Grant Imahara Has Died

We just rarely use "people you hang out with after work" as a category, if you went out on a work dinner, we say acquaintances, if you regularly hang out, they're friends.

I assume you mean "they're not friends", rather than "they're all just friends"?

That doesn't really echo my experience, I have many good friends from past jobs that I'm still in contact with. Though I've also definitely gotten frustrated with people we seemed to get along with at work but then didn't ever seem to want to hang out outside work...

And then are those "nerds" who did the bullying.

I totally agree that simulations of the most likely events would have been nice. The show could have benefited from more strict adherence to the scientific method. Alas, that probably would have made the show less appealing for a large segment of the audience.

But it could also be a coping mechanism that I've developed over the years because telling myself all these negative things was the only way to motivate me.

I believe that was influenced by the way I was raised. Operant conditioning and such. But it's also a part of the negative feedback loop that might have made, now that I'm alone with my own thoughts, reinforcing the same tired patterns day after day and seeing the worst in the world get to me and letting it validate my cynicism and morbidity.

It's like, if you're inclined to that way of thinking throughout your entire life, how do you accidentally discover someone dying like this and not let it get to you? How are you supposed to "get over it" and do the thought suppression or whatever that all of the other mature people around me seem to handle reasonably well?

It's like, basically I never learned how to do that, and it does hurt me in a sense.

So I need to unlearn that and learn something better.

But maybe that's also why I'm thinking of these things and incorporating them into writing the way I do, because of this counterproductive way I think and how the frustrations I want to express can be expressed with my thought process, that people aren't usually trying to think counterproductively in this manner so I have some kind of insight that people with more self esteem will never find, because they don't personally understand the problems I have.

Kayne West was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. They put him on medication and if I'm remembering correctly he said it took away some of his creativity.

If Kanye West wasn't bipolar then we might never have known him as Kanye West the way we do today.

I think about that sometimes, for some reason.

So it's like, what is the part of me that needs the help? Okay, so I ought to improve somehow, because I pretty much always have room for improvement, in general. Maybe art is therapudic. But still, if nobody knows what you do and validate you for it, it's like you're screaming into the void, and that's how I see myself as alone a lot of the time. Not validated for the things I do. Nagata Kabi's definition of "alone" that she picked up from one of her sympathetic Twitter followers. Even though I do have a few people that validate the things I create, it still doesn't feel like it's enough, and don't know at what point it will. Or if it's even supposed to be enough at some point, like if I was some kind of genius in the top X percent of people (I'm not, I'm somewhere in the bottom half) and somehow did everything perfectly I'd just be happy and satisfied one thousand pages and ten thousand upvotes later, after hundreds of comments from people whose faces I'll never know reading "this is the best thing I've read today" and "thanks for the words" and "cool", when I reach middle age and can just kick back and watch the entirety of Star Trek without worrying about what impact I'm going to make on the world every single day.

That being the only reason I do these things.

It's like when people start saying a sentence that begins with the words "In life, you should" and talk about making interpersonal contacts, people that will at least talk to you in good faith and not call you "salty" for getting frustrated at your errors. Because you are going to be put through adversity and fail over and over no matter what you do, and you need to have a healthy way of managing that if you're going to survive. I mean, of course I'm going to get frustrated if I choose to play Persona 5 and end up getting my ass handed to me over and over again. I can't help it. What do you expect me to feel instead?

It was a miracle I managed to meet a single person that understands that kind of frustration and never judges me for it (well, almost never) and has a practically infinite amount of patience and takes time out of her work day to do administrative things for my sake and talk to me (she isn't a therapist, she's someone I can have a legitimate relationship with in the mentor-mentee sense, the kind I don't have to pay to receive - you know, the ones normal people going to see a movie together always have). She never yells at me or tells me something matter of factly like someone smarter who tells me everything I don't know like it's obvious and intimidates me, like they're in a totally different intellectual sphere, and what were you doing with your life all those 24 years to not know that simple thing? And the only reason I met her was because I had a mental health diagnosis. And still the first time I met her I treated her like absolute shit, and only by being put in my place by people who knew better than me did I realize that my behavior was terrible, a firable offense at any other company in any other set of circumstances, and so I learned from my mistakes, and a year later if it wasn't for her I'd probably be either homeless or dead.

I'm just ranting at this point, excuse me.

But I guess the reason I'm writing all of these words out in the open, on a handle that's indexed by major search engines and adtech companies and will be publicly searchable for decades to come, is because all I wanted was for someone to listen, but not just listen really - to also get to know on the level of a friendship of some kind. To not worry about having a social filter with. The people I mentioned are essentially family that will never cross me and keep me in check out of a parental sense of wanting to do right. But I don't have people you can call hard-won friends, the ones you meet at Deerhunter concerts and are of legal drinking age and have jobs and overcome hardships as their own independent person. The ones you're responsible for keeping or losing. I've never understood these kinds of people in the same sense. I've either lost all their trust or, more commonly, lost interest in them when I felt I couldn't say the things I wanted without worrying about whether or not the next word out of my mouth was going to lead them to dump me in the middle of a nice little social outing together in a foreign country and have me pay my own train fares back. I don't mean this metaphorically.

So yes. In a sense, I guess you could conclude from reading all of the above that, indeed, I need help.

https://gekk.info/articles/adhd.html

It really opened my eyes to what AD(H)D is really like from someone actually suffering from it and speaking his mind without mincing words, and how hyperactivity is sometimes overemphasized in the diagnosis. So some people get the impression that if you're not hyper it doesn't apply.

And for me specifically this was so ironic because ADHD was the one disorder that my parents insisted I never had, so I just ended up believing them the entire time I was with them.

But at least now I can think for myself and revisit the possibility for once without being shut down.

And they had once been wrong about me not having this other disorder that, surprise, I actually did have, which is the only reason I was hired into a position specifically seeking those with a diagnosis of said disorder, allowing me to pay my own rent.

And it certainly has something to do with anxiety.

I might have had panic attacks at one point when the pain was new and I wasn't sure if I was in immediate danger. Even after I sort of got used to it and it became "normal," it still stresses me out but not in an "am I going to die in 5 minutes" sense, spurred on by late-night WebMD binging.

In some people, indulging anxieties around health can be problematic in itself or have mental health repercussions. Anxieties could also be aroused by benign findings. For example, I have a 7mm cyst on my left kidney. It is entirely benign and not growing but some people may find such a finding unduly alarming and seek treatment they don't need.

It would seem unwise to do a MRI with GBCA for fun or speculative purposes, on the other hand "makes 1 in a zillion people sick" is actually quite acceptable odds for something that's fatal unless treated.

It seems those dyes can cross the blood-brain barrier as very few things can, which is good during the MRI process, however the body may or may not be terribly good at cleaning them out (and the process of cleaning those dyes out of the blood once they're outta yer brain is also hard on the kidneys).

Also edited to add, we DO know everything there is to know about stupid tricks involving ferrous metal being attracted to giant MRI magnets with squishy humans in the way, and that risk of damage is probably higher than the GBCA risk.

Is it actually? Do you have particular sitcom(s) in mind? I tried to look for this myself and couldn't find much (beyond ratings for anything beyond the top ~20 highest rated shows in a given year).

I know very little about this, but I'm a little skeptical because I feel people tend to vastly overestimate how much money the average person they see on TV makes. The stories of the outliers (like the Friends stars making $1M per episode) really skew the perceptions of this -- the vast majority of professional actors (if not regular TV actors, but maybe even then) make less than the median Bay Area software engineer. A salary on the order of $200K a year for a non-headliner regular actor in a sitcom with viewership around 1M people (which I think is more than a typical episode of Mythbusters would've gotten) doesn't sound that far out of the ballpark to me.

Btw I'm in another European country and I can see the article as well.

Since most people think of COVID as a respiratory disease and the clotting symptoms aren't as well publicized, doctors may not always call for the test when respiratory symptoms aren't present.