What's with this trend of restaurants calling to ask you to confirm your reservation with them. Calling to remind you, sure, but asking you to call back and confirm? WTF?

HELLO PERKINS!

Perkins!!!

LISA! SUZI! HOW ARE YOU?

Living in !!!-land, apparently.

The big question is how are you?

I can see calling to confirm, as I worked at a restaurant that was super busy on the weekends, and if we had a reservation for 6 or 8 that didn't show, or decided to be an hour late, it really fucked things up. We had about 25 tables. So we wouldn't sit a party until the whole party was there, and if no one from the party showed or called 20 mins after reservation time, you lost it. We made this clear when people called, and they still would get pissed. But wait time on Fri/Sat nights was 1 1/2 to 2 hours, so we would sit the people who were waiting. And for a server to have a big 12 tops sitting there empty or with 2 or 3 people, waiting, for 45 minutes -- dude, that's their rent money they're not getting.

It's raining here, which is nice, but I was going to wash the stank dog today. Also, I have discovered that grey cat (not mine) is pissing in the easy chair in the dining room and it's pooling on the floor. Dan tried to tell me that the last time it happened, it was a one-off, and I said No. And that the litter box needed to be kept immaculately clean so they cat would MAYBE not do it again.

Well. Litter box got NAST again, and there we are. He changed it last night, but too late. We will have a Come to Jesus talk tonight, as I take care of my cat's messes and box, and he does his. But that fucking chair is going to the garage TONIGHT, and he is cleaning the piss and getting a new cat box. Greer's piss is smellier than all the other 3 cats put together; I wonder if she has diabetes. But right now, downstairs stinks so bad, I don't even want to walk through the dining room.

I can tolerate a LOT of mess, but stank makes me CRAZY.

Living in !!!-land, apparently.

!!!-Land is a happy and contented (if somewhat over exuberant) land.

I am not too bad. I'm getting bored, which is good,

I may even put on real clothes today.

Interesting.

THE EXPERIENCE OF A UNIFIED MIND AND THE POSSIBILITY OF AN EVERLASTING SOUL ARE CONNECTED. AND THERE IS SCANT EVIDENCE TO SUPPORT THE EXISTENCE OF EITHER.

For the believers in the soul, let’s call them soulists, the soul assumption appears to be only the smallest of steps from the existence of a unified mind. Yet the soul is a claim for which there isn’t any evidence. Today, there isn’t even evidence for that place soulists step off from, the unified mind. Neurology and neuroscience, working unseen over the past century, have eroded these ideas, the soul and the unified mind, down to nothing. Experiences certainly do feel unified, but to accept these feelings as reality is a mistake. Often, the way things feel has nothing to do with how they are.

...

Now consider yourself. Consider your own left arm. It feels perfect, under your control, a part of you, exactly where it should be. But this unified perception relies on neuronal machinery humming in the background, far beneath conscious awareness. Your sense of unity, only perceptible to you, is a sheen on the surface, not a deeper layer of reality.

Where does this leave the soul? Does the soul make any sense in the face of a brain and mind so easily fractured by ischemia? A soul is immaterial, eternal, a little god, impervious to injury, able to survive our deaths. Yet here we see one injured, tethered so close to the injured brain that there is no string. We see a hole, and through it we get a glimpse into the brain’s inner workings. One part is damaged; another part falsely thinks it is whole. How does the idea of a unified soul make any sense in the face of this data?

I may even put on real clothes today.

Eh, overrated.

Wish I could fly out and keep you company for a couple of days. Make a few Trader Joe's runs (and stock up my suitcase). Marathon some SPN or Dr. Who or somthing like that.

HELLO Ms. NO LYMPH NODE INVOLVEMENT!