Imagine your office as a closed elevator accelerating through space.
I wonder if teaching colors your perception of this. I don't feel especially older wrt students as the years go by, but I think that's because I long ago mentally put them in a separate category.
Getting steadily older than your coworkers would feel different. Fortunately, I'm still younger than most of my colleagues in my department at this point.
The young people we have in our office tend to not stay long. I don't think I'm pissing them off, I think they just get enough experience and leave for a place that offers raises. Anyway, the people I work with are mostly the same as when I started ten years ago.
Outside the height of cliches, children don't change at all.
Anyhow I have tried to avoid these problems by doing largely age-inappropriate things at every stage.
Outside the height of cliches, children don't change at all.
I hate it when it's too dark to read.
Vection illusion.
Huh, this was not the word on the tip of my tongue whatsoever. What's the word for the sadness knowing no one will be able to help you find the word on the tip of your tongue because you can't remember enough about the word to help them help you?
I mostly feel like I'm a stationary object in a world getting older. In the past ten years, the most substantial change I've experienced because of aging is mild hair loss and the ability to run for president. My son has gone from not existing to being able to give semi-plausible reasons when asking for money. My parents have gone from old to elderly.
As near as I can tell from watching my dad and other people who have gone before me down similar paths, there's a long climb followed by a plateau followed by a slide followed by death. I got to the plateau somewhere within a few years either side of turning thirty and if I stay plausibly on that plateau until after 70, I win.
It's been long enough since graduate school for those friends to look noticeably older. Graying, skin not so youthful anymore but not exactly wrinkled, bald spots.
So hey: do skin care regimens work on a different level than just make up cover up? Or is it all hocus-pocus?
It's plausible to me that with tons and tons of money at stake, beautologists at the cosmetology institutes may have figured out actual science. It's also plausible to me that with tons and tons of money at stake, the snake oil business could be booming.
Maybe snake oil itself is good for your skin.
I think they're mostly mild acids that burn off the outer layer of skin producing a temporary visual improvement and long term damage.
This stuff was recommended by a blogger I like a lot. I didn't buy it but I like what it claims. The ingredients are things like witch hazel, retinol, green tea leaf extract, etc. Hocus-pocus I suppose.
I think moisturizing, with snake oil or anything else, makes some difference. After that, yeah, acid or lasers (which supposedly don't create long-term damage). I just assume everything else is a scam.
Living Proof supposedly is something that actually has an experimentally measurable effect on skin- came out of the Langer lab at MIT. They charge heavily for that fact, though.
I had the illusion thing happen to me last night. I had to park in a huge 3-4 inch deep puddle in a parking lot, turned off the car and opened the door to look down at the puddle and it was sloshing around under the cart and my first feeling was vertigo and thinking Oh shit the car is rolling away.
14. Possibly both? Topical Tretinoin has some effect.
I'm pretty sure it's possible to find effective compounds without dealing with a personalized sales experience though.
Someone insert Jack Nicholson quote here. (It is Jack, isn't it? Google is not confirming my initial belief.)
The one about high school girls staying the same age?
Yes, that one. I forget if it was high school or college.
Nope, not Jack. Matthew McConauhghdyfsdb
It wasn't a quote from either of those guys, it was a fictional character.
So, really Richard Linklater said it.
19: Award winning molecules! But apparently only for hair, not skin.
The best things you can do for your skin are stay out of the sun and have good genes. I've seen some discreet botox that my friend was happy with, but you have to be aware that there's a tipping point. And there are effective things for dark spots. But I think most everything that has a noticeable effect is expensive, painful, and chancy, which is why I decided, at least for the moment, to just look as old as I am.
I guess I should moderate to say that I think that almost all OTC stuff is b.s. Things like Retin A and prescription strength skin lightener work.
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Holy crap. I just heard that a 1000 sq. foot house down the street from me sold for $480K.
Stop moving here, people. There is nowhere for you to live!
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Scientists have totally shown that embryonic stem cell injectsion keep one youthful, but this knowlege is being suppressed by Big Baby.
The best things you can do for your skin are stay out of the sun after getting bitten by a vampire.
Holy crap. I just heard that a 1000 sq. foot house down the street from me sold for $480K.
What!
My old workplace, The Lemonade Society, was nice because there were lots of lifers you could age alongside. My new workplace has a few lifers and then a ton of people I am older than. Actually I guess it's just smaller and also I'm new there, In any case, it makes me feel like I aged suddenly. As do lots of other things. California Smearcase is kind of this feeble old guy who mostly wants to sit at home with the cat.
Speaking of snake oil, I think I'm going to go to a hypnotist if I can find one that is just smoke and mirrors and no actual woo. The top-rated local one on Yelp apparently includes "shamanic journeying" among her techniques. In the immortal words of Hedwig, "travel exhausts me."
I'm accumulating minor injuries at an alarming rate. Either I need to become much more careful or sedentary, or I need to start some injury prevention workout regimen.
29: If/when I lose my battle with rosacea, I am lasering that red right offa my face.
(And I am very happy with my exfoliating gel. It's winter. I get flaky.)
36: My cow-orker tried some of the online self hypnosis videos to try to manage his anxiety disorder. Made it about ten times worse, to the point he could not leave the house for three days. I'm trying to get him to go to a professional but he's a fix it yourself kind of guy.
Shamanic journeying sounds like a guided hallucinogenic trip. Go for it, Smearcase!
Counterpoint: who stays at one job long enough to notice this? Aren't we all hypermobile interchangeable cogs these days?
I've been at my current job for over 6 years and definitely want to find a new one. My wife, right around eight years, and she's looking too. I'm pretty sure this is the longest she's stayed at any one job, and in my case it's longer than I stayed at all previous "real" jobs combined. (I'm 32, so that's not THAT hard, but still.) I've probably seen more co-workers come or go from my position than are now in it.
39 sounds win/win. You can get mad SSI for agoraphobia I am thinking.
42: Don't do it, Smearcase! You'll hypnotize yourself into thinking you're a cat or Adelina Patti or something!
You'll hypnotize yourself into thinking you're a cat or Adelina Patti or something!
...
California Smearcase is kind of this feeble old guy who mostly wants to sit at home with the cat.
Maybe he already did?
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I am noticing my love handles and the sight feels new to me. My guess: I am slimming faster in the upper torso, so they actually are new, and before I had a smooth egglike curve.
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I just took a Lyft to my kids school then an Uber back (my first time trying each.) I'm so young and hip! Except that the class I was volunteering in was kids who were born after 9/11.
38: Yes! I need acids too to get the dry skin off.
I don't use retin-a that much because it dries my skin out, but it is good for anti-aging.
47: I hadn't heard of Lyft until you just mentioned it. How did the experience compare to uber? Some dude who drove for both put up a hagiographic profile of Lyft.
46: I have noticed on friends who lost a lot of weight, it takes some time for it to look good -- that the progression is from fatter person, to deflated-looking lumpy thinner person, to better-organized looking, smoother thinner person. Something like that might be happening to you.
38: Talk to me about lasers and rosacea? I don't actually know that the color of my face is rosacea, or some different type of redfacedness, but when I think vaguely about stuff I'd attend to if I were either vainer or more energetic, I think I should either be wearing foundation so as to look more flesh-colored, or doing something to make my face actually less red.
I suppose I could google for myself.
So basically you have to control the inflammation or you're just wasting your money on lasers, but basically when your skin gets inflamed and reacty from rosacea repeatedly you break blood vessels in your face and end up perma-pink. I . . . have no actual idea how the lasers work in this case, but it's (apparently) the only thing that makes the pinkness go away. (You can control the outbreaks via oral antibiotics and topical creams that are apparently also antibiotics. I had a lot of success with the initial oral antibiotic treatment.)
Last week was the third time I took a personal secretary/assistant out for a retirement lunch. This time the replacement will be younger than I am, so I may not have to go through it again.
Also, the lawyer who was visibly pregnant when I interviewed for this job is a grandmother. And one of the people who started when I did, right out of school, was recently laid off, and sued us based on age discrimination.
52: Huh. I'm certainly perma-pink, but I don't think it's broken bloodvessels -- I don't have the tiny little red lines. Maybe I will talk to the dermo the next time I go in to get stared at for cancer.
Last week was the third time I took a personal secretary/assistant out for a retirement lunch.
She the Cher of secretaries.
Also, the lawyer who was visibly pregnant when I interviewed for this job is a grandmother.
I just translate this mentally into decades of diapers.
49- pretty comparable in service and price. I was only going less than 2 miles. But Lyft has fewer cars available and they ask you to add a tip, uber includes a default tip rate you can set. And Lyft doesn't let you pay the tip from your free ride credit so Lyft actually cost me a couple bucks (still less than the alternative of the T) while Uber was actually free.
Checking my credit card holds, uber might have charged me the tip silently without putting it on the receipt, which said "card charged: $0". If so fuck them. I'm fine tipping but don't lie about what you charged me.
well.. that's how it works.. we get older but also.. smarter! What i realise is that, however, these differences are smaller tha in the past, now technology allows younger and older to develop their minds similar :) if you know what I mean..
58: In my utopia a ride in a car would never be cheaper than public transit. The car might be more comfortable or convenient, but people should be incentivized economically to take the T. Of course, the MBTA is not exactly reliable these days.
*Speaking of transit woes, did anybody see the TV piece about the woman whose car was vandalized when she left her car in a cleared spot overnight. She called her boss to let her know that she would be late because her car was damaged and was fired.
Fired because she took somebody's parking spot or because she was going to be late?
I assume that it was because she was going to be late. At least that's what they said on TV. I don't know how reliable the TV account was.
She claimed that she didn't know it had been saved. I think that she thought that the hold time had expired.
Maybe her boss was the one who put the space saver in that spot.
I have no idea what you all are talking about with saved spaces and expired time. How is anyone supposed to keep track of that?
The same way the participants in a Balinese cock fight keep track of all the layers of meaning.
65: you mean, how is anybody supposed to keep track of the arbitrary, extra-legal system by which residents are able to expropriate public property for indefinite amounts of time by means of an ambiguous, unstandardized signal that indicates that they have done some unferifiable level of work to claim that property, and given at least implicit carte blanche to retaliate with property violence if that arbitrary expropriation is not honored by other people who may have no idea that they're violating a norm? It's pretty straightforward, really.
It's easy, you keep track of it with passive aggressive notes left where you vaguely but don't explicitly threaten violence for violation of those unwritten and only partially understood norms, paired with appeals to the broader media about what assholes these unnamed vandals are whenever an incident occurs. Really, is there any other way you could imagine running a society of people living in close quarters with limited public resources at times of high stress?
What's being put in the space to save it? A sawhorse?
Driving is definitely cheaper than transit here.
Just google images for "Boston space saver"- anything from chairs to traffic cones to ironing boards to Granny's walker. Some people do get quite creative, for example.
69: something that you don't want, because somebody might take it, and also so it looks like trash, just to make it super extra clear that it's not trash and should not be moved or taken away under any circumstances.
There was that guy who put the snow back on the truck with the New York plates. He thought that slashing the tires would be a step too far.
The second picture on this page shows how it's done in my area. It's not as fraught in my area as in some others as lots of people have some off street parking.
12: Yeah, seventy is the start of the big slide. What's good about it is, if someone tells you "Seventy is the new fifty", you can kill the stupid fucker in some horribly slow and creative way and laugh when they give you a life sentence or the needle.
A few years back after a particularly large snow I was amused to walk by some 'parking vacuum cleaners'. This person reserved their parking spot with two vacuums with an extension cord connecting them. That was a new one. But the one in 72 is pretty funny.
Whatever my feelings about the parking... debates, the front yard snow bars, cozy fire pits and snow tunnels are pretty sweet. It's not all bad!
Go through Southie some weekday in mid to late April. No snow but still there are space savers. Feh.
(And I am very happy with my exfoliating gel. It's winter. I get flaky.)
Is that the stuff you posted at the other place? Would you mind re-linking? I meant to make a mental note of it and forgot, and I'm too lazy to search myself. (I am having this incredibly annoying flakiness on my t-zone/eyebrows and at my hair line, and nowhere else. NOWHERE ELSE. I've tried heavier moisturiser there, tried an exfoliating wash, have decided I obviously need something better. Or that it's possibly actually related to the hair follicles.)
The sanctions involved can get pretty severe when winter gets bad enough. Note that the comments seem to be generally approving.
uber includes a default tip rate you can set
I believe that the Uber app generally does not contemplate tips or leave room for them even optionally. There's a place in the preferences where you can set a tip rate, but that's only for when you use their app to hail participating cabs. I emailed them, confused, about this a while back, and they said "Being Uber means there's no need to tip--we set the fares to ensure that tip is not required, nor expected."
For exfoliating I use the cheapo cream in the unglamorous packaging from the Kaiser pharmacy (and the moisturizer from there too), but I pay the bucks for the French drugstore brand sunscreen and OTC antiwrinkle cream. Genes, daily sunscreen for several decades beginning in your teens, and a hat with a brim as often as possible will together accomplish a lot, but require time travel for many so impractical.
There's a credit card hold for exactly 20% of the total amount of my uberX ride. Maybe it will go away.
The asshole parking behavior I hate most is thinking the because parking was once allowed in a certain place that therefore it's still fine to park there even if you're 9 feet from the curb due to the snow bank. Blocking the road? Who cares, the sign says parking here!
Over the weekend they trucked away some snow and someone who had parked against it was suddenly parked in the middle of the street. They came and towed his ass away but I was amused that they cleared the snow then towed instead of the reverse.
80: It is this stuff. I react badly to most other exfoliators, but not this. Dunno!
Speaking of asshole parking behavior, how bad is this, and what responses are permissible?
We live on a short, narrow, hilly street that ends in a cul-de-sac. The street is barely wide enough for two cars to pass each other if they're driving slowly and carefully, as long as no cars are parked on the street. The city has properly painted all the curbs red and put up no-parking signs. There are a few private driveways and garages on the street. There is street parking on the surrounding roads, but it can be hard to find a space.
Neighbor A parks their sizeable car so one side of it is on the curb cut leading to their garage (which is very close to the street), as if the car is parallel parked. So the car blocks the sidewalk and sticks out into the street by about half its width. Across the street from where this car is parked is a private driveway that cars have to back out of, and it's very hard to back out of or pull into those spaces when the street is effectively narrowed by this half-on-half-off parallel parking. Neighbor A's car is in this spot most of the time; I guess they have another car in their garage that they rarely take out.
Neighbor B parks another sizeable car also in parallel to the road, but in a spot where only its wheels are on the (low) curb -- so at least 3/4 of its width sticks out into the street. Similar problems with a different private driveway across the street, and bigger problems for just driving on the street. Neighbor B parks there fairly infrequently, maybe once a week.
Although the cars block the sidewalk, the street is pretty calm and pedestrians usually just walk in the middle of the road, so that's not such a big deal.
I doubt parking enforcement people would come up the street on their own, but they might come if called.
Also, we became friends with Neighbor A recently, but not super close friends.
40
Someone told me they decided to learn Chinese while on an LSD trip, but I assumed they meant LDS trip. Turns out they actually meant LSD trip. I was glad they were a former hippie and not a Mormon.
At age 20 I started moisturizing every time after washing my face, and I think it's helped in the long term. I just use cheapo drugstore moisturizer. I'm noticing I have fewer ingrained fine wrinkle lines than many of my peers. I also bought an OTC retinol cream last year that I put on my eyes and forehead when I remember. I feel like it's helped a little in reducing wrinkles, but I'm not sure if it's just a placebo effect. It's possible the effect I'm attributing to moisturizer is also the cumulative effect of not wearing daily makeup and not washing my face with harsh makeup removers. I have permanent sun damage in the form of subcutaneous bumps that google tells me can only be temporarily removed by a dermatological treatment.
87: I have no useful advice, but I see the same thing around here. Apparently in parking two wrongs (parking in a no parking zone and parking on the sidewalk) make a right.
OT: Is it possible to join Pandora by accident? I got an email saying I signed up and I don't remember joining anything. And I have not been drunk in at least two weeks (because cold and busy).
Never mind. From the URL that clicking on the email launches, it's clearly spoofing.
Thanks to Apo, I pretty much always hover until I see the URL before clicking.
Apo is the vaccine to our antibodies.
I was on a Greyhound bus once where that illusion of backwards motion was so convincing that a bunch of people freaked out and got off the bus. It was really something. Then I found 5 cigarette butts in the toilet in the back.
I pretty much always hover until I see the URL
That gets pee on the seat, no matter how good a shot you are.