noodle prayer

 my meeting with my now ex-boss went very well, although it began with a neighboring alarm going off  for a few very painful minutes and it reminded me that i've recently become more and more aware that i suffer from misophonia - not that the alarm counts, obviously, but i'm hyper-sensitive to anything unexpected, especially patterns of noises that should not be. like my family's chewing. or a dog barking the same bark in a loop.

anyway.

i returned home for a while before heading to my interview, and by the time i left i was quite nervous. i don't interview well, and this one was really important.

...

it seems to have gone well. i'm now gathering additional references (my current bosses referred me, i've got my previous team lead / manager on board and tomorrow i'll chat with a coworker from my last gig in cape town), and preparing for my next interviews and meetings. 

i've got another interview tomorrow.

we ate ramen for dinner.

...

i headed to the office and spent the next few hours making arrangements and brushing up on some blockchain stuff, had a brief encounter with one of my now-ex coworkers, then headed out and home.

i realized this afternoon that in the whirlwind of the past week or so, i've barely stopped to breathe and just let thoughts settle. i'm fantasizing about getting a job offer very soon, and taking a couple of weeks completely off before returning to work.

at some point in the afternoon i fired off a message to copywriter regarding the sharing of political posts, we don't usually do that but he's a democrat and recently been particularly fired up:

dude, let's chill with the political stuff. there's so much extreme shit on all sides, everyone posting shit without context and manipulating everyone. at the end of the day, i understand you're scared for what's happening now, but i've been scared about what's been happening until now, and nobody really knows what's coming or how things are going to turn out.

the only thing i know for sure is that america and the west in general have been played by russia, china and iran for decades, and we're in deep shit. if it takes bad people to change the balance, so be it. in my opinion there's no worse outcome for america than what comes after what we've been seeing across america and europe since october 7th.

you don't have to agree with me, and we don't even have to agree to disagree. but please avoid posting me political stuff because it's just more of the same of what i'm seeing in my feeds and i don't want any of this shit in my head. i want to be safe, and i want to be functional, and i want to have some peace of mind

fortunately that was received in the spirit it was intended. but now that i'm on the topic, i just saw this clip on the colombian deportation debacle and you can't make this stuff up.

...

it was a bit difficult to get mr smear to cooperate with working through fractions with me, it took a few rounds. i hit upon what seems to be an effective system: if he doesn't cooperate, it's five minutes "time out" + fifteen minutes off his "privileges" (screen time). it took three rounds, and when he finally decided it wasn't worth the fight we got through the exercises and he appears to have learned.

i told him that i really don't enjoy the battle of teaching him stuff when he gets in that mode (which is almost always due to a lack of confidence on his part), but that i really enjoy the payoff: seeing understanding dawn on his face when he *gets* something, and being able to show him how silly his resistance was in the first place 😈

hopefully our next session will be smoother.

...

the eventual success and the rest of the evening was good, though as usual i flaked and passed out on the couch trying to watch something with gd (operation finale). to be fair, it was after i'd spent half an episode of cowboy bebop trying to fix her neck with bengay :P

the cough

 gd's still coughing, and my mom and mr smear have been coughing pretty badly too. i've been a bit post-nasal-drippy myself, but i'm doing somewhat alright. the three of them did rapid antigen tests yesterday just in case, so apparently it's not covid. that's something.

this has been a HUGE week, and i have to work backwards because just trying to remember what happened a few days ago is overwhelming. so i'm writing the rest of this post from the end, but trying to keep it in chronological order nonetheless, so i'm feeling a bit like a detective right now :P

tuesday:

we started the day pretty early, my mother needed to get her phone sorted out (she'd been here three days already) and gd and i navigating legal cannabis. that turned out to be surprisingly straightforward! our next step was trying to sort my mother out with a ravkav card, which we failed to do. i took mr smear with me to work while my mom and gd went to ikea, and i was quite nervous about how the day was going to go... the last time i took him we had an incident.

it proved to be a corrective experience for both of us: he started the day with blockbench, and then when he got bored of that he moved on to video games. we took a break for lunch, and in the interests of expediency (he just wanted to get back to the office) he elected to get sumsum for lunch, and was very proud of himself for putting together his own salad. although he has since admonished me for interfering with his selection, even though i know that if i hadn't "helped" him it was just have been a giant bowl of pickled cucumbers :P

so he ate well, had a good time, and when gd eventually arrived to pick him up he needed to be coerced rather aggressively to leave :P

gd, meanwhile, had had a brilliant idea after she and my mom had picked up curtains and a small desk for - that it might be much cheaper and easier to bring the stuff home by taxi than to get it delivered. and she was totally right!

after work, i walked to firefighter's office for an informal chat. everything was going great until his two "officers" asked me about my professional history, and i finished talking about my previous employer. at that point, unprompted and unplanned, my jaw continued flapping and i just blurted out how unhappy i was with my present employer. not only unprofessional, but a couple of the things i said were far from accurate. i was mortified, and that was while my mouth was still working.

ugh.

i'm still cringing.

the follow-up conversation apparently went well in spite of that, and firefighter helped me put a finger on the root cause of my complaints: i may like the people i work with and get along with them, but we do not have a good culture fit. and the main reason for that is that they're a thoroughly reactive culture.

i came home to recover with my family, simultaneously buzzing with excitement and shame. i spent quite a while thinking about what transpired and what was potentially on the table.

i also put together the new desk, and i'm sitting at it right now - i'm very happy with having a proper space of my own to operate ^_^

wednesday:

the day began with gd and i going for an extended hour and a half of guidance, which proved very helpful, but made me a bit late for work.

the workday began with two revelations: the first, that our italian colleague is leaving, and the second, that a few months ago he ripped out a whole bunch of functionality that i needed in order to complete my work.

in the middle of the day i met up with gd and mr smear for his initial consultation with the public mental health people. we were taken by surprise that the meeting was just for mr smear alone, and we were very concerned that he wouldn't be comfortable with that, but he handled it just fine and actually had a good experience.

this is good.

the next couple of hours were me finally completing the work that i'd spent three days suffering from, and i left the office when i realized that i was effectively done with my week and didn't need to be looking for anything else to do. it was a really, really good feeling.

i did a decent-sized grocery shopping and arrived home just in time for a call with copywriter, who i haven't chatted to properly in years. we had a very interesting chat until dinner time, and he opened with one of the biggest points that is a lesson that i definitely needed right now: it doesn't matter what you're going through, you give positive vibes when you start talking to someone. even if just to set the tone. i've always had trouble with the question "how are you" when i'm having a bad day, and that conversation really clicked for me.

yesterday (thursday):

i needed a vacation day to get my head right, i started the day by chopping a number of items off my to-do list and it felt good.

gd wasn't feeling up to leaving the apartment, and nobody was feeling up to the planned jerusalem mission, so my mom and mr smear and i went on a shopping mission instead. we began by sorting out her ravkav card, which was a bit of a story but we got it right eventually. our first stop was bash gal, where we picked up all of mr smear's mma gear, all right-sized for him, and for much cheaper than getting it through his gym.

i cannot tell you how proud it made me to see him wearing his jiujitsu gi! (even if i've never worn one myself, it looks really good on him ^_^)

then we picked up (apparently) exactly what we needed to get our curtains sorted out, and checked out the gadget store where i thought we'd pick up a pokémon starter kit. 1. we didn't pick up a starter kit, and in retrospect i'm glad we didn't. 2. mr smear may or may not have broken one of the toys on display (i'm pretty sure it was broken already), but the look of abject horror on his face and the deep understanding of why we don't play with items we haven't bought? priceless.

we got to the mall and immediately found the pokémon battle academy, which is what i was looking for. and the sales guy threw in an extra booster pack to wish us luck :) we got slushies, and then i managed to pick up exactly what i needed - a proper usb hub and a simple keyboard that's a) got hebrew letters and b) way more comfortable than my other one.

[GROSSNESS WARNING] on the way out i threw something into a bin with a flip-top, not noticing that someone had spat a giant gob with chunky green snot on the other side. that slammed into the back of my hand. i couldn't get to the bathroom fast enough, and i was incapable of taking the disgusted look off my face for a while.

between our morning adventures and the evening ones, we had a couple of hours to rest at home. mr smear cracked open the new pokémon battle academy and we had a great time following the tutorial! our play was interrupted a couple of times, as i spoke to our neighbour's sister about my mother's aliyah obstacles. hopefully she'll be able to help, but it can't hurt having someone in the foreign ministry aware of the madness that real people (ie non-politicians) are experiencing.

on the way to the shuk, i was chewing gum. on the right side of my mouth, to avoid The Tooth. at one point towards the beginning of our journey, i got adventurous and chewed, twice, on the left side.

my mouth proceeded to HURT for the next couple of HOURS. it was deeply upsetting.

my mom and i sat for bit over coffee and iced tea after dropping mr smear off at his therapy session, and i made plans to meet with one of firefighter's guys who seems to think we're on good footing - this is very exciting! we walked around the shuk for a bit, picking up a french press along the way. i could probably have paid less for it, but it seems good. i'm still a bit nervous about the glass exploding.

we stopped at kongress bazel for falafel on the way home, mr smear ate most of a huge laffa and my mom and i had pitot. it was delicious.

i went to bed almost immediately after saying goodnight to mr smear, because when i bent down to say goodnight my hand suddenly hurt intensely: nerve pain from my neck.

i would wake up around midnight due to reflux (or something similar), caused by me going to bed after eating such a a heavy meal... 

this morning so far:

i woke up feeling a bit better, but nervous about my neck. mr smear's voice is almost gone, so in the interests of protecting it he's taken a page out of the adventure time playbook and he's writing notes to us. so far, it's hilarious!

mars one mit analysis

copywriter sent me a link to this really interesting analysis of mars one.

am i wrong in thinking that they really shouldn't be worrying about transporting spare parts, but should be 3D printing over there? and looking for ways to use the excess oxygen to produce ink...

conserving energy - part ii

[... continued]

thursday:

we woke up to a cooler morning, which i spent studying, then napping, then studying again. in the afternoon i went to the gym to work on the bags because i wouldn't be able to make the class, and i spent about ten or fifteen minutes half-crazed hunting my wraps and certain that they were here somewhere and that i was just botching my search rolls. only it turned out that gd had accidentally taken them with to her gym, but fortunately she'd just finished there and we met at the station.

the hour or so that i spent at the gym was good, i worked hard and learned a thing or two from the guy who once made me paranoid about ringworm, who was pleased to learn a thing or two from me in return :)

it's the first time i've showered at the gym and the experience was pretty comfortable, even though i'd continue sweating for a while afterwards and needed to shower properly when i got home. note to self: don't go to the gym without a protein bar, especially when you're no longer living next door.

gd and i watched the end of reincarnated and i was left with the same complaint about the difference in quality between the music on the soundtrack and the actual album he released. we both agreed that while he comes across as a complete buffoon, snoop's at least honest. he really doesn't have much to say, but he's certainly entertaining.

gd received a gift of turkish coffee from one of her clients and it's the shit! a pity for her that she can't sleep after drinking it :P

we had a slam team meeting but i was the only one who showed up so two of us did some creative collaboration and we've had some interesting ideas. we were far more productive than we would have been with a full team, i suspect it'd be smarter for us all to meet in twos and threes separately.

i had serious munchies by the time i left, and being vegan with midnight munchies is a tragedy. i stopped in at a pizza joint where the guy's eyes popped out of his head as he yelled "pizza without cheese?!", and i eventually found a&w's végé burger which i could order without cheese. they still managed to surprise me by putting mayonnaise on it. mayonnaise?? without mentioning it? who the hell puts mayonnaise on a burger?!

i was still hungry when i got home, gd had made beets which i turned into a mess and she sorted me out with a grilled cheese before we started watching bad grampa. we finished watching the movie last night, and i have to say that watching bad grampa .5 first made the actual movie that much more interesting, shocking and clever.

---yesterday:

it was even cooler than the day before, i was sleeping wonderfully wrapped in blankets but i forced myself to wake up so that i could make gd her breakfast shake. i couldn't get back to sleep, so i played a lot of tekken and watched a bit of underworld, which i've been meaning to see since it came out. it's pretty cool.

i wasn't stressing until i spoke to my mother - who's stressing on my behalf - and made a call to the bank to discover that they haven't heard anything of the amount that my mother transferred to me at the beginning of the week. they've told me to wait patiently until tuesday before panicking, and seeing as my bank balance just went below zero i found that so very comforting :/

i spoke to copywriter for a bit, he made some absurd suggestions about what i can do to stay on the continent if my job doesn't materialize and it took a while to explain to him how immigration works. when you're born an american citizen, these are things you never really need to understand...

i lost an hour to running around looking for a supermarket or health store in the area where i could buy commensal frozen meals. apparently there's an actual restaurant location a few blocks in the other direction, so i'll have to check that out.

desperately hungry and feeling out of time, i stopped in at midi 6 for their vegan option, which of course i enjoyed. i came home to study but found my brain non-compliant, so i ended up doing chores instead. it's not like there's a lack of those at the moment :P

i wasn't up for boxing, so i ran again. quite well, and although my legs were sore when i returned they've settled since and i'm feeling pretty good at the moment.

gd and i shopped, i made dinner and we sank into the couch to finish bad grampa before going to bed.

---today:

i didn't fully wake up in order to make breakfast, and so i managed to get back to sleep and dream about renting out space i don't actually have, leaving me with a sense of disappointment when i got up. i'm glad i've finally posted this, i've tidied a little bit more and i'm about ready to face my day.

i've *just* received a request to rent my apartment... for one night. in the middle of september. *DAMN*, that's unhelpful!

---how far are we from a star trek reality?

revisiting: monday

i'm splitting these up. it's been a crazy week.

---monday:

i mentioned winter coming back for a visit - my windows have been open since the temperature began to rise, and in the middle of the night i woke up feeling frozen.

later i'd wake up absolutely exhausted. it felt appropriate to walk through the rain with folk and blues accompanying me. i was also accompanied by a little trepidation, because i'd received authorization for my south african holiday but megaman did express concern as company policy is not to take more than two weeks consecutively and not to take any holiday prior to CES.

as aota said, though: if it's been authorized, then that's that. i guess in my head i'm still under military conditions regarding holidays...

one of the interns invited me to go white water rafting this weekend - i wonder if it'll materialize? it does sound like fun...

there's nothing i dislike more than crazy last-minute fixes, and being informed that with the amazon server we now have access to metrics and that these metrics show our server operating at 100% cpu after we've already hit showtime... i was not happy. it didn't take long to find the source of the problem, an infinite loop that moonlighter wrote. funny story: i had trouble trying to find a way to perform the same logic using interrupts instead of constant polling, and after a lengthy search discovered that he'd overridden the default operation of the function he was using so that it specifically wouldn't use interrupts. by the time i made that discovery, made the change and tested it, it was too late to put it into production.

not - happy...

to make matters worse, the office had been going completely nuts right until the end of the day, and i was about to pay the price for bad delegation. i asked cls, who'd helped me test my fix by making an important fix on the client, to send out the email to inform megaman and the cto what we'd done. unfortunately, cls misunderstood and thought that we were modifying our production environment to match the testing, and the cto spent the next few emails (spanning a couple of hours) shouting at us for something we weren't planning on doing. no matter how many times i explained. he wasn't reachable by phone. the whole thing was pretty infuriating.

i wasn't feeling great, so i spent the evening cleaning up a bit and trying to write posts. copywriter, my mother and overclocker all made that last bit really tough.

1. copywriter told me, in a rather circuitous fashion, that making the sacrifices that i'm making in order to establish myself as canadian is the right thing to do. on the one hand, i didn't need him to tell me that. on the other, i did need someone to tell me that. by sacrifices we're talking about things like not studying right now, and not going to burning man, and not really focusing on my comics. that sort of thing. essentially, the sacrifice of working full-time as opposed to freelancing and owning my schedule.

2. my mother and i have established what's wrong with me! well, one of the things that's wrong with me, anyway. i have information ocd. that explains why i can't not update my blog, why i need to present myself (and you) with all the details of my days that normal people would simply gloss over. and why i feel terrible when a conversation goes one way without going the other, or why i have to get the whole thought out or prevent you from continuing your story without clarifying things that i can't assimilate. <see asperger's>

i made an enormous salad, grabbed a beer and settled down to watch loads of the it crowd. i needed the beer. i was just about to get into fixing my wraps when i got blocked: it appears that pg took the sewing kit i bought and left me with a different one, one that didn't have any needles in it :S

---something that occurred to me on saturday while listening to stories about our forebears travelling through the desert (for forty years): people who travel through the desert would have to become nocturnal, which would nicely explain why the jewish calendar is lunar, why the jewish "day" begins in the evening and why unlike most cultures jews consider the moon to be masculine and the sun feminine.

it's also easy enough to imagine that the whole blood libel story might have stemmed from the passover retelling of the painting of blood over the doors to ward off the angel of death. but let's ignore the blood libel aspect and return a couple of thousand years to when the jews emerged from the desert and into the land of israel. how quickly did they return to being collectively diurnal? would their enemies (or neighbours) not have found their nocturnal behaviour strange and begun to believe them to be nosferatu? could this explain their miraculous conquest of canaan?

just a thought.

consumption junction

mmmf. netflix and a home theatre setup isn't healthy. i just keep pressing "play" at the end of every episode...

---the discussion about israel that began yesterday continued today, and got very emotional. at some points i was angry because people who know me, but not well, don't understand where i stand and why i left, and it's important for me that everyone knows that i didn't just give up. i didn't just flee with my tail between my legs, and i'm sad that after everything i went through i was unable to make israel my home. i was successful as an israeli, i have one and a half degrees, an excellent service record and good professional experience / references to show that. also a few good friends and a heck of a lot of interesting stories. but what i didn't have was satisfaction.

every day, no, every time i left my apartment i would be exposed to behaviour that made me suffer. and not just behaviour towards me; i cannot ignore other people and i cannot abide by unnecessary aggression. now, it's one thing to try and fail to change that, but it's another entirely to be told not to try to change it. i cannot help but be offended to my core by "the indifference of good men".

what i most appreciated today was a private message from a friend of a friend that i've never met, who'd seen our mutual friend's comments and read what i had to say: she just wanted to share that she could sympathize. i found that touching.

i know that there are a lot of good people there, and a lot of initiatives to bring about change - but i also know that i'm out of place in that society and while i can manage well there i cannot feel secure or be happy until that change is affected. and, as i've said before, while i hope and pray that i'm wrong i've lost faith and can only envision their society collapsing.

is quebec perfect? is anywhere perfect? no. but even though i'm just beginning my new life here, and i don't even know where i'll be in two years' time, i'm already more at peace than i've been in well over a decade. what was i fighting for all that time? and stressing about? to what end?

---last night:

warm bodies: amusing, but with disturbing plot holes that weren't actually funny. it's not as well done as shaun of the dead. having said that, it does present an interesting counterpoint to my zombie thesis and has provided much food for thought. so i guess i appreciate it, even if i'm not thrilled by it. also - it was filmed here! i *thought* the locations looked familiar.

so the meetup itself was afterwards, sitting around a couple of tables at a pizza hut. it was super awkward at first. i was feeling self-conscious about not ordering food, but the guy sitting across from me ordered nothing but green tea so i did too, and then i discovered that he's a vegan as well and we had a discussion that made me feel really good - i got him to rethink some of his fanatic beliefs by assailing him with logic. in particular, he's not so sure he's anti-GM foods anymore. and he informed me that dr. greger is going to be in town soon and i'd really like to hear him speak.

so, a lot of the people at the meetup are a little older (or elderly) and a bit broken (like, recently divorced or in the process of separating), but there were a couple of other younger folk (like, younger than me, i guess i'm not in my early twenties anymore :P). the younger girl invited a few of us to a talk next weekend that sounds right up my alley! cool - i hope i don't hate it...

one old man overheard a conversation i was having about humour and stopped as he walked past: "you sound really educated."
i awkwardly responded with something along the lines of "i try," and only later would think of a decent (and appropriately humble) response.
*sigh*
i'm not used to appreciation from strangers.

so ultimately, the evening was very pleasant and a good time was had by all. riiiiiight until that moment when i decided to accept a lift to the metro station instead of taking a two-minute walk. the man offering was really excited to talk to an israeli, and instead of a minute in the car i sat for about half an hour as he ranted and raved, first about israeli politics and then about quebec politics and the injustice of bill 101 and how it's a human rights violation. basically, it was like being trapped in a car with my offensive uncle on a roll, only this was a total stranger. he kinda reminded me of rip torn, if rip torn was driving a car that looked like he was sleeping in it.

after eventually managing to extract myself from the vehicle, i needed to shake off my disgust and frustration and horror and the hopeless reliving of the defining moment in which i accepted his kind offer: it was with crazy-people vocal expressions that i did so. almost-shouting at myself while alone crossing a bridge in the rain, things like "damn!" and rolling my eyes while breathing "why?!"... that sort of thing.

...

and then i returned to my apartment and the why-i-left-israel discussion wasn't over.
*facepalm*
you'd think i'd just leave it until morning, but xkcd 386. and this was about me.

i watched lots of how i met your mother and ate a lot of chocolate, and i felt better when i finally went to bed. actually, that kinda sums up tonight as well.

---i've been playing penny arcade: gamers vs evil with dystopia, zenstar and schpat, and i actually managed to win a game. i'm super proud!

---today:

i woke up late and into beautiful weather. i had a very long chat with copywriter that got political and philosophical, after which i rushed off to the gym to watch the open mma mat. well! that wasn't happening, so i just trained for a while instead. i mainly focused on my kicking - it's a long process to recalibrate - and walked out totally satisfied with myself and really glad that i'm living so close to an excellent gym.

after chatting with my mum i settled down to work on my comics, and while i didn't make as much progress quantity-wise as last time i certainly did hit upon something that makes the transformation from figure of speech to poetry much clearer. i've been wondering about doing this as a webcomic, but while i think the slow-release format might be suitable my drawing skills definitely are not. i mean, i can communicate what i'm going for but is that really all i want? i want people to read it and enjoy the fantastic world that ol' shakespeare has created, not just go "ah, very clever! i see what he was going for".

---"so delicious" mint marble fudge is soy-based ice-cream and it's stupidly delicious! like, omg, it's awesome and satisfying and uncontrollable.