Hildegard of Bangin’

People don’t realize how ubiquitous drinking used to be. Like most men used to drink every day. It was not uncommon for laborers to have a shot of whiskey to start the day. Taking a couple nips before a big meeting or speech was normal. Wine with dinner and an after dinner digestion drink was common. There are certainly people who are just born addicts and would drink themselves to death under any circumstance, at any historical time, in any culture. But now that it’s been almost a decade since I last drank, and I’ve spent probably too much time studying both addiction and historical culture, I am fully convinced that our current culture is not only characterizing non-problematic drinking as “alcoholic,” but the culture itself is making people drink alcoholically. Historically, outside of certain Protestant denominations that strongly discouraged, if not outright prohibited it, there wasn’t much fuss about drinking in general, but more obvious, frequent drunkenness. Now, true drunkenness is permitted, but only in very specific contexts by specific age groups. The striking difference is that casual drinking (not to drunkenness) is also confined to very specific contexts. Lunch drinking, of even a beer or a glass of wine, is virtually non-existent in contemporary American culture. If your coworker at a major corporation ordered a beer at lunch, it would be shocking. The old shot of whiskey to start the day would immediately be interpreted as alcoholism. There is something about the current culture around alcohol that I believe is literally driving people to a weird version of alcoholism. We are increasingly making it taboo and then compounding our interpretation of the behavior and I think people are subconsciously fulfilling the belief that’s been implanted. Even normal casual drinkers are seemingly constantly feeling the need to examine and prove that they are not alcoholics, where they never even would have considered it 60 years ago. The new crew of health podcasters are making it even worse by making normal people feel like a single beer is going to “ruin their sleep” and destroy their health.

Your coworker is not attractive, they are just within 10 feet of you 40 hrs/week

When Walmart never went back to 24 hours nation wide after Covid I knew that was the end of America.

Next book on the purchase list:

Female friendships can become an incredibly complex dance of manipulation, gaslighting, people-pleasing, love, care, selfishness, selflessness, jealousy, envy, and competition. There is often immense tenderness there, but also an entire subterranean social game operating beneath the surface. If you are good at managing these dynamics, regulating your reactions, reading subtext, and still participating in the game while remaining human, you will probably have a decent number of close female friendships. But even a little social awkwardness, emotional transparency, or inability to tolerate masked behaviour can make female friendships extremely difficult to navigate. Your friends can slowly become your bullies, and it takes an enormous amount of emotional labour to keep moving through those dynamics when you do not naturally possess the social machinery required for them. You begin noticing the injustice, indirectness, performative sweetness, hidden hostility, constant testing, and you cannot keep pretending it is normal. That is why some women do not have many female friends. It is not always because they are jealous, male-centred, or a “red flag.” Sometimes they simply cannot metabolise the amount of social theatre, disguised aggression, and psychological negotiation required to survive certain female circles. The amount of mindspace you have to pay to remain inside such relationships can be enormous.

Backrooms is racist film. It’s technically brilliant, but racist. And it’s a shame during a time where Black studies is being eliminated on college campuses because I fear people are overlooking the obvious tropes and racist callbacks the film ridiculously displays.