slower

 tuesday and wednesday.

mr smear was hardcore on sunday night, then chilled on monday. then yesterday's homework session was horrible again - just awful - and today was (mostly) chilled. i feel like we're getting somewhere, but my god it's taking a lot of strain to get there.

even though things were rough yesterday, they ended on a positive vibe and mutual appreciation. at least that.

...

i've been eating somewhat poorly the past few days, lots of snacking. this week the stress has dropped dramatically from day to day, and i've found myself feeling a bit lost in spite of all the urgent surprises i have thrown at me throughout the day.

usually around leaving time...

...

i think i might be falling asleep.

psycho-analytics

 these past two days have been very much about mr smear, and about GPU drivers.

i fucking hate the GPU driver ecosystem. for the biggest / hottest industry in the world, they're all behaving like rank amateurs and the entire experience is just shit. yesterday morning i felt out of my depth, but after hours of coaching by experts i can now confidently say that i'm both out of my depth and incredibly disappointed.

otherwise, yesterday morning began with mr smear informing me - after we left the apartment - that he'd rather walk to school alone. to have some alone time, and because he's nine.

i'm still feeling the feelings.

in the afternoon we had a parent-teacher's meeting. first, his home-room teacher was running half an hour late, and we had a severe conversation with the other mother who was waiting. i was surprised to find an israeli who considered my opinion on coalition governments being the source of our political evil to be plausible.

the irony is that the left and center of the country have consistently forced bibi to collude with the far right and ultra-orthodox for decades, which has been much more damaging to the majority than bibi worrying about just bibi.

right now, the government has cut funding to the teachers in a way that makes it more attractive to them to quit before year-end and go on welfare. we're all fucked.

as for mr smear, both teachers we spoke to said the same things, the same things we expected and have been dealing with ourselves. we've explicitly authorized them to take his drawing gear away if he doesn't comply, but we're shocked that that would even be necessary...

on the way home, gd warned mr smear multiple times to cooperate with me when i helped him with his math homework. we got through an exercise just fine, and then he did his usual thing and played dumb, trying to "run out the clock".

i lost my temper. in a bad way. as in, i'm embarrassed by how angry i got and i'm embarrassed by how long it took me to calm down again. the temper lasted most of the hour or two that it took to get him to finish the damned exercise, but by the end i felt like he'd understood the rules of engagement and that we weren't fucking around.

then we had dinner, and got him ready for bed. it was very late.

this morning began on a much better note, and for half an hour before he went to school i ran him through some exercises on paper, and it was a pleasant and positive experience. i even got him to follow basic algebra!

after that, gd had a bit of a meltdown about the psychologists demanding she see them in person, then took it out on mr smear's therapist during our parental guidance session 🙄

anyway, we had an interesting and constructive session during which i think i've understood something about mr smear's behavior, which consolidated during our evening call with my mom into the following: all of his bad behaviors - when physically changing locations, socially, and academically - all have the same common thread: not moving, at any cost.

but at the same time, he's had this issue with trying to control everything in counterproductive ways since he was a toddler, and it's only when we really crack down on him that he calms down and proceeds in a healthy way. so perhaps all of this is the same cause, and that we've been misinterpreting it all this time: it's not that he hasn't had enough control over his life, it's that he's had too much control and the lack of clear boundaries has left him holding on to where he is for dear life.

obviously we don't know any of that for sure, but it makes sense. either way, although these past few weeks have been particularly emotionally and psychologically exhausting we're seeing positive results.

...

today's highlight - outside of mr smear's progress, which included a good hebrew reading session when i got home - occurred during a knowledge transfer by the contractor who built the basis for one of our systems. he was speaking softly and the guys in the row behind us were talking loudly, so i turned around to shush them saying "please guys, we're recording". one of the guys yelled "then stop recording!" and everyone in the row - including my boss and one of our founders - immediately began calling me names as loudly as they could to make sure it's in the recording 😂

...

i'm not particularly physically tired but i'm soooo over today, and i've got work to do. i also sent a message this morning to ze german who's been consulting me to explain that i have zero bandwidth, and then an email to his contractor to explain that i can't really help her...

lessons not learned

yesterday evening:

highlight of the - day? evening? - we decided to toast vegan marshmallows over a small candle. they didn't toast as well as real ones, but we still had fun.

today:

another tough night.

today began with another fight with mr smear over screentime.

most of the day has been (and still is) all about my shoulder, it's been locked and hurting and massaging has only brought temporary relief :(

aside from letting mr smear go to a friend's place to screentime while we ventured out in 38° weather to have coffee with our friends, it was a day spent indoors doing not much. i played a fair amount of slay the spire and read a little bit of a canticle for leibowitz, which i'm enjoying when i have the headspace to read.

great, now i suddenly feel guilty for avoiding working this evening...

bonfires

 ah, i remember the conspiracy theory now: trump is burying israel so that he can bring us all in to the US as refugees where we'll rapidly integrate and give them a huge tech and manufacturing advantage.

...

yesterday:

another rough day, much less intense than before but with plenty of intensity left to go around. and lots of surprises / factually incorrect theories that led us down rabbit holes while we were trying to get something urgent (literally) out the door.

i ate too much vegan cake at the happy hour (and forgot to bring the rest home), while a new coworker regaled me with inappropriate tales about his parenting approach during covid. and i shared inappropriate stories with some of my coworkers about the horrible things my son has said to me over the years...

we managed to be "delivery ready" just after 6pm.

as it was lag ba'omer, i tried to find a bonfire but none were reasonably close / guaranteed to include actual bonfires. so instead, i took mr smear for a long, really good walk to the beach, where we had ice cream, and then we had a long, mostly good walk back (minus rushing into a stairwell in a random - but very nice - building when the houthis attacked).

today:

i didn't sleep very well. what made it worse was waking up in the middle of the night to pee, and seeing a notification from threads (which i've tried to opt-out from) for a particularly nasty and libellous antisemitic claim. it took me a while to calm down after that.

the morning started off pretty shit, with another fight with mr smear about screentime even though he's been punished with no screentime. that got ugly.

then i put in some work hours, figuring something out and then fixing a different thing, and then i took mr smear out for a walk. we went to the museum, where we saw some really interesting stuff which triggered some very big feelings (motherland), and although he needed some "herding" he came to the party and we left the museum with a good vibe.

the next part of our walk went really badly, but after he understood what the dynamics needed to be (i can't believe this is what we're doing these days) we made some good progress. our walk continued to the mall, where we had falafel for lunch and picked up two heavy bags of muesli which he carried most of the way home.

on the way home, we passed the war between the sons of light and the sons of darkness monument, and appreciated its structure.

i was really tired when we got home, but before i could nap i had to have a massive fight with my wife over trust issues, and i'm extremely grateful that in spite of all the feelings i managed to express myself well enough that it was resolved in a really positive way.

i did some more work in the afternoon, i managed to make some progress but nothing satisfying, and now the sun's about to set and we're about to make kiddush.

shabbat shalom

an unexpected delivery

today was wednesday. yesterday was tuesday.

yesterday:

it was a relaxed morning (in spite of some trouble getting mr smear up and at 'em), but it was still a very long, busy day with lots of interruptions and headaches.

you know when you take leave, and get sick because you finally have time to be sick? i got to the office yesterday morning and i crashed.

in the evening, when i finally got around to taking care of the top item on my to-do list, it went south and made me leave the office an hour later than i'd planned*. and then, after getting mr smear into bed, i had to continue working on it until eventually realizing that i literally couldn't resolve it without accessing the problem device in person.

* i complained about mr smear reading instead of spending some time with me, and then the sirens went off and we had a few minutes playing a game together in the bomb shelter :P

i was falling on my nose by the time i went to bed. and i slept right until the 6.3 magnitude earthquake in crete woke me up with our building moving around in circles. nobody else woke up, but i couldn't get back to sleep.

today:

oh, yeah - my neck and back have been moving issues around for days now.

this morning started calmer than yesterday, and after dropping mr smear off at school i met up with gd at the hospital to track down the clinic for her toenail issue. i was expecting to get bounced around a bit, but were sent directly to the right place and were immensely relieved and grateful to get an appointment that's relatively soon. and then we walked to our clinic and immediately received authorization for that appointment, so that's awesome ^_^

...

i had one mission today, and i barely touched it. i arrived at the office in time for a meeting with a third party, and we came up with a workaround strategy but his issues really didn't make sense. then i got sidetracked by our security consultant investigating a weird incident of my computer behaving weirdly in the middle of the night when it was supposed to be sleeping.

on my way to pick up lunch, i checked in with gd about an unexpected delivery i'd received a call about, and it turned out to be a beautiful care package from my company to say thank you for all the extra effort since our coworker passed away.

that was really touching!

over lunch, i came up with a weirdly compelling trump / bibi conspiracy but i now cannot for the life of me remember what it was :/

a new employee also has lots of tattoos, which set of a funny lunch discussion. then we interviewed a really interesting candidate, who's surprisingly knowledgeable and compelling for his relatively short experience.

in the afternoon, one of my coworkers approached me to ask me for some help with third parties, and in an exciting turn of events we managed to resolve his issues in a way that might help me with those of the morning. i've got some more testing to do, but if this works we'll have learned something that'll save us a ton of heartache going forward!

...

in the meanwhile, it was mr smear's last play therapy session and it apparently went well. i feel bad for her because mr smear was her final project, i hope us bailing on her doesn't affect her too badly.

...

i came home relatively early for a pleasant evening (in spite of a work issue that exploded at suppertime but that someone else ended up taking care of).

...

after showering, i was clipping my toenails when i noticed that one of them didn't look right. thinking that it was dirty or that i was developing something funky, i tried scraping it, and to my horror most of it almost came right off then and there 😱

it looks like when i recently smashed my toe into a table leg, it did a lot more damage than i thought...

...

at bedtime, gd came out laughing because mr smear had wished her a good night and asked her to never commit suicide. i immediately quipped that i'd bet he wouldn't wish me that... and i was right.

but while i was busy being hurt, gd informed me that mr smear's almost done reading maus, and he's obviously affected by art spiegelman's mother committing suicide. so i feel a little less bad.

i thought i'd get work done tonight, but i'm done. g'nite.

the stress ball

yesterday began positively, and so far the post-privileges world is looking pretty good.

when my mother informed me last night that mr smear had reported that he'd lost his privileges forever, i was reminded that on the way to school, we'd seen a child dressed up in a costume and mr smear had asked me how long until halloween.

now, please bear in mind that my son has absolutely no concept of time, and asking him what day it is is usually a silly waste of breath, but also that on our way home on saturday i'd told him that he'd remember the 10th of may as "the last time [he] fucked with me". so when i asked him what day it was, he didn't hesitate to say "11th of may" and it took everything i had to not laugh out loud and continue with "and what month is halloween?" 🤣

the past two work days have been hard, but yesterday was the harder of the two. it was almost exclusively about planning and preparing installations, although it also included entertaining nystire for a bit, reminiscing about our late coworker with our security officer (who's also mourning, but is outsourced so hasn't been doing so as part of the organization), and interviewing a very interesting candidate (i marked him as "strong hire" when i should have marked "proceed", but there's nothing i can do and it's probably fine).

those distractions notwithstanding, it was 7.30pm when we finally had a release candidate that had been sufficiently tested to begin the first installation, and we then found ourselves doing it on unfamiliar hardware and with a very clear and unrealistic looming deadline.

i found myself alone, nursing a beer (my meal replacement) and running into the weirdest issues, until at 10.15pm i realized that i'd been battling for over an hour with a VPN misconfiguration thinking that i was having network issues - that was when i finally left the office and came home; not physically tired, but emotionally completely done.

oh, and my back having been in a spasm for most of the day didn't help much either.

...

i finally posted the following yesterday evening, which i'd been thinking about since being painfully disappointed by a post from tpj a few days ago:

a few days ago an officer that i served with, who lives in a country with some of the most toxic, antisemitic media in the world (the BBC), wrote a post describing israel as an "occupation" and our army as guilty of war crimes. such counterfactual propaganda is painful enough when other people repeat it, but it's led to me recognize that the old adage about the greatest evil being the indifference of good men needs to be revised:

the greatest evil is the amplification of evil by people who we expect to know better. 

in retrospect, our lives since october 7th have been completely overtaken by a perpetual sense of mourning. we mourn the victims of the massacre itself, and all of the traumas both personal and national that the massacre has left behind. we mourn the hostages even as we hope against hope that some of them might return, and we mourn the horrors that they've endured and continue to endure. we mourn the hopes that we've held for so long that peace was somehow just around the corner, and we mourn the decades that we spent deluding ourselves that the situation was so much simpler and less demonic than it is.

but most of all we mourn the illusion that this modern, 21st century, hi-tech world was somehow better than before, that truth and justice were shared values, that antisemitism was fringe, that the west wasn't at war with innumerable enemies who work tirelessly in underhanded ways to turn democracies against themselves. and we mourn each and every friend, relative and supposed ally who falls into the sophisticated propaganda traps and turns their back on us. even more so the jews who don't realize that they're not only unwittingly betraying us over here, but themselves, and every jew everywhere, before us and after us.

perpetual mourning and grief are hard, exhausting pills to swallow.

...

it wasn't an easy night, but at least the massage time in the morning made a big difference. i dropped mr smear off at school, then headed to a post point to collect some ali express gear for gd. i arrived half an hour before opening time, so i hunted around for a coffee shop and settled down with a vegan coffee slushie.

life was good - for all of three seconds, before my phone rang with a video call from a coworker and an unfamiliar name in desperate need of assistance because one of our systems died.

the unpleasantness continued all the way to the office, with only a few minutes' pause as i picked up the package, and for the most part i didn't feel like much of a contributor (although i quietly celebrated a moment when something i'd suggested did help).

i went straight from that to troubleshooting my own installation, which needed to be done before with could continue with any others, with a bunch of different people breathing down my neck...

ultimately, i figured out what we needed to do, delegated some annoying manual labor to the project lead, and between the two of us we managed to get (almost) everything ready by the end of the day.

which is the point at which we were informed that there would be a delay in delivery, but thank you for the effort 🙄

no matter, it's been one heck of a learning experience for the organization, so i'm good with it. i came home relatively early, we all had a very pleasant evening (and watched the first episode of the original naruto series), i've had some time to myself (including playing slay the spire), and although it's late i'm going to at least spend a little time thinking about some of tomorrow's work before hitting the massager and going to bed.

...

the bitcoin money finally landed in our bank account today, and it was enough to cover the last outstanding debt we owed to my mom. this is a very special moment for us ^_^

almost restful

yesterday:

we all went out to pick up pillows (the ones we bought a few weeks ago are expensive but shit), a bunch of nature store groceries and treats, and then "opened a table" at the hummusia. it was great.

but all the while we were on the clock, trying to make arrangements to get mr smear and his friend to cinema city to see a minecraft movie (in english with hebrew subtitles, as they instructed, because his friend's trying to learn english and they both agreed that it's always better to see a movie in its original language 🤣)

we caught the bus home just in time for me to be able to pick up the first car (our "usual" vehicle wasn't available), figure out how to start it (?!), pick up the boys and get them there just in time, and only almost taking a wrong turn once. i turned the wrong way for parking, though, and we ended up having to walk quite a way... his friend's mom had organized the tickets which were supposed to include concession stand items, and figuring that out when they were already running a bit late was stressful.

i eventually got them seated, then headed out to the car to get it back before the reservation ended feeling somewhat liberated by them being okay and somewhat nervous about them being alone (i was thinking about the off-chance of mr smear somehow coming into contact with dairy)

i drove back to the car's parking spot, parked it, and had just left the building when the sirens went off - a houthi attack.

good grief.

i managed to get into a bomb shelter nearby, one full of extremely loud neighbors, while frantically talking to mr smear's friends parents and explaining that they were alone in glilot but that it was probably okay (because the theatre should be a protected area). then i walked home, grabbed a cup of tea, and began the journey to the second car, which was much futher away.

just before arriving there his friend's mother called to say that she'd called him, and that he'd complained that she was disturbing their movie :P

i drove back to cinema city, found a closer parking, and got to the theatre just as the two of them were walking out, full of enthusiasm and joy ^_^

it took a while to get out of there, but it was all good spirits and they decided that mr smear should go to his place for the evening. the drama that followed was him refusing to take stuff for the night (insisting that he didn't want to sleep over), even though he eventually did end up sleeping there.

god knows if he brushed his teeth. i know for sure he didn't shower :/

gd and i made kiddush, ate a very simple dinner, and watched the rest of nightcrawler (meh. also, have i seen it before? but mainly meh - it's a good movie but not something i'm ever in the mood for)

today:

it's weird waking up without mr smear at home. not unpleasant, but weird. after much not-much-ing (including a fair amount of slay the spire), gd and i took care of the humungous pile of dishes, and around lunchtime i called mr smear and heard that the parents were out and that he hadn't eaten. he was "peckish", he told me, but not hungry.

i walked over there (it's a half hour walk) to pick him up, and arrived in time to find them being fed. i ended up being coerced into staying for lunch and extra coffees, while the kids continued with their screen-time marathon, and the adult conversation was excellent and ended in me passionately describing the magic of shakespeare's sonnets to people who really appreciated it.

after that, i finally managed to extricate myself and my boy, and we were off on our way home. in very good spirits.

...

right until i explained that due to the excessive screen time, there would be none until dinner (which at that point was only an hour or two away). what followed was pretty extreme, not just the fighting over screentime and rudeness and consequences, but also me having to physically drag him half the way home.

it was all just fucking awful.

there were big feelings and strong words and angry silences. also a couple of funny moments, but they didn't last. i explained to mr smear that we're going to mark today - the 10th of may - as the last day that he gets away with the bad attitude.

i didn't know whether gd would be supportive or not, but it only took her a minute to realize what he was doing and how and we agreed whole-broken-heartedly that real measures needed to be taken. so while he showered, i figured out how to block specific sites on the computer, initiated an account deletion for roblox, deleted almost all the games of the ps4 (except for my games) and unsubscribed from their plus program, and disabled his access to our steam library.

it's cold turkey time.

there was still some lingering nastiness over a very quiet dinner, but afterwards we all had a family talk and it really feels like we got through to him. in addition to everything else we discussed - and we discussed a lot of stuff - i instructed him to start working on a gratitude journal, which he did with gusto.

bedtime was smooth, and pleasant.

post-bedtime? gd and i are absolutely drained following all the drama. it was a beautiful, restful weekend that was marred by car rental issues, terrorism and a massive parenting failure, and it's pretty hard right now to focus on the good stuff. i'm going to go practice that now.