2023-07-16 Writing ≠ Competence

In the past few weeks, my life has become a comedy of errors with respect to my left lower extremity:

  1. My ankle was swollen (specifically around the bottom end of the peroneus brevis), so I went to the doctor on the 7th. He assured me it was likely over-exertion. Apparently, a highly active life in your mid-30’s after a modest few decades of sedentary activities can cause stress.
  2. The next day, my foot below that ankle swelled up to dramatic proportions, a bit like injecting blood into a sausage until right before it sprays you in the eye. I ignored it that day.
  3. On Sunday the 9th, I could barely limp out of bed, and was worried. The risk of a blood clot was legitimately severe, so I went to the emergency room. Turns out my blood test was fine, and the ultrasound tech was off that day, and I should come back in if I have any difficulty breathing.
  4. Later on Sunday the 9th, I had difficulty breathing. Couldn’t determine if it was psychosomatic or a chunk of dislodged blood crud that entered my lungs, so went back to emergency room. Got a CT angiogram, which blasted me with somewhere within the equivalent of around 800 x-rays to see that there weren’t any chunks of anything entering my heart. Apparently, there weren’t and I was just being a Panicky Patty.
  5. Finally, got an ultrasound the morning of the 10th. I’m not dead, have no likely chance of dying soon, and probably won’t unless something else unlikely happens.
  6. Since then, the swelling has subsided, the pain isn’t horrific, and I expect to be walking without a cane within a day or two.

This entire experience hasn’t been a new life-and-death experience, but it has been the first life-and-death experience I can properly testify was because of my own carelessness. I’ve been obese, and haven’t fixed the excess calorie hoarding for the apocalypse I consciously know won’t come, and this was the first experience I’ve gotten where I just might die in my own hoarded materials.

So, it’s given me a new outlook on life. Things like my career-oriented anxiety are, to put lightly, stupid by comparison. The cessation of life grabs us all, so we should be prepared for that day.

What I Did

FRONT-END:

More Christian-themed things:

Further, I’ve also created a public pile of dead ideas. Hopefully, almost everything good I’ll think of will show up here if I don’t hand it off to someone else before I lose function of a vital organ.

BACK-END:

There’s a saying I’ve resented: those who can’t do, teach.

My previous post on dumb cliché means that saying has validity, even if it’s something I passionately and vehemently disagree with.

The actual truth behind that saying is “those who specialize in doing stuff have spent so much time on their expertise that they don’t have the language to describe what they do, and people who teach have specialized the other way and therefore aren’t necessarily the most qualified for creating results with that stuff.”

Now, all we have to do is find a way to make that statement memetic, RT it a few thousand times, and everyone will set the record straight.

I kid. Nobody uses Twitter anymore.

But, irrespective of this manic side-quest of thought, I’ve been battling quite a bit of impostor syndrome for the most recent forever, and accepting that I don’t need to build my own CPU from scratch to describe what it does is a foreign concept I am required to accept.

I can happy say I’ve humbly accepted how wrong I’ve been of my absurdly high standards for myself. I don’t need 18 years in CS education before I can write essays plainly describing what a thing is.

What I Learned

I have no idea what I’ve learned. Life is short, but not so short that you can’t make it shorter with things like anxiety.

I can say that having excruciating, chronic pain has forced me to come to grips with how utterly useless understanding can be. Just because you know what caused something, you’re aware what would have prevented it, you could fully fix the problem before it ever arises the next time, and you’ve already scoped out a budget projection and itinerary for the next time does NOT get the cat out of the tree.

What I’m Doing

Working in an insurance office right now, and keeping a home together with a beautiful woman slowly succumbing to the madness symptomatic of trying to maintain two schoolchildren.

Several non-specific and very large tasks with my time beyond that: