I love when I bat a draft of an article back to an editor, and its off my desk for a day or two. I can pretend that it’s perfect and brilliant and catch up on other stuff in my life. This freelance lifestyle is okay in many ways. I think it would be almost impossible to put me in a 9-5 desk ever again.
How about some links before I go out for some exercise?
I’m still thinking about whether or not the media has become too scary and depressing, and nobody wants to watch it anymore. I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, I am definitely consuming more light, lifestyle-type information on social media than I did in the past. On the other, I do think that the media underreported some depressing stories about kids’ lives destroyed by the shutdowns.
I spend too much time looking at Instagram Stories and have been making them, too.
Picture: Where did my babies go? And does Payless still make those sandals?
Apt. 11d 
I am trying to be more deliberate about which news I consume and avoiding rabbit holes of outrage. It’s very hard when I attend to the news, but I think I can do it if I make it a goal, using simplistic CBT to redirect my interest/mind when it starts happening.
My kiddo sometimes argues that my need to turn away is bad because it means I can ignore real problems in the world that I need to be aware of. So, I try to strike a balance.
And, I always want to understand (screen shots of graphs are a personal head exploder). Fortunately the one on life expectancy v expenditure is at Our World in Data: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-vs-health-expenditure
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bj wrote, “Fortunately the one on life expectancy v expenditure is at Our World in Data.”
Note that US life expectancy was going up (albeit less steeply compared to other countries) up until around 2008 (the beginning of the Great Recession). Something bad (or multiple bad things) happened then, and the US just didn’t recover.
Note that Obamacare was voted in in 2010 and became law in 2013.
There ought to be some food for thought in how little positive impact the APA had on US life expectancy.
My frame of reference here is the Russian collapse in life expectancy (particularly male life expectancy) in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_in_Russia
I don’t know if your can trust their numbers, but male life expectancy seemed to have recovered to Soviet (!) levels by around 2014, but a lot has happened since then. At least by 2014, female life expectancy was quite a bit better than Soviet levels.
So, if these numbers can be trusted at all, it is possible to rebound.
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Indeed, did our babies go? I’ve been taking photos now for a long time, not just of my kids, but of everyone else’s. So, seeing all the babies (some of whom disappeared for four years to reappear unrecognizable at the reunion before they disperse) is fascinating.
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Also, according to the wordpress links at the bottom of this 11D post, we apparently had a discussion of vaccine reluctance and opposition eight years ago, in 2014, a million years ago.
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Where did our babies go!
I’ve just been having this conversation with a friend – after she shared the photo of her 15-year-old at 6 ft 6 in.!
I still have him pigeon-holed in my brain as a cute 4 year-old (we took our kids to Playcentre together). Of course, I *have* seen him since then – but reality just doesn’t seem to sink in…..
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Yup, one of my baby’s friends did this, too; another just flew to college, that is, flew a little plane. He doesn’t get to keep it at college, though.
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