I’ve already started production on a line of (still in stealth mode). I think I can do enough in sales - both direct to consumer and wholesale to shops - to patent it and then cover my mortgage and other bills. And hey, if AI doesn’t take my job, maybe I’ll finally get out of debt. Of course it could fail and I’ll be out the seed money, but I’ll also have hundreds of (product) to remind me of my shame, so, whatever.
It’s like when a kid grows up with an abusive father, watches his mom get punched and treated like an animal, and thinks “I’ll never be like that,” and then 15 years later he’s wondering how to make his knuckles less bloody when he teaches his wife a lesson.
I shared an office with Frank Meeink for a week while he was in town giving lectures and speeches. Which only furthered my belief that redemption is always possible. Although since then Trump has been president twice, so I am revising that to “in most cases.”
Let’s let capitalism intervene until they’re all in a call center in India
And just try reading it over the phone to someone, especially a non-native-english speaker.
My personal email is first initial with last name, which I can simply tell them without having to try to spell anything out.
I have a state job tho, and there it’s first initial and middle initial and last name, why the hell… now I can’t email a colleague without looking at a sheet to find their middle initial. Stupid.
I got a hotdog at a food truck that appeared near my house a few years ago. I asked for just ketchup on the dog. She laughed and said “You’re a little boy! That’s OK, little boys get hotdogs too.” I’m like, lady I am giving you money right now, is there a version of this encounter where you’re not judging me?
He could have been President. He could have been a conservative but honorable and good president. I desperately wish we had Wes Clark instead of GWB or Trump, things would look a lot different.
Developmental psychology (Erik Erickson’s theory) teaches us that adults tend to go one of two ways as they approach and hit mid-life - generativity and stagnation. People who have a purpose, who are considering leaving some sort of mark or legacy, to contributing to society tend to fare better. They are happier and more satisfied as time goes on. Folks who become self-absorbed and preoccupied with their own comfort and convenience will then stagnate, which you can imagine is the cranky old person stereotype.
I do subscribe to this theory which is why at 43 I am running a non-profit I started, working to empower other leaders in my community, working on changing legislation for my community, working on building the community itself. I want to be the kind of person who is generous and kind and open-hearted, and be fulfilled. I don’t want to be the person who is counting the ways life did them wrong, using that as a justification to lick wounds and retreat from life, jaded and alone.
Class warfare will be the foundation it’s all built on. Any tech developed for the moon, Mars, whatever - anything we gain in knowledge in return - is going to go to benefit rich fuckers, not you. One day there will be more space tourists. Rich people, not you. Maybe one day Man will even colonize another world. Rich people, not you.
I’m buying fireworks this summer, but they aren’t being used on the 4th.
If you wait long enough the government just does it for you
I am working to build queer community in my Southern red state. It’s hard, and everyone wants more from me than I can deliver. Trying to help a volunteer write a grant proposal. Trying to keep my shit together. Trying to move a thousand small boulders up a thousand small hills.
I do feel valued when I see my son, and he comes running up to me, and gives me a huge hug, which will happen tonight.
But I am also terribly lonely, and it’s the kind where plenty of people are around me, but I am still lonely, because I am not able to be open and authentic to them. They want a leader . Being vulnerable has caused problems with that.
Every once in a while I can buy a bag of weed and then, for a while, none of it matters and I can just roll the boulders all day.
This stuff used to bother me but then I observed nature and its cruel rules for long enough, and I realized that suffering is one of the few constants in life, one of the guarantees. Wasps that paralyze spiders for months so they can be eaten alive by their offspring, bird species where most chicks are left to stave to death, etc… yeah nature is just as cruel as humans can be, but at a much larger scale in perpetuity, and we’re a lot more efficient at turning that suffering into greater good that lessens the suffering of others in perpetuity. So, while I don’t condone or even like to think about baby monkey experiments, I will not bat an eye at lab mice being given Parkinson’s so we can observe and seek answers and cures.