Free time

This reminds me of another circular argument: Anything the president does can be considered “acting presidential” simply because they’re president. You might’ve thought that shitposting on twitter was unbecoming of a world leader, but once a president does it, it’s okay for a president to do.

An argument to protect a fool from public criticism now doubles as a defense against legal action.

I tried muting the TV and just reading the captions for a little, and it made me a fair bit more confident in Biden. And he did have some good moments after I turned the sound back on. I’m just worried it won’t be enough. Maybe it’s the anxiety of realizing that we’ve actually reached election season.

I keep tuning in and out. I tune out when Trump speaks because everything he says is just such an affront to objective reality. But then I also tune out when Biden speaks because… He just comes off as so old it’s making me cringe. Like, this is the best we could come up with to combat a literal fucking fascist.

Then I wonder, what part of this am I listening to? The questions?

I think I’m one of the lucky ones with a natural aptitude for music, but I don’t quite take it seriously enough to really hone my skills and become an expert at it. Whenever I’ve tried, I’ve found it to be more stressful than it is fun. I’m not trying to make it a side hustle, so if it stops feeling fun, I back off of it.

I guess it also depends on the instrument a bit. I mostly play solo, and some instruments don’t seem to lend themselves well to that for me. Piano is my instrument of choice these days.

Volume adjusters

That’s every fucking day

This implies the existence of “legal invaders”

What’s your question?

I’m on board. We all know the only acceptable uses of social media are rating the hotness of college classmates, coordinating hookups, and job searching. Strictly the purview of the 18-24 demographic.

I’m on a jammin’ jelly kick right now. Jam on toast, jam in oatmeal, jam in yogurt, jam on… well, that’s about it.

I don’t get triggered just by opening the fridge tho. Usually it’s like “hey I haven’t had this in a while” and I eat it nonstop for like a week until I’m sick of it, then don’t touch it again for a few months. Nutella is currently on the hate list.

Being able to say “oh that was x+1 years ago” instead of “x years ago” when reflecting on all my past traumas.

give my bro harambe a bullet proof vest

Make everyone’s interpretation of “small thing” slightly more similar.

“Using imprecise language as an excuse to create plausible ambiguity about whether defendant violated this Court’s unequivocal gag order is not a defense; the subject of Donald Trump’s public statement to the press was unmistakably clear.”

HR: This email is to inform you of concerns about your professionalism in the workplace.

Me: 👍 🎉 😂

I’ll throw one out for COVID, but not just the lockdowns or the immediate work changes. It was more about how the deaths kept happening. And happening. And happening. Yet people still failed to take it seriously, even to the point of rebelling against seemingly common-sense safeguards like vaccines, masking, and staying the fuck home.

In the US, we lived through about 4 years of shenanigans and bullshit and lies from an incompetent federal government leading up to the pandemic. But surely that wouldn’t fly for long. You can lie about the number of people at a rally (because who the fuck cares), you can apparently lie about where a hurricane is projected to go (because it’s jUsT a PrOjEcTiOn or something), but surely you can’t bullshit your way out of a pandemic. Hospitals at capacity. Bodies piling up. Loved ones lost. Visible, real, tangible impacts of poor leadership and poor decisionmaking.

But, turns out you can. Even in the most dire of circumstances, you can still convince people that reality isn’t real. Or even if it is, it doesn’t really matter and it’s not their problem. And there are enough people out there who will buy into that message that it will ruin things for everyone else.

Edit: To the original point of the question… I guess I had a little more faith in humanity before all that happened. More faith that real-world consequences would win out against rhetorical bullshit and tribalism.

I did this recently. I wanted to refresh my memory on how I dealt with a personal problem several years ago that seemed to be coming up again.

Surprisingly, the details that stuck with me the most over the years were pretty different from the details I focused on in my writing at the time. I remember going through a lot of problems at that time, and I give them pretty equal weight in my memory. But my writing was hyper-focused on one or two things, while everything else was kind of in the background.

Unfortunately, the issue I felt was coming up again recently was one of those things that was in the background in my writing. So I don’t think the exercise was all that helpful for my initial goal.

Less surprisingly, my writing made me seem pretty cringe. I was expecting that, since I was looking back on a younger, dumber version of myself going through a hard time. But it’s still a bit strange. Like, I thought I was acting as rationally as possible at the time, and I give myself a fair amount of credit for that looking back on it. But when I try to read from a more objective perspective, my missteps and character flaws are a lot more apparent.

Sorta makes me wonder which of my present-day actions will make me say, “What was I thinking…” in another 10 years.

You could make that a goal. Go sneak into a playground (after hours, ideally in a non-creepy manner) and swing on a swingset. Or go to a dog park and run around with some puppies. Also ideally in a non-creepy manner.

Or maybe don’t take my advice. I feel like I had one good suggestion and the rest are all bad.

Maybe a pick-up game of basketball? Or try to get real good at shooting free throws on your own?

You don’t always need to be doing productive/constructive things. Rest and leisure are valuable too. But if you insist, I suppose the first step would be to come up with a list of goals you want to accomplish.