressing it openly.

I do leave my house. I go to the grocery store; I go to WW, which is operating under strict distancing; I go to Target once a week. I do these things for sanity, and I am very careful. But I can't trust that anyone around me is, because my life is inessential.

So when I get home, I scrub, I shower, and then I play with Ponies, because while they are pieces of plastic that can't really love me, they also won't suddenly say they don't mind if I die of a preventable disease if it means they can go out for brunch.

(A surprising number of these people get angry if when they say "but it only kills the elderly," you ask at what age it becomes legally and morally acceptable to shoot their elderly parents. Since obviously that's not murder anymore.)

So yeah. I am riding this Pony all the way to the Rainbow of Light, and I don't give a fuck if it's frivolous or useless. I make my calls, I make my donations, and I brush multicolored plastic hair. That's my life right now, until the assholes stop calling me acceptable losses.

I am not acceptable losses. No one is.