So, this is an odd thing.

I'm finding all this strangely liberating.  I can't begin to understand why.  Perhaps I'm wearier than I thought.  Perhaps I had (or have) more discontent with work than I was aware of.

But ever since finding out about this thing, I've felt liberated.  It's really weird.  Why that particular emotion?  I wonder if it's common, but people don't talk about it much.

In fact, people tend not to like to talk about death at all; we've managed to insulate ourselves from it in so many ways: hospitals, funeral parlors, and all the rest.  There're several industries that are more or less devoted to keeping death away from our thoughts.

There's a whole area of psych now called terror-management-theory, and the idea behind it is that when we are confronted with thoughts of death, especially our own, it makes us think differently about things.  I've thought over the last couple of weeks that TMT might be something that I could spend a little energy on; learn about it, perhaps find some little niche piece of research surrounding it.

But I still have that other project to try to connect dual-process theories of decision-making and motivated reasoning.  I think the results of such a marriage would be very scary to me as someone who really hopes that US politics can once again turn into something approaching a functional government.  But that cannot happen until both the right and the left can think rationally about the problems we have and at the very least agree on a common understanding of what those problems are.  Shit, right now we can't even agree on the language we use to describe things.

It's something of a mess.

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Much later.  Went to see the docs today; things seem to be going about as well as they can be.  We won't know until the post-treatment scans show what effect the radiation and chemotherapy have had.  The doc says there will be a lot of dead tissue in there; I assume that what functional glial cells I have left will eventually clean that up, but it's a little weird thinking about all those dead neurons.  But they are bad neurons, so if they're dead, all the better.  I just want to make sure that they get cleaned up.

Dendrocytes!  Get to work!  Clean that shit up!