Good morning everyone what’s shakin. Just back from the car line, G Wagon was back I can rest early. Jane got up just fine, which is somewhat disturbing since this is her sixth day of staying up two hours late. She seems to be displaying no ill effects from this, which is slightly worrisome because we do not possess the mental fortitude to do two more hours of bedtime every night, thus completely negating what little time we get alone together as a couple. We have generally been pretty lucky with sleep time and bed time but this is alarming. I hesitate to ask the internet advice, but if you have any advice specifically on how you can encourage your kid to stay in their room by themselves until they’re sleepy, that would be great. Maybe some time of game or something. Books occasionally work. Maybe she needs new books.
Best wishes for my mother-in-law who is getting shoulder surgery today. Is that TMI? She is pretty private. Well, she won’t notice this probably cuz she’l be on drugs. And best wishes to Emma for having taken her to the hospital for a 5:45 arrival. If you know my wife, you know this is a miracle of nature. And, contrary to past form, she didn’t stay up all not for it, she actually got some sleep.
Our friend Alice is at Chore House this week and we got to spend time with her last night and that was very nice. I forgot to ask her about the Jonathan Chait mystery, but I think I pretty much sorted that one out: people just don’t like him, so they make fun of his theories. No one ever said academia was not subject to fallacies like the rest of us, I suppose. Speaking of which I read this pretty interesting paper by my old co-worker Tim about what America could learn from its vaccine development experiences during covid, and I am not expert enough to comment on the recommendations, but the history of the development of rDNA vaccines was super interesting, along with insights into the offices at universities that handle the IP rights for the discoveries at their institutions. Maybe not much of a surprise to, like, academics, but to me it was all kind of interesting.
Yesterday I had to go to some work banking so then I stopped at the hardware store and I was like “all right! I’m gonna buy another miter saw! I’ll get a Bosch!” because of some of your comments and how much I love my new Bosch SDS Max Hammer Drill. I was like “I will suck up the extra $100 and diversify.” And they had one left in stock at the hardware store. So I went to pick it up and… the thing is thirty pounds heavier than the Dewalt and… pretty much everyone else. I dunno, man. Like.. I am not sure I can lift an 88 pound saw myself. So, then, the whole thing is an ordeal. I gotta call a neighbor to get the thing out of the box and in place on the bench and whatnot, and everything just goes slower. Is it gonna go slower than not buying a saw? I don’t know. This is such a hassle. Someone solve this problem for me. Eighty-eight pounds! My god.
Hrm. Upon research it turns out the entire box was eighty-eight pounds. The saw is only sixty-five. Only ten pounds more. I could probably handle that.
Don’t you love reading some random dude on the internet’s thought processes as he shops online? Really the best use of all of our time.
Nick sent me that in January. Seems apt.
Also Substack seems to have broken image captions this week. Kinda annoying.
God. I really gotta get off Substack. Soon. Probably. What a waste of time and effort.
I am listening to the new Vampire Weekend and I am generally not a fan of Vampire Weekend, nor have I ever been. But my friend Nicholas told me this album was good and dagnabbit, it turned out he was correct. It has been an enjoyable listen.
So at the last PT appointment I had for my tennis elbow, me and the PT were shootin’ the shit and I was talking about my fused neck and Klippel Fiel syndrome, and how it seemed like my neck and my elbow were two different issues. And she made some comment like “Well, you never know, over time if you don’t resolve this, they may slowly merge into one.” And I swear to god, that woman manifested something in me, because a few weeks later I woke up in Somerville and my right shoulder hurt like a mo fo, and I could barely move it, barely lift anything. After somewhere around three days of this, my friend Emily, who is a licenced massage therapist, did a little work on the shoulder while we were at a bar so, you know, not exactly clinical. But it helped. A bit. So now, a week later, the shoulder hurts every once in a while, just absurdly bad. And if I try and lift anything, like, say, an 88-pound box containing a 65-pound Bosch miter saw, well the thing throbs and hurts for ages. I have moved my tennis elbow strap up to my bicep. I have ordered a bicep compression sleeve. And now I need to make a new appointment. So after a year, this whole arm situation is getting worse, despite seeking repeated medical attention, because I fucking SLEPT.
You hear those stories about people who, like, slept on their arm wrong once and then they have to amputate it or something and maybe those are urban legends but I’m hear to tell you that they are not far from the truth.
The only solution is to never sleep.
Maybe Jane is on to something.
Well that was a short one, I am very scattered today and can’t focus, but I do have a nice mix for you. It’s a shoegaze mix and it has a just fantastic new Fauns song and some new bands and new stuff by old bands like Jesu and Diiv and December Sound, since I have been talking about them a lot lately and was out drinking with that guy from the band last week. But note that I put this December Sound song on here in February, before that. So, you know, synchronicity or whatever.
You know, I have been saying “synchronicity” knowingly, ironically, about coincidences since I was in high school and if I am being honest I really have no idea what it means except for some vague half-baked notion arrived at pre-internet, not long after the release of the Police album. Maybe I should actually learn about synchronicity. Probably something made up by some old European dude huh.
Per Wikipedia: a concept introduced by analytical psychologist Carl Jung “to describecircumstances that appear meaningfully related yet lack a causal connection.”
Hrm. yep. Never mind. Works out just fine. Steady as she goes.
Until tomorrow, friend.