Categories
Medical

Day 928 and Season of No

I feel like I’ve been caught in a loop of shitty things that has me in a “fight or flight” pattern that I can’t find a way to release myself from.

I’m having a very “if it’s not one thing it’s a other” summer. And it has to stop here. If I don’t let it all go I’ll be miserable and it will have been my own choice. I’ve got a choice to prioritize the well being of myself and my family.

I’m writing this at the oral surgeon’s office as my husband’s wisdom teeth removal is today. I’ve been given several lectures on how challenging his recovery will be as he’s so much older than the ideal extraction age.

Teenagers have a lot better bounce back rates than even late thirty something apparently. Fingers crossed being fit and healthy counts for something.

I’m stressed by the prospect of prioritizing myself and family. I like being open and available to the universe.

So I’m just going to start saying no to more and more things until I feel like I’ve got myself out of this misery loop. My priorities will remain my family, my fund, my founders and myself. Probably not exactly in that order but pretty close.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 926 and Hang Over

I don’t drink alcohol so this title is a little silly but I feel like I’m hungover. Maybe it’s having felt like I lived through several containment breaches in an unclear semiotics war.

Maybe it’s some of the grief and loss from a death on midsummer. Maybe it’s worry about my husband’s upcoming oral surgery. Maybe it’s the general sense of uncertainty and fear of future shock.

I am tired and achy and my cognitive processing is absolutely shot. I’ve been battling a migraine all day and even two doses of Imitrax don’t seem to dampen the intensity.

I want to put some of the intensity of the last month behind me but I often feel as if I write that exact sentence and nothing ever gets less intense. It’s always some new piece of human crisis. I went as many of those out of my life as possible so I come out the other side feeling more human.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 924 and Backlog

It’s such a challenge to keep up with reality. Modern conditions have well overmatched human biology.

I’ve tried to keep my own physical biology from being overruled by competing inputs and attention competitions but it’s a losing battle. Sometimes the best you can do is ride the wave and be sure you know when to get up on your board.

I have a little bit of a backlog of inputs to work through. I should probably use the next few summer weeks to pull back and push through it. I’ve got a lot of sense making to do. A lot of inputs to be distilled.

I’ll do what I can to put things up as I see them and have a thought but I’m feeling the need to be a little more guarded. Can’t be out in world and accessible all the time.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 923 and Spicy

Lots of reasons to be optimistic in America that our wheezing economy has been goaded into forgetting that money shouldn’t be free. Again. We imploded the banks and a number of international allied economies but we achieved a soft landing for some Americans. I don’t even know how I feel about that sentence.

It just really feels like shit is going off the rails all over the place but you can’t quite make sense of all the things coming at you because it’s coming at you so damn fast. And everyone is being dramatic about it. As if we didn’t have all kinds of fair warning that the ride was going to be bumpy.

I recently had someone not handle a professional (but somewhat personal) transaction as anything the way I’d hoped. It wasn’t s big deal. I recalibrated something in my life in the face of grief and some personal realignments. Everyone is fine. Everyone has their own shit going on and it’s never about you.

But it does seem like a lot is going on for everyone and whatever the fuck else is exploding that hurts your life and your people. A lot of people are very reactive and it’s all being shown in real time on Twitter.

And yes it’s making me feel like yup however this next world war 3 thing it is going to go is overlaying on your personal life. It’s reminded me that I need to protect myself as I’ve got a job to do no matter how spicy the market gets.

Categories
Politics

Day 922 and Inconveniencing Americans

I’m enjoying a tiny moment of schadenfreude as I hear more stories of Americans being inconvenienced by our systemically fucked federal bureaucracies.

Every time a reasonable person encounters a petty injustice in the renewal of their passport I see hope. Because our immigration, visa, State department sundry consular services are so fucked. Like if you haven’t experienced the cruelty with which Uncle Sam treats it’s least favored citizens consider your luck. Well you must have a lot going for you.

And I’m grateful for your faith in American systems. We need to aspire to treat everyone as well as we have treated our most favored citizens. Our most privileged are an aspiration for us all. The American dream is working towards allowing a fragile peace of mutual freedom.

But you’ve got to remember that in big enough groups everyone is fighting to preserve their status. And that always comes at a cost. And until that cost occurs to more people with power we tend to let it slide. So I hope we inconvenience more Americans soon so we can get back to the business if welcoming the world to our aspirational ideals.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 921 and Unseen

I don’t really have the stomach for writing today. I realized recently that I’ve been accommodating several people I love so far past the boundaries of what I consider physically and emotionally tolerable, that I had some medical issues over the weekend as my body broke down by literally having thin skin. Ironic.

I am often afraid to tell people when I’m not feeling seen. I discuss, and reiterate, and point out, and I try to expand my bounds of tolerance to be more open, but I didn’t feel seen as a child by my own father and I see how it repeats as an adult.

I guess it’s not a shock that I snapped after letting my boundaries go. I’ve felt invaded for sometime (months even) and tried to reassure everyone I’d do my best.

But I realized in the process of minimizing over and over again how exhausting it was to be with everyone as much as they wanted, that because I’d never put my foot down they just didn’t see how much damage it was doing to me.

I am so hurt right now. I feel betrayed. I worked so hard at making a situation work that I missed that no one noticed it wasn’t working for me. And now that I’ve brought it up too late, it seems like I’ve doomed myself to being entirely unseen in the situation for good.

Having let all this out I do feel better. That I’ve done what I needed to make myself feel seen and safe before it was too late for me to recover. I’ll draw firmer boundaries and I’ll be more gentle with myself. I don’t have to live by anyone else’s schedules and demands except the ones I choose.

Categories
Community Internet Culture

Day 920 and Faster Pussy Cat, Kill Kill!

A regular theme of my writing here is the pace of accelerating change. There is rarely a break from “life happens” for any of us because that is the human condition. But I must say it’s really taking a lot to manage for some Americans who have had enormous systemic advantages for several decades now and are reacting poorly to even the potential of loss.

I believe the best way to overcome the loss of these advantages is by banding together in teams and collaborating to solve bigger problems together. Everyone brings a unique viewpoint.

If you are like me, teams are necessary for survival. I can survive on my own but it’s a much smaller more circumscribed life.

I have accepted that whatever character sheet got built before my arrival (genetics & chance) requires some min-maxing as on my own I’m not particularly independent or self sufficient. Yes, libertarians recognize our interdependency. It’s called division of labor.

Min-maxing is the character-building strategy of maximizing a specific desirable ability, skill, or other power of a character and minimizing everything else, seen as undesirable. The result is a character who is excessively powerful in one particular way, but exceedingly weak in others.

Min-Max Gaming Strategy

And so whatever I am left with in this character sheet feels a bit like I got stuck with a lot of weaknesses. But why not simply lean into it. Faster pussycat, kill kill.

A classic exploitation film poster
Categories
Emotional Work

Day 916 and Safe Spaces

Remember when safe spaces burst into a whole discourse thing? Maybe it was when the timelines got crazy around Harambe. I couldn’t pinpoint it but somehow “feelings aren’t facts” turned into a slur instead of commonly agreed upon consensus reality.

And now everyone is slinging insults to land points instead of finding a way to incorporate the duality of feelings and facts into civil society. Some trickster Demi-god is probably very pleased with his work. Maybe a goat or a Loki type.

There are many spaces that can feel unsafe depending on the context and the person. If I am aware that one of my choices provokes a strong response in another person, I may lay it aside for a minute so we can find common ground on choices and values we do share.

My sense of self is strong enough that I don’t have to hold every piece of myself tightly. I can empathize with someone I disagree with and find my way back to myself. Backbones and core beliefs are important.

I am finding myself in a number of situations right now where I wonder if I am too accommodating. My desire to empathize must meet the hard reality that is some people don’t feel safe empathizing with me.

Some of my reactions and feelings recently have left me feeling a bit abandoned and alienated. I am grieving for a lost matriarch in my family. And my grief manifested as a focused gratitude for finally seeing that I could live her lessons on my own every single day. And I have been living more joyfully because of it.

My reaction hasn’t been considered appropriate in some corners. I didn’t feel safe expressing my gratitude and focus and the happiness it brought me to have her thoughts in my head every day. And I realized then that not everyone will be able to feel safe with all your choices and decisions and emotions. Not every space can be safe for everyone.

Categories
Culture

Day 915 and Independence Day

The 4th of July is one of my favorite holidays. I’m proud to be an American. I am a patriot. I genuinely believe in the aspirational ideals of the United States of America.

I’m fully aware of the many millions of ways in which we’ve not lived up to founding ideals across the centuries. But I’ll be damned if I let the worst of us take away the aspirational ideals for the rest of us. The freedom to live up to our higher selves rests in each one of us. And fuck anyone who tells you otherwise.

I like to watch Roland Emmerich’s classic disaster porn cinematic masterpiece Independence Day every July 4th. The speech Bill Pullman delivers as humanity unites to fight the invading hordes of alien locusts is as inspiring a bit of cinema as I can imagine.

In less than an hour, aircraft from here will join others from around the world. And you will be launching the largest aerial battle in the history of mankind. “Mankind.” That word should have new meaning for all of us today. We can’t be consumed by our petty differences anymore. We will be united in our common interests. Perhaps it’s fate that today is the Fourth of July, and you will once again be fighting for our freedom… Not from tyranny, oppression, or persecution… but from annihilation. We are fighting for our right to live. To exist. And should we win the day, the Fourth of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day the world declared in one voice: “We will not go quietly into the night!” We will not vanish without a fight! We’re going to live on! We’re going to survive! Today we celebrate our Independence Day!

Independence Day

Now we don’t seem to be any nearer to humanity uniting behind an American plan for much of anything but I think to think one day we Americans might contribute to something as grandly aspirational as uniting our species. We can barely unite fifty states but we’ve not given up yet. And I personally intend to be here to keep fighting for our ideals. Happy 4th of July.

Categories
Internet Culture Media

Day 912 and The End of The Open Internet

Being valuable for your data has always been a bit of weird feeling for individuals. Because you on your own may have experienced quite varied mileage on being remunerated for your skills, contributions and other ineffable qualities.

We value athletes and business executives and the extremely beautiful and the particularly intelligent and getting paid to be any combination of that is bound up in dumb luck and how you compete in an economy with other humans.

Individually we are all quite unique. But the ways in which we are packaged, marketed, sold and controlled by our social, national and family contracts and norms can make it feel like we are put in boxes. Demographics.

Some professions are very refined at saying what facet of a person is worth something to another person responsible for selling, let’s say, designer clothing or commodity groceries or financial services. We call that cost of acquisition.

The adage in my age of the internet was always “if you don’t pay for the product then you are the product.” And that insight has tainted social media from the start. Even if it was a great deal for all the free users of the social website who didn’t mind using something for free because they couldn’t monetize their attributes at that scale. Generally unless you were in a small class of power users social media didn’t make you money and you weren’t that valuable.

And since you were the product being marketed and sold, other people who market and sold other things (advertising if you will) generally found it was in the best interest of a social media business to make sure there was plenty of flavors of you the user (perhaps SKUs or stock keeping units) on hand so if an advertiser wants to buy access to say a late thirties professional woman with a high net worth, she is online and can be shown an advertisement.

It helps to have active users like that readily available so she might be enticed to buy a $5 sparking water laced with drugs and sugar substitutes. Yes I went to Whole Foods today.

So it’s a mystery to me why you would implode the vast and intertwined delicate tapestry of entrenched network effects so that you can instead deliver less access to the network whose major value is keeping specific demographics on a website for extended periods happy and engaged. But I am not Elon Musk.

Elon Musk rate limiting user access to Twitter because “extractive data” rationalizing

As the age of artificial intelligence trained on reams of user data (available via API or application programming interfaces) gets going the owners of the social web are scared they are getting screwed. Reddit shut down access which is a real blow to Google whose best type of search for niche answers has been amending “Reddit” at the end of a query.

If Elon Musk is selling a dopamine drip of content and access then shutting off the tap is a baffling decision. And I’ll admit I got off the internet today because the strain of whatever is actually happening at Twitter (rumor is server issues and back end chaos and unpaid bills) meant none of my tweets would send.

I quite hope this will be better tomorrow as I rather liked the old system of my data and attention for access to the great wide open feeds. And I actually paid $8 for my account. Can’t imagine what everyone else is experiencing.