On Relationship Standards: Is Reliability a Necessity?

I'm on the autism spectrum, and I have kids on the spectrum and with ADHD and former partners with ADHD. I love them all to bits, but it can be tricky to navigate what behaviours should look like without an attainable standard of comparison. 

People who are neurodiverse are a minority in society. We perceive and think differently, so we will behave a little differently as well. It's a bit similar to being left-handed. We used to force people to write with the right hand which caused all sorts of problems. Now we're in a place where we accept this difference and have accommodations in place, like left-handed desks. But ND is different from left-handedness, of course, in that it affects our basic personality -- who we are, and some traits common to ND brains are overwhelmingly seen as undesirable.

Like being unreliable.

About twenty years ago, I had a partner who commonly got distracted from tasks. The only time he wasn't distractible was when he was engrossed (hyperfocusing) on something of specific interest to him. This is a common ADHD issue -- or a common way of being for a specific group of people. One day he offered to make dinner for me as I marked final exams on my front porch: fresh fish on the BBQ. I watched him leave for the market and then return. A few hours passed, and I went to get an ETA for dinner only to find the fish unwrapped and sitting on the counter, covered in flies because the back door had been left open. I found my partner under his car changing the oil. It had occurred to him on the ride home with the fish that he hadn't done an oil change in a while, and something in his brain told him it's vital to do it RIGHT NOW. Not after dinner, but immediately. When I asked him about his choice, he insisted that the problem is that I just don't understand cars. It's kind of hilarious, if we're allowed to laugh at idiosyncrasies, but also kind of annoying. It didn't always happen like this, but it did just often enough to make it hard to trust that he'd follow through. 

CAN'T OR WON'T

How do we best live with people who just can't do what they say they'll do? Part of the problem is what it means to us when people let us down. We associate caring and loving with remembering things: our likes and dislikes and what makes us feel cared for and special dates. I have a mind like a sieve, so every recipe card has a list of who likes and hates it, with many crossed out as their tastes change, and I have an ongoing list of potential gifts for people, which often end up returned anyway, so it's complicated. Our level of memory for detail is sometimes used as proof of our level of care, when it might be more of a fluke. Some people are just better at keeping those facts in mind, so they appear to be more invested in us when they might not care about us at all. It's not always clear evidence of affiliation, yet we can't let go of it as evidence.  

In my dinner example, it's not that he didn't want to make dinner. He wanted to, and had every intention of it, but it just didn't happen. What his brain planned was thwarted by what his body actually did. It can be frustrating for both parties when things just don't happen as planned. 

If someone make no effort to help, then it can feel like they don't care about our well being and are just using us as a maid. We need to feel like people in our inner circle want to do things for us even if they're not able. In fact, the belief of it might be all we need. I'm reminded of a group of guys I roomed with in uni who told me that guys only ever have to tell women they were about to do something nice for them, you never actually have to do anything. Of course, I insisted, I would never fall for that. Then, single on Valentine's Day that year, I came home to, "We pooled our money to send flowers to your work, but we got confused over who was actually making the call, and it all fell apart!" I thanked them profusely, and told them not to worry that it fell apart. They're so sweet to have thought of it!

You can guess what they said next. 

Part of shared chores and little niceties is feeling like someone else has our back or at least wants to have our back. We want some certainty that we're special to them, or at least that they won't throw us under the bus if push comes to shove. 

STRATEGIES AND DEFENSES

There are tons of books and videos about that one amazing thing that will work to keep you on task. And many of them work really well some of the time. Body doubling has become mainstream now with lots of apps cashing in on the need for the presence of another human being. I have a friend who has post-it notes of a checklist of tasks to do on doorways in his home so he doesn't run from room to room in the morning scrambling to get ready. This simple accommodation makes mornings more efficient by keeping him in one room until he's finished everything on the list. I have alarms on my phone that tell me when I need to make dinner or even shower. A well-meaning friend once remarked that I do that to have a sense of safety, which is a interesting assumption. The reality is, without a reminder, I might not ever leave for work in the morning or stop work to have dinner. It saves me from the effort of reminding myself over and over to make sure to do these simple thing that most people don't need prompts for. 

But some people are resentful of reminders. Instead of being a mere prompt towards action, it's an ongoing crack of the whip that says, 'You're screwing up again.' There's an internal belief fostered by society that we should be able to do all the things without help of any kind. Neurodivergent children and teens are often bombarded with criticisms for their differences. Without someone in their corner to counter all the condemnation, their struggles get an added layer of shame to work through, which makes it hard to admit when they need help to do things. Years of being told you're a fuck-up can make the need for strategies hard to accept.

It's also hard to be an adult in our independence-obsessed culture and come to terms with needing help to do something as basic as getting out of bed on time or remembering to eat. I largely self-accommodate and finish all the things as required, so reliability isn't a problem for me. But I have other issues that just don't budge. I can't do groups. I wasn't aware of this as such an inability until I went back to school and couldn't manage all the groupwork. It's not a hearing issue, but a processing one that makes it difficult to differentiate the voice in front of me from all the other noise in the room. I also can't insert myself in overlapping conversations, which is how people typically talk despite being raised with rules around interrupting. 

It's a bigger problem, though, when people think these skills are necessary to becoming an adult. As a teacher, I once had students come to me stressed out by another class in which they were marked for participating in a class conversation without raising hands and turn taking. The teacher explained, that's what being an adult looks like. I appreciate the desire to want to help kids have these normal kinds of interactions, except there was no skill development involved. It means some bright kids lost marks for something beyond their capacity. It also means some of us on the spectrum will never appear to be adults by this teacher's standards. My brain just shuts down when people talk at once. On the inside it's painful and confusing; on the outside it looks like something ranging from cool aloofness to embarrassing awkwardness. I would have failed that class, and it's part of the reason I left school. It's not something disability services will accommodate. 

Our bar for what people should be able to do as adults is created from a neurotypical standard. In school, we need to have something to measure kids against, but there are other ways to measure ability that don't set ND kids up for failure. It's complex but possible. 

PATRONIZING AND INFANTILIZING

If one partner can't do things, should the other watch over them, cajoling them to keep going? The last thing I'd want in a partnership is to feel like a nag or a manager or a mom. Instead of just the chore list being uneven, it can create a power dynamic that turns one party into the boss, and that's far more difficult to undo. It makes one person into a problem with a cultural agreement that can be too heavy to bear, which says: Of course we should be able to rely on our partner to follow through on tasks.  

In an article in Psychology Today, the author points out that the paternalistic attitude with someone with a disability or difference "can be considered a micro-aggression ... as if saying 'I'm a better adult than you'. ... such as speaking to the adult with disabilities in a higher frequency voice as one might with small children." We think of adulthood as a time when we've got our shit together, but when we measure adult-ness in terms of productivity and task-completion, we leave people out, and we include a lot of people who are cruel and selfish and decidedly immature. We've pushed some functional tasks to a perfectionistic extreme that doesn't allow for grace. Alternatively, adulthood could be measured in terms of kindness, other-centeredness, warmth, affection, and other traits that are more relational than efficient. Without any reliability, society is less functional, but we can fill in the gaps for one another to keep it from collapsing when things aren't getting done. We already do. 

However, what's the difference between a harmful micro-aggression and useful socialization that guides people towards behaviours that lead to more connections? If an adult is yelling or crying in a store, is it a problem with emotional regulation or is it an autistic meltdown? If our attitude towards the behaviour hinges on how much we think it's possible for the shopper to change, then we either have to ask a lot of questions before reacting, or err on the side of understanding. Compassion provoking a desire to support others in ways they request. Erring on the side of bringing down consequences for behaviours keeps us in that infantilizing space in which we hope to train others. We can't do that within a horizontal connection, only from a vertical position looking down. It's brings a stance of righteousness. I understand the urge to tell someone to get grip to end the embarrassment of making a scene, but that would be merely to assuage my own discomfort in a way that accepts the status quo.  

We might look at other couples who don't seem to have these problems and feel like it's not fair. But "fair" is a comparison trap. It provokes us to look around to what we should be getting, what we deserve for our efforts. It keeps us striving for more and better while we live in a constant state of aggravated  disappointment. If only I could fix him... 

EQUALITY VS EQUITY OR WHATEVER WORKS

Kate Manne recently posted an article on her marriage. Her husband does all the things and accommodates her late nights writing by taking the kids in the morning. She laments that they do an equal amount of work all told, but she's compared to other moms and found lacking, while he's compared to other dad and appears amazing, since he's "graded on a curve that is skewed by shitty, entitled, lazy men." The key to this dilemma, it would seem to me, is to stop comparing. 

Comments on that post include women who refuse to settle for an "unequal relationship". It appears to be some kind of a badge of honour for women to have a man who is our equal in chores, which leads to a different kind of hierarchical comparison when things can't be 50/50: If a woman can't manage chores, and her husband takes care of all the things, then he's a hero. If a man can't manage chores, and his wife takes care of all the things, then she's a martyr or a victim of abuse, and she should definitely leave him. I understand why this is a gendered issue. Women have tolerated being treated as second class and doing the bulk of housework for so long it feels like moving backwards to accept anything less than a perfect division of tasks. But even in NT couples, someone's going to get sick or disabled at some point. It's often just a matter of time when that split shifts. 

Instead of aiming for the same number or duration or whatever measurement we use to ensure it's all fair and balanced, we could follow the line popularized by Marx: "From each according to ability to each according to need." The fear here is of getting played. What if it's all learned helplessness and he really can do the things but hasn't learned to do them (which is often, somehow, his mom's fault)? Or worse, what if it's manipulative helplessness? We don't respect women who do more than their share. They're being taken advantage of, and allowing it to happen means they're weak or have no self-respect or something. It's embarrassing to get taken, but it's also a lot of fruitless work to continue trying to hit an ideal that doesn't work in reality. Perhaps it's important to try to gauge fairness generally to make sure no group is getting shafted, but not regularly, measuring our lives against our neighbours. Something like that.

Competition can be useful and motivating when tasks are within our control. When I was in school, marks were posted and tests returned from lowest to highest grades so more competition was fostered. That's got all sorts of problems, but I was near enough to the top that it was very motivating for me. I needed only study more often and more carefully to get higher up the ladder. I could have a direct effect on the results. 

But relationships are entirely a different kettle of fish. No amount of effort on my part can provoke another person to change who they are. I can nag and complain and go on strike and threaten to leave, but none of that makes it more possible for someone with time blindness to show up on time or to hyperfocus on the "right" task. And if they do act from the fear of threats, it makes for a horrible relationship if one person feels like they'll be abandoned if they don't stay in line. 

ACCEPTING DIFFERENCE 

What sometimes comes to mind when I work on having greater acceptance is a scene from American Ultra: A young couple plans a trip. The boyfriend is a nervous flyer, but he insists he can make it this time. But he can't. He spends some time in the bathroom of the airport beating himself up over it, but his girlfriend is completely understanding that they can't go on this trip, or maybe any trip ever, and that just is what it is. Choosing him as a partner means staying close to home forever, and she's made peace with that. But the difference is -- spoilers -- that she knows he's actually a sleeper agent about to be activated. He was programmed to fear flying in order to keep him from escaping. Most of us got our differences more naturally, and we aren't on the verge of activation and change of a heroic nature. We'll always struggle with what might appear to be simple tasks. Some of us might fail to get through mundane tasks without being distracted, and that just is what it is, and we chose them anyway. 

Because our unwritten standards are based on neurotypicals, NDs can seem both deficient and extraordinary. We can't do some simple things, yet can sometimes do other, seemingly much more difficult things with ease. For instance, someone could be an expert on dead languages, but unable to use a cash register, which keeps them out of entry-level jobs. It appears to be a bizarre split of brilliance and idiocy only when compared to NTs because the unwritten NT hierarchy of tasks leads to assumptions around levels of difficulty. Bloom's Taxonomy, a foundation of teacher education, provides a clear vision of these assumptions: memorizing facts is at a lower level than analysis. I speculate that it's ordered in this way because most people find spewing out facts easier that integrating them. But for NDs, the order might be reversed. It explains why some people do poorly in earlier grades, and so well later on, when marks are no longer based on regurgitating facts and exams are replaced with major papers. It doesn't just affect education, though. When our partner can easily do something we find difficult, then we might assume they should also be able to do something that's easier for most people, like to continue making dinner once they've started it. It's sometimes viewed with suspicion as if this person must be up to something by feigning inability. 

If we err on the side of grace, we'll sometimes get taken advantage of, but like the Paradoxical Commandments suggest, do it anyway. If we're compassionate with a lack of reliability, people might keep being who they are, distractible and inefficient, but they might have a lot less shame about it. And while people with ADHD might struggle with being consistently reliable, the other side of that trait is being spontaneous and playful with moments of incredible insight and depth. Some people are so uncomfortable with unreliability that they don't see any other solution than to end the relationship. That was me twenty years ago. But if we can get past that, there's also good reason to stay. 

The Complexity of Letting Go

Finding peace with end of life decisions.

Somehow our only kitten pic!!

My cat died of pancreatic adenocarcinoma a few weeks ago. In March she had an annual check up and was deemed to be in good health for 13, although a bit overweight. We noticed that she was walking a little funny sometimes, so the vet suggested we think about arthritis medication. Then one day in May, just before our appointment to start meds for her suspected arthritis, she went into hiding. A more in-depth vet appointment discovered that her changed gait wasn’t from her joints, but from a huge abdominal mass. It took some tests to find out what it was, then came the dreaded decision-making about what to do about it. Apparently cats can live for months with the condition but often with a very dismal quality of life.

BURYING DIFFICULT PERSONALITIES

She was an ornery cat despite living a life of safety and comfort. I have a certain respect for the fact that she’d snap if you pet her one too many times or in a way that she didn’t want today. She was my work companion, often snuggled in beside me during online school sessions or marking marathons, but there was more than one time during a meeting that she suddenly attacked my arm if I gestured too widely, and I had to feign nonchalance as I shook her off me just outside of camera range. And she was always a bit dirty. As soft as she appeared, her fur acted like velcro, tracking litter throughout the house. Despite regular brushing, wherever she curled up, she left behind the expected layer of hair, but also bits of gravel and maybe some sticks and leaves. Of course she loved to sleep in my bed under the covers. (And who could say no to a tiny mew beckoning to be let in?) I feel asleep to her purrs, but I’d often be rudely awakened by a few sharp bats to the head if I moved around too much. She either couldn’t learn or didn’t care that disciplining me would cost her bed-privileges for the rest of the night.

The Unknowable and Inevitable Mourning

I’m curious about the intersection of psychology, philosophy, and spirituality, and the more I read, the more closely they all appear to intertwine until they’re sometimes indistinguishable. 

Buddhism overlaps with Stoicism, which influenced Albert Ellis’s REBT (then CBT and all its variations). They dig down to acknowledge and question mistaken core beliefs. Plato inspired some of Freud’s work, which mixed with Sartre and Camus to become the existential psychotherapy of Irvin Yalom and Otto Rank. They have a focus on the acceptance of death, which comes back around to the Buddhist prescription to meditate on our bones turning to dust. Yet, despite a general theme being repeated, it’s striking how hard it is to get out from the minutia of daily life to attend to it.

This mix can be found on Dan Harris’ channel, 10% Happier, which I stumbled on when he had comedian Bill Hader as a guest. Harris was a journalist who had a panic attack on air, then turned to meditation for help. I dove into his 2014 book, in which he chronicles his skeptical and very gradual buy-in to the whole idea in a very relatable way. He debunks a few well-known gurus over the course of the book, and then he ends up guided by a few contemporary Jewish Buddhists, including psychiatrist Dr. Mark Epstein (an unfortunate last name in these times). I went back to re-read his 1998 book, Going to Pieces without Falling Apart to flush out some concepts.

ACCEPTING CHANGE

”No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” ~ Heraclitus

These are both books that hope to show us a way to calm our mind enough to be able to think more clearly. Epstein calls the Buddha the original psychoanalyst who teaches us to take a step back from our monkey mind, or the “imperialistic tendency of mind” (prapañca) that can get us spiralling from one tiny error at work towards a vision of living in a cardboard box. We overthink all the time, but it’s possible not to do that. We don’t have to let the spiralling continue. Harris has a metaphor I like of our overwhelming thoughts and feelings bombarding us like a waterfall: we can take a step back to stand safely behind the waterfall to watch it all go by. Harris and Epstein agree that we need to practice this strategy of stepping back through meditation.

15% just for Showing Up!

Changes are coming for Ontario high school students if the newest legislation is passed. It was just tabled, and is already at 2nd reading, so I imagined it's going to be pushed through for a September implementation. (Here's the media briefing and legislation and from the horse's mouth.)

One of the most contentious changes is that instead of being evaluated on their ability to demonstrate their understanding of content and application of skills, 10-15% of student grades must come from participation and attendance. So, instead of the grade being a measure of how well each student is doing compared to a standard that's set by the province, it will be a manipulative tool to get more kids in the room. The alternative to using grades to get kids to stay in class is being interesting, helpful, and welcoming, but apparently those traits are harder to come by. 

More than being pedagogically unsound, grading attendance will disproportionately harm students who are dealing with a mental illness, fighting chronic illness, disabled, impoverished, and/or struggling in an unstable home. Lots of kids can't make it to class for a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with their ability to do the work. Penalizing these kids just adds another burden to them instead of working with them to help them find their own best way to learn. 

Final exams during the exam period will also be mandatory. That's not even the case at universities anymore! I highly doubt this change is for pedagogical reasons, but to ensure those weeks are used. The alternative could be to spread that time throughout the year and acknowledge that teachers have several assessment days during each term. 

I do support final, overall assessments, however. I believe it helps to solidify ideas if students are asked to show, and do the work to think about, how to put it all together. That's an important skill that's missing when finals are just dropped entirely. And setting aside a week where they all have to show up sometimes gets kids to make an effort that otherwise wouldn't be made. But, by then end of my 31-year career, I had landed on having a choice of final assessments, and assigning a weighting to them that best fit each student. So they'd write a paper that helped them work with the concepts, then write an exam, and whichever got the higher mark was worth significantly more. One bad day shouldn't destroy someone's average. 

Other highlights: a "condensed" BEd program of one year, reducing the role of trustees "to remove the distraction caused by trustees", and now the Director of Education will be called the flippin' CEO!! 

On Heroes and Role Models

Simone Weil

A couple months ago I wrote that we should not feel blame-worthy if we can’t do all the most courageous things in order to protect our neighbours or help stop a war or try to undermine the entire system. There are less courageous things we can do within our capacity. While that’s true, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to push ourselves to do a little more, and it doesn’t make the people who do the incredibly courageous things any less laudable.

We have heroes for a reason. The people who put themselves in danger when they stand up to injustice often present ideals of action. They’re never perfect embodiments of living, nor should we expect them to be. After all, they’re still human. But people who are noted for their courage, persistence, strength, generosity, etc. help remind us what it looks like, giving us a direction to move towards.

This recognition came to light in reading Kieran Setiya’s Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way. In his chapter on injustice, he explores the life and work of Simone Weil.

The Atlas Junk Tank

I've been so immersed in American news these days, it's a conscious effort to check out what shenanigans Ford is pulling in Ontario. Of course, it's just more of the same bullshit: Trump-lite. Destroy the useful buildings, like the Science Center, and rebuild some garbage spa or ballroom or a tunnel, whatever you can dream up, likely all as a means to pocket money through subcontracting scams, like they did way back in the Iraq invasion, where there was one contractor for every 1.4 U.S. soldiers.  

Digital Warrior on Bluesky explains the cause of the connection succinctly:

"If you've been wondering why Canada's right wing sometimes sounds like the US right wing, a lot of it is imported infrastructure, not organic debate. Same story beats, same villains, same panic triggers tuned for repetition and amplification. Start here [Tyee article]. This piece names Canadian media nodes tied to AtlasNetwork partners and maps the full pipeline in plain terms. Think of it less as a news story and more as a supply chain diagram for political narratives. Atlas Network is the backbone. It connects, funds, trains, and promotes hundreds of think tanks globally so local groups can push the same deregulation agenda with local accents. It scales ideology through partnerships, not elections. The mechanism: money funds research, research manufactures credentialed experts, and experts become recurring guests or hosts. That is how advocacy gets laundered into news. Viewers get repetition, not transparency, and it starts to feel like consensus. 

On Useful Anger: Cohen's All the Rage

How can we possibly approach the world today without being in a constant stage of rage? Philosopher and psychoanalyst Josh Cohen’s All the Rage suggests how to make this feeling more useful to us. 

He writes from a range of perspectives, everything from political uprisings to the patients in his office, and from how rage plays out in the world to how it manifests in our own minds, all with a thread of climate change activism throughout. Ideas are illustrated with examples from fictional characters, historical figures, and his own family. It hardly seems possible to do all that in just 195 pages, yet the book is a thought-provoking and entertaining read, comfortably shifting from micro to macro issues to explore four kinds of rage.

DEFINITIONS

In day-to-day conversations, we use “rage,” “anger,” and “aggression” almost interchangeably. We do the same for “emotion” and “feeling” and for “drive” and “instinct.” The book uses these terms more precisely, so a bit of a glossary might be useful. The order of events that occurs when we’re outraged becomes important. Cohen explains that aggression is often the way we respond directly to a stimulus, and anger is what happens after that first spark of action, when we choose to hold it back. He explains it succinctly in an interview with The Philosopher:

“Aggression is a kind of stimulus response. It’s what we do with a provocation, which might be an injury; it might be a humiliation, an insult of some kind, something that arouses us to retaliation. Aggression is the way that we get rid of that load of stimulus in action. … Anger is a way of holding on. Feelings are ways of holding on to stuff. When we can’t bear to feel something we instead discharge it in action. … Anger is something that you’re left with when action is unavailable to you or perhaps when you try to take the experience to a higher level, i.e. to maintain it in the consciousness as something to experience and process psychically rather than discharge in an action. That’s why psychoanalysis tends to think of anger as a human achievement.”

It’s not the case that we’re insulted, then feel anger, and then rationally decide to act or not act, even if it sometimes feels like that. Instead, the impetus to act is immediate following an enraging stimulus, and the restraint is what leads to the feeling of anger. I think that’s the idea. It’s counterintuitive to me, so it’s useful that it was repeated a few times in the book.

Choosing Bits from the Bible

This post from the U.S. Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth is just distracting fluff, but it's such a curious collection that I want to give it a second look (video of him here). 

If we take "BIBLICAL" to mean "in the Bible," and "Bible" to mean specifically the Old and New Testaments, then those first three claims are accurate in that they appear in the Bible, but there's still some wiggle room around what they mean AND whether or not they're moral or reasonable. There are many, many passages of the Bible we ignore for better or worse. More on that later. And, of course, anything in the Bible is almost necessarily political. It's chock full of rules and laws that people had to follow or face the consequences, not unlike our current legislation. It's part of a long line of versions of legislation from the Code of Hammurabi to all those American Amendments. But let's look at these claims one at a time: 

It's All a Charade

File this under, "Things we already know or ought to know."  

The BMJ just published a feature called, "Why Covid-19 is 'A Vascular Disease Masquerading as a Respiratory One.'" The quotation inside the title comes from Andy Benest, vascular biologist at the University of Nottingham. He further explains, "The virus enters through the airways but exerts its systemic effects through the vasculature. The common denominator in the lungs, heart, kidneys, and brain." (h/t Chantzy)

This personification of a virus, a non-living entity, removes our responsibility as if there's no way we could have known because it's so stealthy. Except we did know. 

Back in August 2020, five and a half years ago, the Journal of Neuroimaging published a study titled, "Covid-19 as a Blood Clotting Disorder Masquerading as a Respiratory Illness: A Cerebrovascular Perspective and Therapeutic Implications for Stroke Thrombectomy." They said, 

"Several reports have been published of patients with ischemic strokes in the setting of coronavirus disease 2019. The mechanisms of how SARS-CoV-2 results in blood clots and large vessel strokes need to be defined as it has therapeutic implications. ... Once SARS-CoV-2 enters the blood stream, a cascade of events unfolds including ... formation of cross-linked fibrin blood clots, leading to pulmonary emboli (PE) and large vessel strokes seen on angiographic imaging studies. There is emerging evidence for Covid-19 being a blood clotting disorder and SARS-CoV-2 using the respiratory route to enter the blood stream. As the blood-air barrier is breached, varying degrees of collateral damage occur. Although antivira and immune therapies are studied, the role of blood thinners in the prevention and management of blood clots in Covid-19 needs evaluation. ... Understanding the mechanisms of blood clotting can potentially help prevent or mitigate end organ damage beyond the respiratory illness in Covid-19."

It took ten years, from 1971 to 1981, for enough people to understand how latently deadly HIV is, and then another five years more to get public health on board on massive education campaigns to prevent the spread. Every bit of educating before the mid-80s was from ad hoc communities of people who were on the front lines, watching friends and family die of the disease, and distributing pamphlets of information by hand. Covid affects all the major organs, including brain functioning. Even mild Covid. I'm curious and a bit terrified at what we'll see in 2030 if we still can't remember that we've known it's a vascular disease since the first year! 

The Perfidious Lust for Unbridled Power

Saving this here. It's the beautifully penned order, in full, from Fred Biery, U.S. District Judge, a federal judge who ordered the release of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Arias and his father. This photo of Liam was attached to the order, with Matthew 19:14 and John 11:35 written below it. Respectively, "Jesus said, 'Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these." and "Jesus wept."

Opinion and Order of the Court

Before the Court is the petition of asylum seeker Adrian Conego Arias and his five-year-old son for protection of the Great Writ of habeas corpus. They seek nothing more than some modicum of due process and the rule of law. The government has responded.

The case has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children. This Court and others regularly send undocumented people to prison and orders them deported but do so by proper legal procedures. 

Apparent also is this government's ignorance of an American historical document called the Declaration of Independence. Thirty-three-year-old Thomas Jefferson enumerated grievances against a would-be authoritarian king over our nascent nation. Among others were:

    1. "He has sent hither Swarms of Officers to harass our People."       
    2. "He has excited domestic Insurrection among us."
    3. "For quartering large Bodies of Armed Troops among us."    
    4. "He has kept among us, in Times of Peace, Standing Armies without the consent of our Legislatures."

"We the people" are hearing echos of that history.

And then there is that pesky inconvenience called the Fourth Amendment:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probably cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and persons or things to be seized. ~ U.S. Const. amend. IV.

Civics lesson to the government: Administrative warrants issued by the executive branch to itself do not pass probable cause muster. That is called the fox guarding the henhouse. The Constitution requires an independent judicial officer. 

Accordingly, the Court finds that the Constitution of these United States trumps this administration's detention of petitioner Adrian Conejo Arias and his minor son, L.C.R. The Great Writ and release from detention are GRANTED pursuant to the attached Judgment.

Observing human behavior confirms that for some among us, the perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty in its quest know no bounds and are bereft of human decency. And the rule of law be damned. 

Ultimately, Petitioners may, because of the arcane United States immigration system, return to their home country, involuntarily or by self-deportation. But that result should occur through a more orderly and humane policy than currently in place.

Philadelphia, September 17, 1787: "Well, Dr. Franklin, what do we have?" "A republic, if you can keep it." 

With a judicial finger in the constitutional dike.

Honouring Our Capacity

I've had several conversations this week about how to be in a time like this when the U.S. government is so overtly corrupted. I'm just the upstairs neighbour in Canada, but we're high on the list of countries to be overthrown. Even without being in that position, it's hard to be aware of the world today and not be in a constant state of rage. I mean even more than before. I want to fast forward to the end when all the bad guys go to prison, but that will only happen with ongoing action from as many people as possible. However, that type of action doesn't necessarily have to be heroic or extraordinary. This is just my two cents from a distance that's looming closer.

INACTION AS COMPLICITY: What's Enough? 

Viewing newly accepted levels of violence in the U.S. is overwhelming and frightening. A few people have posted lists of things we can do to help, but I wonder if, for many people, it's asking too much. This might be a controversial view at a time when it feels like we all need to get on board to shift the world back to a less selfish and violent place, but the perspective that we all are complicit if we don't act might do more harm than good.

Covid Study References

I sometimes write without linking to studies because I've posted all the studies so many times already, but here's a bunch of useful ones when evidence is necessary.

THE PROBLEM:

Covid isn't a cold at all; it's a vascular disease (affecting the circulatory system) that produces microclots, which can lead to blood vessel damage, strokes, and loss of brain tissue (Frontiers in Microbiology, 2021, Journal of Thrombosis and Haemostasis, 2022, Cardiovascular Diabetology, 2022). Heart disease risk soars after even a mild case (Nature 2022), as well as the risk for heart attacks (Journal of Medical Virology, 2022). Dr. Funmi Okunola explained how Covid causes hypercoagulability, which damages the endothelium, increases strokes, pulmonary embolisms, and deep vein thrombosis, and Professor Danny Altmann explained how clearly mild Covid can be seen to affect the brain in a 2024 video. After an acute case, it hibernates in the body (like chicken pox and HIV), then can cause worse effects years later: the "SARS-CoV-2 spike protein accumulates and persists in the body for years, especially in the skull-meniges-brain axis" (Cell Host & Microbe, 2024). We still know relatively little about Covid, how long it can last, and all the things it can do to the body. HIV started out looking like a bad flu lasting a few weeks, then ten years later, people started dying of AIDS. Nobody knows for sure what the 2030s will look like. It currently still kills more people than car accidents, even as it adds to the number of collisions (Neurology, 2024). It might be wise to continue to take precautions. 

59% of SARS-CoV-2 transmission is from people who don't have any symptoms: 35% from people who are presymptomatic and 24% from people who are carrying it without developing symptoms, like Typhoid Mary (JAMA, 2021), so only masking when around people who are visibly sick, like my doctor does, avoids less than half of the potential transmission in the room, especially in primary health care. 

The Brave and Stalwart

As a quick reminder, well-fitting N95s/FFP3s work amazingly to avoid measles, the flu, and covid. I haven't been sick in years, and I love it!! The only inconvenience is not eating food with people who aren't cautious. I throw on a mask before going inside a public building. It's second-nature now, like putting on a seatbelt when I get in a car. Pretty simple and effective. Really, it's a no brainer.

But Jon Stewart (with Jon Favreau and Tim Miller) saw fit to make fun of people like me: crazy people who continue to avoid getting sick. In case you've forgotten, or if this is news to you, unlike the flu, which is brutal this year, Covid stays in the system, hibernating and attacking internal organs, the brain (sticking glial cells into clumps), and the immune system. The only other virus that attacks the immune system like this, causing lymphopenia, is the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). So, call me crazy for avoiding getting a virus with similar effects as AIDS. 

One-Liner (or so) Film Reviews for 2025

I embraced retirement fully this year by watching a ridiculous number of movies and shows (despite actually continuing to work). These are in the order I watched them, and I highlighted my top favourites (13 of them) and runners up (21 of them) in the more current shows and films. I watched a lot so you don't have to!

The Pluribus Utopia

The recent show Pluribus has got me thinking differently about the kind of ideal state that might be a laudable direction and how to get there. The show is overtly about a hive mind interconnection, that started with a lab-leaked experiment, which affects almost all of the world except for 13 people who have natural immunity. We follow the trajectory of one of these anomalies, Carol, who gives them their titular name, not for "many," a direct translation, but as her own invention: "the plural of succubus."

There will be no significant spoilers here; this isn't about the show specifically, but about its depiction of a perfectly efficient and seemingly happy and altruistic society. Is Carol the last one left in the cave, or is she the only one who made it to the outside?

The hive all works together effortlessly as one, with a prime directive to do no harm, as they distribute food worldwide with the utmost equity. They don't step on bugs or swat flies. They will eat meat if it's already dead, but they won't kill it themselves. They also won't pluck an apple from a tree. They don't interfere with life. They can't lie overtly. It's all very pleasant. The hive won't harm a living body; however, they didn't mind obliterating the human spirit of 8 billion people without explicit consent, rendering their ethics questionable.

The Cyclical Nature of Chores

Emma Wilkins' excellent piece "On Housecraft" in The Philosopher, discusses Helen Hayward's book, Home Work: Essays on Love & Housekeeping in such a compelling way as to provoke some thoughts without having actually read the book in question. So this is a critique of a review of a book I haven't read, but on a topic most of us relate to intimately.

Like me, and many of us, Wilkins hates cleaning and is working through how to make the drudgery more palatable. She's "more likely to make the bathroom less dirty than property clean." Likewise, to take the confessions even further, cobweb strands are clearly visible from where I'm currently sitting in my kitchen.

Wilkins and Haywood raise a long-standing struggle for fairness in this field and pin the problem on daily chores being beneath our dignity, so they explore elevating the art of cleaning and finding personal benefits in the work. These paths might help, but I wonder if it could also help to revere the battle around equity and to lower and ground this regular exertion.

NOBLE AND ADVANTAGEOUS EFFORTS 

Haywood has found a way to embrace housework as a method of demonstrating caring. As an artform, it can become a noble pursuit to have a well-kept home. Wilkins writes that our disdain for chores is relatively new as Aristotle recognized that,

"...'oikonomia' or 'household management' contributed to the wellbeing of the community, thereby serving a higher purpose. … It’s not surprising that, in a secular individualistic culture, cultivating servant-hearted humility holds little appeal. Work done in the home might not earn us money, or praise, or even gratitude. But the more we’re motivated by care, and love, the more noble the work is."

Myth and Motivation: On Dopamine

There are contradicting views and explanations of what dopamine is and does and how much we can intentionally affect it. However, the commonly heard notions of scrolling for dopamine hits, detoxing from dopamine, dopamine drains, and craving dopamine, appear to be more like a story we've constructed to understand our actions than a scientific explanation, and I'm not convinced it's the best narrative to help us change our behaviours, particularly around tech-based habits. 

As a hormone, it's released by the adrenal glands (above the kidneys) into the bloodstream for slower, more general communications where it primarily helps to regulate our immune system. As a neurotransmitter, it provides fast, local comms between neurons in the brain where it does a lot of different things including affecting movement, memory, motivation, mood, and mornings (waking up). It makes up 80% of the "catecholamine content" in our brain, the ingredients that prepare us for action. Our levels fluctuate throughout each day, so you don't have to try to cram all your work into the early hours of the morning.

It's largely discussed as the heart of our quest for pleasure, yet for decades studies have concluded that dopamine doesn't affect pleasure, since we get a dopamine release before a rewarding activity, not after we've completed it. Instead, it affects how the brain decides if an action is worth the effort. A 2020 study found that increasing it with meds like Ritalin can motivate people to perform harder physical tasks. People with higher levels of dopamine are more likely to choose a harder task with a higher reward than an easier, low-reward task. Low dopamine doesn't reduce focus, but it's believed it provokes giving more weight to the perceived cost of an activity instead of the potential reward. Lower levels lead us to save energy.

So why do we think we crave it or, paradoxically, need to try to intentionally deplete it?

Not Just a Health Issue

Professor Lidia Morawska just won a quarter million dollar science prize for her work in proving that Covid is airborne, against the WHO's public announcement to the contrary back in March 2020. Her efforts saved lives.

"A renowned expert in air quality and health, Morawska, of the Queensland University of Technology, began contacting international colleagues. She eventually gathered 239 scientists globally to highlight the risk of airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2. The public pressure eventually prompted the WHO and other authorities to update their public health guidelines. ... 'Science and scientists are nowhere near as listened to as in the past, and decisions are not based on science.' It is a problem she hopes to tackle by bringing scientists together as she did during the early years of the pandemic."

That feels like a lifetime ago, long forgotten by many, yet illnesses and death from Covid haven't retreated. 

A US study tracked 150 million workers and absences "since the end of the so-called public health emergency in 2023" to find that absences continue to be 12.9% higher than before the pandemic. "Absences were highest in occupations with the greatest exposure to the public." And last month a global insurance firm "pegged that number of excess deaths at 2% above the pre-pandemic annual mortality rate. ... That's roughly the equivalent of two fully loaded standard commercial jets crashing and killing everyone aboard every day." They cited long Covid as a significant factor. Andrew Nikiforuk reports in The Tyee, 

There Will Be Time

I've hit a weird anniversary that I'm not sure what to do with: thirty years in the same place. It seems significant because it's double any other place I've ever lived and exactly half my life. I like when numbers line up like that. My house closed on the 1st of November 1995, but I didn't officially moved in until Friday the 3rd. 

I was in my parents' place from age 2 to 17, and it was so boring to have such a stable home life. That sent me moving place to place for the next dozen years or so. At one point, my dad offered me the house when he moved out to live with his new wife, but I was still restless, so I declined. I sometimes can't believe I turned that down! I didn't want to live in my childhood home even though it was amazing with a beautiful forest out back; it mattered more at the time to carve my own path.

In the first five years of my place, I did all the big things I needed to do, and now I've been hitting the end point of all of all that work. Of course the maintenance turnover coincided with retiring. The furnace died in the middle of winter. After fixing one little thing after another to eke out another year, my repair dude told me it had cancer of everything: "That furnace owes you nothing!" The water heater followed soon after. Then this summer I fell through my 25-year-old cedar deck boards outside. I had to fall through a second time before replacing it all. 

New Air Quality Guidelines

Health Canada published new Guidance for Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) Professionals that acknowledge that Covid can be spread through airborne transmission. 

"Indoor air quality is considered an important environmental determinant of health. ... Good indoor air can often be achieved using the following three strategies: reducing or eliminating the sources of air contaminants, ventilating by replacing contaminated indoor air with filtered air from outside, filtering the indoor air ... and education of occupants and building staff on best practices for maintaining good indoor air quality. ...

Epidemiological studies on CO2 concentrations and health effects showed that individuals exposed to CO2 concentrations greater than 800 ppm were more likely to report mucous membrane or respiratory symptoms than those exposed to lower CO2 levels. ... Installing demand-based ventilation relying on CO2 sensors may also be an effective strategy. ... Avoid overcrowding indoor environments with more people than the HVAC system can accommodate. Increase natural ventilation by opening windows. ...

The concept of using indoor CO2 levels as an indicator of ventilation has been discussed for decades. With increased public awareness of the importance of ventilation and commercial-availability of CO2 monitors, there is a renewed interest in using CO2 monitoring as a method for quantifying ventilation. ... Continuous measurements can also be used to see how levels change over the course of the day and whether there are certain locations or certain times of day that are more problematic. ...

With some viruses, such as SARS-CoV-2, transmission was also found to occur from particles remaining suspended in the air and travelling longer distances, hence the benefit of wearing masks, effective ventilation and building air filtration, and stand-alone air purifiers that utilize high efficiency particulate air filters when and where appropriate to reduce the risk of transmission. ... There are no exposure limits for the range of microbial agents found indoors that can cause disease, as these are dependent on the infectious dose needed to cause an infection. Levels should be kept as low as possible. ... Effective ventilation is important for reducing indoor transmission of respiratory infectious diseases and includes ... increasing indoor/outdoor air exchange with exhaust fans and mechanical ventilation systems, filtering air efficiently, and opening external windows and doors. Ventilation can help reduce viral transmission in indoor spaces by preventing the accumulation of potentially infectious respiratory particles in the air. Good ventilation, combined with other personal protective measures, can further reduce the risk of infection.