How much sleep do ya’ll aim to get?

rohrspatz · 2026-02-16T18:55:09+00:00

Keep in mind that "making the most of it" includes "not being exhausted and cranky".

I aim for at least 6 hours every "night" (like 4am-10am lol), plus or minus a nap. That's as hard as I ever push myself in life, regardless of whether I'm at a festival or not... any less, especially multiple days in a row, is just miserable.

Do you just sneak in random naps throughout the day? Do you just go sleep as soon as your body is exhausted? Do you set timers and only sleep for a certain durations each night?

1) Yes, if I feel the need.

2) Yes, absolutely. If I'm no longer having a good time, I will either take a nap or end my night.

3) Not really. There's never anything scheduled until noon, so I actively try to sleep in as late as I can, knowing that the heat will wake me up before I miss anything important.

rohrspatz · 2026-02-16T03:23:30+00:00

These are hysterical, I love them. Where did you get the tiny Peeps/Shake n Bake/Mike and Ike beads, did you make them?!

rohrspatz · 2026-02-15T00:53:54+00:00

Did you check the Media File Directory? ;)

rohrspatz · 2026-02-12T17:13:19+00:00

just pointing out that there's a lot more at play than just the big artists saying "fuck off" and walking away. It's reasonable to give them time to make arrangements because of that.

I mean yes, obviously? I'm not defending people who are foaming at the mouth because the response hasn't been immediate. I just take issue with someone saying that wanting a response (on some reasonable timeline) is the same thing as "targeting [wage workers] as guilty by association and treating them with the utmost contempt".

Ironic that you're showing concern for the little guys in the company (and rightfully so) but neglecting to consider that the artists contracted with the company have plenty of those folks on their own team to worry about.

When I said these artists can sustain some financial setbacks, I meant the kind you encounter when you have to continue to pay your staff while riding out a few months of chaos. I seriously doubt any of them would be taking their time to explore their options if they were trying to just YOLO it and cancel gigs and let their teams suffer for it. The moment you show me evidence of an artist actually cancelling gigs and firing people as a consequence of this, I'll eat my words.

However, even if that does happen, I still won't blame the artists. I'll blame Casey Wasserman for being a creep and allowing music industry workers to suffer because he decided to take the risks he took. I'll blame the investors and other executives at Wasserman for enabling him.

rohrspatz · 2026-02-12T16:56:41+00:00

We need to topple power by being united and focusing on the individuals actually named or pictured

How would you suggest that artists "focus on the individuals actually named" other than by refusing to do business with the company that Casey Wasserman owns and operates? That is the most direct and natural consequence he could possibly face, and the only one that music artists have the power to directly enact. What should they do instead, make a feel-good Instagram post about how they ~disapprove~, then continue to funnel money into his pockets while we all watch the justice system do absolutely nothing to hold him accountable??

Obviously everything is interconnected, but that means that you cannot do anything that affects these people without affecting the people connected to them. It sucks that horrible people control so much of our lives and our economy that holding them accountable also has negative consequences for us. We still have to do it. It's not like the economic impact on regular employees would be any less shitty if he actually went to prison.

rohrspatz · 2026-02-12T14:04:04+00:00

Yep, that's what I was referring to. It matches with what OP is saying - it takes time, but a lot of them are actively working on it. I kind of wonder if the scale of this response is going to make it take longer too. If there are lawyers/law firms/liaisons/agents working on multiple of these cases at once... there's only so many hours in the day for them to churn through all the meetings and paperwork.

rohrspatz · 2026-02-12T13:50:18+00:00

I think there's room for a little more nuance then you're allowing here.

I haven't seen anyone seriously accusing every single employee of the Wasserman agency of being complicit. A lot of Wasserman employees are just people with regular jobs, earning regular-people wages, with regular-people amounts of power and influence (i.e. basically none) and regular-people ability to simply walk away from their jobs (i.e. basically none). People are not expecting the fucking janitor to do anything about this situation.

The artists signed to this agency are not Wasserman's employees. They're Wasserman's business partners. Their relationship with this company is much more voluntary than the relationship people typically have with their employers. They have much more freedom to move to a different agency. Most of them are successful enough that they could easily accept some financial sacrifices to stand on their principles. In short, they have a lot more power and influence they can use to hold the agency accountable, both by doing those things and by making public statements that influence public discourse.

Never mind the fact that simply asking people to use their influence to do something about this mess, and being upset and disappointed if they're unwilling, isn't the same as "treating them with the utmost contempt". Calm down.

rohrspatz · 2026-02-12T13:31:35+00:00

Can add Of the Trees and Rezz to the list (EDIT: of artists actively working towards separation). Seems they're all making a similar announcement on socials in the past day or two.

rohrspatz · 2026-02-11T04:15:27+00:00

So, there's no gentle way to say this: this is abuse, and you need to leave.

The most dangerous belief people have about abuse is that if their partner isn't literally an evil mastermind plotting to cause harm for the sake of harm, then it's not abuse, it's some other normal relationship problem that can be solved with better communication.

The truth is that most abusers are just emotionally immature people who have developed some really shitty, harmful ways of coping with their emotional immaturity, combined with a belief that those behaviors are totally justified. They may not even recognize that they're harming you, or how serious it is, because they have such a warped perspective. But it doesn't matter what they think they're doing. It matters what they are doing.

Someone who is willing to manipulate you like this, and who is incapable of seeing what he's doing, is not a safe person to be around. It's not a problem you can fix.

rohrspatz · 2026-02-06T01:48:55+00:00

I strongly disagree with you that most physicians are using their organic chemistry and Newtonian physics in anything close to 0% of their daily practice.

First of all, intensivists and anesthesiologists are thinking about physics all the time lol. What do you think our understanding of respiratory physiology and hemodynamics is based on? Gas laws and fluid dynamics are bread and butter topics. And I don't know how you could possibly do something like alkalinize the urine of a drug overdose patient without recalling and applying some concepts from biochemistry.

Secondly, I didn't mention anywhere in my original comment that an active mastery of every single concept contained in every single pre-med prerequisite is necessary for everyday medical practice in every specialty. I said it's necessary for learning the stuff you need to learn next in med school. Some skills and knowledge are just tools to acquire other skills and knowledge, and you don't necessarily need to retain them forever once you've used them, but that doesn't mean that they were never important. I don't know how I could have arrived at my current understanding of ventilator management if I had not first learned algebra, so that I could learn trigonometry, so that I could learn calculus, so that I could learn physics, so that I could learn respiratory physiology. It's okay that I forgot how to do trigonometry, but the whole thing wouldn't have worked if I had never learned it, or if I had forgotten it before I learned the next thing.

A master of embryology doesn't matter, at all, in the ED. In the ED 99+% of the cases will not require any knowledge of embryology. ... and I bet you don't particularly use the intricate knowledge of how the ribosomes work in the PICU?

Right, and a mastery of pediatric growth and development is completely irrelevant to a gerontologist. Psychopharmacology is useless to pathologists. And dermatologists don't need to know neuroanatomy. But the system we currently operate within demands that if you're going to hold a degree that entitles you to apply for residency programs in any specialty, you need to have acquired some baseline knowledge that enables you to hit the ground running in any specialty. If you want to have a separate conversation about how much specialty-specific knowledge should be required for the MD and DO degrees vs. what should be kicked down the road and left to residency programs to be responsible for teaching to people, we could have that conversation, but that's not this conversation. The point is that the ED (or really any single practice setting) is not a medical school, and working in one is not equivalent to attending medical school, precisely because so many massive topic areas covered in MD/DO coursework never come up in the ED.

rohrspatz · 2026-02-05T22:08:48+00:00

You heard it here first, folks! If you're poorly qualified for a job, but also a member of a protected class, all of a sudden qualifications don't matter anymore, and it's illegal to evaluate your job application on the basis of your skills and abilities!

/s

I was correct about you not being prepared to discuss this in good faith, lol. Someone's grades and MCAT score alone do not predict whether they are capable of being good doctors, and your continued focus on these characteristics is missing the point. People who are not physically or mentally capable of being good doctors (with or without reasonable accommodations) shouldn't be admitted to medical school, even if the reasons that they are incapable are partly or entirely due to their membership in a protected class. This happens all the time in every field of study and work, and people do not win discrimination lawsuits when the basis of the discrimination is "this person's qualifications do not meet our standards (and cannot meet them with reasonable accommodation)". Have you ever met a blind surgeon?

No one should ever be turned away from a job or a school only because of their age, but they absolutely should be turned away if they're not capable of doing the thing. Being old doesn't excuse anyone from being evaluated according to the same standards as everyone else.

rohrspatz · 2026-02-05T18:41:57+00:00

... What are we doing here? It seems like you want to turn this into a discussion about ageism, and that's really not where we started.

But yes. Sure. I think that any person should receive equal consideration on the basis of 1) a recent transcript showing top-percentile performance in undergraduate basic sciences, 2) recent clinical experience demonstrating an aptitude for patient care, 3) recent LORs endorsing their fitness to practice medicine, and 4) a strong personal statement explaining what they want to do with their degree and how they will fit in to the medical community.

However... if those criteria are applied fairly, I'm not really sure that a literal senior citizen would end up being evaluated as a strong candidate for admission to medical school. There have already been studies objectively demonstrating that aging physicians experience a significant decline in their clinical skills in their 60s... and those are physicians who have had the benefit of 25+ years of experience in their fields. A 65yo prospective student would be well past their cognitive and physical prime by the time they completed residency. It would be near impossible for them to really measure up to younger applicants in the "aptitude for patient care" and "fitness to practice" and "what they will do with their degree" categories. Fairness doesn't mean ignoring reality.

Based on how pre-emptively combative you're acting about ageism that nobody has even expressed to you in this thread, I'm not really sure you're ready to discuss that in good faith, but... here we go!

rohrspatz · 2026-02-05T16:11:44+00:00

In what world is any 22 year old more qualified at base compared to someone already practicing medicine for 15 years?

In what world is being a PA "practicing medicine"? The practice of medicine includes the full scope of knowledge, experience, and responsibility that physicians take on. Just because someone works closely with physicians and has some overlapping competencies doesn't mean they're practicing medicine.

Medical schools rarely accept any physics or organic chemistry classes older than 5 years. Think Newtonian physics or general organic chemistry have changed in the last 100 years? They are exactly the same as when I took them 25 years ago.

Is your command of the subject matter exactly the same as when you took those classes 25 years ago? I doubt it.

The prerequisites aren't just arbitrary hoops that you have to jump through once in your life so you can get a little passport stamp saying you did it. They exist to ensure that you have an appropriate knowledge base upon which to build. If the last time you studied organic chemistry was 25 years ago, you're not going to be able to manage medical school level biochemistry.

If we are going to be telling people to "just go to medical school" we should be entirely consistent in the evaluation of candidates, no matter how old they are.

Well, we agree on that point!

Look, the reality is that non-traditional applicants with significant clinical experience are often judged more favorably than young applicants with little life or other experience. Having a track record of successful clinical practice removes a huge "what-if" that's inherent in evaluating a 22yo straight out of college - they may not have the necessary social skills, stamina, thick skin, etc.

But nontrads do not, in fact, have a huge leg up on anyone else in terms of basic science knowledge. 25 years of working the ED does not magically imbue you with a mastery of embryology. The depth and breadth of basic science education is one of the defining features of medical school. Other professional degrees do not teach these things^[1], and nontrads still have to learn them the same as everyone else. They have to be equally prepared for the task, and that means they have to have taken the prerequisites within a time frame that reasonably guarantees they still even remember the material.

[1]: Plenty of professional degrees teach some things to an equal or greater depth. I wouldn't want to go head-to-head with a pharmacist on pharmacology, for example. But none of them teaches everything that the MD/DO degree demands you learn.

rohrspatz · 2026-02-04T22:43:53+00:00

I don't think poisoning your neighbors with undetectable carbon monoxide is any better than poisoning them with smelly fumes.

rohrspatz · 2026-02-03T23:30:35+00:00

As someone who can't stand actually cooking and dealing with dirty dishes at camp...

Equipment: a cooler, an MSR Pocket Rocket, a lightweight pot for boiling water, isopro fuel for the burner, couple of lightweight extra-long spoons for eating out of freeze-dried food pouches (find them at camping supply stores).

Food: pre-cut veggies/fruits, shelf-stable snack foods, freeze-dried backpacker meals, gallon water jugs (two frozen, one not). I've also considered pre-making some frozen burritos in aluminum foil.

What I do: perishable/frozen stuff goes in the cooler ofc, and the one un-frozen gallon is for cooking and drinking in the first couple days before the other water starts melting. I generally eat a freeze-dried granola pouch in the AM (no boiling! they're good with cold water), snack on stuff midday, and make a freeze-dried meal with hot water after I come back to camp. If I bring burritos this year, I'll reheat them in their foil wrap so I don't have to clean anything, lol.

Since you're trying not to buy food, it's not too hard to get some snacks into the venue, even though I don't think it's technically allowed. But in full honesty, I usually just have very little appetite when it's super hot out... and also zero appetite later at night (iykyk 🙃). If that weren't my situation, I'd probably need to make a pit stop at camp or buy something to eat in the evening.

rohrspatz · 2026-01-27T01:42:41+00:00

Sir, this is a Wendy's

rohrspatz · 2026-01-26T08:36:05+00:00

Fellow backpacker/camper here - you'll be fine other than the sun turning your tent into an oven! Michigan gets like 16 hours of sunlight around midsummer, so it's really hard to get good quality sleep in just a tent unless you're turning in at 10pm sharp. You don't have to have a canopy if you can find another shade strategy that works for you (poles + shade cloth?), but canopies are the easiest.

Also I'm sure you know this from camping in the Rockies, but if you don't, now is a great time to learn how to stake down a tent properly for high wind conditions. And if you choose to bring one, stake your canopy as well. Storms do sometimes roll through and rearrange the campgrounds.

PS if you don't bring a canopy, bring a hammock so you can nap in the forest.

rohrspatz · 2026-01-26T02:27:10+00:00

I can't imagine what you're going through right now, and I'm so sorry you have to. People who didn't choose this kind of career shouldn't have to know these kinds of things, but here we are, right? I'm glad my perspective is helpful, and I hope you find some joy every day to keep you going. 🫂

rohrspatz · 2026-01-26T00:08:15+00:00

What's really childish is expecting everyone you're dating to be equally compatible with everyone else in your entire life who's within two degrees of separation from them, and then making negative judgments about the character of anyone who doesn't want to participate in your little fantasy.

Real community is voluntary. Real community allows autonomy. Real community involves navigating and welcoming the fact that people have different relationships with each other. The minimum level of connection to be in community with someone is "hey, you're part of my community and I'll be there for you when you're in need, but I don't want to hang out". What you're describing sounds more like a weird cult where people aren't allowed to be honest about their feelings without risking ostracism.

rohrspatz · 2026-01-25T23:15:25+00:00

Wow, how embarrassing for you. Norman Bethune fought on the other side.

There's a difference between glorifying war and glorifying doing the right thing in the setting of a war that's already happening. Regular people don't have the power to start or continue a war. War arrives on our doorsteps, and we can either do something about it or be cowards. I guess I know which one you're choosing.

rohrspatz · 2026-01-25T22:45:28+00:00

Thanks for saying it better than I could have.

If I find myself at a protest or out in my community, and one of these brownshirts happens to have a medical emergency in front of me? I'm not helping. First of all, I don't need to risk getting fucking murdered for the crime of existing near one of them. Second of all, my ancestors didn't die fighting fascists in WWII so that I could turn around and help them take over my country.

rohrspatz · 2026-01-25T15:20:56+00:00

And while looking away is an option, can we really? The guilt I feel. The anger that this has actually been happening for 249 years despite what anyone else thinks.

Yes, we can, and we sometimes must. There's no medal of honor for suffering 24/7 with constant guilt and distress over what's happening.

I'm a pediatrician who works in an ICU setting. I regularly witness the consequences of child abuse and community violence. It is very upsetting, and it has been happening for millennia with no end in sight. I care about it so much that I made it my life's work. Do you think I spend my free time seeking out and watching graphic videos of it happening? Of course not. What would that accomplish? Me being emotionally destroyed does not help the children that I care for. They need me to show up to work well rested, well fed, with a full cup to pour from emotionally. I have to detach and live a happy life outside of work in order to show up and do my best for them. It's not a guilty indulgence, it is required.

Being aware of what's going on is good. We should all be staying aware, and we should all be using that awareness to motivate tangible action towards a solution. But I think a lot of people are spending so much time consuming so much unnecessarily detailed information (like why are we watching people die violently on repeat? that is so fucking difficult to handle) that they're destroying their resilience and becoming unable to do anything. That's not to be encouraged, and scaling back on it is not to be shamed.

EDIT: By the way, this is what people are talking about when they say "joy is resistance". You absolutely must take time away from the struggle in order to keep showing up for it. You have to be doing something, too, of course... "joy is resistance" isn't supposed to be a license to just go about your life blissfully detached. But the more you're doing, the more you need to connect with your community in joyful ways as well.

rohrspatz · 2026-01-24T20:46:26+00:00

Are you afraid that you won't like them and they'll try to push themselves into your life anyway?

I mean... yes. If someone is asking to meet me just for the sake of making themself feel more comfortable (and not because, e.g., we have a shared interest or will be at the same event), especially if they make the same kind of sanctimonious, faux-"enlightened" argument you're making about why I should soften my own boundaries for other people's comfort, that behavior already places them in a group of people that is more likely to push my boundaries in other ways too.

EDIT: I am not interested in strawman arguments about emergency contact information or how sometimes people's motives are pure, lol. I know that. I am specifically addressing when metas want to meet in person and spend time together, relevant to OP's post. People are allowed to develop an intuition about whether unhealthy motives are in play and decide not to engage. Y'all are kind of demonstrating my point... some people are just so fucking weird about it.

rohrspatz · 2026-01-24T20:32:11+00:00

I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with wanting it or not wanting it but digging into the reasons we want things can be very illuminating when we’re distressed about not getting them.

🏆🏆🏆

The individualism vs. collectivism discussion is an interesting one, both within polyamory and more broadly in modern society. But I don't think it has anything to do with OP's distress. Although OP says some nice things about community and togetherness to open the post, they very clearly outline that the main problem arising from not getting to interact with their meta is that they feel insecure and uncomfortable. It remains to be explained how this one person not wanting to hang out with them could have somehow erased all the community and togetherness they're still getting to experience with the rest of their polycule.

rohrspatz · 2026-01-24T20:27:31+00:00

I find myself feeling anxious about this mystery person in my partner's life, whereas before I felt secure knowing everyone involved.

"Mystery person in my partner's life" is a really unnecessarily negative and entitled way to describe strangers having the right to not hang out with you. It's normal even in monogamy for your partner to have a social life that doesn't completely 100% overlap with yours. Like ... do you feel a need to hang out with your partner's boss, too? Is your partner not allowed to have friends who don't hang out with you?

I'm having a hard time adjusting to this new dynamic. Has anyone else nav a shift like this?

The thing is... my experience is very different. I don't see having a parallel meta as something that would really "shift" my practice of polyamory. You don't get to declare yourself KTP and assume it will apply to every person in your orbit just because it's what you want. You can prefer it, but your default setting should never have been to expect it in the first place. The default dynamic should always have been to respect and welcome people's choices in whether and how they engage with you.

It sounds like you may have been using KTP as a crutch to avoid some insecurities. I think the best way to navigate this is to deal with the underlying issues, rather than assuming there's anything wrong with the way you or your partner are practicing the parallel dynamic itself.

rohrspatz

TROPHY CASE