The Update for Everybody Else

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

My cat's dying of renal failure. I've had him since I was four. My best friend is visiting. I only see her a few times a year. I'm in a very mixed emotional state.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I doubt Pando will last the night. To afleitch, Antonio, and ProgressiveRealist (who expressed his condolences in another venue), thank you so much. Losses like this are always hard and I'm not really sure what more to say about it right now. He's still breathing, but only just.

EDIT: He's in end stage renal disease and his life signs are starting to go. He can no longer move any voluntary muscles, including those controlling his eyes, and he's cold to the touch. He'll be dead within a few hours. He's lying down with me and my best friend on either side of him, listening to hymns.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

He's passed. It was peaceful, at home, and with a minimum of pain, thank God.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

He's passed. It was peaceful, at home, and with a minimum of pain, thank God.

You have my deepest condolences. I'm not sure if that's the word I should be using for this situation, but considering the kind of relationship you had with him it probably is. I hope you are not suffering too much.

Honestly, right now I want to talk and think about almost anything else. My best friend and I went for a long walk in the rainy night afterwards, and tomorrow we'll go to a Pentecost service together and then maybe drive out to the Pine Barrens (I'm at my mother's house in New Jersey right now) and just...be out there, for a while.

I barely remember a time before him. He was four years younger than me to the day or very nearly so, and I'd had him since he was a kitten.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

As some of you (the IRC crew) know, I've liked this girl for a couple of months. We went to prom together as friends, she's pretty much aware how I feel, and I'm 99% sure she just sees me as a friend, which I can accept. Still, my feelings are bogging me down and probably keeping me from pursuing more...viable relationships. Should I just tell the girl how I feel and that I understand it isn't mutual so as to help let it go?

Bro, just ask her. Don't start presuming, just ask anyway and go after another girl. The biggest mistake I ever made in high school was getting hung up over a girl for two years.

That's probably the best course of action, but on the other hand I feel it could be redundant (again, my infatuation is a terribly-kept secret) and could potentially dent our friendship.

The friend zone is not a nice place.

The 'friend zone' is what you make of it.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Regardless of whether it is absolutely true or not, the implicit premise that higher education only has value if it leads you to making lots of money later in your life is utterly horrendous.

Well, the issue isn't money, it's than you are unemployed or just end doing some unqualified job in a store or a restaurant.

That's a problem with the basic structure and aims of our society and its political economy, not a problem with majoring in the humanities. While I understand the temptation to compromise on this, it's one of the things that I personally refuse to do so on, and I've fully accepted as a consequence of that refusal that once I'm finished with my formal education I'll have hard time finding work that I can do and enjoy. I consider it worth it to pursue a line of study that interests me and that I believe is morally responsible.

Although I'd much rather do some kind of serious and productive labor from which I wasn't alienated than hold a sinecure, this is otherwise some of the realest sh**t opebo has ever said:

More to the point - his complaints form an excellent critique of the capitalist economic system, not 'education'.

Any society that doesn't provide a comfortable sinecure in the bureaucracy for history majors is horrific. 

Just because I've accepted the consequences of this doesn't mean that other people whose interests and passions lie in the humanities and arts should have to.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I've got dyshidrotic eczema. Fortunately, it appears to be a fairly mild case.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I'm going to be in Shelburne Falls for the weekend looking at the house my family will be moving into after we return from Japan in August, then spending a few days in Amherst and Northampton to vote in the Senate election, among other things, before going to New Jersey to a little while to help my parents prepare to move.

Today, my supervisor told me to leave at 4:15 because it "is going to rain and you should get out while you can." I imagine something dark is about to happen here.

Good luck, Duke. Stay safe.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I'm starting to wonder if the stress I've been undergoing the past year or so has been adversely affecting my value as a poster by making me more irritable and quick to default to the aspects of my personality and worldview that piss people off, or if the anxiety derived from the stress has been making me think that it has. (I'm also wondering this about my value as a friend in real life.)

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I'm starting to wonder if the stress I've been undergoing the past year or so has been adversely affecting my value as a poster by making me more irritable and quick to default to the aspects of my personality and worldview that piss people off...

What 'stress' do you experience, mate?

I'm in a major with an 80% attrition rate with one semester left, my cat had been ailing for a while and died last month, and there have been a lot of health problems in my family.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I'm in a major with an 80% attrition rate

What on earth kind of major is that?

Japanese. The program at my university has a reputation among both other departments at the university and the analogous departments in other universities in the region for being intensive, but part of the attrition rate does admittedly derive from the fact that some people who declare the major as freshmen have expectations that would be unrealistic for any serious study of a foreign language.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I'm in a major with an 80% attrition rate

What on earth kind of major is that?

Japanese. The program at my university has a reputation among both other departments at the university and the analogous departments in other universities in the region for being intensive, but part of the attrition rate does admittedly derive from the fact that some people who declare the major as freshmen have expectations that would be unrealistic for any serious study of a foreign language.

What's the attrition rate in an American University undergraduate program typically like?

It varies from place to place, but I found a New York Times article that gives the figures of sixty per cent in science and engineering counting pre-med, forty not counting pre-med, and twenty to thirty in everything else.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I'm going to be spending about forty days in Japan starting in two weeks. When I get back my family is moving and then very shortly thereafter I'm starting my last semester as an undergraduate and working on applications for divinity school (although I'm not seeking ordination at this point). I'm hoping for Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge or Yale Divinity School but I'm also going to apply to at least a few other Episcopal/Anglican or inter/nondenominational divinity schools in the United States and Canada.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I'd like to extend my official congratulations to Bacon King, one of the Atlas greats who's finally found happiness.

This, as well. Best of luck with this person, Bacon King.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I didn't know hooking up was something for which one could use the past progressive.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I didn't know hooking up was something for which you could use the past progressive for.

N'est-ce pas?

True story: I spent about a minute trying to decide whether to write that post in a formal or colloquial register. I think, on further consideration, that I chose imprudently. I'm also changing 'you' to 'one'.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I didn't know hooking up was something for which one could use the past progressive.

You disapprove of habitually hooking up with the same person?

That isn't what I said.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I didn't know hooking up was something for which one could use the past progressive.

You disapprove of habitually hooking up with the same person?

That isn't what I said.

I'm confused. That's the purpose of the verb tense.

Don't play dumb. I didn't say anything about approval or disapproval. I was unaware that the verb could be used that way because my social group self-selects against people who regularly make unironic use of it.

__________

My skin has more or less cleared up, but I have a chest cold now. My cat--the one who didn't die last month--is also sick, although we're not sure with what yet. He's acting incredibly needy and is constantly underfoot. I'm leaving for Japan in nine days.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Yikes. I'm really sorry this is happening, Joe. Best of luck. I have no idea what it must be like deal with a situation like that.

I'm going to be in Japan for six weeks (including for the House of Councillors election!); my plane is taking off in six hours. I'm really nervous.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I'm safely ensconced in Chiba Prefecture.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I'm safely ensconced in Chiba Prefecture.

I hope you talk Japanese.

I do.

I'm in Kyoto now, about to go to sleep. The weather here is awful. Everything else is good so far.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Sixty-five hundred yen is not a reasonable price for half a kilogram of dried blueberries, be it a festival night or not.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Sixty-five hundred yen is not a reasonable price for half a kilogram of dried blueberries, be it a festival night or not.

Yikes!  No, that's not a reasonable price.

I googled a currency converter, and that's about $65. Wtf?

He was clearly trying to rip me off. I won't let that happen again.

The part of Aomori Prefecture that I'm staying in--took the Hikari and Hayate Shinkansen trains up from Kyoto earlier--smells like fish and brine and alternates between industrial port apparatuses and unspoiled shoreline and it's really rather lovely.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Andrew, you have my deepest condolences.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I really, really hate business hotels. And modern cities. And especially business hotels in modern cities, no matter what country they're in.