Listen to the Rain

Laila is two and a half years old!

In the two year and four month update I wrote about how I was worried about her sentence usage, but she's been making up on that score. We taught her "I want [x]" and she picked up on it very quickly, and we've been quick to enforce it too. Of course, she's a toddler, so she gets derailed halfway through. She'll point and say "This. Bite." and then I'll say, "I. Want. Bread." and she'll think a moment and say "I...want...mohlow!!! [marshmallow] and then point to the kitchen cabinet where sashagee keeps her hot chocolate supplies. She know what she wants and what she wants is dessert.

She started her early intervention therapy after her assessment which showed her as almost a year behind in speech. After the speech therapist's first visit, she asked sashagee if the assessing therapists told her anything when they did Laila's assessment, and when sashagee said it was over Zoom, the therapist did a 😐 face. She has since said that she's positive she won't be seeing Laila after her next assessment and that most of the kids she sees don't talk at all, or barely. The occupational therapist had a similar reaction and that one I was there for--she interacted with Laila for an hour, and then rather than telling us what her plan was to help Laila get on track, she asked us if there was anything we waned her to work on. Laila is clearly not nearly as bad as the Zoom assessment would indicate.

Lately, she has really taken to Judaism, by which I mean that she'll sometimes take two cups from her dish playset, put them side-by-side like Shabbat candles, cover her eyes with one hand, and start trying to sing. And her current two favorite books were sent to us by PJ Library--one is called Fridays Are Special, about Shabbat preparations including baking the ḥallah (her favorite part), and the other is called Hoppy Hanukkah!, about a family of rabbits getting ready to celebrate Ḥanukah. That book is still a little advanced for her, but she's asking to read it. Book progress!

Also, she's finally helping mama in the kitchen. After watching a Kimono Mom video about a フルーツサンド (cream and fresh fruit sandwich), she helped sashagee make the cream and put the sandwich together and then got to eat it while wearing her Totoro apron:


Once again, I can use the Chiyo-chan cooking icon.

What other ways will she grow and change?

You might have heard of the collapse of FTX, a crypto trading firm that went from a $32 billion valuation to zero in under a week. This post is only about that tangentially, because I found an article linking to Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison's Tumblr, and reading through it I found this post about interacting with non-rationalists which links to this post by someone else about the differences between approaches to rationalism, those who think "I have discovered a new approach to human thinking, I shall revolutionize the world!! " and "I have discovered a new approach to human thinking, but maybe there's a reason there's no long historical record of people acting this way."

And that led me to thinking--what are the actual successes of rationalists? Their stated principles involve trying to use reason instead of appeals to tradition or emotion in order to guide human behavior, but what social ills have they alleviated? What government reforms have they proposed? What companies have they founded that effectively reduce suffering? Are there any billionaires who have pledged to give most of their wealth away (following the "earning to give" effective altruism proposal) that are actually less rich than when they made the pledge? I admit that I'm biased here, because from my point of view the primary output of rationalists is long blog posts, but one could make a reasonable argument here that the problem is crypto, not rationalism or effective altruism. There are plenty of other crypto exchanges or projects that have gone bankrupt or stolen their customers' funds with no tie to rationalism at all.

On the other hand, rationalism does seem to keep reinventing bog-standard bigotry from "first principles." I remember the SlateStarCodex reddit banning discussion of trans issues outside the designated Culture War threads, despite several trans people commenting that these were real issues that effected their lives, not just a political issue--and that tells me that in 1930s Germany they would have been having serious discussions on the Jewish Question, and in 1870s America about whether freed slaves should be full members of society. The linked Tumblr above repeats uncritical claims about how the entire gender pay gap is explained by work experience and job choice, and while you can explain that by noting Ellison is a self-described former aspiring Catholic tradwife who became an agnostic rationalist, how much Catholic tradwifery is still influencing her thoughts?

Plus there's the whole "AI will go rogue and kill us all! " obsession among rationalists despite there being no evidence that AGI will happen on any reasonable timeframe or is even possible. And I'm not even talking about soulless machines here--human cognition is inextricable from human biology and absent that biology, how would one emulate cognition? This is not an unsolvable problem but it is an extremely difficult one!

I am curious if there are any famous examples I'm missing.

Edit: This interview with Bankman-Fried about how most of his public statements were bullshit and done for PR reasons also seems relevant.

The icon's a stormcrow. See what I did there?

So there's a battle in America over whether to reopen now and, if so, how much. My friends lean more toward the "stay closed as long as it takes," and I've been thinking about that and what it means from a policy perspective. I posted about it on Facebook and this is slightly expanded from that:

( doomsaying within )

It was raining when I woke up, and sitting in my sun nook with the rain on the windows, drinking tea, was lovely. Now it's just grey and drizzly, and that's much less fun. Hopefully the rain comes back, since the sun won't be back until the weekend.

I was surprised when Facebook told me yesterday that I divorced schoolpsychnerd a year ago. I had honestly completely forgotten that the anniversary was approaching.

...which says it all, doesn't it?

I described it a couple people as feeling like in the past, I had been stuffed in a box, and now I was taken out and I could take up space. Not even extra space, just space. schoolpsychnerd had a lot of trauma in her past, and she put in a lot of effort to overcome it, and I think she was mostly successful--more successful than a lot of people would have been. But our relationship, and my personality, still ended up bending around it due to its gravity.

I asked my therapist occasionally what had happened to the old me, pre-moving to Japan, who accepted jaiderai's invitation to travel two and a half hours to a college I'd never been to so I could meet a girl he knew and wanted to introduce me to, or who would hang out with friends after work all the time. And now I know the answer--he was there all the time, buried under everything piled on top of him. And over the last year I've pushed all that out of the way and stood on my feet. I've had a bunch of friends tell me how much I've changed, how I seem so much happier, how full my life seems now. All of that is correct.

And I can carry that hindsight forward. The reason I tagged this post 悟り is because I have a much better understanding of who I really am now, when I'm free to define it on my own terms. I remember my therapist being astonished at how much I changed over the course of the year-and-a-half we saw each other. At our last session, she told me:

"You seem really happy now. Some people never get there."

That post says I play plenty of video games, but I don't even do that lately! I've played five minutes of video games in the last month. I bought Link's Awakening the day it came out, played it the following weekend, and haven't touched it since. There's so much to do that I just don't have time.

Just look at my post for last weekend or the weekend before that for examples of what I mean. Last weekend, I very deliberately took the largest space of free time I had and filled it. I did the same thing tonight--I'm going to a lecture about architecture at a bar.

The previous chapter is definitely over. Now, it's time to live my life.

I didn't realize how extremely annoyed someone telling me they would do something, putting it off to a later date when I asked about it, and then completely blowing it off without any acknowledgement or apology would make me. I spent a bit of time today thinking that I was overreacting, and then I realized that no, I'm not. It's reasonable to be annoyed at someone for failing to follow through on their soft commitments and not even apologizing or offering a reason when I mentioned it today to try to reschedule. The reasonable conclusion is that they don't care

This is a bit of a flash point for me, because I spent thirteen years being unable to trust whether something I was told would get done would actually get done (it was about 80% chance it would happen). Sometimes I was told it would get done four or five times, and only when I got annoyed enough to do it myself would it actually get done. It was all of those comics about emotional labor except with the genders reversed, which means I have a pretty hard time relating to the people who post them sincerely as-is. I also spent thirteen years suppressing my annoyance about it, because schoolpsychnerd treated any time I was angry as me being angry at her as a person, rather than angry at her actions, and then it turned into a debate over her fundamental worth as a human being. So eventually I squashed down all my feelings to avoid having a discussion about chores or about something that bothered me get refocused onto her yet again.

I told my therapist that sometimes I had the urge to laugh during our arguments about how terrible she was and I felt really badly about it, because I certainly didn't think it was funny. Now I realize that I was trying so hard not to feel anything that my body didn't know what to do with its sensations and decided on laughter.

You know, I guess that's one facet of what they call "dissociating."

So now I'm annoyed, and that's healthy and reasonable. The part that's not healthy or reasonable, that I need to work on, is the urge to immediately cut them out of my life completely. This is not a particularly serious incident and that would be an overreaction. But I am allowed to be angry.

Edit: The main thrust of this post is still true, but now I feel a little sheepish because they contacted me after work and arranged to drop off the boxes, so now I can go back to packing without any problems.

In therapy yesterday, my therapist said I seemed almost like a different person than when I started seeing her back in 2016. More in tune with my emotions, and more expressive, and engaged with life, and happier. I mentioned that I hadn't gotten into JET and she was surprised because I had never mentioned it in a session, and considering how formative living in Japan was for my interests and current personality, that says a lot. I didn't get in, and rather than assuming everything was over, I was disappointed and then moved on with my life. You know. A healthy way of dealing with things.

There was a lot of talk about feeling my feelings, and how I don't feel like I have lock myself down to protect anyone now. And that means that people can get closer to me without me almost-reflexively pulling away, and I'm more willing to reach out. And while that was born out of tragedy:

Me: "I never thought about ending things. I didn't want to leave. I just wanted her to be happy.
My therapist: "But at what cost to yourself?"

In the end, the effects on me are positive. And goodbyeomelas said the same thing, so I'm glad that it's evident in other aspects of my life as well.

Another surprise to my therapist is that my stomach pain hasn't abated, though. The Body Keeps the Score talked a lot about people's emotions finding expression in the body as aches if they didn't have any other outlet, so I don't know if that means there's still something I can't express, or if it's just the latent worries I have about life. I'm not a completely different person, after all.

Wednesday at lisekatevans's invitation, I went to a play reading that City Lit is doing as part of a "new plays" series. Since it was a reading, it was a bunch of actors on the stage with the scripts, but that was probably for the best--the play was autobiographical and about sexual assault, back-alley abortions, response to trauma, and vigilante justice, all set against the moon landing of 1969. It was a bit rough, and while the playwright was there and said that it was based on her memories, I do wonder how much of it were literal events that happened, how much was what they wished had happened, and how much was dramatic embellishment. lisekatevans had spoiled the entire plot to me, but I'm not sure whether that made it easier to harder to watch. I knew when all the violent scenes were coming, so maybe they hit me harder because I knew specifically what would go wrong.

There was a panel discussion afterwards with the playwright and two women who work for organizations dealing with sexual assault (the Zacharias House and...I forget the other one), which was briefer than I might have liked and filled with a few too many audience "this is more of a comment..." responses, but I'm glad City Lit made space for it. I'm also glad that the play was no longer a musical, which lisekatevans told me it had been at one point. Maybe that's where lead's speech about losing her "moonglow" came from--I can imagine that as a solo. 🎶

I tried something different for breakfast today. Usually I have a Japanese breakfast of miso soup, rice, pickles, fish, and tea, but lately I've been feeling a bit too full after eating it. So last night I didn't start any rice at all, and this morning I just had some matcha and a bit of halvah, and I brought a snack bar to work with me. And the end result is that as I write this I'm hungry again, so I guess I need to find some medium point between these options. Maybe less miso soup and another vegetable.

I took off a bunch of time to finally use up some of my vacation. The first week of July, the week of Thanksgiving and a couple days before so I can go to Daishocon with the Anime Chicago people, and Yom Kippur. I'm still going to take off the end of the year, and I have a couple more days I need to use after that, but plans are coming together.

And to end on an annoyed note, apparently deciding that the Chicago Dyke March harassing people carrying a Magen David flag was worthy of emulation, the DC Dyke March this year specifically banned the Magen David on flags as a "nationalist" symbol. While they're not nearly as overtly antisemitic as the Chicago Dyke March was, it's still baffling to me that they had the previous example right there and still decided to stick their foot in it.

I guess the Jews murdered in the Pittsburgh Tree of Life shooting last year should have been remembered with pomegranates or the Lion of Judah, instead of having "nationalist" symbols erected as a memorial?

I've been reading The Body Keeps the Score, about trauma and recovery from same. There's a lot in here that I wish I had known about earlier, though I don't know that it would have made a difference. I don't have the kind of deep-seated, serious trauma that this book is talking about. schoolpsychnerd does, but other people can't solve that for her. Still, it might have helped me understand better what she was going through.

This post isn't about that, though. One of the major points the books makes is that the ways traumatized people behave mark them as strange, cause them a lot of pain, and get them shunned or mocked by their peers, but those habits continue because they were protective against the source of their trauma. At one point, in a certain context, they were useful habits, even if in every other context they cause nothing but pain.

When I read that, I immediately thought of some of the habits I developed in my marriage to deal with schoolpsychnerd's behavior. I don't want to go into exhaustive detail (and it would be lashon hara anyway), but one simple example is how I'm often leery of offering a suggestion because there's a part of me that thinks it creates an obligation in the listener. schoolpsychnerd would often treat it that way, because she was a people-pleaser and always tried to accommodate herself to what other people wanted. I didn't want to run roughshod over her, so sometimes we'd end up in a stalemate where each of us tried to get the other to state their opinion first, me so I'd know that her opinion was purely her own and her so she could take my opinion into account when making a decision. That led to me being anxious about asking people to do things, including even inviting them to go out for pie or come to a party, because I've learned over years that merely suggesting something is often treated as a command. So in order to avoid applying undue pressure, I often avoided suggesting things. Most of what this did was isolate me from my friends, but maybe it made schoolpsychnerd feel better.

On Tuesday, though, I thought about hosting a party for Shavuot, since the "eating dairy foods" aspect of the holiday makes it easy to secularize for a gathering. And after about twenty minutes of thought, I made an event and invited sixty people. A Facebook event invite is not a binding contract. It's not pressure in any way. And hopefully people will come and eat delicious ice cream and cheese and have a lovely time.

And this is something I should be aware of in the future, and examine my own actions, and try to figure out what impulses I have that were once an adaptive response but no longer are.

So I'm talking with someone on Hinge and I asked her on a date. She said yes, we set a plan for Thursday after work, and then tragedy struck one of her friends (a child's cancer diagnosis ). She said that she hadn't showered or put on makeup that morning because she had been on the phone with her friend, and I took the hint and asked her if she wanted to reschedule. She said yes and suggested a time later that same day. It didn't work out--I had therapy, and so I suggested 9 p.m., but that was too late for her due to her job requiring her to get up very early--but I took it as a very good sign.

Plus she messaged me first, and when I offered a couple book recommendations (Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman and the works of H. P. Lovecraft), she immediately checked them out from the library, so she's clearly into me, or as much as she can be through just text. We tentatively have a postponement to Saturday, barring news about one of her friend's birthday plans.

But! That isn't really what this post is about. What it's about is that sometimes while we were messaging, I had an extremely strong aversive reaction. Like, the hope that she'd just leave me alone, that she'd stop talking me--that she'd ghost me, basically. I'm not sure where it came from, and I knew it was irrational, so I ignored it as best I could. I've read enough about ghosting, and how even people who hate being ghosted and think it's a horrific aspect of modern online interact still do it because it's such a tempting way of avoiding any conflict. I've read about women saying that want to do something nice for men they're interested in, something small like sending them a link and saying it reminded them of him, but they're afraid it'll scare him off so they artificially pretend like they don't care until they can be sure he won't run. Like approaching a wild animal, slowly, palms out.

But I refuse to be part of the reason that everyone complains about online dating. I didn't wait excessively long before replying to any of her messages, I didn't try to be artificially neutral or strip any tone out of my replies, and I used exclamation points. And that's part of what pushed me to ask her on a date after a couple days of talking rather than draw things out, I think, so in that I suppose it was a good thing. But I'm still concerned about it.

I told my therapist about it, and she didn't directly address the cause, but she did indirectly address it in her advice. The first actionable advice she's ever given me, actually--she told me that when that voice came up in the future, that I should tell it that it's okay. I don't need it to protect me anymore. That I will be fine without it, and that I can handle my life on my own. That I may have experienced betrayal (her word) in the past, but I don't want to cut myself off from connection in the future. She's right. That kind of overreaction is just going to make life harder.

I will try to take her advice, and hopefully go out for drinks on Saturday.

You might have seen this article about Facebook's content moderators floating around the internet. The whole thing is a nightmare log of badly-paid contractors, at risk of being fired at any moment for failing to meet arbitrary figures, suffering terrible psychological damage. Facebook passes off its responsibility to another company that churns through workers, using them up and discarding them as soon as they suffer any of the extremely-predictable mental effects of looking at torture, murder, violent pornography, racism, sexism, and conspiracy theories for hours every day. Here's one quote from early in the piece:

For this portion of her education, Chloe will have to moderate a Facebook post in front of her fellow trainees. When it’s her turn, she walks to the front of the room, where a monitor displays a video that has been posted to the world’s largest social network. None of the trainees have seen it before, Chloe included. She presses play.

The video depicts a man being murdered. Someone is stabbing him, dozens of times, while he screams and begs for his life.

It gets worse from there.

Obviously, the proximate blame in this case is on Facebook. They want to be some kind of cyber-public square, connecting everyone in the world with lines of blazing blue light like some early-00s telecom ad, but don't want any of the actual responsibility of maintaining a public square. They pass off cleaning up the trash to someone else and keep welcoming everyone to the square even if some of those people have repeatedly proven that they shouldn't be there. They let advertisers market specifically to people who are interested in "white genocide," for example, and last year Zuckerberg made some extremely convoluted explanation for why they don't kick out Holocaust-deniers. Their moderation policy is an extension of that libertarian abdication of responsibility. Let someone else clean up their messes and that way you don't have to worry about how the moderators are treated. If they only last a year, if they start thinking the world is flat or that the government planned 9/11, if they end up crying and hyperventilating in their car and can't go home without checking all the locks six times, well, that's the contracting company's problem.

But the other thing I think about is that there's no way to fix this. Even if Facebook directly hired on all the moderators and gave them a six-figure Facebook salary and benefits package, the psychological damage of their jobs wouldn't change much. I'm reminded of FBI agents whose job it is to watch child pornography looking for clues in the videos that will help track down the producers. Is there something visible outside the window? Is the wallpaper the same in these videos from separate sources? They have government job security and a government benefits package and they still suffer horrific burnout, mental problems, and suicide rates. Of course they do.

This is exactly the kind of thing that computers would be perfect for handling, except as the article shows, humans fail constantly at handling it because the standards keep changing in a non-systemic way:

Like Facebook itself, Workplace has an algorithmic News Feed that displays posts based on engagement. During a breaking news event, such as a mass shooting, managers will often post conflicting information about how to moderate individual pieces of content, which then appear out of chronological order on Workplace. Six current and former employees told me that they had made moderation mistakes based on seeing an outdated post at the top of their feed.

No computer is going to be able to handle that in the foreseeable future. Maybe not in my lifetime.

It's a problem with the format. I found a Twitter thread about the differences between modern social media and the "old blogosphere," places like Livejournal and Dreamwidth and webrings. It's a good read, pointing out that the OB was more capable of dealing with bad actors because it was easier to manage small islands of content and curate one's own readings:The thing that really struck me, though, is that the OB is more like physical social networks. Real people are more like those small groups, with some connections between them. I have multiple groups of friends, some of whom know each other and some don't, and in the ones that don't I'm the connection between them. Facebook and Tumblr and Twitter, where anyone can talk with anyone at any time, have no real counterpart in our social history until now, so of course we have no way of dealing with it. Twitter is like if everyone in the world is in a bar simultaneously and they're all somehow in earshot of each other. People reasonably try to import physical-world social norms--don't randomly insult people, don't butt in on conversations you're not a part of--but the platform not only has no expectation that those will be followed, it actively subverts them, and so people spend their time yelling at each other and spreading hate and lies, in far greater numbers than would be possible physically, and the world gets worse.

Basically, what I'm saying is that the robots didn't even need to achieve sapience before they started destroying us.

This is why I still like Dreamwidth a lot, other than tradition. It's a more human-scale website.

I've had an eventful week. I wrote about Friday's dinner here and Saturday's wedding here, and now it's time for the rest of it.

On Sunday my parents came into town and we went out to dinner at Francesca's, a local chain with one branch near my apartment and another one out in the far western suburbs. I'd eaten at the suburban one and it was fine, but this time it was pretty bland. Both my father's and my meals were unimpressive and tasteless, and it was only the free dessert we got because my father mentioned my birthday that really made the dinner worth eating. Fortunately, the cherry pie that they brought from home was delicious. We got some frozen custard from Lickity Split and ate it together.

Among the presents they gave me was a Japanese pickle press. I eat an enormous amount of pickles (every morning at breakfast), and I wanted a way to make refrigerator pickles that didn't need vinegar or twenty-four hours of drying. It worked! The pickles have a different flavor than the ones I make with apple-cider vinegar do, but that's not surprising. They're more clear, and they go better with rice and salted fish. I'm not sure even a three liter press is big enough to keep me in pickles without making apple cider vinegar pickles still, but now I have a choice.

After my parents left, I texted lisekatevans on Sunday night to see if she was free, and I ended up going over to her condo after she was finished with a voice recording session and we drank wine for a while and chatted. She gave me ice cream to help my stomach, which was twisting itself in knots, and then showed me several of Taylor Swift's latest videos because she knew I loved cyberpunk literature and fashion and wanted to know what I thought of them. Especially ...Ready For It?, where the love song lyrics contrast with a robot trying everything to break out from the cage it's been placed in. I mentioned the scene in Ghost in the Shell where the major looks up and sees someone else with her same model of cyberbody drinking in a cafe across the river, and also probably my favorite quote about using cyberpunk just as an aesthetic without actually having anything to say:

Cyberpunk is just Asian cities.

I've seen a lot of cyberpunk aesthetic tumblrs that just post photos of Shinjuku at night in the rain.

Monday, my actually birthday, I mostly did chores to prep for the week. I had taken it off but didn't have any plans and had to do laundry, vacuum, go shopping, make my lunches, and a bunch of other adulting. Tuesday was a normal day with Japanese tutoring where we talked about my weekend and about Japanese cooking.

Wednesday I left work and went to Ramen Wasabi in Logan Square for dinner, alone since no one else was free, where I learned that they could swap out the pork for chicken in the ramen so I could have meat, but cooked their eggs in pork fat so I couldn't get an egg. Then I went on to the movie theatre where Anime Chicago was getting together to watch 夜は短し歩けよ乙女 / The Night is Short, Walk on Girl. With stephen_poon, who wasn't signed up through the Meetup site but new several of the people coming and independently decided to go!

I was warned beforehand that Masaaki Yuasa's work was polarizing, but I loved the movie. I loved the dreamlike quality, the way the scenes flowed into each other and it often wasn't clear what was metaphor and what wasn't, the way things seem to get kind of unreal on a late night out on the town where one event blurs into the next and after leaving every place, the response is "where do we go next?!" Plus, I've been out at night in Pontochō, where the film opens, and I've walked along the Kamogawa. It turned out that stephen_poon even went to a wedding reception in Pontochō and the film's first scene is a wedding reception!

I recommend it if you can find it anywhere.

Thursday was mostly ordinary. Therapy went well--we talked a bit about my anxiety about spending money and when my therapist asked what it was that I was worried about, I said that I'm American and it would be trivially easy for me to develop a health condition or have an accident that requires extensive and expensive health care. I have good insurance, but what happens if I can't work? What happens if the American fascists* reinstitute pre-existing condition death panels? I've lived in countries that have real health care systems, so I know exactly what we're missing. She accepted that and then asked me how much money I would need to feel safe, and I had to admit that I didn't think any realistic amount would be enough. So I guess that's an area I can work on.

I went home, took a shower, sat down to work on coding practice, and then I get a text from lisekatevans inviting me out to a birthday party one of her friends was holding at Pearl's, so I threw on some clothes and went out on a work night to listen to actors swap stories about meeting famous people, plays they were in, Midwestern manners, Scotch distilling, and so on. I mostly listened, though lisekatevans valiantly tried to throw me a couple conversational ropes, but my areas of interest were pretty distant from most of the other people in attendance. The stories and the drinks were good, though, and the birthday girl was wearing a black dress and boots--from what lisekatevans said, her usual aesthetic--so I approve of her sartorial choices. I bought one of her drinks because there was a $10 minimum on card charges.

Early in August I invited worldbshiny out to Izakaya Mita to drink sake and eat Japanese food, and while her schedule has been pretty hectic, she finally had a free moment on Friday. She messaged both meowtima and me, but meowtima couldn't come due to making a million caramels for an event on Sunday. So after work, I went to Bucktown and walked up to Moth, bought a book called 日本茶 / Japanese Green Tea, a travel guide to tea shops in Tōkyō in both Japanese and English. I overpaid by quite a bit--the price on the back was ¥1500 and Moth charged me $33, which is almost 2.5 times the cover price--but I like supporting Moth because my Japanese tutor works there. Then I spent some time in a Starbucks reading Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver until 7 p.m., where I walked over to Izakaya Mita and met worldbshiny

It was nice! I didn't have a very good opinion of Izakaya Mita's food from previous visits, though the drinks are excellent, so I expecting to love the sake and tolerate the food. But we stuck to mostly kushiyaki and appetizers like pickles and gobō kinpira instead of going for the okonomiyaki--Kansai style, plus both varieties were treif--or ramen. The duck heart and duck liver kushiyaki were delicious! And the sake was good too, though the first one I tried was a bit sour for me and the second one was unmemorable, the other two, especially the nigori, were delicious. worldbshiny even got the Tedorigawa sake made at the Yoshida brewery featured in The Birth of Sake (which I wrote about here)! I had a much better culinary experience this time, and worldbshiny and I chatted about our lives because we haven't really had a chance to talk before now. After a few hours, worldbshiny was fading thanks to the effects of the sake, so we went out and caught the bus back to our respective apartments.

As I left, I snapped out ご馳走様でした as I left and after a startled pause, got back a hearty お疲れ様でした。

This weekend I don't have much to do, which is good. I could use the break.

I've been going back and reading through some of my older blog posts lately. One of the major benefits of my having been posting on LJ and then DW for so long is that I basically have a record of my entire adulthood here. If I have doubts about my behavior or thoughts, I can go back and see what I wrote about at the time.

I've learned, for example, that some things about me don't change. I'll probably always be inordinately nervous about meeting new people, and I might always feel a little lonely. I'll probably always get very depressed in the face of failure. Those things have been with me for over a decade and I'd have to be a completely different person in order to change them. But, I can change how I deal with them. A decade ago, I was much more social even despite these worries, often with something to do every weekend. I didn't seem to feel that kind of urge to hermit and do nothing on weekends that I've felt in the last couple of years. I played video games a lot, but I made more time for other things too. I told my therapist that this was actually really hopeful for me, because it means that I don't have to completely change my entire being in order to be the kind of person I'd like to be. I just have to remember who I was, once, and work to be more like that person again. It's something I've already proved that I can do.

I'm working on that. Going to a Starlight Radio Dreams show tonight. And going to movies. I used to do that all the time but really fell out of the habit, originally due to moving to Japan and later due to SOPA. Of course, it turns out that just not purchasing something and otherwise not saying anything about it is a completely ineffective means of protest because the corporation has no idea if you're a lost sale or just disinterested, and also, films like Black Panther making billions is itself a powerful message. I missed out on a lot by not going to movies, including some things I probably would have really enjoyed.

Speaking more of old posts, I found a very old post that chronicles my first forays into the World of Warcraft, the game that I've played the most and which was the overwhelming majority of my gaming time between 2006 and 2011. Little did I know when I started it that I'd rack up something like 500 days playtime. If only I had devoted even 10% of that to Japanese, I'd probably be fluent by now...

I also found this post from back when I worked at a newspaper. I'll put the relevant quote here:

"Sir, our inability to cover a story on a certain day is not a violation of your First Amendment rights."
-one of the reporters

I've slept badly every night this week, and I can only blame one of them on the child downstairs crying. Hopefully this weekend I can make some of it up!

As a general rule, I prefer to be alone. Parties and events on weekends make me nervous because my usual unwinding time from work gets interrupted and also because I spend time dreading their approach as an interruption of my usual alone time. That's not to say that I don't have fun when I get there, because I do, but the thought process I have before hand is "Ugh, that's right, I'm going to [X] this weekend. There goes my Saturday night."

That said, I might be approaching things the wrong way:

This mistaken preference for solitude stems partly from underestimating others’ interest in connecting (Experiments 3a and 3b), which in turn keeps people from learning the actual consequences of social interaction (Experiments 4a and 4b). The pleasure of connection seems contagious: In a laboratory waiting room, participants who were talked to had equally positive experiences as those instructed to talk (Experiment 5). Human beings are social animals. Those who misunderstand the consequences of social interactions may not, in at least some contexts, be social enough for their own well-being.
-Source

That line about "underestimating others’ interest in connecting" really hits home with me, because I almost never initiate a conversation over an electronic medium due to worrying about bothering the other person. I'm a lot better about it in the age of texting, because there's an understanding now that texting is asynchronous in a way that IMing never really was, but I still don't carry on nearly the same number of conversations online as a lot of people seem to.

And reading this article, I ended up thinking of some of the times people have randomly talked to me on the CTA. And while I get extremely annoyed about things like people talking on their phones on mass transit, and even conversations nearby bother me because those old images of everyone reading the newspaper and ignoring each other is my idealized commute, I have to admit that CTA conversations run about 50/50. Some of them are people bothering me when I'm trying to read, and that almost always just annoys me. But some of them are people chatting when I'm just wasting time on my phone, and those I end up enjoying despite myself.

The incident that springs to mind was a bunch of obviously drunk people making nuisances of themselves and playing around on the CTA, until one of them sat next to me, ignored my attempts to rebuff him, and we eventually got to chatting about why they were Chicago (they were glassblowers) and what they were doing on the CTA (they were attending the SOFA expo at Navy Pier). I actually enjoyed the conversation, and alighted at my stop after having written down the dates of SOFA for the next few years so I'd know about it if I wanted to attend as a guest.

That also ties into something else I sometimes think about, which is the desire to have (some) other people force through one's barriers to talk to you. If someone tries to initiate a conversation and keeps trying to talk even in the face of reluctance, it proves that they are actually interesting to talking to you and not just putting on a front for the sake of politeness, whereas if you initiate a conversation with someone else you have no such reassurance. But that doesn't work in reverse, and badgering people to talk is certainly more likely to get them to only chat out of politeness while actually thinking badly of you (and they have no way of accessing your inner life), so often I end up talking to no one even when I'd like people to talk to me.

The Hedgehog's Dilemma. It's a thing.

Friday - Burgers, Art, and Sauerkraut
The next morning, schoolpsychnerd again had to be somewhere early. This time, though, I didn't even wake up when she wished me goodbye, so I was pretty disoriented when I woke up and the room was otherwise empty. I loafed around the room for a couple hours, getting progressively hungrier and less willing to leave the bed, and then I finally scarfed down all the remaining nuts and headed out the door to a burger place I had looked up on my phone. When I went outside, the weather was pretty much my ideal weather: cloudy skies, cool breeze, wet ground, and the smell after the rain. It was almost enough to make me change my mind and go into the Irish bar I saw along the way, but I kept to my original plan.

I had originally set out with the intention to walk from our hotel down to the National Mall, and I managed to stick to that plan even though when I left the restaurant it was raining. I went to the Freer Gallery of Art (and apparently just missed an exhibition about the tea ceremony! By one day! ARGH!), which was recommended I think by my father, though I can't remember exactly who told me to go. Anyway, it's a collection of art from what a 19th century art collector would have called "The Orient," so there was everything from Japanese screens to Arabic pottery. The last one I didn't devote much time to, despite how beautiful it was, because I've never really been interested in pottery. Honestly, I'd be happy with plain white bowls or bowls made out of dark wood, much like my taste in furniture.

There were other interesting things, though:

That's a literal starmetal dagger. Emperor Jahangir had it made out of a fallen star, and later said that it "cut beautifully, as well as the very best swords." So maybe there is something to that meteoric iron superweapon fantasy trope!


That's a picture of Kōbō Daishi on his trip to China to learn the teachings of Buddhism, which he later brought back to Japan. I mainly liked this image because it has a literal example of red oni blue oni (赤鬼青鬼), though the art is definitely beautiful as well. It's the kind of thing I'd love to have in schoolpsychnerd and my bedroom, in my imagined dream residence where the bedroom has byōbu, tatami floors, a futon instead of a bed, zaisu and low table, and so on. I can probably do a lot of that even if there isn't a tatami flooring, really. I actually prefer sitting on the floor in a lot of cases.

Oh! Also, in a weird coincidence, I found proof that schoolpsychnerd, like Nicholas Cage and Keanu Reeves, is an immortal vampire who has survived through the ages and secretly manipulates us from behind the scenes:


Green and Gold: the Little Green Cap, but it's pretty obviously a picture of my wife. I'm on to your schemes!

The collection of jades was neat, but it's just jade discs so it doesn't make a very good photographic subject.

After I looked all around there, I used my remaining time to head back into the Museum of the American Indian and look around some more. There was a short movie called Who We Are that they showed in the theatre on the top floor, so I headed up there to watch that. It was maybe fifteen minutes and primarily served as a well to tell people that Native Americans aren't just records in history books or cultures frozen in time, both of which I already knew, but it was a good introduction to the idea. Then it let us out in an exhibit that went into detail on various tribes' traditional beliefs and practices, most of which I knew almost nothing about. I couldn't stay for the entire time, though, because schoolpsychnerd texted me to let me know she was finished with her presentation an hour before I expected, so I had to start walking. I was determined that I would walk from our hotel to the National Mall and back to our hotel, and I did. It just took me about an hour since it was mostly at a slight-to-moderate incline. I didn't go back to our room when I walked into the hotel room; I just sat on the couch and let schoolpsychnerd know that I was down there.

We were going to meet with satinalien for dinner at Old Europe, but she was feeling under the weather, so schoolpsychnerd and I went ourselves. Here's a sample of what we ate:


That's dark rye bread with Griebenschmalz vom Schwein, or a spread made from rendered pig fat. It may have been the least kosher thing I've ever eaten, but it tasted fantastic. I also got the Schnitzel Old Europe, which had veal, chicken, tomatos, onions, hollendaise sauce, and sides of sauerkraut, potatos, and mixed vegetables. And beef stew as an appetizer and a dark chocolate cake. It was quite possibly the most stereotypical German meal I could have eaten other than the lack of bratwurst, but you can't have everything at once. I also learned that my pronunciation of German is not particularly good, which shouldn't surprise me since I've never studied it at all. Maybe I should look into that if I plan to go to German restaurants more often.

After that, we went home and went to sleep. We were going to meet up with some friends, but they were drained from the day's activities and so were we, so we all went to bed.

Saturday - Trip Home
Not that much to say for the final day, since it was mostly just taken up by going home, going shopping, and then sitting around at home. There was one minor hiccup when it turned out that the hotel's free shuttle didn't run on weekend's until 9, so we had to walk from the hotel to the Metro, and then that Metro trains only run about every half an hour on weekends, but we made it there, made it to Union Station in time to take the MARC train (which only started weekend service in December!) back to the Baltimore airport, and then flew out. The only notable thing was the restaurant we ate in in the Baltimore airport had USB plugs in the wall. They also were locally-owned and served locally-sourced food which was really good, but I didn't take any pictures so you'll have to take my word for it.

It was pretty great. I'm glad we had enough money and I had enough vacation time that I could come along, because if I'm going to be a tourist in a city, DC is a great place to be one, and a lot of schoolpsychnerd and my friends seem to live either in DC or in the cities around it. Next year is Orlando and I've heard that it's in Disney, but how much fun would that be by myself? The year after that is New Orleans, though, where I've never been before, so I have to go to that one.

Whew! That took forever to write.