Suzanne is moving to the the neighbourhood and I volunteered to help. I know I have zero stamina so she’s getting four hours and then I’m cutting out. Katie’s with Ryker and about to come pick me up. I shall report back in due course.
Day: January 27, 2022
From L.M. Sacasas’ the Accelerated Life blog
The following is from the Translator’s Preface to the English edition of Harmut Rosa’s Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity. (The translator is Jonathan Trejo-Mathys.):
A further weighty obstacle to the realization of any ethical life project lies in the way individuals are increasingly caught in an ever denser web of deadlines required by the various social spheres (‘subsystems’) in which they participate: work, family, (school and sports activities of children), church, credit systems (i.e., loan payment due dates), energy systems (utility bills), communications systems (Internet and cell phone bills), etc. The requirement of synchronizing and managing this complicated mesh of imperatives places one under the imperious control of a systematically induced ‘urgency of the fixed-term’ (Luhmann). In practice, the surprising—and ethically disastrous—result is that individuals’ reflective value and preference orderings are not (and tendentially cannot) be reflected in their actions. As Luhmann explains, ‘the division of time and value judgments can no longer be separated. The priority of deadlines flips over into a primacy of deadlines, into an evaluative choiceworthiness that is not in line with the rest of the values that one otherwise professes …. Tasks that are always at a disadvantage must in the end be devalued and ranked as less important in order to reconcile fate and meaning. Thus a restructuring of the order of values can result simply from time problems.’
People compelled to continually defer the activities they value most in order to meet an endless and multiplying stream of pressing deadlines inevitably become haunted by the feeling expressed in the trenchant bon mot of Ödön von Horváth cited by Rosa: ‘I’m actually a quite different person, I just never get around to being him.’
I made a post you can’t see
about my health troubles yesterday because whoo ee that’s a new symptom and I don’t like it. BP a little high, no surprise there. Also, maybe the chocolate was moldy, that probably didn’t help.
Absolutely gorgeous day yesterday, all breathing spring and brilliant sun after FOUR FUCKING DAYS OF FOG – psychologically that was yucky, folks. We took a brief walk and it was lovely.
I can hear Jeff doing the trash for today’s pickup and then we’ll go …
The callous, selfish and uncaring crowd of truckers trying to wake up Canada by making sure as many disabled people die of COVID as possible has claimed that they have 11000 trucks in their convoy on twitter. Given that the Guinness Book of Records says the longest truck convoy in history was in Egypt a few years back and was just under 500 trucks, and given that all the photos they’re showing are actually of BREXIT JFC folks are ya high? The mockery they’re facing is heartwarming.
Today we schlep. I don’t feel scared doing shopping at 7 in the morning. It’s four furtive middle aged men, two stockers, one cashier and four personal shoppers, plus the counter gals in the deli and bakery. That’s it. It’s not many people in that big box. And I have an N95 or two.
Wordle in 5 this morning – 21 straight wins (which means nothing, I’m just participating in a global phenomenon is all.)
I continue to be asymptotically close to finishing the damned airport story, it’s reminding me of that Toronto divorce court judge in the 60s who used to yell GET HER IN BED, GET HER IN BED at the lawyer if he was taking too long proving adultery. YES I AM TRYING TO GET THEM IN BED, RELAX. I’m not really writing porn any more, it’s all HEA M/M AU Destiel.
I have more than 35K karma points on reddit. I got a thousand points just yesterday by telling a young person she is a champ …..and the mother of the bride is not playing in the consensus reality portion of the program.
My UK fan has gamely read another 25,000 words in three of my stories on Archive of Our Own last night. She is literally working her way through my entire posted oeuvre (the story about rescuing kittens was the most recent, but then there was the one about the masturbation club (way more fluffy than it sounds, I know that sounds real unlikely, and the one about the vet who moves in next door to the baker) – almost makes me want to post something just so she has something new. I’m glad she’s providing such innocent evidence of her enjoyment, and I hope she messages me at some point, she’s like my biggest fan at this point. Anyway, I am thinking that I will post them all here over the next year, but under a password, so if people want to read them they can. As Paul used to say all the goddamned time, People who like that sort of thing will find it the sort of thing that they like.
Finished the pho broth. It was so salty, maybe that’s what messed me up.