November 27, 2023:

At the bank she walked right through a plate glass window. Two weeks hospitalized, lacerations head to toe.

Recovery was years. Constant pain. Exhaustion of Western medicine: There's nothing more we can do for you.

To her own endless shock, acupuncture relieved the suffering. That voodoo from the mysterious East.

I thought of it as: When science fails, turn to different science. She thought of it as: Utterly incomprehensible. Not even magic. Magic might have made sense. This was simply and purely baffling.

Hillbilly life in the Big ol' City.

November 26, 2023:

She took two days off. Said she was sick.

It was like skipping school. It was the first two days she'd been happy in a very very very long time.

Now she dreads the morning.

She'd loved the job. Still loves the mission. No longer has confidence in the people.

November 25, 2023:

Leibniz sped up in his last decade. He felt the sands running out. So many massive, ambitious projects.

My friend the Spinozist says, "I thought Leibniz was the enemy?" Misapplication of Althusser's "dividing lines". Lines are properly drawn between Problematics, within ouvres and inside individual works, teasing out the conflicts and unresolved contradictions. Meaningful lines cannot be drawn between named individuals: it's entirely the wrong level of abstraction. Lines between named individuals are a muscle memory of academe: the habit of institutional rivalry. It's too broad to be meaningful.

Leibniz explored the logic which Althusser later labeled "structure in dominance", in which human beings are an assemblage of monads under the direction or jurisdiction of one in particular. He defined conatus as the dynamical seed of motion or change, which appears to be the sense in which Althusser uses it and which is essentially the opposite of Spinoza's striving for self-preservation.

I need to speed up, if I'm to correct any of these mistakes.