#to help them figure out if anything else is wrong before they remove my gallbladder

[verypurplepenguins]

Can wait to go into medical debt next month... fuck my life.

[scowlowl]

Hi c: I remember a post, I think it was from you, about long covid and getting it? Was that you? A friend of mine is struggling and I was wondering if you had any advice about what she can do :< Thank you!!

Oh no, I hope your friend feels better soon! That might have been me, I think I posted about it here a few times and there have definitely been twitter threads.

Standard disclaimer stuff: I am not a doctor. What I found helped me might not help someone else. Long covid is kind of fucked up to deal with because it seems to hit everyone in different ways, in different areas, and months later something that wasn't a problem before can suddenly become one. The long haul groups talk about it as something that feels like it moves around the body, like a total shit gremlin.

The thing that helped me the most initially was joining the facebook groups with other people figuring shit out. This was back April/May for me but they're still very active and full of people sharing resources.

Survivor Corps is I think the big one and they've been the ones reaching out to media and doctors to try to gain some recognition with the medical community initially (as far as I know, all kind of a blur tbh). There's also a long covid group here, and if your friend searches for like, long covid + the country they're in there are usually more local/regional ones for resources closer to home too.

Because we don't really know what specific mechanism is triggering a lot of the long covid stuff yet, most of us are just treating symptoms. Some people have been diagnosed with mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS) and I don't know diddly squat about that but it might be something for your friend to look into. My whole thing has been inflammation and my immune system basically attacking itself because immune systems are both very complex and compellingly fucking stupid. Not to victim blame the immune system or anything.

What helped me depended on what was going wrong at the time, obv, but it means it's a long list.

This is just going to be a brain dump, sorry.

- I never had pneumonia. Mine started in my throat, probably damaged my vocal chords, but never turned into pneumonia. I still had shortness of breath, pressure in my chest, and my oxygen levels dropped. I could breathe but with great difficulty and described it to the EMTs as "breathing is like work." It took all of my energy and focus to breathe in enough. If you are that this point, ever, like, literally fucking ever, call an ambulance.

- Tylenol for a fever. 

- Blood thinners if necessary, I never had any but we know now that a lot of problems are blood clot-related. Tbqh my blood is more thin now than anything but I always had anemia and some sort of “your blood is too small actually?” problem and we don’t know why. I just bleed a lot and bruise easier now. 

- If they try to tell you it's anxiety or in your head or you're not that bed, tell them to go fuck themselves and go to the hospital. Get tested if you can. A lot of the problems long haulers ran into was that we got sick before tests were available, or we were talked into staying home by the emergency workers, and we never got tested. This opens the doors for doctors to tell you it's all in your head, psychological, anxiety, allergies, etc. Just. Go when you first feel sick if at all possible. Get tested before it turns into long covid. 

- I was not sure in the beginning what "shortness of breath" or "pressure" actually felt like, and it made me delay calling for an ambulance for a few days as well. For me, it felt like there was an elastic band of pressure around my lungs. I couldn't fully inhale. My diaphragm was fucked in ways I still don't understand. My lungs also felt heavy, like there was a weight on them or like my lungs themselves were too stiff to inhale. That all counts as pressure/tightness/shortness of breath. So does air hunger, or feeling like you want to be swallowing air.

- I know I'm being super obvious but seriously shortly before I got sicker, I hit up twitter to ask what "pressure" was supposed to feel like because I couldn't tell if what I had "counted."

- Breathing: lying on my stomach with my chest propped up by pillow, in bed helped. So did  pursed lip breathing: here.

- I was prescribed salbutamol initially, which did help with the worst of the wheezing and opened up some of my lungs so I could breathe easier. When I went to the ER again a couple months later, they gave me like 5x the usual dose and sent me home.

- I'm also taking Flovent/fluticasone twice a day for asthma maintenance.

- Histamines are a problem for a lot of people. Some develop a histamine intolerance, which can be helped by eating a low histamine diet.

- Antihistamines helped me the most. I was taking Allegra-D daily. Pepcid AC also helps, because it targets a different kind of histamine. There was such a run on Pepcid when this started that it was actually impossible to find in my area and I had to order some online. 

- I was recently prescribed Singulair and it has been life-changing this past week or so. As far as I know it's not really an antihistamine but blocks/inhibits a particular receptor involved in inflammation that comes into play when allergies do.

- Electrolytes. I don't know why, but my electrolytes are permanently fucked and too low now. If I don't go through like a litre of gatorade a day (or whatever, pick your brand of supplements), I am even more tired and brain foggy than usual. Helps a lot.

- Inflammation is a major problem all around. Sometimes I go for the naproxen or advil and it will help any really major acute flare-up now (like, I can feel when my gallbladder is getting inflamed and about to spasm and I can cut it off sort of), but mostly it's also daily maintenance. I take cucurmin and black pepper daily.

- Other supplements: vitamins A & D, a multivitamin, NAC.  

- CBD oil. This worked wonders for me for a lot of the side-effects of covid, costochondritis and shingles pain especially.

- Diet. I mentioned the low histamine one above. Other people have had some success with a low inflammation diet. Some folks also have so many GI problems that they basically ate chicken and rice and slowly reintroduced foods to see what would trigger something. I appear to get super fucked by nightshades now, e.g. Alcohol is an absolute no. I had to cut caffeine for months because of my heart. (No caffeine/alcohol/red meat was my doctor's first and best advice for heart stuff at the time.)

- Speaking of the heart stuff, if your friend is dealing with that: electrolytes again. I have pedialyte freezies that I would suck on whenever heart palpitations started and it helped calm it down some. My heart was so, so fucked for months that whenever I ate or stood up or sat down it would hit like 140bpm and I had to spend an hour moving as little as possible or I'd just about pass out. There are a LOT of long-haulers now dealing with POTS and I can't really speak to what helps that in particular but if your heart is messing up at all: call a doctor. I still don't know how damaged my heart is from all of this because doctors and wait lists, etc. Get a jump on that.

- Insomnia was absolutely the worst I’ve ever had and I’ve had lifelong, “I’m awake for three days wee” insomnia. The Singulair knocks me right out at night, so that's a bonus, but there has not been a single night since getting sick where I didn't have to take something to help me sleep. I was on Zopiclone before getting sick, at least, but seriously talk to someone about insomnia if necessary. The sleep deprivation alone was making so many things worse.

- Brain fog? Brain fog. I don't have any or many answers for this. My short-term memory is wrecked and usually I'll remember something 2 weeks later, so I live my life on a 2-week lag now.

- Related to brain fog, fatigue. Don't fuck with it. Do not. Chronic Fatigue and Myalgic encephalomyelitis are both brought up often with long covid. I am dealing with it but don't know what to say about it yet because I haven't had a single doctor give a shit thus far. I've spoken to a relative who's an occupational therapist about it and her most helpful advice was about "energy envelopes," which is basically spoon theory. If you feel tired: stop. If you don't, or if you try to push through, we relapse hard and fast and you can pay for one day of walking 10 minutes too long with weeks of being stuck in bed. It's miserable. It will take longer to get back to normal. Some of us can exercise and feel amazing after; others are exercise intolerant and it wrecks them. (I feel best after like, 10 minutes of walking and sunshine right now, which is after months and months of being bedridden.)

- Treat mental exertion the same as physical. Doctors told me to drink Gatorade after mental work because it's still work, and it has helped a lot for whatever reason. It also helps to work on one thing at a time, take a break, switch gears, take a break, etc. I can't multitask anymore anyway.

- Eliminate whatever stressors you can. Stress will make everything worse. 

- It comes and goes. Every relapse was a bit shorter and a bit easier for me, so that now when I fuck up it's like 2-3 days instead of weeks, but it's a rollercoaster.

- It can be random as hell. For about two months my gallbladder just decided to up and die, basically, and we were talking about having it removed. And then it was fine. Hasn't bugged me again lately. I know I said it's symptom management, but it's also like... symptom chasing and trying to figure out what's happening every time the sun rises. This is also exhausting. Everything is exhausting.

- Brain shit. Some of us have serious trouble reading. Sentences swim together. Letters wouldn't turn into words. I took this as a Challenge and started reading children's books and then Animorphs again, like... slowly, as much as I could do without pushing it, and it's still not perfect or great but it was an okay place to start. Honestly the hardest part was the embarrassment and going from a PhD program to reading kids books, but. Do what you have to. Do what you can.

- Sticky notes and labelling things around the house so I could see them when I needed them. I am not fucking around when I say brain fog. I can open the fridge, know I have milk, know it is in the door, and literally not see it to find it. I will put the cream in the dishwasher. I will spin in circles in the kitchen remembering and forgetting and remembering why I’m there again. Sticky notes. Also: journals, index cards, write literally everything down if you need to remember something. Put it somewhere obvious. I like writing on the bathroom mirror for the important shit. (Don’t use lipstick.) 

- Unsurprisingly, a lot of us are struggling with anxiety and depression. Don't let doctors get it backward: it's not anxiety making us sick, it's being sick and ignored and fighting to be helped that's making our mental health worse. So many doctors tell us it's all in our head. I did not move across the country because I was too sick to take care of myself because of ~allergies~ or ~anxiety.~ Fuck off.

- So, so many people report that they relapse whenever they menstruate so if your friend is in that group, they might want to prepare to feel like fucking trash every 4 weeks no matter what they do. I don’t have any advice on this one, I’m sorry. There are a lot of people discussing it in the FB groups, though, and those are searchable for symptoms. 

- So... a tl;dr list of things that might help: anti-inflammatory diets, anti-histamine diets, pepcid AC, allegra or other allergy meds, vitamin A/D/E, multivitamins, electrolytes and gatorade, albuterol, fluticasone, zopiclone (or anything that helps with sleep), CBD oil, singulair, anti-nausea meds (buscopan), muscle relaxants (spasming gallbladder). Rest, so much rest, do not fuck with The Rest if you can help it. I also encourage just getting high and edibles as much as you can because it sure helped me chill out big time and I think was a big factor in my recovery, at least as far as helping me calm down and helping my heart were concerned.

- The actual most helpful part outside of what to take or do was other people. Friends would go out and get me things when I could not, including like, cat food deliveries and all. I had co-workers ready to step in to take over my work on days I could not. I had friends calling doctors because I was too tired to fight them or self-advocate. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say they helped save my idiot life this year. Literally. It's a lot to ask of anyone but it's also that level of support that some of us need, and there shouldn't be any shame in it. (I still feel bad about it anyway but what are you gonna do.)

Depending on where you live, some places are setting up long-haul covid clinics to help people. Reports are mixed: some demand you had a positive test even if you were sick before tests were available. Some people are getting a lot of help regardless. Some are being sent home and told not to come back anyway. It’s kind of a gamble right now but either way, there’s at least some medical recognition making headway now so my fingers are crossed.

Anyway you basically sound like a good bean and your friend is lucky to have you asking around. I have absolutely forgotten something at some point in here because, well, brain fog and no memory, but if you have any questions or want something clarified please just ask. Stay safe!

[cosmosogler]

i got some bad news today.

so you know how back in august i was taking my preliminary exam and i passed out? i thought i remembered the score i got on it, and it was super low. like embarrassingly low, and that’s why the graduate coordinator put me in undergrad courses.

this january i took the test again (i was super sick, i was so sick, god) but i got my scores back pretty quick and was pleased to discover that i had tripled my score. despite everything i was improving! maybe i could improve some more!

well... i got my scores sent to me again since i was applying for summer funding and i asked the grader to send them over. my score in january was actually lower than my score last august had been... i had misremembered my august score. 

so... i’ve actually been doing the opposite of improving this whole time. the whole basis of my scale of improvement was wrong. i’m even doing worse than when i had come in fresh off the gallbladder removal surgery. 

i hate this. i hate feeling like this. i hate feeling so worthless. i feel worthless all the time but bringing it up to the front of my mind and having it stick there is awful. 

i hate that i got a thinly veiled threat from the graduate coordinator before the january test that if i didn’t drastically improve my score there would be “trouble.” i hate that it was an empty threat considering my score went down. i hate that he’s lying to me and making everything seem like life and death. i don’t know when the warning will be for real.

i applied for the funding before i had gotten that score comparison back (i found my january scores and sent those) so i didn’t have that crushing realization until i’d already sent everything in. so at least i wasn’t able to talk myself out of applying. guess my application will get laughed at after all.

i want to die. i hate feeling like i can’t do this. i hate throwing myself at a concrete wall over and over and never making any progress except getting my hands and knees more and more shredded. 

i was wrong. i haven’t improved at all! i thought i was doing way better than i was actually doing, AND I ALREADY THOUGHT I WAS DOING TERRIBLY! GOOD TO KNOW I WAS *STILL* OVERESTIMATING MY ABILITIES EVEN AFTER SETTING THE BAR AS LOW AS POSSIBLE!

i don’t know what to do. keep going, naturally, of course, but i don’t know why. why even bother. i feel like a smelly puddle of stagnant water. worthless. 

i know i’m depressed. i know i was really for real super sick BOTH times i have tried to take my preliminary exam so far. but that won’t give me more chances to take the test. that won’t help me pass my classes with an acceptable gpa.

it doesn’t matter why i failed. all that matters is that i keep failing without even improving even a little bit. that’s all the guys in charge care about. it doesn’t matter that i have a handicap. at the end of the day i get less done than my classmates and that’s all they can see. 

i can’t even tell them how severe the handicap is because i don’t know at all. it looks like it’s pretty severe? but i feel like if i’m putting in all this effort i should be getting somewhere. i can’t even put in the effort... my classmates get the homework done and have time to study before the exams. i’m still struggling to finish assignments for the first time the day before our midterms and finals.

why am i like this? i feel like there’s something i’m missing, some easy fix that will make everything resolve itself if i was just smart enough to see what the solution was. but i’m not smart. i’m stupid. and stubborn and delusional i guess. 

i just... i guess i want to confirm that i’m stupid and i shouldn’t be here. but i can’t because the depression is in the way. so i can’t tell if i’m REALLY THAT DEPRESSED or if i just don’t belong. i don’t want to do anything else... i love physics. i wish i was better at it. i wish i was naturally good at it. i wish i could see the easy fix that would make everything click and i’d understand the subject just fine after that. the way harrison did it. i wish i could make it look effortless. the way luis does it. 

i feel like i understand it when i talk about it but then i need to write it down (or demonstrate to a professor, on the spot, when they ask me what i would have done if i wasn’t stressed about the test) and it’s gone. 

i don’t want depression to be the reason i can’t stay here. i don’t want to go home. i’ll die. mom or dad will do it if they’re ever in a bad enough mood. or i’ll do it. or my brother will do it if he finds out how gay i am. the reason doesn’t matter. at the end of the day i’ll be dead. it doesn’t matter why.

it’s funny... i get the worst grades in my favorite subjects. or the ones most important to me. since middle school. math and english were so, so hard for me to get good grades in. physics is impossible for me to get good grades in. 

but the stories i write, people like those. don’t they? they like the characters. 

character analysis was what i was worst at in english, in high school. character analysis essays tanked my grade all the way through undergrad. 

what was i missing? maybe i just think in a different way and that made my grades bad. how can i shift my thinking gears over to what would get better grades...? how do i articulate my understanding, and where it came from, in a way other people find acceptable? 

in english, it’s like, so much is up to interpretation. and the way i process stories is probably different, i focus on different things, i see the evidence and draw different conclusions than other people... i don’t know... in class discussions i felt more like i rocked at it. griffy praised me one time when i pointed out a word in the text that my classmates didn’t notice. 

“seemed.” the character described himself as “seeming” to be friendly and polite or whatever. it was “a hero of our time.” i hated the character but man it was a fantastic character study.

so like... i can do it, when i’m not thinking about it, i guess. how do i stop thinking about it? i don’t think i can do physics problems without thinking about them very, very hard. i just have to memorize the basic equations. the ones you can derive everything else from, if you understand what they mean. but i can’t seem to do that.

i can memorize all the dang pokemon and the moves they’re most likely to have when you battle another person but i can’t remember that the surface bound charge is literally just the magnitude of the polarization along the normal vector. it’s as simple as F = ma. it’s literally that simple.

and i can’t remember it! not when it matters.

but really, to the people in charge of my future, it doesn’t matter that i think differently. it matters that i can’t speak their language. it doesn’t matter why. it only matters that i can’t do it. thinking in colors and letters just isn’t making the transition to numbers on the page. the right numbers. my professor, last time i talked to her, said i got bogged down in the math that didn’t matter to the problem. 

i got confused and trying to solve the problem the long way didn’t matter. i didn’t even realize i was confused. i mean, i knew i’d done something wrong somewhere, because my integral was too hard, but i couldn’t figure out why. so it didn’t matter. my grade tanked. that’s what matters.

i hate bashing my head against this wall over and over and i hate making people watch me bash my stupid stubborn head against the stupid wall and never make any progress. it must be so frustrating for them. why don’t i just do something different?

i do try so many different things... but i can’t seem to find the right different thing.

but i can’t give up. i want to, but i can’t. i don’t have it in me to give up i guess. maybe if i did something different i could give up. but, you know, i can’t seem to find that missing solution either. i’m just stuck failing over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over

[austinpanda]

Dad Letter 041419

14 April, 2019

Dear Dad--

Tomorrow is tax day! Which doesn’t mean anything for me, because I do my taxes the moment my W2 arrives by email and get a refund, usually when it’s still January or early February. It’s easy when you do one thing all year long. Already got my refund and stuck most of it in savings. Since Zach works for the IRS, this is obviously the time of greatest job security. He said they’re holding meetings where they’re essentially asking everyone to not call in sick or otherwise be absent for the next few weeks, if possible. That’s got to be unpleasant to hear, wouldn’t you think? You work for the IRS, and it’s busy season, so everything’s hurried and unpleasant, but at least you aren’t allowed to be ill or have a personal emergency. “Can I have the day off? I was accidentally decapitated.” “Nope, and dock that honky a day’s pay for napping on the job,” etc.

I got a chance to spend some time with Stacy yesterday evening and it was wonderful! Mom died on April 13th, and yesterday was April 13th, so we got together at a Long John Silver’s near my apartment to eat our weight in hush puppies and catch up on some things mom-related, and other things not mom-related. Apparently the surgeon who removed my gallbladder last October made numerous trips to the waiting room where Zach and Stacy were hanging out to give them updates and, at one point, show pictures.

I never saw the pictures! Apparently he showed them pictures of my insides, once they’d filled me with air to create space for the camera to see everything. Stacy got to see my liver. I’ve never seen my liver, but Stacy has! And he showed them the gallbladder, and the gallstones, one of which was big and black, she said. I believe I did briefly see the pictures of the gallstones. I had at least a couple of (seems like) marble-sized ones. So thinking back on all the times I thought I was up in the middle of the night with heartburn, I was actually up in the middle of the night having a gallbladder attack. And sure enough, I haven’t had another since they took my gallbladder out. It’s weird what a positive experience that ended up being. I got a couple of weeks off work, and now I don’t have gallbladder attacks any longer. Weird when large life events work out just the way they were supposed to.

Oh, the doctor wants to put me on insulin! Specifically, he wants to put me onto a medication called Ozempic. It’s insulin, kinda, but you only need to take it once a week. It would get my blood sugar down and also help me lose weight. That was the good news. The bad news was that it causes weight loss through nausea, which is awesome! The other bad news is that a brief google search gave me the impression that the cost per dose was somewhere between $600 and $800. That was also awesome! After that I was all ready to condemn my country as a pee-soaked hell hole where the medications we need to live are all too expensive for anyone but the rich to afford.

So I went to CVS to pick up the prescription, and my only plan, if it cost $600, was to refuse it. That’s what the doctor said I should do: Don’t accept the medication, just let them know you’ll need to get with your doctor for something else (i.e. something cheaper) and they’ll understand. When I went to the CVS, I was not optimistic. I got in line at the prescription pick-up window and texted Zach, “Now I get to find out if I can afford to continue having blood.”

The guy in front of me had one prescription that was ready and one that was still being worked on, and he hated that. He was grumpy with the wee lass behind the counter. “Yeah, that’s what y’all said last time, grumble grumble…” So he grumbled away and I got nervous and said, “HEY! My doctor called in a prescription for me, I think, for some stuff related to, um, diabetes!!! I’m Rick Weidmann!” And she found it in her system, and said it was going to be $25. So I figured, that’s obviously wrong. I said, “For what medication?”

“For O-…O-…Oz-…”

I said, “Okay, yeah, the internet said it would be many hundreds of dollars!”

She said, “It’s a few hundred, but you have insurance. Oo! I like your shirt!”

At this point I dissolved into a puddle of ecstasy on the floor, swirling around, helpless with mirth. I paid for the medication. (It’s an injection pen thingy.) She asked if I’d ever taken it before, and I’m probably the first person all day who replied, “Why no, I’ve never taken this stuff before.” So she arranged for an even more wee lass, who never made eye contact with me once, to tell me how it worked.

So...great. I tried not to go from pre-diabetic to regular diabetic, but it looks like the bad eating habits I so enjoyed in my 30s and early 40s made it impossible. (Damn you Coca Cola!! You’re my only weakness! Besides bullets!) I’m aware of the seriousness of this, and I’m going to be checking my stupid blood sugar and taking my stupid medications and going to a stupid nutritionist. I’m actually looking forward to the stupid nutritionist, though. I figure this is someone who could do something my doctor never really had the time to do: Tell me how, when, and what I’m supposed to eat as a diabetic person. I get the impression it’s lots of small, healthy meals of mostly rabbit food (plant matter...seeds and salads and such) throughout the day, along with exercise. Perhaps the nutritionist can make me aware of any interesting dietary loopholes, like, “If you’re diabetic, you can’t have pie. Pie is verboten. But if it’s Dutch apple pie, and you eat it with a bacon sandwich, for some reason we haven't figured out, that’s perfectly okay, and you can have all you want.”

Obviously, this will not happen. But what I’m really saying is that I allow space for hope. I dare to dream the nutritionist might actually be able to tell me something I want to hear about nutrition. Maybe, for example, I don’t have to eat broccoli for the rest of my life--which is good, because broccoli is garbage, and can go fuck itself--because here’s another food that’ll give you the same nutrition without being as unpleasant and generally regrettable as broccoli. I’ll certainly let you know what happens.

Until next week. With love!

[pocketprinter]

Charlie Munger: The Psychology of Human Misjudgment (Transcript)

The Psychology of Human Misjudgment, a speech given in 1995 by legendary investor Charlie Munger, opened my eyes to how behavioral psychology can be applied to business and problem-solving.

Munger, for those of you who haven’t heard of him, is the irreverent partner of Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway. He’s offered us such gems as: a two-step process for making effective decisions and the work required to have an opinion.

And this talk on The Psychology of Human Misjudgment is one of the best you’ll ever hear.

My nature makes me incline toward diagnosing and talking about errors in conventional wisdom. And despite years of being smoothed out by the hard knocks that were inevitable for one with my attitude, I don’t believe life ever knocked all the brashness out of the man.

… I have fallen in love with my way of laying out psychology because it has been so useful to me. And so, before I die, I want to imitate to some extent the bequest practices of three characters: the protagonist in John Bunyan’s Pilgram’s Progress, Benjamin Franklin, and my first employer, Ernest Buffett.

Munger made extensive revisions to The Psychology of Human Misjudgment in Poor Charlie’s Almanack because he “thought he could do better at eighty-one than he did more than ten years earlier when he (1) knew less and was more harried by a crowded life and (2) was speaking from rough notes instead of revising transcripts.”

Transcript

I am very interested in the subject of human misjudgment, and Lord knows I’ve created a good bit of it. I don’t think I’ve created my full statistical share, and I think that one of the reasons was I tried to do something about this terrible ignorance I left the Harvard Law School with. When I saw this patterned irrationality, which was so extreme, and I had no theory or anything to deal with it, but I could see that it was extreme, and I could see that it was patterned, I just started to create my own system of psychology, partly by casual reading, but largely from personal experience, and I used that pattern to help me get through life.

Fairly late in life I stumbled into this book, Influence, by a psychologist named Bob Cialdini, who became a super tenured hotshot on a 2,000 person faculty at a very young age. And he wrote this book, which has now sold 300 odd thousand copies, which is remarkable for somebody. Well, it’s an academic book aimed at a popular audience that filled in a lot of holes in my crude system. When those holes had filled in, I thought I had a system that was a good working tool, and I’d like to share that one with you.

And I came here because behavioral economics. How could economics not be behavioral? If it isn’t behavioral, what the hell is it? And I think it’s fairly clear that all reality has to respect all other reality. If you come to inconsistencies, they have to be resolved, and so if there’s anything valid in psychology, economics has to recognize it, and vice versa. So I think the people that are working on this fringe between economics and psychology are absolutely right to be there, and I think there’s been plenty wrong over the years.

Well let me romp through as much of this list as I have time to get through. 24 Standard Causes of Human Misjudgment.

First. Under recognition of the power of what psychologists call reinforcement and economists call incentives. Well you can say, “Everybody knows that.” Well I think I’ve been in the top 5% of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I’ve underestimated it. And never a year passes, but I get some surprise that pushes my limit a little farther.

One of my favorite cases about the power of incentives is the Federal Express case. The heart and soul of the integrity of the system is that all the packages have to be shifted rapidly in one central location each night. And the system has no integrity if the whole shift can’t be done fast. And Federal Express had one hell of a time getting the thing to work. And they tried moral suasion, they tried everything in the world, and finally somebody got the happy thought that they were paying the night shift by the hour, and that maybe if they paid them by the shift, the system would work better. And lo and behold, that solution worked.

Early in the history of Xerox, Joe Wilson, who was then in the government, had to go back to Xerox because he couldn’t understand how their better, new machine was selling so poorly in relation to their older and inferior machine. Of course when he got there he found out that the commission arrangement with the salesmen gave a tremendous incentive to the inferior machine.

And here at Harvard, in the shadow of B.F. Skinner, there was a man who really was into reinforcement as a powerful thought, and you know, Skinner’s lost his reputation in a lot of places, but if you were to analyze the entire history of experimental science at Harvard, he’d be in the top handful. His experiments were very ingenious, the results were counterintuitive, and they were important. It is not given to experimental science to do better.

What gummed up Skinner’s reputation is that he developed a case of what I always call man-with-a-hammer syndrome, to the man with a hammer, every problem tends to look pretty much like a nail. And Skinner had one of the more extreme cases in the history of Academia, and this syndrome doesn’t exempt bright people. It’s just a man with a hammer and Skinner is an extreme example of that. And later, as I go down my list, let’s go back and try and figure out why people, like Skinner, get man-with-a-hammer syndrome.

Incidentally, when I was at the Harvard Law School there was a professor, naturally at Yale, who was derisively discussed at Harvard, and they used to say, “Poor old Blanchard. He thinks declaratory judgments will cure cancer.” And that’s the way Skinner got. And not only that, he was literary, and he scorned opponents who had any different way of thinking or thought anything else was important. This is not a way to make a lasting reputation if the other people turn out to also be doing something important.

My second factor is simple psychological denial. This first really hit me between the eyes when a friend of our family had a super-athlete, super-student son who flew off a carrier in the north Atlantic and never came back, and his mother, who was a very sane woman, just never believed that he was dead. And, of course, if you turn on the television, you find the mothers of the most obvious criminals that man could ever diagnose, and they all think their sons are innocent. That’s simple psychological denial. The reality is too painful to bear, so you just distort it until it’s bearable. We all do that to some extent, and it’s a common psychological misjudgment that causes terrible problems.

Third. Incentive-cause bias, both in ones own mind and that of ones trusted advisor, where it creates what economists call agency costs. Here, my early experience was a doctor who sent bushel baskets full of normal gallbladders down to the pathology lab in the leading hospital in Lincoln, Nebraska. And with that quality control for which community hospitals are famous, about five years after he should’ve been removed from the staff, he was.

And one of the old doctors who participated in the removal was also a family friend, and I asked him, I said, “Tell me, did he think, here’s a way for me to exercise my talents,” this guy was very skilled technically, “And make a high living by doing a few maimings and murders every year, along with some frauds?” And he said, “Hell no, Charlie. He thought that the gallbladder was the source of all medical evil, and if you really love your patients, you couldn’t get that organ out rapidly enough.”

Now that’s an extreme case, but in lesser strength, it’s present in every profession and in every human being. And it causes perfectly terrible behavior. If you take sales presentations and brokers of commercial real estate and businesses, I’m 70 years old, I’ve never seen one I thought was even within hailing distance of objective truth. If you want to talk about the power of incentives and the power of rationalized, terrible behavior, after the Defense Department had had enough experience with cost-plus percentage of cost contracts, the reaction of our republic was to make it a crime for the federal government to write one, and not only a crime, but a felony.

And by the way, the government’s right, but a lot of the way the world is run, including most law firms and a lot of other places, they’ve still got a cost-plus percentage of cost system. And human nature, with its version of what I call incentive-caused bias, causes this terrible abuse. And many of the people who are doing it you would be glad to have married into your family compared to what you’re otherwise going to get.

Now there are huge implications from the fact that the human mind is put together this way, and that is that people who create things like cash registers, which make most behavior hard, are some of the effective saints of our civilization. And the cash register was a great moral instrument when it was created. And Patterson knew that, by the way. He had a little store, and the people were stealing him blind and never made any money, and people sold him a couple of cash registers and it went to profit immediately.

And, of course, he closed the store and went into the cash register business. With results which are … And so this is a huge, important thing. If you read the psychology texts, you will find that if they’re 1,000 pages long, there’s one sentence. Somehow incentive-caused bias has escaped the standard survey course in psychology.

Fourth, and this is a superpower in error-causing psychological tendency, bias from consistency and commitment tendency, including the tendency to avoid or promptly resolve cognitive dissonance. Includes the self-confirmation tendency of all conclusions, particularly expressed conclusions, and with a special persistence for conclusions that are hard-won.

Well what I’m saying here is that the human mind is a lot like the human egg, and the human egg has a shut-off device. When one sperm gets in, it shuts down so the next one can’t get in. The human mind has a big tendency of the same sort. And here again, it doesn’t just catch ordinary mortals, it catches the deans of physics. According to Max Planck, the really innovative, important new physics was never really accepted by the old guard.

Instead, a new guard came along that was less brain-blocked by its previous conclusions. And if Max Planck’s crowd had this consistency and commitment tendency that kept their old inclusions intact in spite of disconfirming evidence, you can imagine what the crowd that you and I are part of behaves like.

And of course, if you make a public disclosure of your conclusion, you’re pounding it into your own head. Many of these students that are screaming at us, you know, they aren’t convincing us, but they’re forming mental change for themselves, because what they’re shouting out they’re pounding in. And I think educational institutions that create a climate where too much of that goes on are in a fundamental sense, they’re irresponsible institutions. It’s very important to not put your brain in chains too young by what you shout out.

And all these things like painful qualifying and initiation rituals, all those things, pound in your commitments and your ideas. The Chinese brainwashing system, which was for war prisoners, was way better than anybody else’s. They maneuvered people into making tiny little commitments and declarations, and then they’d slowly build. That worked way better than torture.

Sixth. Bias from Pavlovian association, misconstruing past correlation as a reliable basis for decision-making. I never took a course in psychology, or economics either for that matter, but I did learn about Pavlov in high school biology. And the way they taught it, you know, so the dog salivated when the bell rang. So what? Nobody made the least effort to tie that to the wide world. Well the truth of the matter is that Pavlovian association is an enormously powerful psychological force in the daily life of all of us. And, indeed, in economics we wouldn’t have money without the role of so-called secondary reinforcement, which is a pure psychological phenomenon demonstrated in the laboratory.

Practically, I’d say 3/4 of advertising works on pure Pavlov. Think how association, pure association, works. Take Coca-Cola company we’re the biggest share-holder. They want to be associated with every wonderful image, heroics in the Olympics, wonderful music, you name it. They don’t want to be associated with Presidents’ funerals and so forth. When have you seen a Coca-Cola ad, and the association really works.

And all these psychological tendencies work largely or entirely on a subconscious level, which makes them very insidious. Now you’ve got Persian messenger syndrome. The Persians really did kill the messenger who brought the bad news. You think that is dead? I mean you should’ve seen Bill Paley in his last 20 years. He didn’t hear one damn thing he didn’t want to hear. People knew that it was bad for the messenger to bring Bill Paley things he didn’t want to hear. Well that means that the leader gets in a cocoon of unreality, and this is a great big enterprise, and boy, did he make some dumb decisions in the last 20 years.

And now the Persian messenger syndrome is alive and well. When I saw, some years ago, Arco and Exxon arguing over a few hundred millions of ambiguity in their North Slope treaties before a superior court judge in Texas, with armies of lawyers and experts on each side. Now this is a Mad Hatter’s tea party, two engineering-style companies can’t resolve some ambiguity without spending tens of millions of dollars in some Texas superior court? In my opinion what happens is that nobody wants to bring the bad news to the executives up the line. But here’s a few hundred million dollars you thought you had that you don’t. And it’s much safer to act like the Persian messenger who goes away to hide rather than bring home the news of the battle lost.

Talking about economics, you get a very interesting phenomenon that I’ve seen over and over again in a long life. You’ve got two products, suppose they’re complex, technical products. Now you’d think, under the laws of economics, that if product A costs X, if product Y costs X minus something, it will sell better than if it sells at X plus something, but that’s not so. In many cases when you raise the price of the alternative products, it’ll get a larger market share than it would when you make it lower than your competitor’s product.

That’s because the bell, a Pavlovian bell, I mean ordinarily there’s a correlation between price and value, then you have an information inefficiency. And so when you raise the price, the sales go up relative to your competitor. That happens again and again and again. It’s a pure Pavlovian phenomenon. You can say, “Well, the economists have figured this sort of thing out when they started talking about information inefficiencies,” but that was fairly late in economics that they found such an obvious thing. And, of course, most of them don’t ask what causes the information inefficiencies.

Well one of the things that causes it is pure old Pavlov and his dog. Now you’ve got bios from Skinnerian association, operant conditioning, you know, where you give the dog a reward and pound in the behavior that preceded the dog’s getting the award. And, of course, Skinner was able to create superstitious pigeons by having the rewards come by accident with certain occurrences, and, of course, we all know people who are the human equivalents of superstitious pigeons. That’s a very powerful phenomenon. And, of course, operant conditioning really works. I mean the people in the center who think that operant conditioning is important are very much right, it’s just that Skinner overdid it a little.

Where you see in business just perfectly horrible results from psychologically rooted tendencies is in accounting. If you take Westinghouse, which blew, what, two or three billion dollars pre-tax at least loaning developers to build hotels, and virtually 100% loans? Now you say any idiot knows that if there’s one thing you don’t like it’s a developer, and another you don’t like it’s a hotel.

And to make a 100% loan to a developer who’s going to build a hotel. But this guy, he probably was an engineer or something, and he didn’t take psychology any more than I did, and he got out there in the hands of these slick salesmen operating under their version of incentive-caused bias, where any damned way of getting Westinghouse to do it was considered normal business, and they just blew it.

That would never have been possible if the accounting system hadn’t been such but for the initial phase of every transaction it showed wonderful financial results. So people who have loose accounting standards are just inviting perfectly horrible behavior in other people. And it’s a sin, it’s an absolute sin. If you carry bushel baskets full of money through the ghetto, and made it easy to steal, that would be a considerable human sin, because you’d be causing a lot of bad behavior, and the bad behavior would spread. Similarly an institution that gets sloppy accounting commits a real human sin, and it’s also a dumb way to do business, as Westinghouse has so wonderfully proved.

Oddly enough nobody mentions, at least nobody I’ve seen, what happened with Joe Jett and Kidder Peabody. The truth of the matter is the accounting system was such that by punching a few buttons, the Joe Jetts of the world could show profits, and profits that showed up in things that resulted in rewards and esteem and every other thing that human being. Well the Joe Jetts are always with us, and they’re not really to blame, in my judgment at least. But that bastard who created that foolish accounting system who, so far as I know, has not been flayed alive, ought to be.

Seventh. Bias from reciprocation tendency, including the tendency of one on a roll to act as other persons expect. Well here, again, Cialdini does a magnificent job at this, and you’re all going to be given a copy of Cialdini’s book. And if you have half as much sense as I think you do, you will immediately order copies for all of your children and several of your friends. You will never make a better investment.

It is so easy to be a patsy for what he calls the compliance practitioners of this life. But, at any rate, reciprocation tendency is a very, very powerful phenomenon, and Cialdini demonstrated this by running around a campus, and he asked people to take juvenile delinquents to the zoo. And it was a campus, and so one in six actually agreed to do it. And after he’d accumulated a statistical output he went around on the same campus and he asked other people, he said, “Gee, would you devote two afternoons a week to taking juvenile delinquents somewhere and suffering greatly yourself to help them,” and there he got 100% of the people to say no.

But after he’d made the first request, he backed off a little, and he said, “Would you at least take them to the zoo one afternoon?” He raised the compliance rate from a third to a half. He got three times the success by just going through the little ask-for-a-lot-and-back-off.

Now if the human mind, on a subconscious level, can be manipulated that way and you don’t know it, I always use the phrase, “You’re like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.” I mean you are really giving a lot of quarter to the external world that you can’t afford to give. And on this so-called role theory, where you tend to act in the way that other people expect, and that’s reciprocation if you think about the way society is organized.

A guy named Zimbardo had people at Stanford divide into two pieces, one were the guards and the other were the prisoners, and they started acting out roles as people expected. He had to stop the experiment after about five days. He was getting into human misery and breakdown and pathological behavior. I mean it was awesome. However, Zimbardo is greatly misinterpreted. It’s not just reciprocation tendency and role theory that caused that, it’s consistency and commitment tendency. Each person, as he acted as a guard or a prisoner, the action itself was pounding in the idea.

Wherever you turn, this consistency and commitment tendency is affecting you. In other words, what you think may change what you do, but perhaps even more important, what you do will change what you think. And you can say, “Everybody knows that.” I want to tell you I didn’t know it well enough early enough.

Eight. Now this is a lollapalooza, and Henry Kaufman wisely talked about this, bias from over-influence by social proof, that is, the conclusions of others, particularly under conditions of natural uncertainty and stress. And here, one of the cases the psychologists use is Kitty Genovese, where all these people, I don’t know, 50, 60, 70 of them just sort of sat and did nothing while she was slowly murdered. Now one of the explanations is that everybody looked at everybody else and nobody else was doing anything, and so there’s automatic social proof that the right thing to do is nothing.

That’s not a good enough explanation for Kitty Genovese, in my judgment. That’s only part of it. There are microeconomic ideas and gain/loss ratios and so forth that also come into play. I think time and time again, in reality, psychological notions and economic notions interplay, and the man who doesn’t understand both is a damned fool.

Big-shot businessmen get into these waves of social proof. Do you remember some years ago when one oil company bought a fertilizer company, and every other major oil company practically ran out and bought a fertilizer company? And there was no more damned reason for all these oil companies to buy fertilizer companies, but they didn’t know exactly what to do, and if Exxon was doing it, it was good enough for Mobil, and vice versa. I think they’re all gone now, but it was a total disaster.

Now let’s talk about efficient market theory, a wonderful economic doctrine that had a long vogue in spite of the experience of Berkshire Hathaway. In fact one of the economists who won, he shared a Nobel Prize, and as he looked at Berkshire Hathaway year after year, which people would throw in his face as saying maybe the market isn’t quite as efficient as you think, he said, “Well, it’s a two-sigma event.” And then he said we were a three-sigma event. And then he said we were a four-sigma event. And he finally got up to six sigmas, better to add a sigma than change a theory, just because the evidence comes in differently. And, of course, when this share of a Nobel Prize went into money management himself, he sank like a stone.

If you think about the doctrines I’ve talked about, namely, one, the power of reinforcement after all you do something and the market goes up and you get paid and rewarded and applauded and what have you, meaning a lot of reinforcement, if you make a bet on a market and the market goes with you. Also, there’s social proof. I mean the prices on the market are the ultimate form of social proof, reflecting what other people think, and so the combination is very powerful.

Why would you expect general market levels to always be totally efficient, say even in 1973, 4 at the pit, or in 1972 or whatever it was when the Nifty 50 were in their heyday? If these psychological notions are-

Fifty were in their heyday. If these psychological notions are correct, you would expect some waves of irrationality, which carry general levels to … ’til they’re inconsistent with the reason.

Nine. What made these economists love the efficient-market theory is the math was so elegant, and after all, math was what they’d learned to do. To the man with a hammer, every problem tends to look pretty much like a nail. The alternative truth was a little messy, and they’d forgotten the great economist Keynes, whom I think said, “Better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.”

Nine. Bias from contrast caused distortions of sensation, perception, and cognition. Here the great experiment that Cialdini does in his class is he takes three buckets of water. One’s hot, one’s cold, and one’s room temperature. And he has the student stick his left hand in the hot water and his right hand in the cold water. Then he has them remove the hands and put them both in the room temperature bucket, and of course with both hands in the same bucket of water, one seems hot, and the other seems cold because the sensation apparatus of man is over-influenced by contrast. It has no absolute scale. It’s got a contrast scale in it, and it’s scale with quantum effects in it, too. It takes a certain percentage change before it’s noticed.

Maybe you’ve had a magician remove your watch, I certainly have, without your noticing it. It’s the same thing. He’s taking advantage of your contrast type troubles and your sensory apparatus. But here the great truth is that cognition mimics sensation, and the cognition manipulators mimic the watch-removing magician. In other words, people are manipulating you all day long on this contrast phenomenon.

Cialdini cites the case of the real estate broker. You’ve got the rube that’s been transferred into your town, and the first thing you do is you take the rube out to two of the most awful over-priced houses you’ve ever seen, and then you take the rube to some moderately over-priced house and then you stick ’em. And it works pretty well, which is why the real estate salesmen do it. It’s always gonna work.

And the accidents of life can do this to you, and it can ruin your life. In my generation when women lived at home until they got married, I saw some perfectly terrible marriages made by highly desirable women because they lived in terrible homes. And I’ve seen some terrible second marriages, which were made because they were slight improvements over an even worse first marriage.

You think you’re immune from these things, and you laugh, and I wanna tell you you aren’t. My favorite analogy, I can’t vouch for the accuracy of. I have this worthless friend I like to Bridge with, and he’s a total intellectual amateur that lives on inherited money. But he told me once something I really enjoyed hearing. He said, “Charlie,” he says, “If you throw a fog into very hot water, the frog will jump out. But if you put the frog in room temperature water and just slowly heat the water up, the frog will die there.”

Now I don’t know whether that’s true about a frog, but it’s sure as hell true about many of the businessmen I know, and there again, it is the contrast phenomenon.

These are hot-shot high-powered people. These are not fools. If it comes to you in small pieces, you’re likely to miss, so you have to … if you’re gonna be a person of good judgment, you have to do something about this warp in your head where it’s so mislead by mere contrast.

Bias from over-influence by authority. Well here the Milgram experiment is it’s caused … I think there have been 1600 psychological papers written about Milgram. He had a person posing as an authority figure trick ordinary people into giving what they had every reason to expect was heavy torture by electric shock to perfectly innocent fellow citizens. And the experiment has been … he was trying to show why Hitler succeeded and a few other things. So it has really caught the fancy of the world. Partly it’s so politically correct and …

Over-influence by authority has another very … this’ll … you’ll like this one. You got a pilot and a co-pilot. The pilot is the authority figure. They don’t do this in airplanes, but they’ve done it in simulators. They have the pilot do something where the co-pilot who’s been trained in simulators a long time. He knows he’s not to allow the plane to crash. They have the pilot to do something where an idiot co-pilot would know the plane was gonna crash, but the pilot’s doing it, and the co-pilot is sitting there, and the pilot is the authority figure. 25% of the time, the plane crashes. This is a very powerful psychological tendency.

It’s not quite as powerful as some people think, and I’ll get to that later.

11. Bias from Deprival Super Reaction Syndrome, including bias caused by present or threatened scarcity, including threatened removal of something almost possessed but never possessed. Here I took the Munger dog, lovely harmless dog. The one way, the only way to get that dog to bite you was to try and take something out of its mouth after it was already there.

Any of you who’ve tried to do take-aways in labor negotiations will know the human version of that dog is there in all of us. I had a neighbor, a predecessor, on a little island where I have a house, and his nextdoor neighbor put a little pine tree in that was about three feet high, and it turned his 180 degree view of the harbor into 179 and three-quarters. Well they had a blood feud like the Hatfields and McCoys, and it went on and on and on. People are really crazy about minor decrements down.

Then if you act on them, you get into reciprocation tendency because you don’t just reciprocate affection, you reciprocate animosity. And the whole thing can escalate, and so huge insanities can come from just subconsciously over-weighing the importance of what you’re losing or almost getting and not getting.

The extreme business cake here was New Coke. Now Coca-Cola has the most valuable trademark in the world. We’re the major shareholder. I think we understand that trademark. Coke has armies of brilliant engineers, lawyers, psychologists, advertising executives, and so forth. And they had a trademark on a flavor, and they’d spent better part of 100 years getting people to believe that trademark had all these intangible values, too. And people associate it with a flavor, so they were gonna tell people not that it was improved ’cause you can’t improve a flavor. If a flavor’s a matter of taste, you may improve a detergent or something, but telling you’re gonna make a major change in a flavor, I mean … So they got this huge Deprival Super Reaction Syndrome.

Pepsi was within weeks of coming out with Old Coke in a Pepsi bottle, which would have been the biggest fiasco in modern times. Perfect, pluperfect insanity. And by the way, both Goizueta and Keough are just wonderful about it. They just joke. They don’t … Keough always says I must’ve been away on vacation. He participated in every single … he’s a wonderful guy. And by the way, Goizueta’s a wonderful, smart guy, an engineer.

Smart people make these terrible blunders. How can you not understand Deprival Super Reaction Syndrome? But people do not react symmetrically to loss and gain. Now maybe a great Bridge player like Zeckhauser does, but that’s a trained response. Ordinary people subconsciously affected by their inborn tendencies.

Bias from envy/jealousy. Well, envy/jealousy made what, two out of the 10 commandments. Those of you who’ve raised siblings or tried to run a law firm or investment bank or even a faculty. I’ve heard Warren say a half a dozen times, “It’s not greed that drives the world but envy.”

Here again, you go through the psychology survey courses. You go to the index: envy, jealousy. Thousand page book, it’s blank! There’s some blind spots in academia. But it’s an enormously powerful thing, and it operates to a considerable extent at a subconscious level, and anybody who doesn’t understand it is taking on defects he shouldn’t have.

Bias from chemical dependency. Well we don’t have to talk about that. We’ve all seen so much of it, but it’s interesting how it always causes moral breakdown if there’s any need, and it always involves massive denial. It aggravates what we talked about earlier in the aviator case, the tendency to distort reality so that it’s endurable.

Bias from gambling compulsion. Well here, Skinner made the only explanation you’ll find in the standard psychology survey course. He, of course, created a variable reinforcement rate for his pigeons, his mice, and he found that that would pound in the behavior better than any other enforcement pattern. He says, “Ah ha! I’ve explained why gambling is such a powerful, addictive force in the civilization.” I think that is, to a very considerable extent, true, but being Skinner, he seemed to think that was the only explanation.

The truth of the matter is the devisers of these modern machines and techniques know a lot of things that Skinner didn’t know. For instance, a lottery … you have a lottery where you get your number by lot and then somebody draws a number by lot? It gets lousy play. You get a lottery where people get to pick their number, get big play. Again, it’s this consistency and commitment thing. People think that if they’ve committed to it, it has to be good. The minute they’ve picked it themselves, it gets an extra validity. After all, they thought it and they acted on it.

Then if you take slot machines, you get bar, bar, lemon. It happens again and again and again. You get all these near misses. Well that’s Deprival Super Reaction Syndrome, and boy do the people who create the machines understand human psychology.

And for the high IQ crowd, they’ve got poker machines where you make choices, so you can play blackjack, so to speak, with the machine. It’s wonderful what we’ve done with our computers to ruin the civilization.

But anyway, this gambling compulsion is a very, very powerful important thing. Look at what’s happening to our country. Every Indian reservation, every river town, and look at the people who are ruined with the aid of their stockbrokers and others.

Again, if you look in the standard textbook of psychology, you’ll find practically nothing on it except maybe one sentence talking about Skinner’s rats. That is not an adequate coverage of the subject.

Bias from liking distortion, including the tendency to especially like oneself, one’s own kind, and one’s own idea structures, and the tendency to be especially susceptible to being mislead by someone liked.

Disliking distortion. Bias from that. The reciprocal of liking distortion and the tendency not to learn appropriately from someone disliked. Well here again, we’ve got hugely powerful tendencies, and if you look at the wars in part of the Harvard Law School as we sit here, you can see that very brilliant people get into this almost pathological behavior, and these are very, very powerful, basic, subconscious, psychological tendencies or at least partly subconscious.

Now let’s get back to B.F. Skinner, man with a hammer syndrome revisited. Why is man with a hammer syndrome always present? Well if you stop to think about it, incentive caused bias. His professional reputation is all tied up with what he knows. He likes himself, and he likes his own ideas, and he’s expressed them to other people, consistency and commitment tendency. I mean you’ve got four or five of these elementary psychological tendencies combining to create this man with a hammer syndrome.

Once you realize that you can’t really buy your thinking down. Partly you can, but largely you can’t in this world. You’ve learned a lesson that’s very useful in life. George Bernard Shaw said, and a character say in The Doctor’s Dilemma, “In the last analysis, every profession is a conspiracy against the laity.” But he didn’t have it quite right because it’s not so much conspiracy as it is a subconscious, psychological tendency.

The guy tells you what is good for him, and he doesn’t recognize that he’s doing anything wrong any more than that doctor did when he was pulling out all those normal gallbladders. He believed that his own idea structures will cure cancer, and he believed that the demons that he’s the guardian against are the biggest demons and the most important ones. And in fact, they may be very small demons compared to the demons that you face. So you’re getting your advice in this world from your paid advisor with this huge load of ghastly bias. And woe to you!

And only two ways to handle it. You can hire your advisor and then just apply a windage factor like I used to do when I was a rifle shooter. I’d just adjust for so many miles an hour wind. Or you can learn the basic elements of your advisor’s trade. You don’t have to learn very much, by the way, because if you learn just a little and you can make him explain why he’s right. And those two tendencies will take part of the warp out of the thinking you’ve tried to hire down.

By and large, it works terribly. I have never seen a management consultant’s report in my long life that didn’t end with the following paragraph: “What this situation really needs is more management consulting.” Never once! I always turn to the last page. Of course Berkshire Hathaway doesn’t hire them, so … I only do this in sort of a lawyer-istic basis. Sometimes I’m in a nonprofit where some idiot hires one.

17. Bias from the non-mathematical nature of the human brain in its natural state as it deals with probabilities employing crude heuristics and is often mislead by mere contrast. The tendency to overweigh conveniently available information and other psychological rooted mis-thinking tendencies on this list when the brain should be using the simple probability mathematics of Fermat and Pascal, applied to all reasonably attainable and correctly weighted items of information that are of value in predicting outcomes. The right way to think is the way Zeckhauser plays Bridge. It’s just that simple.

And your brain doesn’t naturally know how to think the way Zeckhauser knows to play Bridge. Now you notice I put in that availability thing, and there I’m mimicking some very eminent psychologists … Tversky, who raised the idea of availability to a whole heuristic of misjudgment.

You know, they are very substantially right. Ask the Coca-Cola company, which has raised availability to a secular religion, if availability changes behavior. You’ll drink a hell of a lot more Coke if it’s always available. Availability does change behavior and cognition.

Nonetheless, even though I recognize that and applaud Tversky, Kahneman, I don’t like it for my personal system except as part of a greater subsystem, which is you gotta think the way Zeckhauser plays Bridge. It isn’t just the lack of availability that distorts your judgment. All the things on this list distort judgment. And I wanna train myself to mentally run down the list instead of just jumping on availability. So that’s why I state it the way I do.

In a sense, these psychological tendencies make things unavailable ’cause if you quickly jump to one thing and then because you’ve jumped to it, the consistency and commitment tendency makes you lock in, boom, it’s there. Number one.

Or if something is very vivid, which I’m going to come to next, that will really pound in. And the reason that the thing that really matters is now unavailable and what’s extra vivid wins is … the extra vividness creates the unavailability. So I think it’s much better to have a whole list of things that cause you to be less like Zeckhauser than it is just to jump on one factor.

Here, I think we should discuss John Gutfreund. This is a very interesting human example which will be taught in every decent professional school for at least a full generation. Gutfreund has a trusted employee, and it comes to light not through confession but by accident that the trusted employee has lied like hell to the government and manipulated the accounting system and was really the equivalent to forgery. The man immediately says, “I’ve never done it before. I’ll never do it again. It was an isolated example.” Of course, it was obvious that he was trying to help the government as well as himself ’cause he thought the government had been dumb enough to pass a rule that he’d spoken against. And after all, if a government’s not gonna pay attention to a bond trader at Salomon, what kind of a government can it be?

At any rate, and this guy has been part of a little clique that has made way over a billion dollars for Salomon in the very recent past, and it’s a little handful of people. So there are a lot of psychological forces at work. You know the guy’s wife, he’s right in front of you, and there’s human sympathy, and he’s sort of asking for your help, which is the form which encourages reciprocation, and there are all these psychological tendencies are working. Plus the fact he’s part of group that have made a lot of money for you.

At any rate, Gutfreund does not cashier the man, and of course, he had done it before, and he did do it again. Well now you look as though you almost wanted him to do it again or God knows what you look like, but it isn’t good. And that simple decision destroyed John Gutfreund.

It’s so easy to do. Now let’s think it through like the Bridge player, like Zeckhauser. You find an isolated example of a little old lady in the See’s candy company, one of our subsidiaries, getting into the till, and what does she say? “I never did it before. I’ll never do it again. This is gonna ruin my life. Please help me.” And you know her children and her friends, and she’s been around 30 years and standing behind the candy counter with swollen ankles. In your old age, isn’t that glorious a life? And you’re rich and powerful and there she is. “I never did it before, and I will never do it again.”

Well how likely is it that she never did it before? If you’re gonna catch ten embezzlements a year, what are the chances that any one of them, applying what Tversky and Kahneman called baseline information, will be somebody who only did it this once? And the people who have done it before and are gonna do it again, what are they all gonna say?

Well in the history of the See’s candy company, they always say, “I never did it before, and I’m never gonna do it again.” And we cashier them. It would be evil not to because terribly behavior spreads. … You let that stuff … you’ve got social proof, you’ve got incentive caused bias, you got a whole lotta psychological factors that will cause the evil behavior to spread, and pretty soon the whole damn … your place is rotten, the civilization is rotten. It’s not the right way to behave, and …

I will admit that I have … when I knew the wife and children, I have paid severance pay when I fire somebody, for taking a mistress on a extended foreign trip. It’s not the adultery I mind. It’s the embezzlement. But there, I wouldn’t do it where Gutfreund did it, where they’d been cheating somebody else on my behalf. There I think you have to cashier, but if they’re just stealing from you and you get rid of them, I don’t think you need the last ounce of vengeance. In fact, I don’t think you need any vengeance. I don’t think vengeance is much good.

Now we come bias from over-influence by extra vivid evidence. Here’s one … I’m at least $30 million poorer as I sit here giving this little talk because I once bought 300 shares of a stock, and the guy called me back and said, “I got 1500 more.” I said, “Will you hold it for 15 minutes while I think about it?” In CEO of this company, I’ve seen a lot of vivid peculiarities in a long life, but this guy set a world record. I’m talking about the CEO, and I just mis-weighed it. The truth of the matter is his situation was foolproof. He was soon gonna be dead. I turned down the extra 1500 share, and it’s now cost me $30 million, and that’s life in the big city.

It wasn’t something where stock was generally available, and so it’s very easy to mis-weigh the vivid evidence. Gutfreund did that when he looked into the man’s eyes and forgave the colleague.

22. Stress-induced mental changes, small and large, temporary and permanent. Oh no, no no, I’ve skipped one.

Mental confusion caused by information not arrayed in the mind and theory structures creating sound generalizations, developed in response to the question why. Also mis-influence from information that apparently but not really answers the question why. Also failure to obtain deserved influence caused by not properly explaining why.

Well we all know people who’ve flunked, and they try and memorize, and they try and spout back, and they just … doesn’t work. The brain doesn’t work that way. You’ve got to array facts on theory structures answering the question why. If you don’t do that, you cannot handle the world.

Now we get to Feuerstein, who was the general counsel of Salomon when Gutfreund made his big error. And Feuerstein knew better. He told Gutfreund, “You have to report this as a matter of morality and prudent business judgment.” He said, “It’s probably not illegal. There’s probably no legal duty to do it, but you have to do it as a matter of prudent conduct and proper dealing with your main customer.” He said that to Gu-

… and proper dealing with your main customer. He said that to Gutfreund on at least two or three occasions, and he stopped. And, of course, the persuasion failed, and when Gutfreund went down, Feuerstein went with him. It ruined a considerable part of Feuerstein’s life. Well Feuerstein, was a member of the Harvard Law Review, made an elementary psychological mistake. You want to persuade somebody, you really tell them why. And what did we learn in lesson one? Incentives really matter. Vivid evidence really works. He should have told Gutfreund, “You’re likely to ruin your life and disgrace your family and lose your money.” And is Mozer worth this? I know both men. That would’ve worked. So Feuerstein flunked elementary psychology, this very sophisticated, brilliant lawyer. But don’t you do that. It’s not very hard to do, you know, just to remember that “Why?” is terribly important.

Other normal limitations of sensation, memory, cognition and knowledge. Well, I don’t have time for that. Stress-induced mental changes. Here, my favorite example is the great Pavlov. He had all these dogs in cages, which had all been conditioned into changed behaviors, and the great Leningrad flood came, and it just went right up. The dog’s in a cage, and the dog had as much stress as you can imagine a dog ever having. The water receded in time to save some of the dogs, and Pavlov noted that they’d had a total reversal of their conditioned personality. Well, being the great scientist he was, he spent the rest of his life giving nervous breakdowns to dogs, and he learned a hell of a lot that I regard as very interesting. I have never known any Freudian analyst who knew anything about the last work of Pavlov, and I never met a lawyer who understood that what Pavlov found out with those dogs had anything to do with programming, and de-programming, and cults and so forth. …

Then, we’ve got other common mental illnesses and declines, temporary and permanent, including the tendency to lose ability through disuse. Then I’ve got mental and organizational confusion from say-something syndrome. Here, my favorite thing is the bee, a honeybee. A honeybee goes out and finds the nectar, and he comes back, and he does a dance that communicates to the other bees where the nectar is, and they go out and get it. Well, some scientist who was clever, like B.F. Skinner, decided to do an experiment. He put the nectar straight up. Way up. Well, in a natural setting, there is no nectar way the hell straight up, and the poor honeybee doesn’t have a genetic program that is adequate to handle what he now has to communicate.

You’d think the honeybee would come back to the hive and slink into a corner, but he doesn’t. He comes into the hive and does this incoherent dance, and all my life I’ve been dealing with the human equivalent of that honeybee. And it’s a very important part of human organization to set things up so the noise, and the reciprocation and so forth of all these people who have what I call say-something syndrome don’t really affect the decisions.

Now, the time has come to ask two or three questions. This is the most important question in this whole talk. What happens when these standard psychological tendencies combine? What happens when the situation, or the artful manipulation of man, causes several of these tendencies to operate on a person toward the same end at the same time? The clear answer is the combination greatly increases power to change behavior, compared to the power of merely one tendency acting alone. Examples are: Tupperware parties. Tupperware has now made billions of dollars out of a few manipulative psychological tricks. It was so schlock that directors of Justin Dart’s company resigned when he crammed it down his board’s throat. And he was totally right, by the way, judged by economic outcomes.

Moonie conversion methods. Boy, do they work. He just combines four or five of these things together. The system of Alcoholics Anonymous. A 50% no-drinking rate outcome when everything else fails? It’s a very clever system that uses four or five psychological systems at once toward, I might say, a very good end. The Milgrim experiment. See, Milgrim … It’s been widely interpreted as mere obedience, but the truth of the matter is that the experimenter who got the students to give the heavy shocks in Milgrim, he explained why. It was a false explanation. “We need this to look for scientific truth,” and so on. That greatly changed the behavior of the people. And number two, he worked them up, tiny shock, a little larger, a little larger. So commitment and consistency tendency and the contrast principle were both working in favor of this behavior. So again, it’s four different psychological tendencies.

When you get these lollapalooza effects you will almost always find four or five of these things working together. When I was young, there was a whodunit hero who always said cherchez la femme. What you should search for in life is the combination, because the combination is likely to do you in. Or, if you’re the inventor of Tupperware parties, it’s likely to make you enormously rich if you can stand shaving when you do it. One of my favorite cases is the McDonald-Douglas airliner evacuation disaster. The government requires that airliners pass a bunch of tests. One of them is evacuation. Get everybody out, I think it’s 90 seconds or something like that. It’s some short period of time. The government has rules, make it very realistic, so on, and so on. You can’t select nothing but 20-year-old athletes to evacuate your airline.

So McDonald-Douglas schedules one of these things in a hangar, and they make the hangar dark. The concrete floor is 25 feet down, and they got these little rubber chutes, and they got all these old people. They ring the bell, and they all rush out. In the morning when the first test is done, they create, I don’t know, 20 terrible injuries. People go off to hospitals. Of course, they scheduled another one for the afternoon. By the way, they didn’t meet the time schedule either, in addition to causing all the injuries. So what do they do? They do it again in the afternoon. Now, they create 20 more injuries and one case of a severed spinal column with permanent, unfixable paralysis. They’re engineers. These are brilliant people. This is thought over through in a big bureaucracy. … Authorities told you to do it. He told you to make it realistic. You’ve decided to do it. You’d decided to do it twice. Incentive-caused bias. If you pass, you save a lot of money. You’ve got to jump this hurdle before you can sell your new airliner.

Again, three, four, five of these things work together, and it turns human brains into mush. And maybe you think this doesn’t happen in picking investments. If so, you’re living in a different world than I am. Finally, the open-outcry auction. Well the open-outcry auction is just made to turn the brain into mush. You get social proof. The other guy is bidding. You get reciprocation tendency. You get deprival super-reaction syndrome. The thing is going away. I mean, it just absolutely is designed to manipulate people into idiotic behavior.

Finally, the institution of the board of directors of a major human, American company. Well, the top guy is sitting there. He’s an authority figure. He’s doing asinine things. You look around the board, nobody else is objecting. Social proof, it’s okay. Reciprocation tendency, he’s raising the director’s fees every year. He’s flying you around in the corporate airplane to look at interesting plants, or whatever in hell they do, and you go and you really get extreme dysfunction as a corrective decision-making body in the typical American board of directors. They only act, again the power of incentives, they only act when it gets so bad that it starts making them look foolish, or threatening legal liability to them. That’s Munger’s rule. I mean, there are occasional things that don’t follow Munger’s rule, but by and large the board of directors is a very ineffective corrector if the top guy is a little nuts, which, of course, frequently happens.

The second question. Isn’t this list of standard psychological tendencies improperly tautological compared with the system of Euclid? That is, aren’t there overlaps, and can’t some items on the list be derived from combinations of other items? The answer to that is, plainly, yes. Three. What good, in the practical world, is the thought system indicated by the list? Isn’t practical benefit prevented because these psychological tendencies are programmed into the human mind by broad evolution so we can’t get rid of them? Broad evolution, I mean the combination of genetic and cultural evolution, but mostly genetic. Well, the answer is the tendencies are partly good and, indeed, probably much more good than bad, otherwise they wouldn’t be there. By and large these rules of thumb, they work pretty well for man given his limited mental capacity, and that’s why they were programmed in by broad evolution.

At any rate, they can’t be simply washed out automatically and they shouldn’t be. Nonetheless, the psychological thought system described is very useful in spreading wisdom and good conduct when one understands it and uses it constructively. Here are some examples. Karl Braun’s communication practices. He designed oil refineries with spectacular skill and integrity. He had a very simple rule. Remember I said, “Why is important?” You got fired in the Braun company. You had to have five Ws. You had to tell who, what you wanted to do, where and when, and you had to tell him why. If you wrote a communication and left out the why, you got fired, because Braun knew it’s complicated building an oil refinery. It can blow up. All kinds of things happen, and he knew that his communication system worked better if you always told him why. That’s a simple discipline, and boy does it work.

Two, the use of simulators in pilot training. Here, again, abilities attenuate with disuse. Well, the simulator is God’s gift because you can keep them fresh. Three, the system of Alcoholics Anonymous. That’s certainly a constructive use of somebody understanding psychological tendencies. I think they just blundered into it, as a matter of fact, so you can regard it as kind of an evolutionary outcome. But, just because they blundered into it doesn’t mean you can’t invent its equivalent when you need it for a good purpose. Clinical training in medical schools. Here’s a profoundly correct way of understanding psychology. The standard practice is watch one, do one, teach one. Boy, does that pound in what you want pounded in. Again, the consistency and commitment tendency. That is a profoundly correct way to teach clinical medicine.

The rules of the U.S. Constitutional Convention, totally secret, no vote until the final vote, then just one vote on the whole Constitution. Very clever psychological rules, and if they had a different procedure, everybody would have been pushed into a corner by his own pronouncements and his own oratory and his own … and no recorded votes until the last one. And they got it through by a whisker with those wise rules. We wouldn’t have had the Constitution if our forefathers hadn’t been so psychologically acute, and look at the crowd we got now.

Six, the use of granny’s rule. I love this. One of the psychologists who works with the center gets paid a fortune running around America, and he teaches executives to manipulate themselves. Now granny’s rule is you don’t get the ice cream unless you eat your carrots. Well, granny was a very wise woman. That is a very good system. So this guy, a very eminent psychologist, he runs around the country telling executives to organize their day so they force themselves to do what’s unpleasant and important by doing that first, and then rewarding themselves with something they really like doing. He is profoundly correct.

Seven, the Harvard Business School’s emphasis on decision trees. When I was young and foolish, I used to laugh at the Harvard Business School. I said, “They’re teaching 28-year-old people that high school algebra works in real life?” We’re talking about elementary probability. But later, I wised up and I realized that it was very important that they do that, and better late than never. Eight, the use of post-mortems at Johnson & Johnson. At most corporations, if you make an acquisition and it works out to be a disaster, all the paperwork and presentations that caused the dumb acquisition to be made are quickly forgotten. You’ve got denial, you’ve got everything in the world. You’ve got Pavlovian association tendency. Nobody even wants to even be associated with the damned thing, or even mention it. At Johnson & Johnson, they make everybody revisit their old acquisitions and wade through the presentations. That is a very smart thing to do. By the way, I do the same thing routinely.

Nine, the great example of Charles Darwin is he avoided confirmation bias. Darwin probably changed my life because I’m a biography nut, and when I found out the way he always paid extra attention to the disconfirming evidence, and all these little psychological tricks, I also found out that he wasn’t very smart by the ordinary standards of human acuity, yet there he is buried in Westminster Abbey. That’s not where I’m going, I’ll tell you. And I said, “My God, here’s a guy that, by all objective evidence, is not nearly as smart as I am and he’s in Westminster Abbey? He must have tricks I should learn.” And I started wearing little hair shirts like Darwin to try and train myself out of these subconscious psychological tendencies that cause so many errors. It didn’t work perfectly, as you can tell from listening to this talk, but it would’ve been even worse if I hadn’t done what I did. And you can know these psychological tendencies and avoid being the patsy of all the people that are trying to manipulate you to your disadvantage, like Sam Walton. Sam Walton won’t let a purchasing agent take a handkerchief from a salesman. He knows how powerful the subconscious reciprocation tendency is. That is a profoundly correct way for Sam Walton to behave.

Then, there’s the Warren Buffett rule for open-outcry auctions: don’t go. We don’t go to the closed-bid auctions too because they … that’s a counter-productive way to do things ordinarily for a different reason, which Zeckhauser would understand. Four, what special knowledge problems lie buried in the thought system indicated by the list? Well, one is paradox. Now, we’re talking about a type of human wisdom that the more people learn about it, the more attenuated the wisdom gets. That’s an intrinsically paradoxical kind of wisdom. But, we have paradox in mathematics and we don’t give up mathematics. I say damn the paradox. This stuff is wonderfully useful.

By the way, the granny’s rule, when you apply it to yourself, is sort of a paradox in a paradox. The manipulation still works even though you know you’re doing it. I’ve seen that done by one person to another. I drew this beautiful woman as my dinner partner a few years ago, and I’d never seen her before. Well, she’s married to prominent Angelino. She sat down next to me, and she turned her beautiful face up and she said, “Charlie,” she said, “What one word accounts for your remarkable success in life?” Now, I knew I was being manipulated and that she’d done this before, and I just loved it. I never see this woman without a little lift in my spirits. By the way, I told her I was rational. You’ll have to judge yourself whether that’s true. I may be demonstrating some psychological tendency I hadn’t planned on demonstrating.

How should the best parts of psychology and economics interrelate in an enlightened economist’s mind? Two views. That’s the thermodynamics model. You know, you can’t derive thermodynamics from plutonium, gravity, and laws of mechanics, even though it’s a lot of little particles interacting. And here is this wonderful truth that you can sort of develop on your own, which is thermodynamics. Some economists, and I think Milton Friedman is in this group, but I may be wrong on that, sort of like the thermodynamics model. I think Milton Friedman, who has a Nobel prize, is probably a little wrong on that. I think the thermodynamics analogy is over-strained. I think knowledge from these different soft sciences have to be reconciled to eliminate conflict. After all, there’s nothing in thermodynamics that’s inconsistent with Newtonian mechanics and gravity, and I think that some of these economic theories are not totally consistent with other knowledge, and they have to be bent. And I think that these behavioral economics, or economists, are probably the ones that are bending them in the correct direction.

Now, my prediction is when the economists take a little psychology into account that the reconciliation will be quite endurable. Here, my model is the procession of the equinoxes. The world would be simpler for a long-term climatologist if the angle of the axis of the Earth’s rotation, compared to the plane of the Euclyptic, were absolutely fixed. But it isn’t fixed. Over every 40,000 years or so there’s this little wobble, and that has pronounced long-term effects. Well, in many cases, what psychology is going to add is just a little wobble, and it will be endurable. Here, I quote another hero of mine, who of course is Einstein, where he said, “The Lord is subtle, but not malicious.” And I don’t think it’s going to be that hard to bend economics a little to accommodate what’s right in psychology. The final question is if the thought system indicated by this list of psychological tendencies has great value not widely recognized and employed, what should the educational system do about it? I am not going to answer that one now. I like leaving a little mystery.

[rynnvstill]

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year family and friends! We’ve made it to 2018!!! 

I’m so happy and thankful to the Lord to see another year and with new years comes renewed refocus and new goals to achieve. Before I get into the gaze ahead for 2018, I would like to reflect on 2017.

I mentioned on my FB that 2017 wasn’t my best year for me and my family. There were some ups but mostly downs.  It wasn’t a bad year but it was an extremely hard one. There were things I faced in 2017 that made me plant my face in my hands and cry “God, why me?!” Thankfully God was with me all the way even though many times I felt very alone. Everything was challenged. 

Mommy Blues

Oct 6th 2016 I became a new mommy to a beautiful baby girl. The beginning was really rough. I had a C section and could barely hold Naomi because I was in so much pain. I had a hard time using the bathroom ( which I found out later was normal). Trying to recover from my C section and learning how to take care of newborn was very challenging and it took a tole on me. Naomi also had acid reflux in the beginning and a stomach virus around four or five months. On top of all that, there was a 50% chance that I’d pass my hereditary pain epilepsy to her, so we had to constantly in and out of  doctors for her.

 It turns out that she does have the same pain condition as me but we’re working with the neurologist to get her treated. Once we figured out she had the condition, things got a little bit easier because we knew how to care for her to prevent her from having a pain episode.  eventually, the acid reflux went away as well. 

After my 8 weeks of maternity leave, I was cleared to go back to work and I was not happy about that. I wanted noting more than to be home with my baby but instead I had to have other women watch her. I hated the idea of sitting at work some days doing nothing while someone else was playing with her and caring for her. Between feeling guilty about passing the pain condition to her and now leaving her with other women to watch her, I develop postpartum depression. 

I needed a new job

Being a working mom became easier around the time Naomi was 8 months (I know...it took me a while to adjust) but from time to time (mainly when I had nothing to do) I felt guilty about leaving her with other women.  I didn’t get along with one of the women I worked with and I was paying a very high rate to park at my job. The lack of opportunity and abusive treatment prompt me to start looking for another job.

When I started working at the law firm back in 2015, I was very excited. I felt like it was a step in the direction of a real career. I was hoping to learn and move up. That was not the case at all. From day one the lady who “trained me” pretty much set me up to fail. I really felt like she was trying to get me fired. I was told she was my supervisor but later she expressed to me that she wasn’t my supervisor. This confused and upset me because she had a lot of say in my review and work performance. She never had anything nice to say about me and she would let everyone know her frustrations with me. She half trained me, would get frustrated if I tried to ask her a question, would talk about me to other people in the finance department and complain about me to my supervisor. She never told me when i made a mistake; she would just fix it and tell me I made a mistake. I don’t know why this lady gave me such a hard time to this day and i’ll never know but that’s ok. 

Don’t get me wrong, there were blessing from the job. My supervisor was very helpful with my doctors appointments and setting me up for my maternity leave. She even threw me a baby shower. However, the good always came with the a bad moment at this job. The woman who “trained me”  treated me pretty bad when I was pregnant. She didn’t come to my baby shower  or sign the card that was  given to me ( which was fine, I didn’t really care about that). But when  I came back from maternity leave, she thought it was a good idea to give me dirty old baby socks, a dry rotted binky, and used teething toys from her 11 year old granddaughter. I’m 28 years old so I don’t have time for drama, keep it to yourself.

 Enduring harassing situations like my lovely co-workers baby gift, on top of stressing over my expensive parking situation ($25 a day), it took a tole on my health.

Sick Days

Between Naomi and I we have had our share of doctors visits over the course of 2017. For me, it started back in March of 2017. I would get this horrible pain under my right rib around the time of my period. I notice it would start when I would take the white pills in my birth control pack. After I had to be rushed to the hospital in July when the pain got worse, the ER doctor swore that my birth control was not the cause of the pain and that my gallbladder needed to be removed.  Before I was going to  let Chestnut Hill hospital cut me open, I wanted to get a second opinion from the hospital i had Naomi at so, off to Lankenu I went. 

They conducted two test on my gallbladder and concluded that my gallbladder was functioning find. I was advised to see a GI doctor. At this point, I thought I was dying but my GI doctor told me I wasn’t dying, that I was just very constipated. Relieved (no pun intended), she explained to me that the pain I was feeling was trapped gas and stool trying to get around a corn of my GI track (interesting but how did I get so constipated?). She told me that after having deep abdominal surgery (C section), extra hormones (from the birth control), period constipation and add everyday stress (taking care of a baby, working, bills, ect.) that’s how you get extremely constipated. 

She made me do a cleanse but it didn’t work. I conducted a test of my own in October, my prescription for my birth control expired and I didn’t renew it. I wanted to see if I was right all along. If I’d stop taking it, would the pain go away. You won't believe it but that pain has not come back and I'm regular again. (TMI I know but it’s important to the story.)

Still looking for work

At this point I'm depressed because I want nothing more than to leave the law firm. Many so I don’t have to pay for parking but also because the lady I worked with was so abusive towards me in a passive aggressive sort of way too (worse case). She went from ignoring me to pushing work on my when my other co worker went out on disability. 

I was aggressively looking for another job. I had two interviews with a real estate company in Wayne PA but to this day I’m still waiting to hear back from them to know if I got the job or not. I’m pretty sure they went with someone else (I hope) but an email of decline would’ve been nice ( I think it was because I’m brown). 

I laid myself at the feet of the Lord and was honest with Him. I told Him I couldn’t work at this law firm anymore. I could keep paying for parking because it wasn’t helpful to my family. I was honest with him about the lady I worked with, that I had a hard time not hating her. I was just raw before the Lord and honest. Just like David, He heard my cry. Another real estate company reached out to me for AR position in Bryn Mawr, Pa. I had two interview with them (which made me nervous because of the last place) but this time they made an offer and I said yes!

Yes, ladies and gents, I started a new job. I don’t have to pay for parking and so it’s way better than the law firm. 

Closing the book on 2017

There were other crazy events that happened in 2017 but, this blog is getting pretty long and I want to talk about somethings I’m praying God will help me with for 2018. There were great memories of 2017 that I enjoyed very much but like I said the hard times were rough. I thank God he helped me thorough and one of the greatest lessons I’ve learn from 2017 is to trust in the Lord, rest in His grace, and bare it all to Him. He’s truly my help.

Now on to 2018

I’m totally excited about 2018. It started on NYE. I had one of the best NYEs I’ve had in a while. Charlie and I stayed home. After we put Naomi to bed, we played video games until it got closer to midnight, we had some sparkling wine, we counted down to midnight, we cheers, and had our midnight kiss. It was at that moment that I felt hopeful. Like I could feel the Lord wrap his arms around me and His peace filled my heart. It’s going to be a good year. 

Goals

I usually don’t make goals because I feel like anymore, it’s hard to keep them but this year I want to make goals. With these goal, it’s not just for 2018. These goal will be started in 2018 but will continue to grow and develop as the years progress Lord willing. Here are my goals starting 2018:

Art- yes, it’s time to get back into it but up a notch. I’ve purchased artist paints, i’ve been studying art online and practicing and now it’s time to get it done. I have a list of painting and pieces I want to get started this year and I will have an art show once i get a good portion of my work done. I would like to get some prints made and get my art on T-shirts and cups. I would like to start a website where my art is sold and also blog about them on here.

School- I’ve finally decided to go back to school but I’m keeping my major a secret until I finalize where i’m going. It will be a Masters degree. I’m really excited for what the Lord will do through me with this major. I’ll keep you posted with this

Blog- last but not least, I will be blogging again but different. I will write from time to time but I also want to get back into making videos. I will be blogging about spiritual books i’m reading, podcast i’m listening to, my read through the Bible, art pieces i’m working on and how they relate to the Word, I’ll talk about fictional books i’m reading and some funny family stories. 

Conclusion

Guy, I’m so excited for 2018! Keep me in your prayers and I’ll keep you in mine. Until next time, may the Lord keep you in His perfect peace, in Jesus Name, Amen! 

[ericawhitakerrr-blog]

at the beginning...

As I sat and thought about what I would write about, I realized so much of that was a time I have tried everything in my power to forget. If you have ever suffered the loss of a child you know how I feel, if you haven't you cannot possibly fathom it. Your body's natural defense when something truly awful happens is to block it out, and while it's true that I have large gaps in my memory from that time period. I realized I needed to sit down and remember, remember what Tomas meant to me. I sat down and wanted to write about what it meant to lose a baby, but the page stayed blank until suddenly it all came in a rush. Most women say there is no greater pain than childbirth, unfortunately there is, the pain of burying your child. People would say how brave and strong I was, our family was, but the truth is... I was scared, we all were terrified. Sometimes I didn't know if I would even survive this journey I was forced to walk. We survived the trauma, the shock, the agony of those first couple of weeks. Those long nights where I thought I might die from grief. The greatest loss a human can experience is the loss of a child, it destroys and demolishes you. But no one really has a choice to survive the grief, it's not optional, especially with 2 small girls at home. Someone asks me how I am and I simply say "I'm fine, thanks". I say this to you, because I simply cannot describe the pain. 6 months. It's been 6 months since our journey began. 6 months since that fateful Monday in November....There is nothing harder than sitting here during dialysis browsing social media and seeing little baby faces as they are welcomed into the world by their family. I'm so happy for all my friends having babies, gosh I'm so happy for them, but it's hurts, and it stings, and it sucks, to think sitting at home in his little spot on the top of a glass shelf... Sits a tiny urn. This wasn't supposed to happen, this wasn't the way things were meant to be. I write this to share and hopefully help someone else with my story. You aren't alone... I was a healthy, active, normal 30yr old in the prime of my life. I have 2 beautiful girls, (7 and 3), and a wonderful husband. We were expecting our third child, a son, in December of 2016. I was extremely high risk and hospitalized several times over the course of the pregnancy, but that only made me closer with Tomas Isaac, the name I agonized over for weeks wanting it to be perfect. A unexpected bonus was weekly ultrasounds so I would see his little face develop week by week. I couldn't wait to meet him, being a girl mom I was so excited to shift to boy territory. From lace, ribbons, dance class, and pink to the trucks, legos, sports, and of course a love of the Denver Broncos. On November 14th 2016, the unthinkable happened... I went in to the hospital at 36 weeks due to a lack of fetal movement over the weekend. When I awoke Monday morning and realized I had slept through the night I knew in my soul something was terribly wrong. Nothing could have prepared me for what happened next. When I got to the hospital they attempted to find his heartbeat with a doppler and eventually ultrasound and I was told there was no heartbeat. When something like that is told to you, the floor opens and you fall. At that point they told me I would need to be induced to deliver him. I was also given something to sedate me as I was understandably hysterical. I had arrived at the hospital alone because my husband was so sure that I was imagining things and he never truly felt there was any danger. Because of the sedation I actually didn't wake up until almost 2 weeks later and learned what had happened during that time. They had attempted the induction and Tomas's hand had come out first, in trying to reposition him my uterus had ruptured and I started bleeding out. I had to undergo an emergency c section and hysterectomy while they tried to get the bleeding under control. I had to receive 14 units of blood and the blood loss as well as fluid around my heart triggered me coding for 6 minutes. They were finally able to revive me after the 6 minutes but I had lost my kidney function at that point. I was deemed to high of a risk at this point for me to continue to stay at my local hospital's ICU and I was transferred still on the ventilator and with the feeding tube to a larger hospital in Charlotte NC to their ICU for more serious care. Which is where I woke up, with the tube down my throat and no clue what had happened. I had to have Brian and various nurses explain to me, heartbreakingly multiple times that I had lost my baby and the majority of the function of my body. I have no memory of those several weeks, I've tried so hard and failed to remember anything. The last thing I remember is the doctor telling my Tomas had no heartbeat and the next thing I remember I woke up at the hospital in Charlotte. This is my greatest heartbreak. I was never able to hold my son, I never got to touch his cheeks, I never got to kiss his sweet face. I fully believe in my soul, that when I coded I said goodbye to my baby boy. He knew my girls needed me. He sent me back to finish my work as a mother. I know he sent me back because given the choice alone I don't know that I would have chosen to come back. I was broken and there is no pain like that of the pain of losing a child. I was eventually able to come off the ventilator and discharged about 6 weeks after everything happened. I ended up back in the hospital several days later with gallstones and because I wasn't strong enough for surgery a JP drain was put in, in place of removing my gallbladder. I slowly resumed my normal life or what was left of it. After several weeks I became so sick from my gallbladder that we had to find a hospital who was willing to do surgery to remove it. My current surgeon in Charlotte was hesitant with my past history on the operating table. In addition to that, during one of my weekly Mon/Weds/Fri dialysis sessions I ended up having chest pains only to be rushed to the hospital and a blood clot found in my neck. We finally were able to locate a hospital who was willing to do the surgery on both my gallbladder and remove one dialysis catheter to put another one in my chest. The goal was at that point that I would be free a clear from the hospital. Sadly that was not the case for very long. During another routine dialysis treatment I had similar symptoms from when I had the blood clot before. I was rushed off to the hospital where they found another blood clot in my chest directly above my heart. I was treated for that and there were some very positive steps being made in my recovery process. It's been a long road and I have a even longer road ahead of me especially with me being a mom to two daughters who still don't fully understand the loss of our baby as well as the loss of my health. I'm still struggling, with another blood clot in my lung and I just got sick with bronchitis/pneumonia a couple weeks ago, but I know my road ahead will be easier with time. At this point my kidneys are still not functioning, we have waited, hoped, and prayed but unfortunately it doesn't look like that will work out for my own kidneys to start working again. I was placed on the kidney transplant list and the wait period is about 3 years at this point. My best hope for a match is a family member, but since I'm adopted that option is non existent. I have had several people offer to get tested, we should have all the details in the next couple of weeks and then we can start to make plans for anyone who might be willing to donate. I've also had some severe hair loss in the last couple of weeks, more doctor visits to figure out what is going on there. My body took quite a beating over the last 6 months, but I'm not quitting, I'm not slowing down. Most people don't go to bed and expect to spend the next 6 months battling for any sense of normalcy. The permanent scars on my body a constant reminder of what I went through, what I'm still going through. The bruises and needle marks from the IVs cover my arms and hands, the dialysis port in my chest, the 3 scars on my wrist from unknown causes and then of course the biggest one of all.... Perhaps my biggest reminder, the distinct square of a defibrillator paddle forever burned on me. 6 minutes I have no memory of, 6 terrifying minutes for my family, thankfully, 6 minutes my daughters are blissfully unaware of. It's a good time to remember. Remember what I've been through. Remember how blessed I am to be here. Remember the fight to get to where I am today. I did not just stop being pregnant. I didn't lose a pregnancy. My baby died. That one sentence, 3 words that rocked me to the core. I will never forget the words of the doctor "I'm sorry, I don't see a heartbeat". It's easy to say "God needed another angel", but He didn't ask you for yours. My greatest regret is that I never got to hold my sweet baby. My little playmate, my beautiful little boy. I would have loved to cuddle him and tell him I love him. I will always love him. There will forever be a piece of me missing. I read a saying; when a spouse dies, it's called being widowed, a child who loses parents is called an orphan, but there is no word for parents who lose a child. That's how truly awful the loss is. I was so lucky that I was able to carry Tomas for 9 whole months, to hold him, and while I was not able to say goodbye in this world, I know he knew of my love for him. I believe he sent me back, when I coded I believe I held my son, I told him of my love, and we said our goodbyes. To live is a gift, and I will live my life every day thanking God I was so blessed to have Tomas. He is and always will be, the little love of my life, my angel baby, my beautiful, precious baby boy. If I can help even one mother with my story of loss and perseverance then it is all worth it. That horrible day in November became a part of me; it was a turning point, a great threshold. Our story as a family is stilling growing, we have so much left to tell, so much left to live. Very few families can go through what we went through and survive, and function. Somehow, someway, we still are. That's not to say we don't struggle, there are days I struggle to get out bed, to move on. There are days I cry for hours until I'm so exhausted I can't breathe. The pain we have learned to live with is unthinkable. But we haven't been knocked down yet. This is my story, this is my families story, and it is far from over. 

[xtalmay]

I once was married with children

Once upon a time in a kingdom far, far away, there lived a simple girl with a lonely heart. Ha ha, jk. But seriously... I was once a pretty boring person. I had dreams and hopes, like everyone else. I wanted a man and a house and kids. I also wanted a career and a degree. But I wanted to be a stay at home mom also...... I wanted a lot. Lol. So anyway, when I was 18, I worked for Walmart. A good one too. It was busy, customer service oriented, and clean. It was the first supercenter in our area. Pretty exciting. I loved it. I was able to afford to move out of my parents house and into a rental with a friend from work. After a couple months, I think about three, I met a guy from work. At this point, I had not had a serious boyfriend... Not really. But anyway, this guy worked at Walmart as a unloader. I worked in layaway. So we got to see each other pretty often. I was super shy. Like super shy. I also hated and still do hate, PDA. Anyway, this guy's name is Jared. We started seeing eachother in August of 2003. I moved in with him in October of 2003. He also asked me to marry him in November of 2003. I was in love. He loved me. I didn't really know what it was about him that I loved,but I did. In March of 2004, we moved to NM from WA. Furthest I had ever been from my dad or any of my family before. It was rough. I was homesick a lot. But my parents flew me up to visit often. It was pretty cool. He never went with me. When I was 22, so 2006, I missed my family. I wanted to move back home. We didn't have anything going for us in NM. I was starting to hate the desert. We were broke. I couldn't find a job I loved. I missed the rainforest. He didn't understand. So I talked to my dad, and like a thief in the night I ran away from Jared back to my dad's house. Probably could have done that better...... But I didn't know how to leave. It was a rough time. But I missed him so much. All I wanted to do was go back. To him. Maybe I was infatuated. I don't know. But I went back. After only two weeks. When I turned 23,i wanted to try for a baby. I thought (stupidly) that he would change. Maybe care for someone other than himself for once. Maybe he would be able to put his child before himself. Boy, was I wrong. The summer of 2008, I gave birth to our daughter, Jade. 4 days later we got married. I really wasn't happy except with jade. She was my world. I was growing more and more irritated with the selfishness of him. He drove me nuts. I loved him, but I wasn't in love with him anymore. Little things. Like overdrawing our account every paycheck. He had to have games for his Xbox the second they came out. He couldn't wait till payday. I tried to get our finances in order. I couldn't. He always thought he knew better. We played a game I called the 'payday loan shuffle' would borrow from one to pay another. It was terrible. I hated it. I was constantly stressed out. Cried a lot because I felt helpless. When jade was 2 months old, I went to WA to visit and introduce jade to my family. While there, I had to have surgery to remove my gallbladder. What was supposed to be 2 weeks, turned into 5 weeks. While in the hospital, he would call me and constantly talk about how he missed me. And what was he going to do without me. And when was I coming home.... Not once did he really ask how I felt. Or if I was doing alright. Never cared about jade or myself. Just himself. It was all about him. I loved being up there, but in a way I missed Jared. Just enough. So when I got home, I asked him if we could move back. I missed my dad and my family. I wanted my kid to go to a good school. And I wanted to get out of the desert. He promised in 5 years we could go back. So I held onto that hope. And a couple years later my son was born. I didn't get to visit WA much anymore because plane tickets are expensive and I would have to travel with two kids now. I didn't go up for a couple years. I still missed my family. A lot. I tried being a more attentive partner. I was restless so I would ask to go on walks in the neighborhood. He would refuse. I asked to go out in the desert behind out house and lay in the back of the truck and stargaze. He would say yeah in a little while...... We never went. I was getting more and more depressed. When my kids were 4 and 2,i remember making Pancakes, and one of the drippings looked like a heart. And I remember thinking to myself that jade would like it..... But I just stared at it. No happiness was left. I was sad, depressed and wanted to cry. I decided that things needed to change. I'm not and never have been suicidal. Just sad. And depressed. So in January of 2013, I decided to get my own bank account and start a savings account. I had to do something to have a little control over our finances. Even if I was the only one paying bills, at least I knew they would be paid. Jared hated it. He hated our money being separate. He couldn't use my money anymore. His account was still overdrawn every payday. Mine never was. It was crazy how I had felt like it was my fault we never had money..... I guess it wasn't me after all. I was starting to feel a little better. I didn't have any loans in my name. I didn't have an overdrawn account. I was actually putting small amounts into savings. I was also able to convince him to have our tax return deposited into my account, since I wasn't overdrawn. Not sure how, but it worked. I was able to help him pay off loans. We got our bills paid up. It was a nice feeling. But then he was constantly asking me for money. Constantly. It was annoying. But I didn't give him any. I would pay bills. I was tapped out but the lights didn't get turned off. We had running water. The house was current. It was worth it. So I got a gym membership to try and get my life going again. A couple of friends from work had joined the same gym as me. Waylon and Kelly. They were cool guys and I enjoyed hanging out with them. So I mentioned to waylon one day at work that I was going to that gym and he said he and Kelly were too, and that I should join them. I agreed. It would be safer to go at night with two guys than by myself. Over the course of 3 months, I started getting back into shape, after ten years of being over weight. Ten years. Jeez. I finally was down 2 pants sizes. And almost 30lbs. It was awesome. I also became close friends with Waylon. We played online together a couple times. He fixed my computer for me. Just a really cool friend. After the gym we would go grab food, the three of us. And then hang out in the parking lot and chat for a while. It was fun. I felt like I had a life. Small as it was. But I looked forward to the time we spent together. I have always got along better with guys than girls. No drama. Lol. I was starting to be more independent and I stopped reporting to Jared. In April 2013, I decided to tell Jared I wanted a divorce. I had talked to my dad. I had talked to a couple really close friends. I was so incredibly unhappy. Once I made the decision to divorce him, I felt so much better. I felt like the pieces were falling into place. In the end of April, I told him. Officially. I didn't have anywhere to go. I couldn't leave my children. They weren't in school yet, so I didn't have to deal with that. But I also didn't make enough money to move out. So I moved into my son, Rileys room. He was a baby still so I had the room mostly to myself. One day in May, I was sitting on the couch and Jared says he wants to take the kids to the park. He had never done that with me before, I always took them myself. He never went for a walk with me. He never went stargazing with me. Never anything, unless it was beneficial to him in some way. Ever. He asked if I wanted to join him, and I looked right at him with a straight face, and told him no. I didn't want to go. He got super sulky. He then loaded up the kids and left. The second he drove away, I ran to my room, packed my gym bag with gym clothes and a couple outfits, and my travel bag of toiletries. I then jumped in the car and took off. I called my dad. I text a friend. I called Waylon. I didn't have anywhere to go. I just had to get out. I ended up at waylon's house. It was the last person I called and he answered. I felt liberated. I knew from that moment on, my life would be different. I knew there were better men in the world. I didn't know if Waylon and I would even work out. But I knew we were friends and we both needed a place to live. So we went and got an apartment together. We got a three bedroom apartment. We figured if he and I didn't work out, I could move in with my daughter in her room, and it wouldn't be a big deal. He agreed. We are both pretty level headed people. So that summer, I filed for divorce. I packed me and my kids lives up and moved into the apartment with Waylon. My kids were in Colorado visiting family and Jared had gone up there too. He was trying to figure things out. He kept thinking there was hope. Boy was he wrong. He came back with the kids. I went to the house and got them. And since then they have not lived with with their dad. After 3 months he got his new girlfriend pregnant. And then married her. They fought. A lot. Broke up. A lot. Got back together. A lot. It was sad. Unstable. Weird. But whatever. His life. He started off taking the kids every week. Then he slowly started backing off. Little by little. Over time it went from every week to every other week to now he takes them for about four hours every other week. That's it. For someone who loves his kids. And misses them. And wants to see them..... He sure never tries to see them... After his third child was born, he took three months off of work. During the summer. He never asked for the kids. He never even took them for extra time. He never even asked. Then another time he took a week off and never asked for them. Then he asked me if he could pick them up and take them for a whole week to the lake. I told him yes. And two days before he was supposed to take them, he canceled. I don't know the circumstances. I don't know anything. But he didn't take them and they were devastated. He stopped asking for time. He didn't take them for a month at a time. It was getting crazy. But the kids love Waylon. He is their dad. He's been here. He's raised them. He takes them to the park. He buys them things. He loves them as if they were his. He's a great man. What's frustrating is that jade is now 8.5 and she is a smart kid. She came home from visiting him this week in tears. She misses him and wants to stay the night at his house. I told him no because it's a school night. As mom, it's my duty to keep them in school. I have to. It's the law. So I sat her down and tried to ask her questions. Me: jade I need you to understand something for me. Jade: what? Me: it isn't me keeping you from your dad. You know that right? Jade:... Me: did he take you last week? Jade: no Me: did he take you the week before? Jade: no. Me: see? It isn't me keeping you from him. He doesn't come and get you. He doesn't ask to visit. He doesn't do anything. So, this isn't me. I'm not telling him no. He has had all sorts of time to spend with you. He has weekends. He has holidays. He has time. He doesn't take it. Do you understand? Jade: Yeah. Then she continued to cry dramatically. I don't think she understood. It's frustrating. I know she will understand one day. But I worry that she will be too much like me and believe his hogwash about hope. He will always make her feel inadequate. Like she doesn't try hard enough. And it will always be her fault. And that worries me tremendously. So I have to constantly try and comfort her. He pretty much ignores Riley, so that won't be so hard. But Riley only likes him sometimes. Mental abuse is still abuse. I'm confident in my decision to leave him and the proof is in the way our lives have gone since. I'm doing great, Waylon and I are fabulous. We have great jobs. We have a stable home environment. We are not crazy broke, but we are not crazy rich either. Jared has struggled. He has been in and out of relationships. He's filed bankruptcy. He owes the irs for back taxes. He's broke. He has a new girlfriend that seems pretty cool. But his life is still weird. I'm so glad I do not have to live like that anymore. I'm glad I ran away from home that day in May.

[cosmosogler]

second night of very little sleep. it had a dramatically more severe effect on my mood today than it did yesterday.

my dreams were choppy, distracted by non-sequiturs and questions i kept carrying between “scenes” as it were. around 7, i think, i woke up, and when i went back to sleep i was standing near the same people i’d been dreaming about and i asked them about something that happened in the previous dream that didn’t make sense but they didn’t know what i was talking about, as i had just arrived. it got frustrating REALLY fast.

at least they were friendly, before i lost track of them and found a bunch of assholes instead.

i was so sweaty from the lack of ventilation in the living room when i woke up that i was almost stuck to the couch through the sheet i was sleeping on. it might have been between 8:30 and 9. we figured out why eve was refusing to move. she doesn’t like wearing the neck brace at all. it’s kind of funny watching her make the angriest face i’ve ever seen on a dog without even showing any teeth.

once we took the brace off she hopped right up and went outside and then came back in and laid next to the couch to watch me sleep some more. i woke up again right at 10 and took a long shower. i just wanted to sit in the room-temperature water forever. i was really snappy at mom when i had like four things to do at once after that. i don’t regret it, because she was being dumb, but i did overreact.

doge had pooped all over my room last night. so dad left the cleaning stuff all over the floor all night and i had to vacuum it. but mom wanted me to put a bunch of stuff in my room and also to do something else but i don’t remember what. also i was starving. she wouldn’t help me find the vacuum though so i had to wait around for my brother to help me get it up the stairs when i did track it down. then when i was moving the boxes to my room one of them was slipping off the top because i was tripping over wiley, but instead of calling wiley out of my way mom decided to take the box off the top of the pile and scold me for almost dropping it. that’s when i got snippy. i thanked her for helping afterward and let her know that wasn’t sarcastic because i know how passive aggressive they all get and she acted like i had gravely insulted her anyway. so whatever.

oh yeah, first thing when i had woken up in the morning i asked mom about the car situation. mom has decided that she is going to pick up my brother’s car from the shop in the late afternoon after she gets home from work. instead of literally anyone else picking it up during the day before i would actually need it. that wasn’t the really frustrating and terrifying thing though. i accidentally called asher “asher” in front of mom. i “corrected” myself right away but i don’t like slipping up at all. not at all. she’s never heard me call anyone “asher” so i don’t know if she thinks i confused him with one of my internet friends or what. i worry.

i don’t like dropping hints about things on accident. i can’t afford to slip up around people with unpredictable hair-trigger tempers. i can’t afford to slip up around people who act like everything is fine until i’m alone in the car with them and i can’t remove myself from the situation when they decide to start shouting in my face for something i did two weeks ago.

i don’t like not being in full control of what i say and do. i don’t like being distracted. i even ran both “names” for asher through my head before saying anything and i picked the wrong one for the situation.

i don’t like being in this position. i don’t like having to lie about asher. i can only hope he doesn’t think i am ashamed of him. i am literally scared that my parents will not allow him to spend time at my house any more or allow me to use the car to visit him. i don’t mind lying to my parents at all, but i don’t like having to use incorrect information that is upsetting to my friend. i don’t care what mom thinks but i care about how asher feels about it and whether or not i can see him and i hate having to pick “talk to asher” over “asher gets to feel like a human in my house.” 

i know my fears are not unfounded, i know they’re not irrational, but still. technically right now they are just fears. i cannot prove how my parents would react, at this point in time, to asher in particular. but i’ve had worse things happen for “smaller” reasons (to my parents). but i hate having to play risk management with my friends. i hate having to pick their friendship over their comfort or happiness.

i guess that did a lot toward putting me in a bad mood first thing in the morning. probably.

did a lot of packing today. and a lot of sitting around reading. i am doing things in short bursts. i need to get more tortilla chips so i can eat the rest of the God Salsa. maybe i can do that tomorrow.

one thing i am concerned about is my ability to drive tomorrow if i get another half-night of rest. i could sleep in my bed, but i don’t want to sleep so far away from eve. trade-offs are hard to navigate when i’m so tired. i wish eve could handle stairs right now so we could get up to my room. she tried to get on the couch today and fell off and landed on her drainage tube. left a little splat of blood on the wood. 

she recovered pretty quickly. i think she was spooked though because she absolutely did not want to try to stand up. she didn’t cry until i asked her to get up and get over to her bed. she was up and about again later just fine though. apparently mike had been anticipating some falls because he did her sutures in a way that allowed for impacts without breaking or coming out.

she also tried the stairs today but only made it up three steps before she turned around and hopped back down. she tried to get up the stairs because i had been up there moving stuff around. if i try to sleep in my bed, will she try to get up the stairs again? should i put up the baby gate or something? eve would be sad. i don’t have a lot of time left with eve before i move out.

she was a lot more coordinated and adventurous today. perhaps because she’s had some practice now, but probably also because we didn’t give her the knockout painkiller. she really is in a much better mood overall though. she only growled at wiley once and that was when he was actively antagonizing her. i didn’t take him for a walk today so he was kind of restless. too busy packing kitchen stuff. mom put it off for like 12 hours so when she finally wanted to do it i had to put aside some of my scheduled things.

i am trying really hard not to let my sleeping schedule slip too much. i didn’t plan on having to set aside around 10 hours a night for “rest” but at least i am still tired at the same (early) time every night. so i can keep going to bed before 12 even if i can’t get up before 9:30. 

and i didn’t listen to more the adventure zone today but i did at least Consume New Media and for that i have to take my victories when i can get them. 

also, as a side note: i would like to never drink prune juice again. i get the feeling i’m going to have to deal with it again due to my fun gallbladder adventures though.

so. lots of things contributing to bad mood today. more than just lack of sleep. i hope that makes a difference. 

i guess not lack of sleep. i am still laying down, with my eyes closed, and interacting with some kind of unconsciousness, for approximately eight hours total. but definitely not restful, uninterrupted sleep. i am afraid to nap though. naps never lead anywhere good.

guess i’ll have to make a decision in the next ten minutes. i get the feeling that no matter which decision i make though it’s going to be the wrong one in its own special way.