Rants

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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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Who hast not in thy blogs an eye discerning thine honor from thy suffering

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, the 13th of August.  Somehow, “Thursday the 13th” feels less punchy, less interesting, than “Friday the 13th”, but I strongly suspect this is just a cultural artifact of, originally, the day being considered by some to be unlucky, and then of course of the very successful and long-running series of slasher/horror films bearing that title, which took root from that superstition.

This sort of thing can be called more sharply to attention by comparing differences in cultures that do not have very strong shared histories*.  For instance, in the US (and the UK, I believe), ghost stories are generally most associated with mid-autumn, especially around Halloween time.  Whereas, in Japan, telling ghost stories is more associated with the summertime, especially the latter part of it.

I don’t know why that’s the case in Japan, but there are surely causes.  There are causes for all things at some level (probably even of causality itself, though we’re getting into uncharted territory with that speculation).  But, contrary to popular opinion. there are not always reasons.  I actually despise the notion so many people espouse, that “everything happens for a reason”.

Of course, if by “reason” you mean what I would call “cause”, then I cannot quibble with you without engaging in rank hypocrisy, which I try not to do.  But what most people seem to mean by reason in this case has to do with telos, with “purpose”, with “goals”.  In other words, they imagine some personal explanation for things, some willed intention, somewhere.

This is no doubt related to religion‒sometimes it is caused by it, sometimes it probably contributes to causing it, and sometimes it may merely be parallel‒but that doesn’t make it any better.  Deep down, below the façade of piety and orthodoxy, this type of thought seems just to be a kind of self-consolation, like sucking one’s thumb to soothe oneself.

I cannot in good conscience fault all types of self-soothing behavior.  I probably have dozens of what are now called “stims” that I do just to have stuff to do with my hands and feet (and brain, etc.), especially when I feel tense.  But I don’t take them as some hint about the ontology of reality.  I take them as things done by a nervous system trying to cope with a world for which it is perforce imperfectly adapted.

They’re not terrible things, by any means.  Some of them are even kind of cool (I can roll coins across the backs of my fingers, for instance).  But it would be silly of me to imagine or to assume them to have any deeper or broader significance.

What’s the big deal?  Why not let people console themselves with the notion that everything happens for a reason, though it may be an “ineffable” one?  What’s the harm?

Well, there’s always my general recognition that when one fights reality, one always loses.  The course of reality is strict and surrounded by impassable walls; if you don’t maintain your local parallel course to that of reality, sooner or later you will collide with those walls, and it is you who will break, while they will show not so much as a scuff mark.  

If it’s just you who suffers the consequences of this crash, that’s sad but not tragic.  But you may not be the only casualty of your poor steering, and it’s the innocent victims I lament far more than the idiots who drove themselves willfully (or at least willingly) into ruin.

But more specifically, saying that everything happens for “a reason” is a moral “get out of jail free” card.  It lets people look at cases of even terrible suffering and shrug and imagine that the suffering is there for “a reason” and so is “okay”, like Mother Theresa wallowing in the misery of the sick and dying poor as a way to get closer to Jesus.  This sort of thing is easiest when one is not suffering personally.

Now, there is often not much one can do to change a particular case of suffering, but I don’t think that makes it worthwhile to allow oneself to be delusional about it.  It’s better to admit that some entirely unnecessary suffering happens and that it sucks, because that leaves the option open of actually doing something to correct or prevent it, at some point.

It’s better than dismissing it (or worse, embracing it) because of delusions about “God’s plan”, or “karma”, or some Marxist delusion about an inevitable course of history, or any other magical thinking idea, all of which seem to center on an implicit notion of humans being (at least part of) the “purpose” of the cosmos.

Purpose is an invention, something that came into existence in human (and possibly other) brains.  If things in the universe are to be purposeful, it will be up to those who believe in that purpose to make it happen.  This is harder than just imagining that such a purpose is already there, but it actually has the potential to turn out to be made true, at least eventually.

And maybe, here and there, from time to time, when the wind is fair and the stars are right, if one sees suffering but doesn’t imagine that the suffering serves some “greater good”, one might just occasionally take action to relieve it rather than simply to slap on one’s epistemological blinders and go on one’s way.

TTFN

*This is rather akin to finding what processes are biologically fundamental, or at least old, by comparing genomes of organisms that are quite distant relatives**.

**One cannot compare truly unrelated organisms, because on this planet, there are no such things.  All life clearly shows the imprint of common ancestry.  To pick a frequently used example, most of your genes are shared (roughly) with bananas, and far more with banana slugs.

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Blog thyself last, cherish those hearts that hate thee

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday (thus the “hello and good morning” opening), and here I am writing yet another blog post.  I don’t really know why.

I’ve been trying to promote my “stuff” the other day, at least in a haphazard way.  I shared several blog posts on various social media the other day.  Then I shared my “My Books” page, and then the entries for each of my books.  This was done over several hours.

Then, yesterday, I shared some of my songs, to X and to Bluesky, just to see if anyone checks them out.  So far, no luck.  As far as I can tell, no one has so much as seen any of those shares.  Certainly no one has “liked” them.

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.  I don’t exactly have a huge number of followers, anywhere.  But that just shows the poor taste and lack of discernment of humans, that they cannot appreciate ineffable and transcendent genius when it’s right there in front of them.

I’m kidding.  I wish I could be so egotistical; even if I were the most glaringly deluded person ever in the world, if I loved myself, at least I wouldn’t hate myself.

I’ve tried at various times through autosuggestion/self-talk to get myself at least to believe that I love myself (and thence, hopefully, actually to love myself), and I have at times been known to act as if I thought very highly of myself, though those acts were almost always patently in jest.  I think everyone who knew me knew that; they certainly acted as if they did.

Now, though, I have a hard time even saying that I love myself as part of a sort of mantra or summat.  That doesn’t just refer to saying it out loud, but even in my head.  It’s a bit like saying over and over to myself that I do not feel any pain; I’m not good enough at making myself believe the flagrantly counterfactual for it to work.

My mind is strange to me.  For instance, I have a very difficult time taking any joy, let alone pride, in accomplishing anything.  I don’t know why.  So, most of the things I’ve accomplished have not been motivated by any sense of expected satisfaction in the outcomes but rather by a sense of tension and anxiety about the possibility of not achieving it, whatever it might be.

It’s sort of, “Oh, you accomplished something?  Well, of course you did, it’s what’s expected of you.  If you didn’t, there would be hell to pay, even if it’s only the hell of your own sense of failure.  Now, it’s time to get on to the next thing, because you don’t have a right to rest.”

“Run, rabbit, run

Dig that hole, forget the sun.

When at last the work is done

Don’t sit down, it’s time to dig another one.”

Anyway, that driving fear becomes less and less motivational over time, especially after one has failed so much and so often, and one’s life is a tattered mockery of what one thought it might be and what it used to be.

At least if I believed that Lord Foul were doing this to me‒he’s prone to try to hurt people by ruining something they love and then returning it to the person*, it seems‒then I could admire his handiwork (or denigrate it, since he could have made things quite a bit worse than they are).

But of course, I don’t believe in any supernatural entities of any kind.  I don’t rule them out a priori, except by definition (since anything that actually exists is natural, not supernatural), but I find none of them remotely convincing.  I’ve tried to see if they can be, but no, really, all of them bear the flagrant hallmarks of ignorance and would-be wish-fulfillment and fear of death and so on.  They are just instances of humans’ desire to be, literally or figuratively, at the center of the universe.

This applies even to modern discussions about whether consciousness can be “merely” matter** or must be some other, extra, “special” kind of thing, because, after all…it’s humans, innit?  It surely must be something fancy and magical.

I’m being sarcastic, which I hope is obvious.  Things like panpsychism, and even the slightly more sensible notions that consciousness requires quantum events of some kind in the brain and cannot be a product of “ordinary” computation, are merely attempts to make anything we don’t yet fully understand into something woo-filled and magical.  They bear all the hallmarks of an egotistical, willful delusion that tries to make mere humans**** unique, in a unique way.

It’s rather sad.  But more, it’s rather pathetic and contemptible.  At least, I hold it in contempt.  People think they want to imagine magical and “supernatural” things, and while those things can at times be entertained as hypotheses, they generally don’t hold up even to minor to scrutiny.  Reality has tremendous wonders on offer, but because they are “ordinary”, they cannot be good enough for some people.  Unfortunately, as Eliezer Yudkowsky said, “If we cannot take joy in things that are merely real, our lives will always be empty.”

Of course, I cannot seem to take joy in the real or the imaginary, and I certainly have a hard time finding joy in myself.  I find me thoroughly irritating, a lot of the time.  And unfortunately, “No matter where you go, there you are.”  I cannot get away from myself, even by sleeping (see yesterday’s post).

Enough.  The more I write today, the more I seem to want to burn everything down.  I guess I’ll stop, at least for the moment.  I hope you have a good day.

TTFN

*Thomas Covenant said, about Foul’s tendencies, “How do you hurt a man who’s lost everything?  Give him back something, broken.”

**As if there were anything “mere” about matter***.

***Except matter that is part of a mere (which is a term for a shallow lake).

****Humans merit the adjective “mere” much more than matter does.

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Winding down at the end of the week

It’s Friday as I write this (and as I intend to publish it), and I do not expect to work tomorrow, exclusis improvisis*.  There had been some sort of slight possibility of doing something with my youngest one of these weekends, but I’m not sure if that is ever going to pan out.  There certainly hasn’t been any finalization of anything, nor really any tentativization (which is probably not a legitimate word).  I guess I’ll find out.

I don’t like to try to push things from my end, because I don’t want to elicit any sense of obligation or guilt in my child.  While I definitely want to spend time with them (with both of them, ideally, but that’s another matter), it would be horrifying to discover that such time was spent only because of a sense of remorse and duty, not because they wanted to spend time with me.

Then again, I have a hard time imagining that anyone ever wants to spend time with me, at least not anymore.  In the past, I would say that I used to be at least some degree of “fun” as a person with whom to hang out.  But I don’t know that I am capable of being that way anymore‒actually, based on many people who have spent time with me perforce, I think it’s pretty clear that I am not pleasant company.  Maybe I never really was.  Maybe most people just put up with me in the past.

Given such facts, on my current weekends off, such as this coming weekend, I basically just spend time by myself.  That’s good for getting rest from the effort of interpersonal relations, and it also lets me rest my back some, but I do feel quite isolated and gloomy and, yes, lonely.

Waah.  Poor baby.

I’m running out of interesting YouTube videos to watch, despite there being many billions of such videos available.  I do enjoy going for walks when I’m able, usually, and they are good for me overall.  Except, right now, at this time of year, the heat index gets well above 100 Fahrenheit here starting quite early in the morning, meaning my body’s cooling mechanisms cannot adequately function to maintain a healthy temperature, so I’m in danger of heat stroke if I push much at all.

It turns taking a long walk into a possibly suicidal gesture (even potentially a deliberate one).  That’s a bit fascinating, because they can’t Baker Act you for taking a walk, at least not readily.  But overheating and dehydration can put one at risk for kidney stones, and that is something well worth avoiding, believe me.  Well, you don’t have to believe me, but if you end up having kidney stones yourself, I’d be willing to bet that you would agree.

Anyway, I don’t know what I’m trying to discuss.  My mental health has not been good lately, even for me.   By which I mean it isn’t just not good on average, which is true, but that it’s worse than my typical, average, poor state.  I don’t know if that’s obvious to people around me‒as far as I can tell, no one can ever see when I feel truly horrible‒but I can certainly tell, even if no one else can.

Oh!  This brings up a personal pet peeve of mine (I guess all “pet peeves” are personal, but you probably get what I mean):  I despise the recent tendency to use the term “mental health” as a euphemism for mental illness, as in “that person suffered from mental health”.

I don’t understand what people think they are accomplishing‒or avoiding‒by attempting such linguistic gymnastics, but it’s maddeningly absurd and idiotic.  “Health” and “illness” are antonyms, dammit.  One doesn’t suffer from mental health (though I have seen that exact expression used unironically), one suffers due to a relative lack thereof.  It’s as if you said someone went bankrupt from a surfeit of goods and money.

I don’t know why people feel that avoiding words that describe unpleasant things will make those things somehow less difficult, but it doesn’t work, as far as I can see.  It just obfuscates the issues and makes it more difficult to improve things.  You can’t get your mechanic to look at the part of your car that’s having trouble just by saying that your car is really driving lately.  That may not be the best absurd parallel, but that’s okay; the thing itself is so stupid and absurd and insane that it stands alone.

You don’t say of someone who is dying of metastatic cancer that they are suffering from physical health.  They are suffering from a terrible illness.

Likewise, depression (and its various related issues), chronic or otherwise, is a mental illness, and it has mortality rates comparable to many cancers, and worse than some.  There is also much more stigma associated with it than with such ailments as cancer, which doesn’t help.  I’m not sure what can be done about all that.

One thing I can say is that my mental health is poor.  That’s nothing new overall, obviously, but it gets just more and more tedious all the time, even as it continues to have its usual effects.  It becomes harder and harder to see any point in trying to fight it.  What would I gain?  What do I have to which to look forward in my life?

Nothing.  I anticipate no new revelations or relationships or creations or friendships or companionship (redundant list entries, I know).  I anticipate no new accomplishments.  I expect only gradual and rather pathetic decay and dissolution, unless I’m lucky enough to have something take me out more precipitously, or to arrange some such thing for myself.

Well, whatever.  Sorry.  I hope you have a good weekend.

*Barring the unforeseen.

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Don’t rent a phase space in a detrimental State

First off, just to get it off my chest (and in case “they” are listening) I want to say that I hate Google’s latest iteration of the symbol for Google Drive.  Before, it looked like a 2-D representation of a three way analog of a sort of Mobius strip.  Now it looks like a poor attempt to draw that previous symbol by a somewhat challenged child who doesn’t understand proportions, let alone how to produce a facsimile of a 3-D shape on a 2-D surface.

No shade on such a child for not immediately and intuitively being able to apply techniques that took centuries for adult artists to discover.  But I do willingly throw shade at the adult graphic designers‒professional artists who have the shoulders of all those previous artists on which to stand‒who produced this new version of the symbol.  It certainly doesn’t look professional.

It seems that almost every time Google updates things for apparently aesthetic reasons, it makes them a bit less good than they were before.  This brings me back, as so many things do, to a point I often make, which could really be considered a theorem when you get down to it:  while all improvement is change, most change is not improvement.

Just look at any phase space representing possible states of reality that are good or bad or neutral from your point of view, and put the “origin” at where you are now.  If you pick any random direction to move in this phase space‒perhaps flipping a coin for each axis (or dimension) and either increasing or decreasing your coordinate in that axis by one unit vector based on the outcome of the coin flip‒and do this for all axes, and repeat if necessary, the odds of you getting anywhere you actually want to go are less than 50%*.  At least, this is so by any pre-chosen measure(s) of goodness that does not deliberately and flagrantly include most of the phase space.

So, this is my exhortation to Google and all other such similar companies, or companies that may face similar perceived pressures:  don’t just change things for the sake of “being a company that doesn’t appear to accept things as being good enough as they are”, especially if your desperate changes are just cosmetic crap.  Focus your energy on things that are “objectively” in need of improvement‒processing speed, ease of use, environmental impacts and other externalities, reliability of backups, security, that kind of hardnosed, practical stuff.

The merely cosmetic crap can be relegated to, I don’t know…the Met Gala or something along those lines, where people make new-looking stuff all over the place for the (apparent) sake of just trying to do something that looks different than anything anyone else is doing.  And, of course, almost everything one sees at such places veers between hilariously awful and just hideously awful.  That’s my judgment, anyway; it’s the only judgment I have available to use.

Okay, so that’s that off my chest.

Except, of course, that it isn’t really “off my chest”.  Unfortunately, human mental states don’t behave like fluids that build up in pressure and volume and then ease when expressed, as if the pressure has been reduced by allowing one to “vent”** it.  It was an old hypothesis (or set of hypotheses) that this was the way mental states work.  It was not a stupid notion at the time, not at all, but it turns out to have been wrong empirically.

Emotions, drives, things like that, are not some kind of metaphorical fluid, but are mental states, somewhat reminiscent of the states of a computer’s RAM (but not exactly like that).  Acting on such states, given the nature of reinforcement that happens in neural pathways, in individual neurons, and in modules of neurons, is if anything likely to reinforce the state on which you are acting.  So, if you feel angry, then venting your anger, acting on it even in a limited way, will not be likely to produce any form of “catharsis”, but will instead make you more likely to get into that state again in the future.

Neural pathways behave somewhat analogously to trails (paths) through a forest or similar place:  the more such paths are used, the clearer, more well-defined, and easier to use they become.

Think about it.  If catharsis were a real thing, a real, causal process, then every time you say or otherwise express the fact that you love someone, you would feel that love less, you would feel it has been released.  But that is not the way things tend to happen (thank goodness).

In fact, expressing emotions you do not feel can make you start to feel them over time.  This is how certain forms of brainwashing and indoctrination work (and it’s probably part of why professional actors so often seem to have such turbulent emotional lives).  Religions have relied upon this fact, sometimes rather openly, for millennia:  say the prayer, enact the ritual, profess the belief, even if you don’t really believe it, and over time, you may actually start to believe.

All right, well, that’s enough from me for today.  I don’t feel very well, either physically or mentally, but I’ll try not to express those facts too much, because I don’t want to reinforce them.  On the other hand, I’m not simply  going to try to change something without having a good reason for the change.  Goodness knows I’ve tried numerous things in many ways, and they have not taken me to regions of my personal phase space that I consider worth inhabiting.

Hopefully you are doing better.

*Unless you do a post-hoc redefining of “good” to include wherever you happen to end up.  But if you do that, then any and every change could be considered good‒even a change that wipes out you and all that for which you care.  Which, honestly, you will kind of deserve, if that word means anything, because you are being willfully irrational and intellectually dishonest.

**Thus the use of that very expression, “to vent”, regarding emotions‒because people wrongly think that things work that way.

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Time, whose millioned accidents creep in betwixt blogs

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, the 28th of May, which fact implies that May must have started on a Friday.  There are 7 days in a week, so the 28th is the final day of the 4th full week of the month.  Thus, the next day must be the beginning of a “new” week from the perspective of the month.  I’m pretty sure I’m right about this, but I’m not as confident as I ought to feel.  I could go check, of course‒and later, I probably will do so*‒but for now I want to sit with my postdiction.

I have this mental issue in which I feel significantly unsure even of straightforward things for which I “know” the outcome.  For instance, I have to keep track of the money value of sales and who gets the credit (and thus who gets paid and how much) for given sales.  Often, two people work on a sale, and the value is split between them evenly.  I do the splitting in my head, even when they sell for bizarre amounts that make no sense (don’t get me started).  Then I update “the board” and add all the various totals up:  the running total for the particular agents, the total amount sold of each package, the overall total for the day and the overall total for the week.  I do all this in my head, because I know I can, and it’s faster than using the calculator (for logistical, not computational reasons‒I cannot actually do arithmetic faster than a calculator).

But in the end, I check over all the numbers using Excel’s various auto-totaling functions.  This is not merely for the sake of thoroughness and to confirm accuracy, though it serves those purposes.  It’s also because I never feel sure.  Even if I’m splitting a 500 dollar deal two ways, I feel unsure that it’s 250 per person.

It is 250 per person, of course.  That’s basic, simple division.  It’s definitely correct.  I know that intellectually.  But I feel unsure.  It can be terribly annoying, to say nothing of producing anxiety and stress.

It might not bother me so much if I didn’t see so many people expressing and acting upon secure confidence in so many things which they cannot know and things that I know are not so.  Of course, I’m sure at least some of such seeming confidence is bluster and bravado; people are encouraged to act confident because other people respond to it.

There are probably sensible evolutionary reasons for this proclivity.  But there are also evolutionary reasons why young men are more likely to do risky things that get them hurt and/or killed, as well as to get in fights (sometimes lethal ones) with other young men, but that doesn’t mean we want to encourage such behaviors in the modern world.

I don’t really know what point I’m trying to make.  But then again, I don’t really know the point of anything or anybody.  As far as I can tell, there is no point, other than the fact that all this shit just is.  People can make up reasons and purposes and so on, they can imagine telos behind the universe, but pretty much every such proposed idea I’ve encountered has been just plain idiotic.  The infantile, simple-minded, wish-laden fairy tales into which people buy at all levels are just astonishing.  It would be funny, even hilarious, if it were not just so pathetic.

Even the writer of Ecclesiastes recognized that all is vanity.  Sure, he** probably went on to do some sophistry to try to convince himself to obey “YHWH”; it’s been a long time since I read the book.  But I get the feeling that the “all is vanity” point was what really stuck around in the foundations of his heart.

And I think he was probably right.  There probably is no deeper inherent meaning to anything, beyond the laws of Quantum Field Theory and General Relativity and whatever mathematical and physical structures underlie those structures.  I don’t expect that, as we drill down deeper into the nature of reality at its roots, we will find any implied meaning to anything, in the human sense.  But we will find out more about how to shape the universe to the degree that we can do it, so from a practical point of view it’s definitely worth learning as much as possible.  One never even begins to know what potential will be revealed by some fact of nature until one has that fact.

Anyway, enough of this.  Like everything else, this blog post has no point and I’m getting sick of it.  I hope you all have enjoyable days.  There’s no good reason for you not to try to do so.

TTFN

*I did, and I was correct.

**I feel reasonably confident in saying that essentially all of the books of the “Bible”, original and sequel, were written by men.  Supposedly, there was a Gospel according to Mary Magdalene, but the Lateran council or the council of Trent or one of those other goofy get-togethers where a bunch of ignorant but self-important men decided which stuff actually should be put in the Bible kept it out, as well as the apparent “Doubting Thomas” gospel or what have you.  I have to admit, I would be interested in reading at least part of Mary Magdalene’s take on things…that is, if I thought any of those writings were accurate or were likely to be hers, or that she even existed, or that any of the events they described actually happened.

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Are you a Memorial Daypot Dome Gate scandaloholic?

First off, Happy Memorial Day, for those who live in the US (or anyplace else Memorial Day is observed, if there are such places).  I have to admit, it seems slightly weird to wish someone a “happy” Memorial Day, since it’s a day in which we honor and remember fallen soldiers.  At least, that’s the idea behind the holiday.

But of course, when I was quite young, Memorial Day was a happy sort of holiday.  We got a day off school, it was all but summer already, and we always had a big family get-together with grilled hamburgers and hot dogs and all sorts of side dishes like potato salad and chips and such like.  There often tended to be desserts, as well, including (if I recall correctly) popsicles.  I’ve never been a huge popsicle fan, but sometimes, during warm weather, and at such special, family events, they could be quite refreshing.

Still, if I look at a popsicle now, even if it’s a Creamsicle®, I get more of a positive nostalgic feeling than any even slight urge to eat the popsicle.  Would that this were the case with more straightforward ice cream and other such treats.

I know from experience that it is possible to break one’s proclivities for certain junk foods just by overexposure.  I did that‒unintentionally‒with Nutter Butters® and with Pringles®.  I no longer crave either of those things because, for a time, I overindulged in them quite severely, and it wasn’t good for me‒I ended up getting negative associations with eating those things because of the general physical ill-health they engendered.

I guess that means that one way to break a bad food habit may be to give into it in spades‒say, eating only Cheetos® for every meal, three meals a day, nothing else.  I’m not recommending that, by the way; it would not be good for you.  Though, if you were truly starving and had nothing else, it could keep you alive for a time.

Interestingly, I don’t think this aversion therapy works for more fundamentally pathological addictions.  For instance, I wouldn’t recommend trying to quit heroin by doing nothing but heroin for a while‒as I understand it, that’s actually what some people do, and it tends just to lead to tolerance.  Of course, if you die of an overdose, that would eliminate your addiction, but it certainly would not cure it (by any reasonable definition of “cure”).

And of course, severe alcoholics often just drink alcohol almost solely, sometimes as their main source of calories, but even getting sick to their stomachs doesn’t make them quit nor does experiencing the more horrifying effects of alcohol addiction (including alcohol withdrawal, which can kill you).  If these sorts of things don’t trigger an aversion to something, it’s hard to see what would.

This raises (quite tengentially) a pet peeve of mine:  it makes no sense to describe real or figurative addictions by calling oneself, for instance, a “chocoholic” or a “workaholic”.  This would seem to imply that one is addicted to “chocohol” or to “workahol”, whatever such things might be.

If one were following the paradigm that gave us the word “alcoholic” one would be a “chocolatic” or a “workic”.  It’s flagrantly stupid to do the other thing.  If you’ve got a problem with chocolate or with working too much (or whatever), don’t try to use a cutesy, cannibalized term made by cutting and moving something that was never a suffix and then using it as if it were one.  Just call the problem what it is.

This is similar to the fact that people inexplicably want to add “-gate” to the end of every scandal du jour, in reference to the very famous Watergate scandal.  But the Watergate scandal was about a break in at the Watergate Hotel.  That’s where the “gate” part comes from!

If we were to assume current media scandal standards, we would have thought that historic event was a scandal involving water somehow.  It’s as if, because of the old Teapot Dome scandal, people named every scandal a “-pot Dome” scandal.  Then the actual Watergate scandal would have been called the “Watergatepot Dome Scandal”.

It’s submoronic* to call a scandal about pizza, for instance, “pizzagate”.  Is there a Pizzagate Hotel somewhere that had a breakin?  (Though, I must admit, if there isn’t a restaurant that calls itself “Pizzagate” then I’ll be disappointed in the creativity and chutzpah of restaurateurs.)

If my blog achieves only one thing in the world (or two things, in a sense), and if that is to decrease the use of “-holic” and “-gate” in such situations, then I would be pleased enough with having written it.

I don’t have high hopes for that possibility, though.  Then again, I don’t have high hopes for much of anything.  I’m a pretty miserable sort of person, though I think that before the onset of my chronic pain I was less so (though I did already suffer from dysthymia/depression).  Like Kenny Rogers’s gambler, the best I can hope for is to die in my sleep.  Of course, the fact that I sleep horribly makes even that small hope less likely than it might be otherwise.

Whatever.  I’ll simply have to accept the fact of not being asleep when it happens if that’s the way it has to be.  Who knows, maybe it will be better to see it coming, so to speak.

Try to have a good holiday.

*By which I mean “worse than moronic” not “not quite moronic”.

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“Perfect” IS the enemy of the good

I would like to propose that we eliminate or at least strongly curtail the use of the word and concept of “perfect”.  And since there is no reason for me not to propose it, I will do so:

Let us eliminate or at least strongly curtail the use of the word and concept “perfect”.

I wrote those two short paragraphs‒really, a short paragraph and a single sentence‒yesterday afternoon, starting this blog post much earlier than I usually do, because it’s a subject that’s a bit of a pet peeve, but which is also, I think, important.

People have this word, “perfect”, and they think it means something, so they try to behave as if it means something.  But for all but the most trivial cases‒one’s score on a straightforward test, the answer to a well-defined problem in mathematics, et cetera‒it’s a word with no serious meaning in actual reality.

What would a perfect person be?  What would that even mean?  Perfect by what criteria?

What could it mean to say that a work of art is perfect, that a song is perfect?  One can say an interval of notes is “perfect”, e.g., a perfect fifth, but that is because it is a concept with a precise definition in a very limited bailiwick.

In the real world, so to speak, “perfection” is a will-o-the-wisp, an illusion without underlying substance that will tend to lure one into a treacherous (metaphorical) bog.  I think it’s fairly widely recognized that perfectionism is a dangerous and usually detrimental habit or attribute.  One can almost never achieve perfection, even by relatively serious criteria, in the real world; reality is too complex and unpredictable.

But the notion of perfection can certainly succeed at taking most of the joy out of one’s accomplishments.  No matter how good one already is, or how much one improves from one’s previous state, one can never just feel pretty good about it if one is always measuring oneself against an unrealistic and unachievable standard, so one is always failing.

The desire for perfection can also lead to misplaced notions of idealism, which can engender well-meaning atrocities, as one strives to achieve some imaginary, impossible, invented notion of a perfect world.  I’ve written before about the fact that all ideologies are wrong.

The world is simply too complicated (har) for any relatively simple and concise set of ideas* to apply all over, unless you’re counting quantum field theory and general relativity as a relatively simple set of ideas.  They are simple in a certain sense, of course, but that’s a rarefied kind of “simple”.  And we also know they are not complete and do not apply everywhere in their present form as we understand them; they conflict with each other in regions where gravity must be quantized, e.g., the Big Bang or the inside of black holes.

Having the notion of “perfection” also does us the disservice of implying that there is some upper bound on improvement, whether personal or societal or anything in between.  It’s as if there were some analog of the speed of light, an ultimate limit that can only be approached asymptotically.

But, as far as we can tell, there is no upper limit on improvement, at least not by anything other than trivial measures.  A person can, on average, continue to improve over an entire lifetime, never reaching a limit, always able to get better and better, however they might reasonably define “better”.  So can a city, or a nation, or a civilization.

It can be quite discouraging and enervating to compare oneself always to an ideal that is impossible to achieve, at least partly because it is not sensibly defined and cannot be so defined.  And then, as Hamlet said, enterprises of great pitch and moment with this regard their courses turn awry and lose the name of action.  Or something like that.  If you are always falling short because your measure of worth is unattainable, you’re liable to become quite discouraged.

Even in fiction, there are no interesting “perfect” heroes.  Sir Galahad is just boring, for example, while Sir Lancelot is interesting, because he has flaws.  He’s still a good guy, though, even though he may consider himself a failure in the end.

Anyway, there’s more that I could say, and I’m not at all sure that I’ve made my point very well.  This has just been a minor rant about a personal pet peeve, but one that I think has actual detrimental consequences for the world at large.

Speaking of imperfection, my pain persists (of course) and my insomnia has been horrible, particularly last night.  I hope you all have a good week.  I just want to rest.

*Such as the notion that unregulated, truly free markets are the most ideal and efficient way to run an economy for all purposes, or the contrapuntal idea of “from each according to his ability to each according to his need”, or even the seemingly decent “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one”.  For the “many” consists entirely and always of a collection of “ones”, and if some larger group can violate the rights of a smaller group or an individual simply because their “needs” are those of a greater number of people, then there are no rights, and no consistent argument for why anyone’s needs should matter at all.  Even the Golden Rule is far from straightforward in its application.

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You don’t prolong a vowel sound by repeating a silent “e” doggone it!

Well, here we go.  It’s Monday.  It’s the start of another “traditional” work week, and I am participating in that tradition.

I don’t really know why I am doing so‒though, on a reasoning kind of level, I could probably figure out at least some of the proximate causes‒since there is nothing of value for me to sustain by getting an income, and I feel less and less a member of society or civilization with every passing day (or so it seems).  And whatever I am (metaphorically), I don’t like me.

I also don’t know whether the WordPress people were able to fix my site or not*, so I don’t know if I’m going to load this onto it in the usual way or not.  That almost threw me into a nervous breakdown the other day (I suppose the official term would be a “meltdown”, which is apparently what they call it for people with ASD, and though that’s somewhat insulting, it’s not an inappropriate comparison for one to invoke a nuclear catastrophe).

It makes me feel the urge to try to write on Substack or some such similar site.  But I’ve been on WordPress for a decade and a half now‒that’s wild to realize‒and I don’t really want to have to change.  I’d rather just delete.

I’m also having issues with my ride this morning.  I reserved a ride to the station well in advance, which ought to make it more reliable, not less, but evidently that isn’t the case.  Despite the irregularity, I have not been offered a discount, even though if I were late, I would be penalized.  Somehow that doesn’t seem right, and it fills me with at least a slight wish for vengeance.

I know, I know, this isn’t a major deal.  But it feels major to me, relatively speaking, and it makes me want less and less to bother participating in anything at all.  I’m already jogging along the edge of a canyon with unstable sides.  Even little gusts of wind could be enough to push me over the edge, if it comes at a time when I am already unsteady and have taken a bad step.

I take a lot of bad steps.

Speaking of bad steps, I would like to make a public service announcement, aimed mainly at younger folks online.  Here it comes:

It makes no sense to try to convey the impression of an elongated spoken vowel sound in a word that ends in a silent “e” by repeating the e!

The most common use (that I have noticed) of this idiocy is to prolong the word “love” to provide emphasis.  They write things such as “I loveeeeee this restaurant” or whatever.  But “loveeeeeee” would be pronounced “luv-eeeeeee”, as if Thurston Howell from Gilligan’s Island were wailing for his wife as they became separated on a failing getaway raft, like in Castaway.  (Think the analogue of yelling, “Wiiiiiiilsooooooon!”)

If one wants to prolong the main vowel sound of the word “love” then it makes more sense to repeat that vowel, for instance, “I looooove the show Gilligan’s Island.”  The “e” is silent in the original word; it doesn’t make sense to multiply it.  That changes the word’s pronunciation entirely.  It bothers me every time when I see such blatant, if not terribly important, idiocy.  I haaaaaaaaate it!

See how that works better than “hateeeeee” would?  That sounds like someone greeting their beloved head covering, to which they refer by the nickname, “Hatty”.

I think I will make that subject the headline topic of this post (I did).  Maybe someone out there will see it and apply it.

Ugh.  I already feel overwhelmed, and it’s just Monday morning, and work hasn’t even started.  We also have supremely Florida weather here today, very hot but even more humid.  I’m sweating copiously just sitting still.

And now my train is going to be delayed, it turns out.  I really ought just to go back to the house and lie down and not ever get up.  That might be hard to do, of course‒not going back to the house, I mean the “never getting up” part.  For one thing, even though it’s stupidly humid and so I’m probably somewhat dehydrated, I would eventually have to get up to go to the bathroom.  I have no desire to lie in my own urine.

Of course, if I took enough of the right medicine or combinations of medicine, I wouldn’t have to worry about that.  At least, I wouldn’t worry about it.

I don’t know what to say.  I really don’t feel well.  I don’t feel any sense of belonging or connection with the life I have (and am), but I don’t see any change that’s within my power that would do anything but make things even harder and more stressful.

I can’t just throw myself on someone else’s mercy and beg for help.  No one I know has the resources to be able to help me, even if they knew how to do so.  And I don’t have any insurance of any kind, nor any other such things.

I don’t even use my bicycle because the rear tire is punctured and I don’t have any bike stores within bike-pushing distance, and I don’t know how to fix the rear tire myself.  I guess I could learn, but I know that I probably never would do it.  I don’t handle maintenance tasks very well, especially when they’re geared (no pun intended) toward me.  I don’t really have any reserves of will and energy.

Things would be easier if not for chronic pain and the consequences of taking lots of medicine for a long time to try to control it as best I can.  It would also be nice to be able to have an actual, restful night’s sleep.

I want to say that I cannot remember the last time I woke up feeling rested, because that sounds rhetorically impressive, but I do remember:  it was a night/morning in the mid-nineties (I do not recall the exact day and year, because at the time it didn’t seem so noteworthy, though it was wonderful).  As far as I can tell, that was the last time I felt well-rested.

Speaking of rest, I’m going to give this post one for now.  I hope, I truly hope‒and if I thought it was any use, I would pray‒that each and every one of you is feeling much better than I am right now.

*They hadn’t completely, but I am able to do something at least more like classic writing on it than it looked to be as of last week.