the dog ate my homework

I don't really have anything to say, I just thought I should report in and tell you that I won't be posting for the next two or three weeks. Our son's wedding and two other weddings are coming up during the month of June, so I have a good excuse. 

You know, this blog has never had much traffic, which is not really surprising since it's just me, ruminating, long past the point when anyone would consider a personal blog relevant to anything. But my pageviews keep going up and up and up. Like, stratospherically up. In the last 30 days, I've had over 65,000 visits. I am not making that up, and that is crazy. Even back when I had the RSS feed up it was rare for me to get a thousand views in a month. No freaking way do I believe that I averaged more than two thousand individual visits a day from real people who are reading this nonsense. 

It makes me wonder if the LLM AI people are that desperate for content. Would that run the numbers up? We'll scrape anything that won't sue us for copyright violation. I mean, technically, I do own the copyright to everything I write here, but I have no idea how to do anything about it if someone steals it, and they must assume bloggers like me wouldn't. And if they're training AI on blogs--there aren't nearly as many as there used to be, but there are probably still many thousands-- we are in way bigger trouble than we knew, right? 

In other news, our 42nd anniversary is this week. Go, us. That is a long time. 

late night thoughts about wine, the self, and culture

1. Years ago our local community college offered a six week wine-tasting course that promised to teach people how to appreciate good wine. (This was back in the days before my frequent migraines, so drinking wine wasn't the problem that it is now.) We were super excited about it and signed up immediately. But as the course approached, we started having second thoughts, and we ended up canceling our registration (the continuing ed office was thrilled since apparently there was a long waiting list). The reason we canceled was because we figured if we learned to appreciate good wine, we wouldn't want the $12 bottle anymore, we'd want the good stuff. And if we got really enthusiastic about it, we'd turn into snobs and end up spending thousands. 

Of course there are plenty of good reasons to want to be a wine connoisseur.  Maybe you were raised in a family that has a long history of appreciating good wine, or maybe you are a chef, and understanding how wine and different foods interact is important to the work that you do. Maybe you just really love wine. But for us, it made a whole lot more sense to leave well enough alone. 

2. About a month ago, I listened to a couple of very smart men on a podcast talking about Buddhist meditation practices. They both have engaging personalities, and the conversation was fascinating. But there were two things about the conversation that I've been thinking about ever since. One of them I'm saving for another time, but for the purposes of this post, the part of the conversation that interested me was listening to them try to come to terms with the Buddhist concept of  "no self." 

Traditional Buddhists believe that the self, as a separate, well-defined entity, doesn't exist. To a Buddhist, the question of "who am I?" is not answerable. The podcasters really got into the weeds about what it means that none of us has a self. They had some good points about why this is a useful belief-- for example, if some aspect of your beliefs about yourself is irrevocably changed (maybe you are a professional musician, and a car accident renders you unable to play your instrument), the harder you cling to the way you define yourself, the more traumatic the experience will be. 

But for the average human, does it really matter? OK, so we should hold ourselves loosely and with a bit of humility. But how important is it to devote yourself to upholding this particular teaching? Is it really that important to buy into the idea that there is no such thing as a self? I mean, if you knit me a scarf for my birthday, I didn't knit the scarf, you did. If you're reading this post, you're reading it, and I wrote it. If you're sitting at a table eating dinner with eight people, you are each an individual person with your own history, experiences, tastes, and opinions-- and you all know this and understand it, and the conversation would be super boring if that weren't true.  

For all practical purposes, for normal everyday life, having a deep, well-considered understanding and belief in the concept of "no self" is an academic interest. If you find the Buddha's teachings fascinating and illuminating and you want to devote yourself to the study of his ideas, then yes, by all means, go there. Or if you have some other reason to dive deep into the idea, then do it. But most of us are going to get through life just fine without even knowing that that particular teaching exists. And feeling all superior about yourself because you know you don't have a self when some other ignorant slob is still laboring under the delusion of selfhood-- well, that just makes you a snob.

3. So where the heck am I going with this. This stuff is so complicated to talk about, and so emotionally loaded. But I've heard some people who are progressives, liberals, far left thinkers, who have thought themselves way out on a limb about identity, race, gender, orientation, whatever. If you're interested in deconstructing culture, it's fascinating. It's practically addictive. And then they surround themselves with people who agree, and pretty soon they have no idea how far away they are from how most people understand their lives. 

(If the idea of cultural criticism is new to you, the usual example is that we're all like fish swimming around in an aquarium without knowing that we're in water-- cultural criticism/theory is the process of becoming aware of the water. It's about questioning your assumptions and ideas, becoming aware of things that you've always thought were set in stone, but really are just products of tradition and habit. In moderation, it can be super useful. But if you keep going and going, it becomes more and more obscure, and leaves you with an ever-smaller circle of people you can hang out with, because other people don't get it. It can even make it impossible for you to function in the, uh, aquarium.)(Did that help?)

Is that level of detailed analysis genuinely helpful in our current public conversations? Is it creating constructive change in the culture? or is it just tearing it down for the joy of intellectual superiority? I mean for an academic whose life work is understanding social structures and how they work, yes, of course it's important knowledge. But for most of us, it just makes us into snobs, disdainful of people who haven't been initiated into the unending, ever-deepening minutiae of cultural criticism. It creates a gulf of understanding, instead of helping us understand each other.  

I've been that person. I can argue with this myself. But at some point we've got to start reaching across the aisle instead of making the aisle wider and wider. Surely we know that if we're going to live in a diverse society and support each other in our diversity, some of the other people are going to be conservatives? There are going to be people who have every right to their opinion and their beliefs and their religion who believe things that are exactly the opposite of what we do. That's just basic to the whole idea of democracy. And if we're not willing to be supportive of that, we're part of the problem.  

I would never have posted this before I turned off the RSS feed, but you know, this is the new me. 

Same as the old me. (Insert brilliantly clever remark about my self here.)  

Related: The Vanilla Ice Cream Problem 
and this one from 2010(!!) back when I was in grad school: ooooh shiny! 

in which I whine. and regret my lack of social skills.

Here is something I have been thinking about, because  my volunteer stuff always slows down in the summer, I have maybe a little too much time to think. I seem to have become a disaster as a friend. Actually, that's probably over-stating the case, because "disaster" makes me sound important, and I'm pretty sure no one misses me (I warned you: whining). 

So anyway. A couple of years ago, I noticed with one of my groups of friends, no one instigated getting together unless it was me. Which of course makes you wonder, if I stopped trying to get us together, would anyone notice?  

It was right in the thick of when my migraines were the very worst, so I just quit doing it. I'm not sure it was a conscious decision-- it wasn't like I was going for revenge, or even then they'll be sorry, I just didn't have the energy, so I didn't. So I didn't see any of them for quite awhile. 

Then an event came up that was very important to one of the women. The event announcement was a group email, not specifically addressed to me, but I replied and said I would attend. And I did plan on attending, but I hadn't written it into my calendar and there was a lot going on during that two week period, and with one thing and another, I forgot about it. 

Which is totally on me, of course. I forgot about it so thoroughly that I didn't even realize I'd missed it until a week later when I was making my plans for Saturday, which included going to this event, and then looked at the email and realized it had happened the week before. I felt awful about missing it, but we were leaving on a trip that Sunday, and I didn't do anything about it until two weeks later when we got back. I know. It was badly done on my part. I'm not trying to make you feel sorry for me, I'm just trying to figure out how to navigate my non-existent social life.

So anyway. When I sat down to figure out how best to grovel, I realized, wait a minute. No one called me or texted me and said, where are you? or even after the fact, what happened? we missed you! No one contacted me at all after the original email. 

Maybe nobody cared that I had missed it. Maybe I was feeling awful for no reason. This was a group of women that I felt very close to a dozen years ago, but it had been a long time since we had met regularly. Maybe the time for us to be friends had passed. 

So now I haven't seen those women for at least a year, other than running into one of them at a large social event last winter--we chatted as if nothing had happened. And I guess it's fine. But similar things seem to be happening with all my friends. I have plenty of acquaintances, plenty of people who seem happy to see me if I run into them at church or the grocery store. We still get invited to things as a couple (everyone loves my spouse). But if I had something difficult happen to me, I think the only people I would call would be one or both of my sisters. 

Is this OK? Is it OK to not really have friends? I do miss it. I miss when we had kids at home and getting together happened naturally at sports practices or band concerts or school events. I miss when we lived in a neighborhood with a bunch of kids and they were all in and out of our houses all the time. But we don't have kids living at home anymore. Almost no one our age does. And as I've told you before, when I do get together with women friends, I can't figure out what we're supposed to talk about. 

I thought maybe typing this out would help me figure out what I want to do about it, but it hasn't. Or at least not yet. 

That's all I've got this week. 

p.s. I don’t think I have any local readers at the moment, but if I do, please don’t feel like you need to rescue me. I’m fine, just figuring things out. Thanks. 

p.p.s. If the dates seem off on this, you’re right they are— I’m backdating it. I will explain someday. 

long overdue breast reduction surgery update

Fairly niche topic, I know, but I'm writing it out specifically for someone who has googled "breast reduction surgery" and wants to know details. I have a couple of ideas for new posts, but none of them are ready to go, so I was looking through my drafts folder and found this, which has been sitting there for years now. I have no idea why I didn't publish it at the time.

Four years ago, I had breast reduction surgery. I would 100% do it again. The last time I mentioned this, it had only been about six weeks and I was still in recovery mode. I had twinges of pain for months afterward, especially around the scars, but now I've been pain-free for a long time. My clothes fit better, exercise is more comfortable, and I am way happier with my appearance. If you're on the fence about getting it done, I highly recommend it. 

For the sake of total honesty, though, here are the downsides. The immediate recovery was more painful than I expected. It was six weeks before I felt like I could move comfortably, and probably six months before I was pain-free. Also I worried for along time (probably unnecessarily) that I would reopen the incisions. 

Then, appearance-wise. Honestly, I don't really care about the appearance of the scars, or even the appearance of my breasts, because I'm old and the only person besides me who ever sees them seems happy enough with how they look. But if I was 35 and had an active dating life, I might not be all that happy. The scars are mostly invisible at this late date, but there are minor lumpy spots along them, and the ends of the scars are still a bit puffy. Also, my breasts are a bit uneven--oddly, before the surgery, my left breast was larger; now the right one is a little larger. It's not enough to be noticeable when I have clothes on. And like I said, I don't really care, and I certainly don't care enough to wish I hadn't had it done. And I confess there have been a few moments when I've missed the larger size during sex, but only rarely, and again--not nearly enough for me to wish I hadn't done it.

Also, I got a call-back for my mammogram for the first time ever when I had the first one done post-surgery. The problem turned out to be scar tissue masquerading as pre-cancerous cells. That wasn't fun-- the whole thing took a couple of weeks and of course it is pretty stressful to not know if the spot on your scan is cancer.   

My neck and shoulders are better, but it took a surprisingly long time. At the six month mark, I thought that it hadn't made any difference at all. But I guess it just takes your body a long time to realize that something is different, because now I can definitely tell a difference. I have better range of motion in my shoulders, and I can carry my grandkids around for far longer with fewer after-effects than I would have been able to before. Unfortunately, the surgery has not had much effect on my migraines, which I was really hoping for.

So overall, definite improvement. I've only very rarely had surgery (c-section, endometrioma(?) removed), so going in for the surgery was scary. Sometimes I still can't believe I was brave enough to do it, because bravery isn't something I'm known for. But I'm glad I did it. Happy to answer questions if you want, my email address is in my profile.

Ha. Now that I'm about to publish this, I remember why I didn't publish it the first time. I'm a pretty private person, and this feels like way too much personal information. But I guess it makes sense as a public service. We're heading east to spend a week with my spouse's family, so I almost for sure won't post next week. Hope you have a good one.