Puritanical abstinence is a sign of spiritual disease. Variety makes the day better and more interesting. An enriched environment makes people smarter and improves the health of the brain by stimulates the formation of new neural connections and strengthening old ones. Fanatics can abstain from any of a variety of normal daily activities. People who go on pure vegetarian diets miss out on a wide variety good food, clothing choices, and tools. Vegans miss out on even more. They even object to gathering wild honey. The ATkins dieters spend more time obsessing over avoiding carb intake than they spend time exercising. Switching their priorities would allow them to run off the fat. Sugar-free nuts miss out on the best desserts in the world. Teetotalers miss out on the pleasures of alcohol. I like to drink, but sadly for me, I have a bad reaction whenever I drink. That reaction forces me to abstain from most alcohol which makes me virtually a teetotaler. Some people abstain from sex. The American politico-economic empire across the world enforces abstinence from all mind altering substances except for alcohol.
It’s part of the condition of sentient beings to seek out altered states of consciousness such as those provided by mental disciplines and the ingestion of entheogens. Cat’s crave the high of catnip, other animals seek windfall fruits which have been naturally fermented via the action of wild yeast. They eat the alcoholic fruits until they are drunk. Some animals seek out psychedelics. Humans have sought the same experiences since the beginning of time, and having it is an inalienable right that has never been interfered with by government action until recently in history.
The current drug Prohibition criminalises a normal and healthy (when the user exercises self-control) behaviour. The government does not have the moral authority to Prohibit anything. As with alcohol, opiates have recreational merit, and along with many other drugs, opiates arguably have spiritual merit. I can’t get drunk owing to the fact that alcohol triggers migraines, so I’ve taken up the use of opiates. Addiction is not healthy, and it takes a lot of time and energy to deal with, so I keep it to once every three or four days. Without addiction, there is no need to compulsively locate a source all the time, and travelling is easy.
....
We found the guest house easily. It was in an old part of town with centuries old buildings around it. Drusilla parked the car, and we got out and stretched. The temperature was mild, barely below freezing. The air was fresh. The town was surrounded by high, snowy mountains.
The key under a rock next to the door. Our apartment was a suite of rooms that had been partitioned off in a traditional French mountain house. The apartment was a full sized two bedroom apartment complete with a kitchen. We unloaded the car and put away the groceries. We had more groceries than we had actual luggage.
She offered to cook if I washed the dishes. I agreed. I’m not a good cook, but I’m a professionally trained dishwasher. I received my training when I had a part time job in college washing dishes at a Greek restaurant. I washed dishes quickly, thoroughly, and carefully. I only broke a single wine glass that entire job and never had a complaint about dirty dishes. I had been good at my job.
The local pub was still open. It was in a block of old buildings near our flat. The interior, the walls, the floor, and the ceiling, were all of dark wood, and the lights were low. Drusilla ordered a cocktail called “sex on the beach.” While she ordered, she looked into my eyes and had a look that I suspected was intended to communicate something meaningful. I wondered what it was she was trying to say with her eyes.
I ordered an apéritif, a drink served before our meal. It was a liqueur made from wildflowers that grow in the area. Our drinks arrived, and she leaned close to me and touched my knee. The taste of my drink was bitter like medicine. I almost gagged on it. I didn’t finish it. I didn’t want to risk a migraine. I didn’t want to talk to her any more either. I looked out the window and across the valley at the snowy mountains.
Afterwards, we went back to the apartment. She cooked supper. I offered to help, but she reminded me that all I had to do was wash dishes.
“Would you set the table?” she said.
I didn’t know why she wanted the table set. She was sending out bad vibrations. I suddenly felt like I was visiting a girlfriend’s snooty middle_class_pretending_to_be_upper_class parents. I had begun to think of Drusilla as a bitter and hypocritical prospective mother-in-law. The perception of being around someone judgemental and pushy yet ignorant was strong. She was sending out so many conflicting signals.
It’s not that I was embarrassed about the fact that I don’t know how to set a table. I don’t care how it’s done, and I do not need to know how it’s done. Maybe it was different for my grandparents’ generation, but nobody sets the table any more. Most people don’t eat together anymore either. Everyone picks out their own plates, serves their own food, sits where they want, reads a book or newspaper, plays with a phone, watches TV, or works on a laptop. As long as nobody is actually speaking into the phone or playing audio without headphones, it is acceptable. There is no rule that says you must focus on the other person sitting there, whether they are a friend or a stranger.
I suspected that it was my indifferences to irrelevant and outdated social norms that upset her.
Charles Bukowski pointed out that one of the problems with the world is that the ignorant are always dead sure of themselves while the intelligent always question everything including themselves. I had begun to suspect that her personality was, in fact, authoritarian and bullying. I don’t know how I missed this when I first met her. Drusilla is the kind of personality who goes to work as a government bureaucrat or some other soul-destroying job as a drone in the government or corporate sphere. They love rules and regulations and hate anything unstructured, spontaneous, or informal. Such people are not welcome in my life. She can go on living her life gathering and calculating accounting statistics for a rich corporation. I imagine the shareholders appreciate her dedicating her best years to their capital gains and dividends.
As a child, I was taught that table setting, on the rare instance it was done, was women’s work. Whether or not that is relevant, I do not work in the food industry, and I’m not a butler or a housekeeper. I took the trouble to get a PhD in a potentially lucrative field, Molecular Biology, with the expectation that I would NEVER need to know how things like setting tables are done. If it did come up, I would ask or look it up. Even better, on the rare event that I would eat a formal meal, someone would do it for me. That’s how it has been since college. My training is in a highly specialised academic field, and it’s a waste of time to futz around with drudgery like table setting. The last time I tried to cook a formal meal, it was for an American girlfriend, and she threw it out the window.
I found two plates, two forks, two spoons, and two knives. I put them on the table in no particular arrangement.
“You forgot the linens,” she said, with a scowl that I almost missed noticing. “We need glasses too.”
After a quick search, I found some glasses in a cupboard. There were a wide variety, each with a specific function which I did not know. Although there were several types of wine glasses, I picked two of the same kind and two large glasses for water. She bought a case of bottled water, but here we were in a town that has the freshest spring water in the world running from its faucets. I poured a glass of tap water for myself and set out a bottle of grocery store water for her.
The apartment had wifi. I had to look up on my laptop what she wanted me to do with linen cloth in this context.
Next, she got out the wine.
“Would you open the bottle?” she said.
I found a cork screw and opened the wine, waited for it to “breath,” and poured two glasses. Then I worked at my laptop while she cooked. My serving was small because of my sensitivity to alcohol.
“Please clear everything else off the table. No maps, no gloves, no books, no papers, nothing. That includes your laptop,” she said.
There was only one useable table, and that was the dining room table.
In the field of science, the concept of a work-life balance has been lost. Even though the pay is peanuts, work takes the priority in life. It’s expected that one continue to work at home after leaving the lab. That work includes data analysis, writing papers, and responding to work-related emails late into the night. Everybody is doing it; so that is the bare minimum needed to keep up in the competitive field. Failing to do it will result in job loss.
Had I known about the work conditions in academic science beforehand, I would have chosen a different career. Science was not like that only 15 years ago when the economy was better. Everybody who still has a job in today’s economy works at it with a clinical OCD obsession. Ones social life, hobbies, family life, fitness are sacrificed to keep a job in academia. (The combined suicide and attempted suicide rates among PhD students and postdocs is 1 in 4 researchers.)
I was on vacation, but it had been ingrained in me that to survive in science, I need to work compulsively every day and at all hours. I wanted to work on a project on my laptop. It’s a tiny laptop, and the table was so large that it was designed for six people. It was not in the way of the meal. Besides that, food wouldn’t be ready for another hour on account of the fact that she was cooking tough, rooty things that only an eastern European washer-woman would think to cook.
It’s part of the condition of sentient beings to seek out altered states of consciousness such as those provided by mental disciplines and the ingestion of entheogens. Cat’s crave the high of catnip, other animals seek windfall fruits which have been naturally fermented via the action of wild yeast. They eat the alcoholic fruits until they are drunk. Some animals seek out psychedelics. Humans have sought the same experiences since the beginning of time, and having it is an inalienable right that has never been interfered with by government action until recently in history.
The current drug Prohibition criminalises a normal and healthy (when the user exercises self-control) behaviour. The government does not have the moral authority to Prohibit anything. As with alcohol, opiates have recreational merit, and along with many other drugs, opiates arguably have spiritual merit. I can’t get drunk owing to the fact that alcohol triggers migraines, so I’ve taken up the use of opiates. Addiction is not healthy, and it takes a lot of time and energy to deal with, so I keep it to once every three or four days. Without addiction, there is no need to compulsively locate a source all the time, and travelling is easy.
....
We found the guest house easily. It was in an old part of town with centuries old buildings around it. Drusilla parked the car, and we got out and stretched. The temperature was mild, barely below freezing. The air was fresh. The town was surrounded by high, snowy mountains.
The key under a rock next to the door. Our apartment was a suite of rooms that had been partitioned off in a traditional French mountain house. The apartment was a full sized two bedroom apartment complete with a kitchen. We unloaded the car and put away the groceries. We had more groceries than we had actual luggage.
She offered to cook if I washed the dishes. I agreed. I’m not a good cook, but I’m a professionally trained dishwasher. I received my training when I had a part time job in college washing dishes at a Greek restaurant. I washed dishes quickly, thoroughly, and carefully. I only broke a single wine glass that entire job and never had a complaint about dirty dishes. I had been good at my job.
The local pub was still open. It was in a block of old buildings near our flat. The interior, the walls, the floor, and the ceiling, were all of dark wood, and the lights were low. Drusilla ordered a cocktail called “sex on the beach.” While she ordered, she looked into my eyes and had a look that I suspected was intended to communicate something meaningful. I wondered what it was she was trying to say with her eyes.
I ordered an apéritif, a drink served before our meal. It was a liqueur made from wildflowers that grow in the area. Our drinks arrived, and she leaned close to me and touched my knee. The taste of my drink was bitter like medicine. I almost gagged on it. I didn’t finish it. I didn’t want to risk a migraine. I didn’t want to talk to her any more either. I looked out the window and across the valley at the snowy mountains.
Afterwards, we went back to the apartment. She cooked supper. I offered to help, but she reminded me that all I had to do was wash dishes.
“Would you set the table?” she said.
I didn’t know why she wanted the table set. She was sending out bad vibrations. I suddenly felt like I was visiting a girlfriend’s snooty middle_class_pretending_to_be_upper_class parents. I had begun to think of Drusilla as a bitter and hypocritical prospective mother-in-law. The perception of being around someone judgemental and pushy yet ignorant was strong. She was sending out so many conflicting signals.
It’s not that I was embarrassed about the fact that I don’t know how to set a table. I don’t care how it’s done, and I do not need to know how it’s done. Maybe it was different for my grandparents’ generation, but nobody sets the table any more. Most people don’t eat together anymore either. Everyone picks out their own plates, serves their own food, sits where they want, reads a book or newspaper, plays with a phone, watches TV, or works on a laptop. As long as nobody is actually speaking into the phone or playing audio without headphones, it is acceptable. There is no rule that says you must focus on the other person sitting there, whether they are a friend or a stranger.
I suspected that it was my indifferences to irrelevant and outdated social norms that upset her.
Charles Bukowski pointed out that one of the problems with the world is that the ignorant are always dead sure of themselves while the intelligent always question everything including themselves. I had begun to suspect that her personality was, in fact, authoritarian and bullying. I don’t know how I missed this when I first met her. Drusilla is the kind of personality who goes to work as a government bureaucrat or some other soul-destroying job as a drone in the government or corporate sphere. They love rules and regulations and hate anything unstructured, spontaneous, or informal. Such people are not welcome in my life. She can go on living her life gathering and calculating accounting statistics for a rich corporation. I imagine the shareholders appreciate her dedicating her best years to their capital gains and dividends.
As a child, I was taught that table setting, on the rare instance it was done, was women’s work. Whether or not that is relevant, I do not work in the food industry, and I’m not a butler or a housekeeper. I took the trouble to get a PhD in a potentially lucrative field, Molecular Biology, with the expectation that I would NEVER need to know how things like setting tables are done. If it did come up, I would ask or look it up. Even better, on the rare event that I would eat a formal meal, someone would do it for me. That’s how it has been since college. My training is in a highly specialised academic field, and it’s a waste of time to futz around with drudgery like table setting. The last time I tried to cook a formal meal, it was for an American girlfriend, and she threw it out the window.
I found two plates, two forks, two spoons, and two knives. I put them on the table in no particular arrangement.
“You forgot the linens,” she said, with a scowl that I almost missed noticing. “We need glasses too.”
After a quick search, I found some glasses in a cupboard. There were a wide variety, each with a specific function which I did not know. Although there were several types of wine glasses, I picked two of the same kind and two large glasses for water. She bought a case of bottled water, but here we were in a town that has the freshest spring water in the world running from its faucets. I poured a glass of tap water for myself and set out a bottle of grocery store water for her.
The apartment had wifi. I had to look up on my laptop what she wanted me to do with linen cloth in this context.
Next, she got out the wine.
“Would you open the bottle?” she said.
I found a cork screw and opened the wine, waited for it to “breath,” and poured two glasses. Then I worked at my laptop while she cooked. My serving was small because of my sensitivity to alcohol.
“Please clear everything else off the table. No maps, no gloves, no books, no papers, nothing. That includes your laptop,” she said.
There was only one useable table, and that was the dining room table.
In the field of science, the concept of a work-life balance has been lost. Even though the pay is peanuts, work takes the priority in life. It’s expected that one continue to work at home after leaving the lab. That work includes data analysis, writing papers, and responding to work-related emails late into the night. Everybody is doing it; so that is the bare minimum needed to keep up in the competitive field. Failing to do it will result in job loss.
Had I known about the work conditions in academic science beforehand, I would have chosen a different career. Science was not like that only 15 years ago when the economy was better. Everybody who still has a job in today’s economy works at it with a clinical OCD obsession. Ones social life, hobbies, family life, fitness are sacrificed to keep a job in academia. (The combined suicide and attempted suicide rates among PhD students and postdocs is 1 in 4 researchers.)
I was on vacation, but it had been ingrained in me that to survive in science, I need to work compulsively every day and at all hours. I wanted to work on a project on my laptop. It’s a tiny laptop, and the table was so large that it was designed for six people. It was not in the way of the meal. Besides that, food wouldn’t be ready for another hour on account of the fact that she was cooking tough, rooty things that only an eastern European washer-woman would think to cook.