recap

my post-nasal drip has been getting progressively better, though i'm still not 100%. i am feeling loads better, though.

i dropped mr smear off today, drove to my mom's, sold his old balance bike, and tried to square things away so i could get some work done.

the first order of business: docker. i spent forever troubleshooting All The Things, eventually it turned out that window's firewall was silently blocking it without any kind of notification or monitor logs. fuckers.

then something bizarre started happening, and it took me a long time to identify exactly what was going on: whenever something was running with administrative privileges, the mouse and trackpad would be completely disabled. i spent hours searching and trying things out, to no avail, but eventually started shutting things down in desperation and lo! the holdkey app that i've been using for a year was the culprit. clearly i hit a bad setting, and once it was closed my system ran beautifully.

over the course of two work days, i've managed one day's worth of billable hours. i have enjoyed exactly none of this whole ordeal, and effectively lost four irretrievable days of quality of life that i sorely needed. the biggest lessons learned? a bit more patience with some of windows' worse flaws, and that i'm most definitely a windows person - at least until the millions of well-meaning asshats who make linux products for money learn that user experience is meaningful and begins at installation.

...

mr smear:

we had a pretty good start to the day, although as we were leaving for school he told us: "we were playing 'simon says' and one of the kids said 'simon says hit mr smear' so they did". i don't know how accurate/true that story is, but even if it's 100% true then he waited so long to tell us (he hasn't been at school in a week) there's not much we can do about it. the whole thing is heartbreaking.

he got himself into trouble with gd this afternoon, and we suspect that he has been having too much screen-time. he's usually okay with downtime but he wasn't today, though he did calm down eventually and got to choose our dinnertime movie as a reward: i'm glad he chose coco, we all enjoyed it immensely (again).

...

gd and i had a bit of a fight this evening, two rounds, and she said/did some really brilliant things (even though i was angry, i couldn't help but laugh at her legitimately hilarious impressions of me), one of which brought up something really powerful: she described me as operating out of a tiger's cage that i've constructed for myself. and i realized something crazy: my father, as abusive and mean and violent as he was, was not as consistently abusive as the kids (and some teachers) that i was forced to spend most of my days with.

i went to a particularly toxic school, where a culture of bullying has always been the norm - not just the students, but the parents and teachers as well - and i always made a great victim. i came from a home with constant fighting, and was socialized with constant fighting, how was i not going to grow up a big, angry baby? i'm embarrassed about my flailing about, but i still don't know how to handle my emotions, how to express myself in healthy ways. i might not be on the spectrum, but i do exhibit similar behaviours and tonight's little revelation makes me realize that i've spent the past two decades on a sine wave of resocializing. some days are better than others, unfortunately the ability to understand a behaviour or emotion doesn't directly equate to managing it properly.

back to my father: it's intriguing that there are some (positive) things i do with mr smear that remind me of him. i think he was very confused about this whole "life" thing, i don't think he was capable of really loving another human being, and i'm very confident that having children was something he wasn't too excited about, but amidst all the awful memories i recall a few fun ones. it wasn't all bad, and it feels surprisingly peaceful just remembering that.