As a nurse who graduated in the middle of COVID (and was working in hospitals leading up to it), A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher was surprisingly healing read.

“You expect heroes to survive terrible things. If you give them a medal, then you don’t ever have to ask why the terrible thing happened in the first place. Or try to fix it.”

you get me

A few years ago a coworker asked what thing is seen as normal now that’s going to be looked back on in 100 years as completely barbaric and I was like seriously? We’re acute inpatient psych nurses who have to force people to take medications, often by physically holding them down and injecting them. We’re doing the best we can, and I actually got into this field because I was that patient (my first restraint incident was my own) and I like to think I’m part of working towards that better future but holy shit does it suck right now.

Even if you skip over the psychiatric emergencies volatile enough to warrant emergency meds there’s so much more awful shit that I don’t have any good alternatives to. I have to see every person’s full skin including removing their pants on admission. I’m as tactful as I can be, I try to make sure the staff members are the same gender (although usually the men don’t mind the nurses all being female). I try to provide as much modesty and dignity as I can, but in the end I can’t tell just by looking which ones have a knife taped to their leg until their pants are actually off. One person actually had an entire loaded gun that the ED somehow missed. I don’t make them squat and cough or put my fingers in any orifices but it still traumatizes the depressed college students who think we’re gonna heal them instead of just prevent them from dying for three days while we make sure it’s safe for them to take the sedatives they’re gonna need for the weeks or even months until they can see an outpatient psych or therapist who will do the actual helping.

Life is horrible. We do the best we can. I’ve decided my meaning of life is to reduce suffering. I don’t work in an environment that’s conducive to that but I also don’t have a whole lot of better options. There are places that are kinder but they’re not designed to handle the really hard cases and a certain amount of those will always exist. At least the more time I spend trying the better idea I have of what actions I can take that will actually reduce suffering (although luck remains a significant factor) and sometimes I even succeed!

How far in advance are you allowed to act in self defense? If you all but know they’re leaving the room to go get a gun out of the next room can you strike while their back is turned as they leave? What if it’s the neighbor who thinks you banged his wife and he’s going next door to get the gun? For most people there’s probably a distance at which the answer becomes “call the cops” but that distance probably gets a lot farther if the guy you think is about to shoot you is the sheriff’s brother. And what if you’re less sure? What if the person is clearly unhinged but it feels like a coinflip as to whether or not they’re about to try to murder you?

What about on a wider societal level? If you think a group of people is marshalling to attack you or the wider society can you attack first? Do you arrest them or even have the police violently disrupt their gatherings? Do you become a terrorist and commit an act of mass violence in the hopes that it will prevent them from attacking you or another group you consider vulnerable?

That raises the other question of whether it’s acceptable to defend others, but for the sake of simplicity it sounds like you’re not in favor of getting in the middle of other people’s fights which is fair, but do your kids fights count as your fights? Is there an age limit on that?

None of those questions necessarily apply to any particular ideology but I can think of a few ways people might and often actually have used these concepts in ways both favoring and disfavoring my own personal convictions.

tbh the more I learn and experience that’s most of the human experience. I had a Minister when I was young that said there’s really only two human emotions, fear and love, and that without significant intervention fear pretty much always wins. I’ve been working in psychiatry for almost a decade now and there’s lots of finer points to be made about human psychology but in the end it pretty much all does just boil down to fear and love.

He was an exceptionally good Minister, to the extent that for while I didn’t understand how common it was for people to be deeply betrayed by a church leader. It was not uncommon for people in the community to genuinely compare him to Fred Rogers (who was incidentally also a Presbyterian minister). Very similar background, temperament, points of advocacy, and even appearance and mannerism; if they hadn’t both been alive at the same time it almost might make me believe in reincarnation.

This is a big factor. A lot of people conflate less benefits with higher taxes because fear-brain just knows they both equal increased hardship in the end. They’re technically wrong but their statistically slightly more active amygdalas are responding to a genuine threat, just one that they’ve been very skillfully misdirected into helping worsen.

eh if I took up travel nursing I’d probably still want something similar to a house or apartment to rent for 3-6 months because most hotels aren’t really designed to be lived in that long but I also don’t want to buy a wholeass house then worry about selling it in 6 months. but that’s splitting hairs, at what point do you just call that an extended stay hotel? but also at what point does an extended stay hotel become a rental property?

but every time I hear a “property owner” complain about how hard and expensive it is to own other people’s homes I’m just like my guy no one is making you do that if it’s so damn hard just sell it to the person who lives there except deep down you realize how good of a deal you’re getting you’re just mad everybody isn’t acting like you’re not a prick for it.

boofed it

My experience with the internet suggests that you are all but alone in that assertion. I was going to say I don’t know anything about that personally but Nick Wilde from zootopia did kind of get me (I’ve always had a soft spot for the trickster archetype).

Then you’re well prepared for a great doomsleep!

no such thing when you grow up fundie, LOL. So glad I knew what birth control was and a sketchy man looked like on my own from internet research. I went full blown HOE the second I got the chance and that could’ve gone a lot worse if I hadn’t had the knowledge to keep myself safe because my parents sure as hell weren’t gonna teach me.

Awkward by not talking is 100% better, especially from a strategic standpoint. I would be so much farther in life right now if I only knew how to keep my fat fucking mouth shut. There’s a reason the “strong silent type” is a trope. You might be a weird nervous awkward little fuck in there but nobody can prove it.

I’d be interested in knowing what psychosocial developmental stage this person was experiencing during COVID.

It could barely make calls. It can make calls as a party trick but you can’t really access your contacts book in an easily usable way, you can’t start new text conversations, and you can’t view your full calendar and you definitely can’t add events. I don’t need much for a watch to replace my phone but I do need it to call and text well and I need to be able to access my calendar. It’s very clear that those devices are designed and intended to add more tracking and monitoring and dopamine hooks on top of your phone, not to replace it with a less intrusive alternative. It was actually fairly frustrating.

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!!!

I hope they make one I can make calls from without a phone I tried to switch to smartwatch-only late last year but even the Samsung watch couldn’t handle that.

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