ticking

i can barely keep track of the days. today was monday. freedom day. but none of us are feeling particularly free at the moment.

this evening we began yom hazikaron, and i spent most of the hour of the live ceremony from latrun with tears streaming down my face. this was a heavy enough day before i had a son who will probably serve when he's old enough.

gd started a point system for him a few days ago, it's been pretty effective... except when it isn't.

the last three days of last week were super-intense, i was overwhelmed and it didn't help that gd and mr smear were having a hard time too. we've been in lockdown for a long time. we're exhausted.

the three of us dancing madly after watching sing last night was fantastic.

mr smear got the hang of hooks and uppercuts today, it was awesome! he totally failed at the jump rope, though, which is frustrating because he pretty much got it the last time we tried.

there's been a lot of toy story 3 going on this past week. we desperately need another ps3 controller as soon as they lift the restrictions enough.

my initial foray into programmable banking has been a success! my initial foray into clearing my paycheque with my new bank? not so much :(

i've allowed myself to get hooked into bacterial takeover again. it's like a mathematical meditation.

the past two weekends have seen two tabletop simulator games of munchkin, the first one i messed up with antisocial behaviour, the second was a lot of fun and i not only won, but got the hang of importing / creating objects and i now have a much greater appreciation for how awesome TTS is!

i've gotten involved with the temple's technical team, and the past few services were a great success but it's been quite an experience learning the etiquette of how to be online in a meeting that's being streamed live...

on friday we received notice that the lockdown, which until now has been bearable largely because we've had use of our building's common areas, is now being enforced fully and we risk fines and arrest if we go down to the garden. so things are now a bit harder than they were before :(

i'm tired. i'm supposed to be "doing stuff" but i really need to go to bed, so i'm doing that instead.

oh! the latest page of the graphic novel is available! i'm loving the artwork but i wasn't happy with the artist's take on the speech layout, it took an hour or two of (for me) hard work to put together a decent outline of what i wanted but the result he returned is excellent and i'm really pleased!

survivalist

this is a weird time to be alive.

last week was a bit of a wash as far as work was concerned, but a lot of things fell into place and the weekend was mostly good. the highlight of the weekend was friday evening in the playground, mr smear and our neighbours' six year-old daughter were having a very serious debate about monsters and the lion king, and it gave me a wonderful insight into his inner world as much as it brought delight to the adults witnessing it (her grandmother and myself).

i made a bit of progress on one of my personal projects in spite of losing two hours trying to solve a problem that didn't exist, and last night's tabletop simulator game of munchkin was great in spite of me almost destroying it by playing a badly timed curse for shits and giggles.

today wasn't too bad, in addition to my new bank card arriving (which lets me participate in the dev beta programme) we had some major rage / anxiety over some idiot parents in our kid's class and the principal did a fantastic job of allaying our concerns. gd had a bit of a breakdown last night - five weeks of lockdown have been getting to her - but we seem to be making a good go of things and we're mostly okay.

we're very, very grateful. i have a good job, we live in a great building, we're not completely disconnected from my mom, mr smear's mostly managing the new reality and we're finding our groove as a family sharing every waking minute of the day.

horseman and i had a very interesting chat last night, and a crypto-buddy and i turned that conversation's inspiration into something with a lot of potential.

my biggest issue is that it feels like there are considerably less hours in the day, these days. i'm halfway through my work day, it's 10.30pm and mr smear only recently went to sleep. here we go.

still standing

we watched sing the other night, so that song's still stuck in our heads...

mr smear needed me again in the middle of the night, on my way back to bed i groggily decided to try getting up earlier. turned out to be a good idea, i was actually quite productive today in spite of a few big interruptions. i also managed to take mr smear out in the rain with the umbrellas, and get in a big grocery run with my mom's help. and the evening was mostly enjoyable, except for the bit where he ran over and smashed me in the groin and i had to put him and his mother in timeout because neither of them could stop giggling hysterically.

it's late. i'm tired. if it wasn't for the rest of code 8 i'd definitely go to bed right now.

relaxed

[EDIT: published the following day when i realized i hadn't pushed the publish button]

i was going to get some more work done after putting mr smear to bed, but then gd started watching code 8 and it's amazing.

today had some rough edges, but was mostly positive. i got my new bank account opened! in time to invoice my employer with the new details! so that's cool. also, i ended up being right about something at work after my difficult coworker disagreed with me, so i got a little in-your-face bonus in addition to actually solving the problem that's been plaguing me for a day or two :D

oh! and we watched small soldiers this evening, i didn't remember there being a few phrases that aren't so good for kids but overall we all had fun.

better

today was a good day. i had a two and a half hour chat with the difficult teammate that went well, and resulted in me feeling like i have a good understanding of what's going on and what's needed. my conversations with another teammate were constructive. i've applied for a new bank account in order to participate in a really exciting beta programme, i had a (virtual) face-to-face 1:1 with my boss for the first time in weeks and he's renegotiated the terms of my contract in my favour.

the dusk game of tag in the garden with mr smear before bath-time was great. the end of season 2 of con man was amazing.

how is it almost 1am?!?!

the easter bunny keeps laying chocolate eggs

today seemed better than yesterday, although i'm not entirely sure why. some of my engagements with mr smear were very positive, some were unpleasant, but at least gd and i are settling on the strategy that our therapist advised and so far it doesn't seem to be a terrible one.

as for me, i completed my blog post resurrection project, although sadly the blogger api doesn't support uploaded comments so i'm keeping those to myself. there's something immensely satisfying about the fact that it's done, and i did enjoy going through some of them. i also put a bit more time into my little media tool project, the big effort was getting my samsung to play ball and i was very lucky to stumble across an article dealing with the fact that samsung has ditched the standard media camera / mic stream interface and provided a code sample that worked... or, at least it did once i realized that it would only work over https and spent a long time fiddling until i understood that the latest version of OS X doesn't play nicely with self-signed certificates.

we're almost done with con man, and it is utterly magnificent. amazing cast, brilliant writing, absolutely fantastic.

i feel like there was more, but it's now past midnight and i need to go to bed soon. i'm just going to finish up reviewing one of my new creative writing group's pieces and then i'm done.

colonial psychopathy

So, I'm up, wondering if a psychologist somewhere is doing or has done their dissertation, asserting that the behaviour of 16th-19th century monarchs, "explorers", and settlers meets the DSM-5 criteria for sociopathy (ASPD) and that white supremacy is simply a manifestation of the disorder, as it is known to have genetic factors .

me: this is precisely why it's important to teach postmodernism widely and not just for a select few, we end up ascribing ideological aspects to physical traits or personal deficiencies because we have little appreciation for how powerful beliefs and narratives can be. you don't need genes to explain a history of human beings justifying being awful to one another, and those people doing horrible things don't even need to be assholes or sociopaths or evil. many of the biggest tragedies in history were caused by good but misguided intentions borne out of a warped world view.

I absolutely get that. Many "good" people have gone along with horrible things because it was dangerous to go against the flow, or personally convenient, or popular. Lately, maybe because there's a poem coming, I've been reading about European royal families and the degree of generational intermarriage. There are well documented stories about the effects of inbreeding, the Habsburg jaw, hemophilia, etc. Why not the cognitive issues, mental illness and the rest of the potential delays and disorders? These are the people whose worldview got us here. They funded the "exlplorations", had flags planted in their names, and still have their faces on our money. At best, they and their issues were complicit in how we got here through direct or indirect manipulation. At worst, the world's order has been formed by the ideas of sociopaths that then trended and now have a body count in the millions. If we just ask the question, who has killed the most people on the planet, there are clear numbers. Why not look at the source of that genocidal behaviour through a different lens? It's a question. Badness can be bred or born. Both can have influence over large numbers of people.

me: the monarchs and explorers, whatever else may have been wrong with them individually, were products of their time. if you look at the history of genocides in europe, you can make an argument that europeans are a sociopathic and genocidal race. if you look at the history of genocides in africa, you can make that same argument about africans. the idea of exploration is as old as we are (it's how the native americans got there in the first place), same as conquest. what made that behaviour so popular in those centuries was technological advances that enabled it, not sudden psychopathies, and the winners of that era (in particular the british) didn't win because they were somehow worse people, or better people... they won because they had the right tools, the right strategies and a fair amount of luck*
there are plenty of mental disorders that have physical causes, but the behaviours you're describing aren't the product of anything physical, they're caused by good ol' human nature. and that behaviour isn't all good or all bad, it's filled with grey areas. what aspects you pay attention to are dictated by your own ideology, and how you interpret any data you might come across as well. clear numbers don't tell any particular story until you drill down deep into their context.
* if you're interested, one of the most fascinating non-fiction books i've ever read is max boot's "war made new", in which on of the many topics he covers is the naval advances that led to successful british conquest.

Of course there have been genocides all over the world. The difference is that Europe exported theirs for enormous capital gains and murdered and empoverished people all over the planet, particularly the people who look least like them. The idea of race is a creation, but who created it and why? Just because you can, doesn't mean you should, better tools or not. Again, back to the original post. If we look at the colonial mentality as pathological, some might be less likely to accept all of the manifest destiny BS and call it what it was, so we can get on with the business of making things right, and healing the damage, instead of pretending it didn't happen and telling folks to get over it.

me: pretending it didn't happen and telling folks to get over it isn't right, but finding a DSM category for that behaviour isn't going to fix things or help with the healing. colonizers colonized because they stood to gain immensely, but racism isn't confined to colonizers and it's not confined to any one race or set of races. the europeans did horrible things because their ideologies justified it and they could get away with it, not because they were europeans (as opposed to any other race) and not because they were mentally ill.
"the idea of race is a creation" - that's technically true, but it's an organic idea that comes out of seeing differences and having brains that categorize by stereotype and otherness. there's no one race that can take responsibility for racism or xenophobia, it's totally natural, just as it's natural that in every battle or contention one side will win or another. that doesn't make the winner "right", and it's important to teach our kids not to use mental shortcuts like racism (another thing that should be taught to everyone), but to blame any one race for all racism is absurdly racist.
if we want to heal the damage, we need to start by acknowledging what we've done, understanding why we've done it (which is why postmodernism studies are so very important), and then learn how to behave better than our instincts and our ancestors. the first step to achieving that is cognitive contamination, sharing culture and learning to communicate across ideological boundaries. that's hard work, extremely hard work, especially if you're coming from the side of the victim, but it's a war worth waging and every individual win makes you more powerful (which is why so many racists are so defensive these days). what's amazing to me is that we all tend to focus on the bad news and pay relatively little attention to the positive side of things (because we're biologically wired to do that), but if you look at the general state of the world as far as ignorance and racism and homophobia and xenophobia etc are concerned, and compare it to the world twenty, fifty, a hundred, a thousand years ago, you'll see that our ideas are evolving pretty dramatically since we all connected over the internet and things are actually improving. there will always be bigots and assholes and sociopaths, but they're fast becoming pariahs in global culture and the more we all keep talking and posting the more ideas of equality and compassion and mutual respect will become mainstream.

there is no blaming of one race here, only the desire to call a thing a thing, finally, after 500 years of gaslighting. If the exploration of the conquest mentality that brought us here sheds brighter light on the path forward, I think it's worth it. The way my ancestors have been seen and depicted needs to change too. I just want all of the lies to end. As for guilt, if the shoe fits...let folks wear it, and then do something about it. Guilt alone does nothing. If there was no focus on the good, none of us would be here anymore. We'd have died of broken hearts ages ago. We can focus on the good and acknowledge the bad. Maybe we just do that differently.

me: i 100% agree with what you're looking for, all i'm saying is that you're not going to find it with a DSM label. in a way, a DSM label would do more harm than good as it would excuse bad behavior as an unavoidable consequence of a mental illness rather than what it was, and continues to be: borne of choices we make and ideologies we can be educated out of

breathing out

i'm not even certain i have the public holiday off today (it's monday already). this has been a long, long, looooooong long weekend.

i've spent large chunks of it fighting python to write the scripts to resurrect my old blog posts, i finally pulled the trigger a couple of hours ago and still ended up having to do a significant chunk of it manually... and that was just the second third.

oh, well - at least i gained some python experience.

shadowslight, his brother, vfmp and i got in a great game of thunderstone last night, and even a game of evil apples!

we've all be trapped in the apartment for a month now, and it's taking its toll. we had a couple of massive regressions yesterday and today, loads of tantrums and much tougher love than we'd like. this shit is not trivial.

everything's exhausting. everything's costing extra. lots of usually insignificant things are moving front-and-center.

and the long weekend away from work (mostly) hasn't done anything to lessen my anxiety about what tomorrow (or tuesday) are going to look like.

mortified me

i slept alright, still feeling drained but not totally exhausted. the morning was going well until after i finished reading from the torah, when i realized that i'd actually prepared and read the wrong piece. nobody said anything, i checked in with the rabbi who confirmed. oy.

i've uploaded some more of my old posts, mr smear and gd are sitting in front of despicable me 3, and i'm finally going to finish up the writing i started three weeks ago and did have space for until... right now.

horrible week over

this is really hard, even though some of it's quite rewarding. i've just read this excellent article and it rings very, painfully true.

this work week did not feel good, i think mr devops has lost patience with me and i've been miserably trying to piece things together from what he's told me but have just been overwhelmed - hopefully i can make a rescue next week. i even took yesterday and today off, partially for passover but partially just to give myself room to breathe. i wrote python scripts while doing chores and managing mr smear. it's been... fun. okay, some of it really has been fun, but i've been completely drained.

the good news is that i've now written scripts to upload my lost blog posts to blogger! there's a limit, though, which i hope is daily so i can continue upload over the course of the next few days. it was mainly to manage my ocd anxiety, the niggling irritation every time i see those posts in my backups and think about how many years they've been there waiting to go back online. it's a silly, probably meaningless thing but it's making me feel a bit better.

pesach has been remarkably successful. our first night seder on zoom worked pretty well, my only regret was that everyone disappeared for the second half and mr smear was already over the evening and in bed. but he did enjoy it and participate! for the second night there was a kid's seder and he got into that too, so i feel like he's prepped for next year. he loves matzah. he really, really couldn't handle the chrain (horseradish). poor kid looked like his face would implode.

today's big wins were toy story 3 (and hopefully fixing the remote), a long time spent kicking a ball around the garden, carcassonne, two hours pitching some business ideas to my cousin, kiddush with my mom, watching sing as a special treat and then negotiating the resulting "i don't wanna go to bed!" to "i want a story! a movie is NOT a story!" to reciting a poem to him that calmed him down enough to say goodnight and let me and gd watch a couple of episodes of con man.

now i've practiced some leyning and i'm pretty sure i should have called it a night about an hour ago. the last few days i've been waking up almost as tired as when i go to bed.

addendum

also, making serious progress on two of my personal projects, as well as rearranging the furniture over the weekend and actually having space to work for the first time since we moved in a year and a half ago.

and being grateful for our dehumidifier now that it's getting colder. and our bed. 

another 6 days

our isolation began on the 12th of march, it's now (technically) the 8th of april and we're hearing talk of this lockdown being extended for longer than the next two weeks. we're doing okay. mostly (gd's neck's been causing her a lot of pain for about a week now). in general, we're very fortunate.

work-wise, i've been very frustrated, working with a co-worker who's tough to communicate with and dealing with parts of a system i've no experience with or context for. these three things are coming together to make me feel pretty slow and useless, which is not good. another potential concern is that due to the coronavirus pandemic my employer's dropping our maximum hours to 80%. i guess i'm going to be filling the other 20% with my own projects, which is more of a benefit than a stressor.

on friday evening i got into my sound-engineer neighbour's car studio and recorded three poems i've been trying to get out of my head for years, but the last few months in particular. it was a really cool experience! and humbling. and generally a lot of fun.

i don't know how we'd manage these weeks without toy story 3 (ps3). absolute godsend. and we've been gearing up for our first online pesach seder, which is going to be strange. mr smear's been struggling this past week or so and doing a lot of acting out - mostly towards me, which has felt awful. but between yesterday and today we seem to be getting through to him and this morning i scored a "good morning" in addition to a lot of other nice moments.

i've been investing a lot of time in transferring money again. it saddens me that there's so much incompetence in the financial world. every digital institution i've come across makes the traditional banks look more and more attractive, and i can't stand how useless and backwards the traditional banks are.

con man is bloody brilliant. watching the 2014 teenage mutant ninja turtles with mr smear was a trip. watching willow with him was pretty cool, too, and then suddenly it became insanely violent (i was fine with the troll scene, but then watching people getting shot in the chest with arrows and realizing that... perhaps not so good for a four year old...

his response to willow was to make a sign for his bedroom door that says "no evil queens allowed". i haven't the heart to tell him that if his existing signs that say "no mommies or daddies allowed in the morning" hasn't worked...

oh! on sunday morning vfmp and i spent an hour or two setting up thunderstone on tabletop simulator, which was fun. on sunday night his brother, shadowlights and shadowslight's brother joined us for a thunderstone game that went on until 2am and was great fun!

six days under

the past few days have been super-stressful trying to move my money from there to here so i can pay my rent, i've burned at least a day of work in the process (and i'm paid hourly wages, so it stings a lot), and i've *still* had to borrow the money because every damned entity between my bank accounts has served as a spoke in the wheel. i've been champing at the bit for cryptocurrency to take off as an integrated payment method, the moment i can use it for paying rent and bills i'm all in.

aside from that madness, the past few days have been a mixed bag. i've been exhausted, i'm working weird hours again. trying to keep some semblance of normal for my kid, ironically arranging days that are anything but. we had a music hour this evening. we're playing catch and kicking around a soccer ball regularly. i got him back on his skateboard yesterday. we kind of got him to dance a little this afternoon.

the center of cape town is eerily empty, except for the occasional group of homeless, and it seems much nicer without mad drivers all over the place.

gd's been doing the housework, and daily discovering more shit that our cleaning lady hasn't touched ever. this seems like a story that's just going to keep playing out, over and over, and i'm not looking forward to the drama.

mr smear's been all over the place, which is kind of the usual now. fine. the good times are really good, he's fast becoming a gamer, he's spending a fair amount of time amusing himself, he's obsessed with numbers and he *hates* us telling him he's good at maths. go figure (pun not intended).

work's been busy, somewhat satisfying. i've been forced to resurrect my windows machine and it's kinda okay. i'm been making great progress with one of my personal projects and i'm looking forward to sharing it with friends, hopefully soon.