Ok, hotshot. What's your favorite reductionist meme that you feel captures some essence, even though you cringe to be wrapped up so tidily by the meme-sters? The point is to post something a little foolish-looking and get everyone to nod and admit that it's not actually that foolish. "Pizza or Kill and Eat You" is off the table.

I'm sorry to be so one-note lately. I'll find a second post to throw up as well today. I'm thinking maybe if I purge all my mental vomit, it'll help me process.

I just don't want to get that truck-sized sucker-punched nausea of 2016 all over again.

I've described this portion of my worldview before: there's external reality, and there's your internal representation of reality, which matches up to the external reality with various degrees of accuracy. Your internal reality is subject to fears and wishful thinking and all of those things.

Sometimes when there's a gap between what you want to be true and what may actually be true, you grapple with that discrepancy. I think this is where a lot of emotions come from. The feeling of anger is often "I have a drive to fight to make my internal reality real - I want to change the external reality." You might channel that anger in good ways or bad ways or bite it down, but it's a drive to action. Whereas sadness/grief is "I am struggling to accept the external reality, and I'm faced with changing my internal reality to match it." Accepting a death or illness or something that's beyond your control. (You know, now that I think about it, I'm just parroting the Serenity Prayer with a lot more added garbage. Sorry about that!)

Anyway: I think that one of the hardest mental tensions is the push and pull between these two drives: the activist drive to change versus the hospice worker drive to accept and grieve.

So I'm not abandoning the fight to have a victorious November 5th, but I'm also feeling an intense drive to get a grip on reality, and pre-process that we might have the very worst outcome. When I hear reassuring news, I feel momentarily better, and then I wonder, "Is this just heightening the gut-punch that may be coming?"

1. This is short but very good.

via

2. I have mixed feelings about Nobody Wants This (and have only watched a few episodes), but it seems like everyone has an opinion about it. In case you want to share yours here. (I do love the font of the name-logo.)

To what extent do you think this meme is essentially correct? To what extent do you consider it reductionist?

It sums up my beliefs, but I'm a little wary at seeing my beliefs packaged in such a tidy info-snack, and so I want people to poke holes at it. Then I can gauge the size of the holes and decide whether or not I was right all along.

Open thread to share how you're doing, etc.

Me, I'm insanely anxious about this election. Tell me where to donate money or something.

Happy Halloween!

Natasha Miller says she was getting ready to do her job preserving donated organs for transplantation when the nurses wheeled the donor into the operating room.

She quickly realized something wasn't right. Though the donor had been declared dead, he seemed to her very much alive.

"He was moving around -- kind of thrashing. Like, moving, thrashing around on the bed," Miller told NPR in an interview. "And then when we went over there, you could see he had tears coming down. He was crying visibly."

It's spooOOOooky season! (All kidding aside, the story is horrifying.)