Just spent an hour on my feet waiting in line at my bank so I could cash my cheque.
Now that they have raised the amount for Covid, it’s officially a cheque, not a check.
Anyhow, being on my feet for that long sucks. There’s a reason we fat dudes hate having to stand for a long time. The blood from our oversized bodies pools in our feet because our circulatory systems are not designed for such loads, and that makes our feet swell up and get sore.
Luckily, I have learned to shift my weight around in such a way as to minimize the effect, so it stayed in the sub-agony range, but still. Ouch.
So I am going to look into switching to direct deposit. Fuck this physical cheque bullshit. I’ve already switched to a card based lifestyle. Might as well complete the modernization of my finances by going paperless.
Then again, now that I have a webcam, maybe I can do that freaky thing where you can deposit a check just by sending them a picture of it.
I mean, that’s all that electronic cheque readers do anyhow :scan the cheque and then turn that picture into the relevant information.
But it still seems a little bit like magic to me.
Like…. the money is in my account. And yet, I still have the cheque. The cheque did not actually go anywhere. To the primitive part of our minds, cashing a cheque means exchanging the cheque for money.
How can that have happened if I still have the cheque?
Let’s talk N-value
This is a concept I have been pondering for a very long time.
One day, I was reading Reader’s Digest (don’t judge me, they have jokes), and it suddenly struck me that people have an inherent sense of how novel or new something is, and this valuation guides a lot of their consumer behaviour.
Let’s call this value N-value, for lack of a better term. Different people have different preferred N-value levels.
For example, some people have a very low tolerance for things that are too new or different. They actively avoid high N-value things, viewing them as “weird” or saying they “haven’t stood the test of time yet” or similar.
Basically, new things scare them.
Another person, however, might be bored by anything with too low an N-value. For them, familiarity truly breeds contempt.
What intrigues me most about this phenomenon, however, is : how do people know? How is it we can tell something’s N-value? How is it that we all have this sense of things yet nobody ever talks about it?
It’s like it’s such an integral part of our social perception that we don’t even know it’s happening. Fish don’t know they’re wet.
And despite the fact that it happened on a level too deep and primitive for us to even perceive, it also must include dozens of intricate calculations based on countless variables like what we have heard about the thing, how long ago we first heard about it, what sorts of people we associate with the thing, and many many more.
This subject has been on my mind in particular lately because I am reaching an age where my normally near-unlimited N-value tolerance has been compromised by the ravages of time to the point where, for the first time in my life, I find myself thinking, “What the hell is that? God, another new thing for me to learn?”.
Not too hard to see how that will be “Too new. Forget about it. ” before too long.
More after the break.
Boiling that frog
We’ve all heard the bit about how a frog will jump out of boiling water instantly but if you raise the temperate of the water slowly, the frog will sit there and calmly boil to death.
Poor little froggo.
Luckily, in the real world, this is not true. What happens with both people and frogs is that once the water gets to a dangerous temperature, the pain it’s causing will cross the sensory threshold and the individual will feel like “suddenly” the water is way too hot and get the fuck out of the pot.
But metaphorically speaking, it has merit. And I should know, because I am one piping hot frog right now.
The thing about my health issues – some of which are quite dire – is that they are easy to ignore. They don’t hurt. They don’t impair my actions. They don’t make me feel sick.
They just slowly kill me over time. In essence, they frogboil me.
So I feel like I am in a house that is very slowly burning down. Intellectually, I know the house is burning down and that if I don’t do something about it soon, the house will fall down on top of me and I will die.
But the emotion is missing. I know the danger, but I don’t feel it. I look around and nothing seems wrong. I am living my same sad little life. I still waste time playing video games all the goddamned time. I eat, I socialize, I sleep, I poop.
Sure, there’s a hell of a lot going on in my head, but in the extra-cranial universe, my life is the same as it has been for over a decade.
So where’s the fire? There is nothing to goad me into action. Not even the sores on my fucking legs are enough to get me to focus on the here and now and get things done.
Clearly, by default. I am just waiting for something really bad to happen. Something painful and scary and impossible to ignore. The sort of thing you call 911 over.
It’s not like I want something like that to happen. But clearly that is what it is going to take to get me to really take care of myself.
Or more likely, to end up having other people take care of me in a hospital and then back home with far less health and mobility than before.
And who knows, I might take care of myself then…. if they assign someone to check up on me on a regular basis.
Because clearly, if it’s all up to me, I’m fucked.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.