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the additional mental overhead of self-selected pronouns
Saturday, January 27 2024
After an abbreviated version of our usual Saturday morning routine, Gretchen had to join a multi-hour remote training for her new volunteer gig serving as an advisor and advocate for disadvantaged women seeking abortions. I think of myself as an open-minded progressive, but hearing everyone (and all of them were women, probably cis-women at that) introduce themselves along with their pronouns had me feeling like a reactionary dinosaur. Is that really what progressives do now when they first meet each other? I haven't always been a particularly kind person, but I try to be that way these days. Still, this is the sort of thing that's hard for me not to ridicule. What pronouns someone uses, at least when different from what is expected, is a hard thing for someone like me to keep straight even if they are provided, since my brain has been conditioned to assign these completely automatically. It adds another cognitive layer to the already mentally-taxing task of socializing, at least for the likes of me. I've always found protocolic overhead to be an unnecessary annoyance, and this is just more of it. That said, I'm perfectly happy using your pronouns of choice if I can remember (or otherwise determine) what they are. I'm not transphobic and I actually consider myself an ally. I'm just responding to the additional awkward dance we're expected to perform (isn't it bad enough figuring out when to hug or not?).
For participating in the two-day remote training program, Gretchen had received an UberEats credit of $60. Unlike broke Millennials, we're unfamiliar with app-based food delivery services, but Gretchen eventually figured out that the credit could be used to order food for pickup. After hearing me say that I prefer Superbowl Cuisine over the other local Chinese restaurants, Gretchen decided to spend the UberEats credit there (even though she has said she doesn't much like their take on Chinese food). She placed an order early this afternoon for something like $70 worth of food, and sent me to pick it up.
This marked the first time Charlotte the Dog has ever voluntarily jumped into a car to ride with me and Neville while Gretchen was still in the house. Not only did I get the heavy bag of greasy vegan Chinese food from Superbowl, but I also re-upped my bottom-shelf liquor cabinet at the nearby JK's Wine & Liquor.
Later put some work into building out a generic utility system for the spec web app I've been building. This system has a lot in common with various generic reporting systems I've built and is underpinned by a similar form-description JSON specification (which I'd built earlier in the project as the basis for all the app's data editors). This new utility system can produce a form to collect data before then using it to run a PHP function, though of course I could also use it to load values into a SQL template (which is how those generic reporting systems all worked).
This evening Gretchen went off to see a movie with Kate, leaving me alone on a Saturday night. It was natural in this circumstance that I would want to drink, especially since I'd taken 150 mg of pseudoephedrine at around noon (I think that had really helped with the software work described above). So I painted a tiny painting of a tiger's face.
Later I ate a mid-sized wad of ancient cannabis, hoping it would keep me from drinking too much. It had effects, but they weren't particularly strong.
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