spacefem

This book was recommended by a book club I'm in and it got my attention because I do feel like I struggle to get to know people - or I can also admit that as an engineer, don't we all struggle with people. Like, as an entity?

It's always fascinated me that talking is something we teach to 1-2 year olds... the basics. It's like we are all given a pile of steel beams as infants, then it's assumed that we'll just figure out how to build the golden gate bridge.

Anyway the gist of this book is that our society is growing more divided, lonely, with fewer close friends and broader groups of enemies, even among our neighbors. We label people who disagree with us as crazy instead of human. We feel awkward around people who are supposed to be our friends, we don't know what to say when tragedy strikes so we freeze up and stop reaching out.

I like reading memoirs, so my favorite takeaways were about the importance of asking people to tell their stories. The book is full of stories about people who suffered losses, solved problems, changed the world, changed their family... we learn best from the little personal stories.

Then he talks about why it's important to get these stories out of the people we are close to. Being a better listener is obvious. But then asking about those stories, hearing them, drawing parallels... that is the art. Instead of just asking "what are your values" or "how do you feel" but "what happened to you that influenced your values?" or "what event made you feel this way?"

He compares conversations to music. There is a huge difference between playing a tape recorder, or working with an accompanist. An accompanist hears the song as it's being played, follows the lead, adds a bit of their own improvisation but stays in the background. That is what we're doing when we listen and ask questions.

This book was published in 2023. Reading it in 2025, it is all coming through my filter of politics, I see us being worse not better. But the book reminded me that no matter how bad everything is, my job has to be to listen. Find the stories, understand people. Or if I want to support people who agree with me, the best way to support them is to listen to them. Don't get them ranting about the other side, let them tell their stories about how they came to agree with me. What happened to them. It is more valuable, more comforting, healthier.

Hidden Brain had an interesting episode called “When It's All Too Much”, talking about mental health when you see problems around you that you can’t solve. Climate change was the topic of a lot of it. They talked about things people do in response to these problems. Some people shut down and can’t do anything, others work until they’re burnt out, both paths end in despair and inaction.

One anecdote that’s in my head: celebrate the thing you have now that you are trying to save. The guest on the podcast said that when her students were scared of losing the forest, she would ask them “Oh, so you like forests? When’s the last time you were in one?” and it would remind them to go walk around actual trees, because they might not be here forever but at least they are here now so we might as well be in them while we can, and as a bonus it’s some dopamine.

I feel lucky to have a brain that must be very balanced, because when I get down about something it wears off in a few hours. It’s probably annoying to some people around me. I was thinking about this last week, amid all the chaos I was sharing a “happy black history month!” news thing on my linkedin, and I was like man this must look so out of place to people who think the world is really burning down. The truth is, an hour ago, I DID think the world was terrible and there is lots of evidence that it’s burning down. But when I feel like that I do not post anything on linkedin.

Last September I passed my private pilot instrument checkride without talking much about it here, but it was about 18 months of training and craziness, incredibly stressful, a lot of work, but I passed! And now I can fly in clouds.

The flying takes a lot of practice - focus on vertical and navigational guidance regardless of what instruments are failed and stay on those damn lines - but I swear for every hour I spent flying I spent 10 (20? 100?) hours memorizing regulations, definitions, and standards. I've told prospective pilots that I now support the idea of ground school/written test before you even start flying, because that part is not much money but tells you if you have hope. In other words: If you can memorize the visibility minimums of class G airspace at night without hating airplanes, a pilot's life is for you!

My internet friend cheesepilot said a brilliant thing that made me feel better about struggling: "Our brains didn't evolve to memorize facts. Our brains evolved to remember experiences... primarily the ones that resulted in food."

So every time I felt hopeless, I got some cheese-its and went off in search of a new study method. Here is the list, once I had my arms around it:

King Schools ground was my starting point, and their question bank for the written test. It went okay I got an 85%, passed.

The FAR/AIM, obviously... but rather than reading it front to back mine was full of tabs where I'd get a practice question wrong, then look it up.

Youtube - especially checkride prep and "mock oral" videos. Watching someone else stumble through answers was good for me,

Reddit - has some great threads of people posting about reasons they failed their checkride, or threads like "my checkride is today try to stump me"

Quizlet - people have already made tons of flashcards for this and quizlet is an app you can open in line for coffee. win!

Spotify has an instrument checkride audiobook, believe it or not. I went looking for podcasts but didn't find a ton.

The Red Book - aka the oral prep guide. It is also so boring, but... tabs. The oral exam is "open book" but knowing where to look is half the battle, so when I read something and thought "I won't remember that" I made a tab for it.

Made myself a notecard - remember teachers who'd say you could bring one card or sheet of notes? Just making the notes helped me so much, I made a few 1-sheets just for fun.

That Pilot Cafe pdf everybody passes around

Plan a weird flight - before my check ride the examiner asked me to plan a flight between two ridiculous mountain airports on a day with temps 20 degrees c over standard. I learned a lot from just planning it! And telling him it wasn't good for us in a little airplane. but I realized that's something I could have done a month ago, just for practice and run into symbols on charts I'd never seen before.

POH/STC supplements - thou shalt know your airplane, even more before a checkride.

I also filled notebooks with NOTES because writing helps me. I made nice pages, I made messy pages. I had a page of my top 6 questions where I would have SNAPPY answers because they came up on every mock oral video...

When is an instrument rating required
What is required for instrument currency
What is our required equipment
When is an alternate airport required
What are standard takeoff minimums
What are required reporting points en route

I made a page for "weird magnetic compass stuff" to remember when we had to Undershoot North Overshoot South (until I fly to Australia) and another one for Top 10 ACS Fun Facts to remember the standards I'd be held to in the checkride (altitude +/- 100 feet!)

And in the end I STILL did not know everything and was still not perfect, but I "Consistently Met The Standards" and was awarded with a temporary certificate, and then weeks later a new plastic pilots license. It is STRIKINGLY similar to the old one, except if you know where to look, and have very good eyes for small print, right next to the words "airplane single engine land" it says "instrument airplane".

I am absolutely livid about the tiktok ban. It's pure corruption, pure money, I do not believe for .001 seconds that the government is concerned about our privacy or foreign election interference. that negative influence already happened on facebook and nobody cared!

my tiktok following was a blast. 38 thousand followers, 700 mutual friends. it was the friendliest mix of pilots, Midwesterners, progressives, diversity advocates, artists, critics, engineers, people of all genders, races and backgrounds.

I guess the only upside is maybe it will get me back here to writing, now that I can't tell my life stories on tiktok. writing was always healthier and more discrete. no company bans on what I'm doing with dreamwidth. I can keep all of this fairly secret. and as I told my tiktok - wherever I tell my stories, they are the stories, I will tell them elsewhere. I get them out, get them organized, they help me in life just to put thoughts into words, however I do it.

I was better at writing about my books that I read. nobody on tiktok cared much for my book posts, they never went anywhere, I heard all these things about booktok but it turns out that was mostly for fantasy romance or something that I am not against, just not that into. there's an evenness of blogging that I miss. nothing goes totally flat or totally viral, it just is. I could be better about being here and being a friend. I could finish printing out my journals from 2020 and 2021. 2022 might have been lost to the world of short form video.

I'm still mad about it, I'm still sad to be losing it. just trying to find any silver linings.

I saw "Matilda: The Musical" for the first time this week, I was excited to see one of my favorite all time books come to life on stage and it was amazing. But this quote by Miss Trunchbull made me think:

"In this world, children, there are two types of human being. The winners and the losers. I am a winner. I play by the rules and I win. But if I play by the rules and I... do not win, then something is wrong, something is not working. And when something is wrong you have to put it right. Even if it screams."

I see people raising kids this way, sadly enough. When I read stories about cults and religious abuse, it's a theme. If you follow THE RULES God favors you. If God hasn't favored you, it's because you've done something wrong and you need MORE RULES and discipline. You're a bad person. There are Two Types Of People. If you're rich, it's because you work hard and fear God. If you're poor, you are lazy. There are geniuses, and people who need to stay out of their way and quit holding the geniuses back, questioning their authority, and asking them to pay taxes. There are moral beacons of authority, and there are lawless criminals who need to be locked up and punished so they follow the rules. Did you sleep on a park bench because you were homeless? That's against the rules. Why aren't you working! You should be in jail, or forced to leave. You got yourself into this situation.

At some point in my early 20s, I started realizing that there's some serious luck and birthright involved in who's rich, who's poor, who went to college, who went to prison. I realized there aren't two types of people, there's basically one type of person, and we're all kind of trying our best. If we create a system that helps people out, we might all thrive, because you never can predict who's going to do great things in the world. If we create a system focused on finding the bad people and punishing them, we're missing the point. You can blame all your problems on criminals, but then when the blame starts you don't know where to stop, who else isn't following your rules? You slide from thieves to drug addicts to undocumented immigrants, gays, atheists... because you lose a scale, you're so busy trying to figure out who is squarely in your bad category and screwing everything up for all of us, and you definitely can't look in the mirror anymore, you forgot how. In your perfect categories, you tell your children that religious leaders are infallible and drag queens are dangerous and you ignore all evidence to the contrary.

So I decided to do the opposite of all of that, be thankful for what the world has given me, because it was luck, and I can help other people have the same opportunities because I was helped. I wasn't a magic Good Person. How else can we say it? Well... I didn't just fall out of a coconut tree!

I think I have INCURABLE strep throat! This is the worst!

Feb 6 - scratchy throat. tried a vitamin C lozenge
Feb 7 - stayed home sick to rest
Feb 8 - hurt into my ears, went to the doctor, got some amoxicillin
Feb 9 - cancelled our KC trip. I had almost no voice.
Feb 14 - you'd think after nearly a week of antibiotics I'd be better, right? But I wasn't, I woke up with my throat feeling like knives.
Feb 15 - doctor switched me from amoxicillin to cefdinir.
Feb 19 - tried teaching laser cutter class. talked softly but my throat was still KILLING ME at the end.
Feb 20 - I'm seeing an unrelated doctor for an eyelid stye I got back in september, so
Feb 21 - going back to my doctor. my throat hurts.

WTF. I've had strep before... okay years ago I had a bad round where it just kept coming back. But every time, I'd go on antibiotics and they'd knock it out in 48 hours. now I seem to be impervious to antibiotics.

I hate not being able to talk. I hate having a quiet voice. I hate my throat hurting. and I really hate being nervous that I'm just never going to be the same.

Watson the ferret passed away. It was not unexpected, I wrote in December that he was looking pretty bad. 9 years old, deaf, mostly blind, hip issues, soiling his bedding, shaking, and multiple vet visits hadn't gotten us much improvement.

We had a holiday weekend for MLK and Marc let Watson out of his cage where he did his thing... trying to adventure out around the house but getting tired and laying down right in the middle of the floor. I threw down a clean fleece fabric for him to curl up in and said "Marc... HE IS REALLY STRUGGLING." As in seriously, he deserves peace! Can we please have him put to sleep! Marc said okay I'll call the vet. We talked about it at Christmas but Olive, age 10, was basically agreeing that we should not prolong his suffering but she asked me can't he make it to 2024? So we said okay not this week, but here we were two weeks into January and I was like okay family am I forcing this too much or what?

Marc basically agreed with me but he's also an oddly good caretaker, so he said "I've kind of got a routine now, I don't mind." This guy. He's better than me. When the kids were babies he changed more diapers, when they'd get hurt as toddlers he was the medic no matter how gross they'd cut themselves, he always knew what to do. So with Watson he'd listen every day, when Watson woke up he'd change his bedding, let him out for exercise, wash him off, clean the cage, feed him, hold him, watch him, get him back in when he got tired and curled up the blankets and towels we left around, run a load of laundry for the towels and fleece needed for the next day, it was an ordeal. Marc was like oh it's fine.

Sunday night Watson got out of bed, walked over to his food and water, curled up out there and died. Olive wanted to see him so we let her, and it made her cry, she's our sensitive kid, but she later said she felt better because she knew it had to happen someday and she knew she had to accept it.

Ferrets were fun to have, we went through three in this adventure, but they are complicated. injury prone, lots of health issues, hormone imbalances that get expensive to treat, they don't want to eat food that's good for them, they don't want to eat food PERIOD so you're always trying to get them to gain weight, they're okay but not great at choosing to use litter boxes, they demand to have run of your entire house. they don't smell as bad as people think. they're playful and entertaining, that's the best part. they have such nutty little personalities and they're so cute to have around. I'd do it all again, it's just so hard to tell people honestly what they're getting into, and just like every pet there is inevitable loss at the end that's hard on the whole family. at least we know watson lived a good long life with lots of happy years in our house and, we hope, lots of happy years in his previous house before we adopted him. he was a rescue so we don't know, but he would have had to have been loved by his first family once, and they loved him enough to rehome him, we're grateful for that.

last christmas I was still working in customer service. we never had the holidays off, but I'm kind of nostalgic about it now. we'd send around a sheet before thanksgiving and everybody would fill in what days they could take and could not take. there was something comforting about being one of the few people on the phones on say, christmas eve, or new years eve. in fact I almost always took new years eve because it's really nothing of a holiday to me. we did shut down on christmas DAY and had an on-call-only person for big crisis, but they usually weren't disturbed too often.

anyway, there's something nice about telling everyone, "you all take off, I've got this." and being one of a few people holding it all down on a holiday. you know that you will get a day off, you'll be covered, it's just not *that* day and it's alright.

this depends on a team that will cover for you when you DO take your time away. but we were set up for that. my boss had great respect for vacations and days off. "you're no use to anybody if you're burnt out," he'd say. like me, he also despised "single points of failure"... which is an aviation term from safety analysis processes, but it applies organizationally too. People DO get burnt out. or the retire, switch jobs, win the lottery and tell us all to stick it, or heaven forbid there is a tragic accident but I do not speak about that. I'd always use the lottery example for my team. "Some day you could win the lottery and run from this place, and then we'd have to function without you. So WRITE YOUR STUFF DOWN and teach the new guy about that component you're troubleshooting, please? We've failed as an organization if it all depends on YOU."

as far as we were concerned, vacations were a litmus test for that.

which brings me to a movie I watched last night, "It's A Wonderful Life". Marc had never seen it! I've seen it a million times, I thought everyone had? But it hits differently for me now as a manager. My gosh the main character resents EVERYTHING! His town, his family, his life... but he's got people working for him at that savings and loan! NOBODY is competent enough to hold it down so he can travel a little? Of course, he was too busy running the place to go to college, maybe that's the problem, a little leadership coaching would have gone a long way. george's father couldn't teach anybody else to run that place, so nobody could do it except his son who clearly didn't want it? and then it takes heroes and fundraising to save him from imprisonment at the end, but there's no root cause corrective action to figure out how they lost $8,000? inflation calculator... that's $100,000 today!

well I'm glad Clarence got his wings but I hope he didn't leave without an organizational intervention at the building and loan. probably wouldn't make for a heartwarming christmas tale, but everyone would be a lot better off.

1) shoot I left my mouse back at the office
2) I'll use the touchpad all weekend
3) this is terrible. I wanted to make 3d print designs, I can't use this.
4) I think there's an old bluetooth mouse in a drawer!
5) I'm going to look for it.
6) nope, not that mouse, I know it doesn't work
7) not that one either
8) that's it!
9) why won't it turn on?
10) new battery
11) still won't turn on
12) google troubleshooting tips
13) another new battery
14) you know, the old battery looks pretty corroded on the bottom
15) the battery spring sure looks crusty
16) I'll scrape it off and try it again
17) hey, the mouse works, I have a mouse now!
18) what was I going to do on my laptop?
19) honestly I don't feel like doing anything on the computer
20) *goes downstairs*

First off let me say that in global running news, I was so inspired by the Chicago Marathon last weekend.

1) Kelvin Kiptum set a new marathon world record finishing in just over two hours. One of his mile splits was 4:18! Who even runs a mile that fast? And it was his 22nd mile of the day!

2) Jeannie Rice set a world record 3:34 marathon for the women's 75-80 age group. THE 75-80 AGE GROUP.

3) A non-binary division was added this year. There were some stupid internet comments about how women's sports need to be "protected" from trans/non-binary competitors, but an equal number of good comments... the fact is, running is for everyone and we love divisions, we'll set them up all over the place. Also the non-binary winner was 25 minutes behind the women's winner so it's hard to argue that this is about "protecting" women's sports. Just let everybody run.

That said I ran my own personal best 5K this morning... 30:01! Yeah, still not under 30 minutes. But I think it's achievable now. I saw this race pop up on the calendar months ago but I honestly hadn't been running at all, or doing anything. I was out of shape! Going to the gym sometimes but not much. So I got in GEAR about six weeks ago and started running again. At first it was like starting over... I'd walk a block, jog a block. But since I'd been in decent shape about a year ago I wasn't too far off. I also ran 5-6 days a week instead of every-other-day like I used to, since I knew from the past that if I run every day my endurance goes up pretty quickly. I was up to jogging the whole 3 miles in two weeks, and just extended a bit from there, running 6K on the weekends, or trying to go as fast as practical on the 4K runs.

Maybe I could get in under 30 minutes? This race was tough in sections - the last km was uphill and against a CRAZY wind!

Oh and I got to add to my "who's passing me?" bingo card. Since I'm a pretty slow runner, I keep track of the craziest passers when I do a big race.

It now consists of...

1) A very old person (check)
2) A very young person (check! like, under 10 years old, every time)
3) A couple holding hands (ewe. also check)
4) Someone pushing a stroller or wagon (check)
5) Someone actively eating snacks (not this race)
6) A heavily pregnant woman (not this race but seriously it happens all the time)
7) Anyone in costume (not this race, awe)
8) Someone wearing jeans (new addition - CHECK!)
9) over enthusiastic cheerleader (me)

The cooler temps were perfect for running, too. It feels cold since it's the first day in the 40s of the season, but running was great.