Fifteen hours of sleep and a spa day does fix a week of disrupted sleep. I may need some more downtime of resting and recovery and maybe more water drinking before I have a cogent thought.
After seeing my sadly “in the red” recovery scores from my Whoop, I felt a bit of a cortisol mitigation effort was in effect. In other words, I took a little spa day.
When I was younger and living in Chinatown , my apartment was above an acupuncture and massage joint that specialized in pressure point work. Going once a week probably saved my life. It was affordable and close and good.
It was always packed with the working class of the area. The prison complex wasn’t too far away, we had a police precinct two blocks down, and the courts buildings system was a block away and enormous warren of humans. A lot of very intense people in tough, sometimes very physical situations needed to have it worked out of their. Kids.
By comparison, my body was easy work for a man who worked on hurt cops and stressed out prosecutors. White girl problems are easy.
So I’ve done a run of sauna and cold work. I’ve had a massage. I have stretched and done breath work and moved around to feel things reset their flow.
I should really remember that heat, cold, oxygen, movement and pressure really do solve most problems. Don’t forget to eat and drink.
The good vibes of my weekend have washed out on the tides as I consider a frustrating non-interaction that has grown into anger in my heart as rapidly as a wheatgrass seed grows in an Easter basket.
I am considering the question of honor in the context of closed communities and events. If you go looking, the cat is out of the bag on where I was and with whom, but I don’t yet have personal permission to use a name, so I’ll keep this brief.
I’ve been called many names in my time and plenty of them have not been laudatory. Dirty shiksa, stupid cunt, and mostly recently, demonic. Everyone being entitled to their opinion, I don’t generally ask for apologies. I do ask that you say it to my face though.
I am a shiksa, certainly “see you next Tuesday” from time to time, but I remain skeptical that I am possessed by anything from Hades or other Lovecraftian horror from the beyond.
But so long as you use my name in the process of insulting my honor, I only request you look me in the eyes while you do it. I can take it. I stand by who I am and what I say.
So I can’t shake the feeling that I was deliberately dishonored by the speaker. And I am actually angry now. I am used to the insult throwing and name calling of Internet living, indeed I thrive in it. I am not accustomed to aspersions by celebrities as I don’t matter all that much. And I certainly didn’t expect it in a small private group.
I fight in that arena under my own banner. I take those punches under my own name. I won’t lie, someone of stature being so upset as to call me evil without felt good at first (how nice to be noticed) and slowly curdled into a fury over the disrespect.
Maybe it’s because I was one of the few women speaking. It was only after much effort he agreed to speak with my male co-speaker and not me (I’d already left). Maybe it was because after multiple attempts at engagement I was refused time and again. Maybe it’s because his gaze remained staunchly averted. Whatever triggered it has now turned to fiery anger.
I think it’s a bitch move to drop bombs and then runaway like a kicked cur when the beast stirs. And I am quite wide awake now.
Having spent a whirlwind 72 hours at a campout with weirdos I am in a very good mood. Minus getting called demonic by a coward who wouldn’t face me, the entire trip including the long drives was amazing.
It’s always a pleasure to spend offline time with real people. Especially when they disagree with you. Which happened a lot as it was a fractious group of eccentrics from all walks of life.
Technologists, theologians, farmers, military men, musicians, mothers, writers and even a journalist or two. We were missing a trucker friend and a former hobo (his wife is due to deliver a baby any minute now) but it was full in spirit.
We drove home through golden time with a sunset so brilliant it made me wish I could capture even a fraction of its beauty with paintbrush or camera. Alas it will remain a memory that is impossible to share.
It’s positively verdant in the Rocky Mountain west. This far into June it doesn’t seem as if it should be Irish countryside green heading into Wyoming.
Both because I was driving, and an iPhone picture can’t ever do a landscape of such texture and vastness any amount of justice, I have few pictures.
We’ve got a little camp out with some of our oddest friends. As befits the oddity of the open road we made a pit stop on our day trip at one of the centers of interstate commerce Loves.
If you’ve not encountered a Loves, I don’t quite know what America you live in but it’s quite the experience. It ain’t no Bucc-ees but it’s a vibe. The smooth loyalty driven core business of truckers bumps up against the families headed to parts elsewhere. And its merchandise reflects this intersection of oddities.
All I acquired was a half tank of gas, a king size Starbursts for Alex, and a Pina Colda Bai. I made it about a third of the way through the drink before calling uncle.
There was other similarly faux foods we encountered on the road. An equally loyalty driven chain whose signature simulacrum only exists because of a Ray Dalio arbitrage. I wonder what Baudrillard would make of American food in 2025.
Somewhere along the way I leaned into my hippie heritage and stopped wearing bras. Don’t fret, I didn’t burn them. Nor do I view it as any sort of political or fashion statement. It was the pain that did me in.
Sure, the pandemic’s homebound nature gave me the freedom to let loose. But it was the pain in my middle thoracic spine that sealed the deal. It’s at its worst right at my bra line.
I simply could not tolerate the pain from the pressure of even the most forgiving fabric bralette. No bra fitter in the world (not even the famed Orchard Corset of the lower east side) could get around the physics of an inflamed spinal and intercostal condition. My breasts would have go free.
I do have some sense of propriety about the situation. I lock the girls up firmly for business and conservative occasions, but even then if I can find a way to style myself such that I can hide the lack of brazier I do it.
It’s long been hippie lore that the pressure of the straps and clasps of lingerie prevent lymphatic drainage, which can lead to any number of problems. The most feared outcome was breast cancer. Though I do not have any family history of the disease, I did not care to increase my chances as my health waned.
And as I pack for a summer camp out in which I will be socializing with some very conservative people indeed, I found myself humming a crass tune from my maternal grandmother’s third husband’s family.
It was a 4th of July tradition in the raucous La Flair clan (a flavor of French Canadians who oddly settled on Long Island) to host a talent show. The well endowed Boomer women of the clan, who wonderfully possess no shame, had a chorus line dance they called “Bounce Your Boobies!”
I won’t be dressing or dancing in the manner of this fantastic clan but it’s quite likely my boobs will be doing a bit of bouncing for the rest of my life.
As anyone who binges an TV show over the weekend can attest it’s best when you wrap the storyline cleanly and quickly.
And so it would seem we’ve got a clean wrap on the whole Israeli-Iranian conflict. Or says the narrator of America the TV show. Yes, I mean President Donald J Trump.
I must be having some sort of Taoist moment personally as the prospect of war seems very improbable in the energy of the world. We’ve not got the resources to keep dicking around.
And yet we are in news limbo as other countries are involved and don’t have an incentive to wrap it up clean by Monday.
This being the fundamental viewpoint of the cynical and self centered American with the bunker busters but also a flavor of Melian power politics. If we can punch some dickbags in the nards shouldn’t we do it with those big ass bombs right? It’s funny how American runs better on semiotics than policy.
Now I’ve got no idea what happens next except to say that the “nothing ever happens” camp has to realize we are dealing with a lot of variables and everyone involved is egotistical and old.
So standard fare insofar as our historical record and fictional characters usually deliver. Your years of foreign service policy study gets put into dank memes. Hopefully we don’t have a season two as Americans don’t like those $100 barrel of oil vibes at all. Naval superiority? Air supremacy? Nah memetic supremacy.
I had the most beautiful summer solstice day. I was surrounded by beauty and good memories. I walked underneath a canopy of trees over a brook feeding blooming roses.
My whole day had the enlivening feel of the state of summer.
And then evening came with the news of American B-2 bombers dropping on Iranian nuclear targets. That sent a chill down everyone’s spine. It was late enough when the news broke that the day was nearly finished. The evening rapidly sobered. I went to bed.
It was near freezing and raining when I woke up this morning. The mood has altered. It didn’t feel like summer. Alex started a fire in the living room. An entirely welcome warmth in an unseasonably cold summer day.
I loved the Ramona Quimby books as a child. A normal but mischievous girl in a working class family was very relatable. As an eight year old I was neither shiny or well behaved.
I’ve avoided any contact with film or television adaptions so Beverly Cleary’s original work remains in my imagination. I don’t need things spiffed up and polished into Selena Gomez Disney programming. I prefer to see Ramona as just a normal kid.
And normal kids have normal problems. Ramona was a pest, so much of the series involved seeing things from her vantage as child struggling to consider cause and effect in her interpersonal skills.
I remember her having anxiety about this maturation process. Quimby family had a yellow cat they called Picky-Picky. One of her fears was that perhaps own behavior, which could always control, was the reason the cat just wouldn’t eat his food. If she was a good girl would Picky Picky be, well, less picky?
How much of the anxiety from our younger years sounds as silly to your now adult self?
I think back on my own impressions of my behavior as a child and I wonder if I had been “better” would my life have been better?
I was slowly smoothed and sanded from pest to well behaved. But it didn’t change anyone around me.
I don’t know if the worry about the picky cat is merely “head cannon” for me or a point Cleary meant to get across on the values of boundaries and coexistence.
Picky Picky probably would have still been picky. And not all problems of the Quimby family were Ramona’s fault. Least of all the cat’s issues with eating.
I was hit hard by a week of poor health which meant I missed a policy gathering in Helena today which I was really excited to attend. One of the topics was autonomy and choice in medical care and health.
And with any unexpected change of plans I try to see the upside. Because I was bed resting I was able to catch up on a keynote speech by engineer and technical communicating savant Andrei Karpathy’s talk to YC’s Startup School.
He is an excellent public speaker and has a rare gift for clarity which benefits the entire software ecosystem. And we are an industry who disproportionately see the value of sharing in real time the changes we are seeing as we build. This generation built the networks and seeded the data with our content that enabled these models.
I saw in the talk the long lineage of technical cycles, access expansion and autonomy expanding that I have been a part of since my childhood. I’ve seen a few development and deployment cycles to use the theories of Carlotta Perez
Each cycle granted more power to sharing. The excess value generation of making our tools open to more external use has proven itself. And that has generally made for cycles of innovation that are shared mid deployment by the people as it happens.
And yet we still struggle with the right way of interacting with the tools. Math is fairly abstract. Your average human doesn’t much care for conditionals. We developed mathematics over such odd timeframes that it’s somehow easier to think it’s not in tandem with a culture and a commercial environment.
Maybe some only look at the industrial or military applications for tools and they care little about how they were made. The level of autonomy and control and abstraction that is enabled by software baffles. The more accessible something becomes the more we need to think of the user of the tool. Specialists can use special tooling and need not be so accessible. When it becomes a tool for masses things change. And we are in a changing moment for software as a tool just as the world has the highest expectations for them. Because we are perhaps at the edge of the great buildout.
Karpathy said that working with LLMs can feel like using the command line. It’s an intuitive framing for many programmers. He believes we have not yet found the graphical user interface for this era even as we are perhaps building new operating systems.
The GUI or graphical user interface was a mind blowing shift for the personal computing revolution. It allowed in a world of new users including you to use the benefits of computing. Which wasn’t just calculating missile trajectory. The commercial possibilities were as endless as the personal and aesthetic.
That change in access built enormous businesses and was the stuff of nasty backstabbing in the commercialization processes and the competition was very sharp in personal computing era. My father sold software through an old school reseller called Ingram and I gather it was a pretty wild time in the eighties.
But the fresh paradigm is always beyond reach. It’s there waiting to upend your entire world.
To quote Neal Stephenson “ in the beginning there was the command” essay
We were all off the Batch, and on the Command Line, interface now—my very first shift in operating system paradigms, if only I’d known it.
We are in an operating system shift now and we don’t know what to think about it it’s structure. It’s modeled on humans so it has all the same problems we have. It has cognitive deficits just as humans do. This annoys normies who don’t understand how it’s built.
We are interfacing with a new kind of compute output and it will slowly change everything around it as the abstraction layers bring more people into the effort.
We don’t really know what it looks like at this order of magnitude but the change is here and we get to make it. It frankly seems exhausting to ponder and a much much much harder problem set for power than generalized intelligence.
How does this relate to medicine and autonomy? Well, it’s become clear that medicine will be one of the areas that benefits from new access.
I care about the way we develop tools for the entire stack of medicine from pharmaceuticals to patient data. I don’t want another era of regulatory capture. The way we build applications affects how much autonomy and freedom we can give both doctors and patients. I know don’t want to be stuck with what we’ve got. More people should benefit from the changes ahead.