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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Being completely unaware of anyone else:

    • Standing in doorways, using your phone or having a conversation
    • Talking loudly when inappropriate, when I’m in pain at the doctors, I don’t want to hear about your roses
    • leaving your shopping trolley blocking the aisle sideways in the supermarket while looking for your stuff
    • driving down the middle of the road so everyone else has to pull over, when there’s plenty of room for two cars to pass
    • stopping in the middle of the road without indicating, while: looking for your destination, or having a conversation, or deciding what day it is
    • riding your delivery bike down the footpath at high speed weaving between pedestrians

    As Jean-Paul Sartre said, “Hell is other people”.
















  • My disorganised thoughts in no particular order:

    In Australia, donation of blood products is not paid. I think you get a cup of tea and a few biscuits (“cookies”).

    I don’t have a problem with that, and I’m very grateful to those anonymous people who volunteered their time and blood so that I could have blood during my stem cell transplants.

    I also don’t have a problem with people in other countries who are paid for their blood products; I understand what it’s like to be in dire straits, and blood is a renewable resource. However, I feel that if a company is making money from selling blood, they should be paying a fair price to donors.

    Ethically, I feel that any donation of blood (or organs) should be completely anonymous, altruistic, and uncompensated in order to remove any hint of obligation between donor and donee. The idea of being paid for donations makes me personally uncomfortable, even though I just said that I don’t mind other people being compensated.

    I’d like to contribute and save lives and whatever, but I have incurable blood cancer (multiple myeloma) and they won’t allow me to donate.