After dropping A. off at school in Burlington, R. and I drove to CBS Exotics in Winchester, where we oohed and ahed over very, very, very beautiful rock. When I was renovating my kitchen in 1999 (when the startup I worked at succeeded wildly, I didn’t buy a sports car, I bought a sports kitchen, lol), I put in granite countertops. I looked at, but concluded I could not afford at the time, Blue Bahia. For one thing, there was a lot of granite in that kitchen. And for another, I was pretty sure that my fabricator had messed up on the quote (he had, and that was fine, because I had figured out what it should be and had the money for him. As is often the case with me and people I hired to do stuff for me, he was a little surprised.), and when I looked at what I thought it would cost with Blue Bahia, it made me uneasy. I don’t like to feel uneasy, so I picked a very beautiful, but much less expensive, rock.
Anyway. Less granite in this kitchen, so I finally get the blue stuff, and it turns out R. had never seen it before and he loves it like I do. Like everyone does, really, in the end.
CBS Exotics lives up to its name, and has sodalite (no, but pretty), onyx (blue, which we’re waiting on pricing for, and green, which we decided wasn’t quite as awesome), agate (omg but definitely not for the countertops. Thinking about some table tops, tho) and a lot of really pretty granite with great color and pattern. So much fun!
FF started late, and a couple people couldn’t make it, but there were four of us. I’ve been thinking about what would it mean to have something in the Customer Service Box (story idea) to “cure” various things. So we talked about ADHD, and the parts it is crucial to preserve and to what degree a “cure” for ADHD would mean environmental / job / educational setting changes, and to what degree a “cure” might mean changes to the person of a genetic or hormonal or other nature. Similar for autism — not being able to talk seems like something I’d like to be able to offer people a “cure” for, but a lot of the rest of autism isn’t something I see as changeworthy (I do think there are some aspects of neurotypicality that should be “cured”). We also talked a little about what kinds of dentistry would survive the ability to grow a replacement tooth or teeth in adulthood, and how long people would live if you really could get rid of “all” “disease” (not forever) and whether aging itself is something that could be slowed or reversed and how various science fiction has considered that. It’s fun to talk about the different approaches, and I found it healing. I was raised in an extended family context that had been JW since before my father was born on his side, and my mother was born into a Mennonite community altho raised mostly outside it (and part of that in JW-world). The idea of living on earth, in a world without disease and aging, is something that is normal to me — that’s what they offer most of their members — but it’s all magical. God shows up, kills everyone that’s not on His team, and fixes it all. Which honestly, if He could do that, wow, what a personality disordered way of arranging human history, testing everyone for personal loyalty. There’s no flavor on the promise, of exactly what it means to never need to have dental work done again. Do you still have to brush your teeth? Floss? Their answer to, but will there be children is, we don’t know we’ll have to wait and see. Unsatisfying! A refusal to engage with the consequences of any reality sneaking into the comforting promise.
I was thinking about _that_ in part because A. had some questions about conspiracy theories and mental illness. Current psych thinking is that they are not particularly correlated to psychotic disorders, but psych in general has a really interesting take on what counts as delusional thinking (religions don’t because it’s not a delusion if you are part of a group that believes the thing. I mean, way to dodge a lot of conflict, psych. Telling on yourself.). They are prepared to find a connection between high levels of distress and conspiracy thinking, and that, I think is a solid foundation for how people commit to the kinds of promises about Heaven and Hell and Paradise and afterlives in general. My dad belabored, when I was a child, going door to door with him, how people who had nice houses with nice gardens were unlikely to be receptive to what we were offering, because they already were living in a kind of paradise. Also, sort of ignoring the fact that essentially no one was receptive to what we were offering, outside of that whole period of time leading up to 1975. I particularly like the idea that distress in the present leads to people believing in afterlife promises, because it also explains the observed reality that a better life in the present tends to have less kookiness in it in general.
ETA: I listed a backpack on FBM and it’s already been claimed by R., the delightful woman who is a consistent customer (?). I love the backpack, but it actually holds less and is less convenient for my purposes than the Fjallraven Kanken. At this point, I’m probably ready to go list some of the remaining backpacks upstairs, as this is literally the only one I use anymore. It’s kind of funny, after aspiring for so long to be a onebagger, I have accidentally attained my goal after mostly giving up on it. Classic.
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