[FRIAM] Friday AM

[glen]

Ha! Yes, anime is a good thing. But the difference between drawing as a hobby and feeling the need (or parents feeling the need) to "sell" the drawings is something else. (By "sell", I don't mean for money.) Re: health in context - Yes, and I feel a bit bad ranting about this young successful woman not only carrying a baby and having become a MD, but also for taking on the GP job as a MD. GP's are (mostly) heroes. Specialists are opportunists and should be shunned for the most part.

What torques me is this "optimized self" thing ... be all you can be. If I could only lose, say, 20 lbs, work out every day, reduce my drinking to 1 standard per day, etc. maybe my hair would grow back! ... or I'd live till I'm 400 years old ... or something. What's always missing is the Ends. To what End should I do all this optimizing? Surely it's not quality of life. Because if it really were quality of life, you're right, we'd have a UBI and I'd be able to relax in a hammock and take massive doses of LSD to explore the boundaries of the epistemic universe.

No, I conspiratorially suspect the End is "so you'll be a more efficient and effective wage slave". Work 60 hour weeks for a 40-hour based salary. Buy lots of shit on Black Friday or Small Business Saturday so those rent-seeking passive investors can fly, yet again, to Portugal for vacation. *That's* why we need you to stay healthy. And if you're really really lucky, you, too, can end your life as a rent-seeking recreational climate destroyer! Wouldn't that be fantastic? Of course, it's more likely that you'll do everything we tell you and *still* end up in medically-induced bankruptcy or dumpster diving for your lunch or dead from an aneurysm at mile 9 of your next marathon. C'est la vie, sucker.

On 1/2/23 08:42, Gillian Densmore wrote:
> Hey! anime is a good thing. Or at least that's what I tell myself with guilty pleasure anime like HighSchool DXD. :P
> now back to you glen and your rant. So what you're saying is: what the actual [redacted]?  It's down to lipservices to fix the issue of people going postal or snapping in some other awful way. Sure it'd be good for them to take a look how some non-trivial amount of people are just hardly putting food on the table. And be all like: we can either fund that stupid wall or do a universal base income of so much a week for everyone. I think the point of the opening question being open is in this odd thing normals call: health in context. or what I call small talk while the dr. does paper work . Some nothing burger thing to fill dead time. And believe me I'm not great about bsing about myself either so you have my comiserations.
> 
> On Mon, Jan 2, 2023 at 10:50 AM glen <gepropella at gmail.com <mailto:gepropella at gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
>     I've mostly been neutral about "the holidays". But as I age and my productivity tanks, I look upon all the little "reports" we get from friends and family with increasing sadness. It used to simply feel odd that "The So-and-so Family" year end report talked about how little Bobby has taken his amateur anime to new heights or whatever. But now it feels less odd, more normal ... and more digusting somehow. I guess it's a bit like the difference between the haughty _curriculum vitae_ and the more pedestrian, reflective, _résumé_.
> 
>     I went in for a "wellness check" with my GP group the other day. Don't ask me what they mean by "wellness check". I don't know. But because I don't really care which GP of the group sees me, this was a new one. She asked me that bane of the cocktail party question "Tell me about yourself." WTF?!? I *should* have said something like "I want to be an apocalyptic nomad and you breeder/settler types annoy the hell out of me." (She's pregnant with a 1st kid at home.) I might have, had we been at a cocktail party. Instead I just hemmed and hawed and asked her what she wanted to know, specifically. [sigh] It ended the typical way. You drink too much. You're too fat. Your cholesterol's too high. Yaddayaddayadda. Nothing to see here. Move along.
> 
>     I think the problem is I haven't been to a job interview in a while. Maybe that's what I should do this year ... try to line up a few job interviews so I'm forced to practice my narrative self elevator pitch.
> 
>     Happy New Year, y'all.
> 
> 
>     On 12/30/22 16:36, Steve Smith wrote:
>      >
>      >
>      >
>      > On 12/30/22 1:32 PM, glen wrote:
>      >> Interesting tangent. As always, I only post when I feel like I have something to disagree with (or fine-tune in a way that might seem contrarian). I feel like the closing on whim or choosing hours that may be inconvenient for a population is how we *should* do business. There's nothing more inhuman/inhumane than, say, shopping at Safeway at 2am because you *know* a multinational corporation is trying to squeeze that last blood from the market (and its employees).
>      >>
>      >> Convenience is one face of the Janus. Another is the optimized self ... e.g. tracking your footsteps to make sure you get them all in for the day ... or counting calories ... or Amazon-style, Taylorist "quantified self". *In*convenience is life. Attempts to avoid it are akin to suicide. And inconvenience is also pro-social. There's nothing more inconvenient than providing social support for a fellow human, sick puppy, or diseased ecosystem.
>      >>
>      >> So, when I see a "gone fishing" sign on a local business, I get a bit of a dopamine kick. Good for you, dude.
>      >
>      > It might also be worth noting that this "renormalization" leaves room for excellence...  surely there will be *some* small businesses and individuals who will excel by striving to expand or refine their "value proposition"...
>      >
>      > I can see silver linings throughout but I  think there will be "ringing" in many dimensions. As for me, I am happy with my new "lowered expectations" and even, as you suggest, can applaud a "gone fishing" sign...
>      >
>      > My own interests in optimization tend toward expanding circles of context... in my youth (at least into my 30s) the circle was rarely much larger than my self, my nuclear family, my neighborhood, my workplace. Nowadays it has become dizzyingly large and too often abstract... probably to the point of absurdity and ineffectuality.
>      >
>      >   It was safer and perhaps saner when I limited my optimization ideations to people and places I interacted with daily...   I also discovered "satisficing" vs "optimising"  in my 30s which was a significant relief, and allowed more degrees of freedom in my optimization/satisficing intentions/habits.
>      >
>      > "Good enough for who it's for" is a much better mantra, IMO than the usual "... for government work".
>      >
>      >>
>      >> On 12/30/22 12:16, Steve Smith wrote:
>      >>>
>      >>>> OPT Cafe is closed as well. What a way to run a business this is peak Family dining out Time.
>      >>>
>      >>> A new phase of customer service seems to have emerged after COVID. I have ambiguous feelings about it.   Previously I was a little offended by various examples of businesses not catering well at all to their customer's needs/desires/convenience.   Los Alamos as a community is somewhat famous for this...  the "captive audience" and the myriad flexibilities of LANL employees lead to things like retail businesses only open from 9-5PM M-F such that anyone who can't get away from work at a whim simply not being able to do business there... or restaurants that are satisfied with a short M-F lunch hour and/or closing early (by urban standards) and leaving business on the table.
>      >>>
>      >>> With the hammering that service personnel took with COVID (in spite of the myriad relief programs) as well as small-business owners (which can include franchise operators) I have been pretty sympathetic with businesses unable to return to the (sometimes generous) hours and services they kept before COVID.    I would certainly *like* to see the rich range of available services out there return to "normal" but also appreciate that the most vulnerable folks aren't out there 'hurting themselves' to meet my whims.
>      >>>
>      >>> The implications of spiking minimum wages and prices and corporate usury, disaster profiteering are all over the place for me... I think there will be a lot more "ringing in the system" left to be experienced in the aftermath of COVID.


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