Trego's Mountain Ear

"Serving North Lincoln County"

Tag: mental-health

  • You Haven’t Met All The People . . .

    One morning I saw a meme – maybe an unattributed quote: “You still haven’t met all the people you’re going to regret ever meeting.” I’d been ill with chest congestion for several weeks, so on that hand it was an upbeat message. On the the other hand, it’s a depressing description of the world as it is. On the third hand, I may well be one of the people folks regret ever meeting.

    So I got to thinking – and the people I remember have all enriched my life in some manner. The narcissist, whose rage provided the motivation to study up on narcissism, taught me to look beyond the presentation of self. It’s a wonderful gift, to see others more as they are, and go past the disguises that cover up the problem. Some people really do have value as bad examples.

    Others add amusement to life just by being there – I recall one character on one of the main drags of Missoula, as I walked from the motel to a restaurant for breakfast. As he stood in front of me, and whipped his overcoat open, I had time to think, “I surely don’t need a flasher this morning.” I was wrong – the lining of his coat was covered with bible verses that he used in his missionar2y work of bothering people before breakfast.

    In South Dakota, we had biennial visits from Wisconsin Jehovah Witnesses – nice people on a mission to spread their gospel in an area they believed was devoid of their reality. They’d stop by for 15 or 20 minutes, every other year, with no real expectation of making converts. I liked them. Missionaries that stop by for 15 minutes every other year are very tolerable people. More frequent encounters may lead to becoming people you regret meeting.

    The one man I quickly regretted meeting was the county cop who busted me for speeding through Ashland on my next to last trip moving back home to Montana, He did make a point of cheerfully welcoming me back home – but he did it with a forty-dollar bond I forfeit for the crime. Never saw him again, but I was still out forty bucks.

    In general, karma tends to reach a balance – and that’s enough for the people I regret meeting.

  • Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes

    I’ve just watched a couple videos out of Minneapolis. A woman is dead in a confrontation with ICE agents. The old saying is that pictures don’t lie. Obviously, in this day of AI, that isn’t true. (Hell, Stalin’s airbrush specialists took the truth out of pictures before I was born) That’s not my point. The whole bloody thing was avoidable.

    I feel safe from ICE, and even as an elderly stay-at-home living in Trego, I probably encounter ICE agents on the road more often than the average American. They’re kind of neighbors. I may not wave, but neither do I flip them off. It isn’t a job I ever considered, but there are a lot of jobs I didn’t consider. We’re courteous – usually friendly – to each other at Roosville.

    I recall the mojados I met when I was in the southwest – basically decent people, caught in an economic bind, trying to make a living and send money home to their families. If they got caught by La Migra, so be it – it was just one of the risks of doing business. But then it was a game with only two sides playing.

    In general, doing one stupid thing doesn’t get you killed. Doing several stupid things increases the odds of stupidity being fatal. Getting several stupid people doing stupid things at the same time increases the likelihood of someone getting hurt or killed. Perhaps Heinlein described it best: “Stupidity cannot be cured. Stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death. There is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity.”

    Max Weber defined government: “A government is an institution that holds a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.” Combine that with people doing stupid things, getting killed becomes too likely. Minneapolis isn’t in the southwest I knew 40 years ago. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

  • A Matter of Degrees

    A while back I listened to a woman explain that she holds three college degrees. I’m fairly certain that meant associate’s, associate’s, associate’s. My own three are bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate. Generally speaking, under our American system, we only refer to the highest degree held, so the lower two degrees are kind of assumed to exist. Jane Goodall holds a Ph.D. (from Cambridge) but no lower degrees – the British system is a bit different than ours. Dr. Goodall’s researched and published books on chimpanzees were, essentially, all of her college career. I know that her Ph.D. is more prestigious than mine – and that her single degree is a lot more than three associate’s might be.

    The Russians have a degree above the Ph.D. – but it is granted upon successful defense of the dissertation. Under our system, the dissertation and its defense are the final part of the Ph.D. A student who has completed all the coursework for a Ph.D. but has not submitted and successfully defended a dissertation is termed ABD – all but dissertation. ABD is not a degree, and in many ways can be kind of a bad thing. In order to start the dissertation, I had to have substantially completed my coursework, and passed my comps (comprehensive exams). If you don’t pass the comps, you have invested several years in education that you won’t get credit for. Had I failed my comps, I would have walked away with a second non-thesis masters. That’s kind of like having 2 heads – unusual, but not generally helpful to a career. I would like to have a quiet beer with Neil DeGrasse Tyson and learn exactly how he came to have his second Masters.

    Doctorates aren’t equal – the order in which they are given at a University graduation is the only spot where I know you can see the difference in status. Generally speaking, the Ph.D is an academic research degree, while the MD, Juris Doctorate, and Ed.D. are professional degrees. Only time I got to observe this was when my daughter got her Bachelors – the new Ph.D holders went through the line first. The next week, the MDs and JDs began a lifetime of larger paychecks.

    Then we can go to the Associates’s degrees – an Associate of Applied Sciences is a vocational degree, while the Associate of Arts or Associate of Science is generally the first two years of a bachelor’s program. It is quite possible to have 3 separate Associate’s degrees and never take a class with a 300 or 400 number.

  • Sick as Christmas Approaches

    It’s an unpleasant lung and sinus infection. It goes well with asthma to cut down what I can do – yet this time, the disease vector was my grandson. Somehow, the sickness is kind of mitigated by that – it didn’t come from some anonymous student passing through the hallway in an unseen cloud of microbes.

    This time, I got Remi while I was working on the old service station – and despite the illness, I had the joy of giving him the rolling magnet to pick up nails. I may feel a bit crummy – hell, I do feel crummy – but I have the memory of the toddler rolling the magnet, and smiling with every click as a nail was pulled up and magnetism overpowered gravity. He doesn’t have the words yet – but in another ten or twelve years, there’s going to be a discussion about physics with his mother. I may or may not be there to see the interest in physics develop – but I was there when he discovered that magnetism can overpower gravity. It is enough to make the illness an insignificant cost.

    As my daughter took an interest in physics, and moved into quantum, I checked out books on the topic – studying to stay along with her for the next conversation, often in the car as we would drive home. It brought home thoughts to me – the realization that the power of probability combined with chemistry to make elegant experiments, while some atoms manage to stay out of the reaction. 99.9% purity is close enough for what we need – and things happen consistently.

    So I look forward to the next lessons, as the little guy discovers that pieces of copper, aluminum and lead are immune to the power of his magnet. I look forward to his learning of the special aspects of ferrous metals – and possibly moving on to the relationship of a compass to the planet he inhabits. A stuffy nose, sore throat, and congested lungs are a small price to pay for being the grandfather that sets the lessons in motion.