Friend: Sometimes cuddling can be scary.

Me: What do you mean?

Friend: I stop wanting to move and I stop thinking so much about things, and then I get this heavy feeling all over. I worry that I might be dying or something.

Me: Wait…do you just mean that you feel relaxed?

Friend: I guess that could be it.

Me: Well, at least for you it’s a self-limiting problem.

Me: Should I drive or do you want to drive?

Friend: I don’t think I’m a very good driver

Me: What do you mean?

Friend: Like, sometimes I’ll just go blank and forget which one is the brake and which one is the accelerator and have to derive it from first principles.

Me: You mean, like, cogito ergo sum?

Friend: Maybe second principles.

Me: How do you derive the location of the brake from second principles?

Friend: I don’t know, at that point I crashed.

Me: Okay, I’m driving.

K: Nate Silver was right again. Is he single?

K: (a few minutes later) Oh, he’s gay. I wonder if he’s flexible about it, though. Maybe I could just invite him out to lunch or something?

K: (a few minutes later) Wait, I’m looking at a picture of him, and I think I actually did have lunch with him a few years ago. A friend took me along to meet this guy who he said was doing some kind of politics thing, and I didn’t pay much attention, but he looked exactly like that.

K: (a few minutes later) Okay, I checked my emails, and that was definitely Nate Silver I had lunch with. I feel kind of stupid now. It was back in 2010, so maybe he wasn’t famous at the time?

Me: Dear, Nate Silver was named one of the “100 Most Influential Men In The World” in 2009.

K: Oh.

K: Well, one thing I like about you is that you don’t take me out to lunch with one of the 100 most influential men in the world and not tell me about it.

K: Do you?

K: Wait, that professor we had lunch with in Lansing wasn’t one of the hundred most influential men in the world, was he?

Me: https://twitter.com/Clathrus0/status/795669961373061120

K: Oh dear.

K: Wait, I thought Charlemagne was the Pope.

Me: Huh, no, Charlemagne was the Holy Roman Emperor. The Pope was the Pope.

K: Yeah, but I heard they were in cahoots, which I figured doesn’t really happen in this world unless you’re the same person.

Me: And the ruler during this period was Antigonus Monopthalmus.  Can you translate ‘Monopthalmus’?

@worldlypositions: Hmmmm. One…head?

Me: You think he was called Antigonus The One-Headed?

@worldlypositions​: Sure!

Me: That’s not a very imposing epithet.

@worldlypositions​: Sure it is! If you called yourself ‘Antigonus The Two-Headed’, it would be scary, but not too scary, because there’s only one two-headed guy. But if you call yourself Antigonus The One-Headed, it suggests everyone else in your country must have more than one head, which is even scarier.

Elissa: That church over there, the one that’s kind of falling apart? It’s always bothered me.

Me: Why?

Elissa: It’s called “The Church By Jesus Christ”. And Jesus was a carpenter, so I think linking him to that kind of shoddy work is kind of insulting.

Me: What kind of a name is “The Church By Jesus Christ”? Is it supposed to be, like, next to him or something?

Elissa: I think it’s supposed to be started by him, or inspired by him.

Me: Seems a little implausible. I mean, Catholicism, maybe. Greek Orthodoxy, maybe. But a random Protestant church in Ohio?

Elissa: I mean, technically if Jesus is God, then everything is “by Jesus.”

Me: “The Holocaust By Jesus Christ”?

Elissa: I mean, technically, yes.

Me: I don’t think the people who made that church would endorse that Jesus caused the Holocaust.

Elissa: It’s not that he caused it. Just that he deliberately gave humans free will, knowing that it would happen. And that church is the same way.

Me: “The Church That Jesus Christ Failed To Prevent.“

K: I was trying that FaceApp thing earlier today with photos of everyone we know. It looks pretty good. Except for some reason when I try to do the “hot” filter on you, it replaces you with a totally different-looking person.

Me: Ha ha, very funny.

K: No, I’m serious. (she shows me, and this turns out to be 100% true)

K: “I remember when I was young I asked my mom if I was adopted, because I was nothing like the rest of my family. See, they were all pink squishy fleshy beings, and I was a consciousness of pure light and reason. She said ‘Your father used to say that kind of thing too.’“

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.

TIL: JRR Tolkien’s great granddaughter, Ruth Tolkien, is the only blind person in the UK to be a competitive fencer. She is currently ranked the #186th best fencer in the country.