Too much spending on disability?

I was working this afternoon when my desktop began making a grinding noise. It was my CPU fan failing. It sounded like it was going to shoot blades through the case. I backed my work up and shut down stuff pretty quick, but not before the fan totally quiet. For some reason, my computer didn't shut down. The fan had to still be running because you have less than ten seconds. AMD processors will shut themselves down before they burn up. Oddly, it's not a feature Intel processors have (last I checked).


So, I whipped out my laptop, went to the Microcenter website and bought a water cooler for just $76 with tax. Yes, I could have bought a fan for less than half that, but I've never seen a better price for a water-cool system.

I assembled my desktop myself and have for about a decade. If something breaks, all I have to do is replace a single part myself and not the whole system. However, I've never been able to restrain myself from upgrading rather than replacing, mainly because the previous cutting edge components always come down in price.

This failure comes at a bad time, though. I resolved to put off my discretionary spending until the first of each month. A few days ago I broke down and made a discretionary purchase. Microcenter offered an Android tablet computer for only $40. When I lost power, I had to lug my laptop around to the library and cafes for work. I began to resent the weight of my laptop. So, I went for it. Add ten bucks for the three-year replacement plan (makes sense for a cheap tablet) and ten more for the SSD memory, and with tax, I've spent $65.

It might sound frivolous, but it's not. Everything is aimed at keeping myself writing. Yes, I have a laptop. Why do I need a desktop? If either one breaks down, as things always do, I want to be able to keep writing without interruption. A laptop or desktop alone doesn't give me that option. Also, I need things set up so I can't lose work.  So, I have a lot of redundant data storage, hard drives, flash drives and cloud drives.

(I couldn't actually wait, either, to get gloves and a hat after the cold snap this weekend. Another $40.) I could still break even this cycle.

Even with all that, I've had the most horrible luck getting writing done ever since my power got knocked out by the wind storm the previous Sunday. I accomplished is that I finalized two installments for reading for my writer's group, and finished outlining this draft. I haven't been able to advance as I thought this draft 1,000 words a day as I wanted to. Shit happens.

Update: A turning point?

I've felt a little better about prospects the Republicans would stop their de-fund/default-the-government policy since the Kochs came out and renounced the tactic. It seems on the surface the brothers don't have a war chest ready to see that Democrats get blamed. 

This means this entire thing was just one huge, one-shot fuck up by Conservatives and a more costly one than choosing Romney as the winner in 2012. Considering how long they had planned to do this, and how prominent the people behind it were (Ed Meese, for one), the incompetence of this stunt is stunning. The GOP is truly the party of the stupid, where Fundamentalists, Creationists and Global Warming deniers don't feel intellectually threatened.

Continued beneath the divide.

Another Vacation?

My productivity on my novel has fallen to the low hundreds per day.

When I take stock of other things, here's what I see: my apartment is a wreck, the little that's in my refrigerator is going rotten, my cupboard is bare, my desk is cluttered, essential paperwork for my medical is lying in there undone for weeks. Also, I've been accumulating books I'm not reading, movies I'm not watching (fiction is part of my job). I haven't exercised in a month. Usually, when I think of something that I need or want to do I put it on a list. Now I just put it out of my mind. 

My life is falling apart and it's going to keep going unless I do something different.  Some might be due to the pressure from the government shutdown.
 
It's embarrassing to say that I can be stressed out when I don't have a job, but that's why I'm disabled. I have a hard time directing my attention. And I get tired very easily. If I were working for anyone else, it's about this time I'd have a meltdown on the job.

Last time I had all these signs was in early July. At the time, the novel had gone the wrong way. I took two weeks off from writing and came back more productive with my life back in order. This time I'll stay away from it for a week. I'll get everything else in order and come back under less stress, so I hope.

Of course, I might be more stressed due to what's happening politically now.

Experts terrified of US default

The seriousness of the Republican refusal to raise the debt ceiling is beginning to sink in, and the experts are starting to get uncomfortable. Bloomberg this morning calmly calls it "an economic calamity like none the world has ever seen." No, no signs of fear there.

Lehman almost sent the world into a depression. Only the Federal Reserve prevented that from happening. As it is, we just had "the Great Recession." The US debt is twenty-three times the size of Lehman's. 

Update: Outside groups hold sway to keep government defunded.

I blogged on Monday that Conservative political advocacy groups, all fronts for billionaires and corporations, were behind the shutdown and coming default. They are going to be the driving force on keeping it going. A New York Times article by Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Mike McIntire confirms that:

Shortly after President Obama started his second term, a loose-knit coalition of conservative activists led by former Attorney General Edwin Meese III gathered in the capital to plot strategy. Their push to repeal Mr. Obama’s health care law was going nowhere, and they desperately needed a new plan.

Out of that session, held one morning in a location the members insist on keeping secret, came a little-noticed “blueprint to defunding Obamacare,” signed by Mr. Meese and leaders of more than three dozen conservative groups.

It's Official: The Government is Broken

The reboot cast of The Three Stooges, with Ted Cruz a very convincing Moe

Today, the federal government does the unthinkably self-destructive act and refuses to raise the debt ceiling. Don't for a moment fool yourself that this is a repeat of 1996. The House of Representatives this time is far more hardline than it was in the previous shutdown. The Representatives are far less responsive to their constituents. Many of them are millionaires themselves in the pockets of  billionaires. Many have jobs lined up with companies for which they've done favors. This time there's going to be no retraction.

The economic dimension of this crisis is also worse. In the '90s it was just Congress refusing to fund the government, and only did it short term. Now Congress is refusing to pay debts for money that's already spent, for programs it already approved. The government is going deadbeat. Economically, I'm afraid this will be an unmitigated disaster. If it goes on for months, it might make the troubles 2008-2009 look like average years.

I smell a rat.

Is Ginger up to no good, here?

Anytime you introduce a character by counterpointing her with a rodent or weasel, that says something bad about the character.

How to form a writers' group.

My writers' group has been the best educational experience of my life. I won't give the name of the group, because we're on the edge of being victims of our own success. We have a simple game plan. Write, read, critique, and meet to do it face-to-face every week. Members bring their work in, pass out copies and read it aloud one-by-one. That's the procedure for fact, fiction or poetry. If it's a screenplay or stage script, the member assigns parts and has people read them aloud. A person can read or play out 2,000 words maximum. Then the rest of the writers can either give live critiques or write them (and any corrections) on the copies, which are also used to make minor corrections.

And I've been finishing 2,000 words every week. There were two weeks I took a vacation because the novel went off track and I was stressed-out over it. But I came back with the story straightened out and ready to progressed.

Amanda Todd revisted.

I ran across a youtube video that made my blood boil, and I got up today thinking of how I could answer, though probably in 500 characters or less.

The video is from T.J. "The Amazing Atheist." I used to subscribe to his channel, until he took views that I found to be shameful to the very name of atheism. Now he reminds me of Rush Limbaugh.

T.J. doesn't like all the sympathy Amanda Todd got. He pointed out that for what she did (being video'd online flashing her tits when she was 12) she didn't deserve the sympathy other people who get bullied deserve.

I think there are things that make Amanda Todd's bullying much more heinous than other cases. Misogyny is the main one: despising a female for her sexual choices and refusing to forgive her even after the she's dead. What she did as a minor was wrong but didn't hurt anybody. That's all that needs to be said. Nobody died, nobody was deprived no families were broken up because Amanda Todd flashed her tits. What she did was a misdemeanor for juvenile court.  

The actual bullies were in league with a pedophile, who knew exactly how to manipulate them. Where was the bullying and harassment for the adult who persuaded a minor to flash her tits, then used it to extort more nude videos from Todd?

Then those misogynistic, pedophile-enabling bullies wouldn't back off when it was clear Todd was suicidal. That's deep hatred. That's a hatred that comes from the dark evil corner of the human soul where genocide originates. That's the sort of hatred that should put a person in Hell. It makes me wish there were a Hell just so such hateful people would end up there. I hope it would be in the same pit of torment as the pedophiles. As far as I'm concerned, the people who kept harassing her after she became suicidal and made suggestions on how to succeed at it stopped being mere bullies and started being accessories to murder.

What's more, they won't stop hating her after she's dead. You still have posts saying she was a slut and doesn't deserve any sympathy. That is some major league despising there. I think if I were subjected to that and I couldn't get away from it, I don't think I could survive.

So, the argument goes with T.J. that Todd doesn't "deserve" pity as much as some other dead, bullied kids. Oh, horrors, T.J., a slut is getting something she doesn't deserve! Like getting something one doesn't "deserve" doesn't happen millions of times to millions of people a year. I'm sure Amanda Todd's sense of entitlement is bloated as a result of all the honor. If only she weren't dead, it would obviously make her a spoiled, bratty bitch.

Who says feeling bad about Todd makes it impossible to feel bad about other bullied kids? If people didn't have to argue against the late-comer bullies all the time, you probably wouldn't notice anybody missing any sympathy.

Nobody says Amanda Todd is a role model for anything, but what happened to her was a tragedy. What was done to her, far out of proportion to what she did,  was base human cruelty as much as any lynch mob. Tragedies invoke pity, and like people can control their emotions and just aim them surgically. That's not the way it works. Often, our emotions lead us, and there's no rationalization or judgment about it.

Amanda Todd's death wasn't just a case of bullying. It was misogynistic bullying, by both males and females. It was a case of pedophile-led misogynistic bullying. It was a case of persistent, pedophile-led, misogynistic bullying. I think I've made my argument that it was more despicable than most and is in a category all its own. And to anyone who says her morals negated sympathy, I say fuck you all.

The wrong tool, the wrong job.

It's said that doing a job properly requires the right tool, such as, the aphorism about not bringing a knife to a gun fight. In this country, citizens are obsessed over a particular set of tools: firearms. They talk about how likely it is a gun will be used in stopping a crime, and about how people should be given a choice about it.

Guns are specialized tools. An actuary can figure it out the risk, but what are the odds that you're going to get mugged or burglarized as compared to the odds that you'd lock your keys in the car? If the latter happens, you've brought the wrong tool to the situation.