Listen to the Rain

Last night I settled down at my computer to play Stellaris and as it was booting up, worldbshiny texted me to ask me if I wanted to join her at a fundraiser for the Factory Theatre up near Howard. In perhaps an unsurprising turn of events nowadays and the reason I tagged this post "introversion" as an opposite-day thing, I was eager to get out of the house and I accepted, so I closed down Stellaris after playing for maybe ten minutes and left. Twenty-five minutes door to door, and I opened the door on the bar to a wall of sound--karaoke was occurring and I could see why worldbshiny had said she probably wouldn't stay for very long.

Due to said karaoke, we sat at a table at the other end of the bar. worldbshiny ordered a calzone and then asked me to help eat it when it came, since she had been expecting something the size of an empanada and she got something the size of a pizza. We ate, she occasionally introduced me to people as "one of my favorite people to go out to eat or on adventures with" (), and we talked about karaoke, our weeks, our terrible roommates:

Me: "I was going to say I'd never had a terrible roommate, but, uh." 😶
worldbshiny: 😬
Me: 😅
worldbshiny: 😵
Me: 😓

...and theatre, including her brief career in film where she has two credits--one as "ferret wrangler" and one as "bikini-wearing corn thrower." The former was a technical role, where she had to chase down the ferret the villain villainously stroked and calm it between scenes so it'd be ready to be held again.

I don't know whether the corn she was throwing in the latter was on the cob, or kernels.

We stayed for an hour--sadly, I missed the chance to sing along with "I'll Make a Man Out of You" at karaoke because I was too busy talking to worldbshiny--and then at her suggestion, we left. She invited me along to come buy tea wit her at Whole Foods, and since it was the same Whole Foods I shop at, I invited her back to my place for tea, but she was frazzled due to an hour in an extremely loud place and just wanted to go home to bed, so we both went home.

I invited her to a Tu B'Shevat Seder next week, but since she won't find out her rehearsal schedule for next week until tonight, she can't commit to going until then. Hopefully she can make it.

For once I don't have much to talk about.

Friday I stayed in, lit the Shabbat candles, and just relaxed and went to bed early. Saturday I did mostly the same. I beat Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night pretty early on, wrote the review, and then went over to lisekatevans's place for a quiet cocktail party involving peanut curry syrup. The drinks were a somewhat-offputting shade of yellow, but tasted pretty good. There were two other events I didn't attend to go to that, the Neo 40th Reunion and the monthly Van Paugam performance at Murasaki, but it's probably for the best I didn't go to either, because I stalled out at like 11 p.m. and went home and went straight to bed. Even though cillic, heather.eisele, stephen_poon, and abby_the_hairapist were all going to be at Neo...

Today I've mostly done chores--put more batteries in the smoke detectors, dropped off some library books, made lunch for the week, that sort of thing.

Friday and Saturday it was horrifically hot (at least until the torrential fifteen-minute rainstorm on Saturday), and today I was mostly indoors other than when I went out to drop off the library books. And now the day is almost done. Well, next weekend I have a ton of stuff planned, so I'll enjoy it while I can.

It took me years to realize that part of The Hosting of the Sidhe was about a redhead and not someone whose hair was literally on fire, though I suppose you can never tell with the Fair Folk.

My iPad seems pretty decisively broken. It started acting like it had updated to iOS 12.2, but when I plugged into my computer iTunes started downloading the 12.2 update, and then said the iPad wasn't capable of syncin. When I put it in recovery mode it said the iPad could not be recovered and gave me an error 35, which indicates a hardware problem. It's not a problem with the computer or the cable because my phone connected and synced just fine. That leaves the iPad, so I'm taking it in to the Apple Store today. Hopefully they'll fix it, and if not, I guess I'll be getting a new iPad. At least I have the money.

I'm annoyed about it, but that's all. Something like that would have caused panic or a huge anxiety spike even a year ago, but now I'm just determined to fix it. That's progress.

I went to therapy yesterday after dinner at Furious Spoon with lisekatevans to celebrate National Ramen Day, and we talked a bit about my hair, I think because I mentioned it being tangled. My therapist asked if I grew my hair out as a way of deliberately blurring gender lines, and I said no. My conception of gender is fluid, but not in that specific way. As I phrased it to her:

I am a man. Everything I do is masculine.

...but I did mention that literally as long as I could remember, ever since I was a young boy, I've always wanted long hair. I felt best right before my parents took me into the barber to get a haircut, and I always hated going to the barber. It's what led to kind of unhealthy hair--for a long time I'd only get a haircut once a year, and it's only recently that I've started going in for maintenance cuts every 3-4 months.

The conversation continued to how I hate interrupting people in conversations, and how I tend to have a hard time talking to people unprompted, and tend to allow other people to strike up a connection with me, and she suggested maybe my appearance leads to that. I have a lot of experiences that are alien to most men, like people telling me I'm pretty, or touching my hair, or catcalling me, or plopping down next to me and giving me their numbers, and having such an idiosyncratic (as I phrased it) appearance leads to that. Most men aren't over six feet tall, very thin, with waist-length wavy red hair, and dressed all in form-fitting black clothes, but that tends to be what I wear when I go out. And it has worked for me so far. I made all my friends at university because gurami abruptly sat across from me at lunch and introduced himself, saying that he was in three of my classes, and through him I met everyone else.

I remember one time at Dracula's Ball, there was a man with a stuffed animal plush on his shoulder. t3chnomag3 and greyselke went up to talk to him and it turned out he wore it because he was very shy and it got people to come up and talk to him, so it definitely worked out for him.

But as my therapist pointed out, this leaves me at the mercy of other people. And it's worked out for me so far, and may work out in the future, but there's no guarantee of that. It would be better to have the tools to make connections myself so that I can use them if I want rather than hoping for fate to work out. That's easier said than done, obviously, but one thing my therapist keeps bringing up and which I agree with her wholeheartedly is that flexibility is just better overall. It's better to be able to adapt to a wide variety of situations, to not require rigid routines or very specific forms of interaction, so that I'm not lost or out of place outside of those circumstances.

She also brought up that my complete hatred of interrupting people makes it harder for me to make an impression in group settings, because I usually sit in silence unless there's an obvious pause where I can speak, and that lack of impression means it's harder to carry on an interaction into a one-on-one conversation. She's right about that, too, but I'm less sure how to feel comfortable with inserting myself into an existing conversation. I hate being interrupted and I'm very conscious of how much other people hate being talked over too. Can I find a balance? Maybe? I can try.

Summary: I have a very different personal experience than average, and it's meant I haven't had to develop the social skills that some people do. And those skills would be useful for me to have, so I should think about working on them.

"I aspire to be retired!"
-John Siracusa, Accidental Tech Podcast

This is inspired by me asking my father, who just turned 65 late last year, if he was planning on retiring any time soon. He scoffed and said he would stay at the company as long as they'd have him because otherwise he wouldn't know what to do with himself, and my mother agreed. I can see it. He's one of those people who always has a project going on in the backyard, gardening or redoing some aspect of the architecture. The last couple times we visited I helped him raise the one-step stoop out in the backyard because it was settling. He'd go stir-crazy without something to take up most of his time.

I used to think that it wasn't true of me, that if I won the lottery or otherwise had enough money to not need to work I'd quit my job in an instant, but thinking about it more I'm not so sure. After Suzugamine decided not to continue its contract with Lang in Japan and my own contract with Lang wasn't renewed, I couldn't find another job. The local schools in Chiyoda had all already found people because the school year had begun and traveling into the city to get to Suzugamine had resulted in a two-hour commute each way and was extremely stressful for both schoolpsychnerd and me. Eventually, schoolpsychnerd sat down with me and we talked about it, and she told me to consider it a vacation. When we moved back to America I'd get a job and she'd go to school and eventually, that's what happened. In the meantime, I had a year and eight months of not working.

It seems like it'd be exactly what I wanted out of life, since schoolpsychnerd's income was enough to live comfortably on, I could play a lot of video games, and we were living in Japan. But I actually think it was really bad for me. My response to stress is generally isolation, to withdraw into myself and avoid too much contact with other people, and that's pretty quickly what I did. My sleep was horribly disrupted, and I'd repeatedly stay up for thirty-plus hours, sleep ten hours, and repeat in a cycle that left me often awake all night while schoolpsychnerd was asleep and asleep when she was at work. Staying in and playing video games meant I didn't get as much Japanese practice as I could, so while I can read well enough, my speaking still lags behind. And although we had the most friends and were the most socially active that last year we lived in Hiroshima, I spent the overwhelming majority of my time alone.

I've been more isolated than usual in the last year or so and I think it's affecting me the same way. I go to work, sit in front of my computer, and rarely if ever talk to anyone, and most of the time I like it that way. But I'm not sure it's actually good for me, in much the same way that eating only cookies is not healthy over the long term even if they taste really good at the time. Without work to get me out of the house I'd spend days indoors at a stretch. That's what I did over winter break. I even had a brief conversation with a stranger (sort of--she knew schoolpsychnerd) on the L today and it was nice! That's astonishing compared to me a year ago.

I mean, I don't like working qua working. But I'd need to find something to do that wasn't just playing video games all the time.

Thursday we had xoDrVenture over to watch Revolutionary Girl Utena, and then after she left I got a bit overwhelmed by my upcoming schedule and the fact that the pants I ordered arrived and didn't fit, and I ended up lying down in a dark room for fifteen minutes while schoolpsychnerd did some work in the kitchen.

The next day I sent back the pants and the replacements are in the mail, and then I got home from work, devoured dinner, and immediately turned around and headed out to Call of Cthulhu, which you can read about here. Then we came back home and went to bed.

Saturday was LARP and shopping day, taking up a large portion of the afternoon and all of the evening, but also the day where I received an email from my father with the subject "$" and then checked my bank and noticed a pending transaction for a substantial sum of money. Enough to pay for our upcoming trip to Japan multiple times over. When we called my mother for Mother's Day the next day and asked about it, their reasoning was basically that they're not getting any younger and who knows what might happen. So if you wonder why I'm all #doom all the time, well...

Sunday was the aforementioned phone call and the Beach Party of Hope, scheduled in February. Fortunately the weather cooperated, but those again took up a big chunk of the day. We also wrote a letter to Kaminaka-san, one of our old students from Chiyoda, since we're planning to visit Chiyoda on our upcoming trip to Japan and wanted to let him know! That took a bit of time mostly because I had to hand-write Japanese, which I'm not very good at and which always makes me nervous.

Monday was session six of Warlords of the Mushroom Kingdom, which i haven't written about yet because over half of it was Small-time Peddlers of the Mushroom Kingdom, so I'll do a combined six + seven post next week and edit in a link here when it's written.

Tuesday was Japanese class again, which actually went pretty well. 世界の中心で愛を叫ぶ is getting better now that they're getting into more characterization, and at least with the most recent chapter, I went into class thinking I had a lot of trouble with the reading and it turned out that I actually understood almost all of it. Aya-sensei mentioned that it's easy to get caught up in a couple small things you don't understand and assume it means that you don't understand the larger picture and that's simply not the case, and that's definitely true. I think at this point I'd keep reading the book even if I didn't have class anymore.

Tonight, I have nothing scheduled and I'm going to play Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and watch Aria with schoolpsychnerd, and the only thing I have scheduled that is of any importance is that we're going to write another card to one of our students in Japan. And this Friday we're going out to eat at Travelle and then I don't have anything scheduled for the rest of the weekend. Other than beating Symphony of the Night and finishing up my Ender-kun costume for ACEN. Just need to do the grass block!

Almost a third of the way through to a century, and so far my plan to live forever is going splendidly. Also, when I woke up the weather was cloudy and cool, my favorite weather anywhere. That's the upside. The downside is that I've felt nauseous since I woke up for no obvious reason.

I don't have any kind of major celebration planned. schoolpsychnerd and I might go to Jin Ju tonight, if it's open and if my stomach ever decides to settle down. I was originally thinking about having a party, but I really wanted a weekend where we didn't have to do anything and I could just relax. I have WFRP on alternate Mondays, Japanese tutoring every Tuesday, book group most Wednesdays (and schoolpsychnerd is gone much of that evening too), Fridays and Saturdays are often taken up with the socializing, and Sundays are sometimes quiet but sometimes not. Maybe I'll still do something next week, but probably not.

I've been in a questionable mood all day. It might just be being stuck in my bubble:


...but honestly what often happens is that if someone does talk to me, my spines go up, I'll respond tersely in the hope that they'll get tired of talking and go away. I'm amazed that schoolpsychnerd puts up with me, frankly.

But even then, right now is the most sociable I've ever been in my life, with the possible exception of university. And you really can't compare a time when you live five or ten minutes' walk from all your friends with any other time in your life. So obviously I have some kind of good qualities that convinces people to reach past the spines. Or maybe they just look sharper from the inside.

(I really wanted to put a cute hedgehog emoji here, but I can't find a good one. )

Happy birthday to me!

Let's talk about the last year!

I guess the biggest change from the perspective of this blog is that I started actually posting here again. I got inspired by RPGs--as is often the case, I admit--and started my Dungeons & Design series, and I think it was mostly the fact of posting those that got me into the habit of posting about other subjects. There are other factors too, like how I have enough down time here and there at work that I can write posts in notepad, send them home, and then post them. I also stopped friend-locking everything and started defaulting to public posts, even when they're about my life. It's essentially security through apathy--I can see how many people visit my blog, and on an average day it's a couple dozen. I post all these updates to Facebook and Twitter and the truth is that most people don't care. That may be a little sad, but it certainly tells me that the excessive care I was taking about talking about anything remotely personal is unwarranted. Whatever I say will mostly just get lost in the flow of the internet anyway, unless people are specifically looking to read it.

I was hoping that we'd be paid back by at least one of the people who owed us money this year, but it didn't happen. Aggressively didn't happen, in the case of the Japanese Pension Office. Or perhaps passive-aggressively? Regardless, it led to some tight moments at times, especially during the summer, though I do admit that some of that is because I refuse to touch the principal. Now that schoolpsychnerd has a steady paycheck from her internship everything is okay, though I admit my grasping miserliness does mean I'm less happy with our finances that their absolute quality should lead me to be, but overall it's been on an upward trend. And maybe someone will actually pay us this year. A man can dream.

Work continues much the same as it has been. I had my annual review and did better than I did last year, and my job's bureaucracy and policies means that I'll get an automatic raise and a yearly bonus commensurate with my performance. It's theoretically possible that we won't get the bonus, since the amount and whether it occurs at all is based on the AMA's overall performance during the year, but I haven't heard of anything that would indicate that it's not coming. Even if it doesn't, I'll still get the raise. The benefits of working for a non-profit with no shareholders!

In terms of personal improvement, I took up programming! I originally thought about doing it back in May and was given a lot of resources, and later took a Coursera course that I wrote all about. I've even seen found an implementation of Python for the iPad, and since I have my iPad with me all the time at work, I can get that and then have time to bash my head against programs at work as well as at home! Indeed, during my interview for the job I was asked if I knew anything about HTML or programming and I had to say that I did not, so if I can actually learn programming to a useful level I can hopefully get a promotion. The end project was an implementation of Asteroids, and I'd love to do a lot more to work on it than I had to do for the class to keep my hand in, but what I did accomplish is reasonably impressive, I think.

Also, studied Japanese, but on that subject I'm less confident. I maintained my ability, and that's about it.

Last year, I told myself that if I maintained the weight I had reached in August (~77 kg) for a whole year, I'd go get my wedding ring resized because it's rather large now and I'm kind of worried that it will slip off at some point. Well...I did maintain my weight, but I didn't actually get the ring resized--see the above-mentioned grasping miserliness. I also linked up my new iPhone's M7 chip with LoseIt and started tracking my steps and apparently my average number of steps per day is...5,218. Out of the 10K that's recommended. Exercise is healthy basically no matter what, and getting that number up is something I'd like to improve on in the future, but so far I'm doing pretty well on that front.

I made much more of an effort to be social in 2013. In 2012, I think I had the tendency to hermit a lot more, turning down people's invitations and not really inviting anyone over to schoolpsychnerd and my apartment. I'm not sure what exactly it was. It might have been some remaining difficulty with adjusting to the pace of social life in America vs. what it had been like in Japan, maybe some Anxiety Cat--there's a really old one that I thought fit me really well that said something like "too nervous to talk to people, come off as arrogant or standoffish"--maybe just my typical introverted personality, but this year I tried to avoid falling into the trap of staying home all the time. I like to think I succeeded, or at least reasonably well. And it turns out that traveling out to other places isn't really that bad, even on a work night. I tend to apply the maxim "past performance is no indication of future results" to social events if I'm not careful, in the sense that sure I had fun the last time I went to a party, and the time before that, and probably the time before that...but what about this time!?!? That's not a productive attitude to take, honestly. So this year, I made sure to try to shut that off at the pass. Once I get out of the house, then inertia takes over and I'm not exactly going to turn around halfway there. And it turns out that my friends are awesome people and fun to be around to an extent that far outweighs the annoyance of having to change my physical location. Who would have thought, right? Obviously, this has always been true, but it's convincing that little voice that's the trick, and in 2013 I beat it into submission. Or at least, I inflicted grevious wounds.

All in all, it's been a pretty fantastic year, and I'm looking forward to what 2014 will bring.

I realize that posting song lyrics is incredibly emo and so early-2000s as to be aggressively unhip, but it's pseudo-tradition for me, so:

A long December and there's reason to believe
Maybe this year will be better than the last
I can't remember the last thing that you said as you were leavin'
Now the days go by so fast
And it's one more day up in the canyons
And it's one more night in Hollywood
If you think that I could be forgiven...I wish you would
The smell of hospitals in winter
And the feeling that it's all a lot of oysters, but no pearls
All at once you look across a crowded room
To see the way that light attaches to a girl
And it's one more day up in the canyons
And it's one more night in Hollywood
If you think you might come to California...I think you should
Drove up to Hillside Manor sometime after two a.m.
And talked a little while about the year
I guess the winter makes you laugh a little slower,
Makes you talk a little lower about the things you could not show her
And it's been a long December and there's reason to believe
Maybe this year will be better than the last
I can't remember all the times I tried to tell my myself
To hold on to these moments as they pass
And it's one more day up in the canyon
And it's one more night in Hollywood
It's been so long since I've seen the ocean...I guess I should...