Smallhouse Log

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.

Friday, last week of Summer Break

I've been reading a lot lately, and the most recent thing I read -I just finnished- was Maguire's Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister. It was a very compelling tale, and I think part of why it was so compelling is that I knew how it would end, and the tension among what I could expect given the story thus far, what I wanted to happen, and what I knew (or thought I knew) must happen grew as the story progressed and I grew to love the characters more and more. It was a very satisfying ending, in that the characters acted true to their character; everyone got what they wanted, or at least avoided what they could not abide; and the fairytale we all know was presented in total, note for note. Maguire realizes what should have been obvious to any cynic looking at the tale with fresh eyes, but never occurred to me: That a beautiful stranger entering a ball unescorted could not escape the attentions of a prince whether she wanted to or not, and that the uses princes have for beautiful young ladies lie predominantly in one specific area.

Which served as a nice twist, but isn't really important to the story being told.

But the aspect of the book that arrested me most is what I describe above, the same desperate tension that I adore in the Norse myths: We know how the story ends, and it doesn't end well for the heroes. Every action is either in service towards or defiance of that eventuality, but come it shall regardless.

How many movies have employed this trope, of showing the climax first, or part of it, and building up to it the rest of the movie? Of course, they so often have a twist, or Deus ex Machina, or unreliable viewpoint, that let them weasel out of their terrible promises and give a neat resolution before the credits roll.

I think that's part of the appeal, for me, of the Terminator franchise: No matter if the Connors and their allies delay it by years or decades, Skynet always awakens. A victory today doesn't solve the problem, it just kicks the can down the road... and quite possible under less capable feet, as likely to kick it back to the Connors as to kick it forward. Note also the fact that John Connor's father is Kyle Reece, sent back in time by John to protect his mother Sarah; which gives the whole story a cyclical feel, an inevitability that nevertheless leaves room for uncertainty, for hope.

I've had a story kicking around my head for years, about Janus, the Latin god of beginnings and endings (and arcades). While it may seem odd to those that know me well, I who despise dualism in every arena, I have always been intrigued by this deity. Perhaps a part of me, the architecture enthusiast who loves arcades (or the videogame enthusiast who loved arcades in their heyday) felt a kinship or obeisance to this figure, the patron of change -in more ways than one, as he is also associated with coins, which plays nicely into the video arcade angle. And it occurs to me that perhaps this technique -of knowing the end before the beginning, and the tension that creates- is the perfect device for a story about a god of beginnings and endings.

Not that I know how the story ends. Up to now it's been mostly a character study.