Mea Culpa, I did not go out either yesterday or today. Last night I could have seen the wonderful Miwa Gemini do a porch show but the combination of the trip to Brooklyn and the Mets playing a doubleheader talked me out of it. Today there was nothing on my Radar and Jacob deGrom pitching for the Mets makes staying at home tempting. Tomorrow I’m going to the Met game. I wish the deGrominable Snowman was pitching then. It is exciting having a player pitching a season for the ages on the team I love. Last time we had this was Doc Gooden in 1985. No Met position player has come close, ever. There is a reason no Met has ever won the MVP though a few pitchers deserved it.
I did get out of the house and took a standard Donut Walk™. I mistimed it and missed Alice Hasen’s Fiddler Friday. I haven’t seen it in ages because of the Sunset Singing Circle. Now that the season is over I should get back in the Fiddler’s Friday habit.
I need to see more friends. I have seen people the last few weeks, but it’s always been in groups and it’s largely the same people. I am craving some quality one-on-one time. Does everyone make that distinction? I’ve often felt the same imbalance, my life seems to shift between group socializing, individual socializing, and not socializing. It’s been long enough now that I’m accepting that I’ll never internalize being popular. I haven’t been the lonely social outcast in ages, but I still doubt people liking me. It’s irrational and I have learned to not perseverate on it. That’s important, people don’t want to spend time with a person that is always singing, “Nobody loves me/Everybody hates me/I’m going to eat some worms.” It becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. Did you sing that song as a kid? I should flesh it out into a full song, people can relate to it. I know I’m not the only one that irrationally, or even rationally, feels that way.
I’m trying a new way to build Gord’s Gold. In addition to listening to new music I’m now playing my entire collection on shuffle and putting the songs that strike me into my Future Plays list. I cannot do that while writing, it’s to distracting. I’m listening to classical music on WQXR. I need to spend more time seriously listening to classical music, giving it my full attention, not as background. I need to do lots of things.
Today I had my infusion. This was the smoothest it’s ever gone I was in and out of there in 80 minutes. It used to always take more than two hours. I don’t know how it happened, but they are much less backed up since COVID-19. I had a short wait in the waiting room. The other waits are unavoidable. They have to mix my infusion and then give it to me. Each takes about half an hour. I spent my time listening to the excellent Ezra Klein Show. Yesterday’s episode, Republicans Are Setting Off a ‘Doom Loop’ for Democracy, was particularly good. I linked to the Apple Podcast, but you can find it on your favorite podcast source. I use Google. Oddly, I couldn’t find that when I googled. The Republicans are using their structural advantages, the small state advantage of the senate and the concentration of Democrats in cities to create more structural advantages via gerrymandering voting and registrations restrictions, and the courts. The majority of the Supreme Court was appointed by presidents that lost the popular vote and approved by senators that represent a minority of the voters. What I find saddest is that people I know think there is nothing wrong with that. They come up with excuses why it’s fine to be ruled by a minority. The excuses come down to otherwise the people in the big states and cities would dominate. As a majority of the population in a democracy they should. If they are so eager to protect the power of minorities they should be in favor of giving demographic minorities extra voting power. There would be poetic justice to each black person being entitled to five-thirds of a vote. Without that the majority soon to be plurality whites would dominate everything. Somehow that doesn’t bother them.
I wonder how much of the problem is people’s problems internalizing math. Just as I can’t internalize people liking me others can intellectually understand math but not accept the results of the reasoning. The see the maps that show a huge swatch of the country with the same population as greater Los Angeles, which appears as just a dot, and feel that it’s unfair that the dot gets the same voting power over so much of the country. They know that people, not land, vote, but they don’t feel it. I had this kind of misunderstanding demonstrated to me in my baseball trivia group. I asked the members to try and come up with the top 10 players in SLG/OBA ratio. SLG is slugging average and OBA is on base average. Don’t worry what the stats mean. This is not about baseball, or even math, but people’s understanding of math. Many people didn’t realize that for a fraction to be larger the numerator, the top number needs to be larger and or the denominator smaller. They were guessing people with high OBAs. This is why people had to drop the ⅓ pounder burger to compete with the McDonalds ¼ pounder. People thought that ⅓ was smaller than ¼.
The Met game started, and the Met announcers made another kind of common error related to math. They said how Met fans are disappointed deGrom doesn’t get a strike. That’s true. They then added that deGrom would be happy to strike out fewer and pitch to contact so he could pitch fewer pitchers per innings and pitch deeper into the game. One problem with that, deGrom already pitches the fewest pitches per inning of any pitcher in baseball. Yes, theoretically you can get a guy out with only one pitch if he makes contact and it takes at least three to get a strikeout, but when people make contact they sometimes get hits, they never do on strikes. On average high strikeout pitchers allow fewer baserunners and need fewer pitches per inning. That’s not theory, that’s empirical fact, but people have trouble internalizing it. I know that some of My Gentle Readers are rejecting that relationship now. They remember the game where pitcher X struck out very few batters and made very few pitches and pitcher Y struck out many and threw a lot of pitches. That’s how averages work it doesn’t mean that it happens every time.
People make so many perceptional errors that they can convince themselves of things that aren’t true, and that influences politics. More importantly for the 12th game in a row deGrom pitched a perfect first inning. That’s not human, he’s at least a demigod.
Wise Madness 