Wabasha Wednesday

Last dog class. Rev won the laying around not doing anything award. He didn’t do as well at the beginning of class with Shanda but she doesn’t have my special skills for staring at toddlers and making them be quiet and still (lest the warden notices us). So he’s now certified to hump dogs under 75 pounds and dogs 75-150 pounds if they carry less than 11 passengers. And I get my Wednesday nights back.

Put the SSH bug* into review today. It took forever to figure out what it was doing but only like an hour to fix. I don’t know if it’s the same fix we’ll see upstream after I report it but but it’s good enough for government work**. I’ve got half an SR for tomorrow and I need to advance my TMA, but I’m getting dangerously close to having a no-work weekend. Which I’m sure means I’ll be assigned 7 SRs and a perf bug tomorrow.

I’m still doing late nights to keep life progressing but I’m getting closer to a sensible schedule. Got day job work done during the day for the first time this week, along with other chores and projects, and I should be actually asleep a good couple hours earlier than yesterday. It’s fried chicken day and cleaning day tomorrow so I have to get up before noon but that’s close to enough sleep and means I should be back home and done working before 4 PM tonight.

My landlord isn’t sure if he wants to pay for the window I replaced for him. I assumed he prefered to own a property with distinct interior and exterior surfaces but apparently he’s more of a Mobius guy. I’ll have to work on him a bit and see if I can get an answer I like more next week. It’s worth $500 so I can at least try.

Chatted with M today about a cool new job you found in art/science curriculum development, and about how I wanted to work in the Exhibits Workshop at the SF Exploratorium. I probably don’t actually want to work 9-5 in a public fishbowl, but building science museum exhibits does sound like a lot of fun. It’s about as close as I can get to establishment education without breaking out in hives and it lets me build cool things for other people. The Pacific Science Center is actually hiring an exhibits supervisor right now – I had to check after chatting about the concept – but it’s not quite the job for me***. And it definitely doesn’t pay as much as what I’m doing now. Maybe when I have my own science museum.

Talking was better today at home. Adjusting schedule to fit the realities of life, and understand the difference between feeling better and feeling good both seemed easier too. So I think we’re moving back toward something sustainable. It’s still sometimes crying about dog toys but the recovery is faster and easier, and that by itself is a huge relief.

Melissa is progressing on her breakdown plan. She’s decided to obsess on a piece of medical news that, while serious, isn’t a change and isn’t even significantly distinct from her other long-standing health problems. Between that, her ongoing refusal to address issues with her roommates, and her (presumably) eminent loss of income, she’s managed to find enough excuses to not manage or even really participate in any aspect of her life, including her own treatment****. It’s hard to tell what’s actually happening with any of those because her storytelling is unreliable at best, but it doesn’t really matter because she will make them problems even if they aren’t yet. But she’s pretty sure if only she can move in with someone who doesn’t even want to identify as her boyfriend it will all work out; Melissa’s commitment to the patriarchy as a solution is sometimes the hardest part to take.

Shanda has been cooking lately, which is something we’ve both been neglecting for the last few years. I took me two days and several attempts to explain that I had no idea what “sides” I might like have with a meal. I kept telling her that I couldn’t say because I 
didn’t know what I liked, and she kept thinking I was having some issue with the terminology (despite us being from the same town and eating together at least occasionally for about two decades). But I’ve never eaten enough like a human to have any reasonable frame of reference.

When I was young I ate everything because food insecurity. When I moved to Iowa I was so depressed that food preferences were irrelevant (and the dorm kitchens closed at 6 PM, so I rarely ate real food anyway). I got further along with food than with color in terms of having preferences, at least eventually, but I was generally bad enough at eating that preparing a meal with more than one component never really occurred to me. And of course mixing things together feels a lot like food scavenging – which is terrible – so having only one component provides a certain kind of security.

It’s always hard for me to tell if I actually like or don’t like a food, particularly if I’m not currently eating it. It’s easy for me to remember being told to like or not like something as part of The Rules. Or having a preference enforced through intentional punishments, like eating baby food because there isn’t any real food and you have to prove to Mother that you’re “really hungry”. Or disliking a food because of specific traumatic experience, like eating spoiled <whatever> because it’s better than a 2nd or 3rd day of no food.

I am super sensitive to sulphur in foods — cooked broccoli makes me unhappy at a distance of 20 yards — and I don’t much like potatoes without some sort of fat. I prefer pork when given an option for protein. And past that I’d have a lot of trouble systematically understanding what I might want to eat. Which is not to say I don’t like food, or don’t have favorites — the duck confit sliders at Loulay, or a butterscotch malt — but there’s no sense to it, and a lot of bad data.

So I guess I get to try foods now. And try to tease out my actual preferences from my crazily trained indifference and misinformation. It has always sounded like too much work to me — I’ll eat anything so why would it matter — but if I step past my resistance to thinking about it’s probably not any more work than 1000 other historically painful things I have trained myself to feel better about. And it would sure be nice be able to have human interactions about food.

ZiB

*If you use OpenSSH’s sshd and care about size-based rekey limits ping me. I can’t talk yet but it I can put you on the list for when I can.

**Bug discovered during Common Criteria certification, which is required for certain types of federal government sales. I’m unclear on how anyone else has been certified while using OpenSSH, other than maybe better luck in a race condition. But I think it’s more likely that no one actually tested.

***I should check to see if there’s an option for project/contract work though. I give them plenty of money to get someone in management there to talk to me.

****Including but not limited to not paying for her health insurance. Since I last whined about this I found about 6 months worth of premiums in a savings account I funded to help pay her 2019 deductible/co-insurance and I am going to use that to pay for her insurance for a little while longer. Though over the past month she’s silently spent about 1/3 of it so it may not last long.

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Sent from a phone.