I was mostly talking about K-12 schools, although it applies to colleges as well. Of course, "summer jobs" only applies to high school students. But grade schools tend to follow the same schedule as the corresponding high schools even when, as here, they are formally different districts.
Catreona, regarding your massage therapist, may I suggest...
What if you mail your massage therapist her check, and include a brief letter telling her what you told us, about needing her to be on time more. After all, your time is valuable to you. It isn't fair of her to always do this to you. Once in awhile is understandable, but every time is disrespectful or at least impeccably poor time management!
The fact that waiting makes you tense is reason enough to speak up. After all, doesn't that defeat the reason for having a massage therapist at all?
Cat, I feel ya. My late mother was never on time, ever. She wouldn't let me learn how to drive and she made me late for *everything*. She was so late to her second wedding that the groom freaked out that she wasn't coming.
According to what I've read there are two common causes for habitual lateness: 1. Poor time management and 2. A secret love of drama. For my mom it was a combo deal. And as a result I am ALWAYS early. Being late freaks me out immeasurably.
My mother is a great role model in that respect. She always made sure we were at the very least on time, if not early. As a result, both Sis and I are perhaps just a touch compulsive about being early. Most people seem to be pretty laissez-faire about it though. Curiously, both my best friends are chronically late. I don't mind it quite so much in Chris; maybe that's because I love her more than Patty. *sigh*
But in a businesswoman, as Alan points out, it's odd and I should think self-defeating. She doesn't strike me as a terribly well organized person. On the other hand, she has had a hard life, never catching a break. She's a single mother, whose son is now in his early twenties and in college, reportedly a good student and a good boy. I've not met him myself. So, she must have some organizational skills. You can't successfully raise a child if you're a complete scatterbrain. Nor, I should have thought, could you run a business, provide a service.
I shouldn't have thought she was a secret drama queen, though in her youth she was a dancer; so, there may be some of the "Hey, look at me!" element still remaining. She does seem to have the odd idear that the world has an obligation to adapt itself to her wishes. For instance, not only was she understandably crushed by her favorite brother's recent death, she was also angry. She truly believed he was going to recover, apparently not considering the possibility (as it sounded to me from her reports the inevitability) of his death. It's one thing to be hopeful; it's another to be blind.
Or to take a less grievous and more annoying case, often she walks in and says, "The traffic is crazy!" Well, she's been coming to my house for some two and a half years, not always on the same day, but pretty much at the same time. By now, why hasn't she worked out that she needs to set out earlier, allow herself a little more time? But, no. The traffic should adapt to her. If she continues to start at the time she thinks she should start, one of these days the traffic will learn and accommodate itself to her. I mean, of course she never actually says that, but it's obviously what she thinks. It makes no sense to me at all.
The situation is complicated by the fact that she is best buddies with my mother, a state of affairs not entirely of my mother's own making... It's all so bloody complicated, not on our side, but on hers. She is deeply emotionally attached to our family. She keeps saying we're not just clients, we've "touched her heart." She has sort of adopted us, or subsumed us. So she can't see the distinction. She can't see, apparently, that she is the help, not a friend, not a family member. And she's such a wounded little bird that you can't really treat her like the help. I don't know. It's a mess. I am mildly fond of her. I am concerned about her. and I do employ her, so I feel a sense of responsibility towards her.
Mum said she'll have a chat with her next week (I hope she doesn't spin too elaborate a yarn!) and I'll have a bit of a chat with her next week as well. Don't want to upset her, but I do need to get her straightened out. Like Listener says, getting stressed out about the massage defeats the purpose of the massage.
"In the reigning U.S. media-politics culture, “the left” refers first and foremost to the Democratic Party and its many allies at places like The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, CBS, MSNBC, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Brookings Institution, the Center for American Progress, most of academia and a host of other elite sectors and actors. But for anyone who knows anything about the history and meaning of radical movements, calling the dismal dollar-drenched Democrats and their many media allies “the left” is like calling the National Pork Producers Association vegan. As the multimillionaire House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told a young CNN town hall questioner last year, “We’re capitalist and that’s just the way it is.”
"The reigning corporate Democrats would rather lose to the right, even to a proto-fascistic white nationalist and eco-apocalyptic right, than lose to the left, even to a mildly progressive social democratic left within their own party. So what if Bernie Sanders, running (imagine!) in accord with majority progressive opinion would have been considerably more likely to defeat Trump than the incredibly unpopular and transparently elitist Hillary Clinton in the general election in 2016? The Democrats preferred handing the presidency and Congress to the Insane Clown President and the ever more radical right over letting a leftish neo-New Dealer into the White House. That was the “Inauthentic Opposition”—as the late Sheldon Wolin called the Democrats in 2008—doing its job."
Just a few words in and I'm freaking out! CNN is not left. The Center on Foreign Relations is definitely not left! The Democratic Party, whatever it may once have been, is today so much not left that it's right in most ways that matter.
Well, what he's saying is that we need to totally get rid of the current US economic system. Which hasn't been anything Marx would recognize as capitalism for well over a century. He's never quite explicit about what we should replace it with, but he seems to be implying that everybody who thinks everything should be changed from the ground up should unite behind the Poor People's Campaign. Which I had never heard of before.
And not long after I wrote this I saw an email from the American Friends Service Committee about AFSC members who had been arrested in connection with a civil disobedience campaign on behalf of the Poor People's Campaign. The email said in part, "They joined thousands of people nationwide to shine a light on the horrible costs of our war economy and demand action to end poverty, racism, and militarism. And Congress, state lawmakers, and the media are taking notice." But none of this sounds like a complete restructuring of our economy, so I don't know where this guy is coming from.
I looked mostly at the demands. Something of a hodgepodge, but that may not be totally unreasonable for the type of movement this is. But with the arguable exception of the demand for a guaranteed annual income (just briefly thrown in), none of them call for any fundamental change in our economic system. Which means that they don't fit with the tenor of the article originally quoted.
Nice photo, Listener. Reminds me of something you might see in Rivendell. Come to think of it, a lot of your photos remind me of something you might see in Rivendell, which probably says a lot more about me than it does about your photos.
Thanks, puddle; they keep finding out more and more. Recently there was an estimate from genetic data that there had been a considerable loss of population about 5,000 years ago. And they continue finding more and more evidence of large pre-columbian populations. There is widespread agreement now that the population of the Americans was greater than that of Europe at the time of contact, but estimates of how much greater continue to increase. And the estimate that about 90% of them died after European contact seems to be holding up--more people lost than in the Great War or in the Spanish Flu epidemic. There was similar loss of life among the people of far northeastern Siberia, who were closely related to the original Americans, after European contact. Plagues in the Old World generally didn't kill more than about 30% of the population, but they had far greater diversity in HLA antigens[Click], so were able to adapt to a greater variety of infectious diseases. At least that is one theory, and seemingly a credible one. I don't know if the estimate still holds up, but I recall one estimate of the number of people necessary to account for the genetic diversity of Native Americans: less than one hundred, maybe as few as 60 or 70.
About being late. . . . I was seeing a guy once, funny, smart, cute, and ABD in Psychology. First dinner, he called an hour after he was due, was at the liquor store getting wine. When he arrived, I welcomed him, grinning. Oh, he said, you find it funny that a psychologist, who *knows* what being late means can't get here on time?!!! I nodded, we had a lovely time. Next dinner, he called, a half hour late, from the liquor store. I was laughing by the time he arrived. Funny? FUNNY? You think this is funny???? I nodded. We had a lovely time. He was never late again.
Trump’s Lawyers Argue He Can Stop Mueller Probe[Click] Upon reflection and a modicum of research, his lawyers' argument sounds largely the same as the defense of Charles the First, which proved remarkably unsuccessful:
“Thumbs Down if you are registered voter but will sit out the primary election on Tuesday. One online analytics company was showing scant ballots having been returned in one of the hottest local races this time around, the campaign for Congressional District 22 now held by Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Tulare. Of 205,000 ballots mailed to voters in that district, only about 33,000 had been returned as of Wednesday – less than a sixth of the total. C’mon, voters, get with it. You don’t need to vote on everything on the ballot – but do vote on what matters most to you.” ==================================
The Antidote to Trump Is Decency[Click] ========================================== Antibiotics greatly reduce effectiveness of cancer treatment – study[Click] Interesting that the effect is so large. ============================= On another note, I think I have discovered where my father started school—Minot, ND. On Monday I will call the student records department to see if they maintain records that far back, and if so, whether I can get a copy. And a newly discovered third cousin seems to have had the same problem I have, i.e., an unknown (or rather doubted) grandfather. Ancestry.com eventually came up with a DNA link to his/her half first cousin, which established the genetic ancestry to be different from what had been assumed.
P.S.: And thinking of the Dems not being a party of the left, I keep thinking we could use another Huey Long. If it weren't for him, the New Deal would not have been as helpful as it was.
Hallo! Friday was wild but I am still ticking...incase you wondered.
ReplyDeleteSusan...loved the translations! :-D
Bill, were you speaking of colleges? Around here colleges get out in May and grade schools in June.
We home schooled August 1st to May 1st. In Vermont in May everyone is very much in need of being outside. By August everyone is bored. Worked great!
I was mostly talking about K-12 schools, although it applies to colleges as well. Of course, "summer jobs" only applies to high school students. But grade schools tend to follow the same schedule as the corresponding high schools even when, as here, they are formally different districts.
DeleteCatreona, regarding your massage therapist, may I suggest...
ReplyDeleteWhat if you mail your massage therapist her check, and include a brief letter telling her what you told us, about needing her to be on time more. After all, your time is valuable to you. It isn't fair of her to always do this to you. Once in awhile is understandable, but every time is disrespectful or at least impeccably poor time management!
The fact that waiting makes you tense is reason enough to speak up. After all, doesn't that defeat the reason for having a massage therapist at all?
I second the motion.
DeleteAlan
Alan, I very much appreciate your link annotations!!
ReplyDeleteThanks, listener. It's nice to have a safe place to exhibit (within reason) my attitude.
DeleteAlan
Cat, I feel ya. My late mother was never on time, ever. She wouldn't let me learn how to drive and she made me late for *everything*. She was so late to her second wedding that the groom freaked out that she wasn't coming.
ReplyDeleteAccording to what I've read there are two common causes for habitual lateness: 1. Poor time management and 2. A secret love of drama. For my mom it was a combo deal. And as a result I am ALWAYS early. Being late freaks me out immeasurably.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/thriving101/201411/the-real-reason-some-us-are-chronically-late
My mother is a great role model in that respect. She always made sure we were at the very least on time, if not early. As a result, both Sis and I are perhaps just a touch compulsive about being early. Most people seem to be pretty laissez-faire about it though. Curiously, both my best friends are chronically late. I don't mind it quite so much in Chris; maybe that's because I love her more than Patty. *sigh*
DeleteBut in a businesswoman, as Alan points out, it's odd and I should think self-defeating. She doesn't strike me as a terribly well organized person. On the other hand, she has had a hard life, never catching a break. She's a single mother, whose son is now in his early twenties and in college, reportedly a good student and a good boy. I've not met him myself. So, she must have some organizational skills. You can't successfully raise a child if you're a complete scatterbrain. Nor, I should have thought, could you run a business, provide a service.
I shouldn't have thought she was a secret drama queen, though in her youth she was a dancer; so, there may be some of the "Hey, look at me!" element still remaining. She does seem to have the odd idear that the world has an obligation to adapt itself to her wishes. For instance, not only was she understandably crushed by her favorite brother's recent death, she was also angry. She truly believed he was going to recover, apparently not considering the possibility (as it sounded to me from her reports the inevitability) of his death. It's one thing to be hopeful; it's another to be blind.
Or to take a less grievous and more annoying case, often she walks in and says, "The traffic is crazy!" Well, she's been coming to my house for some two and a half years, not always on the same day, but pretty much at the same time. By now, why hasn't she worked out that she needs to set out earlier, allow herself a little more time? But, no. The traffic should adapt to her. If she continues to start at the time she thinks she should start, one of these days the traffic will learn and accommodate itself to her. I mean, of course she never actually says that, but it's obviously what she thinks. It makes no sense to me at all.
The situation is complicated by the fact that she is best buddies with my mother, a state of affairs not entirely of my mother's own making... It's all so bloody complicated, not on our side, but on hers. She is deeply emotionally attached to our family. She keeps saying we're not just clients, we've "touched her heart." She has sort of adopted us, or subsumed us. So she can't see the distinction. She can't see, apparently, that she is the help, not a friend, not a family member. And she's such a wounded little bird that you can't really treat her like the help. I don't know. It's a mess. I am mildly fond of her. I am concerned about her. and I do employ her, so I feel a sense of responsibility towards her.
Mum said she'll have a chat with her next week (I hope she doesn't spin too elaborate a yarn!) and I'll have a bit of a chat with her next week as well. Don't want to upset her, but I do need to get her straightened out. Like Listener says, getting stressed out about the massage defeats the purpose of the massage.
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/needed-now-a-real-and-radical-left/
ReplyDelete"In the reigning U.S. media-politics culture, “the left” refers first and foremost to the Democratic Party and its many allies at places like The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, CBS, MSNBC, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Brookings Institution, the Center for American Progress, most of academia and a host of other elite sectors and actors. But for anyone who knows anything about the history and meaning of radical movements, calling the dismal dollar-drenched Democrats and their many media allies “the left” is like calling the National Pork Producers Association vegan. As the multimillionaire House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told a young CNN town hall questioner last year, “We’re capitalist and that’s just the way it is.”
"The reigning corporate Democrats would rather lose to the right, even to a proto-fascistic white nationalist and eco-apocalyptic right, than lose to the left, even to a mildly progressive social democratic left within their own party. So what if Bernie Sanders, running (imagine!) in accord with majority progressive opinion would have been considerably more likely to defeat Trump than the incredibly unpopular and transparently elitist Hillary Clinton in the general election in 2016? The Democrats preferred handing the presidency and Congress to the Insane Clown President and the ever more radical right over letting a leftish neo-New Dealer into the White House. That was the “Inauthentic Opposition”—as the late Sheldon Wolin called the Democrats in 2008—doing its job."
Just a few words in and I'm freaking out! CNN is not left. The Center on Foreign Relations is definitely not left! The Democratic Party, whatever it may once have been, is today so much not left that it's right in most ways that matter.
DeleteOkay, deep breath, going to read further.
Ah. Okay, I'm with ya now.
DeleteThe problem really is, what do we do about it?
Well, what he's saying is that we need to totally get rid of the current US economic system. Which hasn't been anything Marx would recognize as capitalism for well over a century. He's never quite explicit about what we should replace it with, but he seems to be implying that everybody who thinks everything should be changed from the ground up should unite behind the Poor People's Campaign. Which I had never heard of before.
DeleteAnd not long after I wrote this I saw an email from the American Friends Service Committee about AFSC members who had been arrested in connection with a civil disobedience campaign on behalf of the Poor People's Campaign. The email said in part, "They joined thousands of people nationwide to shine a light on the horrible costs of our war economy and demand action to end poverty, racism, and militarism. And Congress, state lawmakers, and the media are taking notice." But none of this sounds like a complete restructuring of our economy, so I don't know where this guy is coming from.
DeleteHere's a link to The Poor People's Campaign [click]. I'll have to read it all again, but when I read it before, it made a great deal of sense to me.
DeleteI looked mostly at the demands. Something of a hodgepodge, but that may not be totally unreasonable for the type of movement this is. But with the arguable exception of the demand for a guaranteed annual income (just briefly thrown in), none of them call for any fundamental change in our economic system. Which means that they don't fit with the tenor of the article originally quoted.
DeleteNice photo, Listener. Reminds me of something you might see in Rivendell. Come to think of it, a lot of your photos remind me of something you might see in Rivendell, which probably says a lot more about me than it does about your photos.
ReplyDeleteAlan, here's another story about in-migration. . . .
ReplyDeletehttps://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/31/science/americans-migration-dna.html?action=click&module=Trending&pgtype=Article®ion=Footer&contentCollection=Trending
Thanks, puddle; they keep finding out more and more. Recently there was an estimate from genetic data that there had been a considerable loss of population about 5,000 years ago. And they continue finding more and more evidence of large pre-columbian populations. There is widespread agreement now that the population of the Americans was greater than that of Europe at the time of contact, but estimates of how much greater continue to increase. And the estimate that about 90% of them died after European contact seems to be holding up--more people lost than in the Great War or in the Spanish Flu epidemic. There was similar loss of life among the people of far northeastern Siberia, who were closely related to the original Americans, after European contact. Plagues in the Old World generally didn't kill more than about 30% of the population, but they had far greater diversity in HLA antigens[Click], so were able to adapt to a greater variety of infectious diseases. At least that is one theory, and seemingly a credible one. I don't know if the estimate still holds up, but I recall one estimate of the number of people necessary to account for the genetic diversity of Native Americans: less than one hundred, maybe as few as 60 or 70.
DeleteAlan
About being late. . . . I was seeing a guy once, funny, smart, cute, and ABD in Psychology. First dinner, he called an hour after he was due, was at the liquor store getting wine. When he arrived, I welcomed him, grinning. Oh, he said, you find it funny that a psychologist, who *knows* what being late means can't get here on time?!!! I nodded, we had a lovely time. Next dinner, he called, a half hour late, from the liquor store. I was laughing by the time he arrived. Funny? FUNNY? You think this is funny???? I nodded. We had a lovely time. He was never late again.
ReplyDeleteErm, did you continue to like him and have a lovely time with him when he wasn't late?
DeleteWe did. For a good long time. He eventually married the woman who typed his dissertation, lol!
DeleteI was unusual for a man in my time, being able to type; so I typed my own dissertation. Much simpler.
DeleteAlan
Trump’s Lawyers Argue He Can Stop Mueller Probe[Click]
ReplyDeleteUpon reflection and a modicum of research, his lawyers' argument sounds largely the same as the defense of Charles the First, which proved remarkably unsuccessful:
Trial of Charles I of England[Click]
==================
From the editorial page of today’s Fresno Bee:
“Thumbs Down if you are registered voter but will sit out the primary election on Tuesday. One online analytics company was showing scant ballots having been returned in one of the hottest local races this time around, the campaign for Congressional District 22 now held by Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Tulare. Of 205,000 ballots mailed to voters in that district, only about 33,000 had been returned as of Wednesday – less than a sixth of the total. C’mon, voters, get with it. You don’t need to vote on everything on the ballot – but do vote on what matters most to you.”
==================================
The Antidote to Trump Is Decency[Click]
==========================================
Antibiotics greatly reduce effectiveness of cancer treatment – study[Click] Interesting that the effect is so large.
=============================
On another note, I think I have discovered where my father started school—Minot, ND. On Monday I will call the student records department to see if they maintain records that far back, and if so, whether I can get a copy. And a newly discovered third cousin seems to have had the same problem I have, i.e., an unknown (or rather doubted) grandfather. Ancestry.com eventually came up with a DNA link to his/her half first cousin, which established the genetic ancestry to be different from what had been assumed.
—Alan
The antidote to Trump is decency.
DeleteSo true!
I liked the Russian example particularly.
DeleteAlan
P.S.: And thinking of the Dems not being a party of the left, I keep thinking we could use another Huey Long. If it weren't for him, the New Deal would not have been as helpful as it was.