disordered eating

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

ironbite4:

sigmaleph:

definitelynotplanetfall:

sigmaleph:

suppose your body has magically decoupled its functioning from your food intake. you no longer experience hunger or fullness, digestive problems, allergies, tooth decay, etc no matter what (or whether) you eat. food still tastes the way it did before, and any psychoactive properties (from caffeine or alcohol or whatever) are still there.

would you:

a) eat much less than you did before, since you don’t have to?

b) eat much more than you did before, since you can’t get full or experience any other negative side-effect from it and food is pleasant?

c) eat about the same but with much less care taken to avoiding ‘unhealthy’ foods, or foods you in particular couldn’t tolerate well?

d) avoid foods that might have ethical issues that you weren’t avoiding before?

e) leave your eating habits basically unchanged?

f) some combination of the above?

g) some change in an entirely orthogonal direction to the ones i’ve listed here?

  1. in the hypothetical, which is distinct from the post about the hypothetical, am i informed directly of the rules of the change or just left to intuit that it isn’t just another inscrutable biological shift?
  2. is the thrust of the hypothetical “only you experience this” or “everyone experiences this”?

you are directly informed of the rules of the change. this happens to a small number of people yourself among them and it’s a recognised phenomenon, but not to everyone.

Sorry can’t hear anyone over me bankrupting Old Town Country Buffet.

Tags:

#food #disordered eating #surveys #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(a and c) #(I normally eat food-chosen-primarily-for-pleasure-with-loosened-regard-for-cost-effectiveness a few times a year) #(if *all* food is cost-ineffective I am not sure if this frequency would go up at all) #(it definitely wouldn’t go up to several times a day) #(however often it happens‚ it *would* be nice to eat potato chips again without regretting it #and macaroni and cheese without it being a careful balancing act)

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

mediocrity-uwu:

kuttithevangu:

Someone I know not well enough to voice my opinion on the subject said something like why didn’t God make potatoes a low-calorie food so I am here to say: God made them like that because their nutrition density IS what makes them healthy. By God I mean Andean agricultural technicians. Potato is healthy BECAUSE potato holds calories and vitamins. Do not malign potato

For all evolutionary history, life has struggled against calorie deficit… So much energy goes into finding food that there is no time for anything else. Our ancestors selectively bred root vegetables to create the potato, so that we might be the first species whose daily existence doesn’t consist of trying to find the nutrients necessary for survival. One potato can rival the calorie count of many hours of foraging… Eat a potato, and you free up so much time to create and build and connect with your fellow man. Without potato where would you be?? Do not stand on the shoulders of giants and think thyself tall!!

Tags:

#I ate potatoes today and I approve this message #give or take some hyperbole‚ anyway #(it is deeply twisted that ”this food contains less sustenance” is a thing sellers charge *extra* for) #(if I want less food I will *eat* less food) #((besides‚ my appetite is quite good at adjusting for calorie density and is not fooled by your hollowed-out shit)) #food #disordered eating #proud citizen of The Future

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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rustingbridges:

The concept of companies paying for their employees’ food continues to boggle me, but then my entire family works in food service, so our idea of company-provided food is “the customer changed their mind about wanting the food after I made it, and the boss let me keep it”.

Covering some food during travel is pretty standard, I think, since it’s a business expense and employees rightly don’t want to pay for it. My old roommate worked at best buy (which was by no means a great employer) and even they gave him a per diem which covered (cheap) food.

B: Nah, there are starving children in Africa future selves to think of. We keep getting inheritances just as we’re about to run out of money, but that streak’s bound to end sooner or later, and it’s best to start preparing now.

So the question with this is kind of, where does it end? I think if I put my back into it, I could get by pretty much without ever paying for food, except when doing stuff with friends. I’ve definitely done two or three week stretches.

And even if you are counting labor costs, you can buy food at the supermarket for $1-2/day. It just gets really boring.

We keep getting inheritances just as we’re about to run out of money, but that streak’s bound to end sooner or later, and it’s best to start preparing now.

Also no offense but that sounds like a pretty bad situation and hopefully you can get out of it somehow?

 

brin-bellway:

>>and employees rightly don’t want to pay for it.<<

I get the justification for paying for the hotels and such because the employee wouldn’t otherwise have needed to buy them, but you have to eat either way. Sure, it’d be *nice* if they paid for it, but I wouldn’t be pissed if they didn’t.

(I speak from some experience here: my job *did* used to provide some free food each week (but only a small amount, and only from a limited selection of the cheaper menu items), but later switched to an employee-discount system. And every friend or family member who learned about it got angry on my behalf *even though I wasn’t angry about it myself*, and it was really annoying having to try to calm them down and defend against their attempts to instil negative emotions about it in me.)

—

>>It just gets really boring.<<

I would be perfectly content to eat peanut-butter-on-a-spoon for lunch every day for years on end. The *occasional* variety in food is nice, but as the exception, not the norm.

(Also I have a low metabolism and an appetite to match, which is helpful.)

I barely even have to try to knock my food budget down to about four USD a day, so in practice I haven’t done that much other than severely cut back on restaurants.

—

>>I could get by pretty much without ever paying for food, except when doing stuff with friends. I’ve definitely done two or three week stretches.<<

How?

—

>>Also no offense but that sounds like a pretty bad situation and hopefully you can get out of it somehow?<<

…I am worried by the fact that you started this sentence with “no offense”, because it suggests that there is something offensive about the rest of the sentence that I have overlooked.

(Is it something to do with, like, dignity or some shit?)

Our expenses are already extremely low by developed standards even without going full-on rice-and-beans [link]–a thousand USD per person per month would be enough, with room for a small emergency fund–but underemployment is a big problem.

(Though to be fair, I have a positive amount of money and have never been homeless, which makes me better off than most of my friends. (From multiple social circles, at that.))

 

rustingbridges:

I get the justification for paying for the hotels and such because the employee wouldn’t otherwise have needed to buy them, but you have to eat either way.

Sure, but I don’t need to eat out. Compare: eating in the comfort of my home, at supermarket prices, with they company of my lovely girlfriend vs eating at some random nearby restaurant, at corresponding prices, with the company of some random work people (who I happen to like, and may I always be so lucky).

If they want me to keeping doing these kinds of things, they ought to make it minimally bad. My job didn’t involve regular travel (I only did a few times) so I can’t comment on how that works, but while I’m sure the expectations change, I would expect it to change in the direction of more generous compensation for traveling, since traveling kind of sucks.

Sure, it’d be nice if they paid for it, but I wouldn’t be pissed if they didn’t.

I’m going to accuse you of being insufficiently entitled for your own good here. Sure, the expectations should probably with the job, but if I’m doing this for my employer he ought to cover it.

How?

In short, be places where they’re giving out food. Exact options may vary. In nyc you can get roughly a large pizza every night monday thru thursday just from tech meetups, if you’re willing to talk about The Cloud™ and Data Science™. There’s all sorts of things where there’s food and all you gotta do is be around to eat it.

Somewhat less respectably than that, a lot of businesses get rid of extra food. Depending on where you are, there may be organizations that are dedicated to not letting it go to waste. Depending on what you’re after you may in contention with various other indigents but not necessarily – there’s a lot of stuff that’s only good if you have a kitchen and the will to use it.

And at the bottom end of the spectrum, you wouldn’t believe some of the things people throw in the trash. Am I above eating some fancy looking, individually wrapped gifty desserts because the container was once adjacent to garbage? No I am not. (totally untouched nice looking garbage is disproportionately gifty looking, presumably because they are perfunctory, unwanted, and quickly disposed of gifts.)

…I am worried by the fact that you started this sentence with “no offense”, because it suggests that there is something offensive about the rest of the sentence that I have overlooked.

Uh I would say I probably said no offense because it’s a combination of: a) slightly prying b) casting some amount of unasked for advice / judgement on a situation which clearly I have spent less time thinking about than the person to whom I am speaking.

 

voxette-vk:

And at the bottom end of the spectrum, you wouldn’t believe some of the things people throw in the trash. Am I above eating some fancy looking, individually wrapped gifty desserts because the container was once adjacent to garbage? No I am not. (totally untouched nice looking garbage is disproportionately gifty looking, presumably because they are perfunctory, unwanted, and quickly disposed of gifts.)

I suppose I wouldn’t either… but how do you do this in practice without spending a lot of time sorting through nasty garbage?

 

rustingbridges:

Luck, mostly? I used to walk past on my way home from work a particular trash can which was usually completely full and often had that kind of thing just sitting out on top or next to it.

I’m not sure why that particular trash can was like that, but it was a popular / touristy area so it must have just been a, uh, blessed trash can in that respect.

I would not recommend actual garbage sorting as a hobby (fun fact: this is very specifically a legally prohibited activity in many public places).

I think people tend to put “nice” stuff off to the side rather than really shoving it in there, anyway.

 

brin-bellway:

[reblogging this version mostly for completeness; all of my responses are to the post immediately after my last one]

—

>>Sure, but I don’t need to eat out.<<

You don’t need to eat out at a hotel either. I always make sure I know where the local supermarkets are when I’m going to a hotel. Maybe there are hotels where you can reach a restaurant but not a supermarket, but I’ve never had to deal with that.

—

>>I’m going to accuse you of being insufficiently entitled for your own good here.<<

I’ve seen what happens to people who don’t accept their lot. I want no part of it.

(I don’t even mean what *other people* do to them, just the way that the resentment makes them miserable, and the way it skews their decision-making: some of them towards risky plans for the chance of a better life, others towards denial, in both cases ending up even worse off than they’d have been if they’d buckled down and dealt with it.)

—

>>If they want me to keeping doing these kinds of things, they ought to make it minimally bad.<<

Or else what? You’ll leave? Good luck paying the bills. Hell, you’re *American*: at least my dad was still able to get his broken ankle fixed.

(He was laid off from abovementioned cushy programming job almost thirteen years ago, and has never again made enough to make ends meet. He’s finally back in a position where he can at least make *some* money, just not enough.)

—

>>In nyc you can get roughly a large pizza every night monday thru thursday just from tech meetups, if you’re willing to talk about The Cloud™ and Data Science™. There’s all sorts of things where there’s food and all you gotta do is be around to eat it.<<

Who–among the set of people who care enough about how much their food costs to seek out free food, but are not living on the street–can afford to live *that* close to places where they’re giving out food? I’m pretty sure the transportation costs of getting to any place like that would be enough to buy an entire day’s worth of food, and instead you only get one meal out of it.

(Low appetite is a blessing when you’re eating supermarket food and can make the same size of stockpile last longer, but it does mean I suck at exploiting all-you-can-eat situations. I try very hard these days to avoid buffets, because compared to normal restaurants they’re more money for *less* food (in that you don’t get to take home your leftovers).)

—

>>Somewhat less respectably than that, a lot of businesses get rid of extra food. Depending on where you are, there may be organizations that are dedicated to not letting it go to waste.<<

We’ve had friends go to food banks, but I think my parents think those are for people more desperate than we are. Hell, they might even be right.

(Though when said friends offer us the bits of a food-bank variety pack they aren’t able to use themselves, we *do* at least accept them. Ate a cookie bar from a food-bank-sourced bake-it-yourself just yesterday.)

—

>>And at the bottom end of the spectrum, you wouldn’t believe some of the things people throw in the trash. Am I above eating some fancy looking, individually wrapped gifty desserts because the container was once adjacent to garbage? No I am not.<<

I’ve experimented with dumpster diving a few times. Mostly for stuff to sell, but I did once find and redeem a voucher for a free protein bar. (I turned down the spicy ramen cups, though: I dislike pain.)

—

>>I probably said no offense because it’s a combination of: a) slightly prying<<

It’s not like I don’t talk about it [link].

—

>>b) casting some amount of unasked for advice / judgement on a situation which clearly I have spent less time thinking about than the person to whom I am speaking.<<

I don’t mind people calling it a bad situation, though as you can probably tell from the rest of this reply I have had more than enough [people trying to coerce me into having negative emotions] for one lifetime. (Although usually it’s people trying to get me to perform grief about [death of a relative I was not close to] or anger about [insert latest SJ Discourse topic].)

 

humanfist:

You don’t need to eat out at a hotel either. I always make sure I know where the local supermarkets are when I’m going to a hotel. Maybe there are hotels where you can reach a restaurant but not a supermarket, but I’ve never had to deal with that.

Most hotels I’ve stayed at have minimal to no cooking facilities available to guests.  Also, this massively depends on what you are making but grocery buying often requires buying more of a single ingredient than you’ll use in the course of a single business trip.

@rustingbridges responded here, and @serinemolecule responded here.

—

I knew my mom (who is in charge of deciding where we stay while travelling) was specifically selecting for places with kitchens, but I hadn’t realised they were *that* rare if you weren’t specifically selecting for them.

Also I’m not sure why so many people seem to be so attached to having a Hot Meal for dinner, even when in situations that aren’t conducive to them.

—

rustingbridges: >>I’d say anyone who’s concerned about their ability to budget for decent food at all is probably in the demo for using a foodbank<<

I expect to remain concerned about whether I can afford decent food until and unless I become independently wealthy [link]. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of runway is, empirically, not enough.

—

rustingbridges: >>If it’s mine by right I’m just taking it. If someone else wants it they can come get it.<<

You need to try *much* harder to cover your ass, or it is going to get bit.

(Also, the main examples of resentful entitlement I was thinking of are some Uber Eats drivers I am “”friends”“ with who complain (to *me*, *knowing* I can’t do anything about it, just inflicting their negativity on me to no benefit) whenever anyone doesn’t tip them, even though it says right there on the website that customers should not feel obligated to tip, and that was what the drivers signed up for. And the people telling stories from the Good Old Days™, when single blue-collar salaries were large enough to raise five children on and still pay off your mortgage early, and savings accounts gave 5% interest.)

—

Serine, I tried to respond to your post, wrote out a whole draft with links and everything. But I can’t help but react to its condescension and hostility, and probably you’re just one of those people who’s naturally splainy [link] and aren’t actually aware that you keep coming across as picking fights with me.

Tags:

#discourse cw #reply via reblog #adventures in human capitalism #food #disordered eating? #long post #death mention

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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rustingbridges:

The concept of companies paying for their employees’ food continues to boggle me, but then my entire family works in food service, so our idea of company-provided food is “the customer changed their mind about wanting the food after I made it, and the boss let me keep it”.

Covering some food during travel is pretty standard, I think, since it’s a business expense and employees rightly don’t want to pay for it. My old roommate worked at best buy (which was by no means a great employer) and even they gave him a per diem which covered (cheap) food.

B: Nah, there are starving children in Africa future selves to think of. We keep getting inheritances just as we’re about to run out of money, but that streak’s bound to end sooner or later, and it’s best to start preparing now.

So the question with this is kind of, where does it end? I think if I put my back into it, I could get by pretty much without ever paying for food, except when doing stuff with friends. I’ve definitely done two or three week stretches.

And even if you are counting labor costs, you can buy food at the supermarket for $1-2/day. It just gets really boring.

We keep getting inheritances just as we’re about to run out of money, but that streak’s bound to end sooner or later, and it’s best to start preparing now.

Also no offense but that sounds like a pretty bad situation and hopefully you can get out of it somehow?

>>and employees rightly don’t want to pay for it.<<

I get the justification for paying for the hotels and such because the employee wouldn’t otherwise have needed to buy them, but you have to eat either way. Sure, it’d be *nice* if they paid for it, but I wouldn’t be pissed if they didn’t.

(I speak from some experience here: my job *did* used to provide some free food each week (but only a small amount, and only from a limited selection of the cheaper menu items), but later switched to an employee-discount system. And every friend or family member who learned about it got angry on my behalf *even though I wasn’t angry about it myself*, and it was really annoying having to try to calm them down and defend against their attempts to instil negative emotions about it in me.)

—

>>It just gets really boring.<<

I would be perfectly content to eat peanut-butter-on-a-spoon for lunch every day for years on end. The *occasional* variety in food is nice, but as the exception, not the norm.

(Also I have a low metabolism and an appetite to match, which is helpful.)

I barely even have to try to knock my food budget down to about four USD a day, so in practice I haven’t done that much other than severely cut back on restaurants.

—

>>I could get by pretty much without ever paying for food, except when doing stuff with friends. I’ve definitely done two or three week stretches.<<

How?

—

>>Also no offense but that sounds like a pretty bad situation and hopefully you can get out of it somehow?<<

…I am worried by the fact that you started this sentence with “no offense”, because it suggests that there is something offensive about the rest of the sentence that I have overlooked.

(Is it something to do with, like, dignity or some shit?)

Our expenses are already extremely low by developed standards even without going full-on rice-and-beans [link]–a thousand USD per person per month would be enough, with room for a small emergency fund–but underemployment is a big problem.

(Though to be fair, I have a positive amount of money and have never been homeless, which makes me better off than most of my friends. (From multiple social circles, at that.))

Tags:

#food #disordered eating? #adventures in human capitalism #reply via reblog

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~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

rustingbridges:

shacklesburst:

shieldfoss:

shieldfoss:

It’s probably gonna get old if it keeps happening but business travel is still incredibly interesting to me.

This has been one of the cooler hotel rooms. (Not featured because it films poorly in the dark: The ocean past these east-facing windows)

tumblr_inline_po66hmmufz1tl8dj9_500

how is the hotel internet?

Internet is your standard Big City Scandinavia internet (75 MBps so less than at home but fast enough for my purposes – fast enough that I didn’t even think to check it before you asked)

and how is business travel interesting to you?

I’m just not super used to travelling, nor staying outside my own home. I don’t have to worry about breakfast, lunch or dinner and while I hear that hotel food becomes bland once you get used to it, I sure haven’t yet. Also if I was at “regular” work tomorrow I’d be writing some astonishingly dull product design specs for a new component in our software but tomorrow and Tuesday I’m ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬛ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ instead and that’s kind of cool.

Fair. Also that makes me want to finally visit Scandinavia and try out your hotel internet.

I hear that hotel food becomes bland once you get used to it

I’m not even business traveling that much and this rings extremely true to me and I’ve reached that point way faster than I’d ever have anticipated. I mean it’s probably different if you’re a high-class executive staying at really upscale hotels, but the usual buffet fare at 3-4 stars gets old pretty fast. Same with airport lounge food – I still eat there though, not least because it the hot buffet sure beats shelling out like €20 for a small sandwich.

So are y’all like, actually eating at the hotel? I can see the occasional convenience but isn’t there the option of just going down the street or whatever for something more interesting.

I don’t know about them, but why would I pay money to eat food from down the street when hotel food is free?

(Valid answers include “the meal the hotel was serving today was a food I find actively repulsive” and “they only serve dinner Monday – Thursday and it is dinnertime on Saturday”, but do not include “the hotel food was bland”. It’s not like I’d be able to enjoy paid food anyway, haunted by the knowledge that it was a waste of money. Plus I kind of like blandness, tbh.)

—

Context: I have not business-travelled *per se*, but when we do travel we tend to stay at hotels catering primarily to businesspeople. I am thinking of hotels mostly in Massachusetts, with occasional other states plus a couple in Ontario.

Tags:

#adventures in human capitalism #food #reply via reblog #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what #disordered eating?

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~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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thathopeyetlives:

brin-bellway:

inquisitivefeminist:

Me: *has emotions*

Me: time to deal with this in a Positive and Healthy manner

Me: *stuffs myself so full of mashed potatoes there is no room for the emotions anymore*

Mashed potatoes are the Platonic ideal of childhood-nostalgia comfort food. I actually feel nostalgic when I eat them even though I never ate mashed potatoes growing up.

The only time I ever really badly insulted a person who was being nice to me, was when they served me spectacularly bad tasting instant mashed potatoes.

Tags:

#(February 2016) #(huh I don’t remember seeing this branch) #conversational aglets #food #disordered eating

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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inquisitivefeminist:

brin-bellway:

inquisitivefeminist:

Me: *has emotions*

Me: time to deal with this in a Positive and Healthy manner

Me: *stuffs myself so full of mashed potatoes there is no room for the emotions anymore*

Mashed potatoes are the Platonic ideal of childhood-nostalgia comfort food. I actually feel nostalgic when I eat them even though I never ate mashed potatoes growing up.

Yes this is exactly it this is the thing!

Tags:

#(February 2016) #conversational aglets #food #disordered eating

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~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

silentwalrus1:

silentwalrus1:

i had a thought today like man, my ancestors would probably not approve very much of me being such an extravagant glutton, but then i was like wtf are u kidding. those dumbasses didn’t live on a fuckin potato ass diet for no minimalism. they didn’t do what they did, whatever the fuck it was, for me NOT to fucking eat my bodyweight in sashimi!!! they would be fucking ecstatic to see me making the most of my opportunities for plenty. they would be fucking cheering me on. every lice-covered cossack and illiterate serf and three-toothed yak herder in my lineage is with me in this restaurant, and they are going absolutely apeshit watching me try to fit an entire samosa in my mouth

i love this idea that the ancestors are following modern people around like a rappers yes-man as we eat food #‘fucking superb you funky little descendant’ 

me, standing in front of the burger king counter like the blithering hunger gibbon i am: i’ll have… uhhh… double whopper with fries. thank you. large please

the 500 mongolian tatar and polish jew ghosts behind me: [ERUPT INTO WILD SCREAMING AND HIGH FIVES] 

Tags:

#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #food #disordered eating #I do not know this feel but the post is still hilarious #(personally‚ while having a low appetite took some getting used to I’m very happy with it now) #((also there are quite a few Puritans in my ancestry so there’s that))

Berkeley: being other people

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

worldlypositions:

Sometimes I enjoy understanding better what it is like to be other people. You can do this somewhat subtly by talking to people for ages about other topics, and making inferences. Lately I’ve been asking more directly, something like, ‘what about your experience do you think other people would be surprised by?’  But that’s hard to answer, because one doesn’t necessarily have things cached in that way, and many of one’s own idiosyncrasies are probably like water to a fish, and it involves imagining other people imagining you.

Another way to learn about such things is to ask a bunch of people about the details of a common experience. For instance, I have enjoyed:

Going to evensong in Oxford with a bunch of people from the office, then later discussing what we thought about when we got bored: 

  • The very old but humorously hateful notes in the song book
  • The possible friction between the church’s commitment to the poor and their lavish church decor
  • The fact that each of the people in the choir is conscious right now and looking back at us, and later will go and collect their children from school and make dinner in their kitchen and go on living their lives forever
  • The skull decorations

Learning about the YouTube genres that different people are into: 

  • How things work, e.g. how cherry plantations are dried
  • People accidentally dying in extreme sports
  • Marriage proposals
  • Movie trailers
  • Giant pimples being popped
  • Video game reviews
  • Planes crashing
  • Obscure dances

Hearing different people’s views of the monkey waiter sculpture in my house’s foyer 

  • Somehow problematic
  • Creepy in a fun way
  • Never noticed it, but it has a nice face
  • Is a novelty object and therefore disturbs the neutrality of the foyer

One thing I take away from this kind of thing is that different people are paying attention to different things about their environment, and thinking about it in different terms, and getting different kicks out of it.

Many of my friends say they think they are pretty legible, so there would not be much surprising to others about their internal life. My guess is that they are thinking their experience is mostly a sort of standard one, with this window of visual experience, and some accurately represented sounds, and some reasonable thoughts about the things going on in their lives, and so on. But I guess that actually the same visual scene looks in some sense very different to different people, because of things like where their attention goes, what abstractions they use to think about it, and what associations and emotional flavor things have for them.

If you want to play this game with me, what do you think about when you are waiting in the grocery line? What YouTube genres do you come back to? What about your experience do you think other people wouldn’t guess?

>>what do you think about when you are waiting in the grocery line?<<

Some common categories (with example details that may or may not match any particular trip, but are definitely plausible and in-character):

Optimal payment methods. *My* loyalty card has *these* offers on it, and *Mom’s* loyalty card has *those* offers on it, and my credit card only gets 0.5% cashback on everything but hers gets 2% on groceries, and she almost has enough loyalty points to turn in for $10 off but I’m nowhere close…okay, I’m going to get in this line with just the items that have offers on my card, and you get in a different line with everything else. Wait, shit, I still have an unused bread card [link], give me, um…$19.05 of stuff-with-no-loyalty-offers for my batch. Yeah, stuff with price-matching on it is fine, though try not to spread it out among multiple flyers more than necessary.

The things on the tabloid covers.

  • Pitying the people with the divorces and terminal illnesses (their sadness now compounded by having to deal with paparazzi).
  • I…guess it’s nice that Random Celebrity I’ve Barely Heard Of is having a baby? Assuming she wants it?
  • Wondering what it would be like to actually be into any of the things in Cosmo. Wondering if even vanilla-ish heterosexuals are actually into the things in Cosmo. Presumably *some* of them must at least *aspire* to be into that, or it wouldn’t sell. What a strange world they live in. I suppose they’d say the same of me.
  • I can at least understand why people might buy the food magazines. I don’t want to Lose 15 Pounds This Fall (lower fat reserves would just leave me more vulnerable to starvation damage the next time I contract a “”48-hour”“ stomach bug and can barely eat for 11 days), but the pumpkin thingy does look tasty.

The song currently on the radio is ending. God, I hope they don’t play anything triggery next; honestly, who thought it was a good idea to force people to listen to music in order to be in a store, and those earmuffs I tried didn’t help a damn thing with this…oh, okay, it’s just “Call Me Maybe”. I can deal with that, even if part of me is weirded out that it’s not “Thus Spoke Carly Rae” [link].

Why don’t they sell single-serving packets of plain M&Ms at the checkout anymore? They make great emergency-backup chocolate for keeping in my bag (the candy coating keeps them contained, so repeatedly melting and resolidifying doesn’t make them stick to the wrapper), and these days it’s so hard to find a replacement packet after I eat the current one. Makes me overly reluctant to resort to eating it. At least the convenience store has started carrying them now, though their batch is nearly expired and still has a bunch left, so I suspect they’re going to stop carrying them soon.

—

>>What YouTube genres do you come back to?<<

I mostly don’t watch videos, though I’ve been watching some Honest Trailers lately.

I guess questionably-legal music would also count. I tend to treat Youtube as a kind of musical library, borrowing songs in order to decide whether I like them enough to buy, or songs I only need once or twice. I haven’t been trying out music much lately, though, and I was never *all* that big on doing so.

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>>What about your experience do you think other people wouldn’t guess?<<

I seem to have a more limited emotional range, with fewer buckets. There are things that others report as being entire emotions in themselves, like “frustrated” or “horny”, that for me are sub-types of other things (“angry” and “tired”, respectively). And we *react* differently because of this, too: they tend not to snap at people for coming to their attention too soon after stubbing their toe (the target-less anger latching on to whomever’s available), or oversleep when they’re ovulating (which doesn’t actually help; some well-meaning bit of my brain just gets confused, I think).

Tags:

#reply via reblog #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #disordered eating #people who can distinguish between their drive for sleep and drive for sex fascinate me #death mention #nsfw text? #food

~ Brin ~ 3 Comments

{{previous post in sequence}}

deductioneers:

Amass Fuck-You Money

 

thejochiang:

Goals: amass fuckyou money

Forever reblog the mother goddess

 

brin-bellway:

(status: I acknowledge that this is psychological damage from an extended period of financial hardship during formative years, but I nonetheless mostly endorse it)

Hmm. I seem to be having a bunch of thoughts and feelings about this.

There seems to be a…maybe “divide” is too strong a word, I don’t know. But…like, I called it “fuck-you money vs fuck-me money” in a post a while back. Even when the actions are the same, there’s this psychological difference in how people can approach it.

When I see FIRE people, they always frame it in terms of *freedom*. (It’s right there in the acronym: Financially *Independent*, Retiring Early.) But to me, it strikes me as being a thing about *safety*. “Enough money that you can run your household solely off the interest from your investments” can protect you from a lot of different problems, and *that’s* why the idea appeals to me.

A few weeks ago I saw some distant acquaintance-of-an-acquaintance on Tumblr (I don’t recall who) advising a young person with a high-paying job and relatively low expenses (Silicon Valley programmer, I think, or something like that) to go on some trips and enjoy themself, because they weren’t going to have this much disposable income again until their forties if not later. And it felt like a very weird framing to me, because…the way I see it, if future-me doesn’t have money to spare, then neither do I. I don’t have spare money unless I can afford to feed myself, and I can’t truly afford to feed myself unless I can afford to feed *all* of my selves.

16-year-old me got to eat because 7-year-old me’s dad put away some ““extra””, and eventually that ““extra”” was all he had left. Where is 33-year-old me getting *her* food from?

Because if the source isn’t me, then I don’t trust it to come through for her. I want to do all I can to make sure that, no matter who is or is not willing to employ her or for how much, 33-year-old me (and 44-year-old me, and 55-year-old me…) is fed and housed and so forth.

—

(This was going to be a tag ramble, but then I thought it should probably stay with the post if somebody reblogs it to respond or something. I’m just going to leave it in tag format.)

#this post probably partly inspired by my first anniversary of non-freelance employment   #which is coming up soon   #I think I will celebrate by scheduling the dental checkup I have been putting off for ~3 years because I didn’t feel I could afford it   #(yes government healthcare does not cover dental)   #(OHIP has some very weird-looking exceptions)   #(this is probably the result of some kind of complicated political negotiation that I’m not sure I want to know the details of)   #anyway a dental checkup seems like a good compromise between celebratory and practical   #(and [practical celebrations are easier to enjoy]/[I find myself drawn to practical gifts these days anyway including gifts I buy for myself])   #((that safety thing manifests here especially))   #((the things I dream of buying these days are always things that protect you from something))   #((checkups that protect you from tooth damage and electric cars that protect you from rising oil prices and solar-powered phone chargers that protect you from power outages))   #((this I am much less sure I endorse))   #((I mean I think it is good to want practical things but it would also probably be good if I felt safe enough to want a few non-practical things too))   #(((sometimes on especially bad brain days I can’t even bring myself to play Flight Rising)))   #(((that is currently the most common cause of my FR hiatuses)))   #(((it used to be the most common cause was that I felt like playing some other game instead)))

 

maryellencarter:

This is really interesting and I’ve been thinking about it for a while. I’m still not sure I actually have the brain to word everything I’m thinking/feeling about it, but here’s one bit, at least:

“the way I see it, if future-me doesn’t have money to spare, then neither do I. I don’t have spare money unless I can afford to feed myself, and I can’t truly afford to feed myself unless I can afford to feed *all* of my selves.”

I think… there are two things I’m thinking here. One is, I don’t think I believe, subconsciously, that it’s *possible* to have enough money to feed all of my future selves. This is almost certainly trauma-based – having enough money to eat has been a recurring theme in my life from the time I was very young, always coupled with inability to actually earn any money myself to buy any food. I’ve almost always been, and was *meant* to always be, dependent on somebody else to provide for me, and that has done Things to my wiring, which I don’t think I’m articulate enough to parse out right now.

(I think, at least partly… I’m not sure this even comes out in words, but I think there’s a thing I need to think at when I have words, which is that I – I don’t think I see working as me *earning money*. I think I see it as me doing what is incomprehensibly required by the eldritch deities that control whether I get to live. Like there’s a… you see posts about “you have rights as a worker, the company needs you, you have some control here”, etc etc, and I… can’t parse that? It fritzes me out. I can’t process the idea of me having any power in that equation. I’m supposed to only take what I get and be thankful they allow me to serve them. I think I see it as even more dysfunctional and abusive than how most workers in late-stage capitalism see it, and that makes it harder for me to deal with long-term. But that probably needs to be a post when I have slept recently.)

Where was I? Right. Tied into the same traumas is the – well, the brainwashing, that I eat Too Much. That no matter how little I eat, I have to eat less, because I am the Fat. (I’ve said this before, but my skeleton alone is probably hefty enough to play high school football. I’m never gonna be acceptably skinny, even if I literally starve to death.) So the… concept of feeding all my future selves, ties into that irrational belief – the idea that not only is it impossible to amass that much money under late-stage capitalism because the elder gods will not give it to me, but it’s impossible for there to *exist* enough money to feed all my future selves, because I’m like one of those entities in the one Norse myth. You know, the one where the cat was Jormungandr. Words aren’t wording and I can’t identify *which* entity; I feel like the logical one would be fire, the one that eats everything faster than anyone, but I keep thinking of the cup tied to the sea. But, I mean – am I making any sense? This irrational belief that no matter how much money I ever have, I will eat it all. (And that there will be other disasters, that I’ll always have to fix my car or buy new shoes or whatever, but fundamentally: that my needs are too much, that I’m too greedy, that no matter how much money there is, I will use it all up, because I am Bad and demanding and selfish and I take and take and take and never give. But also specifically that if I could eat, and I wasn’t forced to pinch pennies or count calories or be *controlled* somehow by people or circumstances, that I would literally never stop eating and I would eat and eat and eat all the food and all the money and use up all the resources and devour the world. Maybe *I’m* Jormungandr. ;P)

Uh. That… that turned into a thing. I really hope Tumblr doesn’t eat this. It hasn’t eaten any reblog posts I tried to make on my laptop *yet*, but I’m gonna copy it first anyway.

Anyway. All of that was approximately the first of the two things that I was trying to say here. The other one is, of course, that I also don’t actually believe in my future self existing. Any of my future selves. Again, it’s a trauma thing (obviously), but it doesn’t make it any less… convincing. It’s hard to feel like saving up to support my future self has any validity when I’m quite certain – not at all rationally, but still quite certain – that I’m gonna either keel over or kill myself sometime in the next few years. Or that somebody else will kill me. Something along those lines. “Sense of foreshortened future”, that one post called it. I died too young and now my brain can’t stop thinking I’m going to keep dying.

*sigh* I don’t even know if any of that made any sense. Basically I think it’s just a lot of irrational beliefs that I know are irrational but I can’t seem to uninstall them. But maybe writing them down will… help, at some point? Possibly?

>>One is, I don’t think I believe, subconsciously, that it’s *possible* to have enough money to feed all of my future selves.<<

Sometimes I try running some calculations regarding how much money my household would need in order to live off the interest, and depending on what assumptions I feed into the model I tend to get results in the 1 – 2 million USD range.

And on the one hand that’s a lot of money, but at the same time it’s not nearly as much money as I might have guessed off the top of my head. *And* that’s assuming the goal is to not–in an average year–have to touch the money originally invested at all, rather than merely having funds that aren’t due to run out until after dying of old age. (Brain: “The point is to *not* die; why would I make Plan A’s that rely on me dying at some point?”)

(Not to mention the various in-between consolation-prize states, in which one can cover a significant chunk of one’s expenses with interest and only needs to find a *little* work to cover the rest, which is not entirely safe but still quite an improvement.)

You might not find that sort of thing helpful yourself, but personally I find it reassuring to have a sense of the end goal. Even if I have a hard time believing I’ll ever actually have that kind of money, I like having an idea of what Enough money would look like, to help me know where I stand.

—

I was mostly using food as a metonym for necessities, but yeah, it does sound like you’ve got some food-specific brain issues.

(I have fairly low food needs myself, but that’s really just luck. Luck that I have a low metabolism, luck that when a nasty stomach bug in 2012 gave my gut flora a hard whack I found that afterwards my appetite now matched said metabolism rather than being slightly higher, luck that I live in a place where drinking water is extremely easy to source so that needing an extra 2 – 3 litres of water a day doesn’t cause more problems than needing less food prevents. (I don’t expect those things are *directly* related, but all bodies have their own quirks, and some circumstances are more amenable to some quirks than others.))

—

>>I don’t think I see working as me *earning money*. I think I see it as me doing what is incomprehensibly required by the eldritch deities that control whether I get to live.<<

I wonder if something like that isn’t more common than one might think, though maybe not to the same severity and…I think it’s particularly expected of *higher*-tier workers? Like, cubicle farmers and stuff. There is *some* room in the cultural consciousness for people scraping by on minimum wage to be displeased by having their hours cut, but people with a generally comfortable-in-the-medium-term paycheck are expected to have that mental disconnect between work and money, expected to desire to work as little as possible even when their pay is directly tied to how much they work. One is supposed to respond to the prospect of an additional day off with “Sweet, vacation!”, not “Damn, I wanted some more metaphorical acorns to squirrel away for later.”

(and even with low-tier stuff, I *still* sometimes get people expecting me to be pleased if one of my shifts gets removed from the schedule. even my own mother does this sometimes, and she *really* should know better.)

(And yeah, this is another financial aspect where I have the opposite psychological issues to you: I’m *acutely* aware of the connection between work and money. I still have a hard time believing that anyone is willing to pay me $14/hour just to do *this*, and I feel like I have to constantly justify my wage.

On the bright side, I think that *has* gotten me a niche in the employee schedule: slow times and times when he’s not *entirely* sure he needs an extra person on but the risk of being understaffed if he doesn’t is too great. My *top* speed is not very good, but my *average* speed can be quite competitive, because I keep looking for things to do long after everyone else has given up and started looking at stuff on their smartphones (or chatting to each other, or showing each other stuff on their smartphones). And if he puts me on and then finds out too late he didn’t need me after all, he gets a consolation prize of cleaner walls.)

—

>>“Sense of foreshortened future”, that one post called it. I died too young and now my brain can’t stop thinking I’m going to keep dying.<<

Reminds me of a conversation we had a while back regarding nausea, where the same basic impulse manifests in *your* brain as “I want to die” and in *my* brain as “I want to be temporarily unconscious; please wake me when this is over”.

Tags:

#…and now I’m late for bed #oops #reply via reblog #adventures in human capitalism #disordered eating #abuse cw #suicide cw #death tw #long post #(the following category tags were added retroactively:) #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers