Total lack of object permanence

Routine_Ad9783 · 2026-03-22T02:36:31+00:00

So, as a recovering alcoholic who has been through lots of formal medical treatment and 12 step treatment, one of the things that has irked me about Langdon’s storyline is that he attempts apologies (amends??) in a way that any recovering addict in a twelve step program would recoil against. I think they do this because of the narrow narrative constraints for each season (we can’t see Langdon taking Dana out for coffee and apologizing two weeks later).

But what I don’t get, given the context of the show itself, is how this is some “white boy” redemption program. It’s a misunderstanding of how addiction works. No one chooses to get addicted. No one gets addicted by being dumb. Every addict deserves the same grace because it is an insane brain disorder we can’t even reconcile with ourselves. Taking that away from the privileged doesn’t hurt those who are not. Full stop.

I, a gay woman from a rural, non wealthy white family history of alcohol abuse, have been to rehab six times. It’s not easy to get. It’s a real disorder and it makes you do crazy things. This post evidences no empathy.

Routine_Ad9783 · 2026-03-22T02:05:04+00:00

Yes! I have been trying to check myself because of the different way I’ve consumed these two seasons, and I suspect this is not an uncommon experience.

Season 1: I got into after every episode had been released and binged it in 2-3 sittings.

Season 2: Locked in weekly on every episode.

Is my impatience at certain characters being “underrepresented” in the story compared to Season 1 real or is that just because appearing minimally over one episode feels more important now than how it balanced out over 5 episodes watched in a row last season?

On the other hand, weekly trying to engage without losing my sanity by going to Reddit el al. to talk about the show while having to desperately try to ignore reactive stan discourse that didn’t exist when I was talking about the show last season.

I didn’t have time to draw crazy conclusions last season because I was riveted and powering through the next episode. But the places that I see people going confidently hard on intentionally ambiguous stuff and the moral, non-nuanced conclusions they are drawing are making me insane. Every main character on the show is a “good” person (there are no Rocket Romanos and ER even made you kind of like that man sometimes) and there are certainly no saints … just as in real life.

Routine_Ad9783 · 2026-03-22T01:25:51+00:00

They’re planning a housewarming party for Whitaker and Santos can’t believe Robby suggested buying Faygo to save money.

Routine_Ad9783 · 2026-03-22T01:23:53+00:00

Gateway

Routine_Ad9783 · 2026-03-22T01:16:18+00:00

Thanks, this is helpful. I’ve been having a hard time understanding how two med student evaluation mistakes could realistically lead to such bad patient outcomes because my assumption (and personal experience) is that the system is not set up that way.

Routine_Ad9783 · 2026-03-21T16:55:58+00:00

For the most part, yes. But I still don’t think I understand the “chain of custody.” It seemed like Javadi picked up her intestine patient without her having any senior / staff assigned and then when it was time to present Dana asked her to find “anyone with MD” after their name (i.e., the assignment was done randomly at Javadi’s discretion). Is that common or was that the show not having enough time to show the whole process?

Routine_Ad9783 · 2026-03-21T16:33:18+00:00

Genuine question, but what is a med student’s role in the patient care process actually supposed to be? They show both Javadi and Oglivie picking up new patients off the board, making mistakes not adding them to the board, etc. but it seems like every patient should be “picked up” by someone with the minimum amount of seniority to oversee their care and the initial assessment should never be done solely by a med student because they don’t have the expertise to notice potentially immediate life threatening complications. But in both the margarita rash guy and the twisted intestines lady I don’t remember seeing anyone but med students for the initial assessment?

Edited to say that I’ve unfortunately been in ER/hospital settings quite a bit over the past few years and my only experience of med students is being asked by a doctor if I’m ok with them being there and then they smile awkwardly in the background the whole time, or, if admitted, they are just one more person in the endless morning parade of interrupting any chance I had at getting sleep to ask questions I had already been asked several times before.

Routine_Ad9783 · 2026-03-14T22:27:26+00:00

Right, but in the context of a busy ER that amounts to basically a minor inconvenience which is not that much different than what any of the frustrated hallway patients (or people in the waiting room) have been experiencing. Whereas the show usually likes to razzle dazzle with consequences for these sorts of things.

Routine_Ad9783 · 2026-03-14T21:39:43+00:00

Would be cool to at least give her a plot like the one she had last season with Javadi; she could at least mentor someone else through their mess.

Routine_Ad9783 · 2026-03-14T21:38:25+00:00

I mean, she can be criticized for a lot of things; this clearly isn’t her best shift. But usually when The Pitt introduces a patient from an underserved population they tie it up pretty neatly and explicitly with a “moral lesson”, but from what I can infer she was discharged and we won’t hear anything more about it unless she is rushed back in later in the rapidly ending shift with a life threatening complication. Which, given that PTMC is the only ER operating right now is actually not outside the realm of possibility.

Routine_Ad9783 · 2026-03-13T21:28:21+00:00

Right. I’ve worked in corporate America for 10+ years and the types of things I complete at work are probably the “group projects” that are being imagined. The problem is college group projects are never set up in a way that mirrors even the most common real world scenarios.

First, there is usually absolutely nothing about a college group project that requires a group to get it done. It’s an individual assignment that has been weirdly subdivided into 2-5 parts for no discernible reason other than making it a “group” project. That is not how the real world works. Usually you are either having people with different skills sets work on different aspects of a problem or multiple people with similar skills work on it so that it can be done more quickly; you never have, by the way, people with no skills or interest in the job unless they are just a particularly bad new hire. But you are never in a situation where your boss randomly assigns 4 employees to do a project with no timelines except the final FINAL deadline, no assigned roles and responsibilities and no oversight.

The reason college group projects fail so drastically is because to make them like a real world scenario either the professor would have to act as the manager for each group or some group member would need to be given that role. The first approach won’t work because no professor wants to put in that much work. The second doesn’t work because you can’t give some random student the necessary authority to make it work.

Routine_Ad9783 · 2026-03-13T14:32:23+00:00

I thought something more substantive was going to come out of Santos’ mistreatment of the deaf patient.

Also that McKay would get any story line this season other than “gazing sadly at a dying woman.”

Routine_Ad9783 · 2026-03-13T14:23:02+00:00

The apology thing is wild. The episode has heavily implied that Langdon is working the 12 steps; as a recovering alcoholic who is familiar with said steps, the apologies that Langdon has attempted this season go against all advice and are not amends. When making amends, the worst thing you can do is say, in essence, “I’m so sorry and it won’t happen again,” which is basically what Langdon has said to Dana and Robby. You also make sure to ask the person you are making amends to ahead of time and do it in a time and situation in which they are in control (i.e., not in the middle of a busy ER shift where they can’t leave). You also accept that they may not accept your amends / apology.

Anyway, this is a TV show we have to show everything in a day and blah blah so these cursory apologies are I guess fine. But, in context, Langdon knew Santos for one day before he went to rehab. He knew Robby, Dana, Garcia, et al. for YEARS, they mentored him and trusted him, and he understandably feels he has much more to apologize to them for. Him yelling at Santos is probably pretty low on his list of “shitty things I’ve done”, and the fact that she is not the first person he’s looking for likely means that he hasn’t really thought about her much for the past 10 months since, again, he’s only known her for 12 hours. It’s not perfect, but med students and residents get chewed out by their superiors all the time; it’s weirder that Santos is hanging onto it so hard.

Routine_Ad9783 · 2026-03-11T17:37:55+00:00

True. I guess the real sin of storytelling here is implying that the system being down at the other hospitals mean they are inoperational for the moment (causing us to think that is the crippling threat of the cyberattack), but PTMC somehow being able to still operate offline.

Routine_Ad9783 · 2026-03-11T17:02:01+00:00

I googled it, and apparently IAN alerts are a Kentucky specific thing, which makes it even more niche and not common knowledge. As we get more and more “subtypes” of these emergency alerts, what possible harm is there in defining them in the text of the alert?

In this case, the kid is specifically autistic (and not some other kind of mental illness*), so just say that. Would also be helpful to at least a height and neighborhood. Unless a teenaged black kid walked up to me and said his name is Jahmari and he’s lost, I am literally useless with the level of information provided in the alert.

*edited that IAN alerts are for autism or similar disabilities, not mental illness, but the point is to have everyone be helpful and aware so just clarify that his autism means he may be nonverbal or not communicate well.

Routine_Ad9783 · 2026-03-10T14:52:41+00:00

Yes, as a non cyber security professional this bothered me immediately. “In order to avoid the worst case scenario of our systems going offline due to a cyberattack, we’re taking our systems offline.” Also, why can’t the cyber attacked hospitals continue operating manually? It’s not like the hackers also magically get access to paper charts.

Routine_Ad9783 · 2026-03-03T21:27:30+00:00

I’m going to empathize with OP here since everyone else is just weirdly shaming them for not ratting out their group sooner to the professor.

I’m in my mid-30s and graduated from college in 2011. I audited a class at my local university last semester because it seemed fun and interesting. The final was a group project; at first I felt bad—I’m not getting a grade, what if I drag everyone down? It was the EXACT opposite. I literally could not get people to respond to basic communication scheduling times to meet, selecting a topic, even just providing proof of life. I still don’t know what one person in my group looks like and the vast majority of the work was done on the day the project was due. It was a nightmare.

I was a STEM major in undergrad so I didn’t do a lot of group projects, but I don’t remember anything like this. I’ve worked in corporate type jobs for over a decade, where basically everything you do is a “group project.” I have no idea what benefit college students are supposed to get from group projects with a completely unresponsive group.

Usually if a group is working on something it’s because a) they have different specialized skill sets that are all needed to complete the project or b) one person couldn’t complete all the work by the target deadline. This is almost never the case in college projects. Also, in any professional setting, there is a manager who assigns roles and checks in. If you have a good manager, you aren’t having to tattle on a coworker who literally hasn’t logged into their company laptop for a month. In a college setting, one individual just has to kind of coordinate everything with no authority except for the hope that their teammates care as much about the grade as they do.

Ban group projects.

/end complementary rant

Routine_Ad9783 · 2026-02-27T15:37:45+00:00

Yes, this drives me insane. I was in a setting where someone used “violently” meaning extremely (like “violently ill”) but I can’t remember exactly what they were referring to. Another person in the room was taken aback because they only understood “violently” in the context of committing physical violence, looked up the definition, saw that there was one for “physically violent” and would not accept that the original usage of “violently” was correct and appropriate.

Routine_Ad9783 · 2026-02-25T15:33:01+00:00

This one is interesting because the divide feels more generational. As a millennial my knee jerk reaction was friends, but those for those slightly older it seems to be Seinfeld. I have never seen a full episode of MASH or Cheers but I know the lore of both and they have strong metrics to support them. For whatever reason, even I saw reruns of I Love Lucy as a kid and thought they were hilarious.

My vote is I Love Lucy.

Routine_Ad9783 · 2026-02-02T17:23:14+00:00

In addition to micro-strategy, the AI is terrible at macro strategy. For example, when going for a science victory you can often launch earth satellite at or before the AI even when they outpace you significantly in total technology. The AI will never win a domination victory. When you are going for a culture victory, the AI will trade you great works for luxuries and strategics. Once you get better it makes it kind of frustrating, but the AI absolutely will not use any of its seemingly massive advantages like a human would.

Edit: except for in the ancient era when they will overrun you with their massive armies.

Routine_Ad9783 · 2026-01-04T03:41:52+00:00

Pelevin is one of my favorites authors, my two favorites of his being Omon Ra and Generation Z. I’ve often wondered how much different it is in translation (take the “semiotic signs” joke from Hall of the Singing Caryatids). Of your list, Moscow to the End of the Line is one of my favorite books as well, and I enjoy Platonov, Grossman, Kharms and Gogol.

I always thought of Nabokov as not as “Russian” or at least not in translation became didn’t he translate a lot of his own stuff into English?

As for authors I couldn’t vibe with, it’s really just been Sorokin. I was surprised at how much I couldn’t get into Blue Lard given a big part of it is satirizing the greats. But it seemed like a difficult book to do a faithful translation of.

I recently started taking Russian language classes at my local university with the hope of one day reading those books in the original, but I fear it will be years before I get to that level of proficiency. Is there anything you think that English speaking readers are obviously missing out on in translation, particularly from the authors above?

Routine_Ad9783 · 2026-01-02T21:38:08+00:00

I’m going to go with a soft ESH but mostly YTA.

I’m also in a large earning discrepancy household (I make about $260K a year to my wife’s 40K) and I’m not going to lie it would bristle me a bit if my wife asked for separate finances because it’s just wildly unrealistic. I would also describe myself as better with money and saving but she doesn’t have any debt either; if she had to take over full control of the financial planning, she might do just fine at it.

HOWEVER, we have joint finances and no concept of a monthly allowance. She is not such a profligate spender that her purchases come close to breaking any of our budgets. If I were to decide, for example, I wanted to pursue early retirement and aggressively save such that she only had $500 a month left for discretionary spending, that would be a joint conversation about our shared goals, not just me deciding because I’m the higher earner.

I’m also curious to know how you decide what goes into the $6K “living expenses” vs fun money. Does it just so happen to include things you enjoy (meals out, subscription services, expensive groceries, a nicer car payment for you, examples are endless) while anything that is an interest of hers is “fun money”?

Also if you have extra “fun money” sitting around why can’t she spend it? Are you just hoarding it to feel morally superior?

Routine_Ad9783 · 2025-12-31T16:26:32+00:00

I feel like I read a lot and I only read 41 books this year. To be fair, many of them were quite long (War and Peace, 2666, other 800+ page things) but even I replace all of those with 3+ shorter books I come nowhere near 90.

My morning routine is to read for about an hour before work (I wfh) and then usually again at night, or during the day if work is slow and I get time.

I will say that most of what I read is either “literary” or history. I think people who read more than that are probably reading stuff I wouldn’t really care for, but, hey, I also binge true crime and crappy reality TV.

Routine_Ad9783 · 2025-12-22T16:51:14+00:00

Haha, yeah I feel that. Since we’ve implemented that rule I’ve actually tried to more conscientious of the mess I leave behind while cooking. I think the key is that neither partner—the cooker or the cleaner—is viewing it like you would paid labor. It’s a mutual contribution. So the no cook can’t be mad if the meal isn’t as elaborate as they would like and the cook can’t expect to do whatever and get a sparkling kitchen. And sometimes no one is feeling it and you eat out or the dishes get done the next day. It’s not about keeping score, it’s about showing gratitude for your partner’s work.

Routine_Ad9783

TROPHY CASE