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I got a new laptop at work. Took the smallest one they offer – 13″ MacBook Pro. It’s only slightly larger than my 11″ at home, but it’s so much heavier. I don’t know how anyone puts up with a machine you have to hold with both hands or set on a surface, and that you have to use plugged to a custom power adapter most of the time. I feel like you are all living in the past. My 11″ charges on USB¹This 13” has USB-C power (so no custom adapter) but can’t be convinced to charge at 5V unless it’s powered off. It does *run* off of 5V USB though, which is a huge improvement, even if it is well over 10W when the screen is on. and runs all day and is light enough to hold on one hand cantilevered from the corner and type with the other. I like having a 2nd USB-C port so I can charge from either side or connect power with whatever non-radio hardware I’m interfacing. I even sort of like the keyboard display bar, other than the escape key. But I’ll never give up my tiny slice of mobile computing; I could maybe settle for the new Air but even that feels an unnecessary compromise.

Hard day in court for Shanda. Or at least in waiting for and worrying about court – the actual hearing went okay as far as I can tell. But it’s still a tough day, waiting for an anxious thing both in general and then being specifically on-call waiting by the phone for a couple hours. I wish you could be done with your CASA stuff sooner; I understand why you want to follow through, and I think you should, but I can see how hard it is on you. Try to remember that it’s not your game and you’re not trying to win, you’re just trying push the lever they gave you toward less harm. It won’t work because the whole system is designed to hurt people, but you’re probably helping it be less terrible. And once this case is done you never have to do another one again.

Here’s a thing that M taught me over the past few months: under certain circumstances it is possible to experience my anxiety as excitement, and in doing so I can be excited about hard things instead of nervous about them. It doesn’t require majorly reframe my understanding of the situation; I can just read the same anxiety as excitement. I used to do this all the time, though I didn’t have a great handle on how it worked. But it’s definitely part of how I didn’t die when I was young, and how I kept so busy I didn’t have time to die when I was slightly older. It’s a thing I regularly attempt to help other people with. But it’s a thing I lost almost entirely when Melissa was here, and in smaller pieces before that as my life became more stable and pushing through became less relevant. But I think I’m getting a handle on it again — it’s how I’m excited to live in Cleveland instead of nervous about moving and not knowing when I’ll be back. It’s how I’m excited to figure out how to be useful to M instead of nervous about how to do things. It’s how I’m excited to participate in papers and feel competent instead of overwhelmed.

It’s still a distraction, but it’s a particular sort of distraction with better outcomes. Instead of avoiding a hard thing forever, looking for distractions from it, I can be distracted _by_ it and happy to work on it. I still have to not make the distraction take over my life — any distraction can take over your life — but I should definitely use this tool as part of a well-balanced breakfast. This is definitely how I used to do things like actually work on my home automation system, instead of being nervous about how I’ll have to do it someday and never making time like I have been recently. It will still be hard but if I am excited I like hard things²That’s what he said.. I should choose to be excited rather than defeated, to be invested and interested instead of avoidant and afraid. And if I do maybe I’ll finally get the new SMS/MMS/Jabber system going.

A related discovery is that I am allowed — can allocate myself the luxury of time and safety to facilitate — the expectation that I can have preferences about how non-survival, non-The-Plan things turn out for me, and can regulate to those preferences. Like by expecting food to taste good or be reliably available or for clothes to fit or for my state of mind or physical health to be relevant to my own Plan. I often don’t give myself the option to advance from “this is inevitable so it doesn’t matter if I like doing it” to “this is inevitable so I’m going to see if I can learn to like doing it”; once I decide that I’m going to do a thing that seems hard I want to minimize the amount of time I spend worrying about doing the thing. For a long time that was necessary to keep my alive. The hope I might waste by expecting my needs to be met was just not a thing I could afford — hope was pretty thin in my life — so I designed a system that didn’t require hope.

But today I can wager hope. I must if I’m going to ever feel like my life is sustainable. And I must to avoid being a hypocrite. I’m not trying to get to a life with no planning or without disciplined execution of The Plan — those things also help keep me safe. But I am trying to get to a life where planning is easy and effective and executing The Plan doesn’t make me imagine normal things in terms of animal survival and strategic avoidance. Where one of the things I can plan for is me liking many of the activities that keep my alive, or at least having the option to figure out if I can like them instead of merely doing them without consideration for my own wellbeing.

I was thinking about the ways I have arranged my life to simply not care about some thing I want to avoid. This is sometimes a great trick, and one I definitely will want to use again — to build a system that lets me avoid the need for active regulation of some aspect of life when I don’t want to deal with it. This is a great way to deal with ordering consumables, for example — just set up a plan to have new ones arrive by the time they’re needed and never think about it. But it’s a bad plan for avoiding things I might actually want to do, like when I arranged my life (via choice of clothing, location, housing, activities, transportation, etc.) so that I never have to choose clothes at all. There’s freedom in genuinely not caring about a thing, and I want to be able to do that at times. But I also want to be able to move things in and out of the category without a lot of overhead, so I can choose which things I care about more easily, and better regulate whichever ones seem important at any given time. As with excitement I should use this mode of anxiety carefully, taking advantage when I can but being sure the avoidance doesn’t itself become a constraint.

I was browsing RBN and came across this: https://www.reddit.com/r/raisedbynarcissists/comments/aho8gq/ and it hit me even though it’s so simple. For me the not having toys thing wasn’t linked to my assigned gender but to the general concept of deprivation; there weren’t any toys that were appropriate for me. But it’s only one step removed — it’s still some arbitrary, external reason is used to justify poor treatment. It’s still the idea that what you want doesn’t matter because it’s wrong for you to want it in the first place, and you _ought_ to want something else, even though many people want the same thing you do. Even today it’s still hard for me to imagine that I can just have a toy³Like Lego kit 21309. Though what I still want most for Christmas is for you guys to build me a more connected social support network., or even a piece of art that I like. If it doesn’t produce something practical it’s probably not for me, or at least that’s what my feelings tell me. It’s defiantly the reason I hoard movies — I didn’t buy my first one until

I ordered a whole set of emergency supplies for M today: water storage and sanitation, shelf-stable food, fueled cooking equipment and supplies, comprehensive medical supplies, USB power storage and generation, and minor auxiliary heat. Everything I have except propane and advanced comms⁴Now that I list things I think “where’s my cold weather gear and alternate housing” — things I used to keep in the car with me, or use the car itself for. I’m working on owning appropriate medium-cold clothing as part of my regular life and I’m going to be satisfied with that because I don’t live someplace where extreme cold is an … Continue reading . I should probably have done it a lot sooner. It’s a thing I’ve been thinking about since we first moved into the apartment, particular when the heat was off and we didn’t own beds or plates or a functional cooking appliance. But it’s a thing I’m always afraid to share, because it’s one of the ways I feel like I’m too much. In which I am sometimes too much: without regulation I could easily become a fully-on prepper, feeling physically unsafe no matter how much logistical preparation I undertake. Luckily it’s something I’ve studied and considered and moderated, so now I’m only like 60% prepper. I try hard to prepare only for things 1) that might actually cause me significant harm 2) that can be practically mitigated merely with training and supplies and 3) that are at least vaguely plausible in my actual life and 4) with the assumption that I’m leaving for something more sustainable after a few days. And it does work; I feel safer and am satisfied in that safety — for example, having emergency food lets me not survival-worry about having regular food. In any case I’m glad M wants supplies and I hope they help you feel safe in the same way I do. It sure helps me feel safe to provide them and I’m glad it’s a thing I can share instead of being ashamed about.

Did zero work at robots on Friday, but chatted with E and Stochastic for a while. Possibly convinced Stochastic that they could simply ignore certain rules with no consequences, rather than missing out on a thing they wanted. Talked about the inherent injustice of rules, the fallacy of the rule of law, and the power of a hard hat and hi-vis vest. Talked about hijacking equipment and processes to accomplish cool things they were never intended for and the way that works just as well for social processes as mechanical ones. Discussed the tradeoffs of participating in organizations with goals that only partly match yours, and the way power in organizations resists change even when and if you find yourself “in charge” of them. Got to talk to J for just a second; not much but enough to reassure myself that I wasn’t making things terrible. Got to see V for a moment too, and think about purple shoes⁵I keep thinking I might like colored shoes. It’s slightly complicated by the fact that I wear giant wide man shoes and those come in colors from brown to black. Plus I’m desperately afraid of not having technically sufficient shoes, so imagining them as fashion and not survival is difficult for me. I could probably do things to decorate my … Continue reading. All of which was a good time and approximately the right amount of real work.

It was also good warm up for the part of the evening where I scare S. It’s a thing I like doing, in that I feel like I get to speak freely. I even think S does a decent job trying to hear what I mean instead of just checking out when I challenge their assumptions. But it’s also isolating to have to correct someone during what they imagine is safe small talk, and then feeling like the people you’re with are afraid you’ll turn them communist or gay or whatever other non-compliant thing they currently fear from you. It doesn’t matter that their fear is internally motivated, the fact that they understand it as something dangerous you expose them too is enough to be real tough sometimes. Today’s chat was about how I don’t work from home at the largess of my corporate overlord, as he suggested about my ability to work from Cleveland, but how do it against their expressed will and simply tolerate⁶This is a skill I practiced often when I was young, choosing to accept some form of punishment in order to achieve my goal. There are a million instances that all taught me to not care about rules or feel bad about punishment, but one I’ve been thinking about the past few days is eating gristle. When there was meat in Mother’s house it was … Continue reading the (usually minor) consequences even though it’s against the rules. Eventually the topic expanded to include the mismanagement of any project subject to profit goals via the control hierarchy installed to prioritize profit, preempting the propertied purpose or project. How my goal was to stop doing for-profit work as soon as I have a plan to sustain the people I support. And about the abuses related to self-funded retirement and the way it encourages harmful levels money hoarding even in well-meaning old people, let alone those who believe their own lies about deserving the right to hurt other people.

Went back to robots on Saturday and did some work with V. We stripped out and simplified a bunch of code we don’t need, got the project to compile, and then continued on just enough to make it broken again. There’s some new code needed to take the next step but I think it will be well worth writing, and will avoid a lot of environmental influence that has made our code less reliable in past years. I’ll miss the next week of meetings — and yet other week of my D&D game — but there should be plenty of time to get it going before the end of the year, and having something cleaner and easier to use in the future. And I wouldn’t mind a little more time hanging out with V before you leave either.

Built a package for A. It’s slightly late compared to the purported deadline, I didn’t get much notice and collecting and mailing things is complicated when you travel. Regardless, I’m excited to do it. I’ve been pretty weak on care packages the past few months; haven’t built a general-purpose one since early November. I do have some plans for the next one though, which is always nice. I know the contents don’t really matter but still they’re not always easy to fill with unique and vaguely useful or interesting things. Particularly when I don’t get much feedback. But I like to imagine they help me send safety, and help people feel like our friendship is real even though I’m often just a bunch of text on a screen. And I like the excuse to think about people and imagine what might make them smile.

I’ve thought a bit about Don from the train. I feel like he might have talked me into being a crazy person who talks about mental health to people on public transit. Or at least something close. I mean, I don’t wanna annoy people but I feel like maybe I should just talk to people when I see something we share, even when that thing is hard. Maybe particularly when that thing is hard. Not talking about things was always a huge problem for me, and the resistance to even acknowledging hard things outside of “safe” contexts like “family” almost killed me. The world does lots of things to hurt us and I think it would be better — we would be better — if we talked about them more. “Look at this anxious situation we’re both in. Wouldn’t it be better we did it together instead of separately.” It’s sort of what I yell here every day or two. There’s probably some intermediate option that’s not yelling it on the bus (hopefully that isn’t yelling at all), and I’m going to give some thought to what that might be. Anxiety isn’t the only thing I can relate to people about, but it’s a thing that too often gets pushed aside and ignored. A thing we tell people they should feel bad about instead of working to change the world so it isn’t so bad in the first place. And I’m not afraid to talk about either of those things (anxiety or changing the world) so maybe I should. At the very least I expect it would introduce me to interesting people.

And probably 40 other things. This The Screed has been chooching for a while and is still only half-baked. That often happens when I travel; I get lots of anxiety and lots of time for introspection while I’m trapped in a tube and panicking about being discovered by the authorities, then some forced new perspective for the next day or two, and then general business trying to get my life into a sensible shape again. And this time my skin has been terrible, for no obvious reason, which makes the sort of lounging I usually do while writing hard. That’s one of those things I should imagine a physician might be able to help with. But not until I’m back from Cleveland again.

ZiB