By the way I now have the 5K Retina iMac and it’s a-fucking-mazing.

Really it is glorious. While I don’t care for many parts of MacOS especially on a desktop, having such a gorgeous  screen is worth nearly any tradeoff*.

I’m kind of glad they didn’t have this sort of screen when I was younger as I might never have gone outside even once in my life.

By the way, for those who say having 218ppi on the desktop is pointless, consider this: the human eye can discern misalignment of two parallel lines up to two arc-seconds in resolution, equivalent to 1800ppi at ten inches.

Most people don’t sit 10 inches from their monitor, so it’d be about 500-600ppi at average sitting distance.

The main difference I’ve noticed other than being overwhelmingly happy with it is that I don’t get any eye strain at all no matter how long I read.

I got the base model because as 5K on Windows matures in 2-3 years I’ll probably just sell this and go back to Windows. I’m going to add some memory myself and that’s all I’ll need until then.

But for now it’s the best tech device I’ve ever used, right ahead of our MacBook Pro Retina.

*Windows will run on it, but not in 5K. AMD has not made a driver. Without 5K, what’s the point?

My mom was obsessed with Sylvia Plath and Janis Joplin, both women who felt out of place in the world and who killed themselves deliberately or through neglect. Both tragic figures.

I’ve no doubt that my mother saw herself as a similar tragic figure.

Everything in her existence was tinged with regret, even when she was controlling the actions. I think she felt like a passenger in her life though she never even attempted to be the captain. The role of long-suffering victim suited her well, and in her heart of hearts she probably enjoyed it. And if not enjoyed it, it at least felt natural to her.

I’d read most of Sylvia Plath’s output by the time I was 10 or 11. Not because my mom was interested in it — I cared little about her interests even then — but because Plath was a great writer.

My mom however never tried to write, or to sing, or to produce anything in the world. In that she was like most people. Unlike most people, she blamed the world for suppressing her, for holding her back, even though she never made the minimal effort to break through to something else. She never risked anything in the world, never even had the basic courage of Plath to write a single line of poetry, or a book.

And in my mom’s mind it was all someone else’s fault.

My sister had the same victim mentality — in this case I believe not inherited but rather passed on by the family acculturation and thus she was also doomed.

My tendency towards mild sociopathy helped me and made me able to survive all the depredations of my family with little ill result. I learned how not to be from watching my family, and in that way it was a good education.

My mom’s best friend Cookie (a nickname, and a very North Florida one at that — I never knew her real name) killed herself when my mom was 30 or so. I remember her as a cheerful yet morbidly obese woman who like my mom also saw herself as a victim of the world.

I don’t know Cookie’s story, so I won’t tell it nor even speculate any more about her life or motivations, but I do think my mom sought out people who viewed life the same way as she did — a cycle of eternal victimhood over which they had absolutely no control.

I once asked my mom why she had no hobbies, never did anything, never went anywhere. Just never lived.

She saw it — correctly — as a criticism but I also really wanted to know the answer. Wanted to know how someone got to be that way, and implicitly how to avoid it.

But it was worthless. She blamed her parents, blamed my father, blamed my sister, blamed me. And perhaps some of that was even true.

But as she was casting blame on everyone, anyone to which her nicotine-stained fingers could point, never once did she even consider doing what I would’ve done and actually did do later, which was get up and leave and never look back.

That I cannot understand.