Honestly, watching and thinking about the Pixar movie Inside Out helped me understand my anger a lot better. In the movie, Anger is kind of a joke character. But there’s a line when he’s introduced where Joy says “Anger wants things to be fair.”

I think a lot about how when I’m angry, most of the time there’s some imbalance that I want balanced, and I’m looking to inflict pain, either physical or emotional, in order to balance it out. The vast majority of times, that’s not actually a winning strategy, either in terms of long or short term goals.

It doesn’t always work, but trying to think in terms of what I actually want, why I want it, and what impulses and aims are leading to my feelings, has been a lot of help to not feeling so much like I’m being helplessly driven by my anger.

Bowtie, but make it a little bit smaller.

I personally know a person with a child who was born with profound physical and mental disabilities. She’s a dear sweet caring person, and she shared an emotionally devastating story about how she had her first “conversation” with her daughter when said daughter was in her early twenties, which took the form of the daughter being able to indicate, through extraordinary effort, that she preferred to be read one story instead of another.

For her, this was a deeply rewarding moment, the ability to have any kind of deliberate interaction with her daughter, after nearly two decades of struggle and effort. She clearly loves her daughter. I would never try to take anything away from her in that regard.

However. When my wife got pregnant we had very serious conversations about the potential for birth defects and how we were prepared for her to have an abortion if serious defects were found. We talked about the quality of life of a human being we were bringing into existence, and how no one should ever have to feel trapped by their own body, and what our experience of being parents was going to be like.

Our daughter was born without any issues at all. In fact she’s bright and friendly and less destructive than we might have expected… and still being a parent is easily the most intense and difficult project of my entire life, mentally, physically, and emotionally. Nobody should ever have any reservations about being a parent for any reason at all, and if there are factors that you can control to make that decision easier one way or the other, then you should absolutely take control of them.

All of which is to say, no there is absolutely no moral issue with choosing not to deliberately create a person with genetic birth defects. The choice to become a parent is the most important and consequential choice anyone can make. Make it in exactly the way that you would want to make it, and in no other way whatsoever.

What drives me crazy is that both of these cartoons are by the same guy:

Talk about cognitive dissonance!

Also

I’ve only ever found one zip-up hoodie with decent insulation and pockets deep enough that my phone won’t fall out of them if I’m not careful, and you better believe I’m taking good care of it.

Adam Smith does pretty well. I’d say it’s Marxism, mushroom guides, and beekeeping that remain consistently at the top of the rankings. Then you’ve got whatever fiction is currently hot. For a while there it was Where the Crawdads Sing or Demon Copperhead. Sarah J. Maas is currently enjoying an extended streak of very strong sales. The Twilight series went through a bit of a low ebb for a while there but for some reason it’s been selling quite well again lately. Harry Potter used to be a rock solid seller, but one can see that J. K.'s attempts to alienate her fan base have been at least partially successful. It’s interesting to see the trends develop over time.

I work at a used book store. Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto is a great seller, one of the best selling titles we ever get in, in fact. As a result, we keep raising the resale price on the thing each time a new one comes in, and it keeps selling. I’ve never had to mark down a Communist Manifesto for sitting on the shelf for too long. It’s a textbook example of supply and demand in action… and I think that Karl would kind of hate that.

Who Poop Last?!

This is unironically how I felt about Deadpool & Wolverine. I liked it, I thought it was lots of fun, I thought it was actually a bit refreshing changing up the ratio of the ingredients in a MCU movie from what I’ve been used to.

But, please don’t make this again. If every superhero movie from now on is absolutely riddled with winking canon goofs, barely-there cameos, and a total disregard for the idea of taking any of this at all seriously, I’m going to lose my damn mind. It worked… once. That was plenty.

Edit: Essentially, this:

But who am I kidding it made $1.3 billion, it’s going to get made again.

It’s a good change!

My mom once gave me a cat litter scoop like this one

in my Christmas stocking. This was not, to my knowledge, in the context of a conversation about needing to clean up after the cat more often, but for all I know it was her way of subtly trying to get the point across.

Christ, what an asshole!

Pro-choice flag by Anne Lesniak

Awesome. Can we get a new Bushido Blade, while we’re at it?

Not a lamp, but I developed cold urticaria in my 30s; my skin gets rashy if it’s exposed to cold air. I get really bad hives if I’m in cold water, and I need to wear full ankle-to-wrist pajamas or else I get itchy while I’m trying to sleep, just from the cold of the sheets. I’m seriously considering adding an electric heating pad to my bedtime routine.

I passed a Lamborghini SUV on the road the other day. I checked and it retails for about $250,000. Motherfucker really dropped a quarter of a million dollars for a RAV4-looking vehicle to haul the kids to soccer in.

EDIT: Lamborghini Urus

I listened to Hardcore History’s series on World War I in that window, so that was my assigned war of interest.