Category: Existentialism

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Dayton’s Where I’m Meant to Be

I belong with you, where you are! That’s all that matters to me. Dayton, family court, alimony hearings…you name it!

One of our local TV stations has a very bad filler segment (when the commercial break is one commercial too short and the network has to add something so people don’t panic and think the world just ended with a blank TV for 20 seconds). It shows some drone shots of the riverfront with an upbeat inspiring tune expressing to the viewer that Dayton is awesome and that we belong there. Aww, so warm and fuzzy. The jingle is obnoxious and I’d love to share it – yet I can’t find a YouTube of it (and searches instead point me to very bad sappy soft rock tunes which are even worse). This is probably because the YouTube content creator demographic isn’t the type that watches broadcast local TV. I don’t usually either, but sometimes I get forced into a sportsball viewing or some BS the president’s rambling about that Liz wants to watch. And when that jingle comes on, it necessitates a sing-a-long on my part accompanied by an arm-flailing couch dance.

And this ritual inspired a recreation atop the parking garage at the Miami Valley Hospital, with Dayton’s skyline view so prominent.

Dayton, bitches! We just hit our insurance out of pocket maximum so bring on the celebration, Dayton-style!

I’ve lived a number of places, and mocked them all of course. But Dayton? I don’t need a jingle to stay – I’ve put down roots and it doesn’t completely suck. Well, actually I live in a suburb of Dayton, but whatever. A suburb of a small metropolis. There are worse places to exist, and greater Ohio notwithstanding, it’s fairly politically neutral, with enough entertainment options available to the curious.

And restaurants.

And with that intro, here’s the second part of this post, unless you want to see more pics of me dancing.

Some of my work team was in town along with vendor reps. The day concluded with a dinner, which the local VP on the team scheduled at a chain (he might be on the young end of boomers), and oddly chose the specific location of the one very near to my house (which would be a bit of a drive for everyone else). Realizing the mistaken location on the reservation, he changed it to one closer to the hub office, which made things more convenient for everyone else (fine). But then he felt the need to append an annotative addendum to the correction, following a chuckle: “no one goes to Dayton to eat.”

Considering my own general indifference for Dayton itself, the comment shouldn’t have pissed me off to much degree, but it did, which I found surprising. So as I always do, I gave the matter way too much thought. My conclusion? Elitism.

It wasn’t that I live in Dayton or that he’s completely wrong about the restaurant situation (despite him choosing a Cincinnati-based location for the same damn restaurant). It was the annoying smug elitism that some people exude, as in this case, as if they just know better.

Similar to those who expound the virtues of minimalism – yes it’s healthier to avoid buying unnecessary stuff but don’t tell me you can maintain a quality lifestyle while only owning 100 items, unless you’re devoted to permanent nomadism. I certainly own more than 100 tools that are hanging in my garage, and that’s because I need to fix things. The elitist just pays for someone to fix things. So minimalism isn’t some superior life philosophy – it just means you can afford and are willing to pay someone else who has more than 100 items to maintain your ability to own only 100 items.

Another form of elitism: travel. People move out of necessity or to seek a better financial situation. People travel to recreate. Yet there’s always that asshole who comes back from Italy or wherever and suddenly has a different perspective on life after a week vacation and is now an expert on the location they visited. No you aren’t – you’re just a tourist. You didn’t live there for any amount of time. You didn’t work there. You don’t understand the culture. You’d have to be a permanent resident there for some appreciable amount of time. But instead, you just have the financial means to temporarily relocate for recreational purposes. And no amount of Samantha Brown, Steve Ricks, or Anthony Bourdain will change that.

And that’s what was going on here – someone who doesn’t live in Dayton thinks he knows something about Dayton that the rest of the team – that does live in Dayton – doesn’t.

Dayton may not be where I’m meant to be, but it’s where I happen to live – so I get to poke fun at it, but unless you live here, shut up.

–Simon

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Halcyon Days

Suicide Month is upon us again, and as a result I begin to contemplate happier times. Nostalgia is dangerous with its filtered remembrance of history. It’s a driving force behind MAGA and the glory of 1950s America, and The Roaring 20s before that. I don’t wish to go back to those time periods, but I do have my own Halcyon Days. The cruelty of which, as Calvin’s dad puts it, are awarded retroactively:

From gocomics.com: https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1988/11/25

Based simply on the time periods I daydream about, I consider My Halcyon Days, or years rather, to be: 2017-2020.

As nostalgia is purely emotional, I was interested in why I thought these days were so good. Looking back through my personal timeline, here’s my reasoning:

  • I moved from hourly work to salaried. With that came significantly more work autonomy (better job satisfaction and agency), and money. In fact during this time my household ranged from the 76th to 85th percentile in national income levels. Prior to that we were 66th. If the gold standards for middle class income is the middle 5th, which would be the 40th-60th percentile; or all but the top and bottom 20%, so the 20th-80th percentile (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_class) – then we essentially overcame middle classdom during this time. For people living the standard middle class politician soundbites prior (“X# of families can’t absorb an unexpected $1,000 expense”, etc.), I think this socioeconomic change was significant to my stress level reduction for the first time in my working life.
  • I started this blog in February 2017. I think this is more a representative corollary than evidence, but if I began an intentional record of my existence, I must have been finally interested in my own continued living, and finally starting paying attention to the moment instead of potential future goals. And looking back through it, it’s apparent that I had the energy for the multitude of hobbies I maintained at that time.
  • Youth! I achieved the mental maturity to master my own priorities, while also being young enough to bounce back from failure. And I had much better cardio and strength. I just felt physically good.
  • We bought the house the year prior, and while I wouldn’t go back to an apartment now, as a new homeowner I was still excited with its future, rather than worrying about its ongoing maintenance costs.
  • I witnessed the kid’s formative years. For better or worse, a parent always looks back on the experiences with a growing kid, once that kid inevitably becomes a teenager. And now I’m once again concerning myself with her future expenses.
  • This was all just before COVID lockdowns. An irreparable societal change, some consequences of which were certainly for the better, but many of which were not. This coincided with a job promotion, but in the process I lost the camaraderie I had built with my former team and was then denied the opportunity find that same rapport with my new department. It was never the same since, despite the perks of working from home. And while the home office saves me the irritations of cubicle life which I’ve so often criticized before, it replaced that feeling of being a physical embodiment of success. The confidence I felt waltzing into the office lobby wearing khakis and button-down in a sports jacket, then returning home so-attired and parking my sedan in the driveway while checking the mailbox and waving to my neighbor…was all replaced with slipping on cargo pants and a t-shirt and walking down to my basement. The iconic suburban fantasy had ended.

The conclusion? I suppose life just had finally felt fine, and the present was tolerable, and the future held with some optimism. To quote the Wikipedia article:

“The phrase has since come to refer to any peaceful time. Its proper meaning, however, is that of a lucky break, or a bright interval set in the midst of adversity”

Which I’ve now come to identify perfectly with this period in my life, as the current times are anything but peaceful and devoid of adversity. And again, as Calvin’s dad acknowledges, it had to pass for me to be able to know it had happened at all. Those were good days.

–Simon

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Fingernail Growth Rate and Life Expectancy

“Wow Simon, this is such an enticing title for a blog post!”

“I know, right?!”

Okay chill out. This is indeed mildly interesting, at least to me, because the thought never occurred to actually measure this. That is, until some time following the events of March 17, 2024:

Das blood!

A slipup washing knives, totally unrelated to this being St. Patrick’s day, resulted in 3 stitches.

Ouch!

Here’s a better pic, 4 days later:

Twitches get stitches

The wound, being a clean incision brought to me by alcohol-impairment and fine German steel, closed within 2 weeks. But as my fingernail grew out, I noticed that it had been damaged behind the cuticle. What started as a divet turned into a flaking nail as the damage neared the fingertip.

So much for being a hand model

Eventually though, the damage grew out and was clipped away. And unlike my toe which slid under the bathroom door while exiting the shower some 30 years ago, the growth cells were not permanently rendered incapable of uniform nail growth. Huzzah! At long last, the injury is fully healed.

Except for that small split on the side, which might be permanent. But it’s not very noticeable and the skin doesn’t even have a perceptible scar, or more importantly, lasting numbness (I was worried about that for a while).

So how long did this injury take to completely heal? 181 days! Essentially two full seasons. So back to the original line of thought: what is my nails’ growth rate, and naturally – is that normal? Squander not an opportunity, for I have definitive empirical measurements based on when that crack grew out.

This was a difficult picture to take myself

It would appear that, based on photos of the original injury’s location, that between March 17 and September 14, 15 millimeters’ worth of nail grew out. So if we apply some basic math, that’s…

~2.5mm per month, or…

~0.08mm per day.

Which seems like a long damn time to be catching that cracked nail on things. But is that normal?

According to healthonline.com (seems like a legit website), the average nail grows 3.47mm per month, or “roughly a tenth of a millimeter per day”. My math works out to 0.12mm per day, so they’re using fuzzy math, but whatever. Dear God! My nails are growing at 2/3 the average rate for a healthy human! Do I need more alpha-keratin in my diet?

Okay, so digging deeper reveals that’s a rough estimate and nail growth peaks at age 10. I’m 40, so not exactly in my prime anymore, granted. So that means, if my nail growth indeed peaked at age 10, then for each decade since, my nail growth has decreased by 22.2%, if we’re assuming a linear function, which I can only do with two data points. 66.7/3=22.2.

Now the important question: can I use nail regeneration rate as a benchmark for all my cellular regeneration? And if so, can I use that to predict the point at which I’ll no longer be able to adequately heal – i.e. die?

Let’s try. So for X, when X = current percent rate of nail growth (66.7%)…

And when Y = # of decades passed since X, then…

My predicted rate of cellular regeneration, C, = 100-((X/3)*(1+Y))

Then we see where C falls to zero. Then I can simply narrow it down by dividing (X/3) by 10 to determine degeneration rate per year.

My conclusion: I will die sometime just before my 75th birthday!

Not very encouraging. I think I need more data points. Give me another 10 years and I’ll complete another measurement. I hope the prediction is a little more encouraging, otherwise I’ll be looking at early retirement!

–Simon

P.S., This counts as Quantitative Philosophy!

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Perception

Without the dark there isn’t light

Contrast of the bright and hues

When fate returns to claim its dues

Projected thoughts into the eyes

Imagined so they must be lies

Might be there, but is out of sight

–Simon