braving the cesspool

As concerned as I am to have let myself get drawn back into Twitter, it's been interesting to realize that I'm a lot better at it than I used to be. I'm not afraid to follow and engage with people. Some follow me back. I don't worry about it, or feel rejected when they don't. When I used Twitter in the past, I knew I was doing it wrong, but I wasn't comfortable trying to amass followers and interactions by really putting myself out there like this.

My worldview may not be popular, but I'm getting better at engaging with humanity in general, and that even carries over to social media. I've also started to calm down, when people give me their awful takes, comparing Putin to Hitler and all that, while supporting actual Nazis. Russia bans Nazism. Ukraine bans communism. We're arming far-right extremists to the teeth instead of promoting diplomacy.

Liberals have become Nazi sympathizing warmongers, but it doesn't get under my skin as much anymore. I'm still horrified by the potency of western propaganda, but it is what it is. I do my best to dispel it, one ignorant jackass at a time. What's really addictive turns out to be arguing with people, and I'm back to learning everything I can, so that I can do it more competently, and less emotionally. It helps not calling someone an ignorant jackass, for one thing.

Changing minds doesn't occur in a single argument, but introduce people to new ideas and supporting facts, and it can be like planting a seed. I've learned a lot from the people who have argued with me, even if I've never admitted, even to myself, at the time. Minds change, it just takes a while.

For the longest time, the role other people played in my dreams was not at all normative. I'd only dream of random strangers or close family I've known since childhood. I never dreamed about people I'd interacted with only as an adult. I'm not a fan of dream interpretation, but suspect that's quite telling. Only very recently have I found myself dreaming of people I know from the gym. People I've talked to, people I've become brave enough to ask to spar or grapple. People I've felt glimmers of connection with.

Not some sort of idealized connection, just regular people I know very little about, whose company I've enjoyed in the moment. Something in me has been improving, for the first time in my life. The downside of that is realizing how much I've missed out on, these past forty years. Why have I been hiding from this my entire life? It feels pretty tragic, now that I've got so little time left to do much with it. I keep trying not to think about that.

I want to start competing, and have a few years left to give that a shot. Hard to be optimistic that I'll be able to say the same as I approach sixty, but for now, so far, so good. I need to be able to prove myself, before I can think about teaching anyone else.

I've had a sore throat all week, so on top of being distracted by geopolitics, I haven't been getting to the gym, and my mental health has been waning because of it. I try not to dwell too much on how yet another week goes by, sitting around doing nothing. I haven't gotten tested, because I don't think it matters. It's probably BA.2, but a test doesn't change anything. 

I can't go to the gym when I'm symptomatic, even if a dubious test comes up negative. I'm not going to keep testing myself every day, even if it's positive. It just seems like common sense to worry more about symptoms than test results. For two years now I've been meaning to buy a simple thermometer, but I keep forgetting, so of course I have no tests on hand, either.

The gym is such high risk, everyone there gets exposed. We all get new variants the moment they hit Vermont. Anyone there who worries about it doesn't understand the situation. Realistically, we need to focus more on bolstering our immune systems to be able to handle it than think we can somehow evade exposure entirely.

Scary as it may be, it's so important to take risks in life. That's what makes life worth living.