With all of the preparations that go into a day of rest, it can be oddly easy to forget that the purpose was of rest is to restore one’s mind and body.
Rejuvenation, be it body or soul, doesn’t occur immediately. I don’t find anything that involves refilling one’s energy happens quickly.
Jouissance in the Lacanian psychoanalytic tradition suggests that embodied enlivened enjoyment goes beyond pleasure and pain. To rest one must have exerted oneself first.
Now being French, Lacanians mean sexually but I mean generally. Embodied things take time and not all pleasure is free of pain.
Maybe that’s why it there can be as much enjoyment in the toil of preparations for travel or a day of rest as it is to reach one’s destination or take a day off.
The Lacanians must know something about the nature of women (and men). I’ll let Star Trek’s Spock explain.
After a time, you may find that having is not so pleasing a thing, after all, as wanting. It is not logical, but it is often true.
Maybe it’s good to spend so much time in preparation and waiting. Christmas comes but once a year but the preparations can be endless if you so desire.
Not everyone has decent bathtubs. For a good chunk of my life and also in current chunk, I lacks for a decent bathtub. We’ve got an astonishing array of other marvelous ways to heal but not a good soaking tub.
I almost never get to enjoy a warm leisurely bath. I am not a hot tub person. I’ve got sensitive skin and the chemicals involved are not an environment for my skin.
I am alas a great fan of bathing in epsom salts. It is a cure for almost every ailment.
So it was this attitude with which I tried to run myself a bath in a remote location and I failed to consider the tank I was dealing with compared to the size of the soaking tub. Which was generously deep. A terrible and obvious mistake.
A lukewarm tub was my reward. And don’t I look silly for not obey a basic detail. Otherwise a very relaxing day which I would have enjoyed topping off with a soak.
Preparing for a closed world means I’ll have the freedom to close down myself. My body has been a bit up and down as it usually goes s these days so I’d like to log as many hours in restful response as I can.
Other activities I’d enjoy would be bathing in a warm tub, going for peaceful walks with no one around and reading for hours on end. Which seems manageable. It’s a time for prayer and contemplation.
My only wrinkle is the lack of available prepared food. I mentioned I’d be rather remote. And I did pack as much as was feasible
But if I can’t manage a few days of cooking simple meals like pasta and chicken that would be pretty sad. I’m lucky to have relied on that part of my life being handled by others as I do find the idea of cooking to be almost as tiring as the reality.
All of that moving around on hard kitchen floors as you juggle timers and fire is not a favored activity for someone with spinal issues. Still I’m optimistic if I stick to a quiet routine of reflection, rest and prayer maybe I’ll manage. Or perhaps a miracle will occur and I’ll be fed literally and spiritually.
It’s unusual for stores and restaurants in America to close for a holiday. We’ve got rare cases like Chick-fil-A which observes the Sunday sabbath.
America don’t have national day of rest every Sunday like say Germany does. We have shift work and many faiths and nationalities so the days and hours off depend entirely on who you are and how you work.
Maybe it’s a woman thing but knowing a a day of rest in which the whole world comes to a stop always seems to mean an extra day of work. We must prepare for a closed world.
I’ll do loads of laundry, clean the house, do all remaining errands & shopping, and attend to the fuel knowing that if everyone is off then I must be particularly on. I’ll tap into my inner prepper and double down on my to-do list just as I do before storms.
Especially given my variable (occasionally fragile) health if I am to survive things being shut comfortably I need to put on my best Boy Scout act. Be prepared. I don’t care to pile on additional risk if I can mitigate it with a bit of work.
I’m thinking ahead to being somewhere a little remote for Christmas, where it’s unlikely that restaurants, gas stations or grocery stores will be open for the season let alone Christmas.
About the only thing within driving distance that will surely remain open is a monastery. Maybe if my preparations go well I can make a trip to visit with an offering to whoever else might come to worship in the far wilds.
I’ve been trying to coax myself into taking my final biological injection of the year for most of the day. It’s a very painful shot. The feeling of it is somewhere between stinging and hot sauce being pushed into your subcutaneous fat. It’s spicy
I was filled with optimism that this new variant called Bimzelx might be the one that finally brought down my biomarkers. And it did indeed show promising results. My CRP and SED rates have never been better.
Alas, the cost is quite high. I’ve got no immune system response to speak of when it comes to my skin and soft tissues. I’ve had four major skin infections requiring surgicalintervention and many minor skin infections.
My pain is better so long as I can avoid picking up an infection. I’ve been on antibiotics most of the year. Alas I’ve only had maybe 2-3 weeks without an infection brewing or being beaten into a retreat.
So today may be my last spicy shot. I’ve gone it a full year of adjustment. I don’t relish the prospect of adjusting back to my previous medication as it takes a full year to fully dose on and off these things. But maybe I’ll be lucky and on my final shot in the year I’ll see a change for the better
Before the pandemic turned preparedness into a global obsession, being a “prepper” wasn’t seen in a very positive light. We’ve really lightened up the idea of thinking ahead.
Now everyone preps. Americans love shopping so this isn’t a surprise. Who doesn’t love avoiding hard work when you could be buying shit instead?
Being a quirky gearhead or having a momma bear mindset is maybe a bit cringe but everyone saw the upheaval of a global pandemic first hand.
Even if we didn’t experience the pandemics consequences evenly. It’s hard to ignore reality. Sometimes you should have a little extra on hand.
The last few days before a major holiday like Thanksgiving or Christmas is always a crazy time to be shopping from this perspective. Christmas especially is one of the few times you really experience the full force of the entire world trying to be prepared for everyone wanting to buy at the same time. And we still can’t quite get it right.
I went grocery shopping today and the crowds of people, even with a week to go before Christmas were astonishing. Even independent of weather events, the traffic jams and throngs of shoppers felt intense.
When everyone needs to get ahead of a day off it’s clear our system is capacity constrained. And we all know the date is coming a year ahead of time. Imagine what happens when you don’t have notice of something?
Most people don’t have the luxury to do much to harden themselves against the cruel nature of life. I on the other hand can buy prosciutto and almonds without a care in the world. A very merry and very prepper Christmas indeed when eating cured meats and calorie dense nuts.
We’d all better get used to being lost in the crowd of the polycrisis. It’s full time political and economic instability, weather volatility and varied consequences of our current material conditions. Bring an extra bag and get in line right?
Maybe if we all put more energy into thinking about what we do next, we can better focus on meeting our collective demand a bit better. Coordination problems are hard. They are a challenge when trying to plan to buy a ham let alone GPUs or transformers.
There can only be one. One white boy. Oh no, sheesh we didn’t mean in the department. What on earth have you been reading? There is room for everyone to have a seat at the table in our modern world. Just one seat though. Were you expecting there would be more?
There can only be one Highlander. You know, the Scottish warrior Connor Macleod who is part of a race of immortals who must battle it out, do not age and only die if their head is taken? There can only be one of him. Except it’s a whole race. I don’t know how that works to be honest.
Immortals are driven to fight each other in “The Game,” where each beheading transfers power via a mystical energy surge called the Quickening, with the last survivor destined to win “the Prize,” a vaguely defined ultimate power. via Wikipedia
This very popular 1986 movie set between 1630s Scotland and 1980s New York City somehow turned into a mega-franchise with spin-offs and animes. It didn’t start out that flashy. I mean really look at how much content they had to pack into this poster to get people into the theater.
These days content usually the other direction, from anime to tv show to movie, but such was the power of Hollywood and its capacity for distribution in the eighties. Being a Baby Boomer movie director seems like it might have been a trip.
Things are not so rosy for the profession these days. Especially if you are a quirked up white boy like Duncan. We’ve lost them you see. This is a source of much consternation in the discourse. The children of the Higherlander generation definitely thought they would be more than one winner.
We’ve lost a whole generation of white men to diversity initiatives (launched by other white men) even though the lore being produced (by said white men) that white men were rightly battling it out for just one seat. The prize of real ultimate power seemed pretty clear. There can only be one.
Or at least this was the premise mythical of stories from ranging legendary Arthurian kings to actual Caesars of the Roman Empire. There wasn’t a team of Alexanders Who Were Pretty Good. The prize of real ultimate power is the stuff of myth. Sure actual power sharing is more complicated but humans love a final boss.
The American white boys (probably Ulster Scots) are suffering for the widening power sharing agreement reached in the great awokening diversity initiatives of the last generation. And no one even bothered to tell them until their hit middle age and didn’t end up as Highlander. We mostly told them it sucks to suck. You racist little shits just can’t compete.
I gather it wasn’t so bad when your enemy was other quirked up white boys. I don’t emotionally understand why as I was always expecting to have one seat as a token white girl. I must be less bothered having had lowered expectations. There is only one queen right? But there are lots of handmaidens if you are lucky.
Now if you want to be the Highlander you have to fight the whole globe. Highlander might be an Indian girl or a trans Guatemalan. That damned Netflix always caving in to the social expectations of elites forcing their luxury beliefs onto the suffering under class of millennial white boys. Didn’t you read JD Vance’s book? The American underclass is dysfunctional and suffering. They deserve it right?
But did they suck? Ah now that it’s too late we finally get to have the conversation about having deliberately changed the demographics of the elite winners of the Prize in American.
Which I assume is a wife, two kids, split level suburban home and a compact car. They weren’t expecting to be king. Maybe king of the cul-de-sac. And if you were forty in 2014 you didn’t get that. Well some of them.
Millennial American white boys expected they would have more seats at the table (having mostly seen themselves in power) rather than fighting it out to be Highlander.
Which is weird since I assume they saw the same movies, tv shows and animes as the rest of us. It’s hard out there for everyone. And the great game includes Everyone.
Zoomers get it. Shame it requires so much beheading. We’d better divvy up the spoils a bit more before the Highlander comes for our heads eh? Come on, at least give the boys a pilot or a term sheet or a job offer before this gets ugly. Just ask JD Vance.
Maybe because the profession’s entire raison d’être is to engage you there is always a new name for people who are good at grabbing your attention.
I swear I’ve lived through half a dozen new names for the communications profession in twenty years of being paid, in one form or another, to get attention for other people. And I don’t even call myself a marketer.
Everyone on LinkedIn, and a few on Twitter have latched onto the latest buzzword: storyteller. Someone call Joseph Campbell and see if they can send him a residuals check beyond the grave.
The aversion to existing terms like marketing, communications, and public relations is endemic to the space. There is always the new hotness and thus always a new name. Crisis manager. Influencer. Honestly I miss socialite. That was a great term.
I had not intended to read the trend piece as it’s not news to me that we hire professionals to craft stories about brands and people.
Millennials were the original generation who experienced personal brand building as just one of those things required to get a job.
I am glad I opened it up though as I got to experience a pretty amusing bit of story telling inside the Wall Street Journals mobile application. A most unfortunate creative services choice to place storytelling sponsored content from consulting firm Deloitte.
Who knew that consulting firms final form would be not as management consultants but publicists? The remaining few journalists at the Wall Street Journal definitely were not involved in this.
I had a really excellent massage recently. The body worker really got under some of the tension points in my body and the compensatory patterns I was hoping for them to work through. I felt like the flow of my energy was reset.
This type of relational work between two people, one with body issues and another one who knows an efficient path for soothing them, need each other. I need relief and they need a payment that reflects their expertise.
Typically this has been labor paid in some increment of time. I paid for an hour long massage but I’d be willing to pay for more hours and the knowledge and capacity to execute that work on myself or through another body worker or tool.
I’ve got a Theragun, a Tiger Tail, lacrosse balls and foam rollers and I try to work through knots and pains. But I know way less than your average massage therapist or Alexander Technique practitioner so these tools are in the hands of a poor craftsman.
I would love for there to exist some type of Open Source Bodywork Database. I’m thinking work flows, anatomy training from video to textbook and routines input by every type of knowledge tradition and patient.
There are humorously already types of open source startups that work on body based API calls. One is called buttplug.io so you get the idea.
I’d love to see workers get paid to contribute their video, audio, and tactile experiences to an open world and ideally be paid a percentage each time it’s used.
Imagine being about to boot up this massage with an automated massage options. Or open share the repo with a therapist with less experience looking to learn. You pay the therapist trainee and for the routine and everyone benefits.
It’s a bit of a fantasy now but I’m sure we are closer than anyone realizes to being able to train these movements into automated systems. Imagine celebrity osteopaths with programs built into something you can use.
I would prefer this be an open source program for human body knowledge so that we learn mechanically the many physical routines and options that exist to make our bodies function better thanks to aligned incentives for everyone to participate. Dare to dream right?
I’ve been using WordPress for a long time. Like rounding the corner to twenty years (in actuality going on 17) of time in the open source content management system.
Blogging was the new hot thing when I was in college. Blogging platforms emerged out of the strange tendency millennials and Gen Xers had for publicly sharing their own self reflection. I presume we got this from the Me Generation who raised us.
“I learned it from you Mom and Dad!”
Those early generations of social media all had flavors of being oriented towards writing with some multimedia mixed into mediums that were immersive and hyperlinked m but also narratives shared in reverse chronological order because the norm.
We went from Geocities to Livejournal to blogger, Typepad (RIP), and WordPress over the course of a few booms and busts. If you were blogging before 2005, you probably could have made a career out of it.
I don’t just mean writing, though lots of bloggers because professional writers, but whole online communities turned into careers from fashion and beauty to legal and financial.
Alas, the type of person who might once have made a wonderful career out of being a writer was caught out by the gutting of print media. America lost especially the kinds of middle class aspirant jobs that local news and independent publishers once provided for all kinds of creatives.
I’ve watched many platforms attempt to replace media jobs. Tumblr once hired a stable of writers. So did Medium. Neither ended well for anyone. Watching the comings and go of platforms and networks instilled a kind of paranoia in me about owning your own space.
I prefer posting under my own name on my own domain on an open source maintained piece of software as a back. I don’t pretend like I own my distribution on any social media channels. I’m sure Twitter will always be around wink wink.
So I am inclined to distrust Substack though I am reading more and more on the platform and I’ve enjoyed writing my own beauty blog there in the last few months. Thus far they managed to thread the needle on making money and making a social network and I don’t feel fearful that it will suddenly disappear like I once did.
Which is really a shame as it’s designed almost completely for the Gen C and Millenial set who really wished they had media jobs. The most successful did have media jobs and realized they could make more as an independent niche like the venture beat or by pandering to a very specific demographic or market that the giant media platforms don’t like.
These professionals class writers have a preference set for how they do content management and writing that just doesn’t remotely overlap with how I like to write. They want easy peasy hit publish. I want mobile. I want cross platform writing. It’s funny to finally have a content management system solve for monetizing and it’s just not made for me. But distribution and payment matters so I’m not booting up anything on my own without handling that first.
