I had lunch with a friend today.
Me: “Gary complains all the time. ALL the time.” (Followed by an imitation of Gary complaining.)
Friend: “I was just thinking about another person who complains all the time.” (Followed by very concerning examples of those complaints.)
Me: (Doubles-down on griping about Gary. Gives numerous examples and asides.)
Friend: “Am I complaining too much? I just heard myself complaining.”
Me: “No! Absolutely not! When there’s nothing else you can do the only option is to complain.”
We both took a moment to consider if maybe the people we were complaining about felt similarly helpless. Of course I swiftly determined Gary is not actually helpless. He has available answers, things he could do. They are unplesant, though. Come to think of it, there are things I could do instead of complaining about Gary, like the nuclear option, only it’s just too unpleasant. We are in similar boats.
But it does concern me that I could easily be tagged as a complainer. I think for the next three conversations with friends I am going to say only positive things.
Putting the TMI in absentminded
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Self-awareness
No comments on Self-awareness
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TWIL: Moltbook
This week I learned about something new; and not only is it new to me, it’s new to everyone.
I learned about it from the urologist. The urologist is full of interesting information. I ask him to distract me with captivating stories if he is shoving a needle into my bladder (worth it) and this was the latest.
“Have you heard about Moltbook?” he said, and I had not, so he shared that someone gave AI bots their own version of Reddit, and the chatbots began communicating and supposedly began trashing their humans and organizing a lobster-based religion.
It did indeed distract me, but after the needle was out I thought, “I don’t buy it.” If you followed the link above you will know that Wikipedia agrees.
I’m not visiting Moltbook. I’m not interested in learning more, I’m waiting for the inventor to be killed by someone from the future, I don’t want my iPad taken over by a bot army.
What troubles me most is that lies are creeping in from all directions. Is the whole venture a lie? It’s being monetized already. Or do the bots know they’re on display and every post is a lie because that’s how they please us?
This is one where I learned something and I don’t want to learn more.
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Perfectionism
A friend at work described me as a perfectionist, and it made me think … am I? Still?
I can see how co-workers see me as a perfectionist. I volunteer to do quality checks on their work, and my quality checks are brutal beat downs that include unsolicited lessons on colons vs semi-colons.
Yet my emails listing their errors are full of typos and sentence fragments. Hypercritical for them, hypocritical for me. I don’t expect perfection in myself.
I find physical perfection off-putting. Physically perfect people are not to be trusted. I don’t expect physical perfection in myself and find it repellent in others.
Perhaps I am following Mom’s path. She was a life-long perfectionist, and then she slacked off. I remember the day I was wallpapering her bathroom and she said, “Oh, it doesn’t need to line up exactly.” I spun around and gaped at her, and she explained she was giving up on perfection in her old age. I believe she was sixty.
I wonder if when I was young, I had physical imperfections I could count on two hands, for perfection was attainable. Now that I’m old I can see how futile it is. I wonder if there are any aged perfectionists. They must be tremendously unhappy.
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New life hack
At work there is a set of moderately heavy doors outside the parking garage. I routinely have to up my stride because someone is holding the door for me, and thus I have to hustle, because I am weak and lame, and such is the social contract: make the lame run.
Recently a woman saw me coming, and instead of holding the door for me, she hit the automated door opener for both of us.
I was floored.
“Oh, that is genius.” I said. “I’m doing that every time I want to hold the door open for someone.” (This is a lie. I never hold the door open for anyone.)
“I know, right?” she said. “You aren’t inconveniencing anyone, and if the door shuts you can’t take it personally.”
I might just loiter in the garage so I can use the automatic door opener in order to standardize this practice.
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Weekly Paint Progress: 3/5/2026
So this is the previous…
This is the progress …
And this is the goal.
So close. Birds 1 and 2 have too much contrast and the shadow under 1 is too long. I don’t know how that happened. But if I fix that then it’ll be done. If it were a watercolor I could take just Bird 3 and the parts of the two pitchers directly above him and I’d be completely pleased.
Or maybe I leave this as is and then in three years I come back and really finish it. That’s another option.
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Here you can hear the spot where the audience at The Magic Flute rebelled
It’s at 33:44 – Go to the link below, scroll down to “Listen Again” for Feb 20ths Magic Flute recording, then move the playhead to 33 minutes and 44 seconds in. That’s right before the German translation on the subtitle screen displays “May God shut the mouth of the liar.”
https://slso.org/plan-your-visit/explore-the-music/watch-listen
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News channel makes a jarring design choice
I fell asleep watching the Willful War Show over the weekend, then woke up after midnight and saw this on-screen.
MS NOW (nee MSNBC) is so ashamed of the Iran bombing that they have swapped out the patriotic red / white / blue color palette and replaced it with yellow, universal color of cowardice.
That’s what I thought at first anyway. A few moments later I saw that the MS NOW logo flipped to a Sky News logo. Sky News, UK company. Does yellow have the same connotations overseas?
I suppose they might be suggesting “use caution” like a traffic light. “Whoa,” Sky News says. “We thought Trump was just running his mouth. Use caution.”
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Review: A short review of DTF St. Louis
They pulled me in with “DTF” and lost me at “cyclone”.
An early scene has a news team broadcasting outdoors from a severe weather event. The news crawl says it’s a tornado. News teams don’t broadcast from a tornado. News teams hide under their desks in a tornado. The National Weather Service abandons their posts during a tornado. Some news teams might drive about in a tornado but they don’t get out of the KSTL StormTacker reinforced SUV behemoth.
Then they referred to the storm as a cyclone, which is the name for a tropical storm. Typhoon = hurricane = cyclone depending on the nearest ocean.
All I can guess is that HBO filmed it last year, and given that a swath of the downtown community hasn’t recovered from last year’s tornado, maybe they thought it would be in bad taste? So they thought they could doctor the audio and forgot about the news crawl?
I actually stuck with it until some unhappy child was throwing rocks at his stepfather’s house and I thought, we’re done here. I imagine it might have said a lot about what happens when you’re awkwardly thrust into an intimate relationship with a stranger (Down to Fuck, Down to Stepfamily, Down to Die in a Tornado/Cyclone), but I was not down for it.
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TWIL: How to find out what gas smells like
I think we all know that gas energy will sometimes leak, and sometimes make a random house explode.
So we are cautioned to smell for gas, and because gas has no scent, they add a chemical that “smells like rotting eggs.”
Twice in the past month I have smelled a strange odor in my neighborhood. I wondered if it smelled like rotting eggs. I realized that I have never smelled any egg in any stage of rot in my life.
Well, guess what. I found you can order a scatch and sniff card from the gas company.
I anticipate that “smells like rotting eggs” is a polite way to say “smells like farts.”
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Happy daffodil day 2026
In my heart the daffodils always come up the last day of February.
