I have 2 minutes left on this computer.



I'm in Motueka, New Zealand. I have visited two intentional communities, hitchhiked about a thousand kilometers, begun adding the word "heaps" to my vocabulary, hiked above a glacier, got stuck at the top of a mountain in bad weather for 2 nights with no water, and had a lot of fun so far. Now, I have to go water the vegetables and shell nuts for nut butter.



More to come, I guess.

Four days! Or, more like three now...



I'm all excited and scared and stuff. And I have like ten thousand things to do before I go.



Okay, time for bed.

I have health insurance! Blue Cross has approved me for an individual policy. They're going to let me give them money! Yay!!



I have insurance now, through my employer, but I'm getting a much cheaper major medical plan so that I'm covered while travelling, without having to pay for COBRA. This process has been sort of ridiculous... I've had to go to the doctor again to get a note saying that actually, I am healthy despite the fact that I've been to the doctor recently. Oh, and I haven't had asthma since I was a kid, etc. They were going to drop me because of a combined asthma/allergic rhinitis (ie. hay fever) diagnosis. For some reason, they don't care at all about the life-threatening insect sting allergy, but whatever. I guess for them the two possible outcomes are, "Ian gets minimal medical attention, and is fine the next day," or, "Ian dies." Either way, it doesn't cost them much.



I hate insurance companies.

There's this premise I see around a bit, and more and more these days: Advertising is annoying because it's poorly targeted.



This is true, but I think it's missing a lot.



There have definitely been times when I've found a well-targeted ad to be useful. This generally happens to me on Google, and it's usually when I'm searching for the right product for some application. For example, I found my current source for cheap Kevlar thread through a Google ad.



It gets annoying when I'm not looking to buy something. Often I'm looking for information, or to entertain myself, or to connect with other people. In those cases, the ads are an irritation. They get in my way. Perhaps you could say that I shouldn't have ads targeted to me when I don't want to buy something, which would support the original premise (in a sort of modified way). That's still missing something, though.



Advertising does not exist merely to sell products in the way that I bought that Kevlar thread. In many cases, it exists to change culture. On one level, advertising is about making sure that the people who want your product know about it. On another, it's about making people want your product. I often think of this as the difference between advertising and marketing, but I realize that nobody else really uses the language that way. There are probably better words, and I'd know them if I wasn't so resistant to exposing myself to the process by which these tools of cultural control are created.



Having someone manipulate me into desiring a thing, that costs money, that I did not want before will always be annoying. Being manipulated, restricted, or controlled in a non-consensual fashion is not pleasant.

Best blonde joke ever!