Perhaps some frostbite would convince you to have better parents

Got the door alignment sensor working on my front door lock. Would have been easy except I don’t own a 5/8″ drill bit. Which is the same reason I didn’t install one at M’s (though there the challenge increases by only having a 1/4″ hex driver). I got it working with some creative drilling and it’s cool that is knows when the door is open. Now it will lock automatically after a timeout, which is very nice. I should still get a 5/8″ drill bit. And figure out how to make the sensor piece happen for M too.

Watched Wreck-It Ralph (2012). Well constructed like you’d expect from the production team. And lots of fun takes on both visual and social aspects of this video game world they live in. I also really liked Sarah Silverman in it. The romantic subplot is dumb but otherwise the story is solid and all the bits pay off. Also the racers are feeling my current fashion goals, which is reassuring to me even if they’re animated young people.

Went to the Nordic Museum [fig 1] in Ballard. It’s bigger than I expected. They’ve got a bunch of clinker boats around, and a green dress made from peat moss and some rock-shapped pillows that are both soft and very heavy. There’s also a video where the subtitles include the script notes description of the music – cheerful but spacious music – which I love, though it also includes interviews with rich dicks taking credit for the work of immigrants and claiming to share their values.

Old man Dog is sick. He doesn’t have a great GI constitution at the best of times and it’s been worse the past few days. He was kind enough to only vomit on hard surfaces this time around, which I really appreciate. He still wants to watch food happen but he doesn’t actually want any – even if its already in his mouth he lets it drop back out. All he’ll do is lick grass, which has been hard for him with the snow. [fig 2,3] I’m sorry he’s sick but it makes him super cuddly and dials up his old man noises to 11. He always makes fatty grunts and deflation noises when he gets up and down, and he sometimes makes grumbles when soemthing he doesn’t like happens, but when he’s sick he makes grumbles all the time and it’s adorable. Shanda wants to see him as a baby but I know he’s a 98-year-old man who is racist and a sexual predator and who wants to grumble about everything even though he’s secretly a sweetie.

Made actual plans for gym with E. The weather continues to conspire against us but I think it’s going to happen this week. The weather also stopped trash collection for the second week in a row. They sent an email reminding me that I could rent a car and drive my trash to the transfer station and pay a 2nd time to drop off my trash, but that’s probably not gonna happen.

Sometimes it’s hard for me to cook not because the cooking itself requires effort but because of all the rules and punishments from childhood. Like I can’t open pressurized bread (e.g. crescent rolls) because the sound will attract Mother and even if they were planned food for the day it’s likely that the noise will trigger her bad feelings about food and bring a significant amount of ire. Or because the end product is offensive to Mother in some way and triggers her same food punishment feels. I should try to arrange my food habits to not consider her reactions, but it’s not trivial to figure out what bits are mine and which ones were beaten into me. And not without some work to recover even once I know the difference. From each of a thousand different individual things.

I realized that I was not just punished with skim milk but also, seperately asked to be afraid of whole milk. Years ago I stopped drinking skim milk, a “food” I knew that Mother bought to punish herself about eating. So I had 1%. Which was a great success. More recently I “allowed” myself to buy 2% on the basis that while I felt 1% an inoffensive compromise many people who visited preferred something else strongly enough to request it, and 2% would also be “tolerable”. Eventually in Cleveland I just bought regular milk when unspecified milk was requested, on the basis that it wasn’t for me and didn’t matter if I liked it¹I do still slightly prefer 2% to whole milk for things like cereal or straight drinking, but it’s much closer to indifference than my brain predicts. And in a bunch of other contexts I’m completely indifferent or might even prefer whole milk.because I didn’t have to drink it.

I see now that I was constrained in a different way than skim punishment, but I did not know at the time that this one practical problem had so many influences. It’s a concept that I should consider in general to help reconsider things I think I have “fixed”. I have to evaluate it in terms of feels not external impacts because improvements look the same as “solutions” of you are in a mode to look for “solutions”. It’s sort of a stupid clue – the idea that I can feel better about something more than once – but I think it can help me in my philosophy of incremental improvement.

Which is how I got to go home tonight when I was cold. Not only allowed myself to react to it but got Shanda to give me reassurance that it was a good idea. Got reassurance in a way I could mostly believe and only had to ask for 2 or 3 times to make happen. Which is still terrible but also great. It’s important for me to see the progress even though the correct answer was “please help me with this – I lack appropriate footwear” and to not go out at all. I’ll get there eventually but it’s still good to be here, responding to cold feet and feeling like it isn’t too socially demanding to do so.

I always used to imagine that if things really got bad enough Pete would finally be activated as a human and help us. Help himself. Help me. But he never will on some topics. He would literally rather let you die than compromise one some points of his narcissistic superiority and individualism. It was comforting to imagine the tale of a prisoner who escaped with the help of a less terrible than their peers prison guard. The Roald Dahl fantasy. I used to imagine that Pete was tapped by this and not the cause of it. But both are true. His behavior is demanded and reinforced by Mother’s comprehensive narcissism, but he also likes parts of it, and wants to support her in it.

It’s why he demands that you take her side. He’s not just avoiding conflict he’s narc’ing directly by always picking Mother as the person who gets to avoid change – he didn’t consider you as a real participant, just a convenient place to dump emotions he didn’t like. Fuck him. There are literally millions of times her could have done very little work and made things 1000x better, including right this very second. It’s good that he recognized that Mother was wrong (sometimes) but it wasn’t even random about whether he would help – nothing was ever bad enough for you to rate his assistance on topics he wanted to ignore.

I think this is why I can’t easily agree with Ben about how to steal Pete’s money. He seems to think there’s some version where we can make Pete step outside his narc isolation by setting up some sort of interaction with other rich dicks, in the hope that the right “peers” could influence his behavior, but I’m pretty sure that won’t work. That there is no version that’s bad enough to break his superiority because he will get intimidated and withdraw before he ever considers them actual peers. I’m pretty sure you can only do it making him angry – something he’d never allow in a group setting. I still think actual theft is probably easier and more reliable than either of those. He’s too afraid to hire a lawyer to fight about it, even if he noticed, so probably simple fraud would work.

Here’s a thing you should check for at your local school – do they forcibly exclude children without winter gear from participating in school activities. If they do, make them stop. It’s insane to punish²One of the rotation of punishments available at my elementary school was to stand still outside by the wall instead of being allowed to do anything that would keep your heart rate up. Because it was too cold, you see child, for you to possibly be allowed to move around. You might get cold. You should really know better – be better – than this. … Continue reading 9-year-olds for not being dressed correctly. Someone else must be responsible. Punish them if you must but then do /something/ to fix the problem. Same goes for not feeding lunch to poor children. Punish if you feel that helps but you still must fix the actual problem instead of pretending a 9-year-old will fix it for you if they’re punished enough.

I find this is a common pattern in life, where anytime things are bad enough that outside parties should intervene – where even patriarcal standards say that parents should be overruled – they instead say “this is a ‘bad kid'” and choose punishment over help. To some degree that’s also the problem with criminal justice, just with a slightly different group of oppressed people. In any case, next time you see a “bad kid”, please consider if the thing you’re holding them accountable for is something they can actually control, or if you’re just angry that their bad life is spilling over onto you.

Realized that I am not only too restrained in my response to cold intrinsically I also feel inhibited from allowing my need to have a social impact of any kind. And I have to work both ends of problems like that seperately. It feels like one more thing I can’t get done but I should imagine it’s maybe the thing that will finally let me get some of those things done.

I’m back on the queue today but luckily nothing has come in yet. I get to skip going to the office today but still have to call my boss for a meeting where he’ll tell me the same administrative nonsense 4 times – things I already knew from his group announcements – before agreeing we can be done talking. But I’m feeling okay about work in general this week, and I’m going to try to keep that up.

Shanda’s sister left today, which I hope will make it easier for her to feel in control of her life. Sister was super disappointed by the constraints the snow posed and that mood was hard on the household. And Shanda is not quite comfortable being open with sister. It’s better than before but still easy for me to say soemthing that clearly Shanda thinks is secret, or at least secret enough to not talk about for fear other people might have feelings. So I’m sure that’s been hard too – it was hard for me for a long time which is why I am now 100% out of fucks to give about it.

Here’s a thing that Shanda tells me was very reassuring to hear from me. I can’t setup the whole environment and context of this to you in a non-interactive setting but I’ll try to do the punchline justice: It’s okay that things are hard, that you want to change things, that you feel like you don’t know how to make it better. I’m here to help you with those things. Not just the ones that are easy or fast or that don’t affect me directly but specifically the ones that are the hardest and worst and most hurtful. I’ll stick by you, even when it’s tough. I always have and it would take a lot to change that.

ZiB

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Sent from a phone.

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