food

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But though my blogs be mean, take them in good part.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again, so I’m writing another edition of my blog post.  It’s not the first nor the second post I’ve done this week, so calling it my “weekly” blog post would seem somewhat inaccurate.

It’s now only two weeks until Boxing Day, so you should get out your gloves and your speed rope and your heavy bag and get yourself back in shape for the ring!

I really didn’t want to go to the office today.  If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have written a post, except perhaps a single line such as “No blog post today”.  That would be borderline self-contradictory, but since my thoughts and words have been dealing with depression and suicidality lately, I thought if I just wrote nothing people might become concerned.

I’m probably being egotistical even to imagine such a thing.

The reason I didn’t want to go to work was because the office holiday dinner takes place tonight, and I really feel tense about it.  We’ll be going to the same restaurant we used last year, and it was overcrowded and had too much sensory overload even back then, such that I had to start drinking (alcohol) as soon as possible to keep from scratching my own skin off.

It would have been one thing if everyone there had been people with whom I felt comfortable.  There are three or so people at the office with whom I get along well enough that, if just that group and I were going somewhere, it would have been okay.  Certainly there have been many times in my life when I’ve gone out to eat (and similar) with family and/or close friends, and I enjoyed myself.  But I was younger then*, and I had more energy for acting normal, and the people who knew me well were nonjudgmental about my weirdnesses, anyway.

Most of the people at the office, though, are people with whom I wouldn’t normally hang out at any stage in my life‒no insult to them intended, there’s just no common framework.  And the two or three people with whom I think I would most have enjoyed spending time seem to have become more distant recently.  Perhaps that’s all my doing; it almost certainly is my fault.  I know I’m becoming ever less fun to be around.  So I don’t really have anyone with whom I feel I could hang out comfortably‒not in the office, probably not in the world.

It’s not that there’s no one out there who might be willing.  There are many kind people about, though sometimes that can be hard to believe.  But I am not good company‒not for anyone, probably not ever again‒and I certainly don’t deserve any kindness.  I am too weird now, and my life is a mutated, Lovecraftian monstrosity compared to what it once was.

Let’s face it, I was always just a weirdo, anyway; I was just better at pretending to be human in the past‒or if not better, I at least had more energy for it.

Now, I barely have the will to get up and get going in the morning**.  Almost everything I do is just to distract myself, to divert my attention from being aware of my own pathetic and worthless existence.  It makes me wish I had a serious drug or alcohol problem.  Then I could both have a powerful distraction and something that would potentially lead to my death in short order.  Instead, I’ve wasted years trudging through my nosferatu pseudo-life.  My books and blog posts notwithstanding, it really would have made more sense if I had died some time in 2013.  Nothing since then has been of any real use, not to anyone else, and not to me.

I’ll try to work up something remotely akin to enthusiasm for the holiday dinner tonight.  But, if I’m too stressed, I just won’t go.  I know the food will be good, though.  I’m trying to watch what I eat, but everything and everyone around me tends to want to sabotage that intention (including me) especially at this time of the year.

Maybe I should just eat and drink until I make myself really sick, and then I won’t want to do it anymore.  It would be quite nice not to be a person who eats as an escape, as his only reliable source of distraction.  I feel much more clear-headed when I don’t eat, and I know I am much sharper.

How nice it would be not to be such a pathetic glutton.  But I do miss my sister’s holiday cookies.  And I mean to eat whatever I feel like eating this evening‒whether I go to the office dinner or not.

Maybe I’ll get botulism, or a bad case of Hepatitis A that turns fulminant or something.  Keep your fingers crossed!

TTFN

*Such is the nature of the past.

**Though I still cannot sleep even close to as much as I would need to be healthy.

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Once again, no semi-Shakespearean title this week

Hello and good morning.

I have no idea about what to write today.  Yesterday’s rather long post took off from an initial notion that’s been with me for a long time*, with some tangents in between and so on.  The footnote about the doubling of bacteria took a bit of extra effort once I got to the office‒not much, though, since I was able quickly to look up** the size of a typical bacterium on Google, and the calculations were just “plug and chug”.

Thankfully, I already knew the dimensions of the other bits of trivia, like the size of the visible universe in light-years and the length of a light-year, though on my first round of calculations I got something very off with the volume of the visible universe.  I think I must’ve squared rather than cubed at some point, because it was much too small, and when I did my editing, I thought “that can’t be right”, and I redid the figuring.  Then, because of the mistake, I checked that result against Google/Wikipedia, and my correction was, at least, correct.

There, that’s a little discussion on “how the sausage gets made” so to speak.

That’s a curious expression, don’t you think?  Apparently, people prefer not to see how actual sausages get made.  I’m not quite sure why that’s the case, though.  Are people under some delusion that sausages are not made from various and sundry animal parts, at least some of which would not look as pretty as a nice steak if you served them “as they were” on a plate in a restaurant?

Sausages are meat.  They are parts of dead animals, ground up and stuffed together into some form of outer “skin”.  When done right, they are delicious.  This is because humans are opportunistic omnivores with a strong penchant for carnivory, and meat is a concentrated source of nutrients, the sort our ancestors‒the ones that survived to pass on their genes, anyway‒liked to eat because it was very beneficial.

That was a weird digression.  I’ll just say that, if you eat meat‒as I do‒and you are afraid to see how sausages are made, I don’t understand how you think.  I’m not suggesting that you ought to make your own sausages; division of labor is a terrifically useful thing, and makes all of civilization more efficient and indeed possible.  But to be in denial about sausages is a bit like being in denial about landfills and sewers, both of which are real and, for now at least, necessary.

I don’t know why I’m going on about this.  No one but my own brain raised the subject.  For all I know, every one of my readers has seen sausage being made (and seen waste treatment facilities and landfills) and has been perfectly fine and sensible about it.  Or, perhaps, they’re all vegans***.  Or perhaps they’re a mixture.

More likely, most of my readers are indeed opportunistic omnivores.  That seems a very sensible way for an animal to be.  I’ve read or heard of science fiction authors (and possibly even scientists) who speculate that most intelligent life forms would be omnivores.  There’s certainly some potential logic and reason there, but I suspect that mostly it’s projection and bias.  Certainly it is big speculation.

There are very good reasons to suspect that most if not all life will be largely carbon-based, due to carbon’s uniquely profligate chemistry and its near-ubiquity in the universe; those are matters of largely unambiguous physics and chemistry.  But as for the rest, our speculations are largely unguided and thus unconstrained, and we should be careful about even preliminary thoughts, let alone conclusions.

Of course, science fiction writers are free to speculate and invent.  That’s the job.  And within their created universes, they are the Gods.  But it’s important to know the difference between fiction and reality.  Reality is a much harsher taskmaster than fiction, and in reality, the wages of “sin” really are often death.

I think my own wages of that type are long overdue, to be honest.  I keep putting in claims, but HR and Payroll are, apparently, very inefficient.

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Okay, sorry about the little pause, there; maybe you didn’t notice it, since it happened in a different time plane than the one in which you are reading, but it was there, don’t doubt that.  My train seems to be running late, but there has been no announcement about it, and it doesn’t even show up on the Tri-Rail tracker site, though the subsequent two trains do, and are listed as “on time”.  Why should they not be on time?  They’re due a half an hour and an hour from now, respectively.

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There was another pause, there, just now, as I thought I saw the first glimmer of the headlights of “my” train, but alas, it was not so.  I don’t know what I’m going to do if it’s much later.  Trains get more crowded when they’re late and I hate that.  Maybe I’ll just get an Uber.  Maybe I should just go back to the house.  Possibly I should just lie on the tracks “in protest”.  After all, if the trains are going to be late and/or canceled anyway, I might as well give them a strong reason.

***

I have left the train station and am now en route to the office in an Uber.  The train showed no signs of arriving, and there was neither an announcement overhead nor any info online.  The Tri-Rail system used to be much better run.  It seems to be going to the dogs, lately.

Anyway, that’s enough for today.  To paraphrase Adele, I wish nothing but the best for you all.

TTFN

*Another, unrelated one is, how did Princess Leia know to call Han Solo “Flyboy” when she said “Into the garbage chute, Flyboy!” in the original Star Wars movie?  She had not been told he was a pilot.  Was this an early hint of her natural ability with the Force?  Or was it, rather, just George Lucas accidentally giving her a line based on a fact he knew, but that her character would not?

**Google Docs tried to prompt me to split the infinitive and write “to quickly look up” rather than “quickly to look up”, which is what I wrote.  I hate such anti-grammatical suggestion-making!

***It might interest you to know, in loose relation to the present topic, that members of the dominant intelligent species in the star system Vega are obligate carnivores.  So, ironically, real Vegans only eat meat****.

****Of course, that’s all just a bit of sci-fi that I composed.  But wouldn’t it be hilarious if it were so?  I remember the first time I ever saw or heard someone use the term “vegan”.  It was in Bloom County, said by Steve Dallas, after he got his brain flipped by aliens, making his personality the opposite of what it previously had been.  I was already astronomically literate enough to know about Vega, and I wondered what the hell the character (and other, real people) meant when he/they wrote that they were “vegans”.  At first, I thought it might have something to do with astrology; the people involved seemed to fit that mold a lot of the time.