you get me

My guess is it’s sensory input and other information that doesn’t make sense once the brain has started structuring itself towards what’s needed for adult functions. I forgot where I heard it or how they tested it but iirc babies can differentiate a much wider variety of vocalizations than adults, even to the extent of pretty much all the different sounds a human mouth can make, but that as they learn language they lose the ability to differentiate sounds that they don’t need to to speak and understand their first language (like how English speakers struggle to differentiate Ш and Щ but a Japanese person might struggle with R and L). So it’s probably a bunch of info like all those different little sounds you just don’t have the structures to process the data anymore. Like trying to access a niche filetype after you uninstalled the software you used to make and read it.

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.

Most people use the email analogy; the sub-lemmys are on different servers owned and moderated by different people, they just happen to use the same communication protocol. Similar to how you can email a hotmail, yahoo, or icloud account from a gmail account. And because they’re different servers people might have the same name, just differentiated by the server name. So you might see a [email protected] and a [email protected] who aren’t the same person, they just happen to share a name.

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.

to my utter dismay the author apparently did not

actually there’s one weird one that I’ll put at the top because it might actually apply to the rest of you: everybody has nice pens. not like, fancy fountain pens, just the fancier rollerballs that feel smoother on the paper and the permanent markers with higher quality inks. like papermate inkjoys and real brand name sharpies. its a weirdly good indicator that they aren’t cutting corners elsewhere. a pizza party is a one-time expense, like a lovebombing abusive partner who buys you flowers the day after kicking your teeth in. pens are an everyday operating expense, and those costs add up. pens are one of the first things that are gonna get hit when the bean counters start getting their claws into the daily operational costs. good pens means they’re investing in the actual everyday working environment.

here were my first thoughts:

• good nurse to patient ratio (changes by specialty & facility acuity level)
• no mandatory overtime
• on-site security who are authorized to remove violent visitors
• good health insurance (they all suck but for the most part United bad, anthem good)
• no news articles about human rights violations
• low staff turnover / multiple nurses who have been there longer than 2 years
• when you do a shadow shift nobody is asking why they’re staffed so well today

…probably some other stuff I’m not thinking about.

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.

🤣 possibly!

Connections Puzzle #644

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Annd since I don’t see a thread for it yet… Wordle 1,366 4/6

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• 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

I’ve gotten 0 on either this or my mastodon.

Honestly it’s true though, and I’d even go so far as to say they’re healthier; I probably wouldn’t have been drinking so heavily if I was drinking beers that tasted shittier.

When I first heard this song I was an early 20s college dropout and had been working at a state psych hospital as a nursing assistant for a month. I was orienting on dayshift before switching to nights and my coworkers were miserable people who hated me. They sent me to groups for the day with the patients (a staff member had to go from each unit; eventually it became ~my assignment~ when I got held over onto dayshift because I realized it would get me away from them). They were having a music group in the room next to my post in the the hall and they played this, and I remember thinking that I knew that if I just got through all this someday I’d be somebody that people would respect but it really would be nice to just wake up there.

It really sucked at the time and there are a LOT of things I wish I’d done differently but these last few months at this new hospital I’ve had a couple people already (especially on other units) say that when a patient is throwing down and I show up they feel better because they’ve been impressed with how well I’ve handled them before. Sometimes it’s like herding cats but I’ve noticed I’ve got a better sense of even just where everyone needs to be in the room to handle something safely. The past decade almost now actually does kinda feel like a blur and it’s really weird to be waking up wiser and older.

(Also it really set off a love for EDM that had lowkey started with artists like cascada when I was even younger. Avicii is still one of my favorites and while I wish I could’ve had more I’m at least finding something similar with Apashe).

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.

if you do the characteristic “teabagging” motion it saturates quickly. tbh I do it whichever way is most convenient since I’m almost always brewing on the way from one task in one part of my work area to a different one somewhere else. What I put into the travel mug first has much more to do with which one I get my hands on first than it does with any personal preference.

🤣

Connections Puzzle #643

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• 🟨🟨🟨🟨
• 🟩🟦🟦🟦
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I’ve been taking crisis deescalation classes for a decade and got certified to teach them this year. I’ve had classes that teach this as a good posture to keep because it keeps your hands visible and ready to cover your face. To me it reads as extremely dishonest. I think there’s a bit of an art to it and everybody’s ideal stance is going to be a little different depending on their style of interaction, but that’s definitely not one that would look good on me.

I’ve waited up to an hour before (I really needed to be seen). Not to invalidate your frustration; just adding another data point to add to an overall conclusion that the modern health system is fundamentally fucked.