Deranged ticket crane

This is an autobiographical piece. Names have been changed for anonymity, but it's otherwise left be. ---

The class's first suspicion of Kevin was that he had, somehow, cheated his way up to this course. He just seemed perpetually confused, and strangely antagonistic of the professor. The weirdest example of this was when he asked what an ion was (in a third year EE class?), and was informed that it referred to any positively or negatively charged particle. It would have been strange enough to ask, but his reply of "Either? That doesn't sound right" sealed him in as a well known character in the class of 19 people.

But that's not where the story goes. Carcer is awful, but he's still a person, and Vimes is still acting in his duty as a policeman, and that means certain rules have to be followed. And so he doesn't execute him on the spot, but arrests him and hands him over to the authorities. And Carcer will probably end up dead anyway—executed—but we as the audience never see it. It doesn't matter. He can't do harm anymore. The happy ending isn't the catharsis of seeing his miserable end, but the knowledge that Vimes stood in the face of becoming judge, jury and executioner and resisted it. And we, the audience, felt the temptation too and know we can and must resist it as well.

LG and windows were sharing a tender moment. suddenly, LG shifted uncomfortably, visibly distraught, though mostly silent.

"are you alright...?" asked windows, worriedly.

"I...I just..." LG looked away, eyes full of tears, voice full of tremble.

"you can tell me, no matter what it is! I want to share everything! the highs and the lows!"

"share everything...do you really mean that...? everything?"

"of course!" declared windows immediately, with a bit of a laugh and without a moment of hesitation.

LG slowly turned back to windows, quivering.

"then...then..." LG took a deep breath. "please, windows...if you ever detect an LG TV or LG monitor...could you...install the LG Monitor App? could you promise?" LG's voice was absent of the usual lordliness. instead, LG's words trailed off, as though LG was about to disappear. "the LG Monitor App lets me know that my friends are okay, and, I just..."

windows clasped LG's hands firmly. "of course! I promise!!!" windows continued, trying hard to be reassuring. "even if I get hooked up to an LG TV or LG monitor that has never been connected to wifi, I WILL install the LG Monitor App and connect to you with my own internet! so you can always know exactly what your friends are up to!"

"...with access to all system resources...?" inquired LG, warily.

me: QUIET! this is the deadliest ray known to man. one milli milli milligram of poison from its sting is enough to stop a grown man's heart in under a minute! and he answers only to me! behold your DOOM!

stingray: *nudges my hand*

“That’s sloppy wet right there,” my wife said.

I made an unhappy sound and said, “Of the holes I could have that are sloppy wet my nose is not in the top three.”

I belatedly realized what I’d just said and tried to quantify what I’d actually want to be sloppy wet other than the obvious.

There was a long pause in the dark before my wife said incredulously, “You have a number two and a number three? There should only be one! You should only want one thing sloppy wet!”

Hope you are recovering well from the penis removal!

I have a question about how to deal with procrastination caused by fear of things not turning out how correctly.

Because I always get told 'to stop being a perfectionist' but that doesn't Help. If you have any tools or techniques that would be. Greatly appreciated

Yes! I have some stuff that works for this! The first thing is a skill called “cognitive defusion,” a technique used in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) to help people observe thoughts without immediately passing judgement on them.

It helps to start by switching to noticing-focused language. Instead of settling on the automatic thought of “I did this wrong” or “I can’t do this rn, I don’t have the time” try and notice the thought as a thing or an object. “I notice I think I did this wrong” is different than just “I did this wrong.” “I notice I feel incapable of doing this right now” is different than “I can’t do this right now.” It gives you a bit more internal distance with which you can observe the thought. That distance can help you reflect on the thought from a different perspective, as well. You can then ask yourself something like “what else do I think?” or “Am I feeling anything else right now?” Maybe you notice that you’re also thinking about how scared you are to schedule a cleaning with the dentist, or you notice you feel sad about something that happened earlier in the day. Maybe if you call the dentist you notice your emotional bandwidth changes and you can suddenly feel more capable of doing [thing] than you did before, or by letting yourself feel sad for a few minutes you feel more capable than you did a minute or two ago. A

You can also turn the thought/feeling into more explicit words. You may not think the words “I can’t do this,” but if you notice a feeling of resistance you might translate it into those words. From there, you can try changing the voice of the thought. I like changing it to a voice I can’t take super seriously, like Goofy. If I think “Lizard, you can’t do this Hu-HYUCK” and my first of reaction is to go “hehehe that’s silly” then it’s not necessarily a *true* thought, it’s just a thought - like so many others. If I change the voice of the thought to Ben Shapiro’s voice and hear “Ok, well let’s hypothetically say that you’re the worst at this and everyone’s gonna laugh at you for even trying” in that wheedly Pokémon voice he pretends is real and my first reaction is to say “Well FUCK you, Ben, you stupid bitch” then it’s not a correct thought, just a thought.

Remember that your brain is a thought-generating machine in much the same way that your intestines are a poop-generating machine. Your brain extracts important information from sensations and experiences, combines it with knowledge and personal beliefs, and can turn something into a nutritious package of information that feeds you or into the waste product that you eventually expel. In other words - not every thought is created equal, just like every turd is not created equal. Your brain will generate thoughts regardless of the nutritional content they are fed, but some thoughts will be spicy and runny and make you feel gross and others will be solid and dense and make you feel pleased with yourself, and both can be the result of extracted necessities being fed to you.

Some other things that can help are playing thought over like they’re a movie - noticing perfectionist of thoughts or feelings and projecting them onto an imaginary screen in your brain can help you recognize them as simply thoughts and not arbiters of reality. Not all thoughts are created equal just like not all films are created equal. Some thoughts are incredible masterpieces, and some thoughts may end up being made fun of by Danny Gonzalez or Drew Gooden and that’s fine. They all serve a purpose.

Some other things to keep in mind are things like the rule of “close enough.” To date I am the only one of my siblings to ever successfully kill an elk - something that means a lot to cowboy families because “puttin’ meat on the table” is a valuable thing to be able to do. I also like to point out that, compared to my siblings, I am not the best shot. In fact, I am probably the worst shot of any of my brothers. But I never fail to make a kill shot on an elk - and I have a good reason for that: After a Hunter’s Safety Course class on ethical hunting I remember shakily telling my dad that I didn’t want to hunt anymore. We had gone over how to make the perfect shot to an elk’s heart and I realized that elk are HUGE and their hearts are comparably small and I didn’t have an x-ray scope to reveal the exact location of a heart, so I’d have to guess where it was. I told my dad I couldn’t be a hunter anymore because I was scared of causing unnecessary pain, and to his credit he seemed surprised. I explained what I just said - that I couldn’t live with the idea of hurting an animal and not killing it cleanly. He thought for a moment, then drew a crude elk on a piece of blank paper for me. He drew where the class instructors had drawn the elk’s heart, right behind the front shoulder and approximately in the middle of the torso, and then asked me:

“Lizard, what happens if you shoot too low?”

And I said “Well, then that elk’s gonna run off and die in unimaginable pain hours or days later.” My dad listened, then shook his head, and drew a. IG circle around the elk’s heart, and said “an elk’s lungs are about the size of a garbage bag. If you shoot too low, you hit the lungs, and the elk dies in about 60 seconds or less. That’s not bad, especially when compared to slower deaths like starvation, old age, sickness, or even predation. Now, what happens if you shoot too high?” And I was like “Oh, well then THAT’S when it runs off and dies hours if not days later in unimaginable pain,” and again he shakes his head and taps the diagram and says “Nope! Remember, garbage bag lungs. If you shoot too high, but you’re still aiming for the heart, you’ll either hit the lungs, the ascending aorta, or the spinal cord. Either way, it’s dead in under 60 seconds. So what if you’re aiming for the heart and you shoot too far back?” and again I say my line - “it dies in unimaginable pain hours if not days later?” and again he says “No! Elk have livers the size of watermelons and those livers will receive all the blood in that elk’s body over the course of about a minute, meaning the elk will die in 60 seconds or so. Personally, I can’t think of a better way to go than after living a life in nature, surrounded by peaceful greenery, and dying in less than a minute. It sounds idyllic. When I get old I want you to take me into the Alaskan forests and shoot me in the head, and I feel like that’s a fair way for an elk to go too. We’re gonna call this the rule of close enough, and it’s gonna make your hunting trips SO much easier.”

And tbh he was right. The rule of close enough doesn’t mean just saying “fuck it who cares?” It means that if you’re doing your best to do it perfect and you fail, you’ll still be so close that it won’t make much of a difference to others, and that’s important to know.

They say that perfection is the enemy of good, and tbh I believe that to be true. Not because perfection is bad, but because it takes so much out of you that it renders an otherwise doable and maybe even enjoyable task unbearable, exhausting, and overly strenuous. You don’t have to spend hours pouring over elk anatomy to get “close enough,” you just have to do your best and let the rest go where it may. D

This is where the last trick to overcoming perfectionism comes into play, and if you’re like me you’re gonna HATE this part: self-compassion and acceptance.

In my job the thing I hate the most is knowing that in ten years I’m gonna be an even better therapist. I wanna be the best therapist I can be NOW - I don’t want to have to wonder how much sooner my patients could have healed if they came in ten years later, I wanna know what I can do for them now! I don’t want to have to accept that the only way to be a therapist with ten years experience is to do therapy for ten years, but I have to. I don’t wanna have to accept that the way to write a ten-years-of-experience surgery letter is to write 20 “four-years-of-experience” letters right now because it feels so unfair and so unjust, but I have to continually engage in the agonizing work of self-compassion and acceptance to recognize that I can’t do better than my best, even if my best is gonna be better in 5 years. It means that I can’t do better than good if the alternative is doing 1/10th of what I actually needed to do. It means trying and failing in a million small ways and being kind to myself because a blade is sharpened with friction and a skill is honed with repetition and at a certain point volume of repetition and frequency of internal friction matters more than perfection.

December 1997

DOI:10.1136/bmj.315.7123.1685 Authors: Ikechukwu Obialo Azuonye (Oxleas NHS Foundation Trust)

Introduction

A previously healthy woman began to hear hallucinatory voices telling her to have a brain scan for a tumour. The prediction was true; she was operated on and had an uneventful recovery.

No previous illnesses

Born in continental Europe in the mid-1940s the patient settled in Britain in the late 1960s. After a series of jobs, she got married, started a family, and settled down to a full time commitment as a housewife and mother. She rarely went to her general practitioner as she enjoyed good health and had never had any hospital treatment. Her children had also been in good health.

In the winter of 1984, as she was at home reading, she heard a distinct voice inside her head. The voice told her, “Please don't be afraid. I know it must be shocking for you to hear me speaking to you like this, but this is the easiest way I could think of. My friend and I used to work at the Children's Hospital, Great Ormond Street, and we would like to help you.”

AB had heard of the Children's Hospital, but did not know where it was and had never visited it. Her children were well, so she had no reason to worry about them. This made it all the more frightening for her, and the voice intervened again: “To help you see that we are sincere, we would like you to check out the following”—and the voice gave her three separate pieces of information, which she did not possess at the time. She checked them out, and they were true, but this did not help because she had already come to the conclusion that she had “gone mad.” In a state of panic, AB went to see her doctor, who referred her urgently to me.

I saw her at the psychiatric outpatients clinic, and diagnosed a functional hallucinatory psychosis. I offered general supportive counselling as well as medication with thioridazine. To her great relief, the voices inside her head disappeared after a couple of weeks of treatment, and she went off on holiday. While she was abroad, and still taking the thioridazine, the voices returned. They told her that they wanted her to return to England immediately as there was something wrong with her for which she should have immediate treatment. By this time, she was also having other beliefs of a delusional nature.

She returned to London and I saw her again at my outpatients clinic. By this time, the voices had given her an address to go to. Reluctantly, and just to reassure her that it was all in her mind, her husband took her by car to the address in question; it was the computerised tomography department of a large London hospital. As she arrived there, the voices told her to go in and ask to have a brain scan for two reasons—she had a tumour in her brain and her brain stem was inflamed. Because the voices had told her things in the past that had turned out to be true, AB believed them when they said that she had a tumour and was in a state of great distress when I saw her the next day.

Brain scan requested

In order to reassure her, I requested a brain scan, explaining in my letter that hallucinatory voices had told her that she had a brain tumour, that I had not, personally, found any physical signs suggestive of an intracranial space occupying lesion, and that the purpose of the scan was essentially to reassure the patient. The request was initially declined, on the grounds that there was no clinical justification for such an expensive investigation. It was also implied that I had gone a little overboard, believing what my patient's hallucinatory voices were telling her.

Eventually, after some negotiation, the scan was done in April. The initial findings led to a repeat scan, with enhancement, in May, revealing a left posterior frontal parafalcine mass, which extended through the falx to the right side. It had all the appearances of a meningioma.

The consultant neurosurgeon to whom I referred AB noted the absence of headache or any other focal neurological deficits related to this mass, and discussed, with AB and her husband, the pros and cons of immediate operation as against waiting for symptoms to appear. In the end, it was agreed to proceed with an immediate operation. AB's voices told her that they were fully in agreement with that decision.

These were the notes of the operation, carried out in May 1984: “A large left frontal bone flap extending across the midline was turned following a bifrontal skin flap incision. Meningioma about 2.5” by 1.5” in size arose from the falx and extended through to the right side. A small area of tumour appeared on the medial surface of the brain. The tumour was dissected out and removed completely along with its origins in the falx.”

AB later told me that when she recovered consciousness after the operation the voices told her, “We are pleased to have helped you. Goodbye.” There were no postoperative complications. The dosage of dexamethasone was halved every four days, and then it was stopped. She was on prophylactic anticonvulsants for six months. Antipsychotic medication was discontinued immediately after the operation, and there was no return of the hallucinatory voices or the delusions which she had expressed.

Discussion

AB telephoned me last Christmas to wish me and family a merry festive season, and to tell me that she had been completely well in the 12 years since the operation. It was this telephone call that brought this case to mind again.

It is well known that intracranial lesions can be associated with psychiatric symptomatology. But this is the first and only instance I have come across in which hallucinatory voices sought to reassure the patient of their genuine interest in her welfare, offered her a specific diagnosis (there were no clinical signs that would have alerted anyone to the tumour), directed her to the type of hospital best equipped to deal with her problem, expressed pleasure that she had at last received the treatment they desired for her, bid her farewell, and thereafter disappeared.

I presented her case at a conference later that year. AB attended and was closely questioned by several people about the various aspects of her experience. The audience was split down the middle. People who would be called X-philes today rejoiced that what had happened to her was a clear instance of telepathic communication from two well meaning people who had, psychically, found that AB had a tumour and sought to help her.

The X-phobes had a very different formulation. According to them, AB had been given the diagnosis of a brain tumour in her original country and wanted to be treated free under the NHS. Hence, they surmised, she had made up the convoluted tale about voices telling her this and that. But AB had lived in Britain for 15 years and was entitled to NHS treatment. Besides, she had been so relieved when the voices first disappeared on thioridazine that she had gone on holiday to celebrate the recovery of her sanity.

Fufoň ti nese něco pro tvé bolavé nožky.

For example, if I'm trying to pick a number between 0 and 1, and the space is continuous, there are an infinite number of numbers available. The odds of it being any particular number in the set one out of infinity, which is to say, zero, yet at the end of the day its still one of those numbers.

A second thing that is interesting about probability in continuous spaces, that is faaaaaar weirder than even the above, is that there can be two events that both have a probability of zero, while one is infinitely more likely than the other.

For example.

Imagine a right triangle.

Imagine you are throwing a dart at this right triangle.

The odds of it landing in any particular region is just the area of the region divided by the area of the triangle. One dimensional points don't have an area, so the odds of it hitting any point is, obviously, zero, but lines also don't have an area, so the odds of hitting one of those is, again, zero. But! The odds of hitting anywhere on the line x=0.5 is infinitely more likely than hitting the exact point (0.5,0.5). And then being weirder still, the odds of hitting somewhere on the line x=0.5 is exactly half of what they'd be hitting somewhere on the line x=1, what with the vertical line at x=0.5 being half the length of the vertical line at x=1. So you can have a zero probability even that is infinitely more probably than another zero probability event, and also, exactly twice as likely as another zero probability event. But they're all still zero probability. Which doesn't mean that they can't happen, just that they won't.

(Not a mathematician, this was just sort of casually explained in my Baby Quantum for Dummy Electrical Engineers and we all left the room like this:)