Friday
Today was complicated and slow. There was illness and denial and crying and ramen and the death of a duck. It kept me from work* and even from the first half of robots. It was a process stalled for months so it took quite a push to get it rolling. But eventually I think it was good. Shanda discovered a new form of control she wants to exert in her life, and I’m enormously relieved that she wants to share the responsibility.
That control being the negotiation of roles in relationships, as opposed to passive acceptance of the other person’s assignments. A topic complicated enough that many people are happy to merely comply with the prefab roles they are assigned or adopt. But that is not my life – in truth it’s not anyone’s, whether they notice or not – and so negotiation. Which implies objectives and compromises and agency, each of which is traditionally terrifying to Shanda and indispensable to me.
Eventually Shanda stumbled into the accidental harem I was worried about yesterday and we could finally communicate with each other about it. Knowing what you want may not be plausible without experience, but you can still have goals to guide your exploration. It’s unlikely you’ll like the long-term term outcome without them.
Then I paid too much for a car to robots, didn’t do any programming, hardly even talked about the robot, and didn’t manage any useful discussion with S while I was there**.
So my day was pretty heavily weighted toward invisible improvement over visible achievement even after a social event.
But I did give dog two walks, one to settle my pre-dinner mayo and another long one late at night***. He even stood next to me without whining or pulling while I sat in the park and wrote some of this. Which isn’t bad after the weird day he had.
And I’ve got a mostly open weekend at home with Shanda, so maybe I can keep going on this recovery plan.
ZiB
*I was only planning to write a slide deck about V but life cycles, but I barely accomplished daily email. Who doesn’t want to work weekends?
**This was not all my fault. He was pretty worked up about his own day so addressing things he doesn’t want to talk about was a stretch. In particular he doesn’t like his new commute; my recommendation as always was “don’t drive”, and he might actually be doing such a thing. So it wasn’t a total loss.
***Which I achieved without even trying to trick myself into feeling bad about walking for the wrong reasons.
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Sent from a phone.
