10 digit

I thought that I’d write a big long story about Relative vs Absolute once I’d had it all figured out in my mind. But I’ve come to find that it’s actually better to type away here, to sort out and compartmentalize my thoughts, rather than come to the blog with full stories. So in that vein here’s some semi-random things on my mind, hoping to coalesce everything later on into a single ideology.

I think one of the most philosophical battles is not between black and white, or right and wrong, or conservative and liberal. I think it’s between The Relative and The Absolute. This is an unresolved combination that will probably never be resolved. Its like in our own US Congress where we have Senators (an absolute number, 2 from every state) and the House (a relative number depending on your state’s population). Or in a car warranty where you are covered for repairs for 100,000 miles (an absolute number) or 5 years (relative to when the car was purchased). I’m sure there’s other examples of the relative existing next to the absolute that I can’t think of at this moment.

Growing up it seemed as though the conservative Republican part of our country was more in the absolute camp whereas the liberal Democrats where relative. The conservatives were more religious, believing in the absolute authority of God. Liberals were more open minded, looking for both sides of a story, seeing that different perspectives reflected where you stood (in a relative sense).

Growing up I was a Democrat, sometimes even more liberal than a typical Democrat. I went to see Ralph Nader speak when he was running for President with the Green Party. I did a presentation on the Green Party in college. But as I got older I (naturally) became more conservative. I think this is because as you get older you start to see styles, ideas, trends, etc repeat themselves. You see these new trends as nothing new and nothing special. But oh for the old ways of doing things! Now that is what was good. That is when the world made sense.

And then the Great Recession came and I moved from middle-of-the-roadism to a hard conservative stance. But even at this stage I missed the old me, the curious me, the open minded guy. So I’ve steadily been moving back toward the middle of the spectrum. I feel like the typical libertarian now – fiscally conservative but socially liberal. I like being open minded to new ideas and concepts, but most of these new ideas I end up rejecting because they’re judged against my older, conservative perspective.

So which is better – The Absolute or The Relative? I struggle to answer this question. Like, for the church, they believe in the absolute truth of the Bible and God and such. And it is great to be part of this, because believing in something larger than yourself can give you strength and comfort in times of need. Ok. But there’s 13 churches in my town. Which one is the absolute correct one, and (by extension) which 12 are incorrect and tacitly doomed to burn in Hell? Is the Bible absolutely true? When it says that Jesus is a door, I guess we have to literally believe he is a door, frame and doorknob and all.

So these questions posed to a typical church-goer would probably elicit the response that “Well, a lot of the Bible is symbolic.” So who gets to decide which parts are symbolic and which are literal? It used to be that being Christian meant that you’d better get your ass to church or else you would get burned at the stake. Christianity has morphed over the years from this old absolutist stance towards today’s relativistic “Jesus is My Life Coach” stance.

I think that people are both absolutist and relativistic, depending on the circumstances. I think we are all individuals, driven by our own rational self-interest. Note that this is different from selfishness. Selfishness is harmful and not rational. But what is rational and in our own self-interest can change over time, as circumstances change and as new information enters our senses.

We are individual beings following our own self-interest. But humans are also social creatures. So we want to be around others. No one really wants to be alone. Because we have our own self-interest we want to be around others that are most like us; those with the same worldview and ideology as ourselves. This also gets extended to wanting to be around those with the same skin color, nationality and language as us. I think we want to be in these groups because there’s strength in numbers. The bigger the group is of people like me, the stronger I myself become.

There’s also some laziness in this. Maybe we all want the most bang for our buck out of life, like we want the most resources and experiences with the least amount of effort. Being part of a large homogenous group can be good, in that the hardest working top part of the group produces everything while the bottom part just rides on the coattails.

So if one is always a relativist, then that means they are absolutely a relativist, which is a contradiction. One could be always an absolutist, but that is just what they would say. No one can be 100% absolute all the time in their beliefs and actions. Well, they could, but when you have an Absolutist attitude life becomes miserable. You’ve already charted out the direction in your life, and you will fight and leave people who don’t agree with you. At first you will fight and break away from those of you with large differences. Like let’s say I’m absolutely a Republican. I’m going to fight/ignore/marginalize half of the people right off the bat (the Democrat/left side). Then, given enough time, half of the Republican group…….

Hold on, let me retype this in a different way. Let’s say there’s a conservative Thanos in our country. He snaps his fingers and half of the country (liberals, democrats) disappear. The remaining half of the country is happy. Everyone that is left has the same worldview, so life should be good, right?

Given enough time this remaining group will develop differences in ideology and start to splinter off. So then this group will half to be halved again, with another snap. So now you’re left with a quarter of the country that is just true believers. Over time there will be more and more snaps, as people (individuals following their own self-interests) start to pair up and group up with like minded individuals. Until eventually there’s only two people left in the country. There’s a disagreement about some truly petty issue, like the other person doesn’t like my sweater (lol just follow me here). Me, being an absolutist who has proven to have no issues with making my enemies disappear, while snap my fingers to make the other person be gone. And then that’s it; I’m stuck with myself on my Island of Righteousness. Population: 1.

I love this book I’m reading about the history of Eastern Europe. I think this newfound love of history is partly because it’s dynamic, interesting stuff that I can sort of remember from my youth, but it’s also because I’m trying to learn from it to predict the future. It’s scary now, because after reading about the rise of all these cult-of-personalities I can see the dangerous parallels with our own cult-of-personality in Donald Trump.

Trump, himself, is harmless. He’s harmless in that he’s just an empty idiot. He was a Republican president but he could have easily won as a Democratic president, without changing too much of what he says. The danger here is the people that support him, that have built him up in this cult-of-personality and foyster all their prejudices and insecurities onto him.

There was a time when I really liked Trump. I had a Twitter account and only followed three things: St Louis Cardinals, Rush (the band), and Trump. I’m proud to say that I didn’t vote for him in 2016, as his words (and followers) had pushed me off his trail. Then in 2020 I was probably the only person in the country who really didn’t know if I was going to vote for him or not. When I went into the booth the vote I checked boxes for all Republicans (because I’m pro-business) but when I got to the President box I voted for Joe Biden. I’ve never voted for a Democrat for President before. I just held my nose and jumped in.

There was a lot of talk about if the election was “stolen” or not. It was not a stolen election. If I voted this way then there’s no doubt that many other Republicans voted as I did. They would never admit it, of course. But that’s the beauty of the secret ballot; no one ever has to know who you really voted for.

I’m happy with how our political environment looks – our country is about half conservative, half liberal. It’s about half Republican, half Democrat. This is good, because it’s to be expected. Since we do not have a representational congress, we have to live with winner-takes-all type of governing. And since the winner takes all, that eventually leads to there only being two real political parties, as a vote for a third party is a wasted vote.

Having only two real political parties means that they are plastic, malleable, ever-changing, because they are made up of individuals who are chasing their own rational self-interests. So whereas Democrats were pro-slavery 150 years ago, now they are the party of African-Americans. These parties change over time, just like everything else. But it’s good that we have a 50/50 split in our country because it means that both parties change in order to grab this 50 percent. It’s organic and natural. Plus it also introduces my favorite feature of government, which is grid-lock. It’s the libertarian in me that is happy that stuff does NOT get done. The government would probably mess it all up anyway.

Back when I was vacillating back in forth between political ideas I was upset, because I would read about an issue from a liberal point of view and agree with it. But then I would read the conservative view and see that it had good points too. So I was conflicted. I didn’t know what to believe. It wasn’t until I got into Ayn Rand that she gave me the answer I was looking for – Philosophy. Philosophy is the over-arching subject from which politics, history, science, economics and human behavior derive. Sure, she had here own brand of philosophy that she wanted everyone to follow, but you don’t necessarily have to agree with everything she says. I certainly don’t. But he was 1000% percent correct when she said that philosophy is the most important subject ever.

So with this knowledge of philosophy as being important, I could then read about issues – from both liberal and conservative sides – and see that they were only expounding on their pre-determined philosophical worldvidew. This realization made life easier for me, as I could more or less pre-judge what a political piece would say, depending on the worldview of the person who wrote it.

I’ve stayed out of political debates for years. I’ve stayed away from politics pretty much altogether for about 10 years. I’ve been studying and waxing philosophically during this time. But now I feel that this newfound liking of history will bring me back to the political fold. Like, I still don’t want to get in political arguments; I still don’t want to watch Fox News and CNN to get all these different angles. What I want to do is study history so that I can get a thorough understanding of the cycles of progress in the past, and how we got to where we are today. So first I had to study philosophy. Now I have to study history. Maybe years from now when I feel I have a good footing of history under me, then I’ll move on to following current events. Then, I’ll feel more armed if/when I get into political debates. And I think I’ll be more influential to people around me.

I just finished reading (or being told, via audiobook) the Great Courses on Comparative Economies: Capitalism, Socialism, Communism. It was a great read that didn’t compare in the abstract sense; it was more like focusing on specific countries, what kind of economy they used to have, and what they have today.

It was an okay book until it got to the very end, when the author was describing how all the Communist governments fell in 1989, and that all of them were peaceful transfers except for Romania. He said that there was video of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu giving a live speech a few days before Christmas, when the crowd started to turn on him, and Ceaușescu was stunned because no one had ever done anything like this in his 30+ years of rule.

This excited me very much and piqued my attention. I’m not exactly sure why but I think it has to do with me being in high school at the time. I remember the social studies teach wheeling the TV in on a cart and letting us watch the Gulf War (the first one). A few years prior I remember the excitement of the Berlin Wall going down. I knew that this was a time of great change but somehow the Romanian revolution was only on my periphery. It was a visual symbol for me, to think of a dictator, in my time, being shown in the actual act of disbelief.

So I found the video on Youtube and it made history real for me. Mainly it made some part of Eastern European history real for me. I think I’m like most Americans in that we know a lot about Western Europe, history, culture, etc. But Eastern Europe seems dark, backwards, and unknown. So the next book I got and am listening to now is Great Courses – Eastern Europe History. I’ve never been a history buff so I’ll see how much interest I have after I finish this book, but I can foresee my family taking a long trip through Europe someday, and now I’d like to see Eastern Europe too.

Last Tuesday I took the day off. Laina and I went to St Louis to pick up Ted from the airport. Before we got him we stopped at MicroCenter and picked up some black and orange filament for the printer. It was on sale for Black Friday. I’m still maybe only halfway done with the printer assembly. It’s taking longer than I thought but I’m learning all the intricacies of the thing while building it. So if I have trouble later at least I’ll have more in depth knowledge of how to fix it.

We picked up Ted then went to do the usual “Get Chik Fil A and charge at the Brentwood charger” routine. This time though the Brentwood location was totally filled. When we got there I saw that all the parking spaces (both Tesla and non-) were full of “Resla” vehicles, advertised as rental Tesla vehicles according to the outside livery on one of the cars. Luckily we didn’t have to wait for a spot to open.

We got home and I continued tidying up the basement. We took Elsa’s dollhouse over to the music teacher’s house for her daughter to have.

I took Wednesday off as well and we all ran over to Jacksonville to get final groceries for the Thanksgiving meal. Ted and I started watching “Andor” (really one of the best Star Wars shows out there), and I was off my diet the whole break, so life was good. Even being off the diet, I didn’t have any soda or candy nor did I eat to excess. I was still conscious of everything I was eating even though I wasn’t tracking it in the WW app.

Thanksgiving was great. The wife did all the cooking, as usual. Some guys, maybe most guys, don’t do any cooking except for grilling steaks outdoors and cooking the Thanksgiving turkey, and then they do it with great gusto. I’ve never had the urge to do any of that. I try to carry my weight in other ways, by picking up the house or doing dishes.

Friday was a vacation day for work and the wife was out shopping for Black Friday, so Ted, the kids and myself just had a lazy day for the most part. We did play some pickleball since the weather was super nice.

Saturday we all got up early to take Ted back to the airport. Along the way we stopped at a great little pancake house in Alton. Again, I wasn’t like ravishingly hungry, but I could have ate who knows how many pancakes if I hadn’t given some to Jack. He has officially started wrestling practice and can quite literally eat as many calories as possible without ill affects. Like, a thirteen year-old boy playing sports, he has a crazy high metabolism.

We dropped off Ted went to charge at Brentwood again. None of the rental Teslas were there this time, which was odd. Jack and I went into MicroCenter. His hopes of having a super high-end gaming computer have waned now that he can play Farming Simulator on my plain ol’ PC laptop. He was looking around for the steering wheel and controls that they make just for this game but to no avail.

It was great to have Ted around for a holiday. I wish he could be around for every Christmas.

Sunday was another lazy day and Monday I was back to work. I weighed myself that morning, hoping to be around 178 lbs. I was shocked to see I was 174.8 lbs. So even though I had went off my diet I still didn’t go crazy and eat everything in sight. Heck even yesterday I weighed in at 172.8 pounds. I’m only three pounds away from my goal weight and then after that I’m not sure what to do. Maybe WW will give me more daily points to use? I don’t want to keep losing weight but I don’t want to fall back into bad habits either.

Tuesday I went to the hearing center in Jacksonville to pick up my hearing aids. I wore them all day with a smile on my face, like I was getting ready to re-experience the world anew. I imagined being able to hear the wife’s and Elsa’s true voices. I played around with the settings all day since there’s a phone app that controls them. We went to see Emma in the Pep Band and dance team at that night’s basketball game and I could hear other people a little better.

It was a little difficult working while wearing the aids because my glasses rested on them, which tilts the glasses down a little. But I gave them the ol’ college try at work on Wednesday. I wore them to Jack’s eye doctor visit (where we discovered one of his contacts was ripped). I wore them to St Louis Thursday when I chaperoned Elsa’s trip to the City Museum and Cirque du Soleil show. And after putting them through the paces, in these different situations and playing around with the settings, I don’t feel $2000 worth of joy while using them. I constantly toggle the aids on and off, to compare my normal hearing to my assisted hearing, and while it’s kinda nice to hear the high end frequencies, it’s not enough that I’m like utterly amazed or anything. The wife and Elsa still sound the same only with a hint of more high end.

The most defining aspect I discovered is that, while the hearing aids amplify sounds and help me hear, they don’t help me comprehend any better. I still find myself saying “huh” and “what’s that” just as much while wearing the aids as I did without. It’s like my mind still needs the extra second to process what I’ve heard and turn it into meaning. So that’s where my bottleneck is; it’s not in the hearing of conversations, it’s in the mental processing of sounds and forming them into words. But I think this is an issue (or battle) I’ve fought since my early teens. Growing up around my friends we were all very astute at hearing sounds for what they actually sounded like (and always pointing this out) instead of what a “normal” person would do, which is just hear a word and move on. And then being in bands and being very aware of what pitches we were playing on instruments, it’s kind of made me hyper-sensitive about sounds. Add to that all the foreign languages I’ve studied and the French, German and Spanish I took in college, and I feel like when people are talking to me I don’t hear the normal flow of English words coming out of their mouths. I hear the phonemes and sounds they make but it takes a split second for me to translate that into language in my brain. So at this point I think I’ll be returning the hearing aids before my trial period is up. I know that I can always repurchase them in the future if/when my hearing gets notably worse but for now I feel like they’re not for me.

…by Jack Handy

I’ve spent all Saturday morning clearing leaves, for the second weekend in a row. Whereas past years this was an unbearable task, with all the mowing and dumping and shaking the vacuum hose to unclog and all that, now I have a pretty good system. Jack put mulching blades on the mower and that makes all the difference in the world. I can go around the yard once and mulch all the leaves. Then I’ll make a second pass to pick up the small pieces, small enough that they don’t clog the hose that goes up the bagger. Like, I got the front and side yard all done in about an hour and a half. It’s still a chore but as long as I have time on the weekends and the leaves are dry it’s not too bad.

Doing this yard work is a good opportunity to get caught up on my audio books. Today I just finished “The Perfectionists” by Simon Winchester. It’s a great book about the history of precision measurement and how the world has changed a man and machines create objects to finer and finer tolerances. The author read the audiobook himself, which is a hit-or-miss prospect from books I’ve listened to in the past. Sometimes the author is just not cut out to be a narrator. But this guy, with his comforting English accent, did a great job. So then I started the next book: “Capitalism vs. Socialism: Comparing Economic Systems” which is a Great Courses book. That means there’s about 13 hours of audio to listen to.

Growing up I would say I leaned more toward the left-wing socialist camp. Dad was in the Laborers’ Union and he and mom were Democrats. But really, I think all young people are socialists until they buy their first house. Then it’s a quick slide towards hating all these taxes lol. But when you’re young you still feel powerless, like there’s The Man out there that is conspiring to keep you down. But as you get older and wiser you realize that there is no Man.

So during the Great Recession of 2008 I was really freaking out. I thought that economic collapse was eminent (which it very well was). I thought it was going to be The End of the World as We Know It, and I did NOT feel fine. At one point I moved closer to my job just because I thought the price of gas was going to become outrageous, and that I needed to mitigate that before it happened. But then the wife and I moved to a town that was kinda halfway between both our jobs. I was commuting about three hours a day at this point.

Having this much time to spare, I really got into audiobooks. More specifically I really got into Ayn Rand and her book “Atlas Shrugged”. It was an epiphany for me as I read it because it answered a lot of economic questions I had. I was also scared, which makes it easy for a new worldview (good or bad) to be easily accepted.

Then I read “The Fountainhead” and loved it. Actually I re-read it, having read it a few years earlier and dismissing it. The first time I read it because Neil Peart of Rush had good things to say about Rand, and I loved Rush (still do), so I thought I’d check out the book. After reading it I thought all the characters were static, two-dimensional caricatures. All except for one of the main characters, Peter Keating. I sympathized more with him than anyone else because he seemed the most human. But after learning more about Rand and her Russian past and struggles against Communism, I came to see where she was coming from in The Fountainhead. Her characters are two-dimensional on purpose because they symbolize different philosophies. And the Peter Keating character was a sign of what happens when, maybe not choosing the wrong philosophy, but not actively choosing any philosophy at all, then falling between the cracks when you don’t have any larger worldview to guide and support you.

The philosophies were reason/capitalism/individualism versus statism/communism/collectivism. Ayn Rand today is not really taken seriously by any economic or philosophical class, probably because her two-dimensional characters are so off-putting to anyone who comes to her books thinking they’re going to get a well-rounded story arc where characters learn and grow and develop. And so her ideas seem rather idealistic and not suited for the real world. And as time went on I shed a lot of the absolutists didacticism that people often associate with followers of her writings. I would say that I still have at heart about 50% of what she was trying to get across. I still follow her idea of What Man Should Be Allowed To Do but am sceptic of her idea on What Man Should Do. The latter would be all the hero worship that’s present in her books. Like yeah, it’s cool that there are people out there creating great things and business, and they should get to be billionaires, and more power to them, and all that. But I’m not going to go around putting someone like Jeff Bezos up on a pedestal and worship him. He’s probably a jerk in real life, and I’m glad that I don’t have to work for Amazon (from all accounts I’ve read), but America is a great country and he should get all the funds coming to him for having a great business.

I agree more with What Man Should Be Allowed To Do, which is to pay a minimal amount in taxes, just enough to support military, police and courts, and otherwise be left alone. Thought at my peak, around 2010, I was at my most conservative, I now find joy in coming back down to more liberal ideas. I’d say that I’m firmly in the middle now, somewhere between fiscally conservative and socially liberal, like most libertarians. Like, I think America today is greatest country in the world, ever, because we are the best place to be for someone who wants to try to live up to their potential, legally. But would America be great if all the other countries in the world just up and started to be like the US? Probably not. I think a lot of America’s greatness comes from us finding our niche in the world. If someone wants to attempt to make a ton of money, they can come to the US. But if they’re more interested in social equality they could move to Europe. Like, there’s a place for everyone here on Earth.

So now I like to keep my mind open. I’ll entertain ideas from both the left and right political spectrums. I’ll take the ideas, swirl them around in the wine glass, sniff them, taste them and ruminate. But gee, you might say, don’t you believe in anything absolutely? To which I would say that I’m not a particularly religious or jingoistic person, but I do still pray at the alter of Free Trade. I will defend Free Trade until I die. Whether it’s between two people in our country, or me trading with another country, or whatever – it is trading that makes being a human a good social creature. To this end I know that someday I may very well be laid off from my job, and I will have to accept it with a stiff upper lip, because this is the philosophy and worldview that I accept. My job now is very cool, but in order for cool new jobs to be easily created you have to allow for cool old jobs to be easily destroyed. And so my job isn’t really “my” job at all; it’s my employer’s. They created it, they get to dispose of it as they see fit. I’m just selling my labor to them for the time being. I would be upset if I did lose my job because I’m so engaged in it. There’s a lot of it that I’ve taken and molded and injected my own judgement into. So it’s a part of me, part of my identity.

Jack went deer hunting yesterday with Papa, and he’s staying there all weekend too. This is great, to me, on one hand, because who knows what the future will hold. Maybe artificial intelligence really will be a huge paradigm shift and upend many good paying white collar jobs soon. In that case it’s good that Jack gains all this farming, motor vehicle and hunting knowledge. It may be essential in the future. But on the other hand Jack does very well in school. I feel like I’ve pulled (or been pulled, with my wife’s help) out of this lower middle-class rung that I was born into. Now I occupy this higher class. I kind of want Jack to continue this upward trajectory, where he could be even higher and more prosperous than myself. He’s not going to do that if he settles for a blue collar farming job. Now, if farming and machinery continues to be his passion when he gets out of high school, then more power to him. Following your passion is one of the goals in life. But I know that when I was in high school I didn’t harbor any dreams of going to college. And then we all graduate and the smart kids move away to go to school, so they’re not around. And then they graduate college and take entry level jobs, and we’re still on an even keel. Then they start buying nicer houses, nicer cars and nicer vacations with their increasing incomes, and the comparisons to my own life become more visible. Next thing I know I’m going to college myself, about 2-3 years older than my classmates, with a strict determination to graduate and succeed, to catch up to where I feel I should be if I wouldn’t have dilly-dallied around for 2 years. I just don’t want Jack to experience this.

Elsa, on the other hand, I should start saving for her college now. Her grades are below that of Jacks but she will still be on the honor roll in high school. She has unlimited potential, with her people skills, intelligent, wit, and her bubbly personality. She is my supernova and I don’t want there to be any roadblocks in the way for her future.

On another note, Emma, the wife and I went to Chicago Wednesday to see Hamilton: The Musical. We had to get up at the butt crack of dawn to get on the school bus to Macomb. I haven’t ridden on a school bus in about 30 years, so I don’t remember them being so small, cramped and uncomfortable. We got to the Amtrak station in Macomb and got on the train. This is the only train I’ve been on other than the one in Alaska, and that was made more for tourism than for serious mass transit.

I have to say that the trip up was nice. We had comfortable seats that reclined, with leg rests and foot rests. I went to the dining car and almost fell down multiple times from the swaying motion. I thought that it was because we were on the upper level of the train, but taking the single level train home I ran into the same problem.

I had a whole cookie for breakfast, which was 20 WW points. I knew that I was going to blow my diet for this special trip so I wasn’t worried about what I ate. But damn, 20 points is a lot.

In Chicago we went to this restaurant and had the best deep dish pizza I’ve ever had. The cheese was so fresh tasting. But something I’ve noticed during my month long diet is that, you know, I never really get that hungry. I don’t know if it’s because I’m eating apples and bananas all day long, or if my body is adjusting to eating less food, or what. But I also discovered, as I was eating my second slice of pizza, is that I will eat and eat and not get full, even though I wasn’t that hungry to begin with. These are new feelings to me. In my 48 years of life I’ve never ever had to contemplate this much about what goes into my body. Sure, I know that I could stand to lose some weight, for the past 10 years. But this diet is the first one where I’ve actively tracked what I ate, for this long. So I don’t know. I do know that I’m always eating apples and drinking more coffee. It’s the Apples and Coffee diet for me.

I bet the guy who discovered Non-Hodgkins lymphoma was pissed when they named it “Non-Hodgkins” instead of naming it after him. Like, was this Hodgkins guy so beloved by other scientists that they even put his name on stuff he didn’t discover?

The kids had their Finding Nemo Jr. musical this weekend. Emma was Bubbles, one of the main fish in the tank. She had a plastic chicken head that blew bubbles. It originally made some crazy clucking sound too, but we disassembled it and clipped the speaker wire. I was proud of that fix because I can’t remember the last time I successfully took something apart, fixed it, and put it back together correctly. It seems like I always run into some issue, whether it’s fixing someone’s computer or doing something mechanical.

Elsa a moonfish and Jack was a shark. Jack still doesn’t like being in chorus class, and at this point I can’t blame him. He did what we wanted, which was to try it out for a semester and be in a musical. He’s done all of that, gotten a good grade, and only complained a little. He wants to spend more time in band class, like he was before he was in chorus. That sounds like an excellent idea to me.

Elsa had an extra part as a moonfish that carries the “blood” trail through the water, up to the main shark. I’m glad she got this extra part because I think she’s uber talented and could be a leading lady in her high school musicals. She such a naturally talented singer, actress and dancer.

The assembly of the 3D printer is coming along slowly but surely. There’s only a few moments here and there where I can get out all the tools, clear a spot on the table, and dedicate time to putting it together. But I have my first assignment, which is to create tiger-themed pieces for the chess club. I’m getting eager to start printing stuff and testing everything, then trying to create my own models.

Summer and Wyatt stayed with us this weekend. We don’t have a lot of visitors at our house so it’s always nice when someone comes by. This Wednesday the wife, Emma and myself will join the high school band/chorus trip to Chicago to see Hamilton. Then next Tuesday I’m picking up Ted in St Louis. He’s staying for four days. That will be a blast. The kids love having Ted around. Laina will be getting back soon from her Hartford/Manchester/Boston work trip. Thanksgiving will be awesome this year.

Speaking of Thanksgiving, I’m wondering if I should track all I eat in the WW app, or just ignore it for a day. I don’t plan on watching what I eat. Like last night I ate all the pizza I wanted, but I like to track everything now that goes in my body just as a habit. The wife informed me that women (i.e. herself) don’t like skinny men; they like muscle definition. On that note I changed my target weight from 165 lbs to a more realistic 170 lbs. Since I weighed 174.0 yesterday, I’m practically at my target. I don’t plan on stopping my daily workout routine, so I should be on the road to muscle definition soon. I think if I keep tracking my intake, stay away from soda, and eat reasonable portions, I can more or less eat what I want and stay around 170. I like my routine of eating apples and bananas throughout the day. It fills me up for the most part. Because of this I’ve become something of an apple connoisseur – Juici and Sweet Tangos are just the best, all the other types are a chore to eat now.

The wife is watching White Christmas now and had to show me the unbelievably racist blackface part. I watched and agreed – it’s horrible racist, in today’s culture. Back then it is probably what passed for liberal, left-wing feel-goodism. The conservatives of that day would probably have been aghast that a movie would even show negroes at all.

Someday I want to write about a big philosophical debate that plays out in my head, which is this: People today think that the main struggle is between good and evil, or black and white, or conservative vs liberal. I think the main conflict is between the Absolute and the Relative. Some day I’ll put my thoughts down on paper about this, but I’m still thinking it out, usually when I’m doing some chore like mowing the lawn or folding laundry or washing dishes. If my ear isn’t bothering me then I get a chance to think. I love to think. I love to ponder philosophy, to try to integrate and unify all the great ideas in life and come up with some grand idea on how to live properly as a human.

Yesterday we went to Elmwood to watch Emma run her final high school cross country race. It was the first really cold day of the year, about 40 degrees. Everyone is not acclimated yet. But in a couple of months we will be, and 40 degrees will seem like a heat wave.

After the race we went into Peoria and shopped at Sam’s Club. We were going to go to Kohl’s after that to get Jack some pants but we found them at Sam’s. Then we went to Guitar Center. I saw a nice used electric drum set for only $250. I’ll have to call them to see if there’s any problems with it; it seems a little on the cheap side.

Then we got Five Guys cheeseburgers and charged the car. I know that I’ve only been on a diet for a week but I’ve already noticed some changes. Like, I wasn’t hungry any part of the trip. I ate my cheeseburger of course, but I felt like I could have made it home without any hunger pains. I guess this is really just intermittent fasting at this point. I made sure to get the smallest cheeseburger and small fries so I wouldn’t use up a crazy amount of Weight Watcher’s points. But another thing I noticed (especially after Friday’s night Mexican meal) is that I immediately felt like I had to work out when I got home, to try to earn back some WW points. After only a week I had come to identify myself as a “thin guy”, or at least a skinner version of my usual self. And it was a great feeling! But I could also start to see the beginnings of how people develop eating disorders. After building an identity as a skinny person, one will do whatever it takes to keep this up and keep losing weight.

After tracking meals with WW I see know just the crazy amount of calories that people put in their body every day! It’s like hundreds of WW points! And then inside Five Guys I saw overweight people and was kinda sad and disgusted at the same time, like, how can people do this to themselves? No one with a healthy amount of self-esteem could let themselves get overweight.

I’m happy with myself because I’ve worked at home all week, surrounded by snacks, and I managed to toe the line and only eat fruits and low calorie food. I think I’d substituted one habit (eating snacks) with a healthier habit (eating fruit). Wednesday and Thursday I actually found myself with 2 or 4 WW points to spare at the end of the night, and I felt full. So we’ll see how I do at the end of the second week. I hope to the 176 on the scale sometime.

My ear wasn’t bothering me, all in all, yesterday. My left ear made the air-rushing sound but it wasn’t as loud as it usually is. The right ear had some extra metallic-sounding tinnitus but not as loud as usual either. I’m kinda excited about becoming a bionic super human soon (getting hearing aids) mainly because I’d love to be part of conversations in crowded, loud restaurants. I called my insurance to get an out-the-door price on these $7000 units I was looking at and honestly I felt more confused after the call then I did before. I told the lady on the phone that I deal with numbers all day and I still didn’t understand the deductible and coverage amount and all that she was telling me. Sometimes when I try to learn something it goes into a black hole in my head and I just don’t get it. Most of the time it’s the terminology that I don’t understand. People talk fast and throw out phrases that I don’t entirely comprehend and then I’m lost. I have to teach myself what everything means, internalize it, swish it around in my brain like a wine tasting, then have a Eureka moment where it all makes sense.

After I have these moments I’m happy. I love to learn new things, and then I like to teach it to other’s in ways that I think will help. This is called Mansplaining by some lol. To me, I feel like I have to teach it to others so that I get to know it better and keep it from slipping my memory.

Jack is at Papa’s again this weekend. He’s basically there every weekend now. There is an amazing transfer of knowledge going on here, where Jack is learning about tractors, farming, machines and whatnot. I’m trying to get him to learn welding from Papas. That would be a great vocation when he gets out of school. Also it would be cool for him to weld stuff around our house.

Today is nice day. Like, it’s a typical autumn day with leaves falling everywhere. But it’s also overcast, drizzling and 74 degrees. It was the perfect day to walk 2.5 miles. There’s nothing going on at work because everyone is at NAB. I finished my Languages of the World audiobook and started another one on the history of Precision. It’s a good day to walk and think and be creative.

My 3D printer shipped today from the Czech Republic. I don’t have a real end-goal for it. I’m kinda just curious how they work. It’s like how I was curious about Tesla’s vehicles and by now I’ve devoured every bit of info about them. I’m thinking that 3D printing will satisfy me like my job satisfies me; it will be a technical endeavor, to figure out exactly how the parts work together to print what I want. But it will also be a creative challenge, like I could seriously use the Blender 3D program to create my own designs.

Today my left ear is a constant whistle but it’s not as loud as usual. I’ll call this a win for my hearing. Tomorrow I’m getting fitted for hearing aids. I don’t really need them but I think having them will be a plus. Maybe I won’t shy away from conversations if I’m able to fully hear everything that everyone is saying. Plus if I ever have to get a new job I’d for sure need to hear clearly what is being said. Right now for work I have a good pair of bluetooth noise-cancelling earphones with a microphone, and I hear just fine using that.

I took Jack to Mt Sterling to get his contacts today. After that we came home so he could get his Nike Air Force shoes that were delivered, and wear them back to school.

Tonight is the kid’s chili supper for band. Jack, Elsa and Emma will all play.

Oh yeah, almost forgot, I started the Weight Watchers program/app on Saturday. I’ve already lost 3 pounds, down to 178. I haven’t seen 178 in years. I have 27 points per day to spend on eating, and honestly I feel full if I make sure to get enough carbs. I am truly impressed after seeing the wife lose 20 POUNDS!!! using the app. It’s amazing. She looks absolutely stunning. I mean, she looks great at all times but now she looks healthier too. And I feel healthier. I started working out again. It’s almost like the golden handcuffs have come out again to force my actions. My life is golden in that I don’t have to worry about where our meals will come from. My family could eat and eat and eat whatever we want, we could gorge ourselves silly. But I feel we’ve come to a place where we have to take care of our weight (or at least I do) and I have to look nice and in-shape. So I can’t just eat whatever I want, whenever I want. I have to have my physical appearance match my fiscal appearance (lol, I just came up with that).

I was listening to music while working and Elton John’s “Empty Garden” came on. Elton John is about the most morose artist ever. This song was perfect for today’s atmosphere. I’ll have to start listening to all his songs while I’m in the Tesla, until I get sick of them and move on to another artist/band.

I have good ear days and bad ear days. Most days are “good”, in that my ear doesn’t beep. I just whistles like there’s air rushing out of my head. But being that it’s a constant noise, it’s fairly easy to tune out. Other days my ears will beep, usually for a couple of hours then stop, but sometimes they’ll beep all day. Sometimes it’s a random, quieter noise, and that is easy to tune out. Actually all of it is easy to tune out. My work and sleep haven’t been affected. That there is a godsend in and of itself. The rest of the time, if something else can get my attention the noise will not be noticeable. I’ve stopped taking dramamine, clariton and flonase as they don’t seem to do anything more than they do seem to help.

The crappy thing is that it’s all in my head (literally and figuratively). If I can redirect my attention away from the noise then I’m good to go. It’s not like a searing leg pain that can’t be ignored. But it’s crappy because I still have to do these mental workouts just to minimize the impact on my life. I’d much rather take a pill or have an operation than to expend all this mental energy to overcome the problem. I really, really enjoy being lost in thought and letting my mind wander. I don’t like to be focused on one thing when I’m in this state. I’m reading Creativity, a book by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (the guy that wrote Flow). It explains why being in this state is so good for creativity, because you’re letting your subconscious do all the behind-the-scenes work of making associations between different objects and concepts. When there is a unique association made (say, like the future of housing, when people could literally live far from their job and sleep while their autonomous vehicle drives them) then these associations bubble up to the conscious level, where the conscious mind determines if they’re good ideas or not. If they’re good ideas then they’re worth pursuing and expanding upon. And then hopefully you generate some good, service or concept that is judged to be useful and is added to the domain that you’re working in. This is creativity.

Anyway, I like to let my mind wander uninterrupted so that I feel creative. When I’m stuck on an issue at work I know better than to try and think my way through it. It’s better to go for a walk or play guitar or do something so that my subconscious mind can work on it. Then I usually have an epiphany at 3AM and implement the fix when I go to work.

I kind of feel like the rug was pulled out from under me when I started having my ear problems. Like I was literally all set to go to start good habits, like working out and eating less. Then my ears threw me a curveball. But enough time has passed that I’ve accepted this for what it is, and there’s no use for a pity-party, and that life gives no one any guarantees. Plus there’s billions of people that have things going way worse then I, so I can’t really complain.

I’m supposed to get fitted for hearing aids in a couple of weeks. I don’t think it will get rid of the beeping but it will help when my tinnitus gets really bad and it sounds like this high-pitched nasty, metallic sawtooth type of noise instead of the gentle sinusoidal tinnitus that I’ve had for 12+ years and I’m used to. I’m starting to think that my regular tinnitus is caused not from playing loud music when I was younger, but from being around loud machinery at work. This is when I first noticed that the ringing in my ears didn’t go away on the way home. I went to lunch the other day with my friend and was telling him of my situation and he was shocked that I, out of all the people playing in bands, was the one that ended up with hearing problems. There’s other guys that have played loud music twice as long as I have and they don’t have any issues.

If my problems were really due to COVID (and I’m not entirely convinced they are, due to the whole left side of my face hurting for 3-4 days) then I wonder what would happen if I got COVID and/or vaccinated again. Would another bought of COVID cancel out my ear problems? Or would it make it worse? Who knows.

We went to the Fox Theatre last night to see the Beetlejuice musical. It was pretty good. It had some slow parts but the big numbers, with all the singing and dancing and production, was great. It could have done without some sexual references but all in all it was a worthy trip out. I went by the Chesterfield service center and dropped off the tools that the Tesla tech left in my car on Monday, when I finally had the rattling noise fixed (it was two tubes of chapstick that fell in the vents). Then we went to the outlet mall and bought nothing. The cool comic book shop and sports memorabilia shops were gone. It’s back to being clothing shops only. This is disappointing but expected. I wonder if the economy is getting ready to take another nosedive, where nice-to-have-but-not-really-needed shops are the first to go under.

Emma ran at regionals yesterday in Quincy. Her team made it to sectionals so she will run this Saturday in Elmwood. I’ll try to swing by Guitar Center to test out electric drums. I’m slowly trying to piece together a recording studio in the basement, after having so much fun making the wife’s birthday video.

Jack and I were riding around Springfield last Sunday while the wife and Elsa watched the Taylor Swift concert movie. I brought up a previous conversation where Jack was complaining about there being a Pride Month and Hispanic Month and all that but no month for him. I explained that he, being a straight white healthy American male alive in this day and age, has won the genetic lottery. I said that it was still great to be who we (him and myself) are, and that he shouldn’t complain. I said that there’s a Mother’s Day and Father’s Day but no Kids Day, because every day is Kids Day. No need for a special day to celebrate kids lol. I said that being a white American male is like that; every day is Kid’s Day. He said “Yeah but at school it’s like they want us to be gay”. Which I almost bust up laughing at, but the tenor of his voice meant that he was serious. I said to him that you can’t really celebrate something you have no control over. It is weird, on the surface, to have Black History Month or Pride Month. Because you’re born Black or Gay, you don’t have a choice in the matter. So why celebrate something you can’t change. I said they celebrate because of the hardships these minority groups have had in the past and what they’ve had to overcome. That is what they are celebrating. It’s not the immutable physical attributes that they celebrate.

But then I got to thinking – I personally didn’t achieve full self-consciousness until I was in 6th grade. That’s when I started to notice myself and the clothes I wore to school, etc. So Jack, being in 8th grade, may only be two years into being self-concious. So he is presented with an array of pride months and history months for other groups that he is not a part of. He is on a long journey of education, to see why these months are important. But he’s still at the beginning of that journey. As weird as is it is to say it, he may need something or someone to reassure his identity, as a straight white American man, that he has value. I mean, I can see now why so many young white men are disaffected and dissociated with life in the US. I’m not saying they’re right but I can see where they’re coming from. As usual, it’s a problem of education. People need to read, experience and live more to see the wider reality that exists.

I’m also kind of horrified to introduce the concept of validating lives for straight white American men, because I feel that Identity Politics is ultimately detrimental. Like, if I were a White supremicist (sp?) I would be all about minorities having their own months and movements and all that. I would totally push for it. Why? Because it wraps these groups into the warm cocoon of Victimization, where you don’t have to take responsibility for your actions – it’s someone else’s fault why your poor or struggling or whatever. And whenever you start to push this of idea of being victimized by straight, white American men, then you’re unwittingly and unknowingly propping up the other side of the coin, which is that it’s great to be a straight, white American man. Like I feel like my stature of being a straight white American man is being confirmed and propped up by other groups cloistering themselves. There’s no active work needed on my part to validate my existence. Other groups are doing it for me.

To paraphrase the great actor Morgan Freeman, he doesn’t like the idea of Black History Month because every month is American History Month, of which Blacks are an important part. I can see that minorities, throughout history, have had to band together to create strength-in-numbers, in order to achieve justice and gains and acceptance and all that. But then there comes a point where automatically being your brother’s keeper means that you are responsible for his behavior and actions. You will be judged by what your brother does. So then you have to disassociate from the group and start to be an individual, so that you get judged not by the group’s actions but your own. It’s a fine line, this tipping point between having the safety of the group but also being judged as a group.

I went to the audiologist in Macomb yesterday. As I was describing my symptoms to the technician, the audiologist came over and mentioned that she overheard me talking. She has the same problems I do and said that it was due to “COVID and vaccinations.” I could have started a big political discussion by asking her to specify whether it was COVID itself OR the vaccinations that caused my problems, but I left it alone. Maybe the three vaccination shots I received last year made everything worse, or maybe the shots prevented me from getting COVID again, which could have made things worse. Without a crystal ball I’ll never really know.

But it is good to finally know why my hearing is acting up. I can live with this the rest of my life as long as the beeping in the early mornings isn’t too loud. By midday all the beeping and twinkling has died down in favor of an increase in the high end fuzz. Sometimes it sounds like my left ear has a hole in it and air is just rushing out. But all in all it could be worse. When I Googled “COVID and hearing” it brought up stories about people going deaf, or having crippling vertigo. So I’m counting my blessings that what I have isn’t toooooo bad (even though it has the potential to get worse). The audiologist said that she see’s patients all the time with these COVID related symptoms.

So on with my life……

Sunday was the wife’s birthday. This year I planned ahead and made a video of the kids and myself playing/singing “With or Without You.” Not really a love song per se, but it’s something I sang a long time ago and I wanted to redo it for her. I had a blast playing all the instruments and shooting video. I’m still amazed at how you can easily make incredible audio/video with just an iPhone, Garageband and Final Cut Pro on a laptop. Back in the day it would have taken weeks to shoot video, transfer it, render it, mix it, do 4 (or 8) multitrack analog recording, and all that jazz. Now it only takes about an hour to create something really decent.

Jack and Elsa run at Sectionals this weekend. We’re all hoping that Elsa can make it to State. She surely has the physical capability to do it. It’s all mental now; how hard she wants to win.

Laina is in Las Vegas for a business trip. I can’t wait to talk to her about it. I love Las Vegas for 2-3 day trips. Anything more than that gets kind of old when you don’t gamble.