The Half-Life of Sanity
You guys, my girlfriend is so crazy.
No, really — she is! It’s okay, though; she doesn’t mind me saying it, ’cause I call her “O Best Beloved” on the blog and drop lots of other oblique references to her favorite Kipling story (How the Camel Got His Hump).
HUMPH!
(Apologies to Linda Grimes, who does camels every Wednesday for “Hump Day” on her blog — I didn’t realize this was going to go up on Wednesday when I scheduled it. But you should go look at her camels too.)
Anyway. O Best Beloved, as I fondly call her here, is actually more of an O Stressed Beloved, on account of working hard at a very tiring and thankless sort of academic career that looks to my Iowan eyes an awful lot like being a farmer but she claims is actually extremely advanced population genetics. And it makes her crazy.
Case in point: twenty days into a string of unbroken work days (no weekends, no vacations; just twenty days of working in a cornfield collecting god-knows-what data) we had a pretty dramatic meltdown. With the crying and the wailing and the not being happy until I bought her an enormous dead thing on a plate and a few gallons of craft beer and so on, which is totally fair ’cause I do that when I have a bad day too.
Anyway, that was twenty days in. Ten days later there was a similar episode, and five days after that another.
This should be sounding familiar to you by now.
I guess I’m not actually surprised that O Best Beloved goes insane at logarithmic intervals (I also won’t be surprised if “logarithmic” is the wrong word and she corrects me). I do know that I’m not looking forward to Thursday afternoon, when the 2.5-day mark rolls around.
But there’s a comfort here, and it is Zeno’s dichotomy paradox. However frequent the fits of “God I hate this job” become, there will always be a sliver of sanity in between them so long as the gap continues closing by half each time. So that’s something.
Or so math tells me, anyway.
Now, me, I get out of bed at a reasonable hour, drink an early-morning beer, and sort of slip into work like a warm bath that stood a bit too long — not the most enjoyable thing in the world, but perfectly tolerable and something that really ought to get done. So if there’s a half-life to my sanity it’s a very long one under the current circumstances.
And that’s why I’m a writer. What about you?
PSA: We Won’t Know Why You’re Upset if Your Comments Are Illegible
I get it.
You’re upset. Or maybe you’re happy; it doesn’t actually seem to make much difference. Politics are divided now, right? Zero-sum, winner-take-all, no-compromise electoral slugfests: pick a team and fucking root for them, or get the hell out of the stadium and find a different game.
I can live with all that. It’s not how I’d do things, but the internet is wide, and 4chan has taught me that people have many different approaches to life.
Oh boy has it ever.
But here is the problem; I still need to know what you’re talking about. And written political discussion has, in some forums, devolved past that base standard of legibility.
Has anyone else had this problem? Are you struggling to even understand the nature of people’s written complaints? Do you find yourself double-taking while you try to figure out what “rapepugniKKKlans” or “dumbofags” are?
(The answers are “Republicans” and “Democrats,” but I won’t blame you if you didn’t put it together on your own.)
Please help do your part for our future generations’ hopes of intelligible communication: if you know someone who likes to discuss politics on the internet, help them by linking to the posts on this or other blogs that explain the basics of written text! More advanced students can be pointed to philosophers of language and discourse — but please, start small. Remember that you are dealing with angry people. Patience will be needed.
Intelligible meaning is non-partisan! Free speech is a right, but that doesn’t mean you’re not doing it wrong.
I’m Geoffrey Cubbage and I approve of this message.
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politics