This post relates somewhat to my regular post from earlier today.
Here is a link to the book I mentioned.
Memento mori
Well, it’s the first day of a new month today. September is that new month, of course, and despite its seven-related name, it is our ninth month, pushed back partly because of the egotism of two ancient dictators and those who revered them.
Not to say there weren’t things to admire about Julius Caesar or even Octavian (AKA Augustus, whose earlier name meant “eighth”, which at least suits the current month order). But it is a fact that they are both just as dead as the veriest plebian or slave in their “empire”; their bodies are dust in the wind, if that.
Yes, we remember them‒a bit‒but that does them absolutely no good. They returned to their initial state, as Mark Twain discussed at least once: that he had been dead for millions of years before he was conceived, and it had not inconvenienced him in the slightest, so there was little to fear about returning to that state.
If you want to be remembered as a Roman Emperor (it’s probably too late for you to do that now, but let’s consider it for the sake of argument), be remembered like Marcus Aurelius, whose contributions to Stoic philosophy and the nature of a good life are still guiding and inspiring people today. Aurelius continues actually to have effects even millennia after his death‒real ones, consequential ones, not just having people know the names of months that are named after him*.
Marcus Aurelius’s words continue to help stimulate thought and to help with psychological equanimity, and they do so in more logically defensible ways than those of most religious patriarchs (largely because the vast majority of religions are mere hodgepodges of various kinds of bullshit).
Of course, it’s almost certainly all futile. All of it will be entirely effaced in all but the most theoretical sense (e.g., the law of conservation of quantum information) by the passage of time, as everything returns to the state mentioned by good ol’ Samuel Clemens, who is just as dead as Julius Caesar, himself.
I mean all this even if somehow “intelligent” life on Earth survives and advances long enough and successfully enough to become cosmically noticeable or even cosmically important (not a very high likelihood) and even if they discover or create ways to make the universe survive indefinitely or to make new universes or whatever. There is still simply the matter of the signal and the noise.
This is the counter to the sometimes-heard claim that “the internet is forever”. Well…maybe, but I doubt it. Even if it is, though, your most embarrassing upload is already long-since unnoticeable amidst the cacophony. You are merely one face in a crowd of billions, most of whom spend most of their time merely looking at themselves.
We live in troubled times, as the saying goes, and it is certainly true now. But it has always been true, since the very origin of life itself. Life is trouble, it has always been trouble, and I strongly suspect that it will always be trouble. C’est la vie, c’est la guerre, c’est la mort.
The only state in which there is no suffering is death. The state of Nevada may try to claim that spot, what with Las Vegas and Reno, legal gambling, legal prostitution, and whatnot, but just go wander out into the desert for a bit and see how it feels. Don’t even get me started on California or New York or Florida as being states without suffering!
Okay, enough with the stupid, homonym-based jokes.
It is, whatever you call it, the beginning of the month in which, in the northern hemisphere, summer transitions into autumn (or fall). Autumn is my favorite season, and not just because of the autumn people and Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show**.
No, there are many things I like about autumn, aesthetically. It has my favorite holiday, and it has my birthday, and up north it has the lovely changing of the leaves and so on. In Florida, of course, the good things about autumn are strongly attenuated, but Florida has that effect on many of the pleasant things in life. At least the weather begins to moderate in Florida in the autumn.
Of course, one of the two most important events in my life happened in September, shortly before the beginning of autumn. And, less important, but still fun, September 22nd is the day Frodo set off on his journey in The Lord of the Rings. It’s also his (and Bilbo’s birthday).
Frodo and Bilbo are fictional characters, of course. Nevertheless, I strongly suspect that many millions of people know far more about them than they know about Julius Caesar or his nephew. Those two imperators are at least as “fictional” now as entirely made-up characters. Not much cop, this Roman Emperor lark, is it?
Well, have an enjoyable day if you can. You might as well.
*I wonder how many people in the Western world even know where the names of August and July originate. I would not be surprised if I learned that a higher percentage of Japanese people know about the etymology of those two fully summer months (or those two fully winter months in the southern hemisphere). But what proportion of westerners know anything about Amaterasu or Tsukuyomi? I’d bet it’s higher now than at any time in the past, but I’d also bet that it’s still mighty low.
**”We are the hungry ones. We are drawn by your torments like dogs in the night, and we do feed…and feed well.”
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“He had gone often alone into the void places seeking the Imperishable Flame”
It’s the day of the moon today. By which I am not referring to Doctor Who, series 6, episode 2 (the second part of a two-parter) which was called The Day of the Moon, if memory serves. That was a good episode, and it tied into a long arc of a storyline that Stephen Moffat had put into motion in series 4, when he wasn’t even the show runner yet. But it has nothing to do with my first sentence, today.
No, I am simply referring to the fact that this is Monday, the weekday named (in English and some other languages) for the moon. It’s also the last day of August in 2026.
I occasionally wonder, what if Tsukino Usagi, AKA Sailor Moon, recognized that her name was associated with the first day of the work week (and of the school week). I wonder this because Usagi is notoriously not fond of having to go to school. She’s also something of a crybaby, and I can just imagine her lamenting the fact that her Sailor Senshi name is linked to the start of the work week. I can also imagine her being jealous of Sailor Venus, since in Spanish at least, that is associated with Friday (Viernes). Sailor Venus probably wouldn’t care.
And it also only just occurred to me to wonder what had happened to Sailor Pluto once Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet*. I mean, if she’s really more associated with the God of the Underworld than with the now-dwarf planet, as does seem to be the case in the manga and anime, then I guess it’s fine.
Perhaps Sailor Pluto wryly smiled and shook her head indulgently upon learning that the humans had named a very small, very icy object among countless other similar objects, with a highly eccentric orbit that isn’t even in the same plane as that of the planets, after her namesake. And she might indulgently shrug upon hearing of the more recent reclassification. She probably didn’t care much, but she might well have known. She was one of the Sailor Senshi who never seemed really to revert to a truly mortal form nor to have been reincarnated as a normal human.
Okay, well, that was a weird little discursion that handily demonstrates some aspects of my rather niche nerd status. I went from Doctor Who right over to Sailor Moon (while making passing references to planetary astronomy). That’s fine, though. I really like both…series, sagas, stories? I’m not sure the best word to use to encompass them both. Perhaps “universes” is good.
It does annoy me that we now use the word “universe” when referring to things that might be merely one of many, of perhaps infinite, things, when “uni” means one**, with the implication that it is the only one. I wish we could find a better term, so we could go back to using Universe, with the inherent capital “U”, to refer to whatever encompasses everything.
I had intended to use the term “metaverse” in my own stories, such as The Dark Fairy and the Desperado, that dealt with many planes and subsections of existence, but then Fuckerberg stole the term. And I did start thinking about it and using it way before he arrogated it to his pathetic little virtual empire. Then I had to switch to “Omniverse”, which may actually be a more accurate term than Metaverse, but it doesn’t sound as good in my opinion.
So, yeah, now (even in legitimate physics) there is the general use of (small u) universes, which is almost inherently contradictory. Many Worlds may be better, but its a little nonspecific. There are, many worlds, many worlds just in our solar system.
Maybe the term “polyverse” might work? Perhaps “facets”? I don’t know. I suppose it doesn’t matter much. It’s just me dwelling on and being bothered by things that don’t really even register to most other people. Thoughts unlike those of my brethren, indeed.
I hope you have a great day.
*I was resistant to the notion when I first heard about it, from my kids as it turns out. But I looked into it, and I heard the arguments‒perhaps most accessibly addressed by Neil DeGrasse Tyson‒and I was convinced. It turns out that the international astronomical community doesn’t lightly go and change the designation of something, knowing there will be many pissed off Boomers and Gen-Xers (Hello!), but does so only with very well thought-out reasons.
**Though, to refer to cartoons again, Uni was also the name of the little unicorn on which the barbarian character doted in the cartoon Dungeons and Dragons from way back when.
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The title of this blog post is wrong
Well, to quote Emperor Palpatine (in Return of the Jedi), “Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen.”
Now, admittedly, I haven’t specifically foreseen very much, other than trivial things that are foreseen without any conscious thought. But I did foresee (and did predict*) that I would go to the office today and that I would write a blog post today, which is what seems to be happening. Hopefully, the Death Star will not be blown up around me.
Anyway, yeah, I’m going in to the office today. Huzzah.
Okay, with reference to the preceding sentences: Someone needs to tell all the word processor programs that just because we have a compound word “into” does not mean we cannot use the expression “in to” without it being a mistake! The two things do not have precisely the same meaning, and the split words are in any case more fundamental than the compound word.
You’d think the editing software was worried that “in” and “to” were like neutrons or something, and that if you separate the compound words from each other they’ll just…decay with a half-life of about ten minutes, like free neutrons do. Therefore, it’s got to keep them bound, because neutrons in a nucleus are really stable and can last until, I don’t know, the protons decay, if that even happens**.
Perhaps I’m overly impatient, but I get frustrated by the fact that a lot of the time, perhaps most of the time, when Google Docs gives me its grammatical suggestions, I have to choose the option “Suggestion is wrong”.
What bothers me about this‒one of the things‒is that I am pretty sure that I have more grammatical expertise than most people around me, and maybe more than most of the people who use Google Docs. So, out there in the world where people are using it, mostly they are not correcting it, but are allowing it to correct them without even critically evaluating it.
And so, far from such grammar checkers improving people’s grammatical skill and knowledge, they weaken it. One does not, simply by driving 26 miles every day, get in shape to run a marathon****. If anything, one’s physical fitness tends to atrophy, and if one only gets around by motor vehicle, one tends to become far less fit, less healthy, weaker.
Of course, training too much can damage a person’s fitness as well. Like the Laffer curve, we find our peak benefit somewhere in the middle of the arc.
Well, it looks like my footnotes today are even longer than the main body of this post. I suspect that they are also somewhat more interesting than the main body of the post, but interestingness (interest?) is in the mind of the beholder, so only you can judge that.
I hope you all have a very good day today and a very good day tomorrow. You should rest and prepare yourselves, because come Monday, I will be writing another blog post…as always, exclusis improvisis.
*It’s interesting that this word, which has a similar compound structure to “foresee”, is clearly of at least slightly different origin or evolution, linguistically. Fore see: to see before, to see ahead of time. Pre dict: to speak before, to speak the thing before it happens. We pre dict but we don’t fore dict. Likewise, we fore see, but we don’t pre see. Curious.
**There are various theoretical reasons many physicists think protons should decay eventually, but that the half life is predicted to be something like 10 to the 35th or 10 to the 40th years or some such. Now that’s a long half life, obviously. But…there are a loooooot of protons. There are so many protons (they’re everywhere, believe me, you just can’t seem to get away from them) that even if it will take 10 to the 40th years before half of them would decay, we should still be detecting some of them decaying now and then, if we look***. But “we” have been looking for quite a while, and we haven’t been able to detect any instances of proton decay whatsoever so far.
***Think of it this way. If there were a lottery in which to win you had to match 10 numbers, each of which could be between 1 and 100 (nonrepeating), the odds of matching one ticket would be roughly one in 6.28 times 10 to the 19th power, or one in 62,800,000,000,000,000,000 (sixty-two quintillion, 800 quadrillion). Even so, if you had 10 to the 20th people (a hundred quintillion) playing it every week, you’d expect to have fairly frequent winners despite the long odds. The chances of winning for one individual are so slight that they might almost as well be waiting to quantum tunnel through their front door, and yet the odds of there being no winner may be only about a coin flip in any given running of the lottery (I could work out the precise odds, but I don’t know that it’s worth the time and effort). This is not a contradiction. It’s a good reason to remind people not to be fooled by the fact that they may see on the news that someone often ends up winning the slightly more sane lotteries that we actually run. Your own odds of winning are so close to zero that you’re almost certainly far more likely to die in a car accident on the way to buy your lottery ticket than you are to win the lottery, but when someone does win, it’s big news. It’s somewhat analogous to the situation with airline crashes.
***Simply walking into Mordor, on the other hand, might be good for one’s fitness, if only there were not so many…environmental health risks.
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WARNING: The following may contain “sacrilege”. Proceed with caution.
Well, I would say “Thank God it’s Friday”, but I am working tomorrow, exclusis improvisis, and so it’s not the last day of the work week, which is what people are generally celebrating when they say, “Thank God it’s Friday”.
I suppose that tomorrow I could say, “Thank God it’s Saturday” as a replacement expression. It’s a bit more cumbersome, but at least it would be sort of appropriate, since in Judaism, Saturday is Shabbat. Then again, if one is an observant Jew, one does not work on Saturday. Well, I guess if one is a rabbi or a cantor technically one works on Saturday, but that’s a whole nother* thing.
As for the thanking of any deity for the fact of it being Friday (or any other day), it seems gratuitous, because the days of the week and how we order them and what we do on specific ones seems very much a purely human convention. It doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that a god would arrange specifically, and certainly not for individual people. After all, when it’s Friday for me, it’s Friday for everyone else, barring those far enough away for the clock to roll over and such.
Of course, I suppose, if there really were a God, and if that God were, as is generally described in the Abrahamic religions, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, then God would be literally responsible for everything, including every action and choice that any and all humans ever make. So, it wouldn’t be absurd in that case to thank God for the fact of Friday, but it would also be reasonable to say, “Screw God, it’s Monday”.
If God can be given credit for all good things, then God must bear the blame for all bad things. There is no other logical possibility as far as I can see.
I am open to being convinced otherwise, of course, but please spare me any trite and transparently nonsensical excuses like the whole “free will” thing or blaming Satan (or some other, similar entity) for the bad stuff. If people have free will‒a fairly nonsensical notion in and of itself, at least as far as the so-called libertarian** free will as imagined by some in the Abrahamic faiths goes‒then God is not omnipotent, and cannot really even be omniscient.
As for the whole “blaming Satan” thing, well, did God not create Satan? Who is to blame if Satan is faulty? Likewise, who is to blame if humans are faulty? If they were made by an omnipotent and omniscient being, along with everything else in the universe, then that being is the only one that can possibly be held ultimately responsible.
Of course, one could claim that Satan (or Ahriman or whoever) was not created by God, but came into existence separately. That at least is more logically consistent (and somewhat more interesting) than the alternative, but it also inescapably implies that God is neither omnipotent nor omniscient (and it raises questions about the omnipresence thing as well, for where was such a God when its antagonist came into being?).
Of course, it’s all pretty much nonsense, though some of it can be entertaining. We could replace “God” with Eru/Iluvatar and “Satan” with Morgoth and lose nothing from the above discussion. Actually, the latter two are slightly more honest, for in the very first chapter of The Silmarillion, Iluvatar plainly and openly says that Melkor (aka Morgoth) can do nothing that does not have its uttermost source in Him (Eru/Iluvatar). Neither can anyone else. But of course, Tolkien was smarter, or at least better educated, than the men who wrote the Bible and other similar religious works.
An interesting (to me) aside: the name Lucifer (“light-bearer”) referred initially to the morning star, and is referenced only thus in the “old testament”, though apparently there was some snark involved, since it was a taunt toward the King of Babylon, or so I am led to understand. But of course, the morning star is the same astronomical body as the evening star (Eärendil in Tolkien’s world), both of which are actually the planet Venus, just at different times in its relative orbit.
Also interesting is the fact that Venus, supposedly representing the Goddess of Love, is the most hellish place in the solar system, with crushing surface pressure, searing heat, suffocating carbon dioxide atmosphere, and even sulfuric acid rain. Maybe that’s appropriate for the Goddess of Love; love can be corrosive and crushing and searing and even suffocating a lot of the time.
It is funny that the same planet can have come to represent evil (Lucifer) and great good (Eärendil) depending on the story, and also that it can represent love while being the most hellish (though not the deadliest) planet in the solar system. I don’t think the dichotomy or contradiction or whatever you want to call it has any deep meaning about the nature of the cosmos, or even the solar system, but it does say something about the nature of humans and their myths.
Anyway, if I haven’t irreparably offended you with the preceding, I hope you’ll look forward to my post for tomorrow, which I will be writing, exclusis improvisis. It’s not as though you can look back to it, at least not today.
*I wonder if “a whole nother” counts as tmesis, the insertion of a word in the middle of another in order to add emphasis, e.g., abso-friggin-lutely.
**Not to be confused with the political ideology of Libertarianism.
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Here is my threatened audio post
You’re gonna love it! Or not. One of those things. That’s logic for you.
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I can’t think of a good Shakespeare quote, but there’s a little Milton below
Hello and good morning. Welcome to another Thursday. Please wipe your feet on your way in.
Just kidding. It’s all crap here, anyway; don’t worry about wiping your feet.
I don’t have much to say today. I don’t think I do, anyway. Not that such a thing has tended to stop me in the past, but I don’t know. I feel that maybe it’s at least slightly different this time.
Let’s see…updates. I took my third small-dose of lithium this morning. We’ll see how it goes. I don’t think one would expect to see any major effects already, so be patient. I tend to be patient, at least about some things. What’s a doctor without patience, right?
Oh, yesterday afternoon, I had a near episode of esophageal spasm. I’ve had that before‒the first big time it got me to the ER (I was already working in the hospital, so it wasn’t far to go), where I was checked for potential heart attack, which it was not, of course.
It wasn’t one yesterday, either, in case you’re worried. It responded, albeit somewhat stubbornly, to drinking warmish water (and finally some Coke) to help soothe and relax my esophagus. I don’t think anyone else in the office even noticed.
If it had been like the first time they would have noticed! That time I had an apparent vaso-vagal response and my blood pressure went down way low, and I almost fainted. That was part of why they brought me downstairs: a BP of 80 over 40 in a 29 year old man who did have a history of heart surgery is somewhat concerning, and when you’re a medical resident at the hospital, they tend to treat you with urgency.
Okay, well, I think my esophagus yesterday had been irritated by my recent upper GI illness. It’s not impossible, I guess, that lithium could have been involved. I have noticed that, if I accidentally take too many multivitamins‒i.e., more than one in a day‒I am prone to esophageal spasm. Perhaps electrolytes (etc.) are involved in at least increasing the chances of it happening.
I doubt they would be enough to trigger it all by themselves, though in severely misadjusted amounts they could cause severe pathologies of various kinds. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if I found out electrolyte “imbalances” had caused such a thing all by themselves if they were off enough. I don’t think that’s the case with me, though. I have no other signs or symptoms of electrolyte dysfunction that I have noticed.
Okay, that’s enough discussion of that for the moment. I don’t want to trigger an event by thinking about it too much, but since my upper GI tract is still a bit sensitive, it’s not impossible that I could accidentally do that. “The mind is its own place, and of itself / can make a Hell of Heaven, a Heaven of Hell”, as someone said.
I think I may try to do another audio post today. The few that I did recently seemed surprisingly popular, and conversely, my readership numbers have been going down pretty steadily since the last time I did one. Maybe doing them in the first place was a bad idea, like giving a dog a taste of human food so that now it doesn’t want to eat its usual stuff.
Of course, dogs are practical, about food at least. They rarely avoid their usual meals because they get treats. They just eat them both. At least, that’s how the dogs I have known have behaved.
Cats are a little more persnickety. There are situations in which cats really will go dangerously hungry because the food on offer is not their favorite. I would do that with eggplant. It’s not the only food about which I could say that, but it’s the worst.
Anyway, again, I may do an audio today, partly as an experiment. That may even become the subject of the audio, but I don’t think I’ll leave it at that (knowing me, which I do, at least a bit). That would be kind of lame. I guess we’ll see.
I might as well do something though. I haven’t played or sang (or really listened to) any music in nearly two weeks, and I haven’t been reading, and I certainly haven’t been writing fiction. I haven’t even been doing any exercises on Brilliant dot org. And I’m possibly writing worse blog posts lately, and it’s causing people to stop reading.
I don’t know, maybe the declining readership numbers are related to the fact that I’ve been posting a bit earlier in the morning. My insomnia has been generally increasing, and I’m getting up earlier and earlier, and so going to the office earlier and earlier. Some people might just miss the posts because they’re arriving before they look at their notices (or email, or what have you) and other things follow and drown my little whimpers out.
So, if you’re interested, keep your eyes (and ears) open today for my possible audio thingy. I’ll try not to disappoint, even though that’s something I just tend to do ceteris paribus.
Whatever the case, I hope you all have a truly good day.
TTFN
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Blog post after being out sick
I’m sorry about yesterday, everyone*. I had some kind of stomach bug or had eaten something that was a bit off, something like that, and I stayed out of work, so I didn’t write a post. Anyway, it was the sort of thing associated with nausea and vomiting, not really with much “lower GI” trouble, thankfully, but now it’s mostly worked its way out. Certainly, I don’t feel like I’m going to throw up any more, at least not imminently.
It would be nice to be able to say confidently that I don’t think I will ever throw up again in my life‒if I could say so with good reasons‒but I don’t think it’s very likely that I’ll be able to say that honestly.
I need to stop “talking” about this, because it’s making me feel queasy again.
Anyway, I’m going to the office today, because I need to do payroll, and there will also be a bunch of crap on which I will need to catch up from yesterday. That’s part of the reason I hate staying at the house from work even when I don’t feel well. There’s always so much catch-up work after even one missed day. And catch-up is too sweet and acidic for someone who has an icky tummy (ha ha).
I’m really not doing well, overall, in case you haven’t been able to tell, or in case you’re just new here, which is not impossible. In my ongoing quest to try to correct some of this, I recently began encountering videos and some articles about low-dose lithium‒which, in non-low doses is used to treat bipolar disorder among other things**, as you may already know‒being beneficial for things like depression and even for preventing or curtailing certain forms of dementia (and, potentially, slowing aging, though that seems more speculative).
You can’t get the medical form of lithium without a prescription, which is probably good, since in those strong doses it can have significant toxicity, and people using it need to be monitored. But there are other forms that one can get as supplements, and I ordered some recently (from a supposedly reputable brand). They arrived yesterday evening, so I took one dose before bed‒thankfully they don’t appear to be irritating to my stomach‒and then one this morning.
It’s no big surprise that lithium is available in many forms. It is the third most abundant element in the universe, having been created (in comparatively tiny amounts) when hydrogen and helium*** were made, in the aftermath of the Big Bang (technically we are in the aftermath of the Big Bang, and we could even say that we are in the ongoing process of the Big Bang).
But the lithium atom (the ion, really) is the active part in those various available compounds. It is chemically quite similar to sodium and potassium (having that one electron in its outer shell, like they have) which are ubiquitous and essential electrolytes for numerous bodily processes. Like them, in elemental form, lithium is a soft, light metal (indeed, the lightest metal), and like them it is highly reactive.
Anyway, enough of the chemistry trivia. The point here is that I am trying to use it to treat my chronic dysthymia/depression if I can, which has been a difficult and long task at which I have been far from successful.
Probably part of that, or maybe even all of it, is related to my ASD, and so it may not be amenable to the same kinds of treatments that often work for others, and can be quite intractable by ordinary means, since the root problem is very different. I don’t know how often I’ve had severe depressive episodes in the past in which it’s actually been autistic burnout or shutdown or related stuff.
There is growing data that things like cognitive behavioral therapy, which has relatively good results for neurotypical sufferers of depression, may actually be counterproductive in those with autism. Autistic people tend already to analyze their thoughts, often too much, and to be disconnected from their feelings, though they have them and they can be overwhelming. Analyzing it all just seems to increase that disconnect.
So, yeah, I’ve had very limited benefit from therapy, and similarly limited response to various kinds of antidepressants. But maybe lithium will help. I guess I will find out.
I would really like to try therapeutic psilocybin therapy, because based on the state of the science as I understand it so far, it works via entirely different mechanisms involving the “default mode network”, a series of brain areas/modules that are associated with self reference and the like. But there is no legal use of psilocybin in Florida except in clinical studies. (Thank you, Tricky Dick et al; may you and your ilk rot in Hell for as long a consecutive time as the length of misery to which you’ve contributed in so many others.)
The only places psilocybin therapy is legal in the US include Oregon (a very long way from me) and, ironically, DC. So I don’t see how I would be able to avail myself of it in the current state of things. And my brain is not my friend, so I am very leery of using psychedelics without supervision.
But I have to do something, or I’m pretty sure that pretty soon I am going to kill myself. There is very little that holds me here day to day, and the very kind and good people who remain in my life are people I feel‒indeed, I am all but convinced‒would be at least as well off without me around, and probably better.
Have a good day, though.
*However many that may be. It’s probably not a huge number. Then again “everyone” can refer even to one person, so I guess it’s a tolerable pronoun, even if it might be slightly misleading in its usual connotations.
**It’s also pretty good for rechargeable batteries, and when added in the right proportions to deuterium/tritium can enhance the yield of thermonuclear weapons, because neutron capture leads to it decaying into tritium and…something else, another fusion product or some such; I need to review the specifics. It’s never been my primary field of interest.
***Most helium currently on Earth is not helium from that early “elementogenesis” or whatever the official term is. Rather, it is the product of radioactive decay of heavy elements, which often produces “alpha particles” which are just helium nuclei‒two protons and two neutrons‒and which can pretty readily grab electrons from the world about them and turn them into atoms. This is why‒so I understand‒helium gas pockets are often found near concentrations of uranium ore and the like.
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Monday, Thursday, Doomsday, Workday, let’s call the whole thing off
It’s Monday, but for some unclear reason, I felt the strong urge to write that today was Thursday when I was titling this file to be saved. It took a moment of concentration to correct that urge.
Probably it goes back to the long stretch of time when I did my blog posting only on Thursdays, because I worked on my fiction every other workday. That paid off, in a sense, because I did write quite a lot of fiction in that time. Though, to be clear, it did not pay off in any material sense; I’ve spent more by far on copies of my books to give away to coworkers and such than I am likely ever to make back.
It was an awful lot of work for things that, as far as I know, only two other people have actually read at all. My music has done better, honestly, though not in the sense of bringing in any income. But at least some people have listened to it, my originals as well as my covers. I guess songs are quicker and easier to consume than novels or even short stories (especially my short stories).
So, yeah, even though it’s been years since I was following that Thursday blogging practice, the etchings of that habit are still not completely effaced from my brain. This is the way of habits, as I think I mentioned not too long ago.
Speaking of music, by the way, I want to share a really cool bit of music that came up in my YouTube feed, and which I think deserves a listen (and a like and a share if you can) from all of you. It’s very good, as is the artist’s other work.
YouTube is basically all I did this weekend. I did not read nor write, nor did I play any music (either on a stream or from a recording or on guitar or keyboard or cello). I haven’t done any of those things in several weeks, barring a few one-time exceptions. I mean, I went for walks on Saturday and Sunday, though I was careful not to go too far, and I used sunscreen this time. This was because I had a few errands to run; it was too hot and humid to walk for fun.
But, yeah, I watched videos and vegged out rather pathetically pretty much the entire weekend. I mostly watched various reactors reacting to either Backrooms or Fantastic Four First Steps. Meaning, I watched multiple different people and groups of people reacting to each movie, more or less at random.
It’s almost like watching a movie with someone, though not quite*. Movies are a way of socializing for me; they are one of the few ways I can connect with people. TV shows are similar. I don’t really like to watch things by myself. I do it sometimes, of course, and I even went to see a movie by myself once, when I went to the theater to see the last Guardians of the Galaxy movie, because I just didn’t want to miss that.
I considered going to see the new Spider-Man movie this weekend, but it just felt…I don’t know, like something that would highlight my solitude even more than does watching oodles of different people reacting to movies that I’ve liked.
Mind you, I did watch a few more worthwhile videos. The Science Asylum guy put out a couple of new videos about basic circuit theory topics, and I watched Tyler Folse reacting to a Veritasium video. That tends to be fun. He (Tyler, I mean) frequently speaks my own thoughts** when he’s watching such videos, which is refreshing.
Anyway, that’s as good as it gets, and I don’t know if it will ever get that good again. But I am still going to work, though it is often difficult for me clearly to say why I do it, even to myself. I’m just bringing in income to sustain an existence that is almost without anything to recommend it.
I don’t like it here in Florida, for one thing. It’s naturally an amazing state, quite unique and with many, many interesting life forms. Unfortunately, humans are not one of the interesting ones. They are an infestation that has turned this state into a wellspring of the stupidity that is so rampant in the US. It’s no coincidence that Taco Piggy took up residence here.
So, I’m working to sustain an existence I hate, in a location that is largely repellent‒but with a few very lovely oases in time, such as my youngest, who is enough to counterbalance many, many negative things, but who would almost certainly be well served by not having me in their life any more than necessary. That’s certainly the general consensus at which most other people have arrived regarding my presence in their lives.
It gets harder and harder all the time for me to get up and get into the office every day. It’s not because there’s anything particularly bad about the office; I mean, the noise can be really irritating, and if I don’t watch myself it can get the best of me, but the people are okay. They’re actually quite nice. I’m without a doubt the least pleasant person at the office.
That alone is enough to make life subtly and pathetically dreadful.
*I also watched a few more people reacting to the “special look” trailer for Avengers: Doomsday, but I think I’ve seen most of them by now. Doom is, as I’ve noted, my favorite villain and one of my favorite characters overall in fiction, so the special look is nice because it focuses more on him. Here it is, in case you missed it.
**Not literally. He’s not like Tyler Durden. I just mean that he seems to have similar thoughts in response to the things he’s watching to the ones I have.
Please share this:
Each paragraph in this post begins with a vowel. This pattern STARTED as an an accident…
Ugh. I don’t feel quite well this morning. I woke up in the middle of the night almost throwing up, which was also associated with almost choking on my near-vomit and coughing for quite some time while still feeling queasy. I think I ate something that didn’t agree with me, as they say.
Either that, or it could have been one (or more) of my medications (all OTC) that gave me trouble, because I took more of them than usual yesterday; it was quite a bad pain day for me.
Oh, yeah, and my coworker was out sick as well, and therefore I was a bit more run around than usual despite having a bad pain day. So, that wasn’t very good. It hasn’t been a very good week either, overall, even by my standards, which are not exactly stellar.
On the other hand (he said with uncharacteristic optimism), at least that means that next week is likely to be better than this week. This is yet another example of the phenomenon of regression to the mean, which I discussed here recently.
Anyway, at least today is Friday, and I am not working tomorrow. Having the weekend off is something of a mixed blessing, of course. It’s definitely good for me to get the extra bit of rest, which I need mentally even more than physically. But the increased isolation that is an inescapable part of me being off work can have a bad impact on my mood.
And as I think I’ve noted here before recently, my various distractions are losing their capacity to distract. I haven’t been reading or playing music/singing or listening to songs or to podcasts or to audio books. And I need to search increasingly widely to find YouTube videos that grab my attention even briefly.
Of course, I have whole playlists of videos related to science and to mathematics and to autism and what have you, full of videos I thought looked interesting at the time, and which would probably be interesting, at least in principle, if I were to start watching them now. But I cannot seem presently to summon up the energy, the interest, even to start a single one of them.
Again, it’s been a particularly bad week for me. Maybe it was triggered, or influenced, by my long walk in the high heat and my associated sunburn from Sunday. I suspect that took more out of me than I realized at the time. I particularly wonder if the sunburn might have been worse than I thought. Certainly my skin is peeling all over my forehead, nose, and neck.
Alas, there’s not much I can do about it now other than, potentially, to learn from it. For instance, this weekend, since I don’t work, I can do my things that require walking quite a bit earlier, when it’s cooler, and I can also make sure to wear sunscreen when I do. At least I do tend always to remember to bring water, and even if I don’t bring it, there are dozens of places where I can buy some along my routes.
Okay, here’s a little aside that occurred to me as I contemplated my own frustration at having to use the stupid smartphone (ha ha) keyboard. It seems, from what I have heard, that Steve Jobs et al were inspired to try to create the touchpad for the iPhone and related products by watching Star Trek: The Next Generation when he was younger.
I watched that show, too, after initially being prudishly defiant about it because I loved and supported “original” Trek. Before long I loved the new show. But even back then, I thought the concept of their various screens, which had no fixed controls and no actual keys to press and so on, looked revolting. I hated the idea. I likewise hated the notion of reading from the flat computer screens, or the handheld screens as was often the case; I thought it looked terrible.
I could see that it would be quite useful, however, and that it would be only too handy not only to be able to bring up whatever pages or diagrams or whatever one needed on the screen but to have variability of controls on a screen, so the same surface could fulfill many purposes. I could tell how useful it might be, and I could sort of feel the inescapability of it at some level, and aesthetically, it kind of turned my stomach.
And I thought to myself (just now) that if I could avert the existence of the stupid touch-screen crap, but to do so I would have to allow TNG never to have come into existence…
…I think I might choose to let Star Trek go.
Admittedly, some of this verdict is probably related to the fact that I spent a lot of time watching NextGen with my (now-ex) wife, starting from quite early in our relationship. So, I don’t watch it anymore, not on reruns or whatever else, because that pain outweighs the pleasure by quite a bit.
In addition, there are many songs and shows and movies and musicals and even books in which I do not partake anymore, because they remind me of my ex and all things associated with my ex, and they make me feel very sad and lonely.
Unbelievable: that “aside” took up more info-space than the rest of this post entirely!
I suppose that happened with Shakespeare sometimes, too, so I shouldn’t feel too bad. But, of course, I do. Hey…it’s me after all.
Anyway, I hope you all have a good weekend, and if you like, you can probably rather safely look forward to next week’s blogs being better than this week’s.
I know I do.
