Freehold Friday

This thing where Shanda can’t pay attention to anything else – even for a few minutes – when B is upset and available can’t be regular life. Where all plans all become “I’m going to sit next to B and think of nothing more than 2 minutes in the future” but she pretends that there’s no impact to anything else in her life. It particularly can’t be what happens when Shanda is only just piecing together her own self regulation. It’s perhaps better than last time but it’s still me trying to keep her life going sort of against her will.

I’m so helpless to do anything about it while it’s happening because I literary can’t get her attention about this or anything else. She’s responds agreeably when I talk at her but that only makes me feel more ignored because I know she isn’t even listening enough to tell the truth. So I’m just sitting around waiting, maybe for days, for my wife to remember that I live here, that she has a day job, that she wants to control her own life. That she wants to help B not with avoidance but with coping. That she can help B and herself best by making choices instead of drifting around until some extrinsic trigger forces a change.

I feel like the struggle of balancing slow and patient emotional care for others with managing daily life is something we could relate about. But even when she isn’t in the middle of an intense event like today’s I can’t seem to engage her with the idea that our struggles are similar. Or sometimes even that such struggles exist in both our lives.

I got my robot work done today a good hour before I needed it. Which means I can The Screed in the car**, where I just had the 45th interaction with a driver about coaching robots. People want to like it* but that’s awfully close to recognition for me to be comfortable with. I should at least come up with a description I can accept someone mirroring back at me.

I think it might be time to obsessively play Rimworld again. Until I have solved it with an efficient grid layout and fully automated defenses, just like I did in SimCity 2000. In that game if you could win by leaving the entire terrible planet behind. Rimworld imagines the same endgame but I get to determine who to murder and who gets a blue hat.

I’ve already got a few homework submissions. Good job.

ZiB

*Or at least to to talk about the good feelings we’re told to have about education. But like colors that’s one of the things I’m trying to imagine isn’t strictly cynical or ignorant compliance.

**I was thinking bus earlier today but failed to get my shit together in time to make that happen.

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Sent from a phone.