Like, I spent over an hour weeding, deadheading, purning, transplanting stuff, the works. Filled up the bird feeders too, so the birds are happy. I'm sore as fuck but the front yard looks WAY less crappy.

Funny what consistent oxygen will do for a brain & body.

One of the reasons I'm no longer in the SCA is because of how goddamn frustrating it was to try to get involved as a newcomer. The experience I'm having with them now is more of what I dealt with for years: people who were unresponsive, indifferent, or dismissive. It's discouraging.

I need to get this stuff out of my house. I don't play in the SCA anymore, don't have the space, & want it OUT. It's been clogging up my closets & part of my basement for way too long.

I just reached out to a historic music society. Maybe they'll want it?

The terrible bargain is: compliance might buy time to keep treating the greatest number of patients for the longest period of time.

But it also enables & empowers an authoritarian regime.

The current regime has the power to cut off federal funding to hospitals that don't comply with their demands. If they do, then that hospital goes under, & patients don't get the care they need.

At this point, neither the university nor the affiliated hospitals have submitted to pressures like the ones that Columbia & now Northwestern have caved to. But those pressures are still there, & even before I left, C-level & legal teams were balancing risks to patients if they don't submit.

"I swear, it was like that when we got up!"

I don't think that people who've never dealt with narcissists really understand this.

Unless you've had experience with people who are pathologically self-absorbed, & you've done the work to understand that their obvious behaviors/words are just surface stuff, then it's hard to fathom.