methylethyl

Troubled, by Rob Henderson. 

This one's a quick read, written in a kind of telegraphic Reader's-Digest-Condensed style, not winning any literary awards, probably. 

It's also one of the clearest, most honest discussions I've ever read about social class in America, luxury beliefs, upperclass signaling, lowerclass dysfunction, and the process by which the military enables upward mobility.  

When rich people go out and promote single parenthood, obesity, and drugs (let's destigmatize everything!), but would walk through fire to keep their own kids away from all that...  what is that? Is it conscious or unconscious? If unconscious, it's a massive failure to understand how the world outside their rich-people bubble actually works. If conscious...  then it's a deliberate strategy to stunt the competition so their own kids are sure to get a good spot at the table. 

I think I'll make my teenager read it. 

After the rules post, I was still chewing on the problem. What burbled up in my brain is the perfect encapsulation of my struggles with implicit rules. 

In the Douglas Adams Hitchhiker books, he introduces the SEP field: a cloaking device. It's too hard to make things truly invisible. There are too many problems with it. People can still notice an invisible thing, run into it, etc. The SEP field gives you all the advantages of being invisible, without actually making you invisible, so you avoid those pitfalls, and it tweaks a pre-existing human impulse, so requires far less energy to work. The cloaking device simply makes the thing it's cloaking look like Somebody Else's Problem. People see it, but then immediately push it out of their minds, and do not remember it later. You're not invisible, you just look like that spill on the kitchen counter that nobody wants to clean up so everybody studiously ignores it. 

At church one day, I noticed the handle on one of the ladies' room toilets had broken off the flush lever. It was still there, but you couldn't flush the toilet with it-- it jiggled fruitlessly, attached to nothing, purely decorative. I took the lid off the tank, pulled the chain and flushed it, then made an "out of order" sign and put it on the stall door. I asked around until I found the person responsible for toilet maintenance, informed them about the problem, and...  figured my job was done. I offered to do it myself, but I was assured this would not be necessary. The person did not forbid me outright (this is important), but also did not authorize me to fix the toilet. 

Weeks passed. The toilet continued to be broken. There are five stalls in the ladies' room, but after church EVERYBODY with little kids takes them to the bathroom all at once. 99% of the time, two stalls would be sufficient, but then there's that one predictable time where all five are necessary and important. If you didn't have little kids, perhaps it would not seem urgent. Maybe there's a latent SEP field around it. 

This was after I had been dressed down by the choir director for violating chain of command, so I was not feeling great about...  what I was definitely about to do anyway. Toilet mechanisms are very simple. A trained monkey could fix it in 1 minute, without any special tools. Risk of accidentally breaking it nearly zero. Every week, I'd entered the "out of order" stall, reached into the tank, and lifted the flap to flush the toilet-- it was getting slimy from disuse. I took a look at the mechanism to make sure it was the ordinary familiar sort I've replaced half a dozen times before, and checked the other toilets because I thought I could hear a trickle somewhere. The toilet at the opposite end had a flapper that was aging poorly. OK, that's another easy replacement. 

I went to the hardware store, paid about $15 for the relevant parts, stowed them in my oversized purse, and waited. Soon enough I found myself at church after most people had gone home. Alone in the ladies' room I replaced the leaky flapper and the broken flush handle without authorization, hoping I wouldn't get caught. Took down the "out of order" sign. Toilets have all been working fine for several months now, nobody the wiser. The problem is fixed: internal discomfort about non-working thing banished. Yay. 

I feel guilty about this. I probably should have gotten permission first. But I had already tried the "proper chain of command" route and it hadn't worked. I don't need recognition. But I really, really, on an intensely visceral level, need the toilets to work properly. It chafed my soul to have such an easily-fixed thing not working, week after week. From previous experience...  I hesitate to keep working the chain of command and pestering people after I have found and notified the right authority. It doesn't work AND people get irritated with me. Not everybody has the same soul-deep need for things to be correct, work properly, function well. Keep hammering at the chain of command on that and a lot of people will perceive it as a personal attack. 

I don't want personal drama. I just want the toilet handle to work. 

My brother is the same way, but with a lot more experience. He says half the problem is, when you're new anywhere-- new workplace, new duty station, new unit, new boss, new roommates, new whatever-- no matter how helpful you are, anybody who authorizes you to fix something is sticking his neck out. What if you're a moron and you break everything? Now it's their fault for letting you do it. Once you have had time and opportunity to establish that you are not, in fact, a moron, then it's different. You still can't get any traction with the proper chain of command most of the time, but you do reach a point where everybody is willing to overlook you violating it to set things to rights. They won't take responsibility, but they also won't stop you and you don't have to smuggle toilet parts in your purse like some kind of reverse burglar. 

I struggle with that part: integrating myself into the group enough to achieve "not a moron: can be trusted with flush handles" status. But it's deeper than that. I struggle with hierarchies whose priorities are opaque. Probably, they have bigger things to worry about. Maybe it's my perspective that's wrong. Maybe they were waiting for someone else to fix it, like the coffee spill on the counter. Or maybe they just forgot because they never use that stall. I have no idea where the line is between a gentle reminder about an important item and relentless harassment about trivial things... or rules that are absolute and rules that are just guidelines and OK to work around when necessary. 

--The rules as we understand them, and the rules as they really operate--

I have a problem with rules. Not like, gotta fight The Man and wear safety pins in my earlobes and I'm a rebel baby that kind of problems-with-rules.  Not spend-time-in-jail or got-suspended-from-school problems with rules. 

No. I have problems understanding and following unstated rules. 

I'm tempted to say "it's one of those autistic things" but, for the record, I'm not autistic. I have some hella fun (not!) sensory processing abnormalities that affect every aspect of the way I think and relate to other people and the world around me, and in some respects that runs parallel to autistic stereotypes, but...  no. Not autistic. The problem with rules is in that genre: if someone has told me the rule, now I know the rule, and I can try to avoid breaking the rule. Unfortunately, most of the rules we live by are implicit, not explicit. Nobody told you the rule (unless you had really good parents who explicitly trained you about implicit rules: mine didn't), you were expected to pick it up by osmosis, by watching other people, by absorbing subtext from cultural sources and doing what comes naturally to social animals: monkey see, monkey do. 

But if you didn't figure out that rule, and you violate it: SMACKDOWN TIME!

Because the social skills fairy got lost on the way to my house, I have an extremely hard time with implicit rules: the ones nobody tells you, but which you have to work out on your own. I observe what other people are doing much as an anthropologist observes a remote island tribe or a zoologist a bromeliad-dwelling frog. Watch for patterns, come up with a theory, try to build a working model from my observations. Fairly often, I badger normal people trying to get them to define the rules I am missing. They mostly will not do it. They don't actually know a lot of the rules; they comply by instinct. And then there are whole sets of rules with an additional rule attached: it is against the rules to talk about this rule. So it's difficult to know what the precise actual rules are about, say, sex, or money, or religious practice...  because there are hefty rules governing when, where, and with whom, you can talk about those things. You're supposed to just know. And you're not supposed to talk about it. 

For example: my church has a long tradition of head-covering, but it is officially optional. If you are curious what actual guidelines or historical reasoning there might be in favor or against it... forget it. That topic is completely, 100% forbidden. Do not ask. Do not tell. 

Or one of my favorites: I grew up in a culture where the stated rules about sex were: not until you are married, and then only with your spouse. And being a naive literalist...  imagine my shock to find that I was the only one following those rules!  No, the implicit rules, the rules that nobody said out loud, but everybody actually lived by (except me because I am stupid) were: don't have sex with just anybody like a cat in heat, but it's OK to have sex with nice people as long as you don't rack up too many of them before you get married, as long as they are single and of the opposite sex, you don't have more than one partner at the same time, and as long as you avoid pregnancy until after you get married (this was the most important rule).  The acceptable partner number for girls was 3, maybe 4, while the acceptable number for boys was infinity. 

I was told a set of rules, by people who did not themselves follow, or even believe in, those rules. I followed them anyway and I don't regret it, but it torched the credibility of the people who imparted the rules to me. Model collapse. People I thought were honest turned out to be lying. Who else is lying to me, and how much are they lying about? Do they ever tell the truth or is it all just lies?

I can't lie, so it is extremely difficult for me to deal with people who can and do lie. I don't have a mental model for it and so overreact. You are dead to me because you lied, and now I can't trust anything you say ever again. Forget that most people lie some of the time for perfectly innocuous reasons like...  they want to spare your feelings, or they're uncomfortable talking about something. Does not compute. 

Whatever. It happens sometimes. Sometimes model collapse goes very wrong, but I'm able to deal with actual conscience-having humans and work it out. About a year into attending our current parish, I accidentally violated an implicit rule I didn't know about, and deeply offended our choir director, who is also the priest's wife. If that had gone badly, we probably would have had to find a new church to attend. But it didn't. She chewed me out privately, it was very unpleasant, but I was able to get her to tell me the rule I had violated, and specific directions on how not to violate that rule in the future. I'm still not her favorite person, but I'm nonetheless in the choir, she trusts me to chant vespers and lead the music once in a while when she is unavailable. We are able to work together, and we didn't have to find a new church and remove the kids from all their parish friends. Hooray. 

Largely, I think this worked out because both of us care more about the music than about the rules. 

As resolutions go, this is the exception. 

Most of the time, people stay offended, the only explanation forthcoming is "Do you really expect me to believe you didn't know that?" the working relationship gets burned, and I don't know how to fix it. 

Those are implicit social rules. Sometimes when those go awry I can ask trusted friends and family and they can tell me what went wrong, how to avoid it in the future, and even make suggestions on how to fix it. This keeps the world from collapsing. Without them...  every model failure is a sort of personal existential crisis: reality isn't what I thought it was, nothing I thought was real can be trusted, I'm too stupid to navigate civilization and it is time to take my five loaves and go find a cave in the desert to work out my salvation because there is nothing for me here in the world. 

Which would be fine except I have a family to take care of. So...  maybe later? Right now I have to grapple with model failure. I believed something about the world that turned out not to be true. Now what? If it's a small thing: adjust the model to fit this new data. 

But sometimes, it's not a small thing. Sometimes we are not dealing with conscience-having humans. We are dealing instead with...  something other. Dishonest people. Soulless bureaucracies. Inscrutable systems. Unstated rules that directly contradict the explicit rules. Perhaps worse: people who believe things that are objectively wrong but can't see that they are wrong, and propagate the wrongness. Motivated belief: people telling you untrue things because they want to believe those things are true. These are all extremely difficult for me. Every time I find out someone I trusted lied to me, or someone I thought was an expert turns out to be wrong... model collapse. Existential crisis. Now I have to question everything I have ever believed about how the world works. Because if I was wrong about that, I could be wrong about anything.

We have been trying to buy a house. The hunt for something both affordable and habitable has not been going super well, but there were glimmers of hope. We went through the pre-approval process for a mortgage, good for 90 days, and toured several prospective houses. The approval's getting stale after a couple months but we hadn't lost hope yet. And then, the credit bureau drop-kicked my husband's credit score 58 points. He's now under the required minimum score of 650 for most mortgages. We've disputed that, but the bureau gets 30 days to respond, and by then we'll be outside the pre-approval window. This effectively ends our current house search for at least a year. Maybe a few years. 

What happened? Well, we couldn't find his credit card. We filed it somewhere safe the last time we moved. He never actually needed it so we didn't worry, just kept hoping it would turn up. No fraudulent charges, everything paid off, no problem (right?). But since he doesn't have much of a credit history, his credit score isn't as good as mine, and we were looking for ways to improve it. When we got married he had no credit. Zero. Had never had a card, or taken out a loan, because why would you do that if you don't need to borrow money?  I convinced him to get a secured credit card and just use it for gas stations and pay it off every month, to establish a history and add a layer of extra security between gas station card-skimmers and our checking account. It had a $500 limit, and after a few years he had an OK credit score. Never missed a payment or anything. 

But we noticed that his score took a little hit every time he used the card. Turns out if you use more than a certain small percentage of your total available credit, it dings your score. So, OK, if your total credit limit is $500, and you spend $51 a month filling your gas tank, then even if you pay it off at the end of each month, that's more than ten percent of your credit, and it hurts your score. 

So we stopped doing that, his score gradually recovered, cool, fine, we've got this. The rules weren't what we thought they were, we adapted. 

And then, for reasons we still haven't nailed down, 18 months ago, his credit score dropped 50 points overnight. There's a dispute process for if there is incorrect info on your credit report. We ordered ALL the reports and there was nothing. Probably he just hadn't used the card in 12 months and it got dinged as an inactive account. Another rule we didn't know about: having a credit card and not using it hurts your credit. We kept trucking along as usual. As far as we could tell, it was a catch-22 situation: if he used his card, it dropped his score a couple points each month. If he didn't use it, it dropped 50 points at long, unpredictable intervals and recovered at a rate of 1 point every 2 months. So letting the account "go inactive" (nothing happened to the account: he could use it any time) takes 100 months to recover from. And there's absolutely nothing we can do about it after the fact. There was nothing inaccurate in his credit report to dispute. The lack of activity was the problem. Or that's our best guess. They don't ever actually tell you. 

Even with that drop, he was still above the magic 650 so we could apply for a mortgage and look for a house. 

When we applied (-14points), we talked to the loan officer and the real estate agent extensively about what we could afford, how we could afford it, and... about how to work on our credit without triggering more hard inquiries. What we should have done (but didn't know about) years ago was ask the bank for a higher credit limit on the card, so that a single gas purchase wouldn't hurt his credit score and we could keep the account from dormancy. Nobody told us that one, and we can't do it right now because it'll result in a hard inquiry and cost us another 14 points. So, on the advice of an expert, we requested a replacement card, so we could then charge $50 on it, and then spend a few months making the minimum payments instead of just paying it off like we usually do. This, the expert told us, would result in a declining credit balance over some months, which would improve his score. Nobody can tell us how much it will improve his score, and it does result in an initial ding, but... OK we'll try that.

But we had to replace the card first. 

I have asked the internet about this one, and a lost card replacement is not supposed to affect your credit in any way. It's a routine procedure. 

But that's not what happened. We replaced the card, and his credit score dropped 58 points on the same day the lost card replacement registered with the credit bureau. The credit bureau is not required to explain any of that, and in fact goes to a great deal of trouble to avoid explaining and maintain plausible deniability about destroying your credit for no obvious reason. But it looks like what happened is, the lost card got logged as a closed account that was immediately replaced by a new account with the exact same start date, card number, credit limit, etc. But for the split second where the account was "closed", my husband's total available credit went to zero. Which vaporized 58 points from his score instantly. And now we don't qualify for a mortgage. We still haven't recovered from the last 50-point vaporization, so...    I guess we spend the next couple of years playing credit-card games to see if we can use unnecessary interest payments to buy our way back into the good graces of the credit bureaus. 

Everyone says a lost card replacement doesn't affect your score. Did we trigger some extra-special exception?

The best part was that we replaced the card so we could use it, so the account wouldn't go dormant. So we could improve his credit score. 

But even though I read up on how to improve credit, I asked for expert advice, and I believed my sources and took their advice: I was wrong. The model I constructed was wrong, and it failed catastrophically.  And our chance of buying a house this year went to zero. Hard fail. If the recovery follows previously-established patterns, his score will recover in 8-9 years. I hear it only takes 6 years to come back from personal bankruptcy, so if it's 8 years to recover from not-using your card, and 9 years to recover from replacing a lost card...  does that imply something about the credit bureaus' priorities? Is it even worth dealing with banks and credit? Are we getting burned repeatedly because the way we live is inherently incompatible with how America does finance?

Because this is a recurring problem in my life, it's hard to just brush it off as "well, we'll keep trying and figure it out." It feels personal, and it reaches back through time and melds with every other disastrous personal failure that resulted in model collapse. Like that time I bought the same outfit all the other 9th-grade girls were wearing: the corduroy skirt and cashmere cardigan from Express. Surely I would fit in now! I had cracked the code! I had The Outfit!  Nope. The outfit also included a 16" necklace with either a heart or cross pendant, taupe opaque tights, chunky-heeled loafers, carefully immobilized bangs, and being in the same class as the most popular girl since kindergarten. Whoops. How could I have missed that? We're terribly clever people. I scored in the 98th percentile on the SAT. We know tons of people who are way dumber and way more broke than we are, who nonetheless have perfectly immobilized hair and amazing credit: scores over 800. But we are selectively retarded about these things, because of the implicit rules problem. Credit bureaus keep their formulae secret. They have the right to say whether or not you are worthy of a mortgage, but you don't have the right to know how they calculated your worthiness. Replacing a lost card has no effect on your credit, until you actually do it, and then you are ruined for years because it triggered some special exception nobody knows anything about. You don't get to know what the rules are until you violate them, and then you get napalmed. 

 Model collapse.

The world is no longer coherent. 

Whatever we thought the rules were, we were wrong. Nobody is going to tell us the real rules: we'll have to guess. And every time we get it wrong: KABOOM!  Once again, I am standing there, mortified, wearing that stupid corduroy skirt and realizing that my legs are humiliatingly naked and I don't even have bangs, and it was never about the clothes anyway. 

And, you know, what else are we catastrophically wrong about? And when will the next retaliatory strike happen? This is the part that's most difficult. Everything we thought was solid ground turns to quicksand for a while. Nothing feels safe. No decision feels justifiable. We can't even figure out this simple thing that tons of our more normal peers have mastered. We're a really really SPECIAL kind of stupid. 

It's happened before. Eventually things stabilize. The mistake is isolated. Life goes on. The model gets rejiggered to include the new data. It's probably still wrong, but slightly less wrong than before. Hopefully the next time the rule we didn't know about sidles up and kicks us in the teeth, it won't be wearing steel-toed boots. I will keep reminding myself that I've been through worse, and survived it. TransUnion can't make me give up on life. 

But TransUnion might make me give up on buying a house. I am completely ready to throw in the towel on that, take our carefully-saved downpayment fund, buy an empty lot, slap a decrepit used trailer on it, and spraypaint "TO HECK WITH ALL THAT" on the front door. At least I could have a garden again. 

On to the fMRI section!

-Default Mode Network, once again, has something to do with it but we're not sure what. 
-You can't really use an fMRI to look at people experiencing NSCs that involve moving around. 

-There's a suggestion here, from a couple of different studies, that NSCs involve suppression of sensory input, and higher activity in parts of the brain associated with internally-directed attention. Also that for people achieving NSCs through audio stimulation like music and drumming, the function of these things may be to deliberately overwhelm the sensory input channels so that they are then dampened. 

I think I expected there to be more of interest in that section.Darn. 

Conclusions: 

Remarkably unhelpful. 

"The growing interdisciplinary literature converges on the view that trance is best understood as a process rather than a single discrete state"

Um. 

"Trance and psychedelic-induced states may share overlapping phenomenological features and underlying neural mechanisms, so insights from one domain could inform and accelerate progress in the other."

Oh no, you lost me on that one. Nope nope nope. 

Concludes with the usual meta-study thing: More research necessary (please fund us). 

Might be fun to dig up some of the studies this meta study looked at. 

Hello again, and a warm thanks to all who popped in to check on me while I was on hiatus. I know it's been a while: a lot was going on, including Lent, but also a long recovery from an unpleasant illness. I learned a lot. Not nice things, and not learned pleasantly. But if you're the sort who can learn from the mistakes and shortcomings of others: 

1) Stay away from mushroom extracts.

I'm not talking about the magic kind. ALL of them. I mean, the copy on the box sounds great. I know several people who've used them, particularly lion's mane, with good results, so it seemed low risk and a good idea at the time. Nope. Either I'm that one-in-so-many people who reacts idiosyncratically, or that was a bad batch. And there is no way to know ahead of time either way. I have no idea why it happened, but I had a completely bonkers allergic reaction, my guts convulsed for days, my internal temperature regulation broke-- I felt both hot and cold all the time, without any fever. And I had some neuro thing going on where the left side of my body (not the right, and the divide was like a sharp invisible line right down the center line) would cycle on again/off again feeling cold and sort of buzzy. Also, I did not sleep for the first three? four? days. Thereafter, sleep has been difficult to achieve, usually brief. None of that was the worst thing: I was also filled with terror. There was no reasonable thing to be afraid of, so it would simply attach itself to the most handy target. One thing, and then another. Mornings were usually OK, but then sometime between noon and 6pm, the terror would set in, and persist until midnight. It was impossible to sleep. I suspect it was at least partly hormonal: something was dumping adrenaline into the system and I couldn't get it to stop. After a few days I went to see a doctor. Some of the more acute symptoms: the digestive upset, the one-sided nerve activation, and the total inability to sleep, improved or cleared up with some Benadryl. Thus: "allergic". Kinda. But other things: the terror, the abbreviated sleep schedule, persisted for months. 

One of the most disturbing aspects of the whole episode was that it messed with my perception of time. The hours in front of the altar at night, after the kids were in bed, telling my beads and talking to God and white-knuckling it through the terror...  those felt like hours, mostly. But at the same time, the days just whizzed by. Weeks, months, WHOOOOOSH! Like being on a luge track straight toward death. I had the worst time keeping track of what day it was-- had to check the calendar many times a day, and still missed a few appointments because... how could it possibly be Thursday again already?

I can't say whether that was all the extracts. Those weakened me, and within a couple weeks I was laid low with severe bronchitis, back at the doctor, and taking all the drugs: antibiotics, steroids, proton pump inhibitors. Heaven knows which things did what to me. At least I didn't break any ribs coughing this time? The steroids, once again, changed my eyesight for the worse. I need reading glasses now. This does not seem to get better with time. 

Anyway, got through the bronchitis. Five months later, most symptoms, including the inchoate 6pm-to-midnight dread and the awful timewarp, have subsided. Other more minor annoyances remain: I still rarely get to sleep before midnight. I can no longer sleep on my side, but haven't figured out how to sleep comfortably on my back. I lie down for an hour, get frustrated, give up, read until my eyes don't work anymore, try again. 

2) Reflux = don't eat after 5pm. Mint is evil. 

I've always had a wee bit of reflux. Never thought much about it. A minor and very occasional annoyance. I thought. But this last round of bronchitis, a doc finally pointed out to me: no, it's not nothing. And there's a connection between that and the recurring bronchitis. I'm susceptible to the reflux all the time. Weak valves or something. But once I catch a cold and the snot factory goes into overtime, this screws with my stomach acid, makes the reflux worse, and the reflux makes the cough worse, the cough makes everything worse, menthol cough drops make the reflux worse, and it becomes this horrifying doom loop where I sprout hernias and fracture ribs and cough until I puke. And if I can get the reflux under control, I might be able to avoid that in the future. Best news I've heard in years! Tried proton pump inhibitors for... less than a week. They make me feel nauseous all the time. Not worth it. What does actually work is: no eating after 5pm. Going to bed hungry is way better than bronchitis. Lost a few pounds into the bargain. Settling into new habits is hard, but worth it.

Sidenotes: anything that slows stomach emptying makes all of this worse, and this list includes every kind of mint, and especially concentrated menthol products. 

 3) I am capable of fervent, intense, and lengthy prayer...  but only when I'm terrified and miserable. 

While not-sleeping, I spent a lot of quality time with God. It was, in many ways, great. And yet, I am spiritually weak and lack discipline, and it is crazy difficult to keep that practice going, the second the terror and misery let up. That's not a nice thing to find out about myself, but it is a useful thing to know. At least when things are bad, we turn in the right direction: "I will bless the Lord at all times..."  And God is, in fact, merciful and gracious. It was a Learning Experience. May God help me find a way to cultivate that sort of discipline so that I can do it even when things are going well. 

 Yesterday, I started getting calls for...  eh, let's call him Bradley. I don't actually want to destroy his life or anything. Anyway, phone going nuts, calls, texts, all from mortgage companies looking for... (not his real name) Bradley Spellman. Dozens of calls and texts. While I'm answering one, call waiting chimes in with another. 

This has happened before. Two or three years ago, same deal: Bradley Spellman, mortgage companies. Once...  maybe it was a mistake. Maybe he fat-fingered my number instead of his own on the loan application, because it's one digit off or something. Last time, I sighed and spent a week or two asking people to take me off their call list, until the calls stopped. Twice, though? 

In my defense, I was (I am) angry, and I want it to stop. But I do find myself, at this point, wondering where the line is between gentle deterrence and possibly-evil stalking. 

At first, I hung up on them, told them it was a wrong number. Asked them to remove me from their call list. This seemed inadequate. So I started talking to them. I used my super-nice sexy telephone voice. Yes I have one. It is super handy for navigating bureaucratic telephone jungles-- an activity I do not enjoy, but which I excel at. I did not lie to them. 

Me: Hello?
Caller: Is this Bradley Spellman? 
Me: Who's calling? 
Caller: XYZ Super Mortgage
Me: Oh! I'm not Bradley, but I've been trying to get in touch with him! I wonder if you can help me--  this is not his number, but do you have an address, or an email or something I might use to contact him?

The first two actually cared about their jobs and demurred. No, we can't give out information. Third try was the charm. I got a street address. 

It is way easier to extract personal information from strangers on the phone than I expected!

I looked up the street address on google maps. Bradley lives in the same neighborhood I grew up in. Just a few blocks from my parents. Wow that presents some tempting possibilities. 

Let's not do anything illegal though. And... what if he used a fake address as well as a fake phone number? 

That's easy enough to answer. I've been trying to buy a house (unsuccessfully) for like four years now. I have amassed some useful real-estate research tools. 40 seconds to find the owner of the property at that address...  and sure enough it is Bradley Spellman. And now I know that he took out a mortgage for $150k to buy that house in...  roughly the same timeframe as the last deluge of calls from sketchy mortgage companies. 

So I'm like 99% sure I've got the right guy, now. I look him up on Facebook. His FB page literally has a picture OF HIS HOUSE (which I crosschecked with the real estate site and google maps just to be sure) in the header.  Not the brightest bulb in the box. It also links to his business FB page. Where I collected the phone number for his company. 

I now have this guy's full name (first middle and last), his home address, his business info, the name of his spouse, I know when he bought his house and the amount of his mortgage, I know it was a VA loan so he's probably been in the military, I know his maiden name (yeah, he's married to a dude and changed his name. Does that make it a bachelor name?), I know his age (about a year older than me, so... not local or I'd know his name-- military would explain that), and I know that he's applied for a mortgage when he's already got a pretty hefty one. That's curious. There's no way he's going to refi now and get a better rate than 3 years ago, with a 30yr VA loan. Is he looking to buy a second house? Divorce in the works? Real estate investing? Fraud?  

I could have checked the local court records. But I didn't. 

So far, I've just got a stack of easily-accessible information. Possibly, it is an ethical gray area to ask phone reps for information they are not supposed to divulge. 

Here's where it gets a bit dicey though. I DMed him through his FB page (no, I do not use my realname on FB, nor do I friend anybody-- it's for accessing marketplace and stuff) like: Hi Bradley, please stop using my phone number to apply for loans.  I am getting a gazillion phone calls from mortgage companies now, this is the second time it's happened so I don't think it's an accident anymore, and maybe next time you need a dummy phone number just do a quick google search for "fake phone numbers to give to men you're not interested in" or just use a 555 number like in the movies or something. 

Probably still OK, but... I'm really really annoyed at this point. My phone is still ringing every ten minutes. This doesn't feel as cathartic as I'd hoped. I hop over to the public part of his page and leave a comment on the top post: Hey Bradley, stop using my phone number for loan applications. Why are you using a fake number to apply for loans, when you've already got a mortgage anyway? Is this some kind of fraud? 

And then, I copied down his work phone number. 

He blocked me on FB of course. Anyone would. 

But I still have his work number, and now, every time I answer a call for Bradley it goes like this: 

Caller: Is this Mrs. Spellman?
Me: Oh, are you looking for Bradley? 
Caller: Yes
Me: He's not here, let me give you his work number (reads off work number).
Caller: Thank you, have a nice day!
Me: You too!

There's a tally card on my desk. I've given ten callers his work number now. 

I didn't lie or tell anyone that I was Mrs. Spellman. But I did let them assume it. Arguably, I am being super helpful, assuming it was an honest mistake, and redirecting calls *he signed up for* to a number where he might be reachable. 

Arguably. 

Not honestly, though. I definitely want him to be as annoyed by the people calling *my number* (which he's so free about using) as I am. It's not exactly Christian charity. I'll probably be hashing this one out in confession next week. 

But the thing is, my phone is still ringing. I'm up to eleven tickmarks now. Nine of those have been in the last hour. I don't even get a tickmark for the three four calls that came in while I was typing this, that never connected to a rep. 

Sigh. 

Asking nicely went whizzing by yesterday. Where do we cross over from "make the point so it never happens again" to "triggering retaliation"?  Bradley doesn't know me. Did he accidentally fat-finger my phone number on a loan application twice, by accident?  Or is my phone number just his go-to "fake" number when he has to enter a number to complete the form, but doesn't want to get spammed by every mortgage lender in the universe? Maybe he's just dumb and it never occurred to him that the number he randomly made up, actually belonged to someone, and that he was signing that someone up for 50,000 spam phone calls and texts. Wherever the dividing line is between "make sure he gets the message that this is not OK" and "Revenge" I'm pretty sure we're past that. 

Should probably stop. 

But...   the phone is ringing again. Dang. 

EDIT: 

Perhaps eleven is enough to get the point across. I admit I'm still tempted to drop a friendly postcard just to let him know that I know where he lives. That would...   not be nice. I should resist that temptation. Dang. 

Possibly, for the next couple of weeks of frustrating phone calls...   this guy might have a better approach.  It's not their fault someone gave them my number, and I'm not the person they're trying to reach. This thing became unstoppable as soon as Bradley clicked "submit" on that application. There is nothing he can do about it now. It's out of his hands. I just need him to never do it again. So... what's the right response to the dozens of mortgage reps who are still going to call me? Perhaps, as the fellow in the link suggests, this is a God-sent opportunity to practice low-pressure social engagement and soft evangelism. How many people have we shared the Gospel with? Are we good at establishing a social rapport with strangers? How often do we share the love of God with people we just met? Do we need more practice at it? 

UPDATE: 

Well, it turns out evangelism *is* a better tactic. Particularly now that the damage is already done, and there's no way to avoid the next 100 unsolicited phone calls. The God Loves Telemarketers guy is right: it's good practice. The last lady even agreed to let me pray with her. And no joke-- I totally sincerely asked for God's blessing on her. So. 

Two weeks to go. Let's see if we can keep it up!

UPDATE: 

33 phone calls today, including a dozen where the autodial failed to connect to a representative. 

On the plus side, praying with total strangers is losing its weirdness. 

On the minus side, it's fairly exhausting. So far I've only gotten one hostile though. 

Right now: researching how to change my voicemail message to "Hi, I'm not Bradley and I don't know him: please take me off your call list", so I can just turn off my phone for a week. 

 America has a fraud problem. 

Scientific studies are mostly irreproducible, and mostly find what the grant-issuers hoped to find. Because of fraud. 

Our social safety-net programs are overwhelmed...  not really because we have too many disabled, poor, and old people, but because we have a staggering parasite-burden of people collecting benefits fraudulently: lying about eligibility, collecting checks for dead people, etc. And then, on the other end, hospitals and insurance companies, as well as other contractors, conspire to defraud those programs on the payment end. 

Our elections are compromised by vote fraud. 

Our national budget is bloated beyond all reason by fraud. 

Colleges are rife with it, from fraudulent admissions to fraudulent loan and grant applications, to fraudulent coursework and embezzled budgets. 

Building contractors habitually underbid and hide shoddy work. 

Nearly every attempt to reform public schooling-- incentives to improve schools and raise literacy-- leads not to higher literacy, but to testing fraud. 

And down here where it hurts: we have epic levels of real estate fraud.

This study put out by the Philly FED office estimates that a third of the "effective investor population" is people committing occupancy fraud: in other words, they are lying about being investors (rather than regular people just trying to buy a house to live in), in order to take advantage of the mortgage rates, downpayment assistance programs, and other programs meant to help normal non-investor people buy a house-- programs that exist explicitly to help normal working people who want to live in a house, get a leg up on investors in a fraught housing market. I was trying to wrap my head around this number, and it's difficult, but it's possible to get some vague, sketchy outlines of the problem from various sources. A third of the effective investor population is huge, but also...   to grasp that we'd need some idea of the size of the investor population to start with. Is that an available number?  Average number of investment properties owned by average landlord: about two. But does that average tell us anything real? The guy who bought an entire apartment building almost certainly did *not* commit occupancy fraud: it'd be hard to claim you're buying 80 apartment units to use as your primary residence, and programs for first-time homebuyers are unlikely to front that much money. So the majority of that fraud is likely taking place in single-family home sales, which are the majority of rentals. 

This site helpfully gives us some numbers. Are they accurate? I have no idea. Best I can do. They say that 25% of single family homes in the US are owned by investors. That's way bigger than I thought it would be. Since the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to actually own the house you live in, I expect that percentage is much higher down at the bottom end of the rental market-- where we are. Which goes a long way toward explaining why, every time we tried to buy a very modest house in a somewhat sketchy neighborhood, we were relentlessly and immediately outbid by investors. It also notes: 

"Over the last decade, the percentage of investors purchasing single-family homes has steadily increased each year. From 2010, where investors accounted for only 10% of single-family home purchases, to 2019, where the percentage rose to 15%" 

and

"in 2020-2021, investor purchasing of single-family homes experienced a significant surge of over 80%. This surge can be attributed to historically low mortgage rates resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. The combination of low prices and low-interest rates created a favorable environment for investors to expand their portfolio of single-family homes.

As of 2022, investment companies now own approximately one-fourth of all single-family homes."

Which explains an awful lot of what we've been dealing with in our failed attempts to exit renter-hood. During the height of the covid real-estate frenzy, 80% of home sales were to investors who actually admitted to being investors. That's settled down to around 40% since. But think about that a moment: if, as the FED says, a third of the people buying homes who claim not to be investors... are actually investors and lying about it, that could be something like 86% at peak, and 60% now, of single-family home sales to investors, not to people who want to live in a home they own. Most of the homes being sold are going to investors, not occupants. If that continues, that 10% of single-family homes that has ballooned to 25% in recent years, will keep growing. 

Possibly, the numbers are smaller than that for fraud, simply because the really large investors like Blackrock are doing their thing with endless FED funding, not mortgages. They don't need to stoop to petty occupancy fraud when they can milk the taxpayer wholesale. But, they're not buying in my neighborhood. They're targeting up-and-coming city suburbs, and houses above our range. Which means a greater proportion of the sales in our price range probably involve fraud, as that's likelier to be smalltime wannabe REI bros who went to a weekend seminar about passive income and came out with dollar signs flashing in their eyes at the prospect of collecting rent checks and never working again. 

That's infuriating, of course. 

But at the same time...  I guess I can stop feeling like a failure for still renting. All this time, the four years we've been trying, on and off, to buy a house, I've felt like...  were we being naive? Were we missing some crucial information? Were we doing it wrong? 

We looked at our finances back around 2018, realized we were on a dead-end path, worked out the numbers for what we'd have to do to fix that and escape the low-income can't-afford-to-live-anywhere trap, we lived on fairy tears and unicorn farts for two years to send my husband back to school, we nearly tripled our household income, hauled our family up into median income range (even a bit above median for our state!), exceeded all our financial targets (and those targets included what it'd take to buy a house... in 2018) and...   now we're in the same bind as before, except we're renting instead of living with relatives. And that's because the goalposts moved, the dollar lost at least 25% of its value in that same timeframe, house prices nearly doubled, grocery prices went up by 30%, rents went up by a similar margin, and...  it turns out we were having to compete as honest people in a market overrun by fraud. 
 
So...  at least it wasn't us?

It does feel like it's time for another 2018-level re-assessment, though. If the hole just keeps getting deeper, we've got to find a way to keep ahead of it. 

Bits and bobs from my reading heap: 

"The cultivation and expansion of needs is the antithesis of wisdom. It is also the antithesis of freedom and peace. Every increase of needs tends to increase one's dependence on outside forces over which one cannot have control, and therefore increases existential fear." 

-E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered

"Intellectuals are most easily reached by propaganda, particularly if it employs ambiguity. The reader of a number of newspapers expressing diverse attitudes-- just because he is better informed-- is more subjected than anyone else to a propaganda that he cannot perceive, even though he claims to retain free choice in the mastery of all this information. Actually, he is being conditioned to absorb all the propaganda that coordinates and explains the facts he believes himself to be mastering. Thus, information not only provides the basis for propaganda but gives propaganda the means to operate; for information actually generates the problems that propaganda exploits and for which it pretends to offer solutions. In fact, no propaganda can work until the moment when a set of facts has become a problem in the eyes of those who constitute public opinion. 

-Jacques Ellul, Propaganda

On the Council of Florence in 1439: 

"Catholics presented rational arguments for their positions, and the Orthodox responded by citing apostolic Tradition. It was 'the constant conviction of the Latins that they always won the disputation, and of the Greeks that no Latin argument ever touched the heart of the problem.' Even today, when Orthodox Christians reject Western Christian beliefs, it is because they violate apostolic Tradition, not because those teachings are irrational by some Orthodox standards of reason."

"Augustine was trained and educated as a philosopher and rhetorician. Later, as a bishop of the Church, he tried to resolve theological questions by the application of reason and logical deduction. Lacking a formal theological education, Augustine relied on his philosophical training. He believed that truth could not conflict with reason because God is the source of both. Therefore, he concluded that deductive reasoning can be utilized in the service of theology.  ...   Augustine initiated the trajectory that ultimately resulted in the schism between East and West. He sowed the seeds of a different phronema, which over ensuing centuries gradually grew in the West due to his immense influence. Relying on his training in philosophy, he arrived at his own divergent conclusions to some theological questions, many of which had already been resolved by important church councils and notable Greek Fathers." 

-Jeanne Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

"The loftier meaning is therefore more fitting than the obvious one. It commands those participating through virtue in the free life also to equip themselves with the wealth of pagan learning by which foreigners to the faith beautify themselves. Our guide in virtue commands someone who 'borrows' from wealthy Egyptians to receive such things as moral and natural philosophy, geometry, astronomy, dialectic, and whatever else is sought by those outside the Church, since these things will be useful when in time the divine sanctuary of mystery must be beautified with the riches of reason. ...  Those who treasured up for themselves such wealth handed it over to Moses as he was working on the tent of mystery, each one making his personal contribution to the construction of the holy places. It is possible to see this happening even now, for many bring to the Church of God their profane learning as a kind of gift. Such a man was the great Basil, who acquired Egyptian wealth in every respect during his youth and dedicated this wealth to God for the adornment of the Church, the true tabernacle." 

--Gregory of Nyssa: the Life of Moses

There is a common thread here I've been trying to tease out (perhaps I imagine it): the right and wrong use and orientation of wealth, desire, information, learning...   maybe, material resources, learning, intelligence, information, desire, all of these have their proper place when when oriented properly toward God. But as soon as we regard them as goods and ends in and of themselves, tools that can be used on their own, they become perverted and lead to bad things. 
 

Everybody's pushing the trades lately. I'm onboard with that: I WANT the trades to be a viable career path, a good way to support a family, etc. We homeschool our kids, and our parents failed at the whole career-counselling thing. The only thing they knew was: go to college----> get a good job. We were the first generation through the ed. pipeline, for whom that failed. I never quite finished the degree (just as well: I quit when I realized I'd need to borrow money to finish-- at least we don't have debt!), and my husband has a very beautiful BA-with-honors, that is worth less than nothing.

When I say less than nothing, I mean: there are NO jobs you can get with a 4yr liberal-arts degree (for all I know this is true of the science degrees also). None. If you get a 4yr degree and you do not put in another 3yrs racking up debt for a master's degree, your degree counts against you. The only job it qualifies you for is substitute teaching. We discovered this early-ish in our marriage: applying for jobs that do not require a degree (because degree jobs are all for postsecondary degrees now), we experimented with listing the degree on his resume, and leaving it off. The only way to get callbacks was to leave it off. Now we know.

We think the implication of this might be: if you list the degree for a job that doesn't need it, you're signaling that you'll be a lousy employee: entitled, lazy, and overqualified. You don't want this job, you'd just be settling for it, because you fail at life and wasted four years studying literature, but then didn't go for the postgrad. Or maybe you lack relevant job experience compared to HS grads who have already spent four years working fulltime.

For us, the viable career path was: forget the degree, go back to the local 2yr college, get a 2yr professional certification in a medical specialty, and now yay, we have an almost-median income.

So we'd never advise our kids to go get a liberal arts degree. Not happening. College is strictly for if you are laser-focused on a specific career path, such as engineering, that you can't get into without an advanced degree AND that career pays at least twice median income. Otherwise you're wasting seven years of your life in order to be a permanent rent serf and struggle to support a family.

So. That was far too long an intro to say: what about the trades?

I dig Mike Rowe out there pushing skilled trades, I respect all the guys I grew up with whose skill in construction, plumbing, electrical, repair, hvac, etc. literally keep our lives running... and those jobs still look like a raw deal and I can't see advising my kids to do any of that, except as a way to pay for college. These guys are crippled from work-related injuries and toxic exposures well before retirement age. What do they get in return? A median US income, maybe a little under.

I want the numbers to be wrong. I seriously hope they are wrong. I keep looking-- I pull up the local trade schools, I scope out the highest-paying specialties they train in (plumbing, electrician, hvac), and... the starting wages are around $56k, and max out around $80k if you've got years of experience. If you want to know something scary: airframe mechanics (you know, the guys who do all the completely essential maintenance on the giant flying machines) make, on average, well under the median income. The guys who keep airplanes running and are subject to all kinds of toxic exposures and will probably die of cancer from it before they get anywhere near average old age... yeah, we don't pay them enough to afford dental care for their kids.* If you have to fly, I recommend you pray a lot, and ask whatever deity you worship to bless and protect the guys who maintain the aircraft.

Once you already work in the trades, there are certainly ways to get additional training at the company's expense, and lever your way up a little... but the ceiling's lower than you'd think, and the terms are infernal. I know a few guys who've beat the average here, and here's what that looks like: you fly all over the country for weeks or months at a time, to attend intensive training programs and rack up special certifications, so that you can work on specialized machines-- stuff like MRI units in hospitals, industrial manufacturing equipment, giant heavy-duty stuff like excavators, cranes and train engines. If you're very very lucky, you can get this training out of the way while you are young, single, and OK with being away from home for long stretches. If you're *extremely* lucky, you can then land a job that's compatible with having a home life. But if you're most guys on this track, you can typically sign on with a company like Caterpillar (which pays OK and has good benefits) and then spend like the first five years of your career working nights and swing shift. So if like most working class families your wife works too... you had better have some live-in grandparents to watch the kids, or just not have a family until you've reached mid-career at least. It's not much better than working oil rigs and being away six months at a time.

Again, I ask: does anybody actually want the life that's on offer here?

For reference, median household (not individual!) income currently runs about $78k nationally, maybe $63k locally. We live somewhere between those points, with a family of five, and unless something drastic changes** we will never be able to buy a house, help our kids with college, or retire. We depend on the generous child-credit on our tax return, for unavoidable emergencies like car repairs and medical care-- we can't afford those out of our ordinary income, which gets eaten up mostly in rent, insurance, and food. In order to stay afloat on a median income, we buy all our clothes (except underwear), dishes, sheets, towels, vehicles, bicycles, furniture and most household goods secondhand, we do our own car maintenance and minor repairs, we cook every single meal at home, we do not have a TV or any of the luxury subscription services that go with it (we don't netflix and chill). We do not have things like gym memberships. And in spite of this extraordinary level of thrift, we are unable to build savings.

That is what a median income gets you these days. And that's only because we're lucky enough to live in a relatively low-cost part of the country.

Why would I want that for my kids?

I get it, YES, the trades are absolutely a better deal than getting into debt for a four-year degree that is worse than useless: it actively sabotages your job prospects. If the choice is between a BA and a useful trade, definitely go for the useful trade. You can probably handle that without getting into debt. But it's not exactly a good career path, if the numbers are true. And I don't think the people out there advocating for the trades are being honest about that. Mike Rowe is not living on a median income. That's fine, but I think he's depressingly representative of the most prominent people out there advocating The Trades as the future: out of touch with the realities of actually living on a Trades income. Yes, the Trades are absolutely better than just a high school diploma. Yes, the trades are better than just a Bachelor's degree. Yes, they are the right choice for young men who are not heading into theoretical physics or civil engineering, or shipping logistics.

But that's not enough. We DO need more skilled labor, but we need it in a broader context where people working skilled trades are making enough money to have a family, buy a modest house, save for retirement, and buy new shoes for their kids once in a while, and have working conditions that let them have a stable family life. $70k isn't enough. $70k to work night shift and be away for weeks is punishment for crimes not committed. But that's about all you can hope for as a mechanic or plumber or electrician or HVAC specialist, unless you also have the business savvy to be the guy who owns the company. There are a lot of vocations out there that people are willing to be poor for, because those jobs are so deeply soul-rewarding: Priests, musicians, artists, carpenters, luthiers, farmers, writers, craftsmen... HVAC is not one of those jobs. In order to be worthwhile careers (and as a society, we NEED them to be), they need to pay 30-50% more now and rise in tune with inflation AND OR we need to get the dang inflation under control. The debt-and-rental economy needs to end, if we still want to have people who maintain the basic things that make a first-world American way of life possible***.

--------------------------------------------------------------------
*When the revolution comes, these guys will be the first to sign up: the ones who did the responsible thing, got training in a job that was essential and couldn't be outsourced, and then still couldn't afford to move out of their parents' house, get married, and have kids. They're competent, hardworking, and they're probably just as good with guns as they are with wrenches.

**One way this could be solved, is by letting prices collapse in all the radically inflated sectors: housing, doctoring, and education, notably. Those things didn't get more expensive because they got better. They got snowed under by bureaucratic compliance requirements, metastasizing admin, and a crippling burden of middlemen (insurance, bankers, investors, professional licensing organizations). Price collapse would solve all of that, very quickly, as the industries would be forced to de-worm themselves.

***Of course, another way this could play out, is we drop the idea of a first-world way of life. Everyone's living standards are going to decline as resource extraction becomes more expensive. We can fight it, and continue to immiserate everyone in the process, OR, we could embrace it, and start by making it possible to build more basic houses. It doesn't have to be shantytowns. I stayed in very comfortable, beautiful, gracious houses overseas, that cost pennies on the dollar to build, compared to every insurable house in the US. They had no insulation, no indoor plumbing, no HVAC, no carpets, no dishwashers, no fridges, no washing machines, no city water, no sewer, hardly any furniture... they were brick, faced with concrete, tiled halfway up the wall, with corrugated metal roofs seated 6 inches above the top of the walls for ventilation. A mango tree in the yard was the most sought-after climate control. And we lived there a while, and never once felt we were missing out on anything. Why do we need all this junk we have in our house, stateside? Because the architecture is climate-inappropriate (no ventilation, too much upholstery) so if you don't run the hvac, everything gets moldy. We have to have a fridge because everywhere you buy food is too far away to walk every day (not so in the developing world!). We need the junky electronic entertainment because we live too far from each other and have completely forgotten how to have a social life or religious observances. We need a vacuum because of the carpet. We need the mower because of the lawn. We need the washing machine because clothing is cheap, we have too much of it, and we aren't careful with it. We need the dishwasher because we use too many dishes, and we use too many dishes because we have a dishwasher. Nothing about this is necessary, or sensible, and nothing about it makes our lives better. So much of it is just expensive ways to cope with the fact that our family and social networks are broken, and our zoning laws prevent us living in people-friendly environments. What if we invested in *those* instead?

I have nothing to write, but here are a few fun passages I've marked in my reading lately.

"With our artificial methods, especially our regular service of steam, we are ignorant or forgetful of the sea, and the true emotions which it arouses have decayed into ineptitudes with which we are all familiar. We talk of 'commanding' that element in war; there are even some who write as though we of the towns were native to it; there are very few who understand with what divinity it has prompted, allured, and terrified the past of our race, or under what aspect it may prompt, allure, and terrify the men of a future decline."

"I will not deny that an effect always mingles with its cause; for things that happen are realities, whereas time is not real at all. Not only does the saint make the shrine, but the shrine also the saint. A saint must have come to Canterbury. A primeval site will sooner or later bring to fruit a primeval sacredness."

"From the south, as we have already seen, the entry of the traveller was made; for, to repeat the matter, a custom presumably much older than our religion, gave approach to sacred places from the side of the sun."

-Hilaire Belloc, The Old Road


"I take you all for Fools and Pedants, in the Chief, in the Chevron, and in the quarter Fess. Fools absolute, and Pedants lordless. Free Fools, unlanded Fools, and Fools incommensurable, and Pedants displayed and rampant of the Tierce Major. Fools incalculable and Pedants irreparable; indeed the arch Fool-pedants in a universe of pedantic folly and foolish pedantry, O you pedant-fools of the world!"

(talking about daily mass, and ritual)
"1. That for half-an-hour just at the opening of the day you are silent and recollected, and have to put off cares, interests, and passions in the repetition of a familiar action. This must certainly be a great benefit to the body and give it tone.
2. That the Mass is a careful and rapid ritual. Now it is the function of all ritual (as we see in games, social arrangements and so forth) to relieve the mind by so much of responsibility and initiative and to catch you up (as it were) into itself, leading your life for you during the time it lasts. In this way you experience a singular repose, after which fallowness I am sure one is fitter for action and judgement.
3. That the surroundings incline you to good and reasonable thoughts, and for the moment deaden the rasp and jar of that busy wickedness which both working in one's self and received from others is the true source of all human miseries. Thus the time spent at Mass is like a short repose in a deep and well-built library, into which no sounds come and where you feel yourself secure against the outer world.
4. And the most important cause of this feeling of satisfaction is that you are doing what the human race has done for thousands upon thousands upon thousands of years. This is a matter of such moment that I am astonished people hear of it so little. Whatever is buried right into our blood from immemorial habit that we must be certain to do if we are to be fairly happy (of course no grown man or woman can really be very happy for long--but I mean reasonably happy), and, what is more important, decent and secure of our souls. Thus one should from time to time hunt animals, or at the very least shoot at a mark; one should always drink some kind of fermented liquor with one's food-- and especially deep upon great feast-days; one should go on the water from time to time; and one should dance on occasions; and one should sing in chorus. For all these things man has done since God put him into a garden and his eyes first became troubled with a soul. Similarly some teacher or ranter or other, whose name I forget, said lately one very wise thing at least, which was that every man should do a little work with his hands."

--Hilaire Belloc: The Path to Rome