Future anthropologist: “In the early 21st century, there was a superstition against writing your True Email explicitly. You had to write it obliquely, like ‘scott at symbol shireroth dot org’. They believed that if anyone wrote their email out explicitly, it would draw the attention of hostile spirits, and the person would never again know peace.”

Related to the “toxic masculinity” discourse from the other day:

Today I had to go to a committee meeting on doctor burnout. According to a survey, a lot of doctors in one of our departments felt overworked and burnt out, and the committee was supposed to come up with suggestions.

The committee was mostly administrators, mostly female, and although they didn’t use the exact phrase “toxic masculinity”, they talked about “macho culture” a lot. I think their theory was that male doctors had a macho culture where they felt like they didn’t need to take any time for self-care, and they shouldn’t speak up about excessive workload, and they had to look perfect or else they would lose their aura of invincibility. And that having to be this way all the time produced burnout.

So then I, as the doctor representative at the meeting, got up and said that I knew a lot of the doctors in this department, I’d talked to them a lot, and they all said the same thing. They would all love to take some time off for self-care, but there were too many patients and not enough doctors to deal with them, and if any one of them took extra time off, then one of their equally overworked colleagues would have to work even more hours covering for them.

The reason they “weren’t complaining” was that they had already complained to every administrator they could think of, and the administrators had said stuff like “you shouldn’t just complain, you have to be proactive in coming up with a solution” and refused to devote extra resources to the problem.

I said that doctors were really good at complaining about things, and really some of the best complainers-about-things you will ever meet, but that they weren’t going to keep banging their heads against the wall when nobody listened to them and there was no good solution.

The administrators thanked me for my input and went back to talking about macho culture.

I wish I could just start appointments by asking “So, do you prefer mildly condescending platitudes, or medications with a bunch of side effects?”, and then people could just tell me, and I wouldn’t have to guess, and they couldn’t get angry if I gave them the one they wanted.

Public service announcement: if you have a kid with some kind of horrifying predatory criminal, and now your kid is a horrifying predatory criminal, and you have no idea how this happened because the father left before he was even born and your new husband is a great guy and you’ve both always done your best to raise your kid well and give him a good home, your kid’s psychiatrist will listen empathetically to your story, and then empathetically give you a copy of The Nurture Assumption.

…maybe not actually. But it will definitely be on his mind. And maybe it would get people to stop having so many kids with horrifying predatory criminals. Seriously, I’m doing inpatient child psychiatry now and I get multiple cases like this every day.

K and I learned how to shoot guns today. It was interesting. And by interesting, I mean “loud”.

There was some helpful safety training beforehand. But it missed the most important part, which is that the gun will eject the spent bullet casing in a random direction. Somehow I managed to live in a “gun culture” and watch a bunch of action movies without realizing this was a thing. When you’re firing a gun for the first time and really nervous, and a bullet-shaped thing shoots out of the back of the gun and hits spectators in the face, this is NOT a minor point that you can forget to warn people about, even if it turns out to be nothing and everybody laughs that you were so worried about it.

Otherwise everything went okay. I think if I ever have to write a story involving guns, I can use words like “magazine” without sounding ridiculous to people who know what they’re talking about. I think the friend who brought me was expecting that this was going to be some sort of revelatory experience where I realized that Guns Are Your Friends and so gun control was a vile lie, but I feel like if guns were *really* my friends then the person who held one at a slightly different angle than everyone else would not have had a big security guy run up to him and freak out and yell at him until he changed the angle back.

Also, Ada Palmer (author of Too Like The Lightning) was at the shooting range and I got to get a picture with her!

It’s a good thing some bands sell out, because I can’t make out without a girlfriend, and whenever I have responsibilities, I want out.

Today I learned: Ten-year-old Ayn Rand was best-friends-forever with Vladimir Nabokov’s little sister, and they would meet at Nabokov’s mansion and have adorable ten-year-old-girl political debates with each other.

More Wikipedia:

Pope Benedict IX, born Theophylactus of Tusculum in Rome, was Pope on three occasions between October 1032 and July 1048.

Aged approximately 20 at his first election, he is one of the youngest popes in history. He is the only man to have been Pope on more than one occasion and the only man ever to have sold the papacy.