Well, I guess I will go first again.
Alive and ok.
According to our new arrival, life is more than mere survival.
Well, other than feeling like the United States is sliding into full, open fascism and mass death and there is effectively no future:
1. I have discovered how noisy my cat is. Most of my time with her in the past has been in my room, where I run a very whirry fan all the time to block out noise. It turns out that she snores a lot, rather loudly, because she likes to sleep with her head upside-down or buried in a pillow. Also grooming is sort of a plap-plap-plap sound.
2. I have inexplicably lost weight. I mean, it's explicable in the sense that I'm eating less even though my exercise is limited to Walk At Home! youtube with famous walking person Leslie Sansone, I guess. (It's easy on my back, pretty vigorous and for some reason her "walk, walk, power WALK!!!" routine takes my mind off my troubles at least briefly, except when it's filmed in a fitness studio with windows and looking at the outside makes me want to cry.) But anyway, the reason I know I'm not doing too well is that I don't even want to stress-eat. Small, wholesome meals with lots of legumes are about it.
3. I have read fifty new-to-me books this calendar year because the only thing I can handle when not working is reading at exactly the right level of not-challenging. My father and I have a book club so we read a little serious fiction in January and February, but then he very kindly switched to lighter stuff because my brain is pudding - we just finished The Woman In White. Otherwise, the classiest books I've read are Nancy Mitford's four later novels and Dodie Smith's books. My brother and I are reading, apparently, All The Terry Pratchett - the only thing is they seem to rely far to much on hand-wavy personal goodness or the background scheming of the lawful neutral city ruler to save the day, so that depresses me a little.
The house is an utter shambles although I did clean the stovetop yesterday.
Also I have discovered a tremendous appetite for slide shows of Princess Diana's best outfits, slideshows of when Kate Middleton dressed like Princess Diana, slideshows of the Queen's best tiaras, etc. I can now tell Princess Anne from Princess Margaret and I know that Wessex wasn't just made up by Thomas Hardy.
I think Sussex was made up by Megan.
New cases have been flat for about a week and new hospitalizations are declining. Which is good, but it still feels early to be reopening.
At least we're doing it in phases. Outdoor activities OK, but no crowds. Most retail allowed to open but must require social distancing/masks. Theaters, gyms, and bars closed and restaurants take out only for the foreseeable future. Also, the individual municipalities get to decide whether they are ready to start reopening or not, Baltimore city decided not, even though we don't have very many cases (about 0.4% of the population based on the latest numbers).
Today I am really grateful for how easy it is to goof off online during zoom meetings, if hypothetically they were scheduled to run from 9:30 am-5:30 pm as part of a retreat that taps one's new admin responsibilities.
One thing that jumps out at me about zoom meetings is how you can't catch someone's eye and make 1-1 eye contact in response to something that boggles. You can of course send a personal chat, but that requires a notch more effort.
One screen here and one on a web meeting, listening in case I heard my name, was how I spent many an hour back in the day.
5: Meghan, not our Megan. Or was that on purpose?
9: Just like a dog listening in on human conversations.
Why did the blog go catatonic the other day?
Still fine here. This wasn't a great week for accomplishing work, so I'll need to focus a bit harder today (he says already sneaking off to Unfogged at 8:30 am). My wife's been better, but she's dramatically overstaffed (due to PPP forgiveness requirements) for the trickle of curbside orders coming in. She and the staff are doing the tedious work of creating online entries for the various things we sell; that involves running down or taking pictures of everything, then uploading images and associating them, which is tedious. Most of the manufacturers had strict limits about who was allowed to sell online (and the better ones have a limit on allowable discounts, etc.), but since even the most in-person retailers been forced to curbside and delivery, they've mostly abandoned those positions.
10: I didn't know there were other ways to spell it.
On Zoom, people can tell you're a dog.
1,153 new cases reported here today. I'd really like to see this dip below 1,000 again.
First week anywhere has been open to fish in. I goofed off a zoom meeting this morning, and spent three hours getting mildly sunstruck. Caught two nice trout on a dry fly from a put and take water where, of course, there has been nothing taken for two months, so the fish were in good condition and not at all stressed. The only drawback was some bloke plunking himself 15 metres away and talking. TALKING!
I hadn't heard "put and take" before. I'm assuming it's the same as "catch and release," but it seems backwards.
Fortunately, smotherings are unlikely to attract particular attention right now.
Four new cases -- first time we've had that many since April 20. All in a single county -- Big Horn, which is mostly the Crow Nation. I wouldn't be surprised if this is a single family group, but they don't make the data public at that level. 19 active cases altogether in the state, with 3 active hospitalizations.
I don't usually track Crow Nation news -- it's a long way away -- but I would imagine that this may not be the year to visit the Little Bighorn Battlefield. Although, if you want to feel as unwelcome as Custer, maybe this is the year.
19 I saw a sticker on the back of a pickup-with-topper yesterday that had a logo with a trout and said Kiss and Release.
I don't have the hair to pull off what he did.
I don't get fishing, except as something to keep your hands busy while drinking beer or a way to get food.
Last night I got the city's Road Infrastructure Capital Reserve Fund renamed to the Road and Sidewalk Infrastructure Capital Reserve Fund. I don't think anyone not on that zoom call noticed, but it happened.
Did anybody here get shaken by the earthquake in Nevada?
That actually seems meaningful to me, in a foot in the door kind of way.
Heebie, you almost certainly know this, but... you do know that your personal chats on Zoom are appended to the chat transcript that is sent to the host? They aren't private afterward.
Yep. Woke me up at 4:09. It was little here, so I didn't much worry until it occurred to me that it must have been really big somewhere else. Got up to check the epicenter.
26, 27, 29: I agree that it is meaningful. Good work.
30: I haven't initiated or participated in any snarky chats, thank goodness. I know the kids do. But I hadn't thought directly about that point either way, so you may have saved me some future grief.
Are any of you sending kids to summer camp in a few weeks? We have to decide by Tues at 5 for camp starting June 8. I am personally dying to have more bandwidth, but that is not a sufficient reason... the camp has modified its plans, staffing, etc but it's still clearly a step up in riskiness from anything we have done so far.
We're still on the fence, but our kid is older and eager to ignore us.
Anyway, it's hardly an original thought, but it bears repeating. White people are, as a whole, broken.
Yesterday I learned that my onetime dissertation advisor was in the ICU with COVID-19. This morning I learned that he's passed away. He was one of the great Joyceans of the old school--the weekly group he led was where I learned to read Finnegans Wake over the course of a few years--and the least pretentious faculty member I ever met anywhere. He threw these amazing dinner parties where he'd invite graduate students and partners over to eat multi-course dinners on the couch while he blasted Led Zeppelin or Outkast or whatever bit of pop culture had most recently caught his attention. Afterward he might go over to the piano and bang out some of the noisy Bartók piece he'd been learning. He had an evocative smattering of dozens of languages, was wholly indifferent to English department power politics, was an advocate and guide to his students but never sought to divert the course of their research after his personal bent. He was a true pluralist. It's a worse world without him.
Still doing fine here. Finished sanding the deck yesterday so today we'll wash it then do the staining on Sunday. Tomorrow is the state Democratic convention, which is of course virtual this time, so hopefully it'll be shorter and more focused than usual. But, you know, Democrats.
I'm sorry to hear of that. My condolences.
37: Really sorry to hear that. He sounds great.
34: we also haven't decided yet...I don't our standard city camp is opening.
I did see a bunch of toddlers at the daycare down the street today, though.
36 was supposed to be in the doom thread.
We are moving forward with Ace's tonsils/adenoids/turbinates surgery on June 4th. My thinking is that right now we're at the lowest daily case count that we'll see for a long time, so we should get in and out while we can.
We haven't yet had to make a call about summer camp because the camp hasn't yet decided what to do, though "mid-May" was what they last suggested would be their decision point. My wife is concerned that she may have to start going back into the office soon, though it's unclear, and there's a real risk that she'll quit (and give up her pension) if they force the issue. I'm WFH for probably the remainder of the calendar year, and it's already five degrees hotter inside the office than outside on a sunny day, so the air conditioner is going to have to be stuck out of a third-floor window sooner rather than later.
Skate parks and tennis courts are opening here. Maybe I should learn one or the other.
What with all the hockey mask wearing machete wielding killers, Summer camp was always sort of a risky proposition anyway.
47: Hey, at least they're wearing masks.
I endure.
I got paranoid that I was going to get addicted to the massive amount of opioids they gave me, so I stopped taking them. The pain isn't too bad, but I'm bearing the COVID crisis with even less grace than before. I still don't really like to eat, though.
I'm temporarily enjoying having opportunities available on zoom that I usually can't do because travel with a small child is complicated and expensive enough to limit my conference participation. So listening to scholars talk about recent research on the Black Death is both horrifying and somehow heartening. Even if it does involve explaining to a six year old the differences between plague and coronavirus, as home/work boundaries are now completely permeable if not nonexistent.
My wife cut my hair yesterday and I shaved and trimmed the beard, so my Grizzly Adams vibe has retreated a bit.
"Put and Take" is the opposite of Catch and Release -- it's a phenomenon of small, overcrowded countries: managed fisheries for stocked trout where, often, you are not allowed to release fish so that there are none on the lake with the smarts and experience to evade gormless fishermen. This is not actually true of the ones I go to. But the economic model is based on people catching fish most visits, which is easiest with trout that have not been caught before. If the lakes are big and old enough it still feels a bit like nature. But I remember how last summer we drank from the waters we fished in. If I did that here, I'd probably have barley sprouting from my ears from all the fertiliser before I had driven home.
Moby, child, you do not speak of fly fishing.
That actually seems meaningful to me, in a foot in the door kind of way.
Could be. At the very least, it was an opportunity to watch the Public Works Director get defensive about road budgets and for the City Manager to publicly state that some sort of planning for sidewalk improvements may happen at some point in the foreseeable future.
But I remember how last summer we drank from the waters we fished in.
Was that in Sweden?
53: Contrasting road spending with sidewalk and bike infrastructure is a great "my family is dying" moment. And could help if there are lane widening plans that need killed.
54: yes; our wonderful walk through the mountains to Narvik. I had so much planned for this summer, including a travel book based around walking across from the Baltic to the Atlantic. I thought that would be wrong because it would mean leaving my mother alone for so long. And now I get not to see her, and not to walk in the mountains either.
Poor Poor pitiful me.
56.2 Well, many do have it much worse, but we can still acknowledge that this does suck.
One of the problems we've had was that road spending gets bonded and pedestrian spending comes out of the current account. I think that getting them funded from the same source would make a difference. As it is, we issue bonds for roads while bike path improvements are paid for with funds raised by non-profits and whatever matching grants can be found.
Our family is ok. Just mentioned in the doom thread, my mother's assisted living place has topped out at 14 cases, 7 fatalities out of 115 residents, with no new cases in two weeks. Maybe the rest have herd immunity now. She reports that after total lockdown for two months, they are now allowed to sit outside at six foot distances for an hour a day (scheduled by the staff so it's not too many at once), but that deafness and social distancing are not a good combination.
Professionally, we have filed a few cases against banks for discrimination in the PPP program, and we're about to bring a business interruption insurance case. Also, the people at our main office in Knoxville, Tennessee are going back to the office on Monday, but that does not affect me.
Surly Teen is spending an inordinate amount on Zoom with her friends practicing putting on make up. I keep thinking of the Seinfeld episode where Seinfeld's comedian friend converts to Judaism, and Seinfeld accuses him of converting just so he could add Jewish jokes to his act.
I literally just found out fifteen minutes before that a makeup exam for the test I took yesterday is being offered because of a Blackboard outage. I didn't do that well so I'm going to take it, but it's sort of ridiculous to be scheduling tests with less than nine hours notice. I wish I had spent today doing extra studying. Grrr. And they won't show us answer keys and give us a readout of our answers. I wrote the profs with screenshots of a number of questions I found fishy and our grades did get revised upward today so I presume some of the questions were fishy. I want to see their right answers and actually check them. Ugh. Off to take this test.
Huh. Allstate just deposited $27 into our account as a shelter-in-place payback. I can't imagine why - they're not a profit sharing coop, and they don't know whether or not I drove into work everyday anyway (like some of my colleagues).
61: Many auto insurance companies in Ontario (but not mine, alas!) are offering COVID-19 rebates and discounts. These companies are making a mint during lockdown, as accidents claims are way down.
JFC Got up spontaneously at around 2:30 to be out of my place for my walk at 4 am.
My programming retreat is having a party right now and I went and did karaoke in one of the zoom rooms. Especially once I had a couple warmup songs I was sounding good. I just did River and it went well. It was good gentle intro to actually singing the songs I have rehearsed in front of people.
I can't decide whether I should keep going to the other rooms at the party or I should just decide I'm zoomed out. There's an interactive fiction games room but it appears to be empty right now. I could play board games or do chat roulette but I played Zoom board games with a probably overlapping subset of the same folks earlier this week. Online parties are very low commitment. I don't know whether that's a good or a bad thing. It's hard to have serendipitous private interaction, although I guess that's what chat roulette is supposed to be about.
Heading out, compensating for yesterday's Soft Boys t-shirt with a Modern Lovers t-shirt today.
Bro, stop before you get to Joy Division. (I am not successfully continuing this series in any direction, in fact. Stop before you get to the Buzzcocks, the Slits, etc.)
37 sucks so much. So much.
Driving home from sabbatical this upcoming week. This was supposed to be a fun trip up the pacific coast and then across I-94 picking up my 50th state (ND), but instead will be a grim direct shot across I-80 with no fun stops (except maybe takeout in the car at Modern Love Omaha?). I'm not at all mentally prepared for midwestern summer heat.
I don't even know what Modern Love Omaha is.
Isa Chandra Moskowitz's restaurant. She has great vegan cookbooks, e.g. The Veganomicon. There's also a Brooklyn location.
Like with the Reuben, they're always stealing Nebraska's food.
Man, I am not loving the recent trend I've spotted of camo-patterned fabric masks. Way too 2020 for my taste.
That was lovely. Three hours in total. First we met at the 'cultural village' north of the city at 4 am but it was closed to the public which is stupid. There's a very large parking lot on the beach there so we walked along it and watched the sunrise. Walked a bit more then went to this artificial island development where a lot of expats live just to see if we could park and walk around. It's a nice place to walk with great restaurants though I wouldn't want to live there. We parked and walked a little bit. Then north of there is a marina and new city development. There's a boardwalk that's got to be at least a mile long if not much longer and we walked that. Finished at 7. Temperature was already in the high 80s and early on the humidity was about 85%. My glasses kept fogging up. We'll go to the marina and boardwalk again next week. It was pretty empty, very beautifully landscaped, you could see lots of fish in the Gulf waters and just lovely.
Alive and more or less ok. I have no idea what happened to me; I lost 20 pounds without breaking a fever. Doing better though.
Did you have the COVID-19, fm? I'm glad you're feeling better
37: what a loss. he sounds wonderful.
1,547 new cases here today. We're over 30,000.
||
Unconfirmed NMM to Fred Willard which would be a national tragedy. So far only Jamie Lee Curtis is reporting it but her husband Christopher Guest has directed him in a bunch of movies so she might well be one to know. Fuck.
|>
Cold comfort that apparently the cause was not coronavirus.
Like, ice cold. But, somehow, still something.
So tell me, what exactly is an "emotional affair"? Do they usually result in the parties moving on to have real affairs? Has there been discussion of such sinners here before? I have no experience with the temptation myself, but, in speaking with a Carmelite friar of my close acquaintance years ago, the subject came up and, ridiculing it, he posed me a rhetorical question: "What does that even mean? Am I having an emotional affair with you?" Only God saw me flinch; the answer was obvious (mais non!), and it remains obvious, and I am still thinking of the question five years later because its answer was obvious.
Please forgive my posting this question to this thread instead of the other one, which of course I cannot read through the abbey firewall.
Contrapositive, is anything that is not emotional still an affair, or does that leave it as just illicit sex?
I took it to refer to a constellation of confidences, confidence, infatuation/limerence/fondness, mental or emotional prominence, and general, you know, investment (does one still say cathexis?) etc., for/in another person, such that one's partner might understandably feel betrayed, or aggrieved that that person, and not the partner themselves, is playing that role in one's mental life, or that one oneself might feel as if one is conducting what one might think ought to be an important part of one's life with one's partner with someone else.
I have also understood it to be something that could be and perhaps often is entirely one-sided, and which needn't have a notable sexual inflection.
The relationship/AITA/etc. subreddits are obsessed with "emotional affairs." People talking about "emotional affairs" always strikes me as halfway to Billy Graham rule nonsense. It's a problem when people aren't emotionally intimate with their own partners, but if you have a good close relationship with your partner where you can be emotionally intimate, then I really don't see what the problem is with having an emotionally intimate relationship with people beyond your partner too. It's unhealthy to put all your friendship needs solely on your romantic partner.
87: An "Emotional affair" isn't a sexual affair that involves emotions too, it means nothing sexual is happening. I.e. an affair that only involves the emotional components.
It's a problem when people aren't emotionally intimate with their own partners, but if you have a good close relationship with your partner where you can be emotionally intimate, then I really don't see what the problem is with having an emotionally intimate relationship with people beyond your partner too. It's unhealthy to put all your friendship needs solely on your romantic partner.
I think this is sort of missing the point - the betrayal is in the replacement of the primary partner as the source of pitter-patter and central focus in the heart. Having that dreamy early relationship-style monopoly of attention with someone who is not your primary partner.
It's very different than having an intimate friendship with someone.
Still fine physically but jokes about my sanity being at risk are starting to seem less funny. I'm considering something drastic like going to live with my parents in Vermont. I'm definitely going to start taking PTO and instead devote a little more time to the kid, but if things remain shut down as long as Cassandane thinks they will, that'll just be a drop in the bucket.
Hrm... I don't really know anything about this, but it seems to me like there are two rather different types of affairs. One where the relationship is struggling in some important way and the affair is a way of trying out leaving the relationship (or replacing the non-parenting aspects of the relationship until the kids grow up), and ones where the primary relationship is in good shape but the person wants to fuck someone else anyway and thinks they can get away with it. (Though maybe this is more of a continuum than a dichotomy.) It seems to me like emotional affairs are only exist as an analogue of the former sort of sexual affair, but that there's really no such thing as an emotional affair analogue of the second sort.
Emotional polyamory is probably a thing, but I find the concept baffling.
I'm back in the hospital. I learned that if you want the really good stuff, then when they ask you to rate your pain on a scale of 1 to 10, you need to say a number between 10 and infinity.
Yes, best wishes.
If I remember right, what's going is not Covid, but sounds bad anyway.
oh no ws, so sorry. when they asked me that after i broke my wrist i said "really fucking bad" & they produced the powerful stuff. plus a heavenly injection right into the fracture god that was ace.
Oh no, Walt. Hope you're feeling better very soon.
Same rule applies for "how spicy do you want your Indian food?"
When I broke my wrist, I ranked pain as 4, where 10 was "the worst pain you can imagine." I guess my imagination was too vivid. The intake nurse looked at me funny and said most people with the same displaced fracture were screaming, sobbing or both and did I want to rethink my number? Needless to say, I did not get the good drugs.
Walt, I hope you're repaired and fully functional soon.
My academic discipline is having a huge internet meltdown about accusations of racism, and I am so happy not to be seeing any of these people in person for at least another year and a half. The hullabaloo is about a subfield that's adjacent to my own, and I at least vaguely know most of the participants, so it's just awkward af.
In case anyone is feeling bored and highly masochistic: https://cric.ku.dk/Publications/RacismReply/
Ugh, Walt, sorry to hear it!
I am annoyed because on the way to the nature center tonight (two consecutive days of hiking! Except not; stay tuned) my car's tire pressure light came on immediately and we stopped so I could see what was up, at which point it became clear that someone had hit my parked car and messed up the back panel and pulled it away from where it snaps into the body of the car, which whatever, and presumably done some damage to the wheel thus triggered the alert. I've dropped it with the mechanic, filed an insurance claim, borrowed my mom's car, let the mechanic (who's their across-the-street neighbor and has always been good at social distancing by drinking beer on the porch while neighbors call to him from the street) know what the deal was, and now I'm home and the girls and Odile have had a third dinner and I have gin and am ready to collapse. We were able to get tickets for the nature center tomorrow morning instead, so we should still get our hike. But I'm extra annoyed because my regular primary job takes 2-3 months to pay me when it's supposed to happen in 30 days and unemployment pay still isn't showing up and I haven't even gotten that stupid stimulus money for reasons the website can't explain. Actually I just checked to make sure my bitching is accurate and they now claim I'll get it May 20, so that's something. But grr, it shouldn't be so hard to get people to pay me the money they agree they owe me so I can stimulate the economy by, like, doing the bare minimum to fix a car that got hit while parked. Sheesh.
105: I read 10 paragraphs and 6 bullet points without gleaning the slightest understanding of what securitization theory is. And 4000 words is the short version? Yikes.
State convention went reasonably well as these things go. It was definitely more pleasant to be able to Zoom into it from the deck (still not stained, but the sanding is done and we're probably going to wash it tomorrow). Anyway, Amadea was elected as a delegate to the national convention.
Did I take everyone's advice to get well soon? I did not -- instead I looked at J, Robot's link. I really am a masochist.
I have an inflamed pancreas, which is incredibly painful, but seemingly not life-threatening.
The pain scale is very mysterious to me. They must know that my 4 and your 4 and everyone's 4 is different, but when I say "7", the nurses always nod their head like I've communicated something meaningful.
107: I got my stimulus check a couple days ago. Tim and I file separately, and he makes more so will not get the full amount, and he has not gotten his.
I have the same issues with the numeric pain scale as others have said. 10? That's like an A+ so it must be as bad as I can imagine. I can imagine a lot. Likewise 8 and 9 are close to 10 so highly unlikely. But give me tge chart with the pictures (not the Hyperbole and a Half one) and it's much easier. I was crying from the pain of biliary colic. The crying picture is a 10. OK, my pain is 10.
Walt I'm so sorry to hear it's pancreatic. From all reports that's incredibly painful.
111: when I had my septoplasty, in post-op, I said my pain was around a 4, about 20 minutes later because the pain was increasing some, I said I wanted to revise that to a 5 or maybe a 6, and the nurse said simply, "do you want medicine for the pain, and I said, "Yes, yes I do,". They would have been prepared to give me benzo if it was more anxiety type pain - at least that's what the anesthesiologist told me before the procedure.
My kids never use the lower half of the scale. If something hurts it must be the worst thing ever so we often get 10s and if it's not really that bad it's a 7.
The boy who cried benzos.
Better than Bezos. Amazon's construction work in my neighborhood must have a permit for starting no earlier than 0900 on Sundays. On the minute almost, a convoy of dump trucks started rolling down Crystal Drive. They're still coming through.
And there's an Air Force KC135 that's been doing race tracks overhead. Mostly not noticeable but occasionally loud even 4 miles up. Grump grump.
Yesterday, I was lazily strumming the guitar and this melody came to me but for some reason the only lyrics popping into my head were about Forrest Gump. So today I'm trying to finish a mediocre song about Forrest Gump.
1,632 new cases reported here today wheeeeee!!!
I think a lot of this is also being driven by people going to visit their extended families for Iftar. Will probably get worse over Eid.
They've made not wearing a mask in public (unless driving alone) punishable by a fine of up to $55,000 or up to 3 years in jail.
120: that's crazy high. My town sent out an e-mail about not accosting people who aren't wearing them. I guess there have been some fights. Tim said that someone with a medical condition which precluded them from wearing a mask was refused entry into a grocery store. I feel like that's a problem that could be solved with a medical bracelet or ID card. People can bring guide dogs into grocery stores but not regular pets.
A course is a course is a course of course and no one can alter a course of course, except the famous fest of Eid.
I should have put "shift" instead of "alter." The extra syllable is messing it up.
See, I feel a 10 on the pain scale is obvious to everyone around you: you're sweating, shaking violently, whimpering or wailing, turning whitish-green, on the verge of passing out... there is a point at which the rest of your body visibly responds to the trauma. At the worst point in childbirth, I'm not sure i could count to 10. Or to 1.
However! Here is an excellent palliative for the pain that comes from reading bad translations of Rumi. I admit that I own one Coleman Barks Rumi book, and obviously I'm not proud of it, but I did kinda like one of the poems for what it was. I bet I'd like a more faithful translation a lot more, though.
124: no no, "alter" scans like "talk to," but you missed the "of course" after "except". Right?
I did. Alan Young will now haunt me.
125.2 Yeah that's great, I still have the first two dozen or so lines of the Masnavi memorized from when I studied it in Persian. And don't miss this ribald bit. R.A. Nicholson, a great Rumi scholar, rendered it into Latin in his English translation of the Masnavi. (Good translation though the English is dated).
127 Jesus, the comments on that are great, including the devout Muslim who criticizes the poet (i.e. Rumi) for his choice of subject matter and says, "not feeling your poem, sorry bro".
Walt, here's the theory from the horse's mouth: https://youtu.be/wQ07tWOzE_c
J, what's your subfield, if I can ask?
127: the servant showing up at the end to deliver the moral is pretty golden. Tsk, tsk. People seem to recommend the Oxford Masnavi here (Amazon link for reference) but rhyming couplets in English are so risky. You really need a particular meter to back them up, and that's usually not a priority with translations.
Lastly, Cyrus @ 94, I'm worried about you... take care and vent as much as you like. This is an awful situation and taking PTO is very, very reasonable. Taking a cocktail of performance-enhancing psychopharmaceuticals is also very, very reasonable even if they temporarily erase the more appealing parts of your personality, AMA.
The authors of that reply seem awful. That said, it's really hard for me to imagine being in an all-white collaboration writing about the "methodological whiteness" of someone else's work.
I'm back home again. The attack ended up not being as bad this time, so they sent me home.
What exactly is going on, if you're comfortable sharing?
Pancreatitis. It's not unheard of for it to come back, but it is unusual for it to pass so quickly. They're having trouble pinning down the cause.
That sounds awful. I'm sorry.
Mossy, my subfield is too small to really preserve pseudonymity, but my international scholarly association section and caucus memberships overlap a bit more with the scholars being criticized by the Danes than with the Danes themselves. I have been published in the past using a theoretical apparatus the Danes basically introduced to the discipline, but the "innovation" says more about how backward the discipline as a whole is than anything else.
I'll add that security studies is not the most exciting or innovative of subfields today, and I'm happy I'm no longer working in that specific issue area, but Christ is it better than it was 30 years ago!
I don't think I recognized any of the names, but it wasn't my field and I sometimes forget that I've been dropped out completely for fifteen years.
133: thanks, I appreciate it. Today has been better than the past few days. I think some schedule changes would help. I also need to step back a bit from work. I'm not too busy and not too important, but I've been working full-time anyway just because I wanted to make a good impression on new management. I can't do that forever.
Do you get a three day weekend coming up? Because I'm really excited about it.
Fourth of July is a Saturday. I need to figure out if I get off Friday or Monday.
I was about to respond to 144 with a joke from a TV show but wanted to find the exact quote and googling found exactly one instance which was me commenting on a thread in 2012.
143: Probably. Under the old management the answer would be definitely, but the new people do something they call floating holidays. I'd have to look up whether Memorial Day is one of them.
I think all the holidays where it is warm enough for boating are floating holidays.
I'd love to start taking PTO but for the next month and a half (as has been the case for the past 5 months) I'm in projects where some things slow way down if I'm not working, plus as long as there could be "voluntary" PTO as an alternative to furloughs in the future, I'm trying to build up PTO since I've only been in my job about 9 months. Some co-workers who have been there for years are doing regular 4-day weeks because they have so much vacation they'd lose the days, and also very few positions are like mine where there's essentially no coverage for most of my job when I'm out, so the effect of them being out is much less noticeable. I'm really wearing down though.
If it weren't for the pandemic, I'd be making more of an effort to quietly find some way out of my job. But it's "objectively" a good one and would be hard to match in terms of benefits and potential security even in a strong economy. It's certainly better than my old one and sometimes I feel like I don't appreciate that enough. Probably because I thought it would be a lot of work that was work worth doing and instead it's a lot of work that's not.
it's "objectively" a good one and would be hard to match in terms of benefits and potential security even in a strong economy
The absolute worst kind of job. I say this with total objectivity.
1,365 new cases reported here today.
So I'm seeing that arrakis might have the highest infection rate in the world. (Though slightly less than, eg. New York state.) Keep safe, Barry.
152 Thanks. I know! It's unnerving. Though it also has one of the lowest fatality rates.
153: which might mean that it has the highest infection rate in the world because it has the highest testing rate in the world?
Or that they are kicking the sickest migrant workers back to their home country? Or that mostly young workers don't die as easily?
I think the UAE has a much higher testing rate. It is possible that the recent 1,000 plus numbers we've been seeing here is the result of increased testing. They recently opened up drive through testing. But I really don't know. I think some of the spike is idiots visiting their relatives during Ramadan. Along with the normal baseline of the horrible living and working conditions of the migrant laborers.
155.1 I've seen nothing to suggest they are doing that, they are locked down, at least the ones that aren't doing major national project construction. 155.2 might well be true.
Still around. Wishing work wasn't so busy and that I was sleeping better.
I got a stimulus check last week (mailed to my home in the UK, which is not helpful since I now have to send it back to the US for it to be cashed, but that's just the fun of living abroad), which still sort of amazes me given that I have not lived in the US for the last 9 years, and not paid a dime in taxes. However, I have dutifully filed them every year, several months late, so I am telling myself that this is my reward for doing so.
Lourdes, so sorry to hear about your loss. My undergraduate adviser, who I was quite close to during those years and for awhile beyond, died a few years ago and I was taken by surprise by how much it affected me. Obviously very different circumstances, but take care of yourself.
Walt, feel better soon!
So far my 10 in the pain scale is from a kidney infection, which I didn't think was that bad (surely only a 5?) until I stood up and promptly vomited and nearly fainted from the pain. Otherwise, as everyone mentions, I can imagine quite a lot of pain, thank you, especially as someone who has suffered from chronic dental pain. (Which I actually find worse than that kidney infection pain, for all that it is rates a little lower on the scale because I can continue to function.)
158.2 I've not filed mine yet, do you know if we get an extended deadline past the usual 3 months?
I haven't filed mine yet because there was a general delay until July 15.
160: I haven't either. I keep telling myself that I will do it this weekend for nearly 2 months now.
I hate paying estimated taxes so I owe a bunch of money.
162: So it makes sense for you to put off paying it as long as possible. For me it's just pure procrastination.
159: I haven't checked! But I file mine in July almost every year out of laziness. (I am under the minimum foreign income tax threshold though, so YMMV.)
Quite belated thanks to all for the explanations. Even though there was some dissension, the idea is clearer now to me: it seems like both a failed attempt at love and a failed attempt at virtue. The worthiness of both goals could provide some consolation, but I'm inclined toward sorrow.