Andy Lowry @AndyLowry@qoto.org

@alanthwaits@noc.social
Yes, sounds like something they'd do.

@alanthwaits@noc.social
Mukherjee title is
"The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer."

Will absolutely track down the Gawande, thank you! Yes, Aurelius is good stuff. Was just having a conversation with a friend this morning about the first time I attended a UU church to check it out-- the "sermon" was on Aurelius, and the choir performance was from Bach's Coffee Cantata. My first thought was THESE ARE MY PEOPLE. 😎 Plus, they keep the local Subaru dealer in business.

@alanthwaits@noc.social
They're behaving amazingly well from their own perspective, regardless of whether I like it or not.

Have you read Mukherjee's recent book on cancer? It's a real tour de force, as his work usually tends to be. Two thumbs up and a hats-off from me. And while I'm being Mr. Book Review Guy, Tisdale's "Advice for Future Corpses" is really wonderful. Author is a Zen practitioner, which I relate to, though she doesn't actually bring up Buddhism except as tangential examples of coping strategies and such. Tisdale has worked in hospice care for a long time and has a really solid foundation in the cold hard realities, which she manages to get across in a non-scary way. Quite a trick, that. 😉

@hasmis
😃 Thanks, that made me laugh in recognition. I sure as hell don't worry about cholesterol any more. 😉 If I want some sausage gravy, why, I just have some sausage gravy.

Thanks for the kind thoughts!

@adrianhon
I live in a place where it's common to use evaporative cooling in the warmer months, and Dark Sky was the only app that made it easy to pop in and check the dew point so you knew how efficient the cooling was going to be. If the Apple app even has that, I can't find it. It's really annoying that Apple thinks it's okay to actually take something from me that I paid for and owned. Sure hope they never come by the house!

@alanthwaits@noc.social
As well you should! I mean, it's our own cells doing that, so it's hard to be mad at 'em for trying to do their very best at reproducing. 😉

@alanthwaits@noc.social
I think I've detected the same. This accidental sparky-connection thing has been happening a lot lately. A lot of "I don't know this person, but I sure do know this person anyway" going on, and I have no idea why. Not just here, in real life too-- enough that I almost expect it every time I leave the house. A lot of things I used to be certain about are being reshaped and changed, and not because I was trying to do that. Weird, eh? 😎

@jayarava
You know, sometimes the publishing industry thing is really annoying. It's like publishers would really rather not be bothered with little things like selling books. I've spent I don't know how much time trying to track down things even from (relatively) known names and have hit brick walls more often than I want to think about. The title will go out of print after 37 minutes, even though the reason it's out of print is because they sold out of it.

And then the less-well-known names, well, fuhgeddaboudit. Why the hey can't I just pop over to the website of whoever the publisher of Mr. Orsborn's book is and order a copy? It's not like it was written fifty years ago, it's recent. If it's published by a university, couldn't they at least support an in-house author? No wonder Amazon is so successful at providing self-publishing on-demand services! If, god forbid, I should ever want to publish something, that's the sort of setup I would want.

Though I'm a bit ashamed to admit to it, I have, after exhausting all other avenues, downloaded PDFs of books I'm desperate to read from countries that have different copyright laws and make it easy to do that. It shouldn't have to come to that.

Whew, rant over and I feel so much better now.

@alanthwaits@noc.social
Thanks for the boost on that Schwinn, "Alan Watts." Really took me back for a moment. I think we have similar tastes in things generally, as I follow just about everything you boost up! Hope your new year is fabulous and that the damn cancer stays in remission. You tell it I said so.

@SecularJeffrey
Mine was the green Apple Crate one. I loved that thing. The front suspension was SO COOL.

I had no idea that they even made unicycles. There was a Schwinn shop at the bottom of my street as a kid, so I spent rather a lot of time hanging out there and oohing and ahhing. The staff were always kind and friendly to me and treated me like an actual human. Sheesh, I haven't thought about that in a really long time. Thank you for prodding me into a mini-reverie. 😀

Another brief thought on the dying thing: I'm continually surprised by how deeply into the trivial this uncharted territory goes. I'm regularly presented with little decisions that it never occurred to me I'd have to make, like: Which of these email service subscriptions is the most suitable? By the month? Six months? 🤔 😉

I'm pretty sure I could do with a new set of glasses, but does that expense really even make sense at this point? I could have some enjoyable lunches with friends instead.

And on and on. It strays into the absurd sometimes, which at least makes me laugh, so that's good. 😎

#cancer

Now that my lifespan is no longer open-ended and undefined, I've spent some time trying to decide between two approaches as to the best use of my remaining time. One, which I did fall into for a few weeks, was to rush! rush! hurry! to try to pack in as much living as possible. As you're probably smarter than me, you've likely already guessed that this is not really a great approach. It's like skimming over waves rather than comfortably floating on my back and watching the clouds.

I'm now doing just the opposite-- taking time to appreciate each everyday event as it comes up by itself. I'm deliberately using little tricks to slow myself down, like:

1. Wearing cowboy boots. As my sense of balance has been a bit impaired by the now-burned-up brain tumor, and was already damaged by the chemo, this forces me to walk deliberately and carefully. "Walking like I mean it," as a friend describes it. 😉

2. Switching to using fountain pens. Now I write more slowly and carefully, as it's hard to just scribble something quickly with such a pen. There's also the little mini-ritual of uncapping the pen and lining up the cap "just so" to position it symmetrically. I'm surprised at how much better this has caused my note-taking to be. (Though I do do a lot of typing, I have a couple of topics I'm researching for enjoyment and tend to prefer written notes to typed as I read and study.)

Should anyone have any suggestions for more little speed bumps like these, I'd be glad to hear them!

#cancer

@jayarava
That's 100% your creation?! Wow, nicely done, and a nice way to honor the memory of what looks to have been an interesting person.