On Credit For Patience - Day 20

As some of you may know, over the last 3-4 years I have fought an uphill battle to repair my credit. Now, my credit was never that bad - somewhere down in the mid 600s. But it annoyed me on an emotional level, and was potentially an issue on a logistical level as well. Annoying, because I didn’t feel like it reflected any kind of reality, and an issue if I ever wanted to buy a car or a house (which I do, someday) because it was going to cost me a lot of money in extra interest. When I embarked on that journey years back, it felt insurmountably bureaucratic - and that’s because it (almost) was. But it turns out it can be done - you just have to be incredibly patient. Today, FICO informed me that one of the last hurdles was crossed: my TransUnion score went up by 101 points, because a collection came off my record. This collection was for $293. When I left Portland, I tried to return my cable modem. Through a series of shenanigans and goings on fit for an 80s movie, I failed to do so, and despite my best efforts, also could not get them to take my money or let me send them the modem from San Diego. I, quite frankly, eventually forgot about it - but apparently the cable company didn’t. And that transgression was apparently so heinous that it was worth 101 points on my credit. To be clear, I paid them the money as soon as I figured out how, but I guess that wasn’t good enough.

Anyway, finding this out today made me really really happy so I just wanted to share with all y’all. Patience and persistence work! Go on about your day. Adam over and out.

On The Progress Of Ideas - Day 19

Yesterday I was jogging at the gym on the treadmill. My gym has TVs right in front of the treadmill - you really can’t help but watch - usually on a sports channel. I’m not really watching usually, it just images in front of me, and it’s notable because I never watch TV anymore so it’s the only time I really connect with that part of the media. The show that was on yesterday was a sort of NFL recap show going over the weekend’s games - pretty standard stuff. They cut to commercial and my subconscious was only half paying attention. I couldn’t even tell you what ads came on. In the course of this there was a totally unremarkable ad for TGI Friday’s. I want to stress that this ad was really average. It was a totally boring ad about some food special they were running. I can’t remember it at all. Again: very boring ad in the middle of a very boring show. Then, my subconscious did a double-take. “Hey”, it said, “pay attention”. I was like “what, subconscious? This ad is pointless.” But then I looked again. Right in the middle of the ad, they showed a couple kissing over a shared meal. Then, they showed another couple. But this couple was two men. A quick, romantic kiss over the table, over top of their nachos.

The moment flowed by. They moved on to talking about the special itself. A totally predictable ending with some sort of call to action (“$5 fajita shooters!”). Then they went back to the show.

As ideas flow through a society, they go through a progression. At first they are forbidden. Then they are controversial. Then, it’s like they were never not normal to begin with. Gandhi said it best of course: “"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win”.

I am not so foolish as to think that we’ve reached a point of total acceptance for gay rights in this country. That would be naive. But it seems remarkable how unremarkable the moment was. This wasn’t a video that was made to showcase or support gay rights. They were just selling crappy diner food. The gay couple kissing wasn’t a centerpiece of the ad; it just flowed past. It seemed, well…normal. Pedestrian. Everyday.

On Why I Kan't Watch - Day 18

Concussions have been on my mind because of my little adventure a couple of days ago. Juxtaposed with that, I’ve been reading a book - Everything’s Fucked - by Mark Manson - where he espouses, among other things, adherence to a Kantian philosophy. Now, I’ve never read Kant firsthand, but my understanding is that among other things he champions the idea of doing the “right thing”, without regard to consequence or gain. Which is why it seems like a good idea to talk about my love of college football.

I loved college football. I loved football because I grew up with it. Growing up in Buffalo, everyone was a Bills fan. It was just something you did on the weekend; turn your garage over to help park cars for the stadium, dress in red, white and blue, argue about Jim Kelly or Thurman Thomas like they were your best friends. So went I went to college, I got involved with the band and the football team. I loved being in the band; I never played an instrument but helped with the theater performances (that’s a post for another day!). Even after college ended, I stayed a fan. I remember sitting in my office at Johns Hopkins looking for pirated copies of audio broadcasts of the games. One of my favorite stories is finding a broadcast stream where the announcers didn’t realize they weren’t cutting the mikes during the commercial breaks but also weren’t broadcasting the commercials so I just got to hear two guys shooting the shit about their weekend and their wives while waiting for the game to restart.

Anyway. I don’t watch anymore. Which sucks. I miss it. But knowing what we know now about CTE - Chronic Traumatic Encephelopathy - something feels deeply wrong about watching. I don’t watch much pro football either for a number of reasons, but at least there I feel like those are adults getting paid to do something self-harming and stupid. Sort of like mining; not a job I would want, but at least I don’t feel ethically queasy about it. But college kids is another thing entirely. There’s the youth factor; they have their whole lives ahead of them. There’s the education irony; college is supposed to teach you to be smarter, not destroy your brain. But there’s also the ethical dilemma that they are supposed to be amateurs. They’re not even getting paid.

I sincerely hope someday science figures this out so I can go back to watching. But in the meantime, it just isn’t fun for me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_traumatic_encephalopathy

On Real Life - Day 17

Two days ago I bought a pull-up bar because I wanted to start doing pull-ups at home instead of at the gym. You know, one of these kinds that you can put on a door jamb temporarily. Yesterday it showed up and I put it together and tried to use it. The first time it tore a hole in my door jamb. Then, I read the instructions (correctly this time) and installed it properly. I did one full pull up, correctly, and then the second time I put weight on it, it immediately fell apart and I fell to the ground, bruising my tailbone and then whipping my head into the ground, which was really scary and also hurt like the devil and gave me a whopping headache.

I tell this story for one simple reason. Everyone complains, and quite rightly so, that social media is conditioning us to only talk about things which either make us look good, make us look smart, make us look humble, etc. etc. This story is none of those things. Essentially: I cheaped out on an Amazon pull up bar, installed it wrong, it felt apart and I fell down and it hurt a lot but I’ll be OK in a couple of days. There’s really nothing to learn here except A) life sucks in small ways sometimes, and B) don’t buy a cheap pull up bar.

Continue on with your day. Adam over and out.

On Silicon and Graphics - Day 16

I did my masters work in Computer Graphics, around the year 1999-2000. At that time, the king of the graphics scene was a company called Silicon Graphics, or SGI. SGI was not a household name. It was a company, and a set of products, that you used if you were a professional; someone serious about Computer Graphics. CG was still a field that existed largely in the future for most folks, the realm of Lawnmower Man and the demo DVD they used at Radio Shack. For me, though, it was a very real thing, brought to me on a $300,000 Onyx machine so heavy it had castors, and a virtual reality headset that had to be attached to the ceiling with a 2 inch diameter pack of cables and could only be used for about 15 minutes before it gave you a whopping headache. Still, I built a working tennis game in VR on a terminal hooked to an SGI down in the basement VR lab. They were still so rare and expensive that despite being a CG graduate student I wasn’t allowed to have one in my office; I had to go down to the basement. There was something glorious about those days; it still felt like the world was ahead of me - ahead of us, really - and despite the fact that I was pretty miserable in Baltimore - or maybe because of that fact - I threw myself into triangles and textures and glBegin()/glEnd().

Now, I own an SGI desktop system, an O2. In the modern world it’s a serious pain to try to keep one of these things running. I don’t even know why I own it except that it makes me feel good to boot it up and hear that distinctive SGI startup noise and the weird way it makes a metallic ding and turns an icon yellow when you double click on it. Something about the potential of that time, and the nostalgia for that dingy basement, keeps me coming back to it.

On Being Ten Percent Happier - Day 15

Years ago, I bought and read a book called Ten Percent Happier on the recommendation of a friend. I found it to be a good book and persuasive, but it was written for people who weren’t meditators yet and weren’t sold on the benefits of meditation, and so at the time, as someone who taught meditation, it wasn’t a great fit. But I still have the book and recommend it to people who aren’t into meditation. Recently, though, Apple started a program at work, a sort of meditation contest where if you meditated consistently you got some cool small prizes and I figured, what the heck. It turns out they are using the Ten Percent Happier app and as part of doing well in the contest I got to keep a premium version of the app for a full year. It’s been really great; I use it every morning just after breakfast. It’s filled with a lot of really good content; different videos about meditation and then a ton of guided meditations. You can do a different one every day and not run out for a looong time. I think it’s kind of expensive for a full premium version but the free version is already a really great start and has - if I remember right - over two weeks of daily meditation content that you can of course go back and reuse. I really like the layout; it’s clean and simple and doesn’t have any “gamification elements”; it doesn’t look like a game app or a 90s web app. Nothing is blinking. And the attitude of the guy who started it - Dan Harris - is really approachable. I recommend checking it out.

On Running Consistently - Day 14

Continuing on the theme of yesterday, I’ve been running consistently a 5k every day. Always on the treadmill, generally I try to get the same treadmill just to be super sure. Every day I bump up the speed by 0.05 miles/hour. I started out at 5.8 miles/hour about a month ago; that’s a 32:10 5k pace and about 10:30/mile. I knew I could go faster than that, but that was the point; I wanted headroom to improve everyday. I’m honestly curious how fast I can get up to. I’m at 27:01 today, or a 8:41 pace. That’s nowhere near the fastest I’ve ever gone, which is down around 6:30 if I remember correctly. Every day I lose about 10-12 seconds off my pace, so that means that by New Years I would be down around my PR (If I ran every day). What’s important here though is just the consistency; so far in 26 days I’ve run 23 of them (I missed one day because I was just exhausted, and I missed 2 days because I was traveling and couldn’t find a gym easily).

Around about Christmas I’ll come back with an update.

On Consistency - Day 13

You may have noticed that I’m posting on the blog every day, and counting the days. This is a trick I learned from being on my long bike rides, and I’m coming back around to it. But this time it’s not just about doing the blog - I’m discovering (rediscovering?) the joys of consistency, of sticking to something and being yourself and doing things consistently. They say 99% of success is showing up and I’m testing out the benefits of that, and so far it’s going great. There’s a certain freedom and joy in just submitting to a process and having the patience to let it unspool at its own pace. Get rid of all my old things? I don’t have to do it today all at once, I can just do 30 minutes a day. Fill up a journal? One half page at a time. Write a piece of software? 45 minutes a day. Think about it: if you did something 15 minutes a day, every day, a year from now you’d have done over 90 hours of work on that thing. You could probably do something pretty amazing in that amount of time, and all it took was your leftover time and focus. I can get to where I want to go, one day at a time.

On Dharma - Day 12

Back in 2014, when I was an active member of SF Insight (a meditation group in SF), I wrote the following article for their in-house print journal. I’m not sure if they even do a journal anymore like this, but at the time it was quite an honor to be in it. Recently I ran across a physical copy among my things and I’d like to reproduce it here, both for posterity and because I think everything in here is still true and relevant. Some of this still feels fresh.

Downloadable Life: How Can We Cultivate Patience in a Time Of Instant Gratification?

The human mind is like a car; aim it, crank up the engine, and it gladly moves. But once you gas up the engine, it keeps moving in the same direction, speeding up until you put on the brakes or turn the wheel. When ewe engage the pace of life in a modern city, we “push the pedal” on our mental energy. Then, when it’s time to slow down, to sleep or just to have a moment’s rest, we’re often surprised by our mental momentum. So what can we do to “downshift” our mind’s pace? Here are some concrete tips for practicing with life in a modern city.

Cover the Basics. No practice could allow you to self-regulate if you were tired, wired, or feeling ill. So take care of the basics first: get plenty of sleep, lay off the caffeine, and get some exercise. These habits will cultivate the “gas in your tank” your “car” needs to run.

Check Your Speed. Pay attention to the pace of life you choose. Much like we glance down occasionally at the speedometer to verify our own assumptions about our speed when driving, we need to glance at the speed of our minds to make sure they haven’t raced out of control.

Practice Patient Consumption. If you want to watch an episode of 30 Rock and iTunes can give it to you in five seconds, then why not watch? Only, try to watch util you’re satiated and then stop. If you can put the fork down halfway through a piece of cake, perhaps you can stop short of consuming a whole season in one sitting.

Micro-Meditate. Find opportunities to pause and take a deep breath. Wherever you happen to be - in line at the store, driving, surfing the web. With your mind’s eye, take a “snapshot” of where you are. Imagine what this moment might feel like if you remembered it five or ten years from now.

Remember Your Animal Side. No matter how much we may want to deny it, we’re animals. Social animals at that. It’s in our nature to interact with others. Do you want to call a friend and have lunch? Go for it! Remind your monkey mind that you belong to a community of warm human beings who care about you.

Live The Examined Life. The internet is a tool, and as with any tool, what matters most is how we use it. If your intention is to have fun, great! Just make sure you actually are having fun. When you find yourself clicking on a site you’re not sure you even want to read, put the mouse down and take a break. Your great-grandparents probably once felt overwhelmed by radio, television, cars and highways. Have faith in the resilience of the human spirit, find the smile on your face, and take a deep breath.

On Denver 2 - Day 11

A few things about Denver. First of all, I learned that sometimes kickstarting your thought processes by just changing your venue with no particular goal in mind can be really awesome. I really had no reason for coming here. My friend Helen was talking to me and we got to talking about places I could live and ones Id visited and I realized that Denver was the only place I really had any interest in that I’d never visited at all, not even briefly. I’ve been to Colorado before, I even got engaged in Vail a million years ago, but no time in Denver. It’s nice! I think the main downside, for me, is that the terrain reminds me more of Las Vegas or someplace really dry and that isn’t my preferred way to live. I love trees and forests. It’s a bigger city than I anticipated; the buildings downtown are quite impressive. It’s spectacularly clean, but it also seems to have a really bad homeless problem. The food has been tasty. And I will say that this hostel I’m in - the Ember Hostel - is amazing. Again I’m struck by how great it is to stay in hostels. Overall, a nice place, although it didn’t quite wow me. Here’s a few more pictures I took!

On Denver - Day 10

Yes, I am in Denver, Colorado. And yes, I had a Denver omelet. Honestly it wasn’t that great. But Ive enjoyed bumming around Denver for the day. This trip was supposed to kick me in the butt a little and get me to think seriously about some things, and on that score it’s been a raging success. I’ll have more to say about that tomorrow, but in the interest of making sure I post something every day, and also because, let’s be honest, it’s all about the pictures anymore, here is a placeholder post. I will say one thing: I always thought that the trash problem in Oakland and SF was the result of the homeless problem but Denver is clean as a whistle and still has a really bad homeless problem. I’m not sure how that works, need to learn more. Enjoy the pics!

On Mystery Science Theater 3000 - Day 9

Yesterday I received in the mail my brand spankin’ new copy of the limited edition vinyl release of Clowns in the Sky, a collection of songs from Mystery Science Theater 3000. Some of you may know the show, depending on how nerdy, old and/or interested in movies you might be. MST3K (as it is affectionately known) is famous in nerd circles; it’s a super nerdy comedy show filmed in the midwest (which is itself unusual) about a couple of comedians who are trapped in space and have to make fun of bad movies. It’s better than it sounds, and one thing that I respond to - and I think others do too - is a sort of community-theater-esque authenticity and genuiness that pervades the whole show. They don’t give a f*ck, in the best possible way, and the most obvious place to see that is in the skits they do, and particularly the songs they make up. Which is what makes this record so great; its a compilation of them at their funniest and most authentic. My particular favorites are “Creepy Girl”, because I love Kevin Murphy’s voice, and the Godzilla Genealogy Bop, because Joel is such a good and it’s the sort of song only MST3K could pull off!

On Gratitude - Day 8

So, I’m keeping a gratitude journal. :) I realize that may sound cheesy, but somebody close to me encourage me to do so recently, and so here I am, journalling! Every day I spend just about 5 minutes - usually over breakfast - writing down a few thoughts. It’s really been easy and cathartic and maybe even fun. It’s kind of nice just writing by hand the old-fashioned way, and even better that I know nobody has to read it if I don’t want them to, so I can “sound stupid” all I want. I do journal about being grateful about something, but also plans for the future, memories from the past; whatever comes to mind. I do it right before I meditate and that, plus the meditation, really does clear my mind. I think I had hang-ups about “doing it right” in the past that kept me from starting, but now that I’m just going for it and keeping it short and sweet, I find I really am doing it every day.

On Going Beyond Meat - Day 7

Today I got to cook for the first time with a “meat substitute” at home. We still don’t have Impossible Meat in our groceries out here - although they keep saying it’s coming soon - so I bought some Beyond Meat. So, how did I like it? Well, that depends on how you look at it. It was not a home run. In particular, the experience of actually opening the package and, uh, spooning out some to turn into a patty needs a little work. It reminded me uncomfortably of dog or cat food. I realize that makes it sound awful; it wasn’t that bad, but still, the smell wasn’t quite right and the feeling wasn’t quite right. Now, some might say that’s because dog and cat food actually is meat, and that’s true, so I guess that’s good? It’s just not really what I expected or wanted. However, once I started to cook it the situation improved greatly; it smelled good while cooking, looked tasty, it’s a lot easier to cook than ground beef, and it tasted really great actually, very satisfying and meaty. Reminded me a bit more of like a meatball than a true burger, though. So I would (and will) buy it again, but I’m also really looking forward to the Impossible Foods version because this isn’t quite the meat replacement I was hoping for.

One Writing Apps - Day 6

Yesterday I published my first iOS app that I’d written in quite some time. I used to do this regularly and I’m trying to get back into it! My first effort might not appeal to most of you who might read this; it’s a quiz and training app for an online game that I enjoy called Teamfight Tactics. It helps you learn all the myriad quantity of data in the game in a graphically appealing format. I wrote it because…well, just because I wanted to! Because that’s the best reason to create new things. If you happen to be one of my gaming friends and want to check it out, there’s a link below. It was a lot of fun to write and now I have to see about posting it out on the great World Wide Web and see if anybody gets a kick out of it! More to come now that I’ve broken through the creative dam, so to speak!

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tuft-quiz-for-tft/id1486468556?ls=1

On Breaking Up With The Internet - Day 5

TL;DR MC Frontalot has a new album out, and it’s all about his disenchantment with the Internet, and it’s good. I enjoyed it.

For those who don’t know, MC Frontalot is a nerdcore rapper; one of the originals who started the genre, in fact. I started listening to his music really early on because he was one of the first who spoke to me; his songs were about being a dork. He’s never been a programmer or a full on science geek but more of a “geek enthusiast” who loves playing old text-based video games but has enough style and grace to perform on stage as a rapper. A winning combination in my book.

His most recent album, “Net Split”, is a series of stories about a man who has fallen out of love with the Internet. He’s arranged it as sort of a “break up” album, leaning heavily into the metaphor of a relationships that’s on the rocks. In “Never Read The Comments” (a great song title by the way) he writes “Guess I might \ have had enough \ of these posted fisticuffs \ to discuss with the posters \ their and my shared neurosis”. He correctly puts his finger on the worst thing about the modern internet; the tendency to focus energy on negativity. “A single toe dipped in the fester-hole subjects to undertow, as if to know your worth itself became debatable, as if anything could be wonderful enough to be unhateable.” That’s the thing, right? Nothing on the internet is unhateable.

This is a concept I can relate to. Obviously I still love pieces of the Internet, we all do. But many of us who were around in the early days; the BBSs, Usenet, etc., kind of miss the way the Internet was. Frontalot plays with this concept, though, exposing the hypocrisy in songs like “Internet Sucks”: “you were made of everyone everywhere. \ Or so I imagined! Actually, just a bunch of me-types”. Boy is that ever true. The uncomfortable truth is that one reason the internet seemed so, well, civil is that it was a giant circle-jerk.

But, still, one can’t help but feel that something has been gained but something has been lost. Yes, it’s a much more inclusive place, and that’s good, but it’s a much more angry place, and that’s not so good. So excuse me while I boot up my Hayes modem and dial into this CD.

On Not Being Alarmed - Day 4

Today the fire alarm went off in my apartment complex; fortunately not in my exact building or I would have had to leave (it’s earsplitting!) but close enough. The ironic juxtaposition here was pretty awesome :) since I was in the middle of meditating; not only that but the teacher was specifically teaching a lesson on motivation. Many people (I’m not one of them anymore) when they are new to meditation are afraid that meditating will make them “lose their edge” and get complacent, and so he was addressing that, and he mentioned that worrying about things is OK as long as its productive and we’re aware of and in control of our worry. It’s when we run away with our worry that it’s not helping us. And it occurred to me that although this earsplitting fire alarm was going off, nobody seemed all that worried, and precisely nobody was acting as if there was an actual fire. I hear car alarms on my street all the time, and the one thing nobody ever does is act as if somebody is stealing a car. So my takeaway: worry can be like that. Just a alarm blaring in the background that the rest of our life isn’t paying any attention to. And modern life is like that for a lot of people these days; just noise, accomplishing nothing and signifying nothing! So yeah: worrying without purpose is as annoying and pointless as a car alarm.

On Being More Intentional With A Phone - Day 3

A couple of days ago, I put my money where my mouth is and invested in something I hope will keep me more focused and more intentional: a Light Phone 2. This is a device long in the making - yes there was a Light Phone 1 - that started as a kickstarter (actually, I think IndieGoGo). I’ve heard about it several times, but always was scared away by the price tag - it’s almost $400 after taxes, and it won’t even ship for another month. But I increasingly find that, as I evaluate my smartphone experiences, they bring me less and less happiness. Not just in the long term sense, but even short term; I’m just not enjoying a lot of my interactions with my phone. Now, of course there are things that I do enjoy that make my life easier, and that’s the trick that I’m hoping the Light Phone folks can pull off; how to have just enough phone. As of this writing, the only apps it has are texting, calling and an alarm. It doesn’t even have email. Now this is too small of a feature set for me (hey, the first Light Phone only had calling). But Light claims that by the end of the year they will have maps, taxis and music. For me, personally, I will still probably wish it had email. I don’t find email that distracting. But the big thing is no social media on the phone. And, no camera. I look forward to carrying a separate camera, actually, for when I really want to take some pictures and engage in photography, instead of just instagramming.

I realize this idea isn’t for everyone. I’m not sure I’ll be able to use it as my primary phone all the time, primarily because of work. I suspect what’s going to wind up happening is that I will have to carry both phones from time to time; the Light Phone can act as a hotspot, or I may switch to AT&T, where they have a service where both phones can share the phone number. When it shows up in early December, I’ll update this with another post about how it goes and how I’m enjoying it.

http://www.lightphone.com

On being a nerd and being a rapper - Day 2

TL;DR I’ve been listening to a new musician/rapper that I like a lot, and if you’re into rap but more of an adult, you might want to check him out. His name is Crypt and there’s a link below.

For many years I have been into rap music. I love words, and wordplay, so it’s a natural fit. But I never liked traditional rap topics. If you haven’t noticed I’m white and also a computer programmer and so I have little in common with gats, or the hood. When I was a kid that meant the Fresh Prince, but as I got older there started to be this weird little niche called “nerdcore”, with artists like MC Frontalot and MC Chris. A characteristic of these early rappers is that - although they were talented - they were often gimmicky and wrote about extremely nerdy topics, on purpose. A few artists, such as Jesse Dangerously, tried to split the difference and wrote songs about, for example, pacifism. But by and large these were nerd rappers, not rappers who happen to be nerds. But finally, in 2019, there are such things, and one of them is Crypt. I found Crypt because I was looking for reaction videos for Epic Rap Battles, and he did one, and it was really popular but I didn’t know who he was. Following his channel though quickly led me to understand that he was, himself, a rapper. His songs were good, but recently he released an album, and I think it’s finally time to recommend him. It’s great. In particular, there are a few songs that hit me, the best by far being “I’m Not Okay”, which is really well done and touching, and not really at all about being a nerd per se. But the guy is clearly a nerd. He likes video games and Mountain Dew and sometimes worries about girls and is very white and grew up in the ‘burbs. But he doesn’t play off of that, there’s no schtick. He is unironically a rapper and goes on tour and does rap about being awesome and having a big dick sometimes. (Not a lot of shooting people, though, and easy on the misogyny).

Anyway, I liked it. Check it out.

https://youtu.be/a64YRBmjM-4

On Being Sick And Slowing Down - Day 1

Today, while in the car driving to work listening to NPR, I heard a special about a research study which is asking people to intentionally give themselves the flu. The way it works is, you show up a clinic, they blow flu viruses up your nose (literally), then you sit in a clinic for a week while you - presumably - get the flu and they measure a million things about you. On the surface of course, this seems absurd. I mean, you do get paid, but at first glance most people would think “who would volunteer for that?” But it’s an interesting measure of the world we live in and my mental state that my first thought was “gosh, that sounds relaxing”. I honestly had a moment where I felt like it might be nice to just sit and have the flu for a week. No responsibilities - illness, since childhood, has represented a type of freedom. You can get nothing done and nobody faults you for it. And I am not alone - one of the two broadcasters said the same thing, that it sounded nice. Think about that: we’re so busy, and so obsessed with being seen as productive, that being sick becomes appealing just because it gives us permission to slow down. The right answer of course is that we should be able to get the benefits of being sick without actually making ourselves physically ill.