Category: Existentialism

Posted on

Solitude (or, Leave Me Alone!)

I’ve always possessed a rather high tolerance for solitude. And often, I’ve been mislabeled as “antisocial” as a result. But time gives one opportunity to self-reflect, and I have since concluded that this accusation is unfair. I’m not antisocial. Rather, I possess a lack of tolerance to associate with people who don’t contribute to my happiness, well-being, or personal/professional goals. It’s not being self-centered, it’s being pragmatic; and it’s a natural progression into the latter stages of life (I’m middle-aged now I hear!)

It’s probably a very late realization, for I was raised to be the people-pleaser. Parental upbringing, an oppressive educational system, a social system that rewarded agreeableness, and the supremely draconian punishments for upsetting customers in service jobs (the only jobs available to a 16-30 year old) – all contributed to the “be nice and indulge everyone” philosophy that dictated my social interactions throughout my formative years. As a result, this “antisocialness” was instead a tendency to avoid all people, because I was conditioned to have to like all people, and lacked the backbone to be more selective.

Now I’ve realized that I don’t have to do that. And it started with this:

If people obey the fuzzy ropes at public venues, then a chain should accomplish the same. My apologies to USPS and any package couriers. I try to remember to take this down if one of you is coming that day.

Granted solicitors are the most aggravating of the lot. When I checked back on surveillance footage and saw the same guy from 2018 who comes back every year to try to sell me a bug-spraying service, my patience hit an end.

Salesmanship
More Solicitors

Add to that a stereotype Republican boomer neighbor with a litany of conspiracy theories (government is spraying the atmosphere with COVID vaccines, Michelle Obama has a penis…you get the idea), street missionaries trying to get me to join their church, and political activists asking how I plan to vote; and while not true “solicitors”, I’m hoping the chain will send a message.

So far so good, though I haven’t captured anyone on camera yet to draw a correlation.

More importantly, the symbolic gesture has finally emboldened me to become more self-serving! I view this as a good thing. Being a doormat only leads to a life of quiet desperation. That was the lesson that George Bailey should have learned.

Here’s some examples:

  • I hung up on someone! I had to disable blocking unknown callers for a time during that HVAC adventure, and I got another call asking for Dustin Werner. When I said they had the wrong number they proceeded to ask if I knew him, and I just hung up and blocked the number instead. Damn was that liberating!
  • I send my new doctor a letter outlining his incompetent staff (4 weeks and I still don’t have my medical records available). I never “broke up” with a physician before.
  • I stopped engaging with my sister over pointless and hostile “discussions”. Actually, I do feel a little bad about this one, but it’s the similarly politically-charged points as the aforementioned neighbor, albeit not totally unhinged and far left instead of right and dripping with pseudo-intellectualism (the world’s entering environmental collapse, you planted the wrong tree, you interpreted that book/movie wrong, The Patriarchy and men are all overly-confident know-it-alls (why would you even have this as a conversational point when calling your own brother?) I still talk to her in chats though.

This almost sounds like a bad motivational speech, but if you don’t add any value to my life then I’m not going to talk to you!

I mean, within reason of course. I’m not a psychopath. I’ll still help people and do nice things for family, but I won’t tolerate them thinking I owe them my time.

–Simon

Posted on

Eclipse 2024

In the end, everything worked out as planned and hoped. In my first viewing of a total solar eclipse, the food was great the the weather perfect! Huzzah!

Eclipse
2017’s eclipse

It was also surprisingly scary. I know the event isn’t actually a harbinger of doom, but I didn’t expect it to look quite that creepy, with the moon just appearing next to the sun and turning black. An existential moment of personal insignificance.

Anyway, here’s some pics:

You can sort of see a missing bite
Binocular projection
I thought this was a neat screenshot of an augmented reality overlay
Another shot through the filter
Unfiltered and bad auto focus
Party in progress with some apparently needed booty dancing

Last year at this time Canada was on fire and the ashes rained down as a blight upon the land. I like this year better!

–Simon

Posted on

Bonus Bias

A man’s mark of success is in his ability to pay for family necessities.

Well, that and to work hard for that money. But also to have a rewarding career doing something he loves and will change the world. But mostly to be able to take care of his family. But not that that means his wife shouldn’t also have a career, because that’d be sexist. But she shouldn’t be forced to if she doesn’t want to. But don’t suggest that she not. And be ready to pay the bills if she wants to be a housewife which she could totally do if she wants but that’s her choice but it’s a man’s responsibility to support her if not, not that there isn’t anything wrong with being a househusband if that makes more sense economically but know that you’ll always be judged for not being able to take care of your family financially even though it’s totally acceptable in these times to be a househusband except that it isn’t. And you’ll be identified immediately as a pedophile if you go anywhere in public with a kid and there isn’t a woman around, because all men are either rapists or potential rapists. Especially if you’re a loser who doesn’t have a job.

(I couldn’t help but eye-roll a little at Ferrera’s breakdown monologue in the Barbie movie. It sounded pretty juvenile. The double standards exist in the manosphere too. I guess she just needed to vent and the pretext of the fantasy world she was in justified it.)

Fortunately for my own societally-defined personal sense of worth, I’m a high enough level at work to get an annual bonus! And I have the honor of spending it on family necessities, so I get to keep my man card! Necessities such as Invisaligns, dog dental work, and federal taxes! Woohoo!

Meanwhile, Liz spent hers on this:

New couch, coffee table, shelving, and whatever you call that narrow table shelf thing against the wall.

I admit things do look nice.

So I think I need to buy another gun after all. I need a selfish gift for…motivational purposes. Yeah. A man needs to feel reckless at times too. And the gun would be able to protect the family. Wild man energy combined with a protective instinct. Total man card points there. Internal contradiction resolved.

Damn is proving my manhood exhausting. I think I’ll take a nap on that couch.

–Simon

Posted on

Vanity Search and a Dying Medium

February 23rd marked the 7 year anniversary of this blog, and while I admit that I don’t play the SEO game, I’ll note that it’s remained remarkably hidden for all that time. In fact, without some very pointed key words, I can’t locate it in a search engine. The quickest I was able to find acknowledgment that I exist on the internet was my LinkedIn profile, which was 14th in the search results list for my name (there’s a British banker and a film director who always take the spotlight).

Part of the reason for this shadowed existence I believe is due to me migrating to paid hosting. Ephemerality.net previously redirected to moorheadfamily.net, which is my own hosted domain. And if I search along those avenues, I can find a hit for my personal server there. #20 in the search engine in fact. The landing page is a simple menu I coded, intended to make an easy directory to my site’s main functions.

But there’s more to it than that. I used to always appear on page one, and that was when I had a lot less content.

The real reason I exist in obscurity? Indifference and obsolescence. The world simply just doesn’t care about most of what’s out there, especially if it’s not curated and fed into a standardized format. Gone are the days of old school blogging, superseded by social media. As a holdout (I started my first self-hosted blog on a repurposed G3 Powermac running SUSE Linux in 2007: intellectualnexus.net (prior to that I ran a blog on my iMac via Apache and gave out my IP address)), I can personally vouch for how difficult it is to discover other non-monetized personal blogs. They just don’t appear high up in search results. I can’t even get my parents and siblings to visit my blog. I’ve even sent people links to my site where I’ve posted a recipe – my own recipe – that they asked me for, but analytics never show that the post was ever accessed externally. People just won’t visit blogs, even for the content they want.

The upside is that I don’t have coworkers compiling dossiers of my content that they find offensive in order to get me fired (no really – I’ve been summoned to Human Resources for the most benign of complaints (something that mysteriously ceased once I became permanently remote)). The downside is that blogging seems pointless without an audience. (Hence this site’s mission statement.)

But blogs fill the niche between professional journalism and tweets. And when the tweets die a day later, never to be read again, what is left to chronicle our moment in time, honestly and devoid of bias (financial incentives)?

And so I lament.

–Simon

Posted on

Hot Dogs

Humor is how we deal with the horrific.

We went to see the traveling Pompeii exhibit which made its way to the Cincinnati Union Terminal museum. I had seen many of the statues before in magazines and documentaries, but it was certainly more powerful to experience firsthand. Some of the victims had definitely died under varying degrees of agony. Baked and suffocated. Doesn’t sound pleasant. I didn’t find it appropriate to take photos.

But I did still take one of the dog.

And then I thought: this looks an awful lot like a whippet. And whippets are perpetually cold. My own whippet in fact recently cooked herself in front of the fireplace until patches of fur fell out. That’s some desperation.

So if there’s one shred of happiness from this tragic event, it’s that a whippet finally managed to get warm enough. It’s how Poppy would have chosen to go.

–Simon