The trick is that they put all of us terrible people together. Like Australia, but with nerds

What’s funny is that this irrational thought process will actually kind of accept this answer, and not only that, it’s the least unappealing of the answers that it will accept

Like “all my friends are secretly as bad as me” isn’t so awful when I think about it, because I have to live with myself every day anyway, right?

Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help <3

Thanks for the offer, but I think I can do it myself – if I really can’t get myself out of the house today I could also do it tomorrow morning since my flight is in the evening

Also, to clarify, I’m not filling a prescription, I’m picking up one that was written for me because I’m leaving town for a while, which I’ll fill while I’m gone.  This means that I do have meds now (though they do not seem to be doing much for me right now)

bohtie replied to your post: Pretty full of SCREECH and similar thi…

<3 miss you

I would totally ask if you were free right now, except I’m planning to go to sleep in two hours so I can wake up in the middle of the night, possibly not be sad, and work

bohtie replied to your post: Anyway, I had a really good day today …

Look at you being a badass <333

It is not a way I feel especially often, which is all the more reason to relish it when it happens!

(Another amusing detail from the student evaluation comments: one of my students [I’m almost entirely sure I can guess which one it was] described me as “a bit goofy, but good-hearted”)

bohtie replied to your post: The Nostalgebraist Failure of the Day …

hugs! Blame it on me if that helps

It was pretty unequivocally my fault, though, since I scheduled the conversation for Saturday evening knowing that I would be out of the house Saturday evening and likely to forget and have my phone off

In any case I just had a very nice conversation with my mother and all is well now

Once again I want to go to a thing but I’m not going to because residual illness + SSRI increase is making me feel simultaneously half-asleep and jittery, and the thought of being around other people seems very confusing right now

As anyone who’s known me in real life probably knows, I am really bad at GOING TO THINGS.  I think I learned gradually over the course of college that I have a strong feeling I shouldn’t go to a thing I will probably regret it if I actually do, no matter how appealing it might seem to a sort of abstract averaged version of me.  Sometimes the wind in my sails picks up when I get there, but much more often I’m just vacantly sitting and staring and thinking “this experience does not fall within my design specifications”

Trying to synch up the various versions of myself with what is happening at the time is a perennial problem.

Hopefully this will all be over by tomorrow when the next thing happens!

In all fairness, that’s exactly how my brain works. Might explain why I watch so many horror movies

Yeah, it’s actually not even that counter-intuitive for a lot of stories that people like.  I think Pinker’s really shooting himself in the foot by choosing Hamlet as an example, and describing it in the very concrete way he does.  (I could still see Hamlet being a cautionary tale about, say, being too cautious … just not one about about what to do if your uncle kills your dad and marries your mom, because that just isn’t a situation with very wide applicability.)

(If he wanted a famous and respectable example that clearly does work largely as life advice, I think he could have chosen Crime and Punishment?  That would have sounded much less silly.  Well, as long as he phrased the message as “don’t use a standard of ethics that requires you to behave in ways you know you can’t” instead of something more concrete like “if you’re thinking about killing an old pawnbroker, don’t”)