Unbreakable

I don’t like hot beverages. Not sweet, not bitter, not herbal, not savory. So I don’t ever want tea. But I do like ice. I like turning on the machine and having it make me some over the course of 20 minutes. Watching the PLC run through the state machine. Pulling out the first batch – the one that’s not cold enough and so forms thin rings instead of cubes – and getting a sample before the it’s ready. Refilling the ice after the first batch melts. Finding it’s still cold after I’ve forgotten about the ice. Seeing the mislabeled “Ice” light cycle on and off in a way that makes sense to a robot designer and clearly did not to the dude labeling the interface. So send me to make ice when I’m upset. Or make it for me when you notice I need it.

Dave acknowledged the world again today, or at least the part I can see. He has things to say about travel, though I’m classic Dave style he offers hardly enough context to, with research, understand his expression. It’s interpretating intent from the noise of his anxiety. It’s pretending to analyze art without actually seeing it. It’s shouting that I can hear but cannot understand. He says he doesn’t have a favorite color of safety but that indifference is the problem I’m having not a protection against it. I fear not that I’m having a bad impact I fear that I’m having none at all. Have an opinion. Care about something. Be angry. Or sad. Or whatever. But do it, instead of just skipping it. Instead of imagining that it’s not for you. If it would help, feel free to phrase your answer in the form of an Ansible playbook that spins up a MongooseIM instance for me on AWS.

One of the things I really like about N. K. Jemisin’s book is that one of her PoV characters is addressed in the 2nd person. It does exactly the thing I hope to when I talk to “you” and the similarity makes me feel clever. Her book talks in that 2nd person about a protagonist who experiences great trauma, not for the first time, and still must accomplish certain goals – without the support of her family or community – to stay alive and be the person they want to be. So if you like it when I talk to “you” , you might like it when she does too.

DerbyK has great new derby pictures out. You worry about the deconstructed self you see in those images, but I know that other people don’t see what you fear. Mostly they aren’t as mean as you expect people you care about might be to you. Aren’t as mean as you can be to yourself. I see that Skip his dialed up the public volume of his attempt to get affirmation about his hurtful delusions, which must be hard. But I see you’ve got some newish things happening that are letting you live with a slightly improved perspective, which I think is great, and which I hope is helping protect you from the old bullshit.

Got my purple jacket [fig 1] in the right size. I might need to hem the sleeves but otherwise I’m really happy with it. It’s been literally a 20 years since I was excited about my own jacket. It’s been more than 10 years since I even bought one.

Watched the end of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt¹Unbearable Kimmy Gibbler (Netflix). It was exactly what I hoped it would be. They brought back Xanthippe to let us see that she and Kimmy actually became friends, whether Xan liked it or not. And she got to make at least one person feel safe. The Good Place makes me feel like an Arizona Trash Person but UKS knows I’m a Mole Woman too. Would recommend if you spent part of your childhood locked in a bunker, or even just for Ellie Kemper. It’s complete done today at season 4 and most episodes are under 30 minutes.

Went to Home Depot²These stores are the worst. So much wandering around to find the 6 things I need. No one knows where anything is, including me. But we made it eventually, with all the parts we sought. and got parts for a tiny woodworking project, and for a shelf for Shanda’s electric kettle. Hope to work on both tomorrow. Thought about stopping at the craft store for possible enhancements to the woodworking but didn’t quite make it. We’ll see how it goes with the materials on hand. It would be nice to feel like we can accomplish home improvement tasks again, after so long without.

Got Shanda to help me with munster cheese. For complicated childhood food punishment reasons, I was required to not like munster. It was for Alex, not me, and so wanting it would only make me unhappy. Sometimes there would be munster in the house at times there was no food for me, so not liking it was much easier. But that’s not happening anymore I shouldn’t continue to dislike a common cheese on the basis that Mother used to punish me with it. I can’t let that be the standard or I would never be able to do anything. Avoidance can be a great way to keep yourself alive, but it’s a real hard way to actually live.

I’ve been looking at how work is different now that I’m back in town. Talked to M about it today. One difference is the way that interactions with people at work require what seems like too much effort. It’s all the work of real human contact but in an environment that specifically forbids it. Not to mention the way it rewards me³My company literally asks us to “obsess” over certain aspects of our job, and teaches “our” “culture” as a class to people who have worked there since the 1900s. Both things that are clearly bad for me specifically and probably lots of my peers. Not to mention all the capitalism they want me to do. There are lots of reasons it’s easy … Continue reading for managing other people’s feelings. It can make me feel like I’m not up for anything that requires social effort because I’ve already spent it on corporate smalltalk. And it masks how little interactive conversations I have about things I actually care about by filling my day with demanding but useless real-time interactions.

I’m not yet sure what to do about that. But there are other parts I can make better. A schedule would help, on weeks when it’s possible. So not all the time but sometimes; I should do it when I can and not feel bad when I can’t. And I should find some interesting meetings like I used to imagine existed. That and actually working on my side projects in place of some production tasks, so I can feel good about getting them done and take advantage of some automation. I used to imagine that I wanted to automate myself out of a job. That was a decent goal I should reconsider. And I should actually update my resume and take a round of recruiter meetings so I can feel empowered to change jobs when I think that would help.

Talked to Shanda about budget. We got all the one-time expenses from Cleveland more or less squared away with some retirement money. But now we’ve got to figure out how to make it happen on an ongoing basis. I had hoped to maybe get into Mother’s monthly allowance but that seems unlikely at this time. The stress is mostly about the work of figuring out and adapting to a new budget; I’m not gonna starve or lose my housing or anything. Budgeting is a thing that’s easy to feel disappointed or judged or resentful or guilty about, and that requires genuine cognitive and emotional work, so it’s easy for it to become a point of stress among us even though we share a goal.

Saw M’s progress on the same project from last week. I’m excited to see it going. I’m a sucker for process art, which I get automatically when you share over time. I do worry about your chair standing, but I understand why you do it, even if it makes me want to sent you a proper class II stepstool. And I ranted at you about how I’m teaching myself to expect that I can have real conversations with my friends on a regular basis. In aggregate it should be plausible to do a couple of times a week. It feels like a thing I can’t reasonably expect from people. That I spent most weeks in my life bit having and feeling bad for wanting. But I’m supposed to want things and this one doesn’t seem like it will actually hurt people the way I imagine it will. So I’m going to do things to make this happen, even in days when it feels like my corporate overlords sucked all the socialization out of me. I need to expect more interaction to support me, and to receive support more frequently and directly. Because if I actually make it happen it won’t feel like hard work, it will feel like something I like, and only the planning part⁴Speaking of which, you should schedule that next thing you’re worried about and keep putting off. The hair cut or dog wash or massage or tailoring or bank box run or tattoo. The planning part feels like work, and it is a little work. The doing part will take time from your life. But you still want to do the thing – you like the thing and it … Continue reading will be hard.

Got some bright blue⁵And purple and dark blue and some boring colors. Enough different pads and bottles and tubes and pencils and brushes that I should figure out a way to organize them. It’s a mess right now but I’m allowed to make it organized and usable. My childhood taught me to be organized even if that made things useless, because messy meant extra … Continue reading mascara today and used it immediately. Which at my current skill level mostly involves wiping away the mess on parts of my face that aren’t eyelashes. But it looks great and I like that I can add tiny accent colors with different bits of makeup. It took me like 5 tries over 1.5 hours to get Shanda comfortable enough to talk about it after I first tried to show her. That’s not a great statistic but I think it’s an improvement over similar occurrences in the past. It certainly was easier to get to the part where we talked about how she was uncomfortable, instead of talking about it like I was wrong to hope for easy support. Or not talking about it at all.

Shanda feel today while romping with Dog. He ran the full length of the long leash past her, downhill. She did nothing to restrict him, but the end of the leash slack did. First he flipped around his collar, legs up in the air, and then Shanda came down at the other end of the line. Bad times for both of them. Dog seems unaffected other than being a bit worked up, but Shanda hurt her knee. Probably nothing big but still the sort of thing that can make life 11% harder than it is already, and take a lot of extra energy to deal with.

No work for the next two days. Going out for fancy supper for Shanda’s birthday tomorrow, and maybe to the SAM if her knee is up for walking. Hopefully an hour of woodworking on the middle. Thursday I’ve got therapy and I want to work more on my phone gateway. Maybe get Eggsy’s snack project laid out now that I have all the pieces.

ZiB

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Sent from a phone.

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