Tag: Pain

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Culture Internet Culture Reading

Day 1600 and Uncertain Milestones

I read some Charles Dickens today. No this isn’t a Great Expectations joke. Rather, I read the first seven paragraphs of his 900 page novel Bleak House.

Why? I wanted to test my literacy as part of social media’s great ongoing debate about humanity’s waning reading and writing abilities.

A Substacker & Twitter personality broke down a 2015 think-aloud reading comprehension study which analyzed the skills of English majors at two Kansas universities.

[They were asked to] read the first seven paragraphs of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House out loud to a facilitator and then translate each sentence into plain English

They Don’t Read Very Well: A Study of the Reading Comprehension Skills of English Majors at Two Midwestern Universities.

The Substacker Beloved Kitten has written about what constitutes mass literacy before using something called the PIAAC which has five levels of literacy.

If you are a knowledge professional you better hope you are a four but social media comments suggest most of us are not.

This methodology doesn’t even try articulate level 5. And as someone who occasionally sees what a real 1% outlier looks like I don’t disagree. Our best are in a league of their own.

So obviously as American funded “college for all” it was clear not all college attendees would on the right side of average. And as it turns out, the English majors at highly subsidized state universities (mostly white girls incidentally) had a lot of trouble understanding Dickens’s British family court tragedy.

I also don’t want to read that many pages of fog metaphors, and I have an entire tag dedicated to forced metaphors.

I took the test (speaking my answer into my phone) and it was harder than you think to simplify but I had the vocabulary.

Amusingly all of the test takers were sure they could easily finish the stupid book after most of them failed to understand even its basic concepts. I would not finish Bleak House.

Like those other white girls I am unlikely to be in the 1% of literacy when it comes 19th century British literature. Surely in my own skill stack (and it’s overlapping areas of expertise) I can approach 2SD on things. I suspect this blog and my general internet presence suggests I can do Level 4 reading. We think around what we can.

That seems adequate given I contribute what I like and communicate what is enjoyable on my own spaces. Here I am plodding along contributing sixteen hundred days of writing to the public discourse which is its own proof of literacy. It’s several novels worth of training data for our artificial intelligences.

I think about how much I do or don’t want to contribute to the maw of publicly indexed Internet because I believe we get better if we all contribute to this public good.

Our future is a shared coordination problem requiring we can comprehend and contribute to our commons. Maybe I understand enough Dickens to get by. He maybe has a dimmer view of legalistic thinking than I do. But I’m sure he’d see plenty of wretches in our times too.

Categories
Chronic Disease Emotional Work

Day 1589 and Disagreeable

I am in a lot of physical pain and I have been cranky about it all day. I just did not have the energy to self censor my discomfort either. I spent a lot of the day in bed popping off.

Because people are polite I only ever get rewarded for being spicy. I’m sure people harbor all kinds of uncharitable opinions about people who are mouthy, especially women. But I mostly find you can say quite a lot. Especially with your ingroup.

In fact being disagreeable is tolerated, and even celebrated, in almost all public forums. Hard truths, straight acts, unpleasant realities tend to be celebrated. Truth telling can become someone’s persona even when nothing is wrong.

But watch out for that dark path. If you care too much about broader opinions of yourself you can easily become what is called audience captured in which your persona gets adapted to what gets a response. Modeling your life as get it can go very wrong for people.

I felt for comedian John Mulaney who got typecast as the affable guy and absolutely hated being the bad guy for his various addictions and personal life complications.

In his special “Baby J,” Mulaney reflects on the burden of his public persona: “Likeability is jaaaaaaaail,” summary via Perplexity of a much better substack piece

In some ways, playing to type is just cognitively easier for everyone. A social contract if you will. Being able to show more than one side of yourself shouldn’t be shrugged off as people pleasing nor is being disagreeable always a sign of bad temperament. Humans contain multitudes even if everyone plays to type.

Categories
Finance Politics

Day 1558 and Basis Point Bullying

I’ve tried not to pay too close attention to the panicked aftermath of the new tariff regime.

I don’t trade the public markets actively and we’d already made preparations in our personal financial lives for a deleveraged dollar. It seemed clear where things were headed and weakening the dollar solves a couple problems for America.

I am a free trader. I believe in open markets as the most effective means we currently have at our disposal for large scale coordination that works with human nature.

Nevertheless the allure of central planning and collectivism is hard to resist for those in power. The market will adapt and find other ways of allocating assets but the wasted energy of a crisis frustrates investors. Damming the waters only impeded flow.

Each basis point drop saves America 1 billion according to Secretary Bessent. So we’ve an incentive to nuke 30 basis points and keep yields low. And yet the 10 year is still stubbornly high.

The exorbitant privilege of Bretton Woods comes with the fears of a centralized currency managed by technocrats who must give guidance to markets without providing too many surprises.

I grew up with a significant amount of skepticism around the federal reserve and its places to hippie parents and the University of Chicago but even I never thought I’d live to see this kind of test. And I am a Bitcoiner! Maybe Silicon Valley will finally find out what bargain we have with Uncle Sam.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1538 and Reason About the World

There is a pet theory that I ascribe to that precious few changes their minds without experiencing a failure in social consensus. Being pushed outside of culture lets you map it more accurately on the way back in.

There is nothing more valuable than your ability to reason about the world. We sense-make with all kinds of inconsistencies and have so little incentive to step out of what we think is true about our world. Go along to get along is how humans stay alive.

I have had a wildly inaccurate model of the world in the past and I’m confident I’ll say that same soon in the future.

But I’m comfortable falling out of social consensus if it clashes with the model of the world that I work within. I’m not saying I’m smarter than anyone but I do know that I regularly weigh my faulty priors even if it’s embarrassing. I’ll keep searching for people who can reason about the world. We can see better together.

Categories
Medical

Day 1531 and Dumb Novel Problems

I personally find I’ve got an adequate number of problems in my life. I’d rather not go searching for new ones. And yet they keep cropping up no matter one’s hopes.

I’m at the eye clinic at the hospital for a two week checkup on an infection that felt like it literally ballooned my right eyelid. It was either a cyst or a chalazion, the doctor was like eh treatment is the same.

Not to upset those with weak stomachs but the treat is slice open your eyelid and squeeze out the pus, blood and scar tissue. It isn’t as painful as it sounds.

After two weeks of diligent hot washcloths, antibiotic eye drops and doxycycline my eye has reduce the lump to a small pea or large lentil. My body was trying to move it out but it needed a bit more help.

So she sliced it open again seeing if we could get anything else out. Alas the tissue scaring was most of the volume so there was less ooze to be pushed out.

She said I could wait it out but it takes months to move it naturally or we can do a steroid injection and reduce the swelling so it clears more easily.

I’m not a big fan of prednisone when I’m taking it internally but a little localized dexamethasone shot into the eyelid seemed like a good plan to me.

I’ll say that it’s a bit scary trying to stay perfectly still while someone holds a scalpel to your eyelid. Having someone inject a needful of steroids is much worse from a base animal terror perspective for me.

I’m safely through it though now my eye is all puffy again. I’m likely to have a black eye for a bit so I’m excited for all the jokes Alex and I will make about how he hit me. Nothing more awkward than a wife with a black eye.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1530 and Pandemic Anniversary

March 11 2020 was the day the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 to be a pandemic. It’s been five years since we had our once in a century pandemic that changed everything. Honestly it feels like it just happened.

You can quibble a bit on the start (right there in the name alluding to its discovery in 2019) but this second of March the week where America finally started changing behaviors. Within two weeks we’d have the infamous “flatten the curve” discussion. What a shitshow those early days were.

The pandemic changed a lot of people’s lives. The New York Times has a feature with 30 charts about how the world is different that I found interesting.

My life changed in a lot of ways that are probably recognizable to other Americans. My already digital life became how business was done. I moved back home. I rethought my relationship with institutional trust.

We lived in New York when we were locked down. Alex and I didn’t leave our one bedroom apartment for three months except to go to the CVS.

Coincidentally we’d been in the middle of our landlord trying to evict us for filing a complaint with the department of buildings over broken elevators. That got stopped. As soon as it seemed safe to leave city we rented an Airbnb in the Hudson Valley. The next week protests broke out. We had lived above City Hall so we got very lucky.

Figuring out where to land and the shape of our lives was a process. The Airbnb phase felt stressful as the summer ended and the urge for permanency felt overwhelming. We signed a lease site unseen for a townhouse in my hometown of Boulder Colorado.

Much of the rest of these past five years have been subsequently documented here on this blog. We found our way to Montana. A lot happened in those intervening years. None of it felt like it happened very fast. And yet here we are.

Categories
Medical

Day 1524 and in the Red

The MilFred family household is not at its finest. My husband Alex seems to be in the throes of pneumonia while my body is doing its best to manage a host of medication changes.

We have all the typical work while this goes on along with a few other crisis management projects (mold). All dashboards flashing red.

I keep toying with posts saying I’ll have to consider if this is where the habit goes away or that I need some do not disturb time. This is certainly a big part of why.

Categories
Medical

Day 1517 and Blink Blink

I’m writing this in the waiting room of the new hospital campus in Bozeman. We’ve recently had an outpost of the Billings Clinic go up alongside the highway between Bozeman and Belgrade to keep up with the growth in Southwest Montana.

It’s really nice and absolutely packed with people. The average age looks to be early seventies so it’s not a young crowd in the eye clinic.

The only other mid-life people besides Alex and myself is a prison inmate in a yellow jumpsuit and his two Corrections officers. I had half a mind to go ask him what he was in for while showing off my own deformity m.

I’m unsure if it’s a side effect of changing medication or just plain bad luck, but I have an infection in my right eyelid. It started about a month ago and looked like it was a simple chalazion.

It’s sometimes called an eyelid cyst or a meibomian cyst. It slowly forms when an oil gland (called a meibomian gland) becomes blocked. Cleveland Clinic

But over the last month it went from painless little boba ball sized lump to my entire eyelid being swollen. It got much worse this week especially as I started applying wet washcloths to it regularly.

They were able to perform an incision and curettage (don’t click through if you don’t want to see some gnarly eye stuff) as my discomfort was pretty intense. I desperately wanted it drained and they did not disappoint.

Just wiping up the last of the pus

I hope this heals well and without issues. I fear this was complicated by the changes I’m meant to undergo in my medical protocol from one IL-17 inhibitor to another.

To soften any backlash in symptoms during the change I’m on another immunosuppressant so I’m particularly nervous about infections especially when it comes to sensitive areas like the eyes. I’m glad I was able to get this drained but I’m a bit nervous about how it will heal.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease

Day 1491 and Snappy

I am a bit snappy at the moment. Everything hurts and too much is happening. Despite my endless horizon of opportunity my circumstances tightens to the pinprick focal point of pain.

Once you get angry enough that you quote Kierkegaard in public settings it’s probably a sign to knock it off.

I don’t have much of utility to say here except any problem that comes down to information acquisition is an excellent opportunity to make use of new tools so both myself and my husband have been deep in model comparison of different reasoning chains as we try to untangle IL-17 inhibitors vs 23.

It’s a weird feeling to be watching the crisis of institutional confidence in medicine play out over the most incredible extension of knowledge and capacity in my lifetime. PubMed spelunking? Pffft nah we got Sherlock Holmes mode for free.

Categories
Chronic Disease Politics

Day 1490 and Healthcare’s Sin Eaters

I went to see a rheumatologist today. I had the baffling experience of them wanting to actually get to know me. Which was surprisingly unhelpful in the moment but really nails vibe we’ve got with healthcare in America.

I kvetched on Twitter that I spent my week defending hot girls and open source software while I deride Big Pharma and public employee unions. That’s more of a humble brag about my priorities. But I felt bad that I picked on pharmaceuticals. I got replies. Why harsh on pharmaceuticals? And actually fair.

Drug companies are the least bad of some very bad actors. For all its faults, drug companies are not just existing to be parasitic like pharmacy benefit managers or generate wealth through regulatory capture like Epic.

If anything pharma is the sad scapegoat in healthcare. We pick one drug a decade to laud & then like clockwork do a hard reversal on it in a decade or two. Patients get hurt and doctors did their best. We saw with statins, SSRIs, opioids, adderall, and I’m sure soon GLP-1s will be next to have Netflix documentaries. Someone is always to blame and it’s usually the drug companies.

Some category is designated a sin eater for the system’s horrors. Which isn’t at all fair as all those drugs serve real needs. Sorry Oxycodone you remain a villain. But why is American in so much pain?

Which gets back to my surprise as having a doctor who wanted to get to know me. We came in with a typed up diagnostics sheet with a timeline of treatments, protocols and medications and the bastard has the audacity to ask me about the quality of my life.

I hesitate to say “well shit” because I am Protestant from Scandinavians stock because we pride ourselves on being “oh just fine”

And of course I’m the asshole who quotes Kierkegaard at my doctor. Sickness unto death right Doctor? Which I guess is a bit of a downer.

The man actually asked me if I’d consider managing my pain more aggressively. I am absolutely mogged by the audacity of the sentiment that I could suffer less.

Apparently no one scans you for drug seeking behavior when you chuckle and kneel before what God has decided for you. So that’s a good trick I guess for the less sincere.

You can really see how public perception of RFK Jr is so different from what elite narratives would like to see. People are with RFK’s righteous indignation. Why are so many suffering?

The cranks and the crazies are here because America is mostly gaslit by a nest of bad incentives. Doctors don’t want any of this. Neither do the drug companies. But someone has to be blamed and it’s usually the guys with the money. But they are trying as hard as anyone to actually come up with solutions.

Maybe no one deserves to have a righteous Kennedy come after them. But everyone feels a little bit crazy with how the system works now.