my forty-second birthday
"I just don't want the cats to turn into birds and then explode." -Claire, 2025-03-03
Frankie said, "Here's a thought. How many roads must a man walk down?"
"Ah!" said Benjy. "Aha, now that does sound promising!" He rolled the phrase around a little. "Yes," he said, "that's excellent! Sounds very significant without actually tying you down to meaning anything at all. How many roads must a man walk down? Forty-two. Excellent, excellent, that'll fox 'em. Frankie, baby, we are made!"
They performed a scampering dance in their excitement.
I had to do a little quick arithmetic to figure out which birthday I am experiencing, but once I did I knew exactly which quote I wanted to memorialize it with. I had this leisure because this is the first birthday in over a decade that I'm not at work. Not from any planning on my part, I just have Wednesdays off. I think we'll go to the Green City Market and eat crêpes. Perhaps later I'll bake an angelfood cake or some brownies.
Though I'd better change first, I'm dressed all wrong for the farmer's market, those things are very informal, and I'm still wearing my suit. It's my birthday, I'm in my birthday suit.
Friday, third week after Easter
I think Chloe is showing gothic tendencies and I like to congratulate myself that this is because I would recite Coleridge to her on the bus when she was a toddler.
Good Friday
Ooof. Today is a day of fasting, and I don't want to. Which I know is the point. It's easy to find reasons not to do things one doesn't want to do. Doing the harder thing on purpose as a devotional exercise is, like, what Lent is. But I just bought some fun cereal, and I've got a lot to do today and need to take care of myself, and, and, and...
...and Esau sold his birthright for a mess of pottage.
I can listen when I have to, and I have to.
Wednesday, seventh week after Pentecost
Doing a little upkeep on my music library which, like everything else in my life, is a disorganized mess, a shambles, a right kerfuffle. But, uh, progress? Do you call it that if it's just one day, one album?
I don't even know where to buy music these days. Bandcamp, I guess? Soundcloud? My Spotify "To Download" playlist is 43 hours long. I stopped buying music because of lockdown belt-tightening and then GPM stopped and now I'm adrift.
Probably just have to go to each band's website and see what their preferred method entails, blech.
Tuesday, sixth week after Pentecost
I've been reflecting recently on the subject of "playing to win" versus "playing not to lose". Most situations in real life aren't zero-sum and there are gains and losses to be garnered at an individual level asymmetric to the gains and losses of others. The "playing to win" strategy involves seeking the optimal, or above-threshold, result for yourself and partners; the "playing not to lose" strategy is more defensive, and focuses on minimizing penalties for yourself and partners. The problem with the first strategy is that it typically involves more risk — optimal outcomes are less likely and often share decision tree branches with higher-penalty outcomes. The problem with the second strategy is that sometimes a short-term penalty must be eaten to achieve a long-term gain. Rough map to the political concepts of 'progressive' and 'conservative' are trivial and left as an exercise for the reader. Bonus exercise, map to "cooperate" or "defect" in the prisoners' dilemma.
A entity of sufficient perspicacity and wisdom might well know when to switch between these modes, but most of gravitate towards one or the other and switch only under duress if at all; or so it seems to me. I find that I've adopted the second, defensive strategy more and more in my personal life. The results are not great, so far. A greater ability to conserve my personal resources (time, attention, composure, energy) but less opportunity to replenish them. I'm not sure if this needs to change but I've resolved to make the experiment. I hope for the best and will abandon preparing for the worst.
We'll see what happens.
Monday, last week after Epiphany
"Sometimes I like to rip things open with my teeth. They're God's scissors." -Claire, 2021-12-12
Speaking of things that annoy me, last Friday at preschool, one of the other moms put her bags down on the only two large chairs — by which I mean, child sized rather than downright tiny. So rude!
Mask mandates end today for both the City and Illinois in general. Went to the café this morning on our way to preschool and the proprietor wasn't wearing one. I know it's a fools game to expect too much in the way of personal virtue, but I'm still disappointed.
Thankfully, masks are still in full force at preschool.
the Sunday after Fall Trimester
In UX design, there's this concept of graceful failure: the word processor that saves your work before closing unexpectedly, the game that reverts your keybindings upon crashing, the error message that gives a unique crash code you can feed to tech support. Basically, a sudden shutdown that does as little damage as possible. And this is mostly done by preparation: autosaving frequently, keeping the game's keybindings separate from the system's keybindings, and so on.
And in the pandemic-and-small-children struggles with my mental health, I've started trying to adapt this philosophy to asking for help. I used to just push ahead as long as I could until I had nothing left, hoping that I'd have enough in me to complete whatever I had to do before I ran out of spoons. And usually, I could. But sometimes I'd collapse, and either an essential task would go uncompleted, causing damage elsewhere, or I would exceed my limits to complete it, absorbing the damage myself. And that damage has been building up. So a change needed to be made. Now the idea is to shutdown a little earlier, while I still have something left for emergencies -or better yet, to ask for help with an estimate of how long I can go without it so those around me have time to adjust and reorient.
But this is not natural for me. Or maybe better to say, it's not simple. It's not difficult or strange, it's just complex. And it foregoes the possibility of just solving the problem. Correspondingly, I'm adopting the practice inconsistently, still trying to find the right threshold where I ask for help early enough to get it (or adjust my expectations to avoid a crash) but not so early that I'm complicating things that should be simple.
Feeds: