Think Sink
Another thought down the drain, but my mind has a disposal.
I shot the duckstack
The problem with duckstacks is its very difficult to teach them how to ride a bycicle. The Duckstack is four years old, its high time it learns, but how? You can stick the duckstack on the seat, but its feet can’t reach the peddles. You could stick it on one side, but then it couldn’t reach the other. The best we’ve got is bending the duckstack over like a slinky, so that one side of the duckstack is peddling with its head. It isn’t perfect, but it is progress. The next problem to solve is appending an elaborate series of mirrors to enable it to see where its going.
Duckstack Science: Pain
No pain, no gain. Time for a lot of gains.
In the many years you have been alive, excluding my <1 year old readers, you’ve probably experienced one or two “stubbed toes”. When you smash your foot on something, and the pain goes to your head, inflating your head like a giant balloon, and you’re off balance until someone sticks you with a needle, or you float up to the ceiling, or you pop due to air pressure and die. Everyone has this happen to them. But there’s a delay before the pain in the nerves hits you- the electrons have to travel up your nervous system. This is inefficient. We’re putting brains in toes.
All About Emotions
with the defunding of pbs kids the burden falls upon me
Inside your head and heart and fingers are feelings. A feeling is an extrasensory perception, or ESP. You can ESP things like happy, sad, anxious, or hot stove. Like all perceptions, ESPs help you to navigate reality.
I don’t know if its a mistake of psychology, or social science, or materialism (which I may or may not believe in), but its well known that humans are not rational beings. Rationality developed to convince others, not to arrive at the correct conclusions, and generally you can spot the difference by swapping out “am I being logical?” with “am I being rigorous?” Okay. But emotions are actually the same way. We trust our emotions, for good reason, but we naturally mistake them as rational, meaning we tend to think our emotions relate to reality. Emotions are a readout of how you relate to your environment- not the environment’s true nature. The main reason psychotherapy has gone downhill and now leads to so many bad outcomes is that it used to be about fixing you, and now it is about fixing your environment based on your perception of it. This obviously doesn’t work if you are hallucinating, which all of us are 100% of the time but usually on a close enough level that the discrepancies don’t matter.
You can change your emotions.
When your emotions tell you to be sad it is basically telling you there is something you should change in your environment- and its true that if you identify that and change it, you’ll feel better. “something is wrong” “something is right”. They’re a little bit like metal detectors. But they’ll just go off at literally everything if you don’t “drive”. If you are a slave to your emotions, then everything will feel important. If something feels important to you, that’s how you know you’ve been caught.
I was thinking about this because we were talking in church about how there was a time when Joseph Smith was in a bad mood because his kid just died and a mob burned down all his friends houses and he was in jail, and so he was praying and the first thing God said to him was “be of good cheer”, which seems rather cruel if you read it as a suggestion. It reads rather differently if you read it as a commandment.
And this stood out to me, because God has treated me very similarly, many times. When you’re deep in a sour mood, sometimes it requires almost “permission” to get out of it. Sometimes you can snap out of it through circumstance (which in my experience is usually how we chase getting out of a bad mood, whatever your pet vice is. For me I play video games chasing the “high” of a good match, for example.) But looked at frankly this is a tremendous waste of resources if you can literally just toggle it and move on. We’re commanded to forgive 70 x 7 times, in my opinion because indulging in depression is a sin. And it tends to lead to other sins, especially of omission. “The good that you could have done, will go undone.”
Be of good cheer. God has said this to me. Shockingly, he has always been right. I think when Christ tells people “Thy sins are forgiven thee” its the same thing. Of course he really is actually forgiving their sins, but pragmatically, he’s giving them a sort of permission to move on. Don’t miss out on things due to beating yourself over sins which Christ already paid for. Instead just look to repay him with gratitude. That type of a thing. Its possible to be too greedy, but that is usually a function of ingratitude, not quantity. I think God is most concerned about movement, our direction and successes. Certainly my own kids care about all sorts of nonsense, and never see how much better things could be if they would just chill for a bit.
I don’t think we’re going to get all the perspective in life necessary to avoid all these tunnel-vision caused disasters, but I’ve noticed that the more in tune I am with God, when I pray and read scriptures and so forth, setting my emotions straight is usually one of the first things that happens. The spirit and body are the soul of man.
Warning: Party
fear and tremble
Recently we’ve found a reverse disco ball in the cul-de-sac. You understand how bad that is, right? We shouldn’t have to warn you of the destruction the last one of these found caused. A description, so you can avoid it: Its a disco ball that appears to be upside down, rising up from a string vertically from the center of the street. This is bad. If you see any disco related phenomena, stay indoors, don’t look directly at it, and pray that the mirrors do not serve to magnify the suns rays to set everything on fire. But realistically that is going to happen. Spray some water on your walls, I guess.
The Sun Striking Fox
All credit goes to Truman G Madsen from his talk, The Commanding Image of Christ. There is no transcript for the talk, and I think this little fable is worth preserving, so I have reproduced it here.
Once there was a young fox who lived on the other side of the moon. He associated with the junior foxes and took for granted their outlook. They claimed to be influenced by a moonlight orb called "the sun" on the other side. No one had devised a way of traveling there but some testified of visionary glimpses of the realm, and all claimed to be subject to its emanation.
Eventually the fox went away to school. When he came back, he was often seen talking to himself. That, on good authority, is normal for most foxes, in school or out. One of his friends, an effective lip reader followed him around until he knew what he was down to. The monologue went something like this: "All this talk of sunshine, is really moonshine. I'm going on a sun strike. I will bury my testimony. I will dig my hole way down. Then I will say, "I don't know." If anyone tries to argue I will say, "No young fox knows." And if they push me I will say, "No fox can know." He had no more than finished his hole when his friend came up and knocked. Or rather, dug.
“What do you mean,” he began, "No fox can know about the sun?" He had to say it three times, and loud, because when someone is that deep in a hole it is hard to hear. "Just that," the fox replied. "Foxes are using the word 'sun', and no one even knows what it means." “Interesting,” replied the friend, “but that means you don't know what the word means.”
“Alright,” said the fox, “what I'm saying is that I don't think anyone can know about this delusion in foxes heads about the sun, especially young foxes.” "I see," said the friend. “How do you know that no young fox knows?" "They just don't,” replied the fox, they just think they know.” “A remarkable assertion,” the friend replied. "To be sure of that, or even fairly sure, you must have taken inventory of all the young foxes. That is quite the fox hunt." "No," said the fox, "I haven't counted all the heads in that way. Lets just say, I doubt that they know."
“That brings us to you,” said the friend, “which is where I believe you have started and ended on this subject. You say you don't know?” "That's right." “What would have to occur in your life to enable you to know?” "I'm not sure. But something I can really see, and that others can too."
“Very good,” said the friend. “The sun's rays if not presently seeable are at least presently sense-able, and tangibly so. But let us pursue your test: Convince me of your doubts.”
"I am full of doubts I tell you, you don't have to believe me if you don't want to." "but now you are insisting on the reality of something you cannot see. Namely your doubts." That is tricky replied the fox, but in the case of my doubts there is evidence that even you can see. I act like I don't know! "But do you admit that people with belief in the sun can support their beliefs by action?" asked the friend. "No." "It is curious then that you should expect me to take actions as evidence of your doubt. But if action is the test, I have noticed that you do not live down to your disbeliefs. Last week I saw you reading a book on the delights of sunbathing, and hidden in your hole is an artificial sunlamp."
"Well," the fox said, feeling a little sheepish in his fox clothing, "at least I am not psychological! I am not guilty of wanting there to be a sun." Granting said his friend that wishful belief does not make a thing true, neither does wishful disbelief make it false. Where are we then?" "Yes indeed,” said the fox, “Where are we?" "We are to this point,” said the friend, “You are required to admit, after all, that there may be a sun. But by your own tests, I would say that as long as you stay underground you are not likely to come up with much evidence on either side. You are the cause of your own eclipse. Anyway, for all your expressed doubts you haven't yet been around enough to know, therefore not enough to know that young foxes don't know, therefore not enough to know that no fox knows."
Moral: There are no atheists in foxholes
History
As kids get older they become more self sufficient, such as going and getting popsicles whenever they want. This means life becomes full of sticky surprises.
The toddler escaped this week and came back in with the most horrifying hands you’d ever seen. Turns out he had been playing with the walnut smasher and had stained his hands black and purple from walnut juice.
“I jumped backwards! Thats a smart thing to do.” I’m not sure that is the case
This week, the toddler scrunched up into a ball on the table and told us, “Sometimes I turn into squishy yucky tacos.” Sometimes he does that, apparently.
Every child reaches that stage in their life where they realize they can walk around without a diaper if they just take it off.
Ducksnax
popcorn
William Glasser's choice theory (also a book, of the same name) is unsurprisingly really big on the notion you choose everything from depression to autoimmunity even if you're not doing it consciously. "Oh look this is a really secular understanding of the sacredness of agency," was my response.