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I'll put a CAUTION on this. I'm likely to get pretty dark. Somewhere in here I expect to dig into existential angst. You have been warned,
We seem to have an optimism bias. I suppose that it serves us well as an evolutionary adaptation. Regardless of the prognosis we tend to assume that we will be among those who come through OK. It's one of the things that I admire about all of us. It's one of the things that makes it worth doing what we can to get through the next day. Regardless of how depressing it is we find the ray of sunshine. Those of us who survive assume that it is because we are special. We see ten to one odds and assert that someone has to win. It might as well be me. We see a million to one odds and pool together with our coworkers to buy lottery tickets. When they pass my cube I say "There are two kinds of people. Those who buy lottery tickets and those who understand math." Then I hand them five bucks. Who knows. I might win.
I've been dipping into the news again. And there does not seem to be much to be hopeful about. At least not in the long run. There has been a climate news item running the rounds lately. Let me see if I can find a link. Um. Here is one. Please don't read this. It's very depressing. We're all prone to depression. I know that I tend to wallow in it like a pig. But you don't need to dive in after me.
Do you know who Guy McPherson is? He's another of those climate scientists who is convinced that we are not going to survive this. The scenarios are pretty grim. But likely if I live to be one hundred I'll see it.
As a fifty mumble year old suffer of extreme testosterone poising I suspect that rationalization comes with the chemistry. And so I guess that it is probably time to stop fantasizing about playing dress up and start playing dress up. I mean If what I've said is true then there is no time to waste. And if what I've read is false then there is still no time to waste.
So why do I not just do it? Why am I so afraid to bring it up with my wife and ask her permission to waste money buying stuff so that I can playing dress up? Why is it so hard for me to just talk about it with her? Sure there is all the stigma stuff and the "boys don't do that" stuff and the fact that at my age and condition I'll never even come close to looking authentic. I make lists on my computer and compare products and decide on outfits that might look OK. But what could possibly look OK on an ageing couch potato who likes beer too much and exercise too little?
I put an app on my phone called WeCroak. It's very simple. A few times a day it updates a quote about dying. Some of them are pretty good. The current one says: "The only thing that isn't worthless: To live this life truthfully and rightly, and be patient with those woh don't" Attributed to Marcus Aurelius. For me the point of the app is to remind me that putting things off is not worth it.
Even if we will have destroyed our habitat on this planet before I turn one hindered an one. it is still worth taking risks and trying to do what makes us happy. I'm still too scared to bring it up. What a chicken shit little man I am.
Peace, Love, Grace
Comments
huggles
I had to be at the point where I'd lost my marriage, my job, and my home before I'd take the leap. So if I can do it, so can you!
Best of Luck
I won't place a recommendation because sometimes the wife leaves, and sometimes she does not, and I do not know a way to predict it. I was married 38 years, raised three Children and as soon as the truth was divulged, that was the end. My wife felt that I would be competition and she would not tolerate that. I've been living as a woman for 16 years. I do the best that I can.
Peace
Gwen
Hummm?
The train is leaving the station and you are wondering whether to get on it or not? Clue me in because I fail to understand why anyone listens to those who predict the future? Was you paying attention when it was global warming and when that didn't work it was global cooling, and back to global warming again. Now their mantra is climate change. That is the only thing I can agree with the doomsday prophets are claiming. They finally got it right. Climate change has been occurring for millions of years over and over and...
Shall we plow on to more excuses such as not looking like Jenna Lollobrigida if you decided to give it a go? Sweety, ninety nine percent of the women in the world aren't going to look like movie stars at their best. If you're waiting for the body and everything to get that hourglass, movie star look, turn around. I never managed to catch that train and it started disappearing in the distance when I hit forty.
The majority of the people in the world waste their life waiting for the right whatever. Like inventors who have the perfect invention but never put it together. In their mind if they don't try and fail they will always have the perfect invention. Instead of one failure they have two. They failed to try and failed to share their knowledge with the world.
My life is littered with mistakes and disasters. I spent my life chasing dreams. I'm more proud of all the mistakes than I am the accomplishments, because I tried. Think of what can be done, not what can't. That would depress me too.
Hugs Crash
Barb
Life is meant to be lived, not worn until it's worn out.
Oklahoma born and raised cowgirl
Sweety, ninety nine percent of the women...
aren't going to look like movie stars at their best.
Been watching too many YouTube vids of Walmart shoppers then Barbie? :) :) :)
but joking aside, you are right.
Samantha
It's Just Coincidence
Let's review the list of COINCIDENCES that seemingly support the notion of climate change
1.) Increase in Extreme weather events -- record high temperature -- rainfall extremes
2.) Increase of two degrees in average surface temp over last 100 years
3.) Warming oceans which contributes to an increased number and severity of tropical storms
4.) Rapidly melting ice sheets at poles
5.) Shrinking glaciers
6.) Earlier melting of snow and less snow cover
7.) An eight-inch rise in sea level over last century - rate of rise is also increasing
8.) A 30% rise in ocean acidity.
Of course -- all of the above is coincidental and whether or not man has anything to do with it is inconclusive to those who live in a state dependent on the oil and gas industry.
Barbie - I grew up on a farm in North Dakota. During the last forty years I've watch farmers in my home state have to drastically change the crops they grow in response to climate change.
I'm in the insurance industry. We have our thumbs on the pulse of predictable weather. It is incredible what has happened to weather patterns in our nation. Minnesota once had fairly mild weather. Now we are amongst the leading states for violent, destructive storms.
Yes, Barbie, there is climate change.
Now - if climate change is bothering you, don't stick your head in the sand and hope it's a hoax. Do a little research and find out the many, many projects scientist are working on to mitigate and even solve this problem. It is invigorating and we will not only survive, we will create a better world.
Climate change is a bitch. Covid is a bitch.
Measles was a bitch. Polio was a bitch. Science solved them.
Are there scientists who sell their souls creating results that support false agendas. Of course, there are. Big tobacco and big oil have been part of that kind of garbage. So have scientists who drylab results to fund their foundations. But when 99% of scientists say the same things . . ..
I have friends in North Dakota who have sold their souls to oil and gas. Water is as rare in ND as it is where you live. You have to ask about water in many restaurants as they try to conserve by the glassful. Yet they pump precious water into fracking by the truckload.
Now is the time to support our scientists -- even slightly negative remarks could cost lives.
Jill
Angela Rasch (Jill M I)
I agree Jill
And if you add a 68% extinction rate of all species as is happening now, then added to global climate change is the destructive element of intensive farming which has wiped out thousands of species of insect and upon which we depend upon to live. Which is just another way of saying that our own cleverness and greed are making our own extinctions more likely, not to mention mass migrations of people in 20 -50 years because their own lands will be uninhabitable. Wars will be fought over water and places to grow food and still we breed like crazy. I am studying all this for my degree and it is real despite the efforts of vested interests in oil and coal to deny it.
Angharad
Enough Blame to go Around
The fallacies of Climate Change.
Climate change has been ongoing for billions of years. To believe gov. can tax the public for breathing and using the air and make a difference is born of ignorance, lies, and propaganda. People wish to be spoon fed data and information rather than putting in effort in learning.
Urbanisation causes an estimated loss of between 1.6 and 3.3 million hectares of prime agricultural land per year
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/world-on-a-plate/201...
Cities are vast oceans of heat. In all my years of flying we could always tell where the large cities were by the plume of clouds rising way up into the atmosphere above them breaking the normal layers of air.
One of the biggest gov payout programs is the Agricultural Bill of which welfare entitlements, school programs and lunches, and dozens of other programs are folded into. Farmers, ranchers pay almost twice the amount in taxes than what is paid back to them as a subsidy. The grain, livestock raised by farmers ranchers and shipped overseas is the only reason the U.S. isn’t drowning in foreign debt.
Worrying about politics, climate change and whether there will be a party Saturday night instead of the real reason why farmers aren’t raising more chocolate cows to put more chocolate milk in the dairy section is a recipe for disaster. The city limits used to be five miles from me. Now it is a half mile. I remember all the families who used to farm that land now covered under streets, houses, industrial complex. Roy Rayburn’s goat farm is Eastland Addition. Yule Luther’s farm is motels, carwash, etc. Walmart, gas station, restaurants, and an apartment complex sits on top of the Snodgrass farm. Bill Bersmit’s two story house is a high pressure gas pumping station. Bill Gizler’s farm is a gas station, nightclub, Catholic Church, RV Park. I could go on but hopefully you get the picture. I live in an out of the way backwater place and this happened to me. I watched as Oklahoma City and surrounding towns spread out thirty to forty miles from OKC city limits. The Oklahoma City Livestock Yards which was on the outside of OKC is now in the heart of OKC.
None of that is raising anything to eat or spin into clothing. What is being produced is pollution, heat from all the buildings, homes as they turn on their utilities, all the pavement absorbing the sunlight. I cringe when I see TV or movie shots as they sweep out across the vast city lights, streets, buildings, and vehicles.
Worry about climate change all you want. You won’t like my answer. Stop breeding like rabbits and sucking up all the farm land and if it’s not too late, humanity may survive their own destruction. Sadly, I don’t see the future changing from the lies, deception, greed, corruption, and destruction. It’s too easy to blame everything and everyone else. God willing I’ll die on this piece of red earth dirt where I was born and raised before it’s turned into the next bit of human progress.
Hugs People
Life is a gift, treasure it until it’s time to return it.
Oklahoma born and raised cowgirl
I love you Barbie
I love you Barbie Lee, and thanks for the comments. I often consider the words on the Georgia Guidestones:
Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
Guide reproduction wisely — improving fitness and diversity.
Unite humanity with a living new language.
Rule passion — faith — tradition — and all things with tempered reason.
Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.
Avoid petty laws and useless officials.
Balance personal rights with social duties.
Prize truth — beauty — love — seeking harmony with the infinite.
Be not a cancer on the Earth — Leave room for nature — Leave room for nature.
And with respect to all teh chocolate cows out there.
I'll take liberties with Gelett Burgess little ditty:
I've never seen a chocolate cow.
I never hope to see one
But I can tell you any how
I'd rather see than be one.
The earth will be just fine. It's going to be a few billion years before it gets burnt up by the sun. It's us that I worry about.
Your friend
Crash
Slight Correction
It wasn't plants, it was photosynthesizing bacteria. The resulting atmospheric oxygen caused one of the mass extinctions. (Oxygen, highly reactive, is poison to life that can't control it properly.)
An aside: this might be one explanation for the Fermi Paradox. An interstellar-traveling civilization may have had to pass through several pinch-points to survive and become an interstellar-traveling civilization. One of the pinch-points might have been Snowball_Earth suicide.
Why is green the color of life? The sun is maximally intense in the green, so why does chlorophyll reflect green rather than absorb it? We'd expect bacteria that absorbs more energy to be better off on average. Maybe that usually happens -- most planets where life forms develop maximally-absorbing photosynthesis, and consequently pull out so much CO2 that the world becomes cold and is covered completely with ice. The earth might have been a major outlier.
I'll leave it to your imagination what other pinch-points might be, that we might not have passed yet.
-- Daphne Xu
Why is green the color of life?....
When it is a color of death...
Germans still remember that "green" is a color of arsenics and use "blue" for their "ecologically friendly" cars.
As for Fermi and aliens... On Earth AM epoch lasted some 40 to 50 years. Then we moved to FM and very soon after to the CDMA-like standards. So you need to monitor space for a signal that is a blip on the history scale. Just couple of years between the invention of short wave radio and invention of the CDMA. And now, still less then 150 years from the first radio transmission, we are on the brink of the quantum communications... Where there is no known way to intercept data transmitted.
Actually,
it was down to carbon sequestration and acidification of the oceans.
Angharad
Welcome to the world of the transgendered
You just described the mindset of 90% of married transgender AMAB. We suffer from the fear that what we have in the way of relationships will go by the wayside if we come out. Being unwilling to risk losing our wives and children we deny ourselves the very thing that we feel would bring peace and harmony to our personal lives. That is to be who we are openly.
I had that decision taken away from me. When my oldest was just over three years old, my desire to "play dress up" boiled over when I discovered some of my wife's clothes would fit. That is I could get them on. I began "borrowing" her things when she was out. One thing led to another and she didn't go out often enough, so I began slipping into our bedroom to slip into something just long enough to look in the mirror and then quickly strip it off and redress in drab.
Sure enough my recipe for disaster resulted in just that. I tarried just a little to long at the mirror and she walked in on me. We'd been married for just over five years. Why she didn't kick my butt to the curb, I'll never know.
Let me tell you, that's not the way to come out to your spouse. That was the beginning of ten years of not so great marriage. Oh, it looked good on the outside, and in reality, it functioned well enough, but it wasn't what it should have been. It was more of a business partnership than a marriage. What is really surprising is that our sex life managed to stay intact and in the middle of that period, we had our second child. But we could have been poster children for dysfunctional marriage.
Things didn't really turn around until I decided that regardless of how our relationship was in reality, I was going to treat her as if she was everything I could ever want in a spouse. Somewhere along the line, I learned what love was all about. It turns out that love is all about giving. I gave of my time, my money and myself all in an effort to make her smile.
Strangely enough after about a year in that mode she started to become what I treated her as. It's been over 45 years since she walked in on me dressed and we're still married. I tell people we have a good marriage because we survived a bad one. OK, it wasn't bad, it simply was not good.
I guess what I'm getting around to saying is that if you want to survive the storm of coming out, you have to excel in every other aspect of being a husband. Be loving, be kind, be generous; your only chance is to tick all the boxes except macho. We transgendered AMAB have a lot of qualities that women like. If they can get past all the "men are men and that's the way it is" BS it the feminine traits that they really want.
I remember clothes shopping for my wife. I was going through the racks and putting together outfits for her and taking them to the fitting booth for her and advising her on what would go together well. Another woman was shopping near us and after about the fifth time of putting together an outfit, while my wife was trying it on, she said to me, "Your a good fashion advisor." She smiled wistfully at me. She didn't say it, but I'm sure she was thing, "I wish my husband was more like you."
Having survived that horrible coming out, and mending the bridge between us I now live the life you long for. Easy? Not by a long shot. But then, no good marriage was easy to attain. It takes a lot of hard work to get there and once you do it takes hard, but rewarding, work to stay there. For out transgenders it's a lot more difficult.
What it boils down to is "Happy wife; happy life."
Take a shot at making her think you're the greatest thing since indoor plumbing and when you get there, get all your ducks in row, do your homework and sit down with materials at hand and let her know that your traits that she really likes come from your feminine side.
If you'd like to get into just how to go about that, PM me and I'll see if I can come up with my list of books that will help. Plus I'll give you my secret of just how to be the best thing since indoor plumbing.
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Just don't spend your energy on alarmists.
If what Albert Arnold Gore Jr. was promoting 20 years ago was true - I would have lived at a tropical resort by now. But no. No. No such luck.
It is -15C 2 meters from me. And my car is under a foot of snow...
In the late 70-th all of the newspapers wrote that there will be no oil left by the year 2000. It is 2021. There is still oil and known oil fields to last us some 40 to 50 years. And now they promise "end of oil" sometime in the 2060+... And do you know what is the most heavily guarded secret of oil companies? Yes. It is their actual discovered oil reserves. If this information will leak oil price will drop to the cost. Which is under $3 per barrel...
So. No more curtseys to alarmists. Their only aim is to defraud you of some of your hard earned cash.
As for the being open with your loved ones... It is difficult. No advice from me. I was open with my wife... I am somewhere around 10 years past my divorce. We are still friends. We never mention it...
Why are you married?
OK, a bit of a provocative headline, but a serious question. Is it sensible to be married to someone who cannot accept all of you? Can it really be marriage if one (or both) partners have to hide part of themselves to make a marriage work? Is it worth it to do so?
In my opinion - no, but I'm not you. I will say I have been married twice and both women have accepted this part of me. The negotiations of limits weren't too hard because we both wanted to be with each other. I hope you can find the wherewithal to be honest with your wife and I hope she has the compassion to understand. Marriage must be a true partnership, with both parties honestly believing in the goodness of their partners.
Honesty
I just saw a YouTube video a bit ago about lying. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvLf63krM2g
It seems their conclusion was that we frequently lie and that we tell the biggest lies to the people closest to us. And it was on the internet, So it must be true. It might have been Mark Twain who said "If you always tell the truth you don't have to remember anything." On the other hand we all tell stories of all kinds all the time.
I guess that the answer is "it's complex."
Thanks for your perspective. It helps to have more of them to compare.
Your friend
Crash
It's complex.
It has both real and imaginary parts.
More seriously, we are very good at lying to ourselves as well.
-- Daphne Xu
Life is like an analogy
I'm not sure that two dimensional space is enough to capture the human heart. Simple models help. Here is one. Maybe it's just another distraction.
https://mandel.gart.nz
Peace, Love, Grace
Your friend
Crash
2D Too Diminutive?
Try 4D with the quaternions.
-- Daphne Xu
My love of 2x2 matrix,
The nifty thing about ring theory over 2x2 matrices is how they turned out to be useful after all.
That's probably the biggest problem with the world right now. Not enough 2x2 matrix fiction.
Your friend
Crash
Biological Reasons to be Optimistic.
I do like a good blog, and this one covers a few first world problems.
Firstly, the more we learn about the universe the more we understand just how unlikely our existence is. Are we alone in the universe as an intelligent lifeform? It is mathematically very unlikely, but then here we are, apparently with nobody else out there – the Fermi Paradox.
Our existence as a species may be due to a whole series of very unlikely flukes. But your existence as the human you are is also unlikely. There were millions of sperm and an egg that is only receptive for a short period. And there might be other sperm out the kill the half-you swimming hard. And yet you happened.
There is reason to be optimistic.
Climate change … OMG. It is all over! The unlikely miracle of life is finished! Well, all the models that have predicted this face only one problem – the facts. I am not saying that climate change is not happening; and that it is not partly caused by us; and that it at the heart of huge problems we are having, but when the older models have been checked projected results against actuals, they are wrong. There is a difference of opinion – not about the fact of climate change but when we will reach the point of no return.
If we have already reached that point, then have a happy reast of existence. But if we have more time, maybe the change can be reversed? How? We have technology. The problem has been in having people who deny science in charge. Technology may be the answer.
We are learning more all the time. There are experiments happen on changing the pH of the ocean and how to use it to capture CO2. The Ocean is the largest potential sequestration sink. Renewable energy will happen, and soon. Efficient batteries are the key. Technology.
Let’s talk about death – no, let’s not. Why is this even a subject? There is a lot more to talk about that the end of your own existence. It the whole scheme of things it is nothing. You exist against all probability.
Dealing with our own problems. If death is insignificant, how unimportant are our other problems? To dress as a woman or not; To upset somebody you love or not; To lie to them or not. I cannot give advice beyond saying that however unfortunate or out-of-place you may feel, there is nothing stranger than your existence in the first place.
Maryanne
Which Way?
"... when the older models have been checked projected results against actuals, they are wrong." If that's true, which way? Did they underestimate the change?
Were things cooling when they said things were warming?
Were scientists willing to confront their models against later measurements, and modify them? Or is that a fallacy? Scientists' ideas fluttering in the winds of
datafashion, as opposed to standing fast and true?Shouldn't scientists be calculating everything from first principles? Say, a 1045-body quantum-mechanical problem?
What are the records of Koch, Limbaugh, and LaRouche? Should we believe them over working scientists?
-- Daphne Xu
My wife knew before she was my wife...
... But still... It killed our marriage. So... It is a very difficult question, do you really need to open your deepest secrets to anyone?