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Maybe I'm tingling
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I have no idea what is going on. The last couple of weeks have been a weird confluence of quietness and loudness. The world is loud, but my networks are quiet. The spring is loud, but the city is quiet. My mind is quiet, but my mood is loud. If that even makes sense.
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Work has been slow. Really slow. Before he left for three weeks off, Doug and I wrapped up two of our four running projects. Then people were at conferences and meetings and whatnot. So I've been trying to find new projects and tinkering around on things. We have capacity, if you know about anything.
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It was unseasonably warm lately. Scary warm. Summer warm on the 9th of April in a climate that normally sees "April showers [that] bring May flowers". The missing text there is "'freezing cold' April showers". It's not been raining. It's been hot and dry. Well, it was hot and dry. Now it's cold. Listen, what I'm trying to say is – the weather is all sorts of weird, and my tulips will be dead before May.
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People continue to hedge their language around the climate catastrophe. They keep saying things like "record temperature" or "dry spell" or "unseasonably warm" instead of "Holy fuck, we're careening towards a world where we don't have enough water to drink."
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The nerves behind my ears have been tingling. I'm legit starting to think that being a prepper might not be all that ridiculous. Of course, when my neurosis sent me down the prepper path, I learned that 50 weeks of food that doesn't expire for 25 years, suitable for whatever apocalypse comes our way, costs about 14,000 [insert currency]. That seems like a lot of money to spend to quiet an anxiety that most people are just outright ignoring. Or not feeling. I've started saying "currency" instead of $ or £ or €.
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How people in the West aren't looking at the world around us and thinking "Fuck me, it's going to be pretty uncomfortable very, very soon" is beyond me. But many of them aren't. Not that I'm a doom monkey or anything. I'm just reasonably confident all the shoes are going to be dropping soon. Maybe that's why it's so quiet. It's the quiet before the storm.
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"There’s a fine line between intellectual rigor and believing your own bullshit, and smart people are at more risk than ordinary folks." The Dumber Side of Smart People
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Maybe I'm tiny
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It's a strange world, but our defensive little brains are pretty fantastic. We tell ourselves so many stories so that we can Keep Calm and Carry On. We look away from so much.
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TIL there is a black market for human hair and stylists are widely complicit.
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Today I saw three teenagers out in the field at eight o'clock in the morning playing badminton. They were very poor at it, which felt odd until I realised they were all playing left-handed. I can only assume they were training dexterity? Future surgeons? Science fair project? Idfk. In any case it was badminton. At eight am. Why?
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"In the realm of cognitive flexibility, without humility, it is impossible to admit to wrongness, to an attachment to a flawed idea. You become your thought, your narrative; you equate anything challenging it to a challenge of your very self.” Hala Alyan in the Power of Changing Your Mind
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Now here's some unrelated links about AI:
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Maybe I need help?
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"Anxiety is like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn't get you very far." Jodi Picoult
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