Five things make a post

[darkemeralds]

1. My sister moved away last week. Not far, but out of the immediate neighborhood. For her, the change has been extreme--having to sell her house and move to a small rental apartment. Me, I just keep noticing that they don't live in that house anymore, and that there are no drop-by visits, and that I'm back to being on my own in the 'hood. So it's kind of sad.


2. On re-re-re-reading Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature over the last couple of weeks, I've been reminded of the concept of ego depletion. That's where, after forcing yourself to concentrate on a task for too long, your decision-making and general agency become measurably compromised. Five days at a job I quit enjoying ages ago practically guarantees an empty mental larder by Friday night. I'm accepting that writing, editing, or in this case even grocery shopping, over the weekend is more than I can ask of myself.


3. On the plus side, here's my retirement countdown:
   
   
   
   I went to a retirement seminar last week and I'm going to need those 351 days just to negotiate the web of red tape that lies between me and my freedom.


4. I've been re-stocking my mental larder this weekend with The Hour. It's extremely good--I put it off on the grounds of having hated Mad Men (hated. Hated like I've never hated a show before), but I enjoyed succumbing to this view of the period in which I was born.


5. I'm currently reading The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil. It's a text full of very large and very small numbers (teras and petas and nanos and picos all over the place) and therefore perhaps not the best candidate for absorption by audiobook. But the general idea--that within my lifetime we will have created technology that surpasses the capabilities of the human brain (and, shortly thereafter, all the human brains)--is persuasive, and hits me somewhere between exhilarating and terrifying. The book is nearly ten years old and so far Kurzweil's predictions are pretty accurate.

Back to work tomorrow. Work is evil. I can hardly wait for the Singularity.

Comments

[tehomet]

I know what you mean about your sister. My siblings both live more than two hours drive away, and my nearest friend is an hour and a half away by train. It does make a difference.

I have watched precisely one scene of Mad Men and loathed it. I understand that that's probably not unintentional on the part of the writers, but still it's not something I want to spend time on. It's a highly polished cockroach of a show. Eye-catching shine. Get the feck away from me.

Thank goodness you have less than a year to go until you are a free woman. That is marvellous!

[darkemeralds]

Your situation does sound like a serious tradeoff between good things like privacy, quiet, and independence on the one hand, and isolation on the other. I'm realizing that my choice to go car-free was heavily predicated on how close my sister and her kids were. I don't regret the choice--it's paid off in lots of ways--but proximity and transportation are huge public health issues that affect me individually more than I realized.

"A highly polished cockroach of a show" is brilliant.