Welcome to the Trash Heap

Lan Wangji, about to escalate his how-to-court-Wei-Ying strategy to baby-trapping:

Because not only is it wrong, it's fucking stupid.

Like, ffs if you're willing to do that, just lie about getting the degree on your resume and save yourself the money.

Hardly anybody actually checks that shit anyway. Just tell people you went to MIT or whatever, you'll wind up with roughly the same amount of knowledge by lying roughly the same lie.

I used to work for a call center and I was doing a political survey and I called this number that was randomly generated for me and the way our system worked was voice-activated so when the other person said hello you’d get connected to them, so I just launch right into my “Harvard University and NPR blah blah blah” thing and then there’s this long pause and I think the person’s hung up even though I didn’t hear a click

And then I hear “you shouldn’t be able to call this number.”

So I apologize and go into the preset spiel about because we aren’t selling anything, etc. etc. and the answer I get is

“No, I know that. What I mean is that it should be impossible for you to call this number, and I need to know how you got it.”

I explain that it’s randomly generated and I’m very sorry for bothering him, and go to hang up. And before I can click terminate, I hear:

“Ma’am, this is a matter of national security.”

I accidentally called the director of the FBI.

There was no MS Dos involved. Instead, there was a proprietary type-based OS and an actually-uses-transistors refrigerator-sized computer with switches I had to trip at certain times during the night as I watched the data flow from six pm to six AM on Fridays and weekends. If things got stuck, I reset the server. 

The company handled everything from low-end data (hotel and car reservations) to flight plans and tower information. I was weighed every time I came in to make sure it was me. Areas of the building had retina scanners on doors. 

During training. they took us through all the procedures. Including the procedures for the red phone. There was, literally, a red phone on the shelf above my desk. “This is a holdover from the cold war.” They said. “It isn’t going to come up, but here’s the deal. In case of nuclear war or other nation-wide disaster, the phone will ring. Pick up the phone, state your name and station, and await instructions. Do whatever you are told.”

So my third night there, it’s around 2am and there’s a ringing sound. 

I look up, slowly. The Red phone is ringing.

So I reach out, I pick up the phone. I give my name and station number. And I hear every station head in the building do the exact same. One after another, voices giving names and numbers. Then silence for the space of two breaths. Silence broken by…

“Uh… Is Shantavia there?”

It turns out that every toll free, 1-900 or priority number has a corresponding local number that it routs to at its actual destination. Some poor teenage girl was trying to dial a friend of hers, mixed up the numbers, and got the atomic attack alert line for a major air-travel corporation’s command center in the mid-west United States.

There’s another pause, and the guys over in the main data room are cracking up. The overnight site head is saying “I think you have the wrong number, ma’am.” and I’m standing there having faced the specter of nuclear annihilation before I was old enough to legally drink.

Seriously, this is legit.

In December 1955, Sears decided to run a Santa hotline.  Here’s the ad they posted.

Only problem is, they misprinted the number.  And the number they printed?  It went straight through to fucking NORAD.  This was in the middle of the Cold War, when early warning radar was the only thing keeping nuclear annihilation at bay.  NORAD was the front line.

And it wasn’t just any number at NORAD.  Oh no no no.

Terri remembers her dad had two phones on his desk, including a red one. “Only a four-star general at the Pentagon and my dad had the number,” she says.

“This was the ‘50s, this was the Cold War, and he would have been the first one to know if there was an attack on the United States,” Rick says.

The red phone rang one day in December 1955, and Shoup answered it, Pam says. “And then there was a small voice that just asked, ‘Is this Santa Claus?’ ”

His children remember Shoup as straight-laced and disciplined, and he was annoyed and upset by the call and thought it was a joke — but then, Terri says, the little voice started crying.

“And Dad realized that it wasn’t a joke,” her sister says. “So he talked to him, ho-ho-ho’d and asked if he had been a good boy and, ‘May I talk to your mother?’ And the mother got on and said, ‘You haven’t seen the paper yet? There’s a phone number to call Santa. It’s in the Sears ad.’ Dad looked it up, and there it was, his red phone number. And they had children calling one after another, so he put a couple of airmen on the phones to act like Santa Claus.”

“It got to be a big joke at the command center. You know, ‘The old man’s really flipped his lid this time. We’re answering Santa calls,’ ” Terri says.

And then, it got better.

“The airmen had this big glass board with the United States on it and Canada, and when airplanes would come in they would track them,” Pam says.

“And Christmas Eve of 1955, when Dad walked in, there was a drawing of a sleigh with eight reindeer coming over the North Pole,” Rick says.

“Dad said, ‘What is that?’ They say, ‘Colonel, we’re sorry. We were just making a joke. Do you want us to take that down?’ Dad looked at it for a while, and next thing you know, Dad had called the radio station and had said, ‘This is the commander at the Combat Alert Center, and we have an unidentified flying object. Why, it looks like a sleigh.’ Well, the radio stations would call him like every hour and say, ‘Where’s Santa now?’ ” Terri says.

For real.

“And later in life he got letters from all over the world, people saying, ‘Thank you, Colonel,’ for having, you know, this sense of humor. And in his 90s, he would carry those letters around with him in a briefcase that had a lock on it like it was top-secret information,” she says. “You know, he was an important guy, but this is the thing he’s known for.”

“Yeah,” Rick [his son] says, “it’s probably the thing he was proudest of, too.”

So yeah.  I think that might be the best wrong number of all time.

I expect that a lot of you just cringed. Meditation is often presented as a cure-all, much like exercise is. And just like exercise, it's presented in a moralized way that fails to account for people who struggle to "just do it". In fact, in many ways it is worse- at least with exercise, you have sports, weightlifting, and running as classics that are widely known. With meditation, the only way generally spoken about is the "sit down and clear your mind" style. If there's only one way to do something, a large number of people are going to be completely unable to do it.

What meditation is supposed to do is to get you grounded in the present moment. It's supposed to help you tune back into yourself and the immediate world around you. Yes, I know that sounds like woo. Think of it as... an extended grounding exercise.

Here are some accommodations for various problems I've seen people have with it.

It puts you to sleep? Do it before bed and before naps.

Can't sit for an extended period of time? Take whatever position is comfortable. You also don't have to do it for long periods of time. Sometimes I set aside like five minutes to chill out and meditate to ground myself, and it has noticeable benefits for me.

Can't sit still? Walk. A park would be awesome, but just a room you can pace around works. If you really have to stay in one place, rock or sway. The key is that you want a rhythmic movement that you don't have to actively think about. I know at least one person who dances.

Distracted by the world around you? Focus on the input of one of your senses. Put all your processing power into hearing everything around you, or seeing everything, or feeling everything you can touch. The last one creates a great use for any fun rocks you have; you can roll them over in your hands and feel every part of them, and just experience the Texture. An advanced version of this is trying it with two senses.

Unable to clear your mind at all? Take your thoughts, start examining and untangling them. Then, organize them and figure out where they go in your mind. Why are you having this thought? Where should it be classified? I like thinking of the thoughts as books that need to be shelved correctly. This won't get rid of the thoughts, but it works as a form of meditation because you're thinking about the thoughts rather than just thinking them.

For starters our shitty state-sanctioned torturers who used seclusion rooms on us also prompted "strong sitting" which is literally just...meditation. But ignoring that, we have noticed we're pretty much either too aware of our body with even mild meditation or on the converse side of things we will start to feel like we are floating, and we will tell you that when we did that meditation unit back in middle school, we absolutely did not have years and years of meditation practice.

Like, yee, we love (//sarcasm) our traumatatization interacting with our autism. :c

So our question is like...gaining the benefits of meditation or doing meditation without zoinking our ass out. Walking meditation does not work. It kind of lets our ADHD run wild and becomes a moot point. Uh, we did meditation for a mental health unit at our work recently and had to stop the video for fifteen minutes so we could stop freaking out (good thing we had like...an hour and a half of training time) because we forgot neurotypical people and non-traumatized people in general Do Meditation.

Wdk. We have a history of being gaslit (personal and institutional) about the state of our mind and also how it functions so like, we very much doubt CBT would work either.

So like, OP wdk. Maybe what we need is like, ~reverse meditation~ or something.

I hear you saying that you're too aware of your body. Have you tried focusing on your body itself? On the sound of your heart, the sensation of your breathing, the feel of your skin resting on itself. Just all of the sensations that make up your body and how it lives. This can genuinely be really helpful information because then you have more of a read on your body's normal, and can tell when something is Off.

Since walking doesn't work, do you think that rocking would, or some other stationary activity? Kneading dough, washing clothes by hand, anything that's enough to get the wiggles out without working yourself up more.

If the sitting is the problem, you can also lie down on your back or side. Front generally isn't used because it restricts your breathing, but feel free to try it. On the floor, on a couch, anywhere works. As long as you're comfortable and can chill, then you're good.

Additionally, do you know any grounding exercises that do work for you? Grounding is the point of meditation, however you do it. If you can take that grounding exercise and repeat it when you aren't panicking, then that will work as mediation.

At this point, I went and looked up "strong sitting" to make sure that I'm not giving any contradictory advice, and I just want to add on that you may want to try much, much shorter sessions, three to five minutes- or even shorter. Start small, and stop if it starts working you up or you start disassociating.

I feel like I've already tried pretty much everything I can do on my own (as well as tried my best to receive support, medical treatment etc.), so now meditation is my last hope of seeing any improvement in my quality of life, ever. Well, shit! That's an enormous amount of pressure in itself - I have to do this, I have to do it right, it must work ... uhm. Maybe not the best way to approach something that's supposed to be relaxing. 😬

It's a little difficult to list everything I've tried off the top of my head, especially since that would have to include strategies for improving both mental and physical health. The main reason I want to try meditation this time is that I alway seem to be physically tense. I've already moved to a place where I feel much happier, safer, and my life is more convenient. Didn't help. I used to go for walks before I got too sick, which also didn't help. Having plants only led to feeling stressed out in the past because I didn't manage to keep them alive.

I've tried art, journaling, various forms of exercise, progressive muscle relaxation, showering more often, listening to music daily, using stim toys strategically, and who knows what else. The outcome was always either that I physically couldn't do it often enough to notice positive effects, or I ran into some kind of mental block.

Since I'm going to guess you've already tried stretches and yoga, my biggest recommendation for the physical tension is to get a massage. If there's a school near you that offers a sports medicine course, you can often get them for cheap or free if you're willing to let a student work on you. There are also parts of your body you can self massage, like your hands, forearms, legs, and feet. Massage guns can be used for stubborn knots, but I've heard mixed opinions on their efficacy for non-exercise tension. Massage is the most direct method I know of for addressing physical tension.

Another that genuinely works for me is epsom salt baths, but take that with a grain of salt (Hah!) because as far as I know, there's no medical/scientific support for it. It's probably placebo, but the placebo effect can be harnessed to powerful effect. If you don't want to try epsom salt baths, select any other harmless natural remedy that claims to relax you, such as chamomile tea, remember that the placebo effect is an awesome thing and it may be able to help even if the item itself doesn't do anything, and see if that helps.