A beautifully produced video of a beautifully produced garment.
A reminder that this is what we can get to if we put in the work.
That beauty is transcendent, and we have the power to make it.
The capacity for beauty lies within us.
Sweep away the chaff and allow it to shine.
*Complete sentences are for days that are not Saturday.
It’s been a while since I’ve talked about carnivory. (Mostly because I don’t want to wax poetic about poop on this blog but that’s another story for another day.)
One of the lines of argument that carnivores use against the constant cries that “you simply HAVE to eat vegetables!” is the anatomy argument. Where ruminants have 27 thousand different stomachs to digest all that grass, humans have one. Much like carnivores, we also have sharp teeth and high acid content in our stomachs.
There are lots of studies and arguments and graphs that show why humans are built more like carnivores than they are like herbivores. There’s plenty of anecdotal data (if you’ve ever read a vegan forum) of people’s digestive systems getting completely wrecked by a vegan diet. Again, statistics and numbers and arguments.
Then, there’s this:
A succinct argument in meme form. Boom, done. QED.
I can’t stop laughing.
On the personal front, switching to an all animal product diet has been one of the best decisions that I’ve made in recent years. I haven’t eaten a plant-based product for five months, and while healing is slow, it’s been fairly steady.
As I’ve searched for “natural” methods to control my autoimmune illness, I’ve focused (perhaps overly so) on diet. After a while, I felt like I could blame everything on what I ate. Taking a whole host of variables out of my diet has revealed how much variability in symptoms has absolutely nothing to do with what I eat. In fact, the lack of margin with food highlights just how much stress or lack of sleep impacts my health. I’m still terrible at exercising regularly, but I’m seeing a few glimmers of how exercise could provide some immediate, direct impacts.
My only diet-related issue is that I keep eating cheese. I have found that raw-milk cheddar is the best option, and eaten only in conjunction with meat. Otherwise, it doesn’t provide enough “matter” for my digestive system to tackle seriously.
Overall, though, no regrets. I may just be able to make it work without drugs. And that, my friends, I never thought that I could say.
I’m in the midst of a massive transition. Wrapping up an old job, getting started with a new one. Defragging my possessions and moving to a new town — with no place to live yet. (Not for lack of trying.) Living in the midst of chaos, as my two roommates are also packing up and moving out.
God has very clearly laid out the path, but it is surrounded with chaos and uncertainty and newness.
Today, I am feeling it. All of the tasks I feel I have to complete before I’m “allowed” (by whom?) to finish. All the things that I “should” (according to what?) do before I leave town. What is the “proper” way to sort, to clean, to pack?
There are two options: recalibrate, or distract. Focus, lean in, do the work. Writing this blog post is helping some, but I bet doing the work of packing will help even more. Forget should (one of my top 5 most-hated words) and just do. It doesn’t have to be right, just done.
Focus, and make it through.
Dear Supreme Leader:
Effective immediately, I am resigning from my position in your illustrious department. While I am grateful that you hired me, and have grown tremendously in your employ (and to your service), it is time for me to move on.
You see, in my personal hours I have been madly cultivating my love of words and writing and have grown up a [consulting service / editing gig / bestselling novel series, whichever comes first] that is now demanding my full-time attention. This is a somewhat unexpected, but not unwelcome, turn of events and I am compelled to pursue it.
Yes, this is a huge change of life. Yes, it may all come crashing down around my years. But also yes, I must go.
Of course you can trust that I will work to help hire and train my replacement, but let’s get real, academic timing is so slow that I’ll be long gone before HR can approve the position. As such, I’ll make sure that my records are in order and will leave you with a tidy list of my responsibilities that you can divvy out as you see fit.
It has been a pleasure working with you, and I wish you and the team every blessing in the future.
Sincerely,
Me
PS. I voted for Trump.
Two months into my no-shampoo adventure, my scalp started feeling pretty healthy. (Especially after I started using a great hairbrush.) Rather than feeling like there was a bunch of grime building up on my hair, my hair started to feel smooth and soft. My scalp has felt more healthy, without weird scaly bits or random sores that used to pop up now and again. It’s been pretty cool feeling my scalp normalize and heal over the course of time.
Sure my hair still looked a bit greasy at the end of the day, but that’s nothing I can’t handle.
But then I decided to get a haircut.
Haircuts typically come with a shampoo, and this was no exception.
Now I’m dealing with a couple different scratchy scaly sore patches on my scalp.
Coincidence?
I doubt it.
I learned something today, that I think will stick with me for a great long while.
I thought I was negotiating for a new job. Trusted associates were giving me advice, tips on what to ask for and how to ask for it. Different industries and types of businesses have different ways of doing things.
Money vs. time vs. flexibility — what’s most important?
Turns out that none of that mattered, because my supervisor pre-negotiated on my behalf.
While I’m not sad about the outcome, I do feel like I missed a crucial point of inflection for learning how to negotiate. Instead of giving me the opportunity to try and fail, or to fail to try, I was given the end result.
Now, I’m not ungrateful. Don’t get me wrong.
But I do question methods.
If the data suggests that women fail to negotiate more often, and that part of the so-called wage gap exists because failure-to-negotiate leads to a smaller base salary that leads to smaller percentage-based raises 10 or 20 years down the line, wouldn’t it also make sense that you would want to demonstrate to women that they can negotiate, and reinforce that behavior by rewarding it with a salary raise?
So set the stage. Grease the wheels a little bit. Maybe carve out a “yes” from the HR compensation people first, then wait for a girl to try to negotiate up and reward her.
Giving it up front teaches the lizard brain that we can just expect it in the future, and we absolutely cannot.
This method is harder to watch, because it requires risk and includes the possibility of failure, either to plan or to execute. But it also means real success at the end.
Create an environment where someone can succeed by setting an expectation, providing necessary resources, greasing the wheels if need be, and then stepping back to let her learn how to fly.
Artificial, a bit, but effective.
I want to learn how to lead people like that.
Not by doing things for them and expecting them to learn the lesson despite that fact. That’s how you create dependents, not independents.
Colors are fun. A cohesive color palette can be even funner. And it’s funnest when you run across those color palettes in the wild.
Take, for instance, this twitter photo:
Courtesy of @Watchman_motto’s wife’s new studio
Guys. I love a good green/blue color scheme. It’s the color of trees and sky on a clear summer day — God’s perfect creation.
Add a little bit of yellow for sizzle and gray for grounding? Get outta here.
Abstracted from the photo, this reminds me of a sophisticated take on the Seattle Seahawks.
Or, perhaps a relaxed bank or financial firm. Lots of green to make you think of money, but in a youthful way. Gotta sucker those Millennials into taking on more debt before Gen Z comes of age.
When a random documentary photo is enticing enough to make you want to live there, I think the color palette will be welcoming too.
Now that I think about it, I might lessen the influence of that bright blue and put it on par with the yellow, offsetting with more of the green color.
But that’s just quibbling about the price.
The end.
in a particularly unflattering passage about Gamma males in Vox Day’s new book.
Bear in mind that the socio-sexual hierarchy only describes men. I’m a woman. However, I know how this goes:
The Gamma believes that if he admits to the truth of his own feelings, he will lose. This is why he is always creating the impression that something is off about him, because it is. Even more than with the social hierarchy, the Gamma is at war with himself and with his feelings. This is why they often appear to be living in a delusion bubble of their own creation, and why they so often idolize Spock and human reason. They like to think they are beyond all human emotions, because they find their own emotions to be painful for the reasons that were described above.
Vox also provides a path out of Gamma-ness: “Face your demons. Face your fears. Look into the mirror and admit the truth.”
I remember being in my late teens and wishing desperately that I could be a robot so that I would not have emotions to contend with. As I’ve grown (realizing that Spock is in fact a fictional character and emotions aren’t going anywhere) and gone through various types of emotionally-charged situations since then, I’ve also figured out that each time I encounter a new emotion, I have to 1) take the time to figure out what the emotion is, 2) pinpoint the cause of the emotion, 3) construct a mental model that will help me process the emotion, and then 4) do the processing.
It often feels like I have 3 more steps to attend to, where more emotionally mature people intuitively know steps 1 – 3 and can skip directly to step 4 without much strum und drang. Meanwhile, there’s me over in the corner, sobbing, trying to put a name to what I’m feeling because I have no earthly clue what it is. I have to approach it from the side, using logic to examine my own actions and compare myself against others who have gone through similar circumstances (or fictional examples, which is perhaps more problematic but easier to pinpoint due to the stylized nature of most fiction writing).
Eventually I figure it out, and process out the emotions, and all returns to equilibrium.
As I’ve grown into adulthood, processing emotions has become slightly easier, and I expect that it will become still easier over time now that I have a few heuristics built up. I still have problems identifying how I feel about certain things, especially new experiences, because I have no prior emotional framework for that sort of thing. I’ve learned to not war with the fact that I have feelings. I try to acknowledge my feelings — but I do often have a very difficult time admitting those feelings to others.
So I don’t lose by having feelings, just by showing them in public.
Does that make me a Gamma? No.
Is it a little bit embarrassing? Yes.
Not gonna lie, it’s a little bit disconcerting to see one of my biggest personality struggles pinpointed so directly in a description of men who are the most odious to deal with in real life. That association is not flattering to my ego. (LOL)
Personality metrics have been helpful in understand the origin of my inadequacies in processing emotions. Now, I know that the Meyers-Briggs Type Inventory (MBTI) is often derided as being unscientific, but I find that it is incredibly useful as a heuristic, both to understand other people (why they act differently) and myself.
Every time I take the test, my results indicate INTP, as do more of the internet population as would seem likely since INTPs are allegedly a mere 3% of the population (although the INxx types tend to self-select into the online world). I suspect that a high percentage of internet Gammas would also test this way. The one(s) I knew in college certainly did.
Following the theory laid out by Isabel Briggs Meyers, each function can be laid out in an “order of operations” of sorts, like so:
Poor little feeling down there at the end. The theory comes with a warning that often, when someone is forced to react based on a “shadow” function, their actions will come across as crude and childish — not up to that person’s normal standards of thinking or behavior. I certainly see evidence of that in my own naive approach to emotions.
Briggs goes on to remark specifically on feeling in certain personality types:
The least-developed process of the introverted thinkers inevitably is extraverted feeling. They are not apt to know, unless told, what matters emotionally to another person, but they can and should act on the principle that people do care about having their merits appreciated and their point of view respectfully considered. Both the working life and the personal life of the introverted thinkers will go better if they take the trouble to do two simple things: say an appreciative word when praise is honestly due, and mention the points on which they agree with another person before they bring up the points on which they disagree.
I had the great fortune of being raised by an ENFJ mother, for whom feelings are a big part of life, and have worked quite a few jobs doing customer service, which has forced me to empathize with others and consider that other points of view include feelings.
For those introverted thinkers who have not spent time in an environment that invited (or forced) them to consider life outside their own heads, this may be a big reason why they are inadequate at dealing with — and therefore dismissive of — feelings.
The week in Twitter has been absolutely dominated by the Harvey Weinstein scandal.
Because I’ve also been thinking about “columns” for this blog, or some way to make content a little more coherent (perhaps that’s premature since I’ve not even hit 6 months posting yet?), I figured I’d make an “Image of the Week” idea. Part of the reason I started this blog was to push myself into more visual analysis, and I seem to be doing most of that in fashion and not in the visual world around us.
This image struck me as a good summary of the week, because it visually reads “Hollywood” but thematically reads “Lawsuit.”
The phrase “you may be entitled to financial compensation” takes me straight back to being sick on the couch as a kid, watching the daytime commercials for class-action lawsuits against mesothelioma during the breaks in The Price is Right.
This week has been a painful reminder that probably every “pop” culture thing that we like is tainted by someone’s pain or suffering (and not in the cathartic art way).
This week I also learned that it is Wine-steen, not Wine-stine. Oops.
Time for the ultimate in MAGA self reflection: border wall personality test.
thx, r/The_Donald
That’s kind of a trick question, though, because there is already a personality test built into the concept of the wall from the very beginning.
There are three types of reactions:
If you’re a sane person, avoid #3 at all costs.
#2 is a dying breed, probably personified by Dave Rubin of The Rubin Report. At best, a Classical Liberal. At worst, a Moderate.
Most of us MAGAers were convinced pretty early of the rhetorical and practical utility of the wall, so #1 is pretty much a battle cry for us. See also: Ann Coulter.
Trump’s was such a polarizing election, it felt like picking teams for something bigger. Starting from about the debut of pizzagate in late September 2016, things got a whole lot more Real and the split between upside-down world and rightside-up world felt, for the first time, like a physical thing.
There are still a few people caught in the middle, but not very many.
If you’re still deciding, vote for The Tease wall design, because it is clearly the trolliest. And if our big beautiful metaphor can’t have at least a little troll in it..
why bother?
© 2024 Batfort
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑
Recent Comments