Last week I had my appendix removed. It was not an experience I enjoyed.

I had to cancel two trips, my volleyball league and pickup games, and my gym membership, but luckily the appendectomy was more than 4 weeks before we plan to head to Mexico City for the winter. The big trip remains on, as scheduled, and I should be mostly recovered by the time we leave. Right now I’m mostly fighting late afternoon/early evening fatigue and sudden reminders that I still have holes and stitches in my abdomen.

I finally gave in on YouTube Premium– the ads were just too much– though I wish I could cut something out to reduce my monthly bills. If it weren’t for Elsa and her mom, I think Netflix would be top of my chopping block, which is remarkable.

Lately I’ve been itching for a new creative project. I’m not sure if it’ll be writing or music, tactile or technical. I’ve spent the year getting back in touch with the joy of being present in my body and putting in physical effort. Work takes up all the mental space and energy. With an eye toward what I want for 2023, I am starting to consider if there’s some way I can bring creativity into my life so that I can have mental joy outside of work the way I’ve found physical joy.

I’ve got a domain I’m itching to use for something.

Oh yeah, and we finally went to Cuba, with a trip originally booked for May 2020 as a gift to Elsa’s mom for Christmas 2019.

Small thing, but being laid up in the hospital did not mean I could catch up on reading. Even once recovering from surgery, I just couldn’t focus for more than 10 or so minutes on anything. I have never had my body so thoroughly shut down my mind. It wasn’t like I was sleeping either. And while time did pass slowly, it wasn’t the slowest time I’ve ever experienced.

We always say that healing takes work, and I’ve always thought I believed and respected that. I understand it on a completely different level now.

Day two out of the hospital, I was able to complete the delightfully nuts Station Eternity by Mur Lafferty and move on to the next one.

I’m sorry I’ll always associate this book with waiting at urgent care who said I could go to the ER to be certain, or go home and try and get a follow up with my PCP the next day (provided nothing got worse). Then the first ER where I wanted to be treated that had a 10 hour wait. Then the next ER when I was seen after an hour, was quickly told I almost certainly had appendicitis and it was a really good thing I showed up at the ER that night. Within another hour I had a CT scan, which, was a horrible experience (the X-ray contrast caused me to immediate convulse, gag, and vomit up bile into my mask, thankfully the only contents of my stomach since I hadn’t had an appetite for a day), and developed a temperature, both confirming the diagnosts. A 3 am transfer to another hospital where I could have the appendix removed. That unbelievable day of fever and pain while I waited for a 3pm surgery since I was unscheduled. Waking up, being told almost nothing, and feeling like my teeth were going to shatter I was shivering so severely because of how cold I felt. Carted back up to my room about 20 mins later and finally getting placed under warm blankets. Waking up some amount of time later (I have no idea how long the surgery took or when I finally woke all the way back up) and learned my appendix had been “perforated”— which I know means hole, but for some reason everyone said perforated or maybe “ruptured” but never “burst”— which is just great. My fever spiking to 102 at 5am and my only knowing that because I read the machine and not because the nurse told me. And another day and a half in the hospital in a ton of pain, but somehow, slowly getting better. Wanting to avoid withdrawal symptoms, I nearly always refused painkillers. I took oxy exactly twice— once the night when I came into the hospital from the ER when the pain was unbearable and I couldn’t sleep, and once after the surgery while my shivering made everything hurt. I haven’t taken once since I’ve been home and I doubt I will. But I should have taken a lot more oxy.

These last few months I’ve been as physically active as any time in my life— consistently lifting weights 3x a week, playing volleyball at least 3x most weeks as well, and trying to get in a good amount of walking every day. I had two trips planned before moving to Mexico for a couple of months this winter. I wanted to spend my time in Mexico doing a lot of barbell strength training to really bulk up on top of what is probably the best muscle base I’ve had at any point in my life.

Those trips are gone. We’re still going to Mexico, I hope, since I was cleared to fly after 4 weeks provided my recovery goes well. But instead of entering elevation at the peak of my physical fitness, I will come just barely recovered from the most physically traumatic experience I have ever had. Instead of bulking, I’ll be very cautiously and slowly reintroducing any form of resistance training— even if everyone says I’m fully recovered, am I really going to trust my body so quickly again? I’m going to be doing a lot of mental work alongside that physical work.

Modern medicine is a marvel. I’m not sure how anyone handled this without excellent general anesthesia, powerful intravenous antibiotics, and intravenous fluids. Without laparoscopic surgical techniques, which still left me with a nearly 8 inch incision, I can only imagine the pain and trauma. And although before and for at least 24 hours after, I could barely imagine recovering in a reasonable amount of time, 72 hours after surgery I’m doing pretty well. I can listen to a podcast again. I can read again. I could write this post. I can walk around the house confidently. I can believe better health is coming again.

I am not grateful for this experience, but I am grateful that until I was 35 I never had so much as a broken bone or a single surgery. I am hopeful, quite against the odds, it will be at least another 35 years before I need another surgery. I am so glad that I was able to recognize I was still feeling worse, and I should just go to the ER, even if I was convinced it was going to be some combination of gas/constipation. I’m not really sure what would have happened if I tried to sleep it off in bed and my appendix had burst at home. I wouldn’t be writing this post today, that’s for sure.

At some point this year, I made it a goal to refresh my resumé by April. I did not do that. I still have not done that.

My goal wasn’t to go seek another job, but instead, to turn this into an exercise of reclaiming my professional narrative. I’ve been at the same company for eight years now, but that company, and my role there, has grown dramatically in that time. What has not really evolved is my self-perception or the story I tell about myself to others.

I failed to meet my goal, and I don’t see a new resumé happening any time soon. But the achievement is not a new document, but a change of mindset and understanding of myself. That project remains, as it ever will be, on-going, but I think I’ve made some quiet progress on this front.

I was reminded of this failed goal today when I had to write out a short, four sentence personal biography. I realized there were things I listed confidently I would not have a year ago (volleyball) and things that were missing that would have been there most of my life (anything music related). My self-perception can, has, and needs to evolve regarding my personal life just like my professional life ¹.

I think I should be asking, “Who am I?” more often. It’s not as though my motivations, emotions, and actions have stopped continually expanding, contracting, or shaping a constantly changing self. We are what we feel and do, whether or not we take notice of it. The conscious, narrative sense-making I engage has a natural tendency to lag reality.

My contacts have slowly deteriorated in fit over the course of 18 months. This now leads to having to regularly take them out, clean them, and reinsert them in the middle of the day. It’s terribly inconvenient when out of the house. The process of getting new lenses is pretty involved. Even though I’ve already done my first appointment for my new fit, because my lenses are custom made, it can take 3-4 weeks easily to get a pair back from the manufacturer. And when that pair comes, there’s often a need for adjustments. It’s not unusual to have to go back 3 or 4 times over the course of months to get lenses with a good enough fit that I can then wear them for 12-18 months before going through the process again.

All of this for a pair of contacts that would cost me $1500-2000 easily, out of pocket, were it not for having just the right kind of insurance that covers one pair of medically necessary contacts a year. I say the “right kind” because the distinction isn’t even “good” or “bad”– at least in the US. It seems somewhat arbitrary (based on online forums) which health insurers will cover scleral lenses and which will not.

Ultimately, things are not so bad. I have not yet had to have a cornea transplant (though this is a real possibility one day). I can see 20-20 with my contacts, despite significant corneal scarring in one of my eyes. Although I do get some intense glare at night, I can still drive, especially short distances. I have some daytime light sensitivity, but I’ll trade that for being able to buy non-prescription sunglasses. I also don’t have the discomfort some people experience, and routinely wear my lenses 14-15 hours a day. There are all kinds of people on Reddit who proclaim they are suicidal over their keratoconus diagnosis, but at least from my experience and my situation, that seems bonkers.

It just makes me wonder what would happen if I were living in a different time or income bracket. I’m effectively unsighted without my contacts. So although my lenses these days are constantly getting covered in schmutz and getting new ones are a pain in the ass, I am grateful.

Tipping has gotten out of control. I tip everywhere, because I am relatively affluent. But I resent the idea that everywhere I buy things (thanks Square/Toast/Clover/whatever) asks about tips. Not every service job should be reliant on tips.

So many of the things I buy today also have service fees. Why is Lyft charging me a separate gas surcharge? Restaurants are separately charging for delivery and service fees.

It is well past time for a legal remedy. Tips, service fees, and surcharges are nonsense. Charge what you need to charge to pay people a proper wage and achieve the profit margin you need, period.

Prices should be reported with taxes included as well, while we’re at it.

I had this great product that was a face moisturizer with SPF30 that was designed to be rubbed into your beard as well. It was discontinued, and I still can’t find a solid replacement.

Even with what feels like an increase in men’s skincare products in recent years, we’re still well behind what’s marketed to women.

Look, I think there’s a huge pink tax that’s at least 50% bullshit products that shouldn’t be sold to anyone. There’s also no reason to gender 95% of these things. But there should be protective skin products that are designed to work with and for facial hair.

The opening to this piece made it sound like it was just about some argument between two public-ish, intellecutal-ish, journalist-ish people. Blech.

But I kept reading, and it’s actually an excellent defense of and argument for the use of “semi-fascist” to describe Trump and his movement.

The fact of the matter is this: Trumpism at its core is a movement fixated on restoring national greatness through the charismatic leadership of a single providential individual who “alone can fix it.” It is obsessed with national decline and attacking internal enemies. Although more loosely organized and weaker than those of the classical Fascisms, MAGA also has paramilitary formations that have tried to carry out this project to the point of attempting the overthrow an elected government. From the very beginning of his political ascent, he attracted the interest and enthusiasm of the extreme right: he was the kind of thing they’d been looking for for a long time. Perhaps now a disappointment, perhaps now a failure, but certainly a step in the right direction as far as they were concerned.

It’s worth the read, even if the opening was a bit insider-baseball cringe.

Although, for what it’s worth, within the cringe was my first introduction to A.O. Hirschman’s Rhetoric of Reaction. I immediately recognized all three arguments, and I’m quite certain I’ve made some of them myself. I’m definitely going to read Hirschman now, and I’m sure I’ll notice these “theses” all over the internet.

In the construction of his arguments he closely follows something similar to A.O. Hirschman’s famous theses from his Rhetoric of Reaction: the “perversity thesis,” where any action actually result in the opposite of its intent, the “futility thesis,” where any action will actually accomplish nothing, and the “jeopardy thesis,” where any action will threaten some already accomplished social good. These three simple guides provide a template for the pundit for a long career in journalism. They give the appearance of thoughtfulness and counter-intuitive brilliance, when they just methods to generate rote responses.

The last six months have been better than the six months before that.

I said this year was going to be about fun. I didn’t really know what that meant. I just knew that 2021, especially from about June on, was a real slog, and a times, quite dark.

If I had to guess what “fun” meant, I don’t think I would have said, “Your once a week volleyball league will turn into a 3-4 time a week thing.” If I’m in Baltimore, just about every Monday through Thursday, I’m playing volleyball. These days it’s mostly indoor pickup, where folks just show up and self-organize. I’ve learned I really don’t like playing in the sand. I get home tired. My body often hurts. But it’s the most fun I’ve had in years.

I’ve even made some friends, which is pretty great, because my best friend moved away this summer.

I’ve been listening a fair amount to three new albums by Cave In, Porcupine Tree, and Dashboard Confessional, which feels would make as much sense in 2002 as 2022.

Somehow, my household has continued to be COVID-free, and with at least seven trips between now and the end of the year, I am anxious for a fresh Omicron-specific booster.

The dogs are great.

I’m thinking about adding an About page of sorts to the blog. Possibly replacing “Uses” or making Uses a section on that page.

I’m staying in a kind of strange spot in Pittsburgh. Driving through, nothing would seem worth stopping and checking out. But there’s some incredible architecture to experience when you walk around. I don’t think I would have ever noticed this church from inside of a car.

• For All Mankind S3
• Only Murders in the Building S2
• Locke and Key S3
• Star Trek – literally all of the new Trek
• The Sandman
• Good Omens
• American Gods (S3)
• His Dark Materials (S2+)
• The Boys (S3)
• Paper Girls
• Orphan Black
• The Americans
• Patriot
• Resident Evil
• The Wire (S3+)

The list goes on– that’s just off the top of my head. I have too much life happening to watch all the TV.

I’m at the end of the week looking at my todos and figuring out which day I will accomplish these things next week.

• Monday – travel cross country
• Tuesday – meetings from 10-5 with 30mins for lunch
• Wednesday – all day retreat
• Thursday – meetings 930-345 with 30 mins for lunch.

🤷‍♂️

Via Om Malik, this quote from Zuckerberg

Our north star is can we get a billion people into the metaverse doing hundreds of dollars a piece in digital commerce by the end of the decade? If we do that, we’ll build a business that is as big as our current ad business within this decade. I think that’s a really exciting thing. I think a big part of how you do that is by pushing the open metaverse forward, which is what we’re going to do.

I cannot think of anything less exciting.

A year ago today I was coming back from a vacation. I felt awful. It was a fun trip. I ate great. I was very active. I lost considerable weight, during vacation! Without feeling limited at all!

But at the same time, I was reaching the peak (depths?) of a months long crisis. Getting my vaccine was a huge relief, but on the other side of unclenching I realized how much had fallen apart that I had just muscled through.

I know I’m not the only one who thought, “Maybe things are getting back to normal!”, and, no matter how naive that turned out to be, found that there was a lot of damage done that needed healing before we’d feel normal.

It was my first time on a plane in over a year, which was possibly the longest stretch I had gone in my entire life without flying. I thought getting away for a true vacation would be restorative. But what I found when I broke out of my house-office was that I didn’t feel better. I hadn’t taken care of myself in all kinds of ways over the previous 18 months.

So I was in Mexico, on vacation, and found that any moment that I was not extremely occupied, I was terrified. I felt panic. I was having anxiety and concerns before I left, but I thought that I just needed a vacation. So when the vacation solved approximately nothing, I was really lost.

I am still working through some of what I found out about myself that week. A year later, I’m struggling with these dueling memories of a dual experience— I have all of these joyful memories of biking, swimming, and eating mixed in with these deep, dread-filled existential crises.

I made a bunch of mistakes last year. I let myself feel unsupported and unloved without asking for support and love. I let myself focus on small number of opportunities to refill my emotional reserves instead of finding ways to tend to them every single day. I told myself a lot of stories about the world and my place in it and invited no other voices in to challenge my perspective. I refused to let go of things that were no longer making me happy and embrace the new things that were. I resisted and failed to make some big changes that I probably should have made. I got so lost in surviving for so long.

These are things that happen to people (and me) all the time, but the pandemic made them all so much worse. I think I’m better today. I think I’m more prepared to face these same challenges when they come back again. But last year was harder than the pandemic itself for me. Instead of relief, the relative safety of being young and vaccinated without any major risk factors pre-Delta just opened the gates that held back 18 months of flood waters. I am so lucky to have been able to essentially “muscle through” 2020. I felt what that did to me in 2021.

More, Better Web Apps is something I’d like to see. I can’t say that I can point to a web application I enjoy using as much as native applications developed by small teams.

Bjarnason points out native applications that meet his threshold of quality (and I agree), but doesn’t mentions something important: they all use frameworks too, in this case, mountains of proprietary AppKit and UIKit (I’ll stick with UI frameworks as that seems to be the unspoken target of the piece).

Have the web frameworks failed or have the web developers?

I’m not sure.

The Supreme Court has decided that religious schools cannot be excluded by state tuition assistance programs. This is an expansion, in many ways, of past decisions on vouchers that permit religious schools to take part in voucher programs.

I have seen a fair amount of discussion online that focuses on particulars of this case and what it means. Almost everyone is discussing the decision from a set of first principles– fundamentally, those who want religious education to be strongly supported in the US by tax dollars are thrilled, and those who are do not believe the government should fund religious schools are against it.

I don’t think this conversation is being had in bad faith. I do find it a little frustrating that folks are not talking about what their view point means, especially those that are in favor of religious education.

Beyond my own opinion, as someone who identifies as Jewish and is quite uncomfortable with creeping Christianity into the public sphere, I am deeply troubled by the idea of entanglement.

In a landmark case, Lemon v. Kurtzman, the court came up with a three part test for religious activity mixing with government activity. The Lemon Test is as follows (from Wikipedia linked above):

1. The statute must have a secular legislative purpose. (Also known as the Purpose Prong)
2. The principal or primary effect of the statute must neither advance nor inhibit religion. (Also known as the Effect Prong)
3. The statute must not result in an “excessive government entanglement” with religion. (Also known as the Entanglement Prong)

What happens when we fund religious schools? Programs that do so generally have a secular purpose– the provision of a public, secular education. In tuition assistance and voucher programs, states may fund religious schools for the purpose of delivering the secular education of public schools. There are all kinds of tests about how that money can be used– if there’s a religious education component, can public funds be used? The case law here is important to understand, but for the sake of understanding the Lemon Test, they key is that these vouchers and assistance programs are to have private institutions deliver education in place of the state.

In this way, the effect prong also comes into play– what will be the primary impact of the law? In the case of a tuition assistance program, it is not the case that any advancement of religion through the existence of the program makes it religious. It is the case that the primary effect has to be something other than religious. You can’t pass a law that pays a preacher’s salary whose duties are leading a religious congregation or proselytizing, but you might be able to pay a church to grow food that is provided to the hungry. In that case, the primary effect would be feeding the hungry.

It’s the Entanglement test that should have always doomed funding religious education. What does entanglement mean? Simply stated, the result of a religious institution being a part of a government program should not result in the government dictating to that religion the precise ways in which it can or cannot act. A religious institution cannot be tied up in complex bureaucratic oversight and complex relations. Essentially, the government should not be all up in religion’s business.

How can the government not be entangled, if it takes an interest in what students need to learn? States don’t fund education about anything, but instead have state standards and approved curriculum required to be a part of secular, public education. Of course the Church can have it’s own religious teachings, but how can the interest of delivering the same minimum education in the Church not lead to Entanglement? Those who want a religious education have easier, better mechanisms in place. For example, it’s quite legal to have “release” time for a religious education (see Zorach v. Clauson)– students can leave in the afternoon to receive a religious education. There’s a public institution, funded by the public, for the purpose of a secular public education, and then students can additionally receive a religious education at a separate, privately funded space.

The religionists want religious schools funded with public dollars because they explicitly want to remove the secular, state curriculum from children for free. The goal is to not have the state act with any interest in the education of students; of course that interest is why we have any public funds for education in the first place. To enforce the state secular education is delivered, states will run afoul of entanglement.

When you combine this decision, and a general erosion of entanglement, with the broad interpretation of the ministerial exception (see Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru), how can the state enforce Kitzmiller v. Dover?

There are only two ways around this:

1. Totally ignore the state’s interest in a free, appropriate, public education that does not advance a religious view.
2. Totally abandon a judicable standard for direct funding of religion for any public purpose, opening up all government activity to being delivered in part or whole by religionists.

There are people who believe that– dismantle public education because there is no public interest, there are no public, secular values to preserve. For those of us that believe there is a public interest in education and that there are public, secular values that government has an obligation to ensure for all students, it’s not clear what boundaries are left.

Do we really believe that the intent when the US Constitution was written was to permit an individual, with virtually no restrictions, to fire 300 rounds of ammunition? 300 rounds of ammunition designed to shatter bone and eviscerate tissue?

In just a few minutes.

Does it even matter if that was the intent? Are we unable to make a different choice for our society?

Muskets, the standard issue firearm for late 18th century armies fired, on average, three rounds per minute. Three.

I could care less what people thought about guns that fired soft lead, slowly and inaccurately, at three rounds per minute in a world with AR15s. And frankly, I can’t imagine a system that cannot acknowledge that such a dramatic change in circumstances matter.