Author: Julie

Categories
Medical

Day 1884 and Post Op Shop Bop On The Head

I am a stricken by the malaise that comes with minor injuries. Yesterday I had some dental work done (with a laser) and today is all wretched inflammation.

An affliction that requires recuperation gets me down as I can’t say I’m really miserable or in much. I live with worse pain whenever I flare with my ankyloysis. I just feel pretty shitty and my brain is slugging slowly through the muddy waters of stress toxins.

It’s m the mixture of stress, antibiotics (doctor recommended prophylactic course given my soft tissue infection risks of my biological injection) and the tide going out in the cortisol. Being flooded with cortisol is not just a meme.

And so I don’t recommend being this in this state, but you also need to do proper care and maintenance of things like healthcare. And your teeth are a core part of this. After a certain age you can’t just ignore problems. And so I’ll be on Twitter as I can’t concentrate well enough to do much useful today. And my husband will kill me if I do any more cosmetic shopping.

Categories
Aesthetics Medical

Day 1883 and Fill Me Up

I mentioned yesterday I needed to get my lower left molar 19 fix up. The filling placed there long ago by a dental student wasn’t holding up well and looked pretty nasty

A warning for the squeamish that I am going to post before, during and after photos. If things like gums, blood, funky messed up teeth close ups are upsetting to you this is where you should stop.

I was schedule for an hour as molar 19 needed a new filling while 20 was also looking a bit funny as well. First they carefully numbed the left side of my mouth which always feels weird. You feel no pain just pressure. Which is an experience I’ve had a few times this year.

A cleaning was required as well as a cool laser which smelled like popcorn as it zapped out the damage areas.

These hard‑tissue dental lasers (mainly erbium) ablate tooth structure by rapidly heating water and hydroxyapatite in the tooth, “micro‑exploding” tiny amounts of tissue rather than cutting mechanically like a bur.

Erbium laser preparing teeth decay for a small filling on 19 and 20

These systems are typically used for small‑to‑moderate decay especially when soft tissue injury is concern. These lasers can mean less pain and less anesthesia is needed.

A composite filling matched exactly left my teeth looking as good as new. My mouth is still a bit numb but I’m glad to have things fixed up with relative ease. Now I can only hope the healing goes easy as well.

Categories
Aesthetics Medical

Day 1882 and Crowning Glory

I have always been fastidious when it comes to dental hygiene. I floss twice a day, I brush morning and night. I always carry dental picks for good measure.

I didn’t earn enough for steady dental care in my younger years so I knew my habits would have to carry me. But I did have a few tricks that helped me manage in my twenties. I would volunteer my time as a patient at the NYU Dental Clinic.

Not only were you not charged for procedures but you’d learn a lot as students went through clinical hours and professors lectured using your mouth as the live lessons.

I thought this was a pretty good trade for low stakes maintenance work like cleaning but I let them do more involved work including a filling on one of my molars which I’d cracked.

Fifteen years later that the crack which has been filled needed a little maintenance. A another crack had formed and it was looking a little unaesthetic. I was experiencing some dull pain so I decided to get it looked at. And it’s a good thing I did.

For a brief moment there was concern that the nerve in the tooth had died. I should have felt more pain than I did. But the cold test cleared it up. I don’t think I’m healthy enough to manage a tooth being pulled and replaced with my immune suppression medicine.

As I explained the filling’s provenience and just how old it was, it became clear that it needs to be redone. A bit of it had edge over to the back molar I’ll get two teeth filled.

A filling is a treatment where a dentist removes decayed or damaged tooth structure (sometimes it’s a cavity others a crack ) and replaces it with a material (like composite “white” resin, metal amalgam, or other restorations) to restore shape, strength, and function while preventing further decay.

It’s not a crown so the title is a misnomer but it is a bit glorious that one can get care from students and have it hold up for so many years. It’s always something in the maintenance and care of one’s body and I tend to prepare for the worst.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 1881 and Attemplate

I’ve wandered far from the traditional life paths that might have recognizable to past generations of my kin.

It scares me. Any time I contemplate the change I have already experienced, I imagine how much more change I can expect to see.

How are we supposed to raise children, mentor young leaders or align artificial intelligence with the good, the true and the beautiful when we adult humans have experienced life so far from past ideals?

So I’ve been toying with a portmanteau blending attempt and template to express the idea of “an experimental framework” or “proto-template for living, learning, or skill-building.” I need templates to help me attempt to adapt while retaining my humanity.

We will all be re-skilling, re-learning, and re-engaging with our values and as I try to structure templates that help me walk a life and prototype styles that might work for myself and others.

I hoped to communicate both clarity and flexibility with the choice. We are building good ways of being in a world of rapid change. Templates must change and we must always be attempting to learn and adapt.

I liked that attemplate sounds like a natural word you felt like you may have already encountered. It does a nice job of mirroring the thoughtfulness of contemplate. A template for a new era which will be attempt to build, even if the foundations we thought were firm in the past give way to much broader ways of being.

I played with “attempate” which sounds procedural (almost bureaucratic) as if one would take a sheet of paper with an assigned attempate to fill out and live. Why yes, I took the project management attempate sheet to see if I had natural aptitude for detail work.

“Temptlate” sounded engineered. Maybe it would be suitable name for an internal tool or concept document. We will add that to the family Temptlate and see who bites on it for Saturday plans. It’s cute, playful and almost experimental, but not entirely as serious as the scaffolding one hopes to build upstairs n.

Maybe I’m the only one who feels like I lost decade between Trump Derangement Era through Pandemic Biden Gramsci End of March Institutional Capture.

What I thought was true slammed into things I wished were not. And then we fought years of anarcho-tyranny as the state refused to budge even if you attempted to follow its templates.

So here I am trying to find new ways of being for myself, for the future, and for my present. Maybe it’s entirely selfish. Templates for how to live are the anchors from which we used to build religion and power.

We’ve stripped much of the meat from life and turned past ideals into brands and merchandised them into outfits and starter packs. But it’s worth an attempt don’t you think?

Categories
Aesthetics Finance Internet Culture

Day 1880 and the Global Intelligence Crisis Kerfuffle

“It’s not a prediction” he said. It’s just a hypothetical possible reality. I believe we used to call that fiction. A science fiction short story wrapped in a macroeconomic essay written by Citrini Research hit the algorithms like a bomb Markets lapped it up like beasts who’d been lost in a barren desert for weeks. Liquidity!

Remember in 2023 when when Sam Altman said that we’d have superhuman persuasion before we had artificial general intelligence?

Citrini is capable of super human persuasion before AI reached super human general intelligence and it has been strange.

As the market sell off was playing out, a flood of “Contra Citrini” essays emerged immediately from players as varied as Joe Wiesenthal John Loeber, Will Manidis, even proper economists like Alex Imas. The co-author Alap Shah went onto TBPN. Fun fact he was Sheel Mohnot’s roommate in college.

I am unclear if white collar workers are in a frenzy about are doing their existing jobs or if they have even noticed the danger. As a real time update from a fellow investor had us both laughing. An intern couldn’t manage a basic research task. The intern asked them how to get to the Founders Fund’s website.

We may need the bull case for AI, as the bear case for white collar workers acquiring any intelligence in their education process is rather unconvincing.

For some reason “how do I get to the founders fund website” started me singing an old tune sung by Dionne Warwick “Do you know the way to San Jose?”

Do you know the way to San Jose?
I’ve been away so long
I may go wrong and lose my way
Do you know the way to San Jose?
I’m going back to find some peace of mind in San Jose

LA is a great big freeway
Put a hundred down and buy a car
In a week, maybe two, they’ll make you a star


Weeks turn into years, how quick they pass
And all the stars that never were
Are parking cars and pumping gas

Do You Know The Way To San Jose?

The song was used in another completely different “science fiction story goes viral”context. Maybe it’s in my mind as automated virology lab unleashing apocalypse, is a AI doomer staple also recently in the discourse.

Do you know the way to San Jose? Or if Helix is available for download.

In an SyFy channel show from 2014 called Helix, which follows an Arctic research station where research on viruses goes horribly wrong. It used the Burt Bacharach & Hal David song “Do You Know the Way to San Jose” as an unsettling musical motif and clue to resolving the mystery. Unsettling California music has my ear this week.

In 1968 you could return to San Jose from Los Angeles and start a relatively normal life as one of the stars who never made it. Pumping gas and parking cars. If we get too close to the sun of artificial intelligence success we don’t have a San Jose to run to. You can’t get away there as it’s filled with just the part of technology folks peddling dreams as unrealistic as the ones down in Hollywood.

Categories
Preparedness Travel

Day 1879 and Costco versus Cartels vs The State

I have more than one founder in my portfolio who has struggled with basing their businesses in America because U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is barely functional. My own family has been affected on the personal front.

I’m proud America is so desirable a destination. But we can’t be such a dysfunctional one. That makes me feel shamed. I want us to bring the best and brightest here to build.

I’ve never felt such patriotism as we begin to invest in industry and energy again. The America that makes it to its 250th birthday is at another turning point. When hasn’t she been?

My phone showed me memories of the last big birthday trip we took with my father for his 80th. He passed this year. Smiling photos of my brother and I and our spouses with my father a little bemused but happy to be in Puerto Vallarta.

It was cheap boomer luxury provided by a Costco vacation plan. Today the Costco in Puerto Vallarta is on fire. Cartel infighting they say. That detente is done

The last time I saw a Costco on fire my hometown lost a third of its housing stock in a freak prairie fire. In a sick twist of fate those homes housed scientists who did work on weather stations and forecasting work for NIST, NCAR and NOAA.

One of my friends owns an Airstream which they use to go from job to job. They park it in front of their home. A elderly neighbor called in a complaint.

Despite many destitute disorderly trailers and tents on sidewalks, now my friend is the one to get ticked and towed from his own parking spot. A simple ordinance broke and now it’s a fight with the city.

Rentals sit in an uneasy tension with elderly populations sitting housing wealth. They rent their second homes whose property taxes haven’t been reappraised for decades to those of us who might appreciate an opportunity to arbitrage one home’s desirable location for ski season for a break in the winter.

Freedom to transact with one’s own property in an era where property tilts to the elderly feels uncertain. The struggling homeless can’t be moved, but the legal tenant can’t park his van in front of his own home. In Airbnbs they don’t want you to stay more than 14 days. I guess that’s when you get squatters.

I want our institutions to function. I want a viable state capable of doing the business of its citizens. Instead it’s renter classes and public employee unions and right outside (and inside too) our borders we see corporations, crime syndicates and subsidies for the thee and not me for me. Normalcy bias until the Costco is on fire. And then we forget all over again.

Categories
Aesthetics Travel

Day 1878 and Checking Into Hotel California

Yesterday I was on about the “ride share” and gig economy intermediaries, but today it’s the “home share” economy. The short term rental world of permanent vacation properties amid a housing crisis for the rest of us.

Having had a streak of bad luck at hotels in California I am back to my old faithful of Airbnb. Except I seem to have accidentally checked myself into Hotel California. It’s such a lovely place.

But everyone else here is a Boomer but me. I’ve not seen any children or grandchildren. Everyone is over sixty. It’s a heaven ban paradise for those who can afford to live a permanent coastal lifestyle. And for those of us who can rent it for a few days on business.

The Airbnb is in a large complex that is above a stretch of beach one can hike down to for walks. Nearby amenities are yuppie in nature with bistros, coffee shops and Pilates studies. While it is easy driving to its most proximate big city, it doesn’t feel like anyone is going to an office in this suburb.

The Airbnb is run by a management company seemingly owned by an enterprising woman who got prime real estate when rates were lower. I deduced this by scraping all her listings and when they first went online.

I doubt she is interested in letting her investment properties take any damage as no one under 25 is allowed to book and she explicitly states that “it is not child proofed” so you are liable for any issues. Which would explain the demographics.

This is a place for adults, and more specifically adults who have the freedom to work where and when they like.

Or perhaps more accurately are not obliged to work any longer. What a seductive life to live. No wonder there are so many slim, fit, smiling Patagonia swaddled mature people.

“Hotel California” is, according to the Eagles’ Don Henley, a metaphorical song about the dark side of the American dream, particularly the excess and decadence of 1970s Los Angeles. Via Wikipedia

It’s definitely not a Margaritaville sort of place. With koi ponds and soft beiges and tasteful landscaping, it’s too costal grandmother in its aesthetics. But it is certainly decadent. Maybe the American dream of thirty year retirement is the decadence they warned us about in Hotel California. It’s not that they can’t check out. It’s that they won’t.

If you walk among the promenade that overlooks the ocean, you will notice many of the townhomes have signs in their windows advertising their management company. It is all second homes and beach cottages and handled by professionals.

If it weren’t a gate community with guards and a lot of security cameras I’d honestly be terrified to advertise that folks might not be home. But then again, what is anyone going to steal that these denizens can’t easily replace?

They sold out the future already. The thieves are inside the complex. It’s the rest of us looking in who should wonder why it is that no one can check out. It’s just such a lovely place.

Categories
Startups Travel

Day 1877 and Driving Miss Julie

When Uber first hit San Francisco, most of the hype in my circles was that it was finally possible to go out at night like New Yorkers always had. In Manhattan hailing a cab was simple. One was always going by.

San Francisco was neither so dense nor so populous, so maybe you got lucky; but mostly you called cab companies and waited outside of parties for for ages just to be sure someone wouldn’t steal your ride.

Talking to your taxi driver was more interesting in New York. It was the quintessential immigrants job where one worked their way up to a taxi medallion. Different neighborhoods had different demographics. You’d learn a lot about the American dream.

Now that ride sharing and piece work contracting applications are entrenched in our social fabric, the relationship between customer and provider is entirely different.

Using an interface that cuts down interaction is a big part of the appeal. Maybe no one wants to hear about hopes and dreams anymore.

Except that I do. I am one of those chatty Cathy types who wants to let the conversation roam. Uber and Lyft drivers (and whatever other delivery services they may also pick up) tend to be intermittent workers looking to patch up the cracks in the drivers budget or circumstances.

I’ve had a number of veterans (as in military not as in experienced drivers) on my recent trip. This is also a typical demographic in Montana where it’s either former military or college kids looking for extra money.

Times rally must be changing as I’ve not had a prototypical immigrant driver in America for some time now. It’s largely white native born men looking to make ends meet.

New York probably still has that old school style of driver but working class Americans of all stripes are now thoroughly integrated into application intermediary work flows.

Odd jobs used to be paid in cash and maybe some didn’t get reported. Now you’ve got 1099 income from every piece work source of income imaginable. No one is all that reasonable to anyone else.

The companies are just the layer between customer and provider. I’m sure the governments must love this (despite protests to the contrary) as it makes it very easy to collect the taxes.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture Politics

Day 1876 and Phantom Futures Past

It’s just clear that some people are enabled to bigger, better and faster output thanks to rapidly advancing tools coming from the foundation model companies.

Will Manidis is on hot streak of essay writing (aided by artificial intelligence in the best way) and has produced thought provoking writing at a great clip. I love nothing more than seeing an exited founder feel free to express their views at their fullest. I’ve written about his essays in the past and suggest following him.

Today he wrote about visiting Oman and his reflections on its transition to a modern state by a singular leader choosing a third way way of building rather the binary choices other nations seem to have made between of annihilating the past for the future or total preservation of a way of life that no longer functions.

“I left with an unsettling feeling that I had seen a vision of the future that I wasn’t supposed to see. A country that had gotten extraordinarily wealthy but stayed coherent to its pre-industrial identity—a country that didn’t turn into a museum, didn’t paralyze itself in amber, but became a modern, functioning, wealthy nation that did not feel like it had been strip-mined of itself by the money.

In the West, we really have convinced ourselves there are only two options for our post-economic future. You can be Shenzhen or you can be Athens. … Shenzhen is the city that chose money over place so completely that it deleted itself.

…Athens is the opposite failure, and I say this as someone who is at least Greek enough that I feel like I won’t offend anyone. Athens chose place over money so totally that the city itself is a mausoleum”

A photo from Will’s tweet essay on visiting Oman

I don’t know much about Oman and I make no claims to understanding its politics or histories but I too think about what we lose without a sense of place but am also fascinated by the liminal zones of the hyper future set against a past we are actively forgetting. And no nation is immune from this process.

I do however have two books to recommend if the topic of place, continuity and the future interests you. One is a work of fiction and one a photography compendium whose forward was written by my favorite author.

Photographer Greg Girard’s work documents Asian cities in transition, especially Shanghai and Kowloon, was closely associated with William Gibson, who wrote the foreword to Girard’s book Phantom Shanghai. Gibson is the father of cyperpunk. And I contend that his near future fiction gets quite a bit right about how close the dark past is to almost arrived future. These images were shot in 2007 and yet the outlines of the super cities was already energy

One of Girad’s photographs Phantom Shanghai

The other book is a work of alternative historical fiction in the vein of Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle called American War by Omar El Ak. It is premised on an inverted or “reversed” 9/11/War‑on‑Terror in which American bombed a thriving Dubai.

The premise follows a protagonist’ traumatic life as a a radicalized agent of terror preyed on by different foreign influences living in a refuge camp in what was once Georgia.

It rhymes with both Will’s essay and with William Gibson for me. In a review of the book, they quote Faulkner “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.” And as these examples all show us, cyperpunk was born in Some Dark Holler

Categories
Travel

Day 1875 and Between Heaven and Hell

I had a stupid day. Maybe things have been simmering for a bit and a blow up was to be expected. I hit a limit for humiliation and simply didn’t want to keep paying for that kind of treatment. I did not consent.

I’m doing some business in California and am paying an exorbitant fee for the privilege. And I will eat a lot of shit to do the work I love, but I will not pay to be insulted at a premium price point. A Best Western is good enough for me.

This is going to be a ramble as I am so irritated by it as it felt like every single aspect of the hotel did not function. Their bumbling ineptitude would make a Motel 6 blush, let alone a supposedly upper market hotel.

Alas, somewhere between a maid barging in on me naked and the fourth or filth time a staff member knocked on the door confused about the status of my reservation I snapped. I wanted out of my reservation which is spent hours trying to sort.

If they didn’t want to do their jobs, offer me privacy or take my money, well then I didn’t need to be there. I wanted to be literally anywhere else.

I had a late checkout and half an hour before it hit so I went full Karen. I huffed and puffed and demanded a refund. I packed up, dazed and underfed from a busy morning and went to another less glamorous hotel. And it reads like a comedy of errors.

The hotel was charging prices equivalent to five star luxury hotels in other parts of the world and couldn’t deliver on so much as taking out the trash or keeping the changes in the reservation straight. The Keystone cops were better coordinated.

A kerfuffle had developed around extending the stay yesterday. At issue was that I didn’t have the authority to extend the reservation as it has been booked under my husband’s account and not mine.

Alright fine, but plans change and sometimes (often times) my husband and I have to change on short notice. It wasn’t even as if there were amenities on offer that he was entitled to on his account versus mine. I want being sneaky.

There was no breakfast to abuse. No special amenities for the status guests. Hell there wasn’t even a pair of slippers. But somehow it became a thing. Multiple calls to the manager, confirmation details being emailed around and trips to the front desk did not fix the problem.

The front desk manager acted like she was doing me a favor by letting me pay $300 bucks to extend the stay as “she’s really not supposed to do this!” You see I didn’t book the reservation myself.

This bizarre “account owner” issue is now a regular issue for both Marriot and Hyatt owned hotels. And if they didn’t want to take my money I didn’t feel at all bad about losing my cool and walking out.

The chains simply cannot seem to provide hospitality if it is outside of their parameters and their staff is not enabled to do much of anything beyond try to calm you down while never delivering on what you paid. If you happen to have a change of plans then being the wrong spouse counts against you in their dance of protocal.

I was annoyed but alright I’ll let inconvenience him and have Alex change it and move on. I won’t try to shock them by saying m that married couples commingle many things like airline status, Costco accounts and hotel loyalty programs. You’d be shocked at what other stuff we share. It’s almost like being married means sharing your life.

Today was meant to be the first day of the “new” reservation but despite being charged for it, not a single member of the hotel staff could figure it out. I went down multiple times to change keycards and put down deposits and all kinds of rigamoral.

Because I’d been so jet lagged yesterday I didn’t get any housekeeping service nor had I done much beyond work at the desk. So once I thought the extended reservation was sorted I went to visit a sort of luxury concept mall of the likes that combines Dior and Cartier with a billion other amenities from movie theaters and fine dining with staples like a Sephora. I told the hotel I’d give them time to clean as I was going to pick up a few things.

I return three hours later to the room not being cleaned. I am irked but find I call and ask if they can send housekeeping. “Oh we thought you were checking out?!” My response was “well a cleaning woman came in around 10am without knocking while I was naked.” I was wrong to presume that she would come back despite my AI assisted explainer translating my English to her Spanish. I thought she’d understood I was leaving and she could clean. How wrong I was.

“Oh no we have you listed as checking out at 2pm which is why we didn’t clean! Ok but then why did a maid come in earlier without so much as a knock? No explanation was offered.

This goes on for another half an hour as various people come to the room, none of whom communicated with anyone else on the staff.

A gentleman came knocking to ask when I’m checking out (I am not see this is the reservation). Another came to see when I wanted them to clean (two hours ago but now is fine) and then finally on the fourth person to try to sort it out if I had a reservation (look at the barcode I beg you!) I got angry enough that they let me cancel the reservation. They seemed totally flummoxed by my upset.

Somewhere around “just send up a vacuum I’ll clean myself” and “it’s against union policies to let the guests use the cleaning equipment” we’d clearly reached an impasse on what I needed and what they would do (nothing) and they wanted me gone as much as I wanted to be gone.

I know all of this is stupid and very petty, but we’ve reached a point in many industries where everyone is paying out their noses for services meant to be delivered in an expected manner and almost never are. And the prices only ever go up. if I had ever behaved in the manner that they did when I was managing a marketing agency for a luxury hotel in New York I would’ve promptly been fired.

I didn’t need to be insulted about not being my husband. I didn’t need to work my schedule around their cleaning staff or their front desk scheduling snafus or their various corporate policies on who is allowed to book what and when. 

I want to pay a fair price to stay somewhere I can get my work done and have the basics. Hospitality is about being hospitable. And somewhere between the armed guard at the mall and the baffled maid it just hit me that this heaven and hell interplay is all we can expect from here on out. You either pay a fortune or are lucky for what you can get.

It’s not even premium mediocre now. It’s just shitty. And only Karens stand between us and the total devolution of standards for fair exchanges of goods and services. And unfortunately that means I must don the armor of the Karen and hold my line. I refuse to cut my hair and get highlights though. I’ve had enough humiliation for one day.