illegal patience trading on the black market

there is often a wait associated with common errand locations: the post office, the bank, the grocery. in anticipation of having to wait, people entering these premises allocate themselves an amount of patience. allocating patience is like cocking a gun; the patience should be discharged before too long. most people discharge their patience in small bursts which surface to the outside world as audible sighing, clearing of throat, or shifting of weight from one foot to the other.

the people in these situations are at risk of running into two types of problems which jeopardize successful completion of their errand:

1. considering their average rate of patience discharge and the duration of their wait, their initial patience allocation was insufficient.

2. rather than small, periodic bursts, they discharge their patience climatically all in one go like mount st. helens.

there are two types of people who experience problem #1: passive and active. when passive people have spent all their patience, they bow their heads, mutter a word of frustration, sacrifice their place in line, and return to their car, defeated. when active people sense that their patience reserve is running low, they opt to additionally get themselves into problem #2 and discharge their remaining patience in a big bang.

the difference in end result between problems 1 and 2 is that for people who remain in problem 1, their failure to complete the errand is self-imposed, whereas for people who migrate from problem 1 to problem 2 (or were only ever in problem 2), their failure to complete the errand is a consequence of denial of service on behalf of employees, who refuse to assist people who behave threateningly.

your upload is my download: blood vs. drug

many objects serve multiple purposes. this is often strived for in the name of efficiency. an object serving two purposes will sometimes do so simply by means of reciprocal actions. for example, a needle & syringe can put drugs into you or draw your blood, depending on the direction of the plunger.

one rule that can always be counted on to hold true: the number of purposes served by an object is a function of the number of layers under consideration, where the maximum number of purposes served corresponds to all layers being considered. to illustrate what I mean: inside a mechanical pencil, approx. two thirds of the way down, the shallow-sloped and funnel-shaped base of the lead chamber facilitates lead pieces being drawn into a shaft. zooming out to the next layer reveals that this funnel-shaped base is part of a larger mechanism serving the purpose of advancing the lead bit by bit. zooming out again, additional served purposes are added to the list: a mechanical pencil can be used to write, draw, solve math problems, erase, etc.

since increasing the number of purposes served by an object means adding layers to it, for many years the trade-off of serving more purposes was that the object was physically more complex and/or larger. the advent of computers and software has changed things a little. with digital systems, increased physical complexity isn't nearly as relevant as increased computational complexity, and the trade-off isn't size but power consumption and longer time requirements.

what happens when an object serves two purposes, one that is tied to cultural subjectivity and one that isn't? a winter hat with a sports team logo embroidered on it might signal to passersby that the person wearing it is a big fan of the team, whereas the wearer may be more interested in simply keeping their ears warm and couldn't care less about the logo.

yes, but there's no lighthouse

I'm sure that a number of people in the early stages of dementia interpret losing their sense of self as an indication that they're approaching enlightenment. I wonder if their believing this has any impact on the progress of the disease.

if you believe strongly enough that you are someone you currently are not, you will eventually become the person you believe yourself to be. significant personality shifts rarely occur because in order for any change in personality to take place, the person has to genuinely see themselves as someone they are not, and as the disconnect between who they are and who they think they are increases, so too does the likelihood that the way they see themselves is not genuine.

it's difficult to see someone when they are separated from you by a thick coastal fog. echolocation might work, but the sound of waves crashing on the shore could interfere. I'd prefer to walk towards them blindly with arms outstretched, covering more ground by meandering left & right in semicircles, and stopping when my hand caught theirs.

it's out of staples

it used to be that, even when procrastinating, I was never afforded the true experience of relaxation. this was because, from an academic point of view, I could be spending my time more productively. even during previous summer vacations, feelings of exuberance and relief were tempered by the knowledge that I'd be back in class the coming fall. thoughts like these would act to weigh me down, to keep me grounded.

all of that has changed now. the image of college personified looking disapprovingly from behind my shoulder has vanished. there's a genuine absence of responsibility towards university. this situation enables me to have no qualms about staying in my room all day and retreating into the abandoned warehouse that is my mind, browsing the disheveled contents of storage cabinets and altogether having a smashing time kicking a rusted stapler from one end of the building to the other.

I have the feeling that I've jumped off a cliff and am free-falling endlessly. this is counterbalanced by the sense that I'm very light and hardly have any mass at all.

fancy seeing you here

unless there is animosity between them, coworkers who happen to see each other by chance at the store, on the street, or elsewhere other than their workplace, will be inclined to smile.

I think there are two things happening.

1. identifying a familiar face from among the faces of countless strangers who populate a person's field of view over the course of a day is a welcome reassurance that passageways exist between the realities governing workplace and non-workplace life.

2. seeing someone outside of work who you associate with work is exciting for its rude disregard of established expectations. the restless curiosity to see what happens when authority is rejected survives our youth and we continue to harbor it into adulthood. the only difference is that, rather than being parents or school, authority is your workplace, and it has been rejected not by staying out too late or skipping class but by seeing a coworker outside of business hours.

feigning agreement on campus

technical courses steeped in analytical problem solving offer little room for opposing views. if you question the validity of a conclusion, you need only use mathematics to see how the conclusion was derived and to verify that it is in fact correct.

alternately, soft sciences, collectively known at this university as 'perspectives on the human condition', sometimes encourage debate. but even though the phrase "there is no right or wrong answer" pervades these classes, there is material presented that students are expected to accept. however, unlike concepts built on the robust language of math, this material is a flexible agglomeration of ideas. since the material's truth can be so much harder to logistically defend, students are prone to take its validity for granted on blind faith alone.

further, disagreeing with some of the material might not only be frowned upon, but articulating the merit of your disagreement is as difficult as it is for the prof to defend the material's validity, similarly due to the absence of mathematical reasoning.

the punchline to all this is an assault on the seldom-spoken-of assumption that someone who received a good course grade agreed with all the material presented. the reality is that the student may have suppressed their reservations about what was being taught and completed the coursework in a manner that they knew would give them good marks.

money money money

there's a section of the local paper called community snapshots, where the pictures featured depict usually two individuals, one handing the other a check. the people pictured represent their respective organizations, sometimes non-profits, sometimes banks, etc. the money exchanging hands, with the check posing for the photo between the grip of the two individuals, is a donation on behalf of one organization to another. before reading the caption, you can often tell the donor and recipient from one another by their expressions, or lack thereof. last week I happened to glance at a photo and the recipient was all smiles, while the donor was stone cold.

I've not posted a loop in awhile, so: how expensive is it to throw away money?

adaptation

you experience a small change. something outwardly minor enough that it goes unnoticed by people around you. you notice it because it's persistent and uncomfortable. being persistent, you're always aware of it at some level, and it comes to the forefront of your attention when you are busy with nothing and have no distractions. and you wish for things to go back to the way they were, fearful that as long as this change persists, you'll never be able to enjoy things to the degree that you could before.

but I think you can. given enough time, the stress born of the uncomfortable change will become so mentally and physically taxing that the current state of things will replace the way things used to be as the new definition of normalcy. how long this transformation takes to occur depends on the severity of the uncomfortable change.

maybe it seems like I'm trying to talk about life in a deep sense. I'm not. I'm referring to something very trivial and light. it's like walking out of the dentist's office silently cursing them because the work they did changed your bite, upper and lower teeth not meeting each other in the familiar closure manner. but given a brief time, you grow accustomed to the new bite.

awhile ago I had an irritation in my throat. I had the impulse to cough, but coughing wouldn't clear it. after a couple weeks, it finally went away by itself. or maybe it never went away and instead established itself as the new norm that now feels comfortable.