where's the fire
I made the most delightful discovery on Facebook, of all places, just yesterday: there is an ellipsis at the upper right on anyone's post, and when you click it you get a drop-down menu with several options: save post; turn off notifications for this post; hide post; snooze this person for 30 days; unfollow this person; find support or report post.
—Hold up, what was that middle one?? "Snooze [first name] for 30 days"! Beneath that, in smaller print: Temporarily stop seeing posts.
This is definitely new. Maybe part of the forced roll-out of the new Facebook layout? I don't know. But as I said in my post, it may be the greatest feature they have introduced in a decade. I keep falling for posts that are triggering by design, forcing me to post rebuttals in comments mostly just to counter the cavalcade of ignorant comments by other people spewing the very same bullshit as in the original post. Why do I keep falling for this? Nearly zero people on social media—and Facebook in particular, although let's face it Twitter is nearly as bad—are getting their minds changed by anyone. So, I used this feature last night and it was immediately liberating. It still is.
While I do think it's important to be careful about turning social media into an echo chamber of people who only think the way you do, there is also a line. If someone insists on constantly having arguments that are clearly not in good faith, or are designed expressly just to stir up shit, there is no utility there. I finally just, basically, muted it from my feed. And I am already less uptight just looking at my feed. There is one other person I may "snooze" soon as well, depending on what dumfuckery that person also continues to post. We'll see.
I like this option way better than just unfriending someone, or even unfollowing them indefinitely, without unfriendly them. With those options, it has to occur to you again somewhere down the line to give their feed another chance. This way Facebook does it for you. And then, once the posts start appearing again, depending on whether or not they are still posting idiocy that is clearly in bad faith, you can decide whether to mute them for another month, or purge them completely. This is basically more of an "on probation" approach and I am all about it.
In other news, I nearly burned the building down yesterday. Okay, that's not strictly true, but I did do something incredibly stupid.
Alexia, my neighbor, has chosen to stick with a longstanding plan to spend a couple of weeks visiting a friend on Long Island in New York. She was thinking she may have to cancel for a while, but Washington State was then taken off the list of states whose residents have to quarantine for 14 days when visiting. She has a cat, who will be looked after by her son Bram for most days, but so that he doesn't have to go out of his way on his own days off, I will feed her three times each weekend over the next two weekends. I put on a mask, and so did she, and she showed me where everything was in her condo.
Now. I left stuff on the stove, with burners on. I did not turn them on very high, just medium, in an effort to reheat leftovers for Shobhit to have for dinner when he got home from work. And had I done it correctly, it really would have been fine. Except, it was still stupid and I should have known better: nothing seems to prevent my terrible problem with "stove dyslexia," where about 20% of the time I accidentally turn on the wrong burner. I should never leave the condo with a burner on no matter what (I know!) but I especially shouldn't when I know I have this persistent problem. And the thing is, it turned on the burner under the tea pot instead of the wok with the leftovers in it, and there was a second wok, the one with the wooden handle, also on top of the stove. That's usually in the oven being stored but it was taken out so that I could also reheat frozen naans in the oven for him.
And, that wooden handle was hovering just a few inches above the burner that was not supposed to have been turned on. I was over at Alexia's for only a few minutes, but still too long: I really have no excuse, it was moronic. The handle did not catch on fire, but it did get way too hot and the whole underside of it is now completely black.
When I got back to the condo and walked in the door, Shobhit immediately (and in this case, understandably) started shouting at me, like "Are you trying to burn the house down?" or something like that. I felt like an idiot, because it was an idiotic thing to do. I had no defense for it. And Shobhit was very angry—for just a few minutes. Somehow he calmed down surprisingly quickly.
But, note to self: never leave the home with burners turned on under any circumstances, no matter how low they are set. Never, never never! I really need to pound this into my psyche somehow. I don't really want to use, like, a hammer, but I need to find something.
In other news we just finished our fifth Zoom Friday Office Lunch Meetup. Six participants this week, though only five for the first half hour; Aimee from Social & Environmental Responsibility (S&ER) joined at about 12:30. We had one new person in attendance this week, a guy named Bill who is the Construction Project Manager. He spent a few minutes extolling the virtues of "mass timber" construction and even said there are some modern high-rises being built with wood, which I found fascinating.
The movie discussion we had last week, which had promoted the suggestion we all discuss TV show recommendations this week, did not quite pan out: Michelle from IT had posed that question, and she wasn't present this week. Dammit! So the rest on the call this week were Brent, Adrienne and Rebecca. At this point I think maybe Brent, Rebecca and I are the only three who have been on all five calls to date.
It wasn’t super exciting this week, but it served its purpose, and I remain grateful that they keep happening at lunchtime every Friday.
[posted 1:01 pm]