A return to normal

For the past twenty years I have been running an annual reunion of gamers from my university crowd.  We go back to the Comfy Lounge where so many games were played back in the late 90s and early 00s and catch up, gamble, and gab.

The past two years we had to do it online.

There are advantages to having this sort of event online of course - there is a certain smell that you can never completely remove from the Lounge, and you don't have that in a video call.  However, it simply isn't the same.  Just being in the room and overhearing people yelling about great rolls or terrible luck in a distant game is a huge part of the joy, and you just can't get that online.

Also hugs.  Those don't work well online either.

This year I am determined to go Back To The Lounge properly, and it seems that the government is cooperating as Ontario will have rolled back its covid regulations by the time the event takes place.

It is going to be *weird*.  Tons of people, in a room, all breathing near each other!  

It does raise all kinds of questions for me though.  It is clear that legally speaking we won't require vaccination or masks, but I don't know for sure what rules the university will have.  It may be that university rules end up deciding how I have to run the event, but if they don't I am not sure what I should do.

If I just say "Everyone welcome, do what you want" I may lose people who aren't yet comfortable going without masks, or who are worried that unvaccinated people might attend.  If I try to insist on restrictions, I might lose people who aren't interested in masking anymore.  (Also I have no legal authority to enforce any restrictions at all!)

There is going to be a lot of adjustment to the new normal.  My crowd of people leans pretty heavily towards vaccination and caution in terms of covid, so it may take awhile before everyone gets back to being easy with being around other humans.

I, on the other hand, am *completely* ready to grind my naked body up against as many humans as possible, revelling in the breath and sweat and goo and raw physicality of it all.  I have spent two years now in hiding from covid, and I am so ready to be done.

Heavy

A few months ago I looked at myself and realized that I had put on some weight over the course of the pandemic.  I had noticed a few times that I had a bigger tummy than before, and finally it was undeniable - this was no longer a 'drank a lot of water' or 'big dinner' tummy, but long term weight gain.  Upon realizing this, it was obvious why.  I had spent many months sitting in my chair, not getting proper exercise.  I was still doing all my weight training but I wasn't doing any walking except to go to the grocery store.

I was also getting high late at night and snacking on all the things way too often.  The pandemic has led to me being frustrated and lonely, not able to do the things I am used to doing that bring me so much joy.  My DnD games were on hiatus, my travels for gaming conventions were all cancelled, board game nights not allowed, and even visiting The Flautist was off the table.  That left me feeling blue, and pot and snacks helped dull the pain and upset.

My response was quick.  I needed to get more active and stop piling junk into my body.  I added on 30 minutes of walking every day and cut out most of the late night snacking.  This was good in other ways too, because quite frankly I didn't need that food and the walks gave Wendy and I time together and improved my mental health on its own, entirely separate from body shape or size.

I am one of those lucky people whose hunger effectively regulates my weight.  If I just eat when I am hungry and eat healthy food my body maintains a weight I am happy about.  I don't have to starve myself to get to a good weight, I just have to stop messing with my appetite with drugs.

Over the past 2.5 months my weight has dropped back closer to where it was pre pandemic.  Before I began weightlifting I was at 175 pounds, and over the last five years I added on 30 pounds of muscle to sit at 205.  In March of this year I was up to around 215, and now I have dropped back down to 210.  This got me thinking a lot about how I think about my body and how society thinks about fat.

The most absurd thing is the way BMI scores me.  For most of my life I was extremely skinny and yet I scored right in the normal range for BMI.  The system takes your height into account, but it does it so badly that everyone who is tall is shifted heavily towards the overweight side of the spectrum.  Right now I am officially overweight by BMI, which is absurd.  I am a skinny guy with a bunch of extra muscle and five pounds of extra fat, there is no possible way I should be considered overweight.  This picture, for reference, is of an officially overweight person.

Yeah.  'Overweight'.  Now it is clear that BMI does not take into account muscle mass.  This makes it a stupid system, but the fact that it takes height into account so badly that tall people of totally normal build are considered overweight is pathetic.  We shouldn't be using this system for medical diagnosis, or anything else.  It is a classic case of measuring what we can easily measure and confusing that for measuring the right thing.

Figuring out a simple system to categorize people's weight isn't easy.  I don't have a replacement system to offer.  (Improving BMI to properly take height into account is easy, and the fact that we haven't done it is an embarassment.)  However, if a system is garbage we shouldn't stick with it just because we don't have an easy alternative.  Sometimes you just have to toss the system out when it is crap.

This did get me thinking about why I so quickly decided to change my lifestyle.  The main thing was I could see that snacking and sitting weren't good for me.  That is true regardless of my weight, and adding in extra walking and fixing my diet are good by all metrics.

However, I can't deny that part of the motivation was that I didn't like the way my tummy looked.  I was thinking to myself "Dammit I do 200 pushups, 56 deadlifts, and 56 rows a day.  Shouldn't I have a bloody six pack?"  I have never had a six pack, and at this point I am never going to.  My extra bit of belly still bothered me though, and it shouldn't.

That 10 exra pounds around my middle is not a health hazard.  Nobody needs a six pack, and in fact getting one is actually hazardous to the health of most people.  Our bodies are made to store some fat!  I looked fine.

But no matter that I have tons of muscle, no matter that I looked fine, my brain still insisted that I absolutely had to change things.  Vanity and desire for status clearly drove my behaviour no matter how much I could use health to justify it.

That is the way our society deals with fat in a nutshell.  We moralize over people's weight, and go on about health hazards, but most of that is just denying the truth that we want to be skinny for status, and we mock heavy people for that same lack of status.

It sucks.

No matter that I know all this, no matter that I don't want to villify fat, I still made a swift and binding decision to change things when I got some of my own.  

A health condition

A few days ago I was getting groceries and had a difficult interaction with a person in the lineup outside the store.  He was an older man who was wearing a mask in a half assed fashion with it loosely covering his mouth but slid down so it no longer covered his nose.  As we stood in line his mask slipped further and further down until it was sitting around his chin.

It is possible that he didn't notice, and this was entirely unconscious, but I am willing to bet a lot of money that the actual explanation isn't "whoops!" but rather "I don't give a shit about covid transmission and masks are annoying, so I will pretend this just happened and I didn't notice".

I politely said to him "Oh, in case you hadn't noticed, your mask appears to have slipped down."  In text that could appear innocuous, but obviously everyone is going to read that as "Put your damn mask on properly fool, I don't want to get covid from you."

He replied by saying that he didn't *have* to have a mask on, because he had a 'medical condition'.  He followed up by snarkily saying that he would put his mask on, just for me.

I found this infuriating.  I am not trying to enforce some sort of arbitrary dress code.  I don't give a shit about the rules!  I care about disease transmission.  This isn't about me trying to make sure everyone does as they are told, it is about me wanting to end this damnable pandemic.  It isn't about whether you *must* wear the mask, it is about doing so because it is your civic duty to protect other people even if you don't care about your own health at all.

I didn't yell all of that at him, much as I wanted to.  He put on his mask, and for the moment it covered all the breathing bits of him.  He got into the store and immediately took his mask off again once he was more than a few meters from me.

Does he actually have a medical condition that makes mask use unsafe for him?  Possible, but I doubt it.  He was wearing and using a mask, but used it only enough to create plausible deniability.  However, his actual medical status doesn't change my situation at all.  I am still pissed about all the people I see putting in the absolute bare minimum amount of effort required to get people off of their backs.  I am pissed about the woman in my building who held a mask five centimeters in front of her face while talking to the concierge in an attempt to pretend she was actually wearing it.  I am grumpy at all the people wandering about the mall with masks hanging half off of their faces, just having it on enough to not get yelled at.

I wish I knew what I should do about these things.  I am a big loud dude - if I get aggressive with people about this stuff, they are likely to do whatever I say.... for just long enough to get out of my presence.  Is it even worth trying to convince selfish jerks to do the right thing if they are only going to do it as long as my gaze is directly on them?

I don't know.  What I do know is watching people who chafe under the restrictions of the pandemic behave in ways that extend the pandemic makes my blood boil.

Boooooring

Yesterday we held Back to the Lounge, my annual university gamer reunion.  Sadly it was virtual instead of in person, but it was still good to get to see some people I hadn't seen in awhile and take some sweet, sweet dollars from others due to their incompetence at barbu.

It sure made me feel boring though.

When someone says "So, what's new?" I used to be able to talk about things I was doing, or at least something in the news I found interesting.  Now I have nothing.

There are two reasons for this - first, everyone is boring now because nobody goes anywhere, meets anyone, or does anything.  If you aren't boring now, odds are good you are a jackass who is taking big risks for no reason.

The second reason is my hiatus from social media.  In the fall I ditched my facebook feed and I don't look at it anymore.  That has been good in a way, because a lot of that feed was full of stress inducing outrage that was useless to me.  It was largely stuff I couldn't do anything about, and focusing and worrying about things you can't change is not useful.  However, I also don't have much to say about anything.  If people want to talk about the impact on world trade of a boat getting stuck in the Suez Canal, I don't have anything to contribute.  I didn't know that was happening until days after.

Having been away from social media for many months now I think that leaving it behind was a good decision.  It isn't without cost, because there were definitely things worth reading on there.  Some of those worthwhile things were just amusing, and some were informative and useful.  An awful lot were just time wasting nonsense though, and in sum I think being away from it is a positive change.

However, I am not sure that combining this with a pandemic is a good idea.  It has left me feeling isolated.  I am not sure that solving feelings of isolation by binging on Facebook is actually a good plan, but definitely my timing could have been better.  

I can't be sure what the optimal, rational course is.  It will be many months yet before we are all vaccinated and life can truly go back to normal.  Until then my ability to generate interesting ideas and stories will be limited.  I can fill the gap with stuff from the news or social media in order to have things to say, but I don't know how much value saying those things has.  Humans use small talk as a crucial part of social interaction, so being stuck for things to say isn't great.  Should I see "Did you see the latest outrageous or unlikely thing on the internet?" as a important piece of having relationships with people, or just a pointless waste of time, filling the air?

Viscerally I don't have the urge to go back on Facebook.  No matter how much I poke at it from various angles, I simply don't have the emotional drive to get back on that wagon.  Even if it does leave me boring as anything, I think my course is charted, and I just have to wait until we finally get covid-19 on the ropes to become a person with interesting things to say again.

Getting better, but not all the way

Our stories about illness often do not reflect the reality.  Too often when we talk about disease we try to put it into convenient buckets - sick, healthy, cured, infected.  The reality of illness is that a huge proportion of health struggles wax and wane over time becoming more or less of a struggle but never completely vanishing.  Even when we are discharged from the care of doctors and people talk as though we are cured we often have to deal with the illness for a great time to come.

Pinkie Pie is a great example of this.  When she was young she had serious kidney problems that led to a four day hospital stay many years ago.  We spent years being careful about diet, water intake, bathroom usage, and other things and still ended up in the hospital or doctor's office many times.  That hasn't been an acute struggle for five years or so now, and in the minds of many people I imagine Pinkie Pie is cured.

She isn't cured.  She never will be. 

Although she isn't cured she is in much better shape.  A short while ago the hospital finally cleared us to stop visiting them and to continue on our lifelong program of managing her illness.  These days that is fairly easy and we rarely think much about it, but I still need to keep on reminding her to do the things that they have told us to do.

It is weird to think about sometimes.  I feel like there should be some giant emotional release of tension to finally get the news that we aren't going to be visiting Sick Kids Hospital anymore.  That release didn't happen though.  She was steadily getting better over years and years and it was clear that this sort of thing was coming.  When they finally told us to go away forever it felt like just another step along a long journey.

I am trained by media to expect a huge reveal "You are cured!" and a subsequent shift in paradigm.  Instead all I have is just a vague sense of relief that we don't have to commute downtown for appointments anymore.

I think this is a more realistic model of illness and recovery than what books, movies, and shows train us to expect.  Disease is rarely one and done, usually leaving a long, difficult trail.

Thankfully after many years and much struggle we are on the easy part of that trail.  We can't entirely relax because the trail could get rough once again, but for now the path is smooth and straight.

Reality is sad

For quite some time I had it in my head that the pandemic would be winding down in the spring.  I had thought that by the time summer started I would be back to doing the best things with the best people.  I have been missing those activities that can't be safely engaged in during these stressful times.  I had all kinds of plans for board game nights that devolved into orgies (carefully not messing up the pieces, of course, that game is going to get finished *properly*).

But it seems that I was overly optimistic.  Canada is apparently planning on having half of its population vaccinated by September 2021.

When I read that it was a punch to the gut.

Another *year* of sitting at home, not able to see many of my favourite people, not able to do my favourite things.

Another year of the World Boardgaming Championships not happening.

Another summer of sitting at home, not able to go out and do the things.

Another year of not seeing my extended family.

It is all kinds of depressing.

I find it hard to figure out what to think of it.  On one hand, I am the sort of person that wants to eat at home anyway - restaurants not opening doesn't matter to me.  I am financially stable still, so I don't worry about that.  I have fun things to do, and I am confident that when it all finally ends I will have much to go back to.  I don't have to take serious risks with my own health, and I can stay at home.  My kid is mostly self sufficient these days, and homeschooling is actually going quite well this year, far better than ever before.

Many people don't have those things.  I don't want to be whining about my circumstances when so many have it so much worse.

Still, knowing that other people have all my problems plus a bunch of extra ones doesn't help me much.  The feelings are still there.

However, there is nothing to be done for it.  I just have to accept that I have another year of being at home, and make the best of it.

You can be damn sure though that when we finally do get the restrictions lifted I am going to have such an outrageous party it will be remembered for years and years to come.  New heights of debauchery must be reached to celebrate the end of the worst crisis of my life so far.

I guess I will hold onto that thought tight, and use it for whatever comfort it can bring.

Better than expected

Covid 19 continues to dominate world conversation.  It actually has been a major factor in why I haven't been posting over the past couple of months, largely because all of my media is saturated by it and I find I don't usually have much to add.  It sucks, people are responding to it badly, life is weird now.  I can say those things, and they are true, but since everybody is saying that it doesn't feel like there is much point in me spewing the same things onto my blog.

But I do have one point to make that may provide a different take on the whole affair:  I am surprised at how well the world is handling the covid crisis.

Don't get me wrong - we could do much better.  The response from some nations and leaders in particular has been heinously self serving and nonsensical, and average people refusing to wear masks as a political signal is also deplorable.

But we are doing a lot better than I figured we would.

At the beginning of all of this I assumed that all nations would refuse any serious measure to contain the virus in the name of economic progress.  I was stunned that so many nations actually came around to policies that closed stores and halted consumption.  I had thought that this simply wouldn't happen.  I figured that leaders would happily sacrifice 50% of the elderly and 1% of the rest of us on the altar of profit.

My expectation, made back in February, was that by this point about 2% of the world population would be dead, and we could easily be as high as 5% by year end.  I didn't expect any sort of serious attempt to stop the virus until every municipality worldwide was digging mass graves, desperately trying to find places to put all the corpses.

There was a reason I stocked up on food in those early days, and in part it was because I thought that we would have a far worse lockdown period following a monstrous dieoff due to covid.  Instead most countries had a moderate lockdown much earlier than I expected and it seems like the deaths from covid will be serious, but shouldn't even come close to 1% of world population, much less 5%.

(So far about .01% of world population has died to covid, and while it is still rising, it seems like we will have a vaccine long before we threaten to have 1% of us die from this.)

We could do much better, yes.  But we already did an awful lot better than I expected of us, so humanity surprised me in a positive way.  I normally like to whinge about how terrible people are, but I figurd I should at least note when it goes the other way and they surprise me in a good way.

In more normal covid news, I have grown a covid beard.  I already got called santa claus by a surprised family member, and nobody thinks it looks good, but this is apparently what I am doing with my time.

Covid and privilege

One thing that the covid crisis has shone a light on is privilege of many sorts.  The death toll goes across all demographics, but the trend is clear - those with less privilege are dying far more often.  Poor people, people of colour, homeless people, these are the ones dying far more often than white rich folks.  As I understand it this is one of the few situations where men don't have extra benefits - they are dying more of covid than women are.

When we talk about the crisis we should think carefully about what privilege we have that impacts it.  I see many people talking about how others ought to behave, and those statements are usually coloured by the speaker's position in life.  Those living with partners strongly object to people seeing anybody outside their home and can't imagine why anyone would.  Certainly there are risks to doing so, but if you are partnered and have somebody around to meet your needs for sex, cuddling, hugging, and whatever else you should be cautious to judge those who don't.

It is easy to talk about never leaving your house when you have somebody at home with you, but telling someone that they should simply never have human contact for months or even a year is a harsh thing when they live alone.  We know that telling teenagers that abstinence is the only way is a failure of strategy, and the same applies here.

That doesn't mean we should all be going to orgies, obviously.  It does mean that we have to accept that human contact is necessary for manypeople, and if you find that easy to get, you should hesitate to judge those who don't.

The same sort of thing applies with wealth.  If you have children and you live in a house with a yard this pandemic is drastically easier than if you are trying to cope with them in a 2 bedroom apartment.  Telling someone that they have to sit in the same physical space as their kids for months or a year is a completely different thing when you can retreat to a study, send them to the yard, or go exercise in the garage.  When you literally can't get more than 4 meters from them, the situation is not the same.

We don't tax people by charging everybody 20k in taxes and just accepting that this crushes the poor and barely tickles the rich.  We charge a percentage, asking those who have more to contribute more.  Something of the same philosophy needs to be considered with the crisis.  Nobody has a pass to going to parties with random people, but people in challenging circumstances should have more flexibility in how they cope than those who have it easier.

There are all kinds of ways we should apply this.  If you are a knowledge worker with highly desirable skills, you need to accept that someone with precarious employment is going to need to return to work sooner.  Surely there are many other kinds of examples, but the general key is to keep in mind that people's circumstances can be wildly different from your own, and that just because you don't find a rule a problem doesn't mean that it is workable for everyone.

I support strong precautions against covid, and I think we should definitely deal with it by implementing universal basic income.  I don't think we should reopen the economy quickly.  I do think though that we should all be careful how we judge others behaviour when they clearly have far less privilege than we do.  Nobody needs parties or conventions, but we do need security and contact, for starters, and we all should put a lot of effort into removing risk, while accepting that someone else may not have the resources to give as much as we do.

Algorithms, smart and stupid

Facebook has been shoving a new ad at me.  I am full of ambivalence about it, because I both want to praise the targetting of the ad and also ridicule it.

The ad was for a jaw exercising device.   It looks like a donut shaped piece of silicone, and the idea is that you chew on it to give yourself a chiselled jawline.  The actor in the ad talked about being 48 and how he used the device to get back his youthful jaw.

I am 41, and into fitness, so that much they got right.

Unfortunately for them, they also assumed that I am ignorant and desperate.

You can't fix saggy skin with muscle exercises.  You also can't remove subcutaneous fat with targetted regimens.  You *can* generally remove subcutaneous fat from your body with exercise, but you sure as hell can't pick a spot and nuke the fat right there.  This jaw chiselling device is a ridiculous scam.  It is no different from the Ab Blasters I saw advertised on TV when I was young.  Exercise is good for you, sure, but you can't pick a spot and nuke it!  You can pick a spot and make it strong, but the body removes fat where it wants to.

Facebook is hit and miss with these things.  It does aim a lot of board game and video game ads at me, which is accurate, but it also really tries to sell me trucks, which is a total non starter.

But the truck ads are understandable.  I am in a age and income bracket where buying a vehicle is plausible.  The most outrageous miss I have ever seen is when FB started sending surrogate mother ads at me.  Much as I might like to help infertile people to have children, I lack some key things that are required for that endeavour.  Shouldn't FB have my sex sorted by now?

I can't quite sort out how much to respect algorithms.  Sending a gym rat like me ads for adjustable home dumbbells during a time when I can't go to a gym?  Great idea!  (I am not buying, but it is a well targetted ad.)  But singing lessons?  Not so much.

The algorithms are getting better, and sometimes they do make great decisions, but we are a long way away from Skynet.

Learning from disaster

The ongoing crisis has taught me some things.  While I hang out at home a lot, I apparently chafe at the requirement of staying home.  I suppose that isn't unusual, but present circumstances certainly bring it into stark relief.  I also discovered that while I support substantial restrictions on our collective behaviour to combat covid-19, some of them really grind on me.

Throughout my life a lot of things I try to do have been criticized by people under the umbrella of 'safety'.  Going barefoot, you can't do that because safety!  Polyamory, you can't do that, because safety!  Marijuana, you can't use that, because safety!

My usual response to this is to bristle with indignation and then swing back, hard.  I tend to go on about how those same people yelling about safety happily support all kinds of things that are drastically more dangerous, and argue that their real issue with my behaviour is simply that I am doing something different than they are used to, but they fall back on 'safety' when they have no real arguments.

Sometimes I don't have time for debating the topic and my response boils down to

FUCK YOU I DO WHAT I WANT.

It turns out the restrictions on behaviour because of Covid-19 push my buttons because of this.  I agree that I should stay at home, and I agree that we must endure inconvenience to make grocery shopping less likely to transmit diseases, and I agree with most the things we are doing.

But damn when authorities tell me how to live because 'safety' my instinct is to snarl and tell them to get bent.

Even though those arguments from safety are well grounded these days I have gotten so used to safety being thrown around as a catch all for 'I have no actual reasons or data' that it really winds me up.

This came up in regards to grocery store population caps.  Recently I was really grumpy after a grocery store visit where the security person enforcing store population sat on his phone ignoring everything and occasionally looked up and motioned a random bunch of people into the grocery store.  The cashiers were standing around bored because the security guard wasn't keeping enough people in the store, and the people waiting in the enormous line were standing close together, often chatting with one another.  Keeping us all in line was simply increasing the danger to all of us, not just wasting our time but also *increasing* our risk. 

It bothers me to restrict people's behaviour for no gain, but it *really* burns my bridge when regulations in the name of safety actually make things worse.  It is a tough thing to argue though, because I actually support greater safety measures that are effective, and if I argue against restrictions people will naturally assume I am in denial of some kind, or that I buy into the 'let all the old people die to save the stock market' thing.

While I don't think I will come out of this mess with new skills, I suspect I will end up at least learning a few things about myself.

Number Five

Planning orgies in Ontario just got a lot more complicated.  They aren't the easiest thing to plan at the best of times, but right now the challenge is extreme.

The government just announced that gatherings of more than five people are banned.  This leaves the door open for orgies, but just barely.  Three people is a threesome, four is a foursome, and five or more is an orgy, so orgies are still just barely legal.

There are some tricks to this though.  If you invite exactly five people to your orgy you have the problem that if anybody ditches you don't have an orgy anymore.  You might still have a grand time, but an orgy it is not.  During the best of times getting everyone to show up to an orgy is rough, and right now it is extra difficult between covid-19 and anxiety about covid-19.  Invite seven people and you might still not have enough, but if they all show up you are breaking the law, to say nothing of being extreme disease vectors.

However, we can get creative.  Hitting exactly five for an orgy is tough, but there are some exceptions in the government's five person policy that could potentially get us a venue for a larger group without breaking the law.

We could, for example, hold an orgy with up to ten people at a funeral.  I met The Flautist at a funeral so you can definitely pick up in that atmosphere.  A funeral orgy would require some real planning, but the flexibility to invite ten people and still proceed even if some of them decide to just mourn instead of have sex is useful.

Another exception we could use is to hold it at a child care center for front line workers.  This has some ... other challenges.  I suppose we could just invite ten people to a closet in a child care center, but I don't know that actually completing the orgy would be likely.  For some reason I imagine the police would have something to say about that.  The funeral plan looks a lot better.

The last possibility is holding it amongst your household.  Households larger than five people are allowed to hang out together, and nothing prevents you having an orgy amongst everyone living with you.  You just need a household where you have at least five adults willing to have an orgy already living together!  There is side benefit that if they accept the invite they can't beg off by claiming it is too far away or they don't have time - they are already there, and what else were they doing anyway?

It has been a long time since I lived in a household where an orgy amongst the residents would have been possible.  It wasn't ever going to happen in any case, but it would have been legal for us to do that back in 2001-2002.

So in Ontario it seems that your orgy options are quite limited.  A regular orgy ignores social distancing protocols, funerals are a tough sell for some people, and child care centers are full of children.  The only reasonable chance is to live with at least four other people in a household who all want to have an orgy with you.  Of course, if you already live in that situation you have it pretty good as far as orgies go!  Another example of the rich getting richer, it would seem.

Against the current

My life often involves me refusing to do what everyone else is doing.  Other people wear shoes, I refuse.  Other people refuse to put bananas in pasta sauce, I toss em right in.  (They were delicious, by the way.)

This time it is all about employment.  Around the world people are dealing with the loss of income due to social distancing protocols and the struggle to find work is real. 

I have spent the past 11 years unemployed, staying home with my kid, cooking and cleaning.  Getting a job seemed silly because I am needed here.

But now that all kinds of people are suddenly unemployed?  I am looking for work!

Not because of some money crunch, because my household luckily is supported by an extremely steady income, but simply because there is a desperate need for the work to get done.  A local hospital is hunting for people to do screening, so they need someone who can deal with upset and difficult people for extended periods while being assertive, authoritative, but compassionate.

This is a thing I am extremely well trained for.  They are only asking for a high school diploma, but I actually have work experience interfacing between a medical establishment and challenging clients, as well as a bunch of generic sales experience.  Heck, I was even known as the guy to park with a customer who had mental health challenges or who was having an emotional breakdown. 

They need exactly me for this!

So I applied for the job, part time.  I am sure the actual work will be wretched.  The screening gear will be terrible, dealing with sick and terrified people isn't fun, and there will be endless bureaucratic protocol that I hate.

But this has to get done, it has to get done well, and I am the person to do it.

Plus I desperately need to get out of my place and *do* something.

Not that I have the job yet.  They haven't called me for an interview or anything, much less given me the job.  But I have no doubt the combination of my expertise at interviews, excellent qualifications, and straight white guy privilege will get me through.

Maybe what I was waiting for all these years was a job I really wanted to do, because it really needed doing and I am actually the person who should be doing it.

Covid19 giveth, and Covid19 taketh away

Much of my life has vanished over the last week due to Covid19.  My gaming groups have all called it quits, my trips to Ottawa and Waterloo for gaming and socializing got cancelled, and now my building has closed the gym and hot tub for the forseeable future.  Aside from grocery shopping I have no reason at all to leave my condo anymore.

But while the virus has taken much from me, it has opened up new doors.  For example, even though I can't lift weights anymore because the gym is gone, I found something new to do in its stead, courtesy of our viral overlord.

Grocery bags filled with emergency food are my new weight lifting solution.  It isn't as good as proper weights of course, because exercises like deadlifts don't work with objects as large as this.  However, there are enough exercises that do work that I can use these as a clumsy and annoying replacement for proper weights.

As I said in my post a few weeks ago, I bought a lot of groceries well ahead of time to get prepared for the inevitable supply chain disruptions and the possibility of quarantine.  I collected the last few things this week, but my household was well prepared for this mess.  I may get bored of pasta and vegetable soup, but we won't go hungry.  Boost and ramen, as pictured above, aren't exactly my ideal meals, but my small person has particular tastes that must be accomodated.

You might wonder why I am weighing bags down with packages of ramen - surely those weigh nothing?  You would be right that they a bag full of ramen would be nearly worthless.  However, the bottoms of these bags are full of canned soup and bags of beans, which add considerably more heft.  They still weigh quite a bit less than the weights I am used to using, but I just increased my reps to make up for that and overall it still works.

Grocery bags full of cans don't have nearly the flexibility of a proper weight room though, so I expect that there are certain muscles that won't be getting the workout I desire.  I am going to be doing two hundred pushups a day in additional to grocery based exercises, so at least my ability to launch myself up off the floor will remain intact.

Covid19 can take away my gaming.  It can take away my dates.  But it cannot take my muscles!

Armageddon, but for farms

I am back from Farmageddon.  I travelled to North Carolina on the 26th and got home yesterday.  It was a grand time with so many games played.  Even though the event was themed around the game Agricola I only played it five times over ten days of gaming - I don't even know how many different games I played but I had a great time in any case.

North Carolina gives me culture shock.  The group at Farmageddon was pretty liberal and fit with my politics fine, but when driving around or wandering through airports I was often taken aback.  Last time the thing that got me was the emphasis on the military and veneration of active duty military personnel, as well as people wearing clothes that made it clear they wanted to murder people.  This time the strange thing was medical ads.

There are advertising pushes for hospitals here in Canada, but they are fundraising drives.  I think this is stupid and we should just tax more to fund them properly rather than wasting money making ads, but I don't get to decide this stuff unfortunately.  However, in the US the ads were different because they didn't seem to be about fundraising but rather about recruiting patients.  The idea of medical institutions having ad teams to drum up business blows my fucking mind.  How is this the way it works?

I knew that medicine in the US was privatized, of course.  Sometimes though these things catch me unawares and I realize that I hadn't followed it to its logical conclusion.  Why is healthcare in the US so ludicrously expensive?  Lots of reasons... but one of them is patients are paying for advertising aiming to bring in more patients!

The free market is a useful tool, good at many things.  Running hospitals is not one of them.

A consequence of travelling to visit my parents from the 21st to 25th and then travelling to play board games from the 26th to 6th is that my workout routine is completely disrupted.  I can do pushups anywhere, and I can do pullups off of a beam at my parent's place, but that isn't a proper workout.

During Farmageddon I found another person who was really into the whole gym rat lifestyle, and we figured out how to get our workouts into days that are full of games.  We set up challenges where we would do clap pushups based on game actions, which ended up with me doing something like 75 clap pushups over the course of a single game.  I made a lot of time in between game turns into pushup time over the days I was away, but I really didn't know how my fitness level would hold up.  Today I finally got back to the routine, and I found out that my constant pushup sets during gaming kept those muscles in good shape.  All of my push exercises were no problem.  The other exercises were pretty rough though.  However, this means it shouldn't take long for me to get completely back into fighting shape.

I wonder how much me running away from the game table to crack out 25 pushups all the time affected other people.  Were they just laughing at me?  Annoyed at the interruption?  Vaguely amused that I refused to take a week off?  I don't know!  I do know that I feel better when I get my muscles sore though, so I am going to keep on doing this as a way to cope with a lack of a proper gym.

As much as I enjoyed my time there though, I am glad to be home.  I need my own space, my own kitchen, my own computer, and some quiet and silence.  No matter how great people are, at some point I gotta run away.  I certainly am not an extreme introvert, but I trend that way without a doubt.

False alarm

A short while ago I wrote a post about how Pinkie Pie is doing better.  School was going better, though not great, and she was really up from where she was in months past.  Things were really improving.  I got lots of people telling me how happy they were that her mental health situation had finally improved.  Yay!

And then everything fell apart.  It isn't surprising, as it was just this exact time of year two years ago that her challenges first arrived.  Darkness and cold are not good for her.  She has fallen back from school being a challenge, but basically working, to just lying in bed all day every day.

It tears me apart.  I have to be available, there to try to get her up for school, try to get her to school in the afternoon, try to keep her life going.  Despite being there, I just can't *do* anything to make it happen.  All I can do is watch.

There is some extra frustration in having so recently written that things were going well.  I don't want to be going back and forth, cataloguing every change, but after several months of improvement I felt like there was real reason for optimism, and it was worth telling people about.  Then, without warning, it all collapses in a heap.

Now I have to face a ton of conversations where people ask after her, expecting more good news, and I have to tell all of them how much of a catatrophe I am facing.

Giving out news about health is such a fraught, messy process.  I don't like it.

I know that doing it via blog posts isn't ideal, and has its issues.  This is more than a news source though, it is therapy for me, so I write here as much for myself as for informing the world.

I just want to tell all the doctors to stand aside, I am going to fix this shit myself.  No more waiting for their slow, ponderous processes to make decisions.  I also know they won't put up with that, because they have to protect kids from parents who don't know what they are doing.  I get that in general putting an administrative wall between parents and treatment options is a useful thing.  But I can see so clearly what needs to happen, and I can't make it happen.

All I can do is sit here, wait, and feel helpless before a thing I can't argue with, or fight, or fix.

Not made of steel, apparently

10 days ago I was working out in the gym and I damaged myself.  Weight lifting is a pretty safe exercise regimen, assuming you don't do anything really foolish, but I managed to injure my body anyway.  The exercise that got me?  Leg raises.

I have done thousands of leg raises at this machine, but 10 days ago I got distracted or something and brought my feet up wrong, catching the left one on the little metal peg you see in the picture.  It hurt pretty bad at the time but I kept on with my routine and finished everything just fine.  That night I was moving around on crutches, it was swollen 3 cm above usual size, and I was in agony.  But over the next couple of days it seemed to get better so I figured on just waiting till it healed.  I could stand on the balls of my feet easily enough, so I was confident it was only a terrible bruise, not a bone break.

That discolouration you see is all bruising, no dirt or bad lighting.  This photo was taken a week after the damage, and I was still limping around really bad and feeling a lot of pain.  It was bad enough that I even skipped out on helping Naked Man move furniture - and it takes quite a bit of damage to keep me from honouring a commitment to move a heavy object.

I was on course to just ignore it but Wendy and The Flautist were not on board with that.  They both kept fussing at me to go to the doctor, and while I wasn't into that plan, eventually I succumbed to the pressure and went in.  I got an xray, and lo and behold I was right and it is purely meat damage.  The only cure is to take it easy and wait.

So now I am sitting around home all day waiting for my stupid foot to fix itself.  I have managed, so far at least, to avoid saying "I told you so!" directly to either Wendy or the Flautist, but I did decide to crow about it on the internet.

I have spent many years imagining what getting doubled teamed by my wife and my girlfriend on my birthday would be like.  Those dreams didn't include quite so much "Book a doctor's appointment you doorknob, you aren't actually made of steel." or "Sit down and let somebody else do that, or you are never going to get better."  and instead had .... other characteristics.  This, I think, is a great example of polyamory as it actually is, instead of how people think it is.  Outsiders mostly seem to think it is about nonstop orgies, when mostly it is just about coping with the random junk life throws in your way, just like it is for everybody else.

Everyone is like me

The other day I was at a doctor's appointment with Pinkie Pie.  (Routine, everything is fine.)  The two doctors we were seeing were ones we had never talked to before, and they were trying to make small talk with Pinkie Pie.  Of course they asked the one thing everyone asks a kid - what grade are you in?  That she is being homeschooled came up, and they seized on that.  They started asking about university entrance exams for homeschooled kids (I don't know much about it, to be honest) and made it clear that the really important thing about homeschooling was getting good grades on said exams... even though none of us even knew if said exams existed.

They also talked about how wonderful homeschooling was because you can apply to university years early and get started on your career faster.  I tried to explain that going to university at age fifteen wasn't for everyone, but they were off, chatting to each other about how great it was that she was being homeschooled so she could skip tons of grades and get working sooner.

It doesn't surprise me that a couple of doctors would see it this way.  Their world mostly consists of overachievers who put an uncommon amount of time and energy into their careers.  For them, going to university early would have been fine, from a academic perspective at least.

But from my perspective people have forty years to do the career thing, and only a handful of years to do the teenager thing.  Rushing to the working world is fine if that is what the teenager in question really wants, but pushing it onto them, or assuming that this is obviously the thing you should do, is a destructive error.  They will have so long to grind away in a job - let them grow into it organically, no need to force the issue.

What is particularly frustrating though is how they projected their worldview and experiences onto my kid.  They didn't think "Well, there are a ton of reasons for homeschooling, maybe I should ask what the reason is."  They immediate leaped to the assumption that I am homeschooling with the purpose of giving my brilliant, overachieving child a head start on her career.  If they had asked I might have said that homeschooling is because I want to teach from the Bible, or because fuck the system man, or because school isn't working for her, and those are completely different situations than they are imagining.

Also my kid, while fairly clever, isn't by any means overachieving.

Doctors making all kinds of silly assumptions doesn't affect me directly.  These guys assumed that everyone is in the top 5% of humanity academically, and don't notice the fact that this isn't possible, but people assume plenty of things more ridiculous than that.

But it bothers me that they don't seem to notice how it will affect kids in their care.  12 year olds aren't stupid, and when you make it clear that your standard of normal far exceeds their capabilities they notice.  When you lead off with the assumption that this kid finds school trivial, that academics are effortless, and that marks on exams are the important thing, you leave kids who struggle in school, get low grades, and do poorly on exams feeling even worse than they already do.  Kids that have trouble in these ways are sent the message that they suck constantly and they don't need more of it from their physicians.

A lot of the world struggles mightily with the structures we have in place to measure, control, and evaluate each other.  Just because *you* fit nicely into those structures doesn't mean everyone does.  Those doctors surely would have agreed that some kids really have trouble in school, but they never bothered to think that the kid they are treating might well be one of those, and just assumed that she was just like them instead.

I want the world to be a place where a lot more people spend a lot more time thinking "What if this person in front of me is someone who finds this thing hard, even if *I* find it easy?" 

Serious Medicine

I was at a marijuana dispensary earlier this week, and what I saw there amused me to no end.  I wasn't actually buying MJ myself, just accompanying someone else to get her own supply.  I was under the impression, prior to going, that dispensaries were regulated and serious, supplying medicine to people who needed it.  Also they were clearly just selling to anyone who wanted to pay.  However, I expected some sort of cursory screening process and at least a pretense of officialness.

I didn't even get a pretense.

The dispensary had a board of daily specials.  Now I may not be any kind of medical expert, but I feel like daily special such as "Hash Wednesdays!" aren't quite selling the 'serious medicine' thing.  Nor was the plate of cookies, the trance music, or the checkout clerk vaping in the corner.

I don't mind any of that of course.  MJ shouldn't be illegal and there is no compelling reason why people should have to jump through crazy hoops to get it.  It should be sold with just as much hucksterism as anything else.

But that contrast between the fact that MJ is clearly being sold as a recreational drug and the official line that it is still illegal here is staggering.  The government is maintaining the line that MJ is dangerous and that it is under control so that all the pearl clutchers can stop worrying about reefer madness while at the same time officials basically ignore MJ being sold openly.  We have this foolish, destructive, hypocritical system that can't decide if MJ should just be lightly regulated and otherwise ignored (it should be) or if it is a dangerous drug that has to be kept away from people no matter the cost.

A week from now MJ will become legal here.  We will finally be able to use it without worrying that we will be tossed in jail, our lives torched in order to prevent us from feeling sleepy and snacky.  Naturally the government is rolling this out in a completely idiotic way, using a single government supplier that won't even have any brick and mortar locations in the beginning.  The lack of competition in supply and the lack of freedom of purchasing means that people will continue to buy from illegal sources, funnelling money into organized crime.

Legalization is a good first step, but the Ontario government is still proceeding as if they can prevent MJ usage by simply making production by the private sector illegal.  A cursory examination of any part of human history can teach us that this is foolish in the extreme.

There are a lot of things that the free market is bad at, but providing MJ is one of the things it would actually be good at.  Tight fisted government control just makes things worse.

At least there is some measure of progress, and in a week I can wander down to my local dispensary and fill out an official looking form to buy my weed without worrying about being imprisoned for my troubles.  That much, at least, is looking up.

Like a shoe

This past summer I had my first experience of having sex with a male.  I had big plans for a blog post after the experiment, figuring I could talk about how much or how little the label bisexual applied to me now.  How bi am I? seemed like an appropriate title.

The answer to the question is:  Basically not at all.

Afterwards I described the experience as being similar to having had sex with a shoe.  I don't personally eroticize shoes at all, they are just an object, and this was similar.  It wasn't horrifying or bad, and no internalized homophobia manifested.  It just didn't do it for me.

This should not be read as though anything said male partners did was wrong.  Honestly the experience for me had little to do with what they did, because the physical sensations were perfectly good and expected.  I don't think of them as objects in other ways, but as far as sex with me goes, the magic thing that normally happens just wasn't there, in the same way it wouldn't be there with any other thing I don't eroticize, like say my own hand.  Apparently I have a strict hierarchy of experiences:  On top is sex with females, then masturbation, then sex with males.  Masturbation is superior to sex with males because I can quit when I want and I don't need to be concerned with anyone else's needs, which is convenient, though it does sound ruthless and selfish.

It turns out that all my years of double takes at exposed cleavage and open mouthed awe at wide, curvy hips really did indicate that female bodies are the thing that launch my boat.  I wasn't really doubting that, but I figured there might be a little bit more flexibility in my orientation if I gave it a try, and now having tried it I am forced to conclude that I am really quite straight.  Heteroflexible is a reasonable term since it would be fine if I had sex with a male, but I don't see much reason to pursue that.

All of which is too bad because I really liked the idea of being bisexual.  I know it is hard for lots of people and there is plenty of bigotry out there, but given who I am and how my life is I expect it would be an upgrade for me.  Turns out, that ain't happening.

I am glad to have given this a try though.  Learning is fun!

One odd consequence of this is that I cannot legally donate blood in Canada now.  Men who have had sex with men are banned from doing that.  That rule goes away after one year, presuming I stop having sex with men completely.  It is perfectly safe though if I have lots of sex with lots of women... or so goes the theory.  I haven't ever donated blood anyway, (which I should have done, really) but this ruleset is still troubling to me.

Five figures of steps

People really want to get their 10,000 steps in.  My father in law has a fitbit and aims to get his 10k a day, Wendy has her phone tracking her steps, and lots of other people I know do the same.  Of course there is nothing magical at all about 10,000 steps.  People have all kinds of different needs and capabilities and there is no reason at all to assume that 10,000 is somehow the 'correct' amount of exercise.  10,000 is just a thing because it is a big round number and we humans really like those.

I read an article talking about this, and it managed to really miss the point.  The article pointed out correctly that there isn't any hard medical science suggesting that 10,000 is the optimal number of steps for health.  But was anyone really thinking that?  With all the confounding factors going into it it seems blatantly clear to me that 10,000 is just a convenient round number that happens to be attainable for a normal person with an interest in walking.  1,000 is clearly trivial for most people, and 100,000 is near impossible, so 10,000 it is.

Here is the trick.  Sure, there isn't any medical evidence that 10,000 is correct.  But if you stop there you are missing something big.  There is plenty of evidence to suggest that walking is good for you, that people stick to walking regimens if they have clear goals and can treat it like a game, and that one major barrier to sticking to walking regimens is consistency.  10,000 isn't some magical thing that comes from physiology, it is a magical thing that comes from psychology.

We aren't doing 10,000 steps for medical reasons, we are doing it because fitbits and step trackers and big round numbers help us keep to a healthy routine.  We are using brain hacks to get ourselves to do things we know we should do.

That is a good thing!

And by we, I don't mean me, because I don't walk that much, and I don't track my steps.  If I need more exercise I go to the gym and lift more and harder, because I like tracking those numbers a lot more.  Doing 28 pushup sets or 30 pushup sets isn't something medicine has an opinion on, but I use the numbers to motivate me to healthy behaviour.

Our society so often seems to get caught up in which exercise is perfect, and what exactly we can do to sculpt our bodies just the way we want.  We shouldn't be bothering.  The trick is to find something to get yourself moving that you will enjoy and stick to.  The details of the exercise are unimportant, all you need to do is do something, and keep doing it.