Wednesday
Skipped my noon meeting today. I don’t want them to get used to me showing up too regularly. It might lead to dependency. That and I was expecting Shanda to be available during the time slot, though she ended up delaying long enough that I could have done both.
Ben is taking the charity idea somewhat seriously. He bounded right in to imagining it as a multi-donor thing, but I’m not sure that’s a good idea. I suspect he’s worried about it not being real* or not doing enough work for it to count as a job. He gets a lot of pressure to ignore his needs and work 40 hours anyway, because that’s what good men are supposed to do. But I know he has a much more fundamental fear of wielding too much power – a fear not dissimilar from the one where I don’t want people to notice my interventions – and running something with significant capital would be very stressful for him. And for me. Plus there’s just a lot less overhead for an org with a $100k gross budget than one with $1M.
I’m not happy with dog classes. Last week alone was super stressful for me. Spending 40 minutes trying to get my dog to stop humping other dogs, and another hour having him be too nervous to participate was not fun. Plus there are a dozen other people and dogs there to annoy me. The first week with Shanda was better for parts but worse when I was managing her and the dog. She’s mostly better but still not really up for working with me. There are only 4 classes left but the number I want to go to feels closer to 0.
One of the people I should think more about this week is A. He didn’t find my alternative communication plan useful, or at least that’s how I’m understanding the silence, so I should do something to get back to the old plan. I’m not sure what that is yet, though I think today’s news [fig 1, 2] is a good place to start.
More generally I need to find a way to get social support for myself even when I can’t independently coordinate it. A lot of my relationships have a dynamic wherein I facilitate most communication and my failure to do so means there isn’t enough, or at least not enough about me. So when I’m having trouble talking there isn’t any talking, or it’s focused on the things I’ve accomplished and not the things that I need. When I do recover there’s also the burden of reconnecting, which means I not only have to get back to typical behavior on my own, but then push past the static friction to get things rolling again.
Part of that is the way I minimize my need at every opportunity. Part of that is the way I insist on helping others before myself regardless of the urgency of my needs. Part of that is the way I imagine my only value in a relationship as a function of utility and therefore reduce my contact when I know I can’t be as useful as imagine I ought to be. Part of that is the way my emotions are unusually subtle when I’m not explicitly sharing. And part of that is that I pick friends**** who like all of those attributes.
Still haven’t had the window fixed. I don’t even have an appointment***. Almost no one will call or write me back and the one who did has a full voicemail box** so we can’t get in touch. I guess I’ll just get used to living outside.
I feel like I can’t – or at least like I don’t want – to fire up a speculative commercial software project while I still have a day job. I’m pretty sure it would eat more time than I want to spare, and even if I had it 97% done I’m not sure it’s much of a shortcut to being able to sell it sustainably. But last time I did such things there were 100 other reasons it was hard and it’s difficult to sort out which parts were related to the business and which were just my life at the time. Maybe I should start by getting a new home automation platform up, to see if I can handle running a decent sized software project at home.
ZiB
*Real in that it’s something other than a scam on Father. But I think that’s the wrong way to frame this. For one thing I don’t think it’s possible to harm Father merely by taking money from him. That’s one reason I want to keep it small – to minimize potential harms. For another I believe the focus should be on the things the money buys and not where it came from. But I can understand the worry that this will just become another dangerous burden that we have to manage to keep other people safe. Just like Father and Mother are.
**This makes no sense to me. For one thing, the limit should be like 10 GB of storage, not 10 messages. For another they should offer to forward them via email or whatever and then delete the original so that storage is your problem and not theirs. But mostly it makes me think that unified messaging outside of telecom control and a computer-aided, geography-aware scheduling system would be super valuable to many businesses, if they could rent it for $25/employee-month.
***I did eventually get one of them to call me back. I now have an appointment for them to come “tomorrow” at no specific time, to get me a quote. I don’t know how long it will take to turn a quote into a piece of glass, but it’s better than thr nothing I was getting before.
****And friends who understand my lack of STDERR output as an indication of proper operation, even though I run with –silent by default.
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Sent from a phone.
