Thorn

In the early days of my old blog (around 2012), "A Quiet Voice" was a thorn in my side and I was in hers. 

As a woman of transsexual experience, my digging into gender variance and transsexualism in particular with what were perhaps the wrong questions was irritating her. She likely mistook my approach as an affront to her identity which of course it wasn't. Needless to say, we clashed.

However her challenging me turned out to be prophetic in its helpfulness because she ended up clearing up some misconceptions I might have had at the time. 

About two weeks ago I emailed her to ask how she was and to tell her that her acting as a foil was instrumental in coming to a clearer picture. 

Thus at turns out, she and Jack Molay both ended up playing pivotal roles in different ways. 

After about a week and a half, she finally came back with "wow a blast from the past! How are you?" 

A blast from the past indeed and she says she is doing well.

I'm very glad.

Steak

I was recently watching Bob Odenkirk being interviewed and what stayed with me was his depth of character as a person. 

We are only a month apart in age and he holds views I agree with. He has lived long enough to know that life is messy and unpredictable and can sometimes be bleak. It can also at times be achingly beautiful. 

Judging from his responses, this is clearly not someone who lives with his head in the clouds and is far from a vapid Hollywood archetype. His start as a comedy sketch writer no doubt makes a difference.

Most of us don't live with our mortality as a front and center consideration. Instead, distraction is often a way to put away the idea that we are finite at least here on terra firma. 

However, if we thought more about it we might live and prioritize differently. 

At one point Odenkirk is asked about being a millionaire and he responds that it's nice to have a little more security and options but then adds:

"Sure you can have steak every night if you want, but then after a while you get tired of steak"

Crickets

Studies have shown that when we ask people to defend their deeply held beliefs on an issue, they will rattle off a series of reasons. When we then ask them to explain how those reasons influence outcome, suddenly their whole argument falls apart for lack of understanding. 

This is because reasons are cheap but critical thought requires effort. 

Many people operate through having desired outcome be defended through fabricated reasoning. In other words, the conclusion comes first and the fabricated explanations come second. 

"Why do you support Brexit?" 

"Because I don't want Britain falling under Sharia Law" 

"What is Sharia Law and by what mechanism would this happen?" 

Crickets. 

The interesting thing is that most of us can fall prey to thinking everyone else suffers from this issue but we are the exception. It is the reason our own thinking on any issue should be examined closely. 

When I was training young engineers I would tell them that if they could arrive at the same answer from two or more directions then they were probably on to something.

It's pretty much mandatory.

Calm within the storm

I work on my patience for the public a little bit every day because otherwise I will always be annoyed with someone for one reason or another. I remind myself to be kind.

A retired colleague called me yesterday and we talked about this very issue of seeing things disintegrate around us. 

"Do I call you Joanna now?" 

"If you wouldn't mind otherwise use a J initial" I respond in a jovial tone. He couldn't care less whether I am transgender or not but is sufficiently intrigued to ask some questions including the voice register change.

We're both in our sixties and have seen much over our careers. What I always liked about him was his maverick approach which got him into trouble with management for mostly the right reasons. A capable mechanical engineer who ran on his own proverbial treadmill is how I would describe him. 

The world is the same but also different in that it sped up to a frantic pace which encouraged chaos and incompetence in our former business. 

He was very despondent to hear about the scuba diving accident which led to the death of our other common colleague 

My recent coffee with Beatrice (another former colleague) all but confirmed that the shoddy work is here to stay. Never mind the training, just get another warm body in there and hope for the best.

She says she tries to stay calm within the storm.

Happy Halloween to those who celebrate it in some form :)

Like water between the fingers

Love, like happiness, is one of the most complex and difficult to grasp concepts in the universe. 

It is fed through things like altruism, faith, compromise and empathy but undone by envy, lust and anger. It is underpinned by a strong current of predetermined biology which is what can make a parent love a child so unconditionally from the outset. 

It will also break your heart like nothing else can to the point of appetite and sleep loss; a despair which has even driven some to self harm. 

I had forgotten the 2009 film "A Single Man" which I saw in theaters with someone I was then fairly sure I would end up with long term. It is about a closeted gay professor in the 1950's who loses the love of his life but cannot cope with the sorrow. 

He contemplates how to do himself in as he interacts with others with their own tiny bits of insight as he grapples with despair. 

The truth is that there is no bottling a predictable formula for this idea though poets, novelists, playwrights and film makers have tried to. It is fleeting and cagey and defies being easily nailed down. 

Just when you think you have it, it escapes through your fingers and are then left to lick wounds you are certain will never heal. 

I told a young woman I know who recently had a breakup that it hurts a tiny bit less each day until one day you almost don't remember why it hurt so much to begin with.

A world without training wheels

Think about the world we live in today as a bicycle without training wheels. Some feel unsteady and uncomfortable while others regale in the freedom to ride anywhere they want. 

The former has a considerably larger contingent than the latter. 

Most people want safety and rules they can follow and when those disappear panic sets in. Conservatives certainly fit that bill as they bemoan the loss of the predictability of even just a decade ago. 

The world has never functioned well because it is run by people. By our very nature we are short sighted, lack critical thinking and are emotional above everything else. Thus you remove the training wheels and things fall apart fast. 

Cultural outrage is the first weapon reached for because it works the best. Scare people by trumpeting a perceived threat and you have them hooked. 

You can even convince them while you pick their back pocket at the same time. 

Watching The Good Liars interview Trumpers in line for a rally feels like shooting fish in a barrel. You may even feel self satisfied and smug as you watch them answer in unintelligible and stupid ways until you realize some of these people could be your neighbours and might otherwise have seemed entirely reasonable to you when borrowing that cup of sugar. 

It's just that they feel unsteady on that bicycle.

Lots of change

I sent Helene Cote a quick text yesterday telling her that at almost 64 years of age and 4 years into retirement, my life as an out transgender person is going well. 

She was so happy to receive the news because as one of the sexologists within the McGill University and Montréal General hospital affiliated gender identity clinic, she deals with a great many of us at every age and stage of progress. 

I was one of the few that did not move on to some form of medical transition. 

I told her that social transition is possible for older people but not easy; no form of significant life change ever is. 

A few years ago she had me participate in a small forum of both male to female and female to male patients where I was the only one not on a hormone regimen. 

Some of the younger people would pass perfectly under the radar since they began treatment so early. 

I dropped out of a program I was approved for fearing I would succumb to medical transition in my mid 40's and opted for my own psychological heavy lifting in understanding both the subject matter and myself. Helene has told me numerous times that it's the most fearful ones at the outset that tend to have the most resolve in the end and transition. Conversely, the more Gung Ho at the outset, the more likely they were to drop out.

This is likely because the fearful understood the gravity of some of the challenges they were potentially facing.

Not to mention that the head of the program at that time was an SOB in his 70's who (a la Blanchard) mostly saw the patients as defectives rather than as members of the human mosaic. 

Needless to say, lots of change since then; both in society and within the program itself.

All, I am happy to say, in the right direction.

And ye shall find

Around age 50, Leo Tolstoy had a deep existential crisis. He had already gained great acclaim plus wealth as the celebrated author of "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina". 

The crisis was about meaning and purpose which having climbed to the top of literary circles had not helped him find. He even at times contemplated suicide as he searched for expert opinion from within the worlds of science, philosophy and religion of his day. 

Neither source provided him with satisfactory answers. 

Tolstoy then turned to observing the simple peasants who worked his property and noticed that they found happiness within their simple existence. They weren't contemplating the deep questions of the nature of our existence but instead lived day to day while helping each other to survive. 

He proceeded to work alongside them wearing simple clothing while toiling in fields performing manual labour. 

Over time his crisis resolved and he found increasing solace in a simplified spirituality which resulted in becoming a heretic in the eyes of a Russian orthodox church that excommunicated him in 1901 for rejecting many of its doctrinal beliefs. 

Tolstoy had ended up embracing a more radical and pacifist approach which ultimately ended up influencing people like Mahatma Gandhi; however it drew ire within conventional ecclesiastical circles. 

He died in 1910 an unrepentant man. 

The search for meaning took Tolstoy into the world of simplicity and helping others which resolved his crisis.

To its logical conclusion

If we were to follow the idea of constant growth and in particular the progression of AI to its logical conclusion, almost no one will have a job one day and thus no money with which to purchase goods and services. Products made by robots will be bought by almost no one. 

This of course makes no sense but it once did in a world which was in need of growth. 

So we continue to use the GDP growth metric in a world with increasingly limited resources owned by increasingly less people. 

It is a recipe for disaster. 

Hence the unfettered capitalist growth model fails completely and we are seeing it now as the US collapses under the weight of late stage capitalism where many people cannot afford life basics while the select few ponder how to decorate their villas. 

The only way out of this is to figure out how to properly share global resources under models which still encourage people to be motivated. We need more fairness which need not mean equality of outcome. 

Right now we are headed for implosion scenarios where the masses rebel once they feel they have nothing to lose and it's coming faster than we think.

Good old days

At the turn of the twentieth century, average life expectancy was approximately in the mid 50's. Performing basic tasks to survive were much more tedious and time consuming. Think about doing laundry, fetching well water, chopping wood for a fire or shoveling snow when no modern plows existed. 

Think also about basic diseases we now take for granted as being eradicated or completely treatable. 

Thus at the macro level things have improved dramatically and yet at the micro level we feel more listless and stressed. As emotional creatures it's how we feel at the ground level that takes preference over whether we have eliminated small pox which used to kill millions. 

The embarrassment of choice plus having more personal freedom hasn't made us any happier. It can even be argued that the distraction of being busier performing more menial tasks was better because it was bolstered by a community spirit of shared experience. 

We also had institutions and family dynamics in place which made the hard work seem a bit more bearable. 

Thus we have both gained and lost which proves that you can't readily make a convincing argument for the good old days at any juncture in our history.

Little victories

Lula finally prevailed in his election runoff in Brazil no thanks to Israel and the Trump regime both of whom tried to meddle to tip the scales for Flavio Bolsenaro. 

What's interesting about Brazil is that it was heavily Roman Catholic and now counts evangelicals as being approximately 30% of the population. Small wonder that their dogma lends itself well to the aspirations of the US political right. 

Concepts like the Rapture feed very well into a political ideology which includes making sure that Jewish aspirations are upheld until they are only undone by a returning Christ. 

Lula's victory has got MAGA''s panties in a bunch and I saw a video which sampled the outrage on X. Unsurprisingly, conspiracy theories abound including talk of stopping bus service and extending voting by 2 hours as both playing into the hands of the left. Don't try and figure out the non-existant logic.

As the US midterms approach, early voting shows promising signs for the Dems as its very likely that some registered Republicans as well as non party affiliated voters are among the people completely fed up with the toxicity, incompetence and stupidity of Trumpism.