Therapy and Stuff

​I realize it may sound like joking at best and complaining about first-world problems at worst when I express my disappointment at running up last night against Spotify's 10,000 song playlist limit that I wasn't aware of. You may consider it absurd that I would want to have more than 10,000 songs on a playlist. The reason I want to have more than 10,000 songs on a playlist is that I like shuffling every artist and every genre into an enormous game of chance. Heavy metal and polka and New Age and Dora the Explorer back-to-back is just fine with me. Many years ago when I got my first mp3 player, I had trouble even grasping the concept of a "playlist", because why would I want to choose just some of my music? My idea of a playlist was the entire Windows Media Player library. So here's my playlist, capped at 10,000 songs unless and until Spotify changes its mind. (There's a big discussion about it here, where Spotify went from "The 1% of our customers who want that many songs don't matter" to "It's not in our plans, but it's a good idea." So there's hope.)

I started group therapy again this week, seeing as this is my last chance before I'll graduate and not be able to afford it. There's not much to say about that because, you know, confidentiality, but I wanted to mention it because there are people who think I shouldn't be open about my mental illness and I want them to know exactly what I think of that attitude. There are a lot of people who should go to therapy but don't because our society has wrongly made them feel that it's something to be embarrassed about. As a child when I had to go to a building labeled "Massena Mental Health Clinic", I felt humiliated and dirty inside, and I shouldn't have, but that's the mindset I was fed from literally everywhere. There are also a lot of people who should go to therapy but don't because their insurance doesn't cover it because our society decided long ago that only physical problems matter. Anyway, I already love my fellow group members, just as I did the last two times. I hope they love me too. It's going to be awkward if they don't.

When I was meeting with someone on campus for unrelated reasons having to do with me not being able to buy groceries because someone took all my money, and she started asking about my personal life and recommended therapy, she asked (among other things) whether I ever feel like hurting people. And I said "Yes" while thinking Duh. I highly doubt there's one human on this planet above the age of five with at least a bare minimum of mental capacity who has never wanted to hurt someone. Even on a good day when I enjoy being alive, I would bet my life that everyone from Gandhi to Mother Theresa to Pope Francis has wanted to hurt someone before. But there's this notion in our society that mentally ill people are dangerous and scary, even though the only statistically significant difference between violence from mentally ill people and other people disappears when drugs and alcohol are factored in. Gee, I wonder why mentally ill people in our society would feel the need to use drugs and alcohol. What a mystery.

I'm wondering, not for the first time, why several nobodies on the internet suddenly think it's their place to deny the medical and scientific consensus that addiction is a disease. I mean, just because people already have that attitude toward evolution, climate change, vaccines, the shape of the Earth, and 9/11 doesn't mean we need more things on that list. And their argument makes me want to claw my eyeballs out. So you see, addicts are just like non-addicts, with the same brain chemistry and education and life circumstances and social support, and the only difference is that addicts decided to start doing drugs for literally no reason because they're stupid, and this means that addiction isn't a disease because the definition of a disease apparently mentions something about "choice" in the invisible fine print somewhere, but STDs still count as diseases because reasons. That's not even a straw man - have you seen that stupid meme with the guy on the bike falling over? I hate to think how my close friend who turned to heroin because both her parents were abusing her must feel when she sees this garbage.

The fraternities on campus tried to recruit people (specifically male people) this week and I participated in as many activities as I could for the food. Now I know how to play poker. They were all real friendly, almost cultishly so, and I would be seriously considering joining up with one of them if it didn't cost five hundred dollars. That would probably be a great bargain if this were my first semester rather than my last, but it's not and it's not and also I don't currently have anywhere near five hundred dollars. I enjoyed my brief time with them except for the moment when I was at a potluck and a bunch of fraternity guys were clustered around somebody's phone watching something and I came over to see what it was and it was porn. What the crap, guys?

Barbara Res, a former construction executive on Trump Tower, recently claimed:

On this particular day, the architect had come to Donald Trump’s office to show him what the interior of the residential elevator cabs would look like. Trump looked at the panels where the buttons you push to reach a floor were located. He noticed that next to each number were some little dots.

“What’s this?” Trump asked. “Braille,” the architect replied. Trump told the architect to take it off, get rid of it. “We can’t,” the architect said, “It’s the law.” “Get rid of the (expletive) Braille. No blind people are going to live in Trump Tower. Just do it,” Trump yelled back, calling him weak.

The more the architect protested, the angrier Trump got. Donald liked to pick on this guy. As a general rule, Trump thought architects and engineers were weak as compared to construction people. And he loved to torment weak people. But did he think the architect would remove the Braille from the panels? Never.

Naturally, many people have chosen not to believe her claim because it's entirely inconsistent with the respectful, tolerant way our president has always spoken about demographics that aren't him. (That was sarcasm.) But even if there was a video of him saying these words, it wouldn't matter to most of them. It's been pretty well-demonstrated at this point that he can say whatever he wants with no real consequences, in fact sometimes to his own benefit. Yay, democracy. On a slightly related note, I've seen Braille on signs and wondered how blind people are supposed to know to put their hands there in the first place. Are they just supposed to touch every inch of every wall? That's gross.

Carla Ulbrich - Therapy Works

I have my doubts as to whether anybody actually listens to the songs that I share as a public service, so I haven't done it much this year. But here's one.