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The Flea and the Acrobat: The origin of this segment

I've been trying, slowly, to watch Stranger Things.  (Slowly. Very slowly.) But I got as far as the episode about the flea and the acrobat. The idea goes like this: Imagine a tightrope, with an acrobat walking along. The acrobat has to be perfectly balanced, because she can only stand on the tightrope if she's perfectly balanced. Now imagine a flea crawling along the tightrope next to the acrobat. To the flea, the entire tightrope is a surface it can crawl on. The analogy was used in the show to explain a dimensional door, but I have a different take on it. To me, having depression feels a lot like that tightrope. To stay happy with depression basically takes perfect balance. You need to be able to balance your mental state and keep yourself stimulated but not put so much energy into anything that you burn yourself out. If you wobble in any direction, you plunge down into the pit. Meanwhile, around you are these people who seem to just crawl all around the tightrope. Th
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Thinking Inside Out: I really don't give a fuck if you're healthy, as long as you're happy.

Let me start by saying two things: I'm a raging liberal. I fucking hate  some liberal talking points. The topic of discussion today? "People can be healthy at any size." Stick with me. This isn't going where you think it is. When I was in high school, the music teacher was a skinny-ish guy with a bulging belly. Not huge, but enough that friends who'd known him a long time would tease him about it. I have few memories of music class, but I remember the time he told us about those friends teasing him. He laughed. He patted his belly. And he said, "You know what this is? Good food! And lots of it!" Yum. Then there was the episode of House, M.D.  (anyone else remember that show?) where the patient was a man who doctors would classify as "morbidly obese." On various occasions he told the cast to STFU about his weight. "I'd rather die of a heart attack eating a seven-course dinner than live to ninety by not eating anyt
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What does the "Undo" button do: I'm not a therapist, but I play one on the phone.

From time to time I get the sense early on in a call that the person I'm talking to needs way more than just help fixing their computer problems. It's usually not that hard to spot them. They've got the hitch in their breath that says they're too damn tired for this, or their patience when they get interrupted by someone on the other side of the phone is just that bit frayed. I believe in the charity principle, so I try my best to believe that people can be reached. I try to say, okay, this person is probably tired, or busy, or this is the fifth crisis that's been brought to them in the past hour. And then... there was this person. I've had panic attacks. This poor woman was well past a panic attack. She was on the verge of hyperventilating herself into an early grave. I've heard more calm from a toddler on a sugar rush. You could hear fewer "sorry's" in an ancient East Asian court. In her mind she didn't know anything, she couldn
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Project Re-Rail: Marie Kon-don't-you-touch-my-shit

I'll be really honest. I only picked up The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up  because I first read The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a Fuck  and Sarah Knight believes in this KonMarie thing. I'll be extra super duper  honest and add that I've only read the first 50 pages or so so far. But based on those 50 pages, I have a few guesses about Marie Kondo: She's probably neurotypical, or if she's on the autism spectrum, she's on the part that means you can reliably predict your interests for the next fifteen or fifty years. She doesn't have many hobbies. She's not much of a reader. Why do I think this? Because based on these 50 pages, I've been told that over the course of six months, I should go through every one of my belongings and discard any that does not spark joy. I've further been told that there is a strict order this should follow, and "books" comes before "papers" comes before "miscellany" in this
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Project Re-Rail: The Clutter Hypothesis

This month I spent a lot of money on Amazon that I shouldn't have. I returned a lot of stuff, but not all of it, for the pretty simple reason that I genuinely have a use for a lot of it. Primarily the big bundles of storage and display baskets currently scattered throughout my room. There's one on the table by my door (recently moved from a different house) that's just full of random junk. Another on my bookcase for the same purpose. Really! See, I have a hypothesis that I'm testing. The hypothesis is this: Clutter is not  the result of insufficient organizational systems, or even the result of having too much crap. Wait,  you're saying as you work through that sentence. But clutter is stuff that isn't organized. So it has to be the result of not being organized. Or of having too much stuff. Right? Well. Kind of. Let me clarify the details of this hypothesis. Having organizational systems is, obviously, good. Books go on the bookcase. Clothes go in the
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Project Re-Rail: The Origin of this Segment

I have major depression, general anxiety disorder, hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, sleep apnea, and chronic fatigue. At the time of writing this I'm also going through a hell of a lot of financial, emotional, and relationship stress (the latter is mostly spillover from the other two). Over the past couple months, I've found myself thinking things like the following: "Everything is a mess and I'm a mess." "I'm such a fucking train wreck." "Why can't I just not? " "I'd really like to just stop existing for now, please." Do you know what are some very unhealthy thoughts? Yeah. All of those things. I have a therapist--I've had one since I was fifteen and told my mom I was considering killing myself to avoid going to school. But recently it's been pretty clear I need a bit more than that. Fortunately it's the new year, and that means any bookstore you go into has a nice display advertising ways to
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What Does The "Undo" Button Do?: The Origin Of This Segment

I work in tech support. Please save your sympathies for someone else; I enjoy tech support. I come from a family of teachers. My mom and her youngest sister both teach Spanish, and their father taught finance at a local public university until his retirement. Education is in my blood, basically, and when the occasional tech support customer expresses amazement that I was able to make something seem so simple, I happily explain to them that tech support is my way of teaching students who all give a fuck about the lesson plan. (I don't say fuck on the phone.) But while I do enjoy it, I also have a good amount of Stories(TM).  Sadly, the origin of this segment isn't much of a story--but it is pretty important that I explain to you WTF the title even means. See, a couple days ago a coworker from a different department stopped by and warned me she was going to ask me the stupidest question I'd ever been asked. I asked her without blinking, "Is it 'what does the '
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