Musing, blogging, reflecting, affirming, complaining, documenting
Honestly, I don’t think it’s possible. I can’t remember the last time I bought a ticket through them, as I go to box offices at the venues to get my tickets. And if I can’t do that, I just don’t attend the event.
The good news is that N.C.’s new-ish Attorney General is going after them for being a monopoly. Here’s the first few paragraphs of the article. If you’re interested, read the rest on Substack. (Scroll to heading: The People vs. Ticketmaster/Live Nation.)
Recently, like in the last month or so, these painful nodules popped up on the end of the middle and index fingers on my left hand.
A trip to the Raleigh Hand-to-Shoulder Center diagnosed them as mucous cysts, also known as ganglion cysts, and yesterday I had them removed.
They have to remain wrapped for 5 days, and it’s really cramping my style typing.
I am dictating what I want to say into an iNote on my phone and then cutting and pasting the resulting text into this blog entry. I will not be deterred.
From the movie Elegy:
I think it was Bette Davis who said old age is not for sissies. But it was Tolstoy who said the biggest surprise in a man’s life is old age. Old age sneaks up on you, and the next thing you know you’re asking yourself — I’m asking myself — why can’t an old man act his real age? How is it possible for me to still be involved in the carnal aspects of the human comedy? Because, in my head, nothing has changed.
Or, as Roseanne Roseannadanna said (6 seconds):
In the last month or so, these painful nodules have popped up on my middle and index fingers on my left hand, and today I learned about mucous cysts (a.k.a. ganglion cysts), which I’ll have removed in the next 2 weeks.
Looking at this x-ray taken at the Raleigh Hand to Shoulder Center, the doctor said about the spaces between my knuckle joints, “These are the joints of an 18-year-old.” (So flattering! 😂😂😂). And about the proximal interphalangeal ones (midway between knuckles and fingertips), “And these are still very good.” But, as you can see, about the ones near your fingertips, well there’s bone-on-bone osteoarthritis going on there, especially in those two fingers with the nodules.”
As the old #DadJoke goes — certainly, my dad said it often: “Arthur — the worse one of the Ritis family.”
Interesting aside: You see that crooked little finger? I had that checked out in 2007 in the same practice, which used to be called the Raleigh Hand Clinic, and it was Dr. George Edwards, Jr. who looked at it. 18 years later and Junior has retired and Dr. George Edwards III now works there. (You might be getting old if a lot of your doctors are retiring.)
It has never caused me any pain — and still doesn’t in spite of the x-ray suggesting it could, probably should. It also hasn’t gotten any more crooked. I affectionately refer to it as “my cut & paste finger,” since I tend to “rock” on it when I execute those functions.
In all fairness to my fingers, they have been very, very good to me throughout my 42 working years, starting with keyboard work that began with typing more punched cards than you can shake a stick at during my 4 years of undergrad learning how to program.
And every job, and there have been plenty of them — from my very first job at IBM in 1980 until I retired from Red Hat in 2022 — my fingers have cranked out untold millions of characters without any pain that was debilitating enough to stop me. I’m actually quite surprised I never got the dreaded carpal tunnel syndrome over the years.
Give a hand to my hands.
I don’t like Instagram (IG)—never have. There, I said it.
The biggest issue I have with IG is that it’s a platform based on images, so a photo is required with every post. I don’t want to post an image most of the time I want to share something. I’m a writer. My product is text. So almost every time I post there, I have to create an image of that text. And that’s just silly.
I only joined it to host my 50-word stories when I decided, in January of 2021, to write 3 of them around a theme every day in 2021. I’d heard of accounts that had a shtick going viral on there, accounts like:
and I had big dreams of my 50-word stories being my shtick and doing the same thing. Since that didn’t happen, and I’m done writing them, I’m happy to not log in daily there to post them.
It’s no secret that IG is a “young people’s platform,” so my biggest draw to go there now is that it’s where a lot of my work colleagues post stuff.
So, I’ll hang out on my @instatome account, and let my @jm50wordstories account rest.
Not that I’m still traumatized about it, or still in disbelief about it, or can’t let go of it, but on Tuesday, October 10, 2006, I made this entry in my blog:
Today I received an email from my professor with some “advice” on how to handle the fact that my project partner is not participating. Her advice was incredulous to me.
I dropped the course.
What had happened was…
The course was a Communication & Technology course, which I took during my third semester of grad school, and my group comprised one hot dude and myself. (To be clear, that’s two different people.)
At about 2 weeks into our project, we still hadn’t met to get started, and I sent him email initiating a meeting. After 3 such unanswered emails, another week without him in class, and the drop/add deadline for the course now approaching, I emailed the professor explaining what I’d already done and asked her to intervene.
Her response was, “You need to figure out how to get together.”
“Actually, no I don’t.”
