I made the leaderboard of Hacker News the first time under a previous handle not long after I got myself off the street. Shortly thereafter, I changed handles and I made the leaderboard for the second time at 2:03am April 15, 2021.
I made a note of it in my HN profile, saying As of 2:03am 15 April 2021, I am officially both the first AND second woman to have made the leaderboard. <-- My story. Sticking to it.
I soon redacted it because I don't really want to make a target of myself, but I know I said that because someone did a small celebratory tweet with a screenshot of it, which was a small bright spot in my life. I do not feel like an insider on Hacker News by any stretch of the imagination.
I don't have a lot of social contacts via HN. It hasn't proven to be a great networking opportunity for me and my internal subjective gut feeling is that if I don't have "friends" or other social contacts, I must be doing it wrong and I must be broken.
This is no doubt in part due to me being very social in my youth and I have in the past had lots of contacts via some of the previous email lists or what not that I participated in. But also I feel like my finances are in the toilet because of my inability to connect socially.
I don't think that's crazy talk but I also feel like there are myriad confounding factors, so it's impossible for me to really judge. I just know I am dirt poor and not managing to fix that and I feel really kicked around and victimized and I have all this emotional baggage concerning my relationship to Hacker News such that I sometimes feel like just "flouncing out" but I never can quite manage to bring myself to do that.
A shorter version of this commercial has shown up on Reddit for me a few times recently. There is about two seconds of Colin Kaepernick that flash by really quick and I had to stop the video to catch it at all.
He's 34 years old. He's worth about $20 million dollars and was a quarterback in the NFL for six seasons.
The internet tells me the average length of an NFL career is just 3.3 years or 4.44 years for quarterbacks. My general understanding is those careers are so short on average because injuries take a lot of people out and a lot of football players end up permanently brain damaged from repeated concussions.
I watched a clip at some point of him being given some kind of humanitarian award where the presenter suggested Mr. Kaepernick had sacrificed millions and millions of dollars by taking a knee and having his NFL career cut short. Perhaps that's true.
Or perhaps he would have had his career ended shortly anyway due to injury and there would be no civil rights legacy, no TV shows or movies about him, no publishing company, no related charities and what not that he has founded.
Nike is sort of painting him as a victim. That's the narrative I have been hearing for a while now: Colin Kaepernick, poor Black guy screwed over by the NFL for having a conscience and acting on it.
And I wonder what his internal narrative is. Does he agree with the world framing him as a victim?
Or does he see someone who was extraordinarily accomplished in his field who thereby had a platform from which to speak to larger issues and used it for something more important to him than furthering his pro football career? If given the choice by a genie, would he trade the civil rights gains which appear to have grown out of his actions for a longer pro football career and the money that should have gone with it?
From what I gather, he seems to be a very sincere Christian. He is covered in tattoos that quote the Bible and he did not make a big deal of sitting out during the National Anthem.
He just didn't feel it was right to stand for it so he very quietly didn't stand for it. It took a bit for the press to notice and begin broadcasting what he was up to.
Since I don't follow football and I don't follow news, I initially only knew blurbs and headlines. I assumed he was some kind of drama queen making a stink but if you actually watch videos and interviews and read articles, he's very soft spoken and seems genuinely humble, which I did not expect.
His height and build, dramatic good looks, eye catching hair and the amount of press coverage and what not kind of gave me the impression that he is all drama, all the time and I didn't really know he was so accomplished in his career until recently.
As far as I knew, he was some loser who needed the attention or something because he wasn't getting enough for his work or whatever and he just liked derailing everything to be the center of attention, but that doesn't really look like how it went down. Granted, it's hard to get a good sense of things after the fact if you weren't watching it go down at the time, but my impression of him changed with actually reading a few articles, etc.
If he's a sincere Christian like he appears to be, does he really think he was victimized and his God abandoned him and crapped on his life? Or does he look at his life and think "Well, I could have had a career-ending injury. I'm not maimed. Maybe this is a better life for me and six years in the NFL and $20 million dollars doesn't make me a victim and a loser. Maybe this is really overall better for me and the good Lord moves in mysterious ways."
I do feel like a victim. I do feel shafted and unfortunate because I'm dirt poor and I live in a hovel and I spent nearly six years homeless (etc).
But I also can estimate that getting me and my sons well when that isn't supposed to be possible has avoided about $10 million dollars in medical expenses and the torture that would have gone along with such treatment.
I have a fairly good idea what the road not taken looks like for me and it's vastly worse than what I am currently living with. But it's very hard at times to feel fortunate when I'm constantly broke, have no friends, can't seem to figure out how to resolve my financial problems, etc.
I don't really think of Mr. Kaepernick as a victim. I feel like it is a disservice to him to frame his life in those terms, but I really struggle sometimes to not frame my life in those terms.
I'm getting well when that is not supposed to be possible. I appear to be the only openly female member of Hacker News to make the leaderboard. I think those things are probably not unrelated.
Hacker News is the only place I have ever found where I can sometimes engage in meaty discourse on medical subjects even though I have trouble understanding the medicalese and yadda. That's not unrelated to me getting better.
That doesn't mean my financial problems aren't genuine and serious. It doesn't mean I don't have some real challenges in fixing some things.
But I know what CF is supposed to do to not only my body and my life but my finances. It's supposed to cost up to a quarter of a million dollars per person per year and there are two of us in my family of three with a diagnosis of atypical cystic fibrosis, so that's potentially as much as half a million annually.
I've seen people with CF online say "I took $100,000 in drugs alone last year, not counting hospitalizations and surgeries." I've seen people with CF online talk about how they were living in a trailer that was put in the name of a relative so the hospital couldn't repossess their home over their overdue medical bills.
Compared to things like that, my problems are relatively small and manageable.
And yet they still seem so crushing and inescapable at times, which is perhaps why I spend part of my time reading stories about people like Colin Kaepernick and trying to use such as some means to gain insight into how to cope with or view my own life.
I still mostly feel like a victim. But it certainly could be vastly worse than it is, though that takeaway kind of lacks the positive spin I would like to somehow find and feel is real and genuine.
I made a note of it in my HN profile, saying As of 2:03am 15 April 2021, I am officially both the first AND second woman to have made the leaderboard. <-- My story. Sticking to it.
I soon redacted it because I don't really want to make a target of myself, but I know I said that because someone did a small celebratory tweet with a screenshot of it, which was a small bright spot in my life. I do not feel like an insider on Hacker News by any stretch of the imagination.
I don't have a lot of social contacts via HN. It hasn't proven to be a great networking opportunity for me and my internal subjective gut feeling is that if I don't have "friends" or other social contacts, I must be doing it wrong and I must be broken.
This is no doubt in part due to me being very social in my youth and I have in the past had lots of contacts via some of the previous email lists or what not that I participated in. But also I feel like my finances are in the toilet because of my inability to connect socially.
I don't think that's crazy talk but I also feel like there are myriad confounding factors, so it's impossible for me to really judge. I just know I am dirt poor and not managing to fix that and I feel really kicked around and victimized and I have all this emotional baggage concerning my relationship to Hacker News such that I sometimes feel like just "flouncing out" but I never can quite manage to bring myself to do that.
A shorter version of this commercial has shown up on Reddit for me a few times recently. There is about two seconds of Colin Kaepernick that flash by really quick and I had to stop the video to catch it at all.
I've seen justice shout from the 50-yard line of the bended knee.
He's 34 years old. He's worth about $20 million dollars and was a quarterback in the NFL for six seasons.
The internet tells me the average length of an NFL career is just 3.3 years or 4.44 years for quarterbacks. My general understanding is those careers are so short on average because injuries take a lot of people out and a lot of football players end up permanently brain damaged from repeated concussions.
I watched a clip at some point of him being given some kind of humanitarian award where the presenter suggested Mr. Kaepernick had sacrificed millions and millions of dollars by taking a knee and having his NFL career cut short. Perhaps that's true.
Or perhaps he would have had his career ended shortly anyway due to injury and there would be no civil rights legacy, no TV shows or movies about him, no publishing company, no related charities and what not that he has founded.
Nike is sort of painting him as a victim. That's the narrative I have been hearing for a while now: Colin Kaepernick, poor Black guy screwed over by the NFL for having a conscience and acting on it.
And I wonder what his internal narrative is. Does he agree with the world framing him as a victim?
Or does he see someone who was extraordinarily accomplished in his field who thereby had a platform from which to speak to larger issues and used it for something more important to him than furthering his pro football career? If given the choice by a genie, would he trade the civil rights gains which appear to have grown out of his actions for a longer pro football career and the money that should have gone with it?
From what I gather, he seems to be a very sincere Christian. He is covered in tattoos that quote the Bible and he did not make a big deal of sitting out during the National Anthem.
He just didn't feel it was right to stand for it so he very quietly didn't stand for it. It took a bit for the press to notice and begin broadcasting what he was up to.
Since I don't follow football and I don't follow news, I initially only knew blurbs and headlines. I assumed he was some kind of drama queen making a stink but if you actually watch videos and interviews and read articles, he's very soft spoken and seems genuinely humble, which I did not expect.
His height and build, dramatic good looks, eye catching hair and the amount of press coverage and what not kind of gave me the impression that he is all drama, all the time and I didn't really know he was so accomplished in his career until recently.
As far as I knew, he was some loser who needed the attention or something because he wasn't getting enough for his work or whatever and he just liked derailing everything to be the center of attention, but that doesn't really look like how it went down. Granted, it's hard to get a good sense of things after the fact if you weren't watching it go down at the time, but my impression of him changed with actually reading a few articles, etc.
If he's a sincere Christian like he appears to be, does he really think he was victimized and his God abandoned him and crapped on his life? Or does he look at his life and think "Well, I could have had a career-ending injury. I'm not maimed. Maybe this is a better life for me and six years in the NFL and $20 million dollars doesn't make me a victim and a loser. Maybe this is really overall better for me and the good Lord moves in mysterious ways."
I do feel like a victim. I do feel shafted and unfortunate because I'm dirt poor and I live in a hovel and I spent nearly six years homeless (etc).
But I also can estimate that getting me and my sons well when that isn't supposed to be possible has avoided about $10 million dollars in medical expenses and the torture that would have gone along with such treatment.
I have a fairly good idea what the road not taken looks like for me and it's vastly worse than what I am currently living with. But it's very hard at times to feel fortunate when I'm constantly broke, have no friends, can't seem to figure out how to resolve my financial problems, etc.
I don't really think of Mr. Kaepernick as a victim. I feel like it is a disservice to him to frame his life in those terms, but I really struggle sometimes to not frame my life in those terms.
I'm getting well when that is not supposed to be possible. I appear to be the only openly female member of Hacker News to make the leaderboard. I think those things are probably not unrelated.
Hacker News is the only place I have ever found where I can sometimes engage in meaty discourse on medical subjects even though I have trouble understanding the medicalese and yadda. That's not unrelated to me getting better.
That doesn't mean my financial problems aren't genuine and serious. It doesn't mean I don't have some real challenges in fixing some things.
But I know what CF is supposed to do to not only my body and my life but my finances. It's supposed to cost up to a quarter of a million dollars per person per year and there are two of us in my family of three with a diagnosis of atypical cystic fibrosis, so that's potentially as much as half a million annually.
I've seen people with CF online say "I took $100,000 in drugs alone last year, not counting hospitalizations and surgeries." I've seen people with CF online talk about how they were living in a trailer that was put in the name of a relative so the hospital couldn't repossess their home over their overdue medical bills.
Compared to things like that, my problems are relatively small and manageable.
And yet they still seem so crushing and inescapable at times, which is perhaps why I spend part of my time reading stories about people like Colin Kaepernick and trying to use such as some means to gain insight into how to cope with or view my own life.
I still mostly feel like a victim. But it certainly could be vastly worse than it is, though that takeaway kind of lacks the positive spin I would like to somehow find and feel is real and genuine.