This was not exactly the situation you speak of, but my experience in the poorer parts of Nigeria showed me that people still needed personal space, even if it was very small and mostly symbolic. I think it is a basic human need.
Crap - Niarobi, in Kenya, not Nigeria. Sheesh.
Sorry, that should have been: Leave me alone, racist!
Science!
"Crowding stresses males but calms females"
But the old John Calhoun experiment was actually what I was looking for.
Among the aberrations in behavior were the following: expulsion of young before weaning was complete, wounding of young, inability of dominant males to maintain the defense of their territory and females, aggressive behavior of females, passivity of non-dominant males with increased attacks on each other which were not defended against. After day 600 the social breakdown continued and the population declined toward extinction. During this period females ceased to reproduce. Their male counterparts withdrew completely, never engaging in courtship or fighting. They ate, drank, slept, and groomed themselves - all solitary pursuits. Sleek, healthy coats and an absence of scars characterized these males. They were dubbed "the beautiful ones".The conclusions drawn from this experiment were that when all available space is taken and all social roles filled, competition and the stresses experienced by the individuals will result in a total breakdown in complex social behaviors, ultimately resulting in the demise of the population.
Even in the 19th century poor families slept ten to a bed if necessary, and single men slept in bunkhouses for months on end, so they had to construct privacy some other way. I imagine there are fairly strict and universally understood rules of etiquette about when not to talk to people and what not to notice.
In fiction you read a lot about individuals (urban or rural) who would escape to their own special place where they could be by themselves, but maybe it was just novelists-to-be who did that.
At Xmas we had 16 people in a house which comfortably sleeps 9, and there were people looking for privacy all over the place.
there were people looking for privacy all over the place.
I like this phrase. Thanks.
A recent article on Calhoun "The cultural influence of John B. Calhoun's rodent experiments"
Unable to control the frequency of social contact, the rats became increasingly stressed. Males became aggressive and some formed gangs, attacking females and the young. Mothers neglected their infants, failing to construct proper nests and even abandoning or attacking their pups. One group of males isolated themselves from the community around them and became exclusively homosexual. Cannibalism began - first of the abandoned young, then of the victims of violence.
Of course, I see this as a continuum, not a bright line over which the pathologies begin. Two's a couple, three's a crowd. Sigmund says.
The "beautiful ones" and the exclusively homosexual rats are interesting. I haven't read enough Harvey & Lefebvre et al but I think they emphasize the need for unstructured urban spaces where creativity in social role formation can be exercised.
And Yggles, who sees grass and demands a Wendy's be built there, is a monster, a mind wrecked by a life in crowds.
This strikes me as a topic about which rat psychology is least illuminating. Mammals range from solitary creatures like wolverines that get together once a year to breed, to colony creatures like prairie dogs and mole rats. Historically and cross-culturally there's quite a range of human patterns, and in many cultures solitude is regarded as an unquestionably bad thing. I just was reading about a Peace Corps volunteer who breathed a sigh of relief when everyone in her settlement went away for some festival and made plans to enjoy her solitude, when she found out that one villager had stayed behind to keep her from getting lonely.
Even in the 19th century poor families slept ten to a bed if necessary
My mom taught in an inner city school when she was younger and she said that one of her students slept in the same bed as all his siblings. A younger sibling had a bout of nocturnal enuresis that left a smell on him that prompted questions.
10: I wonder how introverts do in a society that abhors solitude? They must be constantly stressed.
One of the reasons why leprosy survived as long as it did in Scandinavia (~3000 Norwegian lepers ca. 1850) was the close quarters people lived in, including ten-to-a-bed.
I wonder how introverts do in a society that abhors devalues solitude? They must be constantly stressed.
It ain't so bad.
Two's a couple, three's a crowd.
I dunno. I just saw 3 last weekend, and liked it more than I would have imagined, based purely on the 55 metascore--which I attribute mostly to the power of the acknowledged triangle as romantic ideal. (And it really is refreshing to have romantic leads who look like normal, if perhaps quite attractive, people.)
The US is very hospitable to introverts. When I go back to Portland in a couple of months I will no longer have to relate socially to anyone whatsoever, except very minimally with retail clerks and the apartment manager.
It is indeed. I loved living by myself. So peaceful. I love camping by myself, too. Not that I get to do that anymore.
I loved living by myself
So what did you go and do? You went and had babies. It's a common error, I did it myself.
It's true. But they've got such cute proportions.
15:I went looking at IMDB but I can't find the Spanish movie I saw, 2000s, about a love triangle. The sex was a little screwy, but what I liked about it was that they were all equally ambitious art students who loved each other and only one had adequate artistic talent. I really felt for all three of them, the heartbreaking disappointment, the desire to not be envious or resentful, and the successful one's need to break from the losers in order to not feel guilt and build on the pride of accomplishment.
17: I've never camped by myself and don't think I would like it at all. Even though I both love camping and love being by myself.
Maybe I should try it some time; it might be better than I'm thinking.
OT, but can someone explain to me the legal theory on which it's constitutional for a state to flatly prohibit any private health insurer from offering abortion coverage? That makes no sense to me. (I mean, on legal grounds--most abortion restrictions make no sense, but at least I understand how you get there, legally. But this leaves me confused.)
The right to have an abortion is not the right to have someone else pay for it.
23: which is why the government isn't required to fund abortions, and medicaid doesn't have to cover them. But there's nothing about the rationale for creating a 'right' to abortion in the first place that would seem to support a state's right to completely prohibit private insurers from covering the procedure.
Put another way, "the right to have an abortion is not the right to have someone else pay for it" goes way too far. Could a state prohibit anyone from borrowing money from a friend to pay for an abortion? What's the difference?
These are private plans. I can't see the rationale for the state forbidding private plans to cover abortion. I looks like they're using Obama's semi-public health plan for a back-door prohibition of abortion for anyone.
I shouldn't have brought it up. I'd rather talk about solitary camping. What the hell do you do? Read? Fish? Just sit around the campfire by yourself, drinking?
Actually, this doesn't sound that bad.
Based on my experiences in Ghana, I would say that people's needs for solitude are understood differently in West Africa than they are here. When I first went, I was allowed to stay in my room alone because I was a student, but it was still seen as strange and questionable behavior. In general people were only alone in passing or when doing work that required concentration. I would say that introverts there were still expected to be social, in the sense of hanging out in group spaces, but allowed to be more passively social. There is much greater toleration for withdrawing or antisocial behavior in seemingly social spaces. What might provoke resentment or offense here is dismissed there with, "Oh, that's just how they are."
I did about 3 ten day solitary backpacking trips when i was young. Totally loved it. I walked about 10 miles a day, took frequent breaks, and explored the neighborhood.
23: Right, you don't have a right to have someone pay for it. So, the insurer should not necessarily have to pay for an abortion. But why would a private insurer be prohibited from doing it?
I guess you'd want to work for a large employer with an ERISA plan that would not be governed by the state. I sort of thought that the ACA would make it safe for me to move away from Massachusetts, but the way that the essential benefits design is being regulated makes it clear that the states are going to have a lot of power depending on what currently offered benchmark plan they choose.
Cost sharing is how they're going to deter people from using services.
Good news is that pediatric vision and oral care has to be covered.
26: Some of my best memories are of camping/hiking/backpacking alone in my 20s. Just being off on your own, no need for consultation on where to go or what to do next. It does magnify the risk of some small fuck-up turning into a bigger deal, however (although that was part of the appeal).
Similarly, I love driving long distances alone.
Similarly, I love driving long distances alone.
See, I hate this. (Although not any more than I hate driving long distances with other people, so maybe this isn't relevant.)
The problem with other people on long drives is that they are so needy (or at least their needs are almost never congruent with mine).
24: there's nothing about the rationale for creating a 'right' to abortion in the first place that would seem to support a state's right to completely prohibit private insurers from covering the procedure.
Not as far as I can see, not for plans free of government funding -- that is, not in the upcoming health insurance exchanges -- but IANAL.
I don't know why the first "right" in the above-quoted portion of 24 is in scare quotes.
My pharmacy claims that no insurer is currently covering the cost of birth control pills. Maybe this is a New York state thing?
34: Seriously? That's just ... wrong. (And my information is out of date by a few months, but it wasn't the case in CA.)
I used to love long distance drives alone. I did Lexington Dallas (14 hours) surely a dozen times, all before I had a cell phone. I wouldn't do it again for love or money but it's a fond memory.
I'm constantly planning road trips with my friend M but I can't imagine we'll actually ever take one. Are road trips at all fun as a middle-aged person?
34.--I've had a hard time tracking down external proof, as all searches for "birth control insurance" are about the new law that will make total coverage without copay mandatory by January 2013. It's a recent phenomenon, according to the pharmacist, almost as though the insurers are trying to extract as much money as possible before the new law kicks in...
34: MassHealth (Massachusetts' Medicaid plan) charges no copayment on birth control pills.
Are road trips at all fun as a middle-aged person?
I'm not quite middle-aged, but I had an absolute blast driving to/from LA at the beginning of the year. And the three-week road trip I did around Europe a few years ago was also a great time.
Are road trips at all fun as a middle-aged person?
We do family ones to camp all the time and I enjoy them. Yellowstone's only six hours or so to the north, Glacier about 12 hours, Zion's and Bryce to the south, Dinosaur Monument three and half hours east, etc.
34, 37: It's a recent phenomenon, according to the pharmacist, almost as though the insurers are trying to extract as much money as possible before the new law kicks in...
Jesus, this is depressing, yet true, yet unsurprising.
AFAIK, the abortion thing was completely predicted because a) the exchanges essentially force private insurance companies to take the federally subsidized customers, and b) yet the design of the plans and acceptability of private insurance companies is left to the states. There was talk at the time the companies could offer separate abortion-friendly plans not on the exchanges but it was well-known that if they did offer alternative plans some states could deny them access to the exchanges.
Stupak was well pleased with Executive Order 13535 ...because he, and Obama, understood how it would work out.
Wait, it's January 2013? The article I just read claimed it would be August 2012.
44.--I'm not entirely sure. Given that I can't even find independent corroboration of what my pharmacist is saying, I give up on the research segment of this afternoon.
For what it's worth, the insurers would be trying to do this, at the very end, whether we were seeing a shift to full-fledged single-payer health insurance or not.
43: s/b b) should be something like "implementation of the exchanges left to the states"
There were a lot of reasons some if us hated and mistrusted the ACA.
Are road trips at all fun as a middle-aged person?Oh yeah, but I think they are sometimes replaced with something better than driving - a week in Europe or some tropical location. The feeling is the same - freedom - at least for awhile.
Again, although I think it's terrible policy, I can perfectly easily understand the legal theory under which states are banning abortion coverage on their soon-to-be active exchanges. (The orange states in the map in 22.) What I don't understand at all are those ones that are flatly prohibiting all insurance companies from including abortion coverage in their policies. (The red states in the map.) (Maybe these laws will just be quickly struck down, and then my complete confusion will make more sense.)
43.1 is basically right, as far as I know. However -- and this is not to diminish the importance of family planning coverage -- the health insurance companies would have withdrawn coverage for this or that, or raised rates, in the run-up to the shift whether we were shifting to a full public option or not.
Urple's 49 is my question too. Going forward, I suppose they could say that having accepted any Government money bound you to additional regs. But the current law in the red states like Kansas makes no sense to me.
49: The red states' laws should be struck down, as far as I can tell.
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My housemate thinks he's done well to scatter bird seed in the back yard prior to this evening's snow flurries. But he's scattering it in the now-fallow garden plot areas. ? I thought this was kind of silly, since that seed will sprout various things in the spring, in the garden? And we don't want that? My housemate said that he thought that (a) the bird poop in the garden would be good (really??), and (b) the birds might not be able to find the seed in the grass.
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I just looked at the drug list for my plan, and it covers dozens of oral contraceptives.
53: You should probably ask a doctor before you take one.
Okay, as soon as I recover my research mojo, I will look into this story and, probably, have to channel my inner rage bunny and unleash it at someone.
What the hell do you do? Read? Fish? Just sit around the campfire by yourself, drinking?
Actually, this doesn't sound that bad.
I used to take a ton of books, a journal, a water-proof radio (never got completely out of radio range), and a box of wine or a little bit of pot.
I just did out-of-my-car camping, so during the day I'd go for long walks and then come back to the campsite and read, and then sit by the fire and go to bed early. Maybe bring a problem I was working on to think about.
Well, it doesn't go bad, doesn't need to be refrigerated, doesn't have any glass, and is pretty light, and I don't often drink hard liquor.
So no one knows what it's like in gigantic slums of giant cities? There aren't any memoirs written by people from there, or anything like that?
I was raised in a town of 4,000 people and you had to drive over an hour to get somewhere bigger. I find Pittsburgh a gigantic city, but it doesn't really have gigantic slums.
So, not me. I wouldn't last twenty minutes in that type of crowd.
I just read A Fine Balance which has some parts about a couple of guys that wind up living in a slum by a big city in India. Turns out it kind of sucks. That is, living in the slum sucks; the book I highly recommend .
So no one knows what it's like in gigantic slums of giant cities?
I understand it's fantastic quiz show training.
62: I did read that. I forgot that part of it was in the slums. I just remember the lead being poured in someone's ears, and the disfigurement of children, unless I'm confusing books.
I just remember the lead being poured in someone's ears
Stubborn wax?
52: Islands in the Pacific have been stripped bare of their vast bird-poop deposits so fortunes could be made in exporting it as fertilizer. Your housemate could be on to something with getting the birds to poop in your garden.
I didn't realize that "very light weight" and "absence of glass" were of paramount concern when car camping.
It depends on how much wine your hauling.
At this time of day I imagine the whole Unfoggetariat at one huge table eating dinner away from their computers.
I'd rather talk about solitary camping. What the hell do you do? Read? Fish? Just sit around the campfire by yourself, drinking?
Well, sometimes, through no fault of your own, you get lost trying to find your camp in the dark after abandoning a mandatory middle-of-the-night expedition on account of rain, and start looking for a tree to sleep under that has a lot of dry pine needles for bedding and insulation. Other times, you lie there eating soggy lentils and listening to rain rapping your Army-surplus tarp and wonder why you paid for the experience and whether whatever ripped up the deer carcass a few miles back is out looking for city slickers to eat. When the weather's decent, you wonder why you have nothing to read but your navigation notes.
On the abortion question, I think you have to start with the proposition that the police power is quite broad. A state can ban loans charging higher than a particular interest rate, covenants not to compete, all sorts of contractual arrangements. On abortion, we're dealing with a fundamental right, yes, but also with a state interest. This snippet from Gonzalez v. Carhart lays out what I think is the current balance:
Before viability, a State "may not prohibit any woman from making the ultimate decision to terminate her pregnancy." [Casey,]505 U. S., at 879 (plurality opinion). It also may not impose upon this right an undue burden, which exists if a regulation's "purpose or effect is to place a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion before the fetus attains viability." Id., at 878. On the other hand, "[r]egulations which do no more than create a structural mechanism by which the State, or the parent or guardian of a minor, may express profound respect for the life of the unborn are permitted, if they are not a substantial obstacle to the woman's exercise of the right to choose." Id., at 877..
That 'other hand' is pretty wavy, imo.
I didn't realize that "very light weight" and "absence of glass" were of paramount concern when car camping.
I'm really lazy. I don't like carrying heavy things like a cooler full of ice into the car. Also, glass is a bad idea at a campsite, even if your car is right there, isn't it?
70 -- Around here, you're hoping for a spruce, not a pine. Just something to keep in mind.
To the OP, because no one else sympathizes when I complain about this, I have a housemate who can't seem to be in the same room and not conversing. Worse, his topic of conversation is always either "what have you been up to" or "what are your plans for the night/weekend/whatever." I HATE this.
I love taking long drives by myself, and have only come to love it even more in the iPod era.
76.last: Yeah, satellite radio was key to enjoying the LA roadtrip. I'd have gone insane in the old days.
no one knows what it's like in gigantic slums of giant cities? There aren't any memoirs...?
Down and Out in Paris in London makes the slum experience sound pretty unappealing, but I don't recall any focus on lack of privacy.
1) To the OP, I did read something about something about Mumbai can't remember
2) Why can't I remember any literature about driven mad by urban crowds? Many of my Japanese movies involve overcrowded conditions, and there ain't much privacy in shoin-zukuri but everyone seems to handle it ok, or personalize the problems like has been done in the thread, or be distracted by issues of survival.
3) Why is there no picture of orichalch on the fucking web? What is the net good for?
4) Guy pulled over to the side of the road this afternoon, and asked to take a picture of my dogs to show his wife. I swear. I wonder what was really going on.
77, yeah, but local radio is kind of fun too. KILI in SD is totally worth it, and I had a nice time with KUNI when I drove across Iowa a couple times 20+ years ago.
Thanks for 71, CC. I didn't know.
if they are not a substantial obstacle to the woman's exercise of the right to choose.
I'm really surprised that this would be the current state of things, and that what counts as a substantial obstacle hasn't been further clarified by now.
These people who are trumpeting broad police powers usually express their support for the freedome to contract .... Just sayin.
The point of 49 is that the quoted language in 71 doesn't even seem to arguably support flatly prohibiting all insurance companies from including abortion coverage in their policies. (Sure, I could gin up arguments, but they seem exceedingly weak.) How does such a law not have the "purpose or effect ... to place a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion before the fetus attains viability"?
I'm also not sure there's a straight-faced argument that this "do[es] no more than create a structural mechanism by which the State, or the parent or guardian of a minor, may express profound respect for the life of the unborn", since--even more directly than something like requiring counseling or a waiting period or whatnot--this is basically just preventing poor people from obtaining abortions. But even if you were to get past that threshold, how is this not a "substantial obstacle to the woman's exercise of the right to choose"?
82 is some weird sockpuppeting, even for ToS.
83: Well, yes. Right. It's really surprising if this is the current state of legal affairs.
But, you know, it's a state by state thing right now, and I'm guessing that the states that've prohibited insurance coverage of abortion outright are working their way toward the Supreme Court. It's not outlandish to suppose that that's the very reason for these states' laws: to reopen the case before the Supremes.
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Bleg: light reading ebooks I can download tonight for a long trip tomorrow?
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I've actually never read it. I know some people love it, but I can't tell if they love it because they love boring shit, or if it's actually good in some way.
I really liked the Jennifer Egan books I read recently.
Never read it. I think the whale wins.
More seriously, here's one of the Jeeves books.
I mean, they can be ordinary kindle books.
I got a Kindle for Christmas because nobody has iPad-level love for me so I went to Amazon and downloaded a ton of free history books.
So, light reading books, that are similar to "A Visit From The Goon Squad". Any other hints?
Well, I have spent the last 48 hours inside the head of Clark Ashton Smith, biography and criticism, with a little George Sterling and Nora May French. All online.
Indeed, none could have dreamt that the great sorcerer was one with the beggar-boy Narthos, an orphan of questionable parentage, who had begged his daily bread in the streets and bazaars of Ummaos. Wretchedly had he lived, alone and despised; and a hatred of the cruel, opulent city grew in his heart like a smothered flame that feeds in secret, biding the time when it shall become a conflagration consuming all things.Bitterer always, through his boyhood and early youth, was the spleen and rancor of Narthos toward men. And one day the prince Zotulla, a boy but little older than he, riding a restive palfrey, came upon him in the square before the imperial palace; and Narthos implored an alms. But Zotulla, scorning his plea, rode arrogantly forward, spurring the palfrey; and Narthos was ridden down and trampled under its hooves. And afterward, nigh to death from the trampling, he lay senseless for many hours, while the people passed him by unheeding. And at last, regaining his senses, he dragged himself to his hovel; but he limped a little thereafter all his days, and the mark of one hoof remained like a brand on his body, fading never.
If it is to your taste.
Sometimes I don't even think you all bothered to read the story about the 1986 Bengals, let alone be seriously concerned about my reading list. You all will be sorry when I'm bored.
I don't know anything about ebooks. What are the odds that a given book, still in print, will be available as an ebook? 99%? 1%? Is it like Netflix streaming, when you look at the list of available things and think "My god, everything I could ever want is here!" and then try searching and the first ten movies you search for aren't there.
Yes, it is a lot like that. Although everything published in the last few years is on there.
It's there, but they want ten bucks for it and that just seems like too much.
If you have any tolerance for science fiction, google for Helen Wright's "A Matter of Oaths" which is nice light reading that she put up for free when it went out of print. Likewise Martha Wells' fantasy "The Element of Fire", try manybooks.
But the $10 can be ignored if you get the hang of impulse purchases. Just try a little harder.
It's probably time for me to try some sci-fi, instead of coasting on the assumption that I hate it, but that assumption has long, long roots. I suppose if I connected with the characters I could like it.
103: Ender's Game, definitely. If nothing else, I would be entertained by you blogging your reactions to it.
Oh gee. Couldn't you start her with like Ursula LeGuin or something? No, gotta go right into the weirdly pederastic neofascism? Okay. (N.B. I liked Ender's Game a lot but that is what it is.)
Like The Andromeda Strain. Scientists foolishly studying viruses that could escape and wipe out humanity? What kind of nonsense is that?
Tonight was my first visit to a drive-in beer distributor. It is very convenient when you have a kid in the car and can't run into the store without a whole process.
108: I'm envisioning a happy meal, consisting of an airport bottle of Cognac, with boys'/girls'-colored Jell-o shooters for dessert. And a toy.
No, poor people are prevented from getting abortions by prohibiting Medicaid funding.
If the Hyde Amendment is a mechanism for manifesting respect for fetal life, and isn't this just the lamest description of what states can do, maybe this is too. The excerpts from Maher v, Roe discussed in Harris v. McRae (both before Casey) are kind of chilling.
No liquor or food. Just beer. State alcohol laws are somehow really strict yet I can by a case without moving my ass from the driver's seat.
Hmmm...I think the need for privacy and the need for personal space are a little different. The first is probably a human universal, to some degree or another (e.g. AFAIK, expulsion of bodily waste is considered a private act everywhere). The second varies widely by culture. In particular, sleeping in one's own room seems to be a very recent development in Western culture (and seen as borderline pathological elsewhere.)
As an anecdote, I spent a summer in China with a fellow grad student friend of mine, and we ended up having to share a bed, because 1) it was what we could afford on our grant, and 2) it was big, and 2 girls in a kingsize bed was considered practically palatial (our rental agent shared the same size bed with 5 girls, all her coworkers.) Likewise, another summer I went to visit the same friend at her grandmother's house in Nanjing. Although the house had seven bedrooms, five of which were empty, we ended up sharing a small double bed, since that was the normal thing to do.
In terms of privacy though, a lot of literature on the cultural revolution in China today focusses on how absolute lack of privacy or personal space led to people practically clawing each other's eyes out (and may explain much of the antisocial behavior of the period. I imagine it's much easier to have your parents beaten to death if you have to share a room the size of a closet with them and your entire extended family.) A semi-fictional work that deals with this is "Daughter of the River" (Hungry Daughter (Ji'e de nü'er) in Chinese).
http://www.guttmacher.org/statecenter/spibs/spib_RICA.pdf
Looks like the RI version has been enjoined.
I'm enjoying the heck out of Carter Beats The Devil, which is breezier than Jennifer Egan, although it does remind me that Ragtime is even better.
And looking a little further, I see that the RI law was enjoined in 1984, which injunction was affirmed in 1986. WRT abortion, that's a long time ago.
To the OP, a book that resonated for me when I read it many years ago with regard to crowded living was Henry Roth's Call It Sleep.
Hmm, there seems to be a copy of The Third Policeman online. Grab it.
86: rtfa
OP: in college, a private dorm was a perk or luxury;
in prison, solitary confinent is extra punishment.
117: seconded. I have been to a slum in india where the couple's whole living space was one little room, and they shared a common toilet. it was our rickshaw driver's house. the horrible thing was, he was going home for lunch, which his wife had prepared by did not eat with him, and she fanned him with an actual fan while he ate. which might have been more bearable had she not been both pregnant and coughing up blood from tuberculosis. fuck sexism. she had a cloth draped across the front for a door, she could be alone-ish when he was gone, but the sheer mass of people living crushed around her would have weighed heavily on me. little dirt lanes, just full full full of people, touching you. "stand on zanzibar" is a great book to read, one in which overpopulation causes "muckers," people just snap and run amok,
No, poor people are prevented from getting abortions by prohibiting Medicaid funding.
I don't see how that state of affairs affects the legal argument, though, because it's not technically a prohibition; it's more an illustration of the problems of majestic-equality-of-the-law.
Whether it makes sense or not in practice, we've set up a conceptual barrier between the state banning people from obtaining abortions with their own money (not allowed) and the state allocating zero money to abortions (allowed). Banning abortion from any insurance coverage, regardless of state subsidy, is essentially banning people from pre-paying for their own abortions, and is therefore by pretty much any definition a "substantial obstacle."
I'm not even close to sidebar domination, I'm giving up. I have considered matters with extraordinary care and my current state of loopiness is exactly equivalent to my having had 5 shots of tequila and then 1 bong hit. not in the other order, I'd be more pukey. that's science-facttion, people.
Here's another vote against solitude:
... #
She blogged for NPR. She loved the blogging, but the quiet writing life didn't suit her. "That was the most depressed I've ever been," Brownstein says of her blogging days. "I really don't know what to do when my life is not chaotic. Sitting alone in my house with my dog, trying to think of smart things to write about music?"
84: I had no idea that I was sockpuppeting.
To the OP -- Samoa wasn't anthill-crowded, but it was socially a no-privacy culture. Traditional houses don't have walls, Western-style houses usually have floor-to-ceiling windows. Peace Corps Volunteers were antisocial freaks for hanging curtains ("Miss Breat? What are you doing in there?")
It really didn't seem to bother people much not having private space of their own -- I think the modern Western/American need for privacy/alone time is culturally contingent. Once you've developed the need for it, it's really hard to give up, but if you never get to expect it, it's not going to give you any trouble.
What Jimmy Pongo said about Ghana in 27 sounds dead right -- wanting to be alone was weird, but there was a lot more tolerance for being with other people and not putting on a public face. You could sulk or whatever in a room full of other people without it making you a jerk.
120 -- I think it is as well, But that doesn't mean that Justice Kennedy won't be carried away by the symbolism of it all. That survey I linked suggests that insurance coverage actually is available, but you have to pay extra and buy a rider. I'll bet you $5, Minivet, that Justice Kennedy finds that this saves the statute (although it's ridiculous to insist that people plan for unplanned pregnancies in this way).
That survey I linked suggests that insurance coverage actually is available, but you have to pay extra and buy a rider. I'll bet you $5, Minivet, that Justice Kennedy finds that this saves the statute (although it's ridiculous to insist that people plan for unplanned pregnancies in this way).
Yeah, that does sound like a saving fig leaf.
You could sulk or whatever in a room full of other people without it making you a jerk.
It's like my emo-teen-self's dream come true!
And my 50-something self's as well it turns out. Observation from latest holidays with relatives program-related activities is that I can fully participate (and even be the "spark") for an hour or two, but then need to repair to someplace quiet the Internet to get recharged.
123: the ellipses, the typos -- it's an easy leap. Hell, when I changed my pseud, LB wondered if it was an anti-semitic invention of ToS.
The idea of being anti-social in public, freely, is really interesting. I hadn't thought about how much our culture dictates that an anti-social person remove themself from public.
And speaking of light reading, when Claude Shannon was testing the "redundancy" of written English with his wife while developing his Mathematical Communication (Information) Theory he used Raymond Chandler's "Pickup on Noon Street".
Hmm, "repair to" and "retire to" are both becoming obsolete?
As the other thread is alarmingly on-topic, I'll ask here. Does it seem like a good idea to hire your immediate next-door neighbor to sell your house? I can see a whole bunch of potential problems, but I may be paranoid.
I wasn't even aware they were particularly friendly neighbors.
I'd say not a good idea. But ask them if they have your best interests at heart. If they say yes, go for it.
I'm not selling. I just noticed the sign across the street.
Then I definitely wouldn't hire them.
138: No, you totes should. They could put together a BOGO deal, and then maybe yours will be bought!