Monthly Archives: September 2014

jeezly fuck, videos!

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I was browsing my tablet’s SD card when I came across a whole metric shitload of videos that I have yet to share with you people.

Clearly, this is an intolerable condition which cannot be allowed to persist.

So hatten down your batches, people, cause it’s vidya time!

First off, we have this little number that I recorded a week ago but somehow failed to link anywhere :

See, that’s exactly the sort of thing that marks me as a mental pervert. Things other people worry about don’t worry me at all, but I lay awake nights thinking about tangles or potential energy or the true meaning of the Lion King.

I am pretty sure that I have ranted about potential energy in this space before, but darned if I can find the entry. I don’t seem to have done it either as a blog entry or as a video. Or maybe my Google Fu is just too weak.

Trust me… don’t get me started.

Oh, and I went out on a little excursion today, about which I am quite pleased. Every time I leave the home of my own accord when I dont technically even have to do it is a little victory against my agoraphobia, and another little victory for me learning to go out into the world and enjoy life.

The main reason for going out was to get some lab work done that the people booking the MRI on my knee and the CT on my ear will need before they can book me. Surprisingly, given that it’s primarily kidney function stuff, I did not need to give a urine sample. That turned out to be a good thing, because I stupidly had a good long pee right before I left, so I was running on an empty tank. Dodged a bullet there.

And my, they are getting efficient at LifeLabs (and wow, is it nice to have one a block away). I didn’t have to take a number at all, which is nice. I have never liked taking a number. I appreciate the efficiency and justice of the number-taking system and it sure as heck is better than having everyone just milling around and fighting for attention, but I just don’t like being assigned a number that I have to remember so that I know it’s my turn when I hear said number bellowed.

They just took my CareCard and announced my name and what cubicle to go to, and the tech was superb. She found a vein right away, I felt almost no pain when the needle went in, and she had her three or four tubes in no time at all.

That has got to be a weird job, though. Spending all day taking blood samples. Poking holes in people, many of whom are probably pretty nervous and some of whom will be freaking the fuck out, finding veins and draining blood, dozens of times a day, all day, five days a week.

And that’s just the blood. There must be other stuff they do that is way more gross and/or way more painful and scary. Seems like a pretty thankless job. I hope they get paid well.

Next up, we have some footage of the view off our new balcony, plus a few more aspects of our new apartment in the sky Warning, a little on the shaky side.

I have to admit, an unworthy yuppie-ish side of me wonders how much better the view is from further up the tower and resents those above us for their presumably superior view.

But oh well. You can take the boy out of the middle class…..

After the labwork, I wandered around the strip mall around there. It’s a very Asian place. Definitely a good place to get various Asian cuisines, like Taiwanese, Beijing, Szechuan, and of course, sushi.

No Thai though, at least, none that I saw. That’s too bad. Thai is my fave Asian cuisine amongst the ones that I have tried. I don’t care for pepper, so Szechuan is out for me, but I love curry, so Thai is high on my list of Asian goodness.

They also had two Filipino places (see, you know it’s genuine because they spell it with an F), a restaurant and a bakery. I’ve never had Filipino food. I admit, I am curious, but sort of a chicken when it comes to trying new cuisines not because I am afraid to try new things, but because it means going into an unfamiliar social situation.

Still, who knows, I might work up the nerve to try new things at the strip mall some time. It just takes me a while. I passed the Chinese bakery near PriceSmart (shop smart, shop… PriceSmart) dozens of times before I finally went in and discovered just what a wonderful thing a Chinese BBQ pork bun can be.

Anyhow, I was hungry, so of all the enticing and exotic options in front of me, I ate at a submarine sandwich place. What can I say, I ate at the place where I understood what all the food was. Here’s my video from there :

I instantly liked the place. It has that unpretentious greasy spoon type feeling that I love so much. Nothing fancy, just good food at a good price (seriously, costs slightly less than McD’s) and all served by a very friendly older Asian lady whom I think must be the owner as well as the cook.

And that’s another thing…. my roast beef sub was not just made fresh, it was COOKED fresh. Cooked! She didn’t just slap a piece of cold cut style roast beef on there. She took a slice of actual roast beef out of the freezer and fried that sucker up right in front of me. Holy real food, Batman!

I haven’t had a sub like that since way before the days of Subway. I liked the place so much, it even inspired me to do my first ever Yelp review!

I feel so modern now.

That’s it for me for tonight folks. I will talk to all you nice people again tomorrow.

The Rise And Fall Of Maturity

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What, exactly, makes you a grownup? And how has that changed over the years?

Because it definitely has changed. At least since World War II and probably even before that, it has seemed to successive generations that the generations before them were more competent, organized, tough, and strong than them.

Partly, this is an illusion created by the power gap between parents and their kids, and kids’ need to feel that their parents are powerful and in control of things and that adults, in general, know what they are doing.

That is the only way a kid can feel safe enough to be able to relax and be a kid. Part of the job of a parent is to help maintain this belief, even if privately you feel like you have no idea what you are doing and any minute now it will all fall apart.

But there is real truth to this idea as well. With every generation, we specialize more and end up knowing less. The human animal, despite shaking our spears at the sky and declaring our individuality, actually becomes more interdependent with each successive generation. The role of the adult as an individual lessens, and the adult as a society emerges.

The parents of the Greatest Generation were tough. They ran farms, built their own homes, raised animals, bought and traded goods, pumped cisterns, and in general worked a hell of a lot harder than their kids ever would. Even city dwellers faced far more hardship, death, and horror than we can possibly imagine in our safe and golden age.

Their children survived the Great Depression, fought in World War II, and built the very foundations of modern society. They made it through childhoods plagued by diseases like polio and the Spanish Flu, wars that destroyed entire nations, and poverty so severe that people ate their shoes. They might not have been quite the rugged loners of their parents generation, but they were tough, resourceful, and survived lives that seem like living hell to us now.

Then came their children, the Baby Boomers. Much has been made of their self-indulgent ways, but they still managed to have families, careers, and homes. Sure, they might not have been (or had to be) as tough and competent as their parents, but they at least had their lives together.

And then we come to my generation, Generation X. Very few of the people my age that I know have anything like the sort of lives their parents had at their age. They sometimes have some of the aspects of it, like a family, or a career, but very few of them have the whole basket of competencies that our parents had.

And what did we do? We overprotected our kids and created a generation even less capable than ourselves.

So that is what has been happening to us as individuals over successive generations. And yet, somehow, society continues. In fact, it has never been better.

It seems like as individuals lose competencies, society as a whole gains them. While generation after generation becomes less capable, society becomes more just, sane, safe, secure, and healthy. Just what the heck is going on? Where is all the competency coming from?

The only possible answer is that as we develop our modern societies, said societies become more complex and interconnected. The competencies that once had to reside within individuals now resides in systems. The further we modernize, the more power, authority, and competence flows away from traditional power structures and more into the spaces in between the power blocs.

In short, the competency becomes less of a hierarchical strength and more of an emergent phenomenon.

Way back in our hunter-gatherer days, there was no specialization apart from gender differences. All men were hunters. All women were gatherers. All hunters had the same set of skills. Ditto gatherers. A hunter could survive on his own for weeks because of all the jungle lore he had acquired over the years.

But as populations grew, specialization was required. First, the chieftain, who organized and led the hunters. Then the shaman, someone who neither hunted nor gathered but whom they supported because he was their intermediary with the unknown.

Then as populations grew still further, you have the blacksmith, the seamstress, and countless other specialized jobs emerging. And always it was the same tradeoff : in return for the kind of quality and quantity a society gets by having people who do nothing but their trade, society has to support the specialists.

Thus, it could easily seem like generation after generation, people became less competent. If a hunter has a son who’s a blacksmith, he could very well say that his son would be helpless on his own, and he’d be right.

What he is missing, though, is that while his son is less capable of surviving on his own, the society in which the son operates is greatly enriched by having someone who knows all that there is to know about working metal and making durable metal goods. The son’s competencies might be more specialized, but they still require a great deal of knowledge, both applied and theoretical, and his hunter father would be just as helpless in the son’s world as vice versa.

So perhaps it is mere narcissistic neurosis to compare ourselves to our parents and bewail our lack of their apparent competence. We are merely products of the process of specialization that is the very foundation of civilization and that has been going on since the time of the caveman.

We don’t know everything our parents did. But they did not know a lot of it before they had us either. And they would be lost in the modern world we understand, just as one day we all will be lost in the world our children create.

We don’t lose competency. We simply build it into the world we create.

And that conclude another meandering diatribe. I will talk to all you nice people out there again tomorrow!

The sleeper speaks

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Hoo boy, has this been one sleepy day.

I brought it on myself. Last night, after getting back from hanging out and watching videos with Felicity, I did the same stupid thing I have done a thousand stupid times before and decided to play some video games before going to sleep.

Dumb idea. When I do that, I under up really overstimulated. So when I got tired of playing games and wanted to go to sleep, what do you know, I am too hyper to sleep and trying to sleep only makes it worse.

But I was quite tired and really wanted to sleep. There was just this wall of overstimulation to overcome first. I tried some exercise, and that helped some. I also tried out a new habit of man, mainly wandering around the apartment, and that also helped a little bit.

Eventually, though, I got so frustrated with my lack of ability to sleep and my having overstimulated myself right through the effects of the dose of quetiapine I had taken earlier that I decided to activate the nuclear option : taking a third quetiapine.

Normally, I only take two, and that gets the job done. But I was getting desperate and, I will admit, irrational. So only two hours after the previous dose, I took a third pill.

I know that this would likely result in me sleeping all day, so it’s not like I didn’t know the consequences. And what do you know, I slept all day today, and honestly, I could probably sleep all night too. When I am done writing this blog entry, I will be very tempted to just go back to bed, and I have gotten around twelve hours of sleep already.

So, mental note, do not do the Third Pill unless the situation is dire. I knew I had nothing in particular that I needed to get done today when I took the Third Pill, but still.

Past a certain point, this sleepiness shit gets really irritating. Especially when there are things you want to do, like for instance, write your damned blog entry and make a video for the day.

You know, just to take two completely random examples.

As is, I am worried about the day’s video. If I go to sleep when I am done here, I might sleep past midnight and hence miss my chance to do a video TODAY, and that would really bother me.

On the other hand, despite having a liter of Diet Coke in me, I feel downright incoherent as I write this to you nice people and I don’t know just how good a video I can make when I am having trouble keeping my eyes open.

So I have a tough choice to make when I am done here.

Yesterday was the big Final Day of the move, the last day of our legal tenancy in apartment 209 at 3851 Francis Road here in Richmond. So there was a fair bit of scrambling to try to get the last of our stuff out of there.

I have come to the conclusion that we are hoarders. Very mild ones, of course. Definitely a subclinical level of hoarding, But hoarders nevertheless, because we “rescue” things.

It’s a familiar scenario. You are walking past a dumpster or other garbage receptacle and you see that someone has thrown away something that is still “perfectly good”.

Now some people would walk on by and never give a thought to this grotesque waste of valuable resources. Others might click their tongues at what a tragic waste is occurring right before their eyes, but do nothing to stop it.

But we are the kind of people who take the damned thing home with us in order to “rescue” it from the dumpster and the landfill. It feels very virtuous while also letting you cluck your tongue at others’ wasteful ways, and also gives you that thrill of acquisition.

Still, it’s not hoarding yet. In order to be hoarding, you don’t just have to be acquiring,

You have to be retaining.

As we have moved, I have found enormous quantities of stuff that we will, honestly, never ever ever use and never needed in the first place. There is also stuff that you xan imagine maybe someday needing, but which realistically is actually just taking up space in your domicile and your brain.

And this stuff accumulates. You end up with enormous quantities of useless crap dragging you down. It would be one thing if we “rescued” immediately went to Value Village or the like. But it doesn’t, it just build up in all our cupboards and closets.

And it really bothers me, now that I have experienced it myself. I am not at all sentimental about material objects. With few exceptions, material possessions are strictly functional in my books. They either serve a function, or they can go. And I am very susceptible to feelings of being held back or encumebered by the superfluous and the trivial.

So I usually have no problem at all giving things the old heave-ho when they have become more of a liability than an asset. I value my freedom of action more than most material things. I would rather travel light through life than squat on a hoard of what is, after all is said and done, merely stuff.

So if I had my druthers, we would have disposed of more and moved a whole lot yes.

And by “disposed of”, I mean “recycle”, of course. I might not be sentimental about possessions, but I am very keen on efficiency and I agree that it is a crying shame when something still useful goes to the landfill.

I just don’t see why we have to be the ones who end up with all this stuff.

Well, we’re in an apartment half the size of the last one now, and so we just cannot afford to keep accumulating crap. We are going to have to be far, far pickier of what we add to our lives.

Myself, I don’t need more more than the things I use in my daily life.

Well, I am nodding off at the computer, so I suspect it’s time to lay down again.

I will talk to all you wonderful people again tomorrow.