championship sunday

another Sunday Seven

I’m about a week into my post-Instagram life, and I have to say I miss it far less than I thought I might. I’ve quit several social media platforms before, so I know about those withdrawal symptoms: looking to where the app icon used to be, typing the first letters of the site into the browser address bar, picking up the phone to see if I got any notifications, the general FOMO. This time, after the first few hours…nothing. It was the right time to leave for a lot of obvious political reasons, and also because my primary use case for the application was to document what the kids were up to. Now that they’re both over 18, that feels a bit odd.¹ There are a few people I’ll surely never hear from again, and that’s a real loss.

On the topic of social media, I’ve seen some good arguments lately that it should all be ephemeral. Snapchat led the way there, then TikTok, and then Zuck copied it (per usual) with stories that disappear. Now most such sites have some form of autoephemeration. I’ve come around to agree this is actually how it should be done. There’s a place for ideas with longer lifetimes (You Are Here), and everything else should be like the wind. Do any of us want our throwaway thoughts dug up years from now? Unfortunately BlueSky (like Twitter before it) doesn’t have this feature baked in. I’ve found a few scripts that can automatically delete BlueSky posts² after so many days or under other definable circumstances, and I’ll be implementing that in the coming days. Once again, though, this is the kind of thing that only nerds can DIY at the moment, and if sites like that want to catch up to the big kids, they’re going to have to make that stuff easier.

Yesterday the OPRF³ varsity dance team, co-captained by my daughter Leah, competed at their IHSA sectional. Sadly, they did not advance to state, though they were close. This marks the end of a seven-year run of competitive high school athletics for our family, going back to her brother Danny’s freshman baseball season. I’m definitely in my feels about it a little bit. So many good memories. She’ll keep dancing in college (though likely not competitively) and he’s still competing at the college level today. It’s not the end, but it is the end of an era that gave us so many big, emotional moments. With her graduation approaching this spring, this is the era of ending eras, though of course many new ones are starting, too.

There’s no new news to report on the neurosurgery front. The surgical consult is ahead this week. I did discover a fascinating thing about America’s “healthcare” “system” though. The gross cost billed to my insurer for the MRI on my neck, done at a major university-affiliated healthcare system, was about $3,200. I had a follow-up MRI done on my brain by an independent radiology place in a local storefront, with and without contrast, and they only billed about $1,600 to the insurer. Now I need a third MRI, this one on my lower back for a different problem, and my “insurer” balked and said I need to complete six weeks of physical therapy before they’d approve paying for that MRI. So I called back to the storefront imaging place and asked them how much a lumbar MRI would cost if I paid out-of-pocket. It’s $345, 10% of what was billed for the same pictures two feet north. If any defender of the status quo could explain this to me, I’m all ears.⁴

My employer has told us folks in consulting roles that they want us to be out there traveling to customer sites more frequently, to try to get back to the levels of on-site engagement we practiced before COVID changed everything. There are a lot of complexities around it, not least of which being that many of our customers aren’t really back in their offices on a regular basis. But I’m open to it. I signed up to be a road warrior when I took the job, eyes wide open. The thing I am wondering about, personally, is for how much longer my American passport will be welcomed in the foreign countries that are home to several of my customers. And, to a lesser extent, when I have to renew my expiring passport at some point this year, what sort of questions might the new State Department have about my beliefs and loyalties? And how will I answer those?

Earlier this week—I regret that I can’t find the source now—I read something about how wishing away time is a crime, maybe even something like a sin. The rationale goes that it’s the most precious resource we have, and even when pressed with difficult circumstances, counting down the hours or days until the end of whatever‑it‑is, just hoping to get through it, squanders this priceless resource. I’ve been thinking about that a lot. I can see both sides. I think the implication is that in most situations, even while something oppressive is happening, there’s room for the rest of your life, too, and to just be looking ahead to the finish line for the bad thing could devalue or obscure those joys. I can also imagine suffering so profound that there is no space for joy. I need to keep chewing on this one.

Because it’s been hard not to surrender to despair. Every day the news is a barrage of revanchist, reactionary destruction. The second law of thermodynamics applies to our politics and institutions, too: the natural state of the universe is always moving toward increasing entropy. Disorder is the norm. It requires much more work and energy to build things than it does to tear them down. So they sow chaos, kicking over a few dominoes, knowing the rest will fall fairly quickly, and a positive feedback loop initiates where the tools to repair and rebuild are also destroyed. The only possible endpoint is ruin. I see a lot of well-meaning people out there dispensing advice for how to get through this. Unfortunately I haven’t seen anything that really works for me, yet. I’m filtering my news, focusing on myself and those closest to me, and helping others where I can. Other than getting my body healed enough to fight or flee, none of those softer things are really going to help much in the future I anticipate.

Sorry, there was no actual football content here. The title was misleading, I was just looking for something that fit the day.