Listen to the Rain

When I was younger, I was a big fan of Vampire: the Masquerade. I ran a game of it at Penn, for greyselke, jdcohen, spacialk, t3chnomag3, and a couple other people for a year, through the Week of Nightmares and the political chaos as the Ventrue Primogen attempted to overthrow the Prince of Philadelphia. I still have the huge list I made of all the vampires in Philadelphia and their relationships. I even went to a Vampire LARP at schoolpsychnerd's behest, though I never took to it.

I was young, and vampires were monsters. This was a horror game! You were transformed into a terrible creature of the night forced to stalk the living, to drink blood to survive, and ground down under the feet of the elders. What an amazing setting.

Well, that was twenty years ago. Now that I'm older, I can see that Vampire, and Werewolf, and Mage all have the appeal of the young. In Vampire, you play a fledgeling vampire, thrust into a society in which you are at the bottom and all the people older than you have already taken all the power and authority for themselves. You're going to have to fight them and take it yourself. In Werewolf, corporations are literally killing the planet because they're evil, like Captain Planet villains. And in Mage, if you can't accomplish something it's because you didn't believe hard enough. Anything is possible if you have the will and drive to accomplish it.

But no, the real horror game for me now is Changeling. Changeling, which I had no idea what to do with as a kid, which posited faeries hidden in human bodies, trying desperately to keep their dreams alive against the crushing mundanity of the world, knowing that they will inevitably fail and become Undone, the mortal body taking over as the faerie soul sleeps until its next incarnation.

I used to have multiple weekly or biweekly games I played in, even during COVID. Then they dwindled to no weekly games, then only one biweekly game, and now...nothing. No physical dice have been rolled in my house in years. I look at my bookshelves full of RPGs and see not promise and a surfeit of ideas but the falling grains of an hourglass as I'm forced to admit that many, perhaps most, of the games I've bought will never be played and some of them may never even be read. Some of them I've owned for close to a decade and haven't even opened. There is simply not enough time.

And that's the message of Changeling, and of life. There's not enough time to accomplish all that you want to do, or even a portion of what you want to do. I used to read 80 books a year and my to-read list still never got any shorter. There are more good video games coming out now than I would ever have time to play even if I were a shut-in NEET, much less as a family man. I lived in Japan for years and did not get to go to all the places I wanted to in the Chūgoku region, much less Japan, much less East Asia. I've been playing Hollow Knight for six months because I keep using the time I could be playing it to work on my Cataclysm mod. You have to pick and choose, and the doors you open mean that, by necessity, other doors close. Even by staying up to write this, I've closed the door on getting a full eight hours of sleep.

The horror of Changeling is not that you will die--though of course, you will--but that life will grind you down and narrow your vision and crush your dreams to the point that the you of twenty years ago would avert their eyes in disgust, or simply would not recognize you, if they had to see the you now.

Probably going to stay up a bit longer.

Insomnia and waking up before dawn--not a good combination.

Today is תענית בכורות ta’anit beḥorot, the Fast of the Firstborn, in commemoration of the innocents who died in Egypt as part of G-d's work to free the Children of Israel. It's a reminder that even in a righteous war, sometimes bystanders suffer, and that freedom from oppression almost always comes with a cost in blood. The story mentions that "G-d hardened Pharaoh's heart" but people often forget that this happens after Pharaoh hardens his own heart multiple times, and when Pharaoh pursued them to the Sea of Reeds, all G-d did was tip Pharaoh over into vengeance since he had already changed his mind about having let the Children of Israel go (Exodus 14:5). And in modern times, it takes no divine prodding for oppressive structures to remain in place. The message of the plagues is that the struggle against oppression is worth fighting, even if it leads to blood, and the message of ta’anit beḥorot is that those who die in the fight should be remembered.

I'm definitely glad that I'm hosting Second Seder this year, not first, and don't have to cook today.

The house is clean! As the prayer goes, may any ḥametz that remains in my house be as the dust of the earth, but hopefully there isn't much because I vacuumed multiple times, put the oven and toaster oven on self-cleaning, washed the counters and tables with boiling water, scrubbed the floor...and yet, I'm sure Laila found some way to secrete some ḥametz somewhere because babies are chaos. I remember seeing a tweet from an archeologist who talked about how they have a specific word for the layer of garbage that often exists in the corners of houses and wondering how our ancestors could ever have let things get so bad, and then it ended with "Now I have a toddler and now I understand." Laila's very cute but she certainly does work against any kind of schedule.

Tonight we're going to First Seder at britshlez's and then tomorrow I'm spending most of the day cooking and then hosting Second Seder. The last time I hosted there were fifteen people in attendance. There won't be nearly as many people this time, but hopefully it will be just as lovely.

Alright, time to get ready for work.

That time has come again!

I'm currently sitting with Laila on my lap, wrapped in a blanket and sound asleep as I write this. She's still refusing to fall asleep without direct contact with one of us--it turns out that humans needs to be taught how to make themselves fall asleep--and we haven't accomplished that yet, so one of us always needs to be up so we can hold her to let her fall asleep. The pediatrician that sashagee went to on Tuesday recommended just plopping her in the bed and letting her cry, and while it's true that we shouldn't come running every single time she makes a noise since learning to self-soothe is a vital human skill, that doesn't mean that a week-old-baby needs to be abandoned to learn that life is cruel. We'll be tired for a bit and try to gradually teach Laila that her bassinet is not a cold place where she's all alone and that mommy and daddy are right there with her. But until then, well, I slept four hours last night and sashagee is asleep right now. Hence my insomnia icon--I think it's never been more appropriate.

( Dinner )

That's it for this post--I made time for the farmer's market but it's hard to have time for much else. sashagee's family came to visit so I met her grandmother and mother finally, and they gave us a four-hour nap on Sunday which was probably the greatest gift they could have given us. Her parents are coming again this weekend, and then my parents next weekend. I have a feeling that we'll be seeing a lot more of both in the future, because this is the first grandchild for both sides and she's probably going to be spoiled rotten. There are worse fates.

With that title I really should have a Goblin Slayer icon to go with this post. Heavy metal intensifies.

I realized yesterday that, since I had pneumonia as a high school student that left me with damaged lungs to the point where for a decade-and-a-half, I'd get a horrible wracking cough every winter for five to seven weeks, I might be at higher risk from serious complications from coronavirus than I thought. I haven't gotten that cough for several years now, but I don't know what, if anything, that says about my lungs and how much I've actually healed. It's possible that I'd be one of the asymptomatic carriers since I'm otherwise in excellent health, and it's possible that I'd have to be put on a ventilator. I have no idea, so it's pretty good that I can work from home and only have to go out for food like some kind of burrowing animal. Yesterday I went to the grocery store and it was the first time I had left the house since Saturday.

Today we're switching over from the old new database to the new new database. I thought this would impact my work, but since we're working from the old database since the old new database is a trash fire, it doesn't. I just need to avoid the old new database so its info can be migrated to the new new database, and if this sounds ridiculous and stupid, let me tell you about how actually dealing with them is! The new new database has a terrible UX--in the old database I can work entirely with key commands, in the new new database I have to click through five pages to change one record--but the old new database wouldn't even start a search if you hit Enter, you had to manually click the Search button until I wrote a script to click the button when you pressed Enter.

So what I'm saying is that the bar for "better" is pretty low here.

I've gone to sleep early the past two nights and woken up early in the morning both of those days. I don't think this means anything other than this is an extremely stressful time. There was a tweet I saw that went:
...and that's really the heart of it, isn't it? Trying to pretend like this is a nice jaunt, or a chance to do that thing you've been putting off for a while, or learn a new skill, ignore the societal level of fear. We built our whole society around the idea that pandemics were a solved problem, and we were wrong.

At least the people learning a new skill aren't spending all their time online belittling and mocking people for daring to briefly step outside on a nice day, though.

A long while ago I wrote a blog post about the idea of fun boredom, about doing dull repetitive tasks deliberately because the monotony is part of the appeal. One obvious example would be people watching a TV series or movie they've already seen a dozen times and know every single line of, and another would be playing old JRPGs that require a lot of grinding, which is my own version of it. I recently went back to my iOS game of the original Final Fantasy that I've been playing on and off for years only to find that an update had erased my save and iCloud backup somehow hadn't worked. That let me implement something I was already considering for a while, but hadn't yet done because I was almost at the end of the iOS game--switching to the original NES version. And since I'm playing in Japanese, switching to the Famicom version.

There are a lot of differences between the modern iOS version and the Famicom version, but I can summarize them all as "Famicom requires way more grinding." So that's what I've been doing, just walking back and forth in a forest and killing goblins, then killing gigas worms (Eng: creeps), then killing ogres, and occasionally hitting the game milestones. It's soothing, to see the numbers go up on my little chibi characters, to watch the burst of pixels when the black mage casts a spell, to listen to the chiptune themes. While the graphics of the iOS version are great, much better than the mobile abominations of Final Fantasy V and Final Fantasy VI, the first version of the game I ever played was in my basement as a kid, in front of the TV on an NES, so the 8-bit version of Final Fantasy will always be my favorite. And in this time of uncertainty, with plague all around, playing a game where I know the plot, I know all the tricks, I know exactly what I need to do and I can turn off my brain and click through the fight command and buy up those potions to delve into the dungeons...that's comforting. It's a bit of normality that I can control, assuming your definition of normality involves goblins in the forest.

I have thought about resubscribing to WoW, or starting FFXIV, but I think the MMO part of my life is over. MMOs are about friends who also play them, and I can't rebuild the old Pig and Whistle community from nothing.

And now, back to work. Shabbat is tonight, which is the one part of the week that still feels different because I don't check social media then. It's actually still restful, and right now, I'll take all of that feeling I can get.

Normally I'd have a bunch of stuff to talk about over the last week...but I was on and off sick! I called in on Tuesday, did things on Wednesday, then did nothing on Thursday and Friday and cancelled my plans on Saturday because I wasn't sure how I would feel, which is why I don't have a report for the Anime Chicago winter sampler this season because I didn't go. It could be a lot worse, though--my sister wanderluster_kp officially has the flu and is home sick, whereas I just was under the weather. As the saying goes:

If you think you have a cold, you have the sniffles
If you think you have the flu, you have a cold
If you think you're dying, you have the flu
If dying sounds like a great idea, go to the hospital

But I feel good now.

I mean, other than that I could barely sleep last night. I spent hours trying to fall asleep and only finally managed it around 4 a.m., so I got roughly two and a half hours of sleep. It's fine.

On Wednesday, feeling well, I accepted worldbshiny's invitation to go to Vosges in Lincoln Park for an all chocolate dinner to celebrate good news that I'm not sure is public yet. We got choco drinks--mine was 100% cacao and was delicious--with chocolate bars, worldbshiny bought a white chocolate and oat milk drink, and I bought some extra truffles that we had right before we left. Her original idea was to get the cacao elixirs, but they're designed more to be taken home, so we settled on other products. I was only able to stay for about 45 minutes, but it was lovely to be eating dinner again with worldbshiny and lisekatevans and meowtima!

Also, when I went on to Mishkan's Wednesday meditation--the message this time was on Parashat Vaera, where G-d hardens Pharaoh's heart, and about how the words are various derivatives of the root חזק chazak, "strong, powerful," like in Exodus 14:4, וחזקתי v'chizzakti, "And he strengthened," so that sometimes standing up for yourself is the right thing to do and sometimes it seems right but it's actually cruel--everyone there was incredibly jealous of choco dinner.

Thursday and Friday, I did nothing except start playing Stellaris. Due to sickness, my long mostly-hiatus from video games is over and the Serene Kingdom of Senalata will rule the galaxy!

Saturday I also played Stellaris, but around midafternoon I was getting antsy and I started texting around. worldbshiny was going to see a show, but said we should get together soon. britshlez was free, though, so I met her and her boyfriend at O'Shaughnessy's in Ravenswood and we had a couple drinks. We got into a good old-fashioned bar debate about animal rights! My position was that we can't rule that animals are equal to humans because animals are unable to uphold human responsibilities, and their position was that for most of human existence animals weren't seen as separate and beneath humans the way they are now. We agreed that meat is delicious but modern civilization eats too much of it, though. I thought about that as I had vegetarian food for the entire weekend.

Me: "Almost all of the meat I eat is chicken."
britshlez: "They used to be dinosaurs."
Me: "I know! It's vengeance. Their ancestors ate our ancestors, and now I return the favor."
britshlez: "Ancestors?"
Me: "Well, you know, our long-distant species ancestors. Millions of years ago."

On Sunday I was going to go shopping in Andersonville and look around, but I delayed playing Stellaris for too long and when thosesocks texted me and asked me if I wanted to hang out. I knew she had something she wanted help with hanging, so I asked if I could get some shopping done, and I went to the Middle Eastern Grocery Store and bought some food, dropped off an extremely overdue library book, and then went to thosesocks's apartment. We talked for a while, about some stuff that had happened at her church that day and about tabletop RPGs, and then she asked me if I could help her hang fairy lights in her living room, going from the arch to the kitchen across to the couch and back to the closet. Standing on a chair I had a pretty good reach to the ceiling, so we drilled holes in the ceiling and screwed hooks in them and then moved the lights around until thosesocks was happy with them. She was right--her apartment was really cozy with her plant lights by the window and the fairy lights strung overhead. It makes me want to see if I can get some of those flame bulbs to emulate a fire. Flicking light is incredibly comforting to me.

Me: "You call me excessively tall, but when you need someone to hang something for you."
thosesocks: "Did I say that...?"
Me: "I am quoting you."

I feel a bit out of it today due to lack of sleep, but I had a lovely weekend. Hopefully my week again takes more from my weekend and not my week.

Hour three of trying to fall asleep.

After two weeks off, my sleep schedule reset to the truest expression of my being. I got tired and fell asleep around 1:30 a.m. and I’d stay asleep for 8-9 hours pretty consistently. But tomorrow I have to get up at 6:30 a.m. to get to work on time, and barring jet lag or sickness or staying up through the previous night, I have never in my life been tired at 11 p.m. So now I’m trying to listen to white noise so I can fall asleep and it’s pretty much pointless so far.

Back to trying, though!

I did not sleep well last night at all. I picked up just a little bit of con crud from CONvergence, the kind that doesn't bother me when I'm awake but which kicks into high gear when I lie down and get ready to sleep. That's meant that I haven't gotten a lot of sleep lately, but it was particularly bad last night. I put on a Headspace sleep meditation, all of which are forty-five minutes long, and either I woke up right after it ended or I lay in bed trying to fall asleep after it ran out, because I distinctly remember being surprised by the sudden silence. And I woke up again during the night. Sigh.

( My weekend )

Last night was extra tiring because I had serious insomnia mixed with restlessness that made it very hard to lie still. I eventually managed to fall asleep after putting on a meditation podcast and focusing on my breathing only to have horrible nightmares basically all night, so here I am at work falling asleep. Sigh.

Last Saturday was a Lunar New Year day. There was a parade on Argyle Street that I went to--another thing that's been going on for years and this is the first time I've been--that was neat, albeit shorter than I expected. The big parade was on Sunday in Chinatown, but that's much further from my apartment and I wanted Sunday to recover. The parade was mostly floats from local or city organizations like the Argyle Night Market, the Chinese Consulate, the CTA, and the Hip Sing Association. There were two groups of dragon dancers and one group of musicians, but the parade wasn't very long. After less than ten minutes everything had gone by as I stood on the corner of Broadway and Ainslie, and then I got a mess of macarons at t'oui across the street. My picture of macarons got twice the Instagram likes of my pictures of the parade, because food.

Saturday night I went to meowtima's Lunar New Year dumpling party! I got complimented on my outfit and had a Frenchman swooning over my voice within ten minutes of walking in, so of course I had a good time, but a lot of it was also due to meowtima's cooking. There were a ton of pork and veggie dumplings, and the veggie dumplings were filled with a delicious mushroom medley. Also, fang.the.tall made a Malaysian yee sang, and while I missed the tossing I got to eat the salad. And of course, as soon as I mentioned that duck fat was fine but pork was not (the pork dumplings were fried in duck fat), I got into a discussion about Jewish dietary laws. These things just happen.

A woman also asked for my number and then...asked for my Twitch profile? I'm genuinely unsure if this is a kids-these-days moment or a unique incident.

Yesterday I briefly thought about going to the parade down in Chinatown, but instead I stayed inside, played Dragon Age: Origins, and did my taxes. I realize that a lot of people are getting smaller or no refunds this year due to deliberate deceit by the current regime, and because of that it feels extra unpleasant that I got a huge refund due to the tax law changes from 2017 mixed with my life circumstances. Apparently there's a weird change to taxes on dividends that saved me $600? Thanks, I guess. Too bad the rest of that bill is going to bankrupt the country.

Alright, back to work and trying to stay awake.

Been a while since I made an insomnia post.

I'm not tired at all, though my eyes are a bit itchy. I think it's because I had two horrific nightmares last night. One bog-standard suddenly-late-to-work one, and one more in my usual vein where I was in the middle of an invasion of alien body snatchers that turned people into zombies. I woke up from the first one at 3:30 a.m. and managed to get back to sleep only to wake up from the second one at 8:30 after going to bed at 1:30. So now I'm lying in bed and just thinking about nightmares.

I even took extra care to wind down. I played a bit of Breath of the Wild, then I read, then I spent an hour transcribing Wild Man Blues, the Cowboy Bebop light novel that never got an official or even fan-translated US release that I want to translate. Then I lay in bed, looked at soft forest imagery on tumblr while listening to dungeon synth (MURGRIND's Inheritor of the Forest Throne) with my devices all at below-minimum brightness thanks to the zoom accessibility hack, and then tried to sleep. No luck, I'm still wide awake.

Maybe I'll turn on my Rain Rain Chiyoda mix--rainfall, the sound of water flowing through the stone gutters, and frogs croaking in the rice fields. That usually helps if nothing else does.

Hopefully you're all having sweet dreams right now. お休みなさい。(( _ _ ))..zzzZZ

It took me an hour and a half to fall asleep last night and then I had horrible dreams for most of the night, but it did lead me to empirical proof that sometimes movie cliches are real. In my dream I was exploring a run-down mansion or house, by myself, and at some point I went upstairs and saw someone else. Being a dream, I went over to talk to him and he turned around and had a fleshless skull for a face, much like the strange woman from the NES game Uninvited. He said something spooky, I screamed...and apparently screamed in real life as well, loud enough to wake up both schoolpsychnerd and myself. Fortunately, she rolled over and went back to sleep, though it took me a while to fall back asleep and then I woke up before my alarm.

I did not suddenly start up in bed with a gasp, though I have done that when I lived in Ireland, when I dreamed about a zombie cat trying to tear off my face. Eventually I will combine these two stereotypical incidents and have a real picture-perfect horror movie waking up moment.

Part of the reason I had such a hard time getting to sleep is that I was worried something would go wrong at work today. So far, nothing has, and I even got all of my vacation I need to take before the end of the year approved. Hopefully the day remains uneventful!

schoolpsychnerd doesn't like the dark. I do. That's the way of it. Left up to myself, I leave most if not all the lights in the apartment out, since the light filtering in from the alley outside through what few openings are left in the curtains we have up is enough for me to see by. Even at night, I usually don't bother to turn on the lights when I get up and move around. The apartment layout doesn't change, after all, and my night vision is pretty good. But sometimes, when I come home, the curtains are open and all the lights are on as schoolpsychnerd soaks up the light.

The last couple nights, I've been reading a Let's Play of a Japanese RPG Maker game called Corpse Party. You can probably tell what kind of game it is from the title, and even though the links to the music and sound had vanished into the internet ether--sadly, since they're the highlight--I still found it creepy enough that before I went to sleep last night, I left the living room light on.

It would have made more sense when we lived in Japan, since we basically lived in a J-Horror house. We literally had an abandoned house right next to ours, plus another abandoned compound just down the street. We had steep stairs with no railing that a spirit could easily have pushed us to our deaths down. But here, where three quarters of the apartment is always visible from any other point in it?

Well, it's the dark. schoolpsychnerd was worried that I would think less of her when she told me that she didn't like the dark, but I don't. The dark is scary! And who knows what could be out there. I can tell myself whatever I want, but my instincts are the instincts of a savannah-dwelling ape who stayed with the group or huddled by the fire and lived, while those who knew there was nothing out there were eaten by lions. So it took me a long time to fall asleep, and while I didn't have nightmares that I remember, I woke up an hour and a half before my alarm.

Maybe it's also that the game takes place in a school. I taught in a Japanese school, and I've been in other schools. They're all laid out pretty similarly, so it was easy for me to convert the minimal RPG Maker graphics in my mind into what a decayed, rotting school would actually look like. Maybe more effective than if the graphics had been more realistic.

Usually I'm fine in the dark, but it doesn't take much.

I almost slept through the night! Yesterday I was almost completely wiped out from about noon on, to the point that it felt like it did during the dark times in Japan when my sleep schedule was completely off-kilter. Now I feel okay after sleeping from 10:30 p.m. to 6 a.m., with a brief bathroom break around 2:30. schoolpsychnerd is not quite so lucky, but at least is sleeping better now than she did last night. And she gets two weeks to recover before she has to go to work, too.

Going there was just being tired in the evening and going to bed early but not actually having disrupted sleep. Not the case coming back. I've always found going west easier than going east.

I'm also readjusting to a non-traveling diet. My meals in Japan were a lot more bread- and rice-based than my meals here, because that's what's available to travelers. That and pickles. I'm pretty sure the 2% body weight I lost in the few days since I got back is just my body purging itself of excess pickle salt. The first day I was back, even my usual miso soup and pickles at breakfast tasted a bit off to me, which was probably my body telling me that enough was quite enough, thank you. Today it tasted lovely again, so maybe drinking all those pots of tea helped.

If you're curious, jetlag in Japanese is 時差惚け (jisaboke, "Time difference stupidity"). Perfect.

Or am I? Do multiple places count as home? I know I had a tendency to use "home" to interchangeably refer to our house in Chiyoda and to Chicago, depending on the exact circumstances of the conversation. Home for different reasons, I guess.

I've had few moments of serious culture shock, but there have been a lot of little things. The way money looks. The trains into and out of Chicago (once every 2 hours? Seriously?). Women's fashion. People having different hair colors. And then, it's hard to tell how much is culture shock and how much is just the standard malaise you get when you move away from a place you've lived a while, leaving your friends and the places you love behind. It hasn't been as difficult to adjust, but the fact that I speak the language fluently here is probably a lot of the reason for that.

Waiting on news on an apartment. If we're turned down, it's back into the city to look again.