Mental Nomad

Anyone else feeling First Act Jack Skellington lately?

One of the sides (I don't know if it's an upside or downside) of being a forgotten middle child of the 1980s is learned helplessness. My entire life has (and continues to be) a series of "Damn it, what now?" followed by "Well, shoot, I don't have the resources to fight this, so I guess this is my life now."

There is something that always baffled me about law enforcement agencies: why would you ever need quotas? You would think that if they're doing their job, then crime would drop or taper off or level out and there would be lower numbers, which would be a good thing. Creating quotas for arrests or tickets or whatever only encourages offices to stretch definitions or flat-out fabricate stuff to inflate the numbers.

Likely unpopular hot take: ma'am is not an ageist insult to convey that the person thinks you're a matronly old woman. If someone from the south calls you ma'am, it is an acknowledgement that you deserve respect and there is no age attached to the honoriffic.

You CLOTHE yourself with CLOTH

Look, if you want me to take the lead in a project, then you have 2 options.

Dear Amazon:

Snooze = up to 15 minutes

A few weeks ago I thought, "Oh, I should maybe read [type of book] this summer." This is what I did for years when I was younger--picked a genre to try to read during the summer. Then I realized I haven't been tied to the world of academia since my daughter graduated in 2020. I am not beholden to this concept of "summer reading" any more. I have a TBR stack that I am happy to be working through and I don't really want to interject anything to interrupt my progress on the pile. I can read what I want when I want without any outside interference. I'm not going to change my reading pace simply because it's hotter, there's a little more daylight, and random kids are running around screaming everywhere at all hours with their brief moments of freedom. I am a free autonomous adult who is no longer burdened by a school-year calendar. My days don't vary for class breaks or holidays or homecoming or any other type of school-type events. My reading (nor my crafting, for that matter) doesn't have to take any cues from anything outside my own motivation. So, I don't need any "summer reading warrior lists" or "summer reading journals" or anything else like that. Since I'm not getting any external reward for how many books I race through in 2 months, nor do I need external motivation to read, I will continue on as I have for quite some time in my adult life.