Bra back pain braindump

 Physically helpful things:

 

- Do something right away. Last time, I tried to power through it. Bad idea. Take the bra off. Stretch. Take a muscle relaxant. Order half a dozen bras on the internet. Do something.

- Stretching my back vertically helps. Obliques, lats, whatever the muscles from my shoulders to my hips are.

- Rolling on a pilates ball helps. Last time rolling on a pilates ball on the floor was too intense but rolling a pilates ball between my back and the wall helped. This time the wall isn't effective, but the floor gloriously grinds up pockets of pain and tightness like a mortar and pestle. Just don't roll the pilates ball directly under your spine - the spine doesn't like that! Roll it just to the left of the spine, then just to the right of the spine.

- Extra sleep helps, by which I mean sleeping until I wake up naturally and then rolling over and seeing if I have more sleep in me. Conversely, insufficient sleep is disproportionately negative. This is super inconvenient.

- Leaning back in my chair helps. I'm not sure if that has something to do with the behaviour of my back muscles or the load-bearing distribution of my bra or just the fact that having my whole back pressed against the backrest eliminates my awareness of the bra elastic. 

- Make the bra straps a bit looser than makes sense. When a tight band has triggered pain, tight straps can trigger additional pain.

 

Psychologically helpful things:

 

- The worst thing is the fear of never being comfortable in a bra at all ever again in the decades of life expectancy I have left. (If you're just tuning in, I'm also not comfortable without a bra.) So it helps psychologically to find opportunities to be comfortable in a) a bra, and b) the particular bra I'm trying to break in. Sometimes this means wearing the bra I'm trying to break in while stretching or while applying a heating pad, so my muscles are physically relaxed in the presence of the triggering band. Sometimes this means wearing my old bra with the dead elastic while sitting perfectly comfortably at my desk working.

- Once I'm confident the bra I'm breaking in isn't actively inducing pain, wearing it out of the house for limited amounts of time helps. When I'm out of the house, the world provides plenty of distractions, so I'm not focusing primarily on my elastics. This also provides cumulative empirical evidence that I can go half an hour or an hour without my back freaking out from the bra. 

Unhelpful things:

- This is one of those problems that leads to a bunch of recommendations for things that I've already tried or that are irrelevant to me. Yes, I do know most women are wearing the wrong bra size! Yes, I have had professional fitting - they can tell me what fits my body but have no expertise in pain issues! Yes, I have tried a bra extender - it just moves the pain to a more sensitive part of my ribs! Yes, I have tried a sports bra - it's worse! Yes, I have tried yoga - I've been doing it for 20 fucking years, and have stretched out every muscle in my back four times already today! I would cheerfully let google stalk me if it meant the algorithm could screen out everything I've already tried!

- The worst part is the dread. This instance of bra pain and my last instance of bra pain came on completely unexpectedly. So, even after I resolve the problem, I never know when it will happen again. I wake up every morning pain-free, but I have no idea what will happen when I get out of bed, when I put on a bra - or make the decision to sit around the apartment without a bra. Even though I spent 6 straight hours perfectly comfortable in a proper bra yesterday and, as I type this, have been perfectly comfortable in a proper bra for 7 hours, I can't imagine what will happen if I go to that wedding next year or go into the office for a full day or take a train out of the city to visit someone. In a world where things can go wrong, I can't imagine them going right, and that taints the anticipation of the next time, post-pandemic, when I get to spend time with loved ones or hold a baby or see Eddie Izzard. (Eddie darling, I love you madly, but just because the rules permit live shows doesn't mean they're advisable!)

- And the thing is, I'm one of the lucky ones. I work from home! I can change my bra four times a day or sit around naked or stop to stretch as much as I want! I have the disposable income to spend on new bras and ointments and back massagers! There are people with similar or worse problems whose lives and livelihoods don't allow them this flexibility - possibly including the warehouse and delivery workers bringing me the pile of new bras I ordered to try on, or the bra fitters and massage therapists I might go to if I decide my bra difficulty outweighs my mask difficulty (which I still haven't become desensitized to), all the health care workers taking care of people who have much worse problems, our unhoused neighbours who don't have any space or privacy or leeway to make the hundreds of tiny adjustments that get me through the day . . . why is this even allowed to happen???

Health and labour: a mini-braindump

A weird thing about the way we talk about health in our society is that the notion of "being healthy" has an intrinsic element of labour to it, in that you aren't seen as "healthy" if you don't work at it.

 

Example: imagine someone who eats whatever they want without regard for nutrition, doesn't engage in any intentional physical activity beyond what occurs naturally in the course of their life, and doesn't see a doctor for preventive medical care.

They'd be seen as unhealthy.

 

Even if their body does whatever they need it to. Even if their numbers are good. People who like to opine on such things would look at their (lack of) regime and go on about how they're unhealthy and need to add weight training and kale smoothies to their routine.

 

We just don't have a paradigm for being considered healthy without working at it.

  

***

I just realized as I was writing this that this is what really bugs me about alternative medicine (or, at least, the subset of alternative medicine that reaches me) is that it always calls for more work. You're never done, it's never good enough. 

Even in contexts where I'm not seeking advice. If I mention in passing that, for example, every few years I get strep throat and have to take a course of antibiotics, the alternative medicine aficionados in my vicinity come swooping in recommending additional task (a food to eat, a supplement to take) that they want me to do every single day for the rest of my life to supposedly prevent this horrific fate of having to take a couple of pills a day for a week every few years.

While I don't have any theoretical objection to alternative medicine and do in fact incorporate aspects of it into my life, I simply have less and less room for a paradigm that demands such ceaseless work.

***

 

On a personal level, I'm finding more and more that the labour isn't worth the benefit. Putting in the work that it takes to get optimal health outcomes is like studying 6 hours a day to get an A when, if you didn't study at all, you'd get a B. 

 

It inches my numbers down to just inside the range of what's officially considered healthy, as opposed to their natural state of just outside the range of what's officially considered healthy, but doesn't change a thing about how I feel or function. 

 

Exercise makes me better at exercise, and doesn't change a thing about the activities of daily life. When I started doing yoga 20 years ago, a side plank was torture. Now, it's boring. And it hasn't changed a thing about how I feel or about my ability to do anything other than side planks. It hasn't even improved my physical appearance.

***

 

I've also noticed an awful lot of health labour is kind of . . . consumerist? Buy this, eat this, just a dollar a day to solve a problem you can't even perceive!

And there's also this sense that keeping yourself healthy is some kind of . . . responsibility to society, maybe? I'm not really sure how to articulate this part. But I get this vibe from the way some people talk, that if you aren't seen to be doing the labour, and if you aren't seen to be engaging in the "correct" consumption patterns, it's like you aren't doing your duty as a citizen.

I don't think that's, well, healthy.

 

***

 

It would also be interesting to study how the labour of health has evolved over time (and, probably, varied by society). I can't immediately point to any data, but I feel like the expected labour has increased as my life has gone on. 

In the time before nutrition labels, people couldn't possibly have been expected to monitor their nutrition in such minute detail. In the time before gyms, people couldn't possibly have been expected to engage in weight training.

There was a time when it was socially unacceptable for women to be seen engaging in athletic activities. There was a time when it would have been socially unacceptable for anyone, of any gender, to jog down the street.

(There have also been many other times when many other combinations of activities were socially acceptable or unacceptable in historical cultures I'm unfamiliar with.)

People for whom food is scarce eat what's available. If you've always lived in this kind of context, the idea of deliberately limiting your caloric intake would be laughable.

People for whom life requires constant physical labour would find the idea of doing additional exercise to meet a standard of fitness that never comes up in real life laughable. 

I wonder if there has ever been a time and place in history were people were expected to do more health-related labour (on top of the labour of simply staying alive) than they are now?

Mask braindump: my struggles, what I've learned, and how some mask advocacy has been unhelpful

I have a lot of trouble wearing masks. I've learned some things that make it easier, and I've seen some people trying to promote mask-wearing in ways that are unhelpful and counterproductive.  So I thought I'd blog it all here for future reference.

I've already tweeted most of this as I was experiencing it, so if you follow me on Twitter there's nothing new here.

Caveats

1. I am not a medical professional. My explanation of any medical concepts is my own understanding and is not necessarily a perfectly accurate and comprehensive account of every medical consideration. I'm including it because my own understanding helps me figure out how to wear masks better and longer. 


2. Portions of this post describe ways that I misunderstood medical concepts en route to learning more. I'm including them because describing how I misunderstood things is important to understanding how some kinds of mask advocacy were unhelpful. If you read or excerpt only these portions, it's possible you might come away with incorrect information.


My mask-wearing experience

I'd never worn a mask before COVID-19 came along, but I'd never heard of anyone experiencing adverse effects from them either. So when I got my first cloth mask (thank you, Mommy!) I put it on expecting everything to go smoothly.

I was surprised to discover that my body was working harder than it should have been - I was breathing harder, and occasionally getting light-headed. There was even a time or two where I think my judgement was affected!

When the fabric of the mask touched my mouth, I started outright panicking, feeling that I was suffocating even though I knew I wasn't, but even when the mask didn't touch my mouth (and my mother tried multiple variations specifically designed to keep the fabric away from my mouth!) I was always in some degree of distress.

The mask usually becomes untenable after 40 minutes. My irreproducible personal best was one hour, but just the other day (even after I'd proven to my own satisfaction that I get enough oxygen as described below) I could only manage 15 minutes. It's unpredictable, and the unpredictability is an additional worry.

My original (erroneous) self-diagnosis

The problems occur when I wear a mask, in other words when my nose and mouth are covered. Oxygen gets in through our nose and mouth. If you don't get enough oxygen, you die. Falling unconscious is en route to dying. Feeling light-headed is en route to falling unconscious. Therefore, I concluded, I wasn't getting as much oxygen when I wore a mask, because the mask was blocking some of it.

Seemed like a perfectly logical extrapolation from available evidence, and I couldn't imagine any other explanation. 

My concern wasn't that I'd die from lack of oxygen. (I mean, I might, but then I'd be dead so I wouldn't have to worry about it.)  My concern was that I might faint from lack of oxygen. I've only fainted once in my adult life, and that resulted in my head injury, from which I've never fully recovered. I certainly can't risk it happening again!


The pulse ox selfie problem

As I was struggling with all this, a trend emerged of doctors posting selfies of themselves wearing a mask and a pulse oximeter showing a good, high oxygen level, with the general thesis that wearing a mask doesn't decrease your oxygen level, often suggesting or outright stating that if you think it does, you're ignorant or a liar or anti-science.

All of which is very annoying to have saturating your twitter feed when you've just come back from a grocery run of struggling to breathe in a mask!

From this, I saw several possible conclusions:

- If I went to a doctor with this mask breathing problem, I wouldn't be believed.
- Maybe my body works differently than their bodies, and therefore anything they have to say is inapplicable to me.
- Maybe people who struggle with masks simply don't make it through medical school, and then doctors forget they ever existed. 
- Maybe I have an unprecedented problem that medical science has never heard of, but mid-pandemic isn't a time to go down the diagnostic rabbithole that would entail.
- Obviously, from all these pulse oximeters, oxygen level was the crucial issue. I couldn't imagine any other issue, no one was talking about any other issue, so the cause of my problems must be low blood oxygen levels.

Low blood oxygen isn't the cause

All these pulse ox selfies gave me the idea that I might be able to use a pulse oximeter to detect when I was on the verge of fainting, or to convince myself that I wasn't going to faint.  I ran the idea by a friend with medical training, who told me it doesn't work that way - because your blood oxygen could be normal and you could still faint!

She went on to tell me that was what likely happening is I'm hyperventilating from anxiety at wearing the mask (shortly afterwards I learned this is called false suffocation alarm) which is lowering my blood pressure, which is making me light-headed. She also told me about counterpressure - clenching and tensing muscles to temporarily increase blood pressure and possibly prevent fainting.

So I tried counterpressure the next time I had an early glimmer of mask light-headedness, and the effect was immediate. About 80% of the light-headedness vanished instantly, and I could move about safely without fear of fainting.

This immediately proved two things to me:

1. The mask doesn't affect my oxygen levels - if it did, counterpressure wouldn't get immediate results.
2. The light-headedness, and therefore the risk of fainting, is real - if they weren't, the counterpressure wouldn't get results.

Improved, but not cured

Having effectively proven to myself that it isn't lack of oxygen that's making me light-headed, I soon became less uncomfortable in the mask. However, the false suffocation alarm persists, and my body still fights the mask. I counterpressure, my head usually clears, I move forward. If the counterpressure isn't immediately effective, I sit down, get my head down to heart level, regain equilibrium. I've gotten really good at doing this in a way that makes it look like I'm just examining the items on the bottom shelf, so people in the grocery store don't think I'm in distress and approach me.


I've had moments where I completely forgot I was wearing a mask and days where it took an hour for me to feel any symptoms, but I've also had moments where I feel like I'm suffocating even though I know I'm not and days where I feel symptoms after 15 minutes.

Disposable masks might be easier

As I was in the midst of writing this all up, I tried a disposable mask (sold in the grocery store, marked non-medical) for the first time, and found my body didn't panic in it.  I haven't figured out how to keep it from fogging up my glasses (the nose wire is less effective than in cloth masks), but I only rarely have to fight my body or get light-headed, which is a vast improvement! And even when I do have to fight my body, it's glaringly obvious to my brain that I can breathe, so I'm able to better psych myself out of panicking.

Which makes me realize - all the pulse ox selfies I saw were wearing (presumably medical) disposable masks. What if the thing they were insisting is easy is a completely different thing from the thing I was struggling with???


What mask advocates could have done better

The pulse ox selfies were intended to convince people to wear masks, but they were absolutely counter-productive in my case and, I'd imagine, for anyone else who is struggling with masks.


The emphasis on blood oxygen level led me to believe that blood oxygen is the only possible problem, thereby preventing me from finding my way to useful coping mechanisms. The strong "masks are easy and there's no difficulty at all" (or, at most, handwaving it with "masks can be uncomfortable", which is a word I'd apply to skinny jeans and the seats at Massey Hall - getting light-headed in the middle of crossing Yonge St. calls for a stronger adjective) sometimes made me think medical professionals wouldn't believe me and therefore couldn't help me, sometimes made me think I had to just push through my light-headedness (bad idea - the risk of fainting is real, even if the cause isn't low blood oxygen), and sometimes made me think I was experiencing some unprecedented medical problem.

What would have been far more useful would be talk about actual real-life problems that people sometimes have with masks, and how to actually address them in real life.

For example, the fact that I'm not experiencing low blood oxygen isn't relevant, the fact that I'm feeling light-headed is. So it would be useful for doctors advocating for mask usage to talk about how feeling light-headed is something that happens to some people, here's what it means, here's what to do, here's when to worry.

And do the same thing for any other issues people might have with wearing masks.

It would also have been far more useful to talk about different kinds of masks or mask-wearing options and how they address different issues. For example, I find disposable masks significantly easier. Maybe other people with other issues would find other kinds of masks easier.

"Masks are easy" harms your credibility in the eyes of people who struggle with masks, people who haven't tried masks yet themselves but know people who struggle with masks, and people who are afraid of masks. "Here's how to handle mask issues that may arise" is far more credible and useful, and will get more people wearing masks more often.

Disillusionment (Part 2)

This post contains descriptions of racism and other stereotypes.

"So," you're wondering, "you're a Harry Potter fan. Why is your big "disillusionment at discovering someone is transphobic" post about Heather Mallick rather than J.K. Rowling?"

And the answer to that is I got emotional closure on Harry Potter at the end of Book 7. All was well, I closed the book and walked away. I have no need to revisit Hogwarts - I may well go my entire life without ever looking at another Harry Potter fic, and not even notice its absence.

But there's another problem.

When it J.K. Rowling's transphobia reached my Twitter feed, people also started posting about various stereotypes contained the Harry Potter series. (The linked article is but one example - there were many examples, but I'm struggling to re-find them.)

I'm not worldly enough to have spotted these stereotypes.  I'm not worldly enough to extrapolate from the examples given in these articles to spot other stereotypes.

All of which is a problem because last year, completely ignorant of all these issues, I gave Fairy Goddaughter Harry Potter for her seventh birthday.


Harry Potter is one of the fandoms I share with Fairy Goddaughter's mother (who really needs a blog nickname!). We read the books together. We were high school classmates when it began, Fairy Goddaughter's Mother was a newlywed when it ended.

In the months leading up to her seventh birthday, Fairy Goddaughter was expressing interest in the character of Hermione Granger. Who is she? Is she smart? Is she powerful? So her mother decided Fairy Goddaughter was ready, and allowed me the honour of giving Fairy Goddaughter her metaphorical Hogwarts letter.

Then I had a creative idea - literally my first creative idea since my head injury! Fairy Goddaughter should be invited to Hogwarts with an actual Hogwarts letter!

Inspired - and rejoicing in the sensation of inspiration, which I never thought I'd feel again! - I ran around the neighbourhood looking for everything I needed.  Hogwarts letters are written on parchment! But it turns out real parchment doesn't look like I'd imagined. Luckily, Deserres had stationery that looked more like a Hogwarts letter than actual parchment does. Hogwarts letters are written in green calligraphy! I've tried calligraphy pens before, they just make a mess. Luckily, Deserres had these markers with slanted tips that produce writing that looks more like calligraphy than I can produce with a calligraphy pen. Hogwarts letters are delivered by owl! They don't yet have a service where you can get an actual owl to deliver a letter to a given address, so instead I ran around to every store that sells toys, looking for the closest approximation of a Hogwarts owl.

Using my green calligraphyesque marker and my parchment-emulating stationery, I wrote Fairy Goddaughter a letter about how these books have meant so much to her mother and to me, and I hope she has an equally magical time at Hogwarts.

I packed up the beautiful Harry Potter box set in a shipping box, rolled up the letter like a scroll, tucked it under the owl so it would look like the owl was holding it, and sent it off to Fairy Goddaughter, full of pride and anticipation that she gets to set off on her magical journey, and full of glee and delight that my post-head-injury brain actually thought of and implemented a creative idea.


And, completely unbeknownst to me, I was handing her a book full of harmful stereotypes that I'm not worldly enough to detect. And I have every reason to believe Fairy Goddaughter's parents aren't either. (Fairy Goddaughter's Mother and I have talked at length over the years about how our sheltered upbringing in a small town with very little diversity didn't equip us to detect things like stereotypes and racism.) And we all enthusiastically presented it as a magical happy place.


What do you do about this?? How do adults who are too sheltered to notice stereotypes learn about stereotypes in order to guide children appropriately?


In life in general, people likely become aware of stereotypes because people around them use stereotypes with a critical mass of frequency. The lack of diversity where I grew up meant I didn't have this exposure. I can't say with confidence that no one was racist (and, as I learn more about the world, I'm coming to realize that fallacies like white saviour syndrome and othering were rampant), but rather that there was no one for the racist people to be racist towards, at least not with enough frequency for us to notice patterns and develop awareness of stereotypes. 


Most, if not all, of the stereotypes I've become aware of in my life have been from people pointing out examples of racism. They provide a screenshot or a link: "See, this is racist!"

And I wouldn't have been able to determine that independently, by which I mean that the racist words or images read as a sequence of nonsense to me.

For example, some 20 years after I started watching Monty Python, I learned that the embassy scene in Monty Python's Cycling Tour episode involves what I learned is called "yellowface" - racist, stereotypical depictions of Chinese people. Watching it the first time as a teenager, I didn't even realize that they were trying to depict Chinese people. I thought it was just a bunch of people in strange costumes and silly voices behaving erratically (to be expected from the comedy troupe that brought us Gumbies).

But I can't extrapolate from this to see what else might be racist. I can't even tell you with certainty that Gumbies aren't racist. (What I've read about their origin suggests that there's no racial or ethnic or stereotyping component, but I can't rule out the possibility that I'm just not seeing it.)

So how do I learn this? Do I have to go around listening to racist people, or is there another way? I do try to read books by people of a variety of races (and am always open to new recommendations), I try to pay attention and believe people when they say something is racist, but that's insufficient for me to learn what I need to know. Even though I'm reading, paying attention, listening, and believing people, the next example of racism that's pointed out to me always ends up being a completely different thing that also read to me as meaningless nonsense, that I  couldn't extrapolate from previous things. I fully recognize that I need to educate myself and not put the burden on racialized people to teach me, but . . . so far it isn't working, and I don't know what else to do.


My parents would have told you that it's a good thing that I don't know anything about racism or stereotypes. And, if that were true of every single child, they would be right. If no one knew any stereotypes, there would be no such thing as stereotypes.

But the problem is that some people are targeted by stereotypes. Stereotypes are used to hurt them. So they have the burden of being hurt and of people like me not being able to see it.  If no one knew any stereotypes there wouldn't be any stereotypes, but if enough people know them that they can be used to harm, then other people's ignorance exacerbates the situation.

What do we do about this?


***

As with the previous post, it's not really about me and my feelings, it's about how this fits into the system.

When I learned about the stereotypes present in Harry Potter, I found myself wondering why the editor didn't remove them. J.K. Rowling wasn't famous when she wrote the first book, I doubt she would have had the clout to reject a "Dude, this looks really racist!" edit.

But . . . what if the editor was in the same position as me? In my own job I'm sometimes called upon to edit, and I don't know many stereotypes. Have I inadvertently let some through???

My own anti-racism education was, as you can see, insufficient. It was a topic in school around Grade 9 I think, and it didn't do anything. There was some "stereotypes are bad", and we sat there and agreed "Yes, stereotypes are bad!" but never gained the ability to recognize stereotypes when being used by other people.

One of the examples of stereotypes used was the notion that Polish people are stupid.  My own mother was born in Poland . . . and I had never heard of this stereotype! My Polish relatives are intelligent, classy people, my non-Polish relatives are less so, and I'd never heard another human being express an opinion on Polishness. I managed to grow up without even being exposed to stereotypes about my own ethnicity!

And because I'd never been exposed to this stereotype (or any of the others used as examples), it sort of reinforced in myself (and, likely, my classmates) the idea that stereotypes are Other - not something that happens in real life, not something that we'll ever encounter.


So the problem reinforces and feeds on itself. People like me who grow up sheltered aren't exposed to stereotypes, which gets in the way of teaching us about stereotypes, which leaves us oblivious and useless to people who are harmed by stereotypes.

What do we even do about this?


And then there's the fact that I love buying books for children. Even though I don't celebrate xmas myself, it's the occasion when I most often get to see my baby cousins, so I delight in going to Mabel's Fables, picking out books for each child, wrapping them paper shiny enough to make a child believe the package must contain magic . . . and, all this time, how many stereotypes have I unknowingly placed in their innocent hands? Thereby normalizing the stereotypes without any of us even realizing it, and perpetuating the cycle for another generation?

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine braindump (full spoilers)

Nearly a year after I started watching, and 25 years after it first started airing, I finally finished watching DS9! My immediate thoughts:

- I didn't watch the series when it first came out because it was too dark my preteen self.  But I was pleasantly surprised about how light a touch they had on some of the darker storylines. For example, there's one plot line where Chief O'Brien is implanted with the memories of spending 20 years in prison.  I'd heard of this episode before I went in, so I was expecting to see an hour of O'Brien going through hell and then in the last act we learn it's all a dream.  But instead they start with him being released, and the memories come out in counselling sessions. The episode is much more tolerable knowing from the outset that he's okay! Other things I thought would be awkward, like the O'Briens' baby being implanted in Kira's uterus and the Dax symbiont being  implanted in Ezri (I sense a theme here?) were presented as a fait accompli rather than as the angst I was expecting,

- I blogged before about how I found the technobabble from Discovery and The Orville unconvincing.  It turns out I find the technobabble from DS9 perfectly convincing - and sometimes even informative! For example, someone on screen mentions tachyons, and my brain instantly goes "There must be a cloaked ship!" Moments later, a ship decloaks.

- Compared with other Star Treks, I can see the scaffolding of the writing, by which I mean I recognize things like "They showed Odo shape-shifting in the cold open so people who are just tuning in would know he's a shape-shifter" or "The away team is composed of humans only because having multiple alien species on the away team would complicate the intended plot." I can't tell if this reflects the writing, or if it reflects my own sophistication. The last time I watched new-to-me Star Trek was Voyager, which I watched 10 years ago, and I didn't see the scaffolding of the writing.  At first I was thinking this must reflect how my literary analysis skills have improved (despite the fact that DS9 takes place in a visual medium, recognizing the scaffolding of the writing is a literary analysis skill), but upon further reflection I think it's because I read TVTropes (warning: rabbithole). I now recognize things like lampshading and handwaving and MacGuffins and Applied Phlebotinum.

- Weirdly, I can't see the scaffolding of the writing nearly as much on Star Trek: Discovery. Again, I don't know if that's because of the quality of the writing, or just because of what I'm accustomed to.  I don't watch that much drama, so the more modern style of television writing we see on Discovery and the serial season-long arc structure are less familiar to me. I've probably watched less than 50 episodes of comparably-written television in my life.  In contrast, I have now watched over 500 episodes of 90s-era Star Trek, so I have a far better sense of how the story needs to work.

- I was surprised by how often they did time travel and mirror universe episodes. I was watching at a rate of 5 episodes a week so I can't tell how well they would have fit into the original broadcast pacing, but to me they felt really frequent.  My visceral reaction was that the writers were "cheating" - which of course is a ridiculous reaction (especially since mirror universe/time travel doesn't necessarily produce a better episode), but nevertheless that is my visceral reaction.

- Another thing that surprised me watching 20-25 years after it was written is how gratuitously cis-heterocentric it appeared.  For example, if the Jem'Hadar don't procreate naturally, why would they all be male as opposed to being genderless? Why should the female changeling be female (or have any gender)?  I can see Odo opting to present as a gender because he grew up among solids, but the female changeling is from the link. Why should Odo only be sexually attracted to women? (Why should Odo be sexually attracted to anybody?)

- Since Odo is established as having a sex life, are his genitals sexually sensitive?  Can he make them sexually sensitive (or not) as he morphs?  Can he make other parts of his body sexually sensitive and, like, get off on shaking hands with someone?

- I appreciate how DS9 shows that the various alien cultures (Klingons, Ferengi, etc.) have complexity and nuance, and also suggests that we're only seeing a slice of their complexity and nuance.   Previous Star Treks made the aliens more one-dimensional, so that was a welcome and refreshing improvement.

- Speaking of only seeing a slice, another thing I wasn't expecting but appreciated was that I felt like we were only seeing anecdotes from the Dominion War.  Previous Star Treks (and Discovery, now that I think about it), I've felt like we're seeing everything that happens to the crew during the time period in question.  The argument could easily be made that we're not seeing everything, but I did come away with the impression that we were seeing everything in the other serieses.  However, by having the overarching Dominion War arc interspersed with smaller, lighter episodes that don't advance the Dominion War plot, I came away from DS9 feeling like we're not seeing everything, which leaves room for other things to happen in between. (Novels! Fanfic! Webisodes!)

- And speaking of leaving room for other things to happen, I appreciate that the writers obeyed the campsite rule as they ended the series, and left the Star Trek universe nice and tidy for future writers.  The Dominion War is over, so we have the option of picking up in a peaceful, optimistic future.  Many different alien species are more fleshed out, so we can have them as interesting allies in our peaceful optimistic future, but underlying tensions aren't completely gone so almost any old antagonism could be picked up.  And, if we need a mysterious enemy, the Breen are there.  Or they could just fade back into the background since they're so very mysterious. The Pah-wraiths are vanquished, so the Star Trek universe can go back to being aspiritual if needed, but they did exist (as did the Prophets) so that can be explored if needed.  I don't believe any protagonist character's return has been ruled out, and any given character can easily be written around.  Basically, the Alpha Quadrant is left nice and tidy so the next writers who come along can make full use of it however they need to.  I appreciate the planning and effort that went into doing that (and am vaguely amused that I can see it.)

Emotional labour braindump

I've recently been reading this epic MetaFilter thread about emotional labour, and it's been very educational and made me realize quite a number of things, some of which I'm braindumping here and others of which will need to be their own posts.

The thread uses a very broad definition of emotional labour, and I find that broad definition useful so I'm using it too. Things that are perhaps on the periphery of the scope of emotional labour (like housework) are actually things that I have the same relationship with as I do with things that are universally agreed upon as emotional labour, so if it's in my blog post, it counts!

- I am terrible at emotional labour and, at the same time, I greatly value it in others. My absolute relationship fantasy is someone who would take care of 100% of the emotional labour in the relationship. I'd gladly do literally everything else in exchange for emotional labour. But, obviously, that would never work out. Even if it could work as an emotional dynamic, someone who is that giving and awesome could do way better than me.

- The specific way in that I'm bad at emotional labour is that I don't see the opportunities. My brain just doesn't make the necessary connections. I'm the person sitting at the table not realizing people have started clearing the table until it's too late for me to help. At a family gathering where everyone but me was helping clean up, I could see that I should be doing something helpful, but didn't see what to do. So, being the mature and competent adult I am, I asked my mother. She stopped what she was doing, looked around, and told me to put empty pop cans in the recycling and empty disposable cups in the garbage. I literally did not see that a task that needs doing is putting the garbage in the garbage!

- I want to be better at emotional labour because it's something I want to be able to do for people I care about. (And I'm becoming increasingly convinced that my poor emotional labour skills are the reason why I'm unmarriageable.) But when I try to do it proactively, I just end up doing things that aren't helpful and are probably intrusive or disruptive and people are staring at me like WTF are you doing?  Best case, they say thank you to close the matter but don't actually mean it.

- However, the fact that I'm terrible at emotional labour also means I don't get stuck doing it for people I don't care about. I don't get sucked into keeping up appearances or organizing office social events or playing cruise director or who knows what else because I simply can't see what might hypothetically need to be done, the same way I couldn't see the garbage that needed to be put in the garbage.

- I've been wondering over the years why I don't really end up with users or emotional vampires in my life, and I think this might be why - I literally can't give them what they need!

- One of the kinds of emotional labour described in the thread that I actually do is sending greeting cards. But I don't do it for the right reasons. I don't do it because the recipients will appreciate it - I can't tell whether or not they actually appreciate it. I do it because it's the sort of thing I appreciate - I love getting mail! I'm doing unto others, but, as I've mentioned before, my Do Unto Others often doesn't work. I can't figure out how to do the actual emotional labour, so I'm doing a simulacrum of it.

- This also made me realize that emotional labour is one of the reasons why I'm So Done with people who are politically incompatible. It's a combination of the labour I have to do and the labour that they're failing to do. When they start advocating for policies that hurt people, I have to decide whether to speak up (and make the conversation less pleasant) or let it slide (and leave them with the impression that their position is objectively okay and that I think their position is okay). I have to read whether they are a person who can be swayed with information or whether they'll just take that as an invitation to argue. And I have to do the work of changing the subject to something that would be pleasant for everyone to talk about, despite the politically incompatible person's efforts to stay on their chosen topic. And this is because they're not doing the work of finding and sticking to topics that everyone would enjoy discussing. There are people who don't think politics should make a difference in social interactions and would say that you shouldn't let politics stand in the way getting to know someone who could be an awesome person, but I already have plenty of awesome people in my life who don't require that work.

- Most of what I dislike about being single is the absence of a certain individual, not the absence of a theoretical partner. But the one exception is I dislike not having a default person. When I need a person, I have to ask around and find someone who is willing to go out of their way for me. My people are awesome so I've never not found a person (and I'd say about 80% of the time the first person I ask says yes), but I still have to ask. Can you walk with me to the subway and let me text you when I get home? (Whereas if I had a partner they would be coming home with me.) Can you come over here whenever you have a moment and help me move the thing I can't lift myself? (Whereas if I had a partner, I'd just ask them the grab the other end of this.) Can you buy me that one thing I need for my phobias but can't buy myself because of my phobias? (Whereas if I had a partner, I'd just add it to the shopping list next time they're doing errands.)  I always have to ask.  So, as I read about emotional labour, I realize that maybe I wouldn't have to ask when I need a person if I knew how to be a person well enough to do the emotional labour so my partner wouldn't have to ask.

But, despite this realization, I can't just fake it like I did with Entitlement, because the whole problem is I don't see the things that need doing.

However, despite all that, emotional labour is not something I want to learn to so do I can make people like me. It's something I want to learn to to for people who already like me for the person I already am.

US gun money braindump

With the various US shootings in the news and a constant flow of information about how gun industry money is influencing US politics, my shower gave me the early foundations of an idea to disrupt the cycle.

I know I'm a foreigner and therefore this isn't my business at all, but it is an idea I haven't seen elsewhere, so I'm posting it in case it's useful to anyone.

We know that the pro-gun people's argument for having guns is that they need them for self-defence and/or they're used for perfectly valid sporting pursuits.

We know that there's a lot of firearm manufacturer money spent lobbying against any restrictions on owning or acquiring firearms.

My first idea to disrupt this was to make firearm manufacturers pay a fine whenever a product they make is used as a murder weapon.  This is intended to disincentivize manufacturers from lobbying against firearms restrictions, and possibly incentivize them to produce products that make mass murder less easy.

But, because of all this lobbying money, any law specifically targeting firearm manufacturers is unlikely to pass.

So my next idea was to be big and bold: all manufacturers of all products must pay a fine whenever a product they manufacture is used as a murder weapon.

Q: But wouldn't this result in all kinds of harm to all kinds of random businesses (many of whose products are far more vital and far less profitable than firearms)?

A: To mitigate that, I propose a progressive fine structure.  The fine to be paid is a percentage of the company's revenues (not profits, because those can be hidden with accounting).  It starts out as an extremely small percentage (like 0.01%), and that percentage increases (perhaps even doubles) with every subsequent murder. (I can make an argument for the percentage increasing every time there's a murder with any of the company's products, or for each individual product having its own tally.)  So if you're a manufacturer of cosmetics and one very resourceful person comes up with a way to murder someone using a tube of mascara, you have to pay a tiny fine. But if you're a manufacturer of firearms or ammunition and someone murders 50 people all at once with one of your products, you're going to be in serious financial trouble.  (And, of course if you're a manufacturer of cosmetics and someone murders 50 people all at once with one of your products, you're going to be in serious financial trouble too.)

Q: But why are you just focusing on murder? All kinds of people are shot in alleged self-defence or in accidents too, not to mention all the people who are injured, some of them seriously!

A: All these things are important too, and I have no objection to including them if it can be made workable. My thinking in focusing on murder is that it's far more difficult to argue with. By making policy that focuses strictly on murder weapons, you're not questioning the go-to arguments of self-defence or culturally-considered-legitimate sporting pursuits. You're not trying to take guns away from law-abiding citizens or regular folks.  You are, in fact, agreeing with all the standard arguments about why guns should be allowed. It's just the bizarre, exceptional case of murderers that you're addressing - people who use the guns for the express purpose of going out to kill people.

Q: Wouldn't the focus on murder make people (perhaps with firearm-industry-provided lawyers) attempt to defend themselves with claims of self-defence or accidents?

A: Since murder is already a separate crime with a more severe sentence, people are already incentivized to do that. I don't know whether or not extra lawyering could make a difference.

Q: Why manufacturers? Why not retailers?

A: I have no objection to including retailers too. I'm focusing on manufacturers because I have the impression that that's where the lobbying money is coming from.

Q: So what do you expect manufacturers to actually do?

A: Primarily, to stop lobbying against various proposed legislation intended to stop guns from getting into the hands of dangerous people.

But they could perhaps also stop manufacturing guns that make it so easy to kill so many people.  For example, they could make guns that fire fewer rounds per minute, or that require the user to squeeze the trigger each time they want to fire a round rather than holding it down. I've seen mentions of certain types of ammunition being more lethal than others, so ammunition manufacturers could probably use that information to make ammunition that's less lethal. Perhaps they might also have the option of providing their products wholesale only to retailers with stricter security checks.

And, of course, they always have the option of doing nothing and bearing the risk of a massive fine that would put them out of business if someone should choose to use their products for mass murder.

Q: And what about manufacturers of other products who get caught up in this? What do you expect them to actually do?

A: If their products are being used as murder weapons on the same order of magnitude as guns, perhaps it would be a good thing for them to be incentivized to make these products less lethal!

Q: Might this disincentivize foreign companies from making their products available in the US?

A: It might, I don't know. Maybe if it does, and maybe if there's enough demand for the product in question, it could also boost the US manufacturing sector.

Q: And how do you propose getting this kind of legislation introduced when it's so obviously targeting firearms?

A: Wait until someone is murdered with an ordinary object that isn't intended as a weapon. Sensationalize the situation in the media, cite other historical cases of people being murdered with ordinary household objects that aren't intended as a weapon, and make it sound vitally important to introduce safety measures so ordinary household objects can't be used as murder weapons. Don't mention firearms at all.  Cars have had more and more safety measures introduced over the years, at least some of which have been required by law. Use the same spirit for everything, but without (at least initially) presuming to dictate what exactly the safety measures should be.  This is a country that managed to ban Kinder Eggs FFS - surely they can pass some anti-murder-weapon legislation if no one mentions the G word.

Go Set a Watchman braindump

This post is a full spoiler zone for Go Set a Watchman.

1. It's quite obvious that Harper Lee did not intend this book in its current form to be published after To Kill a Mockingbird, because Henry Clinton wasn't in Mockingbird. (There's a "Henry" in Scout's class, but we know that Henry Clinton is several years older than her so he wouldn't have been in her class.)  If you already know that your child-protagonist's future love interest grew up in the neighbourhood and went to the same schools, why wouldn't you give him a quick cameo - just a named extra in a crowd scene? It's a quick and easy Sirius Black moment.

2. Another reason why it's obvious that Harper Lee did not intend this book to be published in its current form after Mockingbird is that the description of Tom Robinson's trial is different in Watchman. In Watchman, the defendant was acquitted. In Mockingbird, he was found guilty.

3. But, since Mockingbird was written second, the change in outcome of the trial supports my theory that Atticus didn't actually give Tom Robinson a full and proper defence.  Which is exactly what he explicitly says he wants to do with Calpurnia's grandson as well!

4. I don't understand why Scout went to visit Calpurnia and told her that Atticus would do everything to help her grandson when she knew full well he wouldn't.  She could have warned Calpurnia about Atticus's plans. She could have not mentioned anything about the quality of defence he'd receive from Atticus. She could have not visited Calpurnia at all.  Why did she choose instead to visit and falsely reassure?

5. In my Mockingbird post, I theorized that Scout could grow into someone who is (or is perceived to be) racist in her old age. After Watchman, I still don't feel like we know enough to argue for or against that outcome. But if I were to start collecting evidence that could be used to argue that Scout is racist, I would include that conversation with Calpurnia, along with Scout's assumption that the dialect Calpurnia speaks in the black community isn't her natural dialect while the dialect she speaks when raising her white employer's children is.

6. The most interesting story alluded to in this book isn't told at all: it's the story of the impact of the Second World War. Dill is in Italy!  If you look at it from the universe of Mockingbird, that's unimaginable!  What's he doing there? What's his life like? But in Watchman, it's just mentioned in passing and wouldn't even be mentionable if Mockingbird didn't exist.

7. (If Mockingbird had in fact been written with the intention of publishing it and then publishing Watchman, I suspect the characters of Dill and Henry would have been merged into one. Henry is or can easily be presented as enough of an outsider to fulfill the role of Dill in Mockingbird. We would then have been shown rather than told Henry's and Scout's long-standing attachment, and we'd also better grok Aunt Alexandra's objection to him as marriage material because we remember that grubby kid from Mockingbird.)

8. The other interesting story that isn't told is Scout's everyday life in New York. The book mentions (about 100 pages after I started wondering) that Scout went to college and then went to New York, where she's been living for five years.  It doesn't mention what she does for a living.  (If I had to guess a Generic Job That's Not Interesting Enough To Mention for a woman in her era and circumstances it would have been some kind of typing job, but the book specifically mentions that she can't use a typerwriter.) It doesn't mention where she lives or what her day-to-day life is like.  It doesn't get into how she found adapting to the city after growing up in such a ridiculously small town. That would be interesting!  I would totally read The Adventures of Scout in New York City! But the book doesn't even touch on it.

9. I haven't looked into whether Mockingbird has a robust fanfiction community and I'm not sure that I want to have a fanfiction relationship with this universe, but the adventures of Dill in Italy and the adventures of Scout in New York would be excellent fodder for a skilled fanfic author who is loyal to the characters and the settings. (Or, like, for Harper Lee to write more books in this universe, but I suspect that's not something she'll be doing.)

10. Overall, in reading this book, a feeling I had all too often was "I don't get it".

Often what I didn't get was, as I mentioned in my previous posts, a result of my being too far removed from the culture in which the book was written.  There are things that feel like the author thinks they're meaningful, but are meaningless to me.

One important example not mentioned in my previous posts is the racist organization to which Atticus and Henry belong, which is called a "Citizens' Council".  Scout expresses shock that such a thing exists in Maycomb, then goes to the meeting and hears all kinds of vile racist rhetoric being spewed.

The problem for me as a reader is that "Citizens' Council" sounds like some kind of municipal volunteer organization that discusses the beautification of parks or something.  I was spoiled for the racist plotline so I was able to quickly put together what was going on, but if I hadn't been I wouldn't have understood Scout's shock at the organization's existence.  Then, when she attended the meeting, I would have concluded that the council had been taken over by some Rob Ford type and that the rest of the plotline would have to do with unseating him.  Then I would have been very confused for a very long time.

Googling "Citizens' Council" is actually informative - the very first result has the information you need - but if I hadn't known about this plotline in advance, it never would have even occurred to me from my seat in 21st-century Canada to look into the name of this seemingly clearly-named and innocuous-sounding organization for an explanation of why they're spewing racist rhetoric and why Scout seemed to see that coming.

11. Another thing I often didn't get was the then-current events being referred to.  In one case, a current event was described only with the name of the state (either Mississippi or Missouri).  And, since I don't know the exact year the book is set, it's not like I can just google "What was happening in Mississippi in the 1950s?"  There's a mention of a Supreme Court decision that's fairly key, and I could only figure out what the actual decision was by including "Go Set a Watchman" as a search keyword - there wasn't enough information to get there based on the text alone. The characters are talking like everyone knows what they're talking about, and I'm missing crucial information because I live in a different country and a different century.

12. But there were also non-cultural things I didn't get. I came away from the book feeling that I hadn't understood the whole story. So what does Scout end up doing in the long run? Does she stay with Henry or does she dump him? Was Atticus racist all along or did he become racist due to recent events? If so, which of the vaguely-alluded recent events triggered it?  I also felt like the book intended to have a moral of the story, but I wasn't able to determine what it was actually intended to be.

13. I think the cultural "I don't get it"s could be addressed with very minor editing. This is a book with multi-page "As you know..." conversations about US history. Surely it wouldn't be too arduous to slip in a few keywords here and there so 21st-century readers and their international readers (both of which they knew they would have, given that the book was published in 2015 as the sequel to a famous novel) could grasp the connotations just as easily as the author's contemporaries.  Since the drink "set-up" is mentioned in an explanation from the narrator to the reader about the drinking habits of the people of Maycomb, it wouldn't be at all incongruous for the narrator to slip in a few words explaining to the reader what a "set-up" actually is. The internet tells me that Citizens' Councils are also referred to as White Citizens' Councils, so it wouldn't be at all out of place to just slip the word "White" in there in the first occurrence to give those of us who aren't up on the subject matter a hint of why Scout might be shocked about it. The impenetrable references to then-current events could be also be made clear (or, at least, googleable) with a keyword to get us started.

14. As for the aspects of the plot resolution and moral that I felt I missed, normally I would assume it's because I'm not a sophisticated enough reader.  Despite being a voracious reader I've never been especially good at Literature, so I wouldn't be surprised if I missed the kind of stuff that people write papers about.  But what's relevant in the particular case of Watchman is that I didn't feel like I'd missed anything after reading Mockingbird.  Even though I did miss some stuff, as I discovered in my reread, I came away feeling that I had grasped as much of the plot resolution and the moral as the book intended me to.  And, frankly, it's only polite to make multiple books in a series equally accessible to the same set of readers.

15. While it is the author's prerogative to write the way she wants to without spelling everything out for outsiders, I think doing so here is a missed opportunity.  Given the cultural weight of Mockingbird, Watchman was going to reach a lot of people who are far enough removed from the culture in which it was written to not get it.  And, especially in light of some of the racial weirdness in the news lately, it has the potential to be particularly educational to those of us who don't get it.

Stress and resilience: an inconclusive braindump

As you've probably noticed, these past couple of months I've been finding myself disproportionately stressed about things that don't actually constitute real problems, like having to choose condo finishes and computer problems and a shortage of fanfiction.

This is a clear demonstration of the fact that I'm too easily stressed and not resilient enough to live in the real world.  But what do I do about this?  Braindump on my blog, of course!

***


By chance, I was recently required to take a (useless and unnecessary) training session on "change management".  It included a component on resilience, which I was looking forward to, but unfortunately it turned out to be useless.

According to the training, one of the things you're supposed to do to make yourself more resilient is self-care.  But the problem is that in my experience, resilience only becomes necessary in situations where your usual self-care is unavailable. I need to be resilient in the face of the loss of my fanfic happy place, and my fanfic happy place is a key part of my self-care. I need to be resilient during 2 weeks without  my computer, and my computer is a key part of my self-care.  I need to be resilient when dealing with condo drama that, if not properly addressed, will result in suboptimal housing, and optimal housing is a key part of my self-care.  If these things that threaten my self-care didn't exist, I wouldn't need to be resilient.

Another thing you're supposed to do to make yourself more resilient is live your values. We were told to list the traits we hate in others, then identify the opposite of those traits.  Those opposites are our values.  This exercise led me to identify my values as socialism and Wheaton's Law, which sounds about right.  But the problem is that I don't see how being socialist and not being a dick would equip me to deal with the unprecedented (to me) challenge of choosing condo finishes or the stress of eventually moving, or even the lesser stresses of a fanfic drought or two weeks without a computer - to say nothing of real problems that will likely happen to me someday, like unemployment or bereavement. My values aren't even relevant to the situations that require resilience. It's like advising someone going through a divorce to adopt a vegetarian diet - it just has nothing to do with the situation at hand.

I don't know if my emotions work differently than other people's or if the training was just spouting platitudes, but the ideas they presented weren't even on the same plane as resilience. Not sure what I'm supposed to do with that.

***

One issue that has become apparent to me in recent months is that my destressers are very externally dependent, which isn't very resilient.  Fanfic works beautifully, but I'm dependent on people writing new fanfic. Other fandom also works beautifully, but I'm also dependent on new creations from my fandoms - there's a diminishing return on the destressing benefits rereading/rewatching. Gaming works fantastically, but I'm dependent upon having a gaming-capable computer.  A good night's sleep and a long hot shower help, but that's dependent on quality living conditions.  Food and alcohol work, but that's dependent on my usual resources being available, and also comes with physical limitations. (As much as I'd enjoy it, I can't be tipsy and cramming cheese in my mouth every minute of every day.)  There is nothing that destresses me that isn't dependent on other people and/or circumstances.

***

Anti-materialistic people often say that the problem is seeking happiness in the things that money can buy, and that instead you should get happiness from your interpersonal relationships.  But interpersonal relationships are also entirely dependent on other people. They can abandon you of their own free will. They may be unable or unwilling to give you what you need.  They may not be available when you need them.  Interpersonal relationships can, of course, be rewarding, add to your happiness and improve your resilience, but they are just as dependent on people and/or circumstances as materialistic destressers.

***

At this point, people usually suggest exercise and/or nature.  But those don't destress me. Exercise makes me angry; nature is best case neutral, worst case a panic attack trigger, while taking me away from the things that actually do destress me, most of which occur in my home. 

***

Which is the problem with finding a new destresser.  Obviously, if I wanted to proactively seek something to replace my missing fanfiction, the way to do it would be to make a concerted effort to try out random things until something gets the desired results. But the problem with doing that is it would take time away from the tried and true, so it has to be approached carefully and measuredly.

Analogy: Cheese isn't available to put on my salad, but salad is still good. But if I just went around throwing other things on my salad willy-nilly in a desperate attempt to find a replacement for cheese, I could ruin a lot of salads. When I've had a difficult, stressful day and I'm desperately craving a yummy salad, it would probably be a bad idea to experiment and risk not getting my craving filled - and, in fact, risk becoming even crankier because something that I thought would fill my craving didn't.  And, of course, the flaw in this analogy is that it's easy to eat around a non-yummy ingredient in a salad, whereas the impact of stressers and failed destressers on stress levels and energy flow can't be quite so easily circumvented.

***

Historically, my destressers have always come to me organically, through my reading and other media consumption.  And my reading already follows a system that provides a good balance between known enjoyments and discovering new things, so I don't know if it can be further forced to provide me with the very specific form of new things I need to replace my lost fanfiction.

All of which is to say I don't have any answers, and I'd probably completely shatter if any real problems came along.

Easy vs. hard, virtue vs. laziness: a braindump

1. In my last post, I mentioned how I can't cope with interior decorating but can do my job well.  This is because my job is easy, or at least is easy for me.

2. Conventional wisdom dictates that you're supposed to challenge yourself, and just doing what's easy is lazy and coasting and slothful and generally non-virtuous.

3. So am I doing a bad thing by choosing a job that is easy for me?  Would it have been more virtuous to go into engineering like grownups were always pressuring me to do, and do something that I struggle with and might sometimes even fail?

4. Or was it virtuous to choose something I'm good at, thereby giving the world an always-competent translator with the potential to become exceptional, rather than giving the world a mediocre engineer?

5. My approach to life as a whole is similar: I arrange things to make them easy for myself. The vast, vast majority of the time, everything I do is something I can handle without breaking a sweat, because I have eliminated the need for the things that make me struggle.  Is that laziness?  Or is it cleverness that I've been able to find workarounds for the hard stuff?

6. But, again, making things easier reduces the chance of failure, which makes me less of a burden to other people.  If I fail to pay my rent on time or crash a car in an ill-advised attempt to drive, I'm inconveniencing others.  If my little corner of the world just quietly and unremarkably runs smoothly, I'm minimizing my footprint.

7. Also, if I make my life easy, I'm less stressed.  When I'm stressed, I have trouble keeping my emotions to a civilized level, which also makes me a burden to people who have the misfortune of having to interact with me, and makes my life more difficult because it's detrimental to my credibility.

8. Or is behaving like a civilized person at all times while stressed just another hard thing I should be doing to challenge myself?

9. Another one for the Things They Should Quantify list: the optimal balance between challenging yourself and not being a burden to others.

Downton braindump (full spoilers up to the end of season 4)

- As you may have expected, I'm disappointed that they didn't show us Edith's pregnancy and time in Geneva.  There's so much of interest there!  Did they need a cover story or did they just keep quietly to themselves?  Did Edith have to wear a fake wedding ring?  Did they need to hire new servants for their time in Geneva to make sure that gossip wouldn't spread?  Did Rosamund take her lady's maid?  If so, how did she ensure her silence?  If not, how did she explain the whole "I'm going on a trip and not taking you with me" thing?

- Jack's breakup with Rose is another story that they told rather than showing, but I did think the conversation between Jack and Mary was a good character moment for both of them.

- The problem with Mary having all the suitors is that if she marries someone, she will become the lady of their estate with all the related responsibilities, when she already has the responsibility of helping keep Downton well-run so it's secure for George's future.  I can't see her just turning her back on Downton, but I also can't see an aristocratic marriage in that era working out with the lady of the house's primary responsibility being another estate.  Not to mention that if she has a son with any future husband, that son would inherit the husband's estate.

- If Lord Grantham dies and Lady Mary hasn't remarried, what would her title be?  Functionally she'd be a Dowager Countess, but she's never been a Countess because you have to be the wife of an Earl.  Would she get some bigger title than simply Lady Mary?

- Actually, if Lord Grantham died right now, would Cora also be a Dowager Countess?  If there can only be one Dowager (and what with Violet obviously being immortal), what would Cora be?

- Speaking of Lord Grantham, I think it's an excellent writing decision to make him incompetent.  People have criticized the trope (often found in sitcoms and such) of the father being an incompetent buffoon (although Lord Grantham isn't a buffoon), but I think it's really interesting in this era and context because his decisions have so much impact on so many people.  If a sitcom father does something foolish, maybe he blows up a barbecue.  If Lord Grantham does something foolish, the livelihood of everyone in the house (and maybe the whole estate?) is harmed.  So when he didn't want Mary to be involved in running the estate (with that paternalistic "for her own good" tone), this was actually a threat to the estate.

- When Thomas catches Branson showing the teacher around the house, Branson makes a point of explaining the situation to him and worrying about whether he misinterpreted it.  But when Lord Grantham comments "I heard you had a guest", Branson simply says "Yes I did."  That seems bass-ackwards to me.  If Branson somehow felt that he owed Thomas an explanation, surely he'd owe Lord Grantham (who actually owns the house!) an explanation!  Even if he'd collected his wits and wasn't going to fall into a stuttering apology/explanation, he could have just thrown in a very casual, "Yes, Miss Bunting the schoolteacher is very interested in our local art and history and architecture, so I was showing her around."  Cora and Isobel and the Dowager Countess already know that he is friends with the schoolteacher, and even if they do evolve in the direction of a romance eventually that makes it look more organic, rather than having a secret assignation at his dead wife's parents' house while they're away.

- Why did the season finale mention that Mrs. Levinson's lady's maid had quit and that Cora had asked the Dowager Countess not to travel with a lady's maid and then not do anything with that information?  They should have showed us some chaos with only two lady's maids for four ladies (plus Edith, plus Rose who was actually being presented to court and therefore would have wanted to look her best.)  They should have at least showed them with slightly different hair styles than usual!  (And speaking of which, who did Mrs. Levinson's hair etc. all during the ocean crossing if she wasn't travelling with a lady's maid?)

Ideas for spinoffs:

1. A prequel covering the early days of Robert and Cora's marriage.  A benign marriage of convenience isn't something we really see portrayed on TV or in fiction in general, and it would be interesting to explore.

2. If Tom decides to move to America like he's mentioned in passing (although he hasn't raised the idea lately, there should be a sequel where, after WWII has conveniently killed off anyone who needs to die to make this happen, Baby Sybbie, now a twenty-something woman raised in the US by her working-class Irish father, inherits Downton. in all the mess of postwar Britain. Daisy is the cook, Anna is the housekeeper, and Thomas is the butler.  (I haven't figured out where Mr. Bates is, but Thomas would be more interesting as the butler because he's evil but he's on Sybbie's side.  And I know Anna isn't on a housekeeper track, but we don't have any other named maids.

3. Fifteen or twenty years in the future, George begins a flirtation with Edith's daughter, not knowing that she is his biological cousin.  Edith tries to stop him, but he assumes she's just a snobbish old aunt. This could also have an interesting "everything dies and the illegitimate daughter inherits" denouement.  Or maybe everyone but Edith dies, and then she reveals herself to her daughter.

Google Reader cancellation braindump

Silos

I use RSS feeds to follow websites, newspaper columnists, webcomics, blogs, comment threads, livejournals, tumblrs, fanfiction, and YouTube channels all in one convenient place.  Before I joined Twitter, I also used it for Twitter feeds.  This saves me the trouble of having to go to each website separately to check for updates. By nudging the internet away from RSS feeds, Google is encouraging the siloing of the internet.  Each of these things has its own mechanism for following within the website.  We use RSS to follow them all in one convenient place.  But weakening RSS and creating the perception that it's obsolete might drive websites to neglect it and move towards a more siloed approach, trying to force you to follow each website only from within that website.  (I've actually noticed that with YouTube lately - if I use youtube while logged into a google account, it has suddenly started acting as though that's a youtube account and encouraging me to make a channel, even though my youtube use is entirely passive and I have no interest in having an actual account. The few youtube channels I do follow, I follow with RSS.)

Social media

Some of the commentary I've read suggests that RSS is less necessary now that we have social media.  I don't understand this line of thinking.  The people I'm connected to on social media do often provide interesting links, but they're a supplement to, not a replacement for, my own Google Reader.  My Google Reader contains the things I want to read - specific bloggers and websites and columnists and communities and comics and fic authors that I've decided I want to read to completion, and be informed as soon as they update. I'm not just looking for something to read, I have specific things I want to read.  So how does it happen that someone thinks having self-curated reading material is inferior to just reading whatever their friends happen to link to? Do they not have their own preferences?  Are they really bad at determining what will be interesting to them?

Novelty

Google's decision to kill both Google Reader and iGoogle seems to be because newer things exist.  I blogged about this before regarding their decision to kill iGoogle, where they seem to think people are going to stop using the Web because apps exist, and stop using regular computers because tablets exist.  I dislike this because the newer things don't meet the same needs. (Even if I had a tablet, I wouldn't use it to translate or blog or play Sims.)  I've also noticed this reflected in search results themselves.  Google searches seem to prioritize newer information over older information, even when you're not searching by date, which can be irritating if you're trying to determine the origin of something. They don't even have the option of reverse sort by date, so you can quickly and easily find the origin or the first recorded occurrence of something.

Permanence oblige

Google is 15 years old, which is massive in internet time.  (I myself have been using the internet regularly for under 20 years.) It has been the best search engine for all this time. Gmail is 9 years old, which is also a significant period in internet time, and it has been the best webmail provider for all this time.  Even for people who are supposed to be techy and of the moment, a gmail address is perfectly respectable in a way that a hotmail address never quite was.  Because Google has been the very best for so long, it is the closest thing the internet has to permanence, stability, longevity.  And, because of it's permanence, stability and longevity, it has a greater duty of reliability and dependability than some random startup.  If you want to be an essential part of people's internet experience, you have to create enough stability that people can feel safe taking the risk of making their internet experience dependent on you.  Google is losing some of this credibility.

Evil?

Google Reader and iGoogle are my primary gateways to the internet, and now Google has cancelled both of them.  This makes me fear for the future of Gmail and Blogger.  (Or search, for that matter).

There is a petition to save Google Reader here.

Spoilerrific Downton braindump

Warning: this post contains spoilers for all of Downton Abbey to date.

- So why did O'Brien have it in for Thomas all this season anyway?  If the show told us, I've forgotten.

- I think making Robert basically incompetent at his job of being Earl of Grantham is a good and interesting direction for the show to take.  In the first two seasons, many people criticized the character for being too perfect - kind and benevolent to everyone.  But having him be incompetent (and a wee bit out of touch) while continuing to be kind and benevolent makes him far more interesting.  It's also an interesting contrast with Ethel: Robert is incompetent but gets to retain his position and will live in luxury for basically the rest of his natural life; Ethel made one mistake, and is socially deemed unemployable and reduced to prostitution.

- Although I'm surprised that Ethel didn't just take off for some other part of the country and claim to be a widow. They'd just had a war and an influenza outbreak, I'm quite sure there were many young widows with small children.

- I'm disappointed that we'll never get to see Sybil's everyday life in Ireland. It would have been so interesting to see how she adjusted.  Even with her nurse training, she probably would have had her own "What is a weekend?" moment.  For example, she's probably never done laundry (it was time-consuming in that era, and I doubt they would have had trained nurses doing hospital laundry when any untrained person could have done it) and she's probably never gone grocery shopping.

- I really don't get why Robert and the Dowager Countess were so put off by the prospect of Edith marrying an older man and therefore having to nurse him through his dotage.  So what if she does?  Basically, she'd be earning her pension.  It's the early 20th century British nobility equivalent of taking some tedious administrative job in a university so your kids will have drug coverage and a dental plan.  And, I just realized, Robert had his own marriage of convenience, which worked out splendidly!

- (Speaking of, they should make a Downton prequel that covers the early days of Robert's and Cora's marriage.  A benign marriage of mutual convenience has got to be an interesting interpersonal dynamic, and not something we often (if ever) see in fiction.)

- This means Sir Anthony Strallan's "I'm leaving you at the altar for your own good" thing was a triply dick move.  First, because Edith gets to decide for herself what her own good is, thank you very much.  Second, because he's denying her the opportunity to earn her pension. As of the time of the wedding, Downton was broke and the family was going to downsize.  Sir Anthony still had his fortune.  His refusing to marry her because he thought she could do better would be like that university administrative job refusing to hire you because they unilaterally decide that this job wouldn't be your passion.  And third, he's leaving Edith dependent on her family.  Which doesn't just mean she's dependent on her parents, it also means that, once her parents die, she'll be dependent on Matthew and Mary.  Imagine being financially at the mercy of your least favourite sibling for the rest of your life!  Leaving someone in that situation is certainly not noble, Sir Anthony!  In fact, the noble thing for someone in Sir Anthony's position to do for someone in Lady Edith's position would be to marry her even if he isn't attracted to her but they get along reasonably well enough for a marriage of convenience.

- At the very very least, Edith should have gotten breakfast in bed the morning after she was jilted at the altar!

- I really want to know the internal logic of this "married women get breakfast in bed" rule!  How did they come up with it and why?  Surely getting dressed and going downstairs is just as difficult for an unmarried woman!  Also, why don't they share with their husbands?  We saw several scenes of a woman eating breakfast in bed and chatting with her husband while he gets dressed to go down and eat breakfast.  I don't know about you, but if my spouse were right there with food while I was getting ready to go get food, I'd certainly stop getting ready and start eating off their plate!  I also wonder if women who have been married but now aren't (widows and divorcées) get breakfast in bed.  Maybe we'll learn next season...

- I think we needed a bit more "show, don't tell" about how many men of the daughters' generation died in WWI.  Sybil mentioned once that it seems like every man she's ever danced with is dead, and Edith told Robert that it's ridiculous to object to her marrying someone older because so many of the men of her generation died, but we haven't actually seen this.  William (the footman who married Daisy) died, the father of Ethel's baby died, and...that's it for named characters, I think. Maybe a scene where they're organizing some major social event for the first time since before the war, and a huge chunk of their guest list is dead?  Too bad they jumped right from 1918 to 1920 at the end of season 2, so now they can't really address this any more.

- I really do think they've had time moving too quickly in this show.  We've had 9 years in three short seasons!  I kind of get why they didn't want WWI to last more than 1 season, and they had to make the last xmas special take place nearly a year after season 3 for obvious plot reasons, but if we keep up this pace they'll have to kill off the Dowager Countess from old age in a season or two!

- I really want to know what Mary's medical problem was!  A "small operation" that restores female fertility and could be successfully diagnosed and carried out in the year 1920. And, whatever the problem was, it presumably didn't interfere with the mechanics of sex, because if it had then Matthew wouldn't be worrying that the problem might be him.  Anyone have enough medical knowledge to figure out what this was?  Theory: maybe it isn't a real condition at all and is just a plot device.

- I had the misfortune to learn that the actor who plays Matthew was leaving the show before I even started watching Season 3, so the whole plot of the Season 3 xmas special seemed glaringly projected to me.  I knew where they had to end up, so the foreshadowing and such seemed completely unsubtle.

- Why oh why oh why did they have to name the latest new maid Edna?  We already have Edith and Ethel for me to get mixed up.  Why introduce yet another two syllable old lady name that starts with E?  (I know they're probably old lady names because of the era, but we also have names like Mary and Anna and Matthew.)

Springsteen braindump

If this was in fact real life that just happened, I think I just went to my very first Bruce Springsteen concert!

- Highest density of white people I've ever seen in one place! Yes, I grew up in a nearly all-white community, but there were more people in skydome than in the whole town.

- I've never been in skydome before (for a concert or anything else) and it was bigger and louder than I expected, but I like the washroom and concession setup. You can still hear the performance while you pee.

- Thank you to the guy behind us for being such excellent DVD commentary for us n00bs!

- I can't believe how many times the pit cameras caught people filming Springsteen with their phones when they could instead have reached out their hand and actually touched him!

- He took someone's beer and then dribbled most of it down his shirt while acting like he was drinking. Waste of beer!

- Jack of all Trades + Murder Incorporated = Dude can't find a job so becomes a hitman

- The little girl who sang along with Sunny Day was entirely too confident, which made that bit of business less charming for me. However, My Favourite Little Person is totally going to grow up to be her.

- The crowd collectively knows the harmony lines to Badlands, Thunder Road, 10th Ave. and Glory Days.

- Normally, I actually do sing the harmony lines because I have a shamefully narrow vocal range and nearly all Bruce Springsteen songs are in a bad key for me. However, in this loud stadium in this giant crowd, unable to hear my own voice, I was able to sing the melody line and hit notes (mostly low) that I've never been able to hit before. I couldn't hear myself, but I have enough training to tell that I hit them by feel. Not sure what happened there.

- At the beginning, people were deliberately applauding Jake for (literally, I hear) filling Clarence's shoes, then partway through they weren't doing that so much so I was thinking the crowd got accustomed to it and that was good, then they started doing it again towards the end (triggered by Land of Hopes and Dreams).

- The video camera guys and the people who decide what to put on which screen when really know what they're doing! During any live performance, I watch what the people in the background are doing, and (as far as I could see from my half-assed seats, at least) the cameras didn't miss anything interesting.

- The anniversary couple is totally going to go home and have sex and both pretend the other person is Bruce.

- I'm surprised how many people had signs for songs that he was going to play anyway! Playlists are documented religiously! Why waste your sign on Rosalita?

- Unless their goal was to get their sign used rather than get a song that they actually want played.

- I still think Springsteen needs to cover Queen - Crazy Little Thing Called Love, We Will Rock You, Fat-Bottomed Girls, etc.

- Apparently the way to get Bruce to play your song is to draw dirty pictures on your sign.

- (Maybe that strategy could be used to get him to play Fat-Bottomed Girls?)

- I'm surprised how many children they were, and how young some of them were. Especially since they (or at least all the ones that showed up on camera) were in the pit, and the internet tells me the pit people had to be there from like three hours before the concert started.

- Songs that made me happy that I can remember: Sunny Day, Thunder Road, Hopes and Dreams, Glory Days, Jack of all Trades, Shackled and Drawn, and at least two others that are slipping my mind.

- But, of all those songs, it's Rosalita, which I don't even like, that's stuck in my head.

- I managed to time my pee break so I didn't miss any songs that it would have made me sad to miss!

- Apart from being amazed at how much energy the band has to play over 3 hours and give absolutely 100% to every single thing (including moments where I was like "I can't believe he's putting so much into that one part when I really don't think anyone would notice or care if he did it calmly), I'm amazed that they can go so long without peeing!!! I also didn't see anyone drinking water (apart from the whole collapse/sponge/water physical comedy thing), although they must have at some point.

- I'm really surprised the whole collapse/sponge/water thing played out as well as it did and for as long as it did, although by that point people would have clapped for anything.

- From my perch far above, I saw two different people with whom I'm casually acquainted and who are most likely casually acquainted with each other on different parts of the floor. I don't think they saw each other.

- Before the concert started, we had enormous fun watching crew people climb up rope ladders and scaffold and speculate on what they were doing. (Conclusion: best tree fort ever!)

- I wonder how much it would have cost to make the CN Tower lights coordinate with the stage lights.

- I'm a total n00b who's just been studying these past few weeks (I hate going into a concert not knowing the songs) and there was only one song I didn't recognize (the slow piano solo one- update: the internet just told me it's called incident on 57th street). My friend (MFLP's mommy, who really needs her own blog name because she was here first) was even more of a n00b and didn't study at all (it's like raising her child is time-consuming or something!) and she reports that the concert was awesome for her.

- MFLP's daddy and I had a disagreement over how long it takes to walk between union station and skydome. I thought a short time, he thought a long time. Turns out it was a long time, but that's not because of the distance but rather the crowds. Tons and tons of people walking slowly in clumps in front of you, with the entire population of fanexpo coming in the other direction! It would take a short time if you were the only one.

- Things I learned about skydome/rogers centre: the gate on your ticket is important! We tried to walk in the first door we came to, and the guy made us go around to the gate on our ticket number.

- The only negative of the whole experience was Roger's Centre's bottle lid policy. I came in with a 330 mL sealed commercial brand water bottle in my purse. The purse searching lady said I could only bring it in if I gave her the lid. So then I was stuck with an open bottle. I drank some water, my friend drank some water, but an open bottle is a really inconvenient thing to have so I threw it out. Then I noticed the people walking up and down the aisles hawking water didn't confiscate the lid - which is such bullshit because the bottles they were selling were twice as big as the bottle I wanted to bring in! - and doubly bullshit since they sell beer in cans which are also bigger than the bottle I wanted to bring in and also made of metal and also explode if you shake them! - but I was too far from the aisle to attract their attention. However, halfway through the show I got thirsty, so I bought a bottle from one of the concessions (for $4.75!!!!) - and the guy confiscated the lid before he handed it over! So I was stuck with an open bottle again, and spent the vast majority of my very first Bruce Springsteen concert trying not to spill my water when I should have been uninhibitedly jumping up and down like an idiot! Dear Rogers Centre: you need to either give us water in cups with lids, or install cupholders on the seats, or let us bring fricking water bottles in like grownups! This quite seriously hindered my ability to uninhibitedly enjoy my very first Bruce Springsteen concert, and that's simply not acceptable!

Plastic bag braindump

1. "But Whole Foods doesn't use plastic bags and they do fine..." The experience of an individual store not providing something is not indicative of the experience of its unavailability in the entire city. It's easy to plan for one store in your many errands not having bags - if you misestimate, you can always get an extra bag from another store. But it's far more inconvenient, and your planning has to be far more perfect, if you can't get another bag, at all, ever, from anyone.

Analogy: most shoe stores will put an extra hole in your sandal straps if you ask them to. I once went to a shoe store that didn't have the tool to do that with. No big deal, my regular shoemaker was willing to do it for free. However, the relative inconvenience of that one non-hole-making shoe store is not indicative of the impact of banning that shoe-strap-hole-punching tool from Toronto city limits.

2. "Shopping without bags is easy! All you have to do is get these bins and keep them in your trunk..." Not if you don't have a car it's not. Since the stated reason for eliminating plastic bags is environmental, all discussion of the matter should focus on the carless trip chain, which benefits from things like light weight and waterproofness and handles and not having to carry big bulky sacks around all day just because you might want to stop in and pick up a couple of things after work. Making it more difficult to live without a car would be even worse for the environment - especially since this is Toronto, where there are many high-density neighbourhoods with shops within walking distance or public transit of homes. And, because I'm frustrated by how often people are promoting a car-based outlook in the name of environmentalism, I'm instituting a new rule: everyone who says it's easy to do away with plastic bags and then cites a car-based example is banned from using a car on their next comparable shopping trip.

3. "But I don't like plastic bags. I have sooo many of them and I don't even like them!" So why do you keep taking them? I've seriously seen this multiple times - people who actively embrace a ban because they feel that they have too many plastic bags in their own home. I don't like those awful "reusable" bags and already have more of then than I'd like, so I don't take them any more, not even when they're being given away for free. I also don't like cantaloupe. Or tampons without applicators. Or bubble gum. So I don't buy any and say no thank you if they're ever offered to me for free. It's really rather simple. Just because you have trouble saying "No thanks" or not reaching out and accepting what is thrust in your direction is not a good basis for a ban. "And sometimes they get holes in them!" So do shoes. And underwear. And "reuseable" bags for that matter. That isn't a good reason to stop (and ban!) their use.

4. "This is a failure of leadership by Rob Ford." No, it isn't. Don't get me wrong, I have no fondness for Rob Ford and would love to seize a chance to criticize him, but it's not his job to make council not vote stupidly. It's council's job to not vote stupidly by virtue of being remotely competent adults. In fact, because we don't have a party system at the municipal level and voted for our councillors on the basis of a non-party system, it would be morally wrong and a betrayal of voters for the mayor to whip the vote. (I know he attempts to do so from time to time; that is something you can cite when looking for examples of poor mayorship.)

5. Would the cost to retailers make it worth adhering to the ban? Some media coverage (e.g. the first letter to the editor here from C.R. Ihasz) has mentioned that paper bags are significantly more expensive to retailers than plastic, and some coverage has mentioned that some retailers have already ordered and paid for enough plastic bags to meet their anticipated needs for the next 12-18 months. I haven't seen anything about what the consequences of providing plastic bags after the ban would be, but it seems like the sort of thing that would be punishable by a fine. It might be more cost-effective to retailers to continue providing plastic bags in violation of the ban, and just accept any fines as the cost of doing business.

Also, paging C.R. Ihasz: I would like to know the name of your store so I can direct some of my business there.

6. How will this affect farmer's market farmers? When I purchase soft, easily squishable produce (peaches, strawberries, etc.) from a farmer's market, I have them put the Foodland Ontario basket in a plastic bag and carry the bag around by the handles. That protects the fruit from being bruised or smashed as much as possible while keeping it clean and easy to carry. But when I buy harder, sturdier produce (apples, carrots, etc.) I have them take it out of the basket and just put it in a plastic bag. The basket isn't necessary to keep the fruit from bruising or smashing, and it's lighter to carry that way. The farmer keeps the baskets I don't use and fills them up again the next week. But if the farmers can't provide plastic bags and we have to do our market run with reusable bags, then we'll have to keep all our baskets to keep the fruit as segregated as possible in the reusables (or else the apples will bruise the peaches and the carrots will burst the berries.) I'd be using twice as many baskets under these circumstances, which means that my farmers would have to buy twice as many baskets (which are surely significantly more expensive than bags.) Plus, I have no use for the baskets once I get my food home, so that's something even bigger and bulkier going into the waste stream in addition to my usual one plastic bag a day.

7. What about retailers who reuse plastic bags? Some small businesses I patronize (i.e. owner-operated, only one or two employees) don't have their own plastic bags. If I need a bag for my purchase, they give me a bag they used when they bought something at a store, or promotional bags given to them by their vendors. Including these in the ban may would be ridiculous.

8. Legislate handles! If it turns out that City Council isn't able to undo this ridiculous over-reaching ban and retailers are left only able to provide us with paper bags (which would actually increase my household waste footprint, because I have no further use for paper once I get them home so they'd go straight into recycling while I still throw out one plastic bag a day full of food waste), City Council should pass a law requiring all bags to have handles! At least that would solve the logistical problem of an errand trip chain with multiple stops. It's true that a handle requirement would be far beyond the scope of what City Council should be legislating, but so is an outright ban.