sleep journal entry and post-hosting

i had severe lower back and hip flexor discomfort just before going to bed and had to stretch for quite a while.

i woke up at 6.40am this morning, read stranger in a strange land for a while, then went back to sleep for another hour and a half.

now my back's hurting because mr smear decided he needed some "roughhousing" and i wasn't stretched and ready to chase him around the apartment :P

...

gd posted the following yesterday, based on our experience hosting mr smear's friend the other day:

Many will hate me for this, but IDGAF anymore. I'm starting to wonder about children going through actual clinical burn outs being diagnosed as autistic. I have to ponder this, but after a certain experience I had recently (with a non autistic child in a toxic environment), certain behaviours can very much be mistaken for autism. Burns outs are very real and they don't only affect grown ups.

someone responded with "just because you're autistic doesn't mean you can't also be an asshole."

indeed - but also, just because you're an asshole doesn't mean you can't also be hurting and flailing about, it's a vicious cycle. in this case in particular, i don't care what this child was diagnosed with officially, i think the root cause is a severe lack of boundaries.

and as a parent who took a hell of a long time to learn how to establish boundaries in a healthy way (i'm still learning), i'm not unsympathetic to how hard that can be, especially in a time like now with an overload of awful parenting advice and far too much media and social media influence.

artificial unintelligence

 an anxiety has been stirring. i've written about it a fair amount the last few days, and it's crystallizing.

AI is making me dumber. lazier, more than dumber, but a laziness that's rendering it harder and harder to activate my brain.

it's not *just* all the leaning on AI, though. it's also the fact that my life is being constantly railroaded and derailed by all sorts of unexpected, mandatory, urgent side-quests that are nobody's fault, but that put everything on my shoulders.

and then, when i finally manage to get part of my sleep issues sorted out, i get hit with this horrible sinusitis bullshit. so i'm completely exhausted and i don't have the energy to sit and focus and climb out of this hole.

i hope it's not covid again.

...

i read comics, played more slay the spire 2, made at least two attempts to make some progress on AI harnesses, went for a walk with my mom and mr smear, rearranged our bookshelves, and went for a walk with my mom around the soulless neighborhood next door before saying good night to mr smear, posting this, hopping in the shower, and praying for an easier night.

the coughing chorus

 it hasn't stopped. his fever went down a bit, but it's not staying down, and his cough doesn't seem to be getting better. emotionally, he's taking a stimulant that's heightening his emotional intensity, and combined with his usual truculent (my new favorite word) default it's been a really hard day.

this morning i helped ozdoc make her radio interview shareable (thanks, facebook, for making it nigh-impossible to share audio files), and i read a bit more of the fifth percy jackson novel.

at this point, i'm so disappointed by the writing quality nosedive that i'd put the book down if i didn't want to just get through it for closure. riordan thoroughly betrays percy's character in the underworld scenes, and rips the reader out of the world with silly gags, and it's now very clear to me why percy jackson never achieved harry potter-like status in the zeitgeist.

...

i don't know what it was specifically, but something triggered me this morning regarding the ai is slowly destroying your brain video; that "folie à deux" isn't just confined to AI and to individuals, but it's the exact same mechanism that's causing mass psychosis on a global scale: it started with search filter bubbles more than two decades ago, then evolved to ad-tech driven social media driving engagement by sowing division.

this explains why flat earthers are a thing, and antivaxxers are a thing, and how the political spectrum ceased to be a spectrum and everyone decided that anyone with opposing views is extreme, insane, and evil.

...

i packed my laptop into my bag, dressed for rain, and headed out to find a quiet corner to write in. i managed to get in more than two hours of focus time, churned out an article i'm proud of, and generated a video for it using notebooklm that i'm really happy with.

on my way home - in the pouring rain - i picked up a globe for mr smear. he seems happy with it, in spite of all the country names being in hebrew...

once home, i had a quick late-lunch and then hopped on a call with my lead, who's setting me up for a meeting with a potential client. so i've got some homework to do.

the rest of the evening was a mixed bag of chilling with mr smear (watching jujutsu kaisen) and enjoying dinner, and fighting over ridiculous shit. after he went to bed gd and i had it out, and we're both feeling pretty sensitive to the fact that we're now acutely retroactively aware of all of our missteps that brought us to mr smear's more toxic behavior.

it feels pretty awful.

anyway, i've spent the past couple of hours playing around with AI and watching things while mindlessly minesweeper-ing, and i'm about to balatro for a bit before bed and hope that by some miracle mr smear's cough settles and he gets some sleep.

not least because he's supposed to go to a manga-drawing workshop tomorrow which he was really excited about...

meeting

 this morning started off a bit rocky, as i explained to mr smear the "new rules" which he immediately declared unfair and "evil". by the time he got to brushing his teeth, we were deep into synthknot territory* which is an excellent mood-transformer, and by breakfast he was ready to talk. he left the apartment in relatively good spirits.

* mr smear and i have both had psychovirtual stuck in our heads all day

i spent most of my morning updating people post-contract signing, i did a little bit of post-interview digging to understand where i went wrong (i failed yesterday's phone screen because i struggled with the details of a threading issue, which sucks, but whatever), and 

[omg we just received gd's renewed cannabis license! what an enormous relief!]

then i hopped on a bus to a part of ramat aviv i never remember exists to meet one of the guys i got fired with. i had a good vegan burger experience, and we talked shop, and it was very interesting hearing the story of his career and potentially connecting on a variety of side-projects.

he gave me a ride home, where i almost immediately crashed on the couch and remained out for quite a while. then i grudgingly got up (in stages), and got in touch with swordschool to discuss our december project. so far, i don't really understand the business side of things but it's very exciting stuff.

afterwards, we all went to the school for the parent-teacher evening. i just realized that we never spoke to his homeroom teacher, which is a bit embarrassing...

on our way in, we noticed a couple of the art pieces on the walls that were definitely creepy / horror themed, so not only is mr smear not the only kid so inclined, but the art teachers are clearly not that concerned by it. the two art teachers we met with both made it very clear that mr smear's talent is rare, and that his behavior is generally okay and improving. we informed them of his backstory and the things we're concerned with, which tied in with their experiences of him, and we left with a really nice feeling that he's in good hands.

the other parents were mad because the second teacher spent half an hour with us while there was a queue forming (the meetings were supposed to be ten minutes each, and it was getting late). when one of them came in to complain, the teacher calmly told her: "you will wait, this is important". while she showed us mr smear's work compared to some of the other students', and suggested that she's going to start challenging him with some more advanced stuff.

we caught the bus home, but it was late so i took mr smear to get a laffa. we had some difficult conversations along the way, but almost all in good spirits. i almost got into a fight with a big guy who refused to move his car off the sidewalk.

i didn't get anything for myself, but i did take a couple of bites and it was excellent.

we got home, mr smear got through the bedtime sequence in reasonable time, gd went to bed early, and i'm probably going to go to bed soon because we have to be up at 5.30am, even though i'm not sure it's going to help me get much sleep...

something

 these past few weeks seem like a fever dream, and any moment that i realize that this is all real is jarring and triggers thin tentacles of anxiety creeping through my torso.

i slept alright last night. mr smear woke me up at 6.30am to dutifully inform me that he'd brushed his teeth so that he could get on screens by 7.30am. i wish he was this motivated to get ready for school.

i got up to him playing totally accurate battle simulator, and watched him for a while, developing my usual concern that he won't play the campaign and actually learn anything. eventually *i* took a turn, and went into the campaign, and he cheered me on* while i smashed through what appears to be the tutorial levels.

* by making sure i knew that my strategies were obviously garbage, and then being surprised whenever i won

i watched a bit of why the universe’s expansion doesn’t make sense, it's very calming.

we watched another episode of jujutsu kaisen, and then i piled warm blankets on myself and read a bit of percy jackson until i passed out.

now i'm drinking coffee, listening to SORA 1989, and wondering whether i should be *doing* something or not. i always have a hard time not *doing* anything, but the *do something* mechanism in my brain seems to be offline.

spokes in the wheel

i slept alright, but woke up enraged from a nightmare in which mr smear was at a birthday party and the other kids (along with the birthday kid's parents) uninvited him because he "wasn't a citizen".

but then that rage compounded as i opened my phone and saw an urgent message from one of our deployments that had been sent hours before, and they needed a password. "i'll help out", i thought to myself, but our password manager's mid-migration because we have an external security company that invented work but didn't ensure it was completed, and they made a decision to use an SSO that doesn't work properly.

by the time i finally managed to get into my account, i couldn't find the password i was looking for, and i wrote my boss, furious, to say that we need to take full control of our passwords from these clowns.

so that happened.

we all woke up a bit earlier than usual this morning, so until it was time to take mr smear to the shuttle bus i read some more of the neverending story to him. i was re-inspired because of this video about how "prophetic" the book is, but gd has an additional related story about how it helped her through some very dark times.

and now i'm off to see a neurologist about my sleep issues.

chicken

 yesterday was intense.

i made it just in time for the yoga class, which was tough but fluid. the instructor asked me for my favorite bird, catching me off guard, and after taking some time to give it some thought i responded with "chicken". hilarity ensued. towards the end, he demonstrated a movement (balancing on hands with knees tucked into the backs of arms) and i just couldn't figure it out; at one point i was convinced that i just had the wrong body shape. when he eventually found a way to explain it to me and i got it right, i was surprised by how little strain it was on my spine and was treated to applause by my coworkers :P

the morning could be best described as a series of surprise events - it took me more than half an hour before i was able to sneak off for a quick shower between meetings.

during the meeting before my big presentation, i kept trying and failing to build an image that was being delivered to me, and eventually tried restarting docker, only to see an update pending. it looks like docker may have finally fixed whatever they broke a couple of versions ago.

from there i rushed into my presentation. i joked about it being prophetic that i'd inserted a quote slide at the beginning that said "everything is broken", because between microsoft's rug-pull with vscode extensions and our mitigations for docker's bugs made an absolute mess of everything. in spite of that, though, we got through an hour and ten minutes and there seemed to be a lot of interest, surprise and appreciation 🤷

lipgirl's lunch idea worked out really well. "i helped" (i just squeezed lemon juice), but she and another coworker put together a huge plate of really good salad; it wasn't just a good idea for us, but it looks like we might have some more people joining in on this.

soon after lunch, i headed to the warehouse to help our tech support staff on their first installation. while there, i received a call from someone i once served with who's interviewing with us, and by the time we were done i think he was convinced that joining us is a pretty good idea. i also ended up on a diatribe with my coworkers, describing some of my tokyo takeaways.

it was around 4pm when we collectively realized that we had three deployments scheduled for the next morning and they had no idea how to do them. i should mention that on a day full of pressure, our new star devops was nowhere to be found - he was preoccupied with the farewell from his previous employer. after scrambling to make space on the desks, and beginning to get the installations going (the tech support kid hadn't yet learned not to skip steps, so we had a restart at one point), we then began the process of preparing the deployments and preparing his machine to perform them.

it - took - six - hours.

there was lots of complaining, lots of joking around, and a ridiculous incident where we detected a leak in the warehouse that almost took out some of our expensive and sensitive equipment. i could have just done everything myself and bailed early, but i'm no longer the only person who can do this stuff, we learned a lot, and the celebratory vibe before we shut everything down was very real.

i came home super late, did a mind-dump with my wife and mom, and then entered into a very difficult, tiring, but ultimately rewarding fight/discussion with gd.

today:

i eventually fell into bed around 2am, with a sore back and a mind all over the place. and then something happened shortly after i fell asleep that woke me up, and i don't know if i managed to get back to sleep after that.

it's been a relaxed morning so far, i'm about to go pick up a package on the way to work and hopefully it'll be a good day.

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...

gurgle splat (and a review of our son)

 i did get a (literal) couple of hours' sleep before my alarm went off this morning. most of them, anyway.

mr smear was great this morning. he was rewarded accordingly, with multiple reminders that it's a special treat. gods help us.

the skin under my fingernail is splitting again. this is the third or fourth time since winter started and i'm so over it.

gd is very much over her damaged toe, but she insisted on not going to the clinic and instead going to her sewing lesson ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

the work day was a struggle and a half, it was very frustrating and a lot of what i had issues with made me feel rather dumb. otherwise, i had a couple of good syncs with coworkers, i finally got to sumsum for lunch (one of the syncs in question, fascinating talk), and my stomach gave me trouble pretty much the entire day. also, i'm regaining weight... i have definitely not been eating responsibly.

...

in the late afternoon gd and i met with the guy who did mr smear's psych evaluation for a feedback session. it was very comforting hearing that we've already got a good understanding of his abilities and his struggles, though it's heartbreaking that so much of his hardship is trauma response, primarily from immigrating and bullying (but also his fear of coming into contact with dairy).

we've been given some helpful recommendations and we'll continue doing what we can. and the school has absolutely no validation for medicating our child.

...

i left work pretty late, but got to enjoy some of my leftovers dinner (i avoided tonight's pizza) with gd and mr smear, and after we got mr smear into bed the two of us watched about half of john wick (neither of us have seen it before). and then i got back to working, after forty minutes deciding that i'd had enough.

i suspect that tomorrow's going to be a reckoning of sorts.

quiet

 i've been having trouble sleeping tonight, after crashing pretty early (i finished watching the first episode of slow horses, sonofabitch i'm in). after randomly scrolling through reddit threads* i lay quietly thinking about stuff.

quiet in mind, as much as in body.

i've been thinking a lot about having to face the polygraph, and as i said to gd earlier - i don't know how it'll go, and i don't expect going through this to magically resolve anything from the previous trauma, but in a way i feel like it's facing something big and that in itself would be an achievement. i'm psychologically ready to face the music, and i'm at a point in my life where what will be asked of me really isn't much of a price to pay.

i've been thinking a lot about alignment recently, and how long i've been operating professionally from a baseline misalignment, and while i'm certainly stressed about integrating well into my new role and impressing my employers and coworkers, i'm in a better place than i've been in what feels like an extraordinarily long time.

* why am i still looking at reddit? mainly for inscryption posts, and i added a few movies to my watch list.

...

our day could have started well, because gd's back finally relaxed a bit. but our day didn't start very well, and that's to say that it started off pretty badly... but by the time mr smear needed to leave for school we were all in a better place for it. it feels like the theme of the last week, to be honest. i accompanied him to school, and that served like a really pleasant reset to the day.

then gd and i hurried to misrad hapnim to continue renewing her passport. the clerk we were supposed to return to was on reception duty so it took a little while for us to get to him; while waiting in line, a lady told me how it was my "lucky day" because there were relatively few people waiting, and i turned to gd and said that after everything we've been through, i feel like any day that we're here in israel, that we're able to come to misrad hapnim and expect service, is a lucky day.

the clerk gave us a name and told us to tell them that we'd been there the day before, which made me pause, but i shut my mouth and did as i was told. we found the person - i think she's a manager - and when i told her what he'd told me to, she said "yes, i remember, i'm the one who signed it yesterday."

i couldn't stop myself from starting to say "huh, but we..." before realizing what was happening and shutting my mouth accordingly 🤣

she sat us down in front of another clerk, and we were out of there about five minutes later. great success!

...

my work day was alright. i ran into trouble with cdktf - it's documentation is arguably worse than AWS documentation, which is saying something - and just set up what my coworkers needed manually and left "the right way" for another day.

startup life.

i wanted to go find the closest sumsum salad bar, but then got diverted to the hummusia equivalent of a dive bar. the hummus was alright - not amazing - but the atmosphere was excellent 👌

it was a troubleshooting / headscratching sort of a day. i left the office at a reasonable time, got through a page of maths homework with mr smear without any bad feelings, we continued watching the fifth harry potter movie over dinner, and - aside from navigating an emotional outburst from gd* - the evening was relaxed.

* it was about not getting treatment for her foot, and i think we're going to need to visit the clinic tomorrow and try to get her an emergency appointment. we've been so concerned about her back the past few days we completely forgot about it.

...

i've been up for a few hours now, and i'm not sure if i'm going to be ready to go to bed anytime soon, but every time i think about sleeping i hear the sirens going off in my mind. fucking houthis.

the festival of everything being upside down

ugh: it got worse before it got better.

around the time i finally went to bed, mr smear woke up needing to go to the toilet (so there was much messing about with lights). i closed my eyes and let gd handle it.

then, around 3am, i got up to pee, and found mr smear with his light on reading harry potter. i stood in his doorway and (gently but with a disapproving tone) made it clear that that was unacceptable, and that he needed to be sleeping so he could get up at 6.30am.

and that was when he started arguing with me. and on top of the bad vibe, once i got him to put the book away he then complained that he couldn't go to sleep because he'd read something creepy.

that was when i lost patience, and he was fighting back, and i'd been exhausted already, so i called gd in to handle the situation and tried to go back to sleep. but i was too angry, and i couldn't bring that anger down, and then i remembered jordan peterson talking about not letting your kids do things that make you dislike them, and that anger with him slowly morphed into fear for him.

i never really got any rest, and in addition to the psychological/emotional struggle my lower back started giving me trouble too.

i was a wreck come the morning.

i managed to avoid dealing with the issue until mr smear and i were both "awake" and doing alright, and then i took him aside and told him what i'd been feeling and worrying about. he seems to have heard me, he responded well, and the rest of the morning went well.

after mr smear went to school, gd and i left to meet up with one of my los angeles cousins' kids who's visiting israel from new york, and who i haven't seen since i was a teenager and he was little. we had no idea what to expect (turns out he did a little jail time at some point, so maybe both of them did?), but after arriving at his hotel (and taking a quick tour of a tattoo studio / gallery, it's kind of our thing) we found him and walked to a cool little coffee shop, and spent the better part of two hours enjoying a beautiful sunny morning chat with a really decent guy who turned out to be quite a kindred spirit ^_^

afterwards, gd and i took the light rail to my office from where she took a bus back home, and i walked in and immediately began to fall apart,

the coffee didn't help. the fruit didn't help. the hummus for lunch was delicious but certainly didn't help. and then a long meeting in a stuffy meeting room on top of all of everything made the struggle to keep my eyes open very, very real.

not counting the happy hour (and unveiling of our new logo, which is actually pretty cool), i spent the rest of the afternoon in a fatigue haze trying to compensate with lots of sugary snacks and i'm not quite sure how much i actually achieved.

after finally arriving back home, i helped mr smear with a couple more pages of math homework (with no drama!) and we watched an episode of delicious in dungeon while eating "drekfast" (dinner + breakfast), took care of some random things after getting mr smear into bed, and then went to bed myself and passed out.

...

aside from very long, very scary, very real dreams about a dinosaur apocalypse, i slept relatively well. now we're all up and coffee'd and breakfasted, we're off to dizengoff center to see what's happening there for purim.

chag sameach!

channukah gelt

"when i'm older, i'm going to become a christian" - my boy, whose only reference is that christians get to celebrate christmas.

well. if you think we're above "channukah bushes" and channukah gelt bribery, think again.

...

today was generally okay, but long. and weird. after dropping mr smear off at school, and helping gd with the grocery shopping, i headed to the office, arriving just in time to find a phone "booth" and join gd and mr smear's therapist for a guidance session.

it went well, but we had a breakthrough moment about our influence on mr smear's fear of the dark that made us sad.

i heard back from the company i interviewed with last week: nope.

i yelled at a HOT sales representative for calling me, and someone on our floor who overheard tried to help... it was a funny moment.

i consulted with horseman about whether or not to trade thursday's bitcoin, then got involved with messages with mr smear's teacher and tutor, and by the time i was ready to get some work done, everyone was leaving to get lunch.

after lunch, i needed to sync with my boss, but he and my coworker were busy, so i tried to find a way to withdraw. i eventually ended up so suspicious that i gave up for now, and went to sit in my boss's office thinking that he'd get to me when he was done.

the two of them carried on talking until my boss put his backpack on, at which point i interrupted to ask if he was leaving, and they both expressed surprise to learn that i'd been waiting patiently for them to finish...

... in parting, my boss asked me to do one more investigation.

i spent the remainder of the afternoon doing two things: sending some of the crypto to my south african bank account, and performing the investigation. it was roughly 6pm when i realized, while checking my results, that there was a much easier way to show that the investigation was pointless...

i walked home, we had a pleasant evening / vegan pizza dinner / chat with my mom / virtual tour around krybabie's mom's new apartment, which ended with mr smear's assertion (above).

we had a talk, and it's not clear if i handled it well or not. then we informed him, in the most confusing ways possible, of our new channukah tradition. at least he seemed happy about some of it :P

i didn't sleep well at all last night - both physically and psychologically - i've no idea whether i should go to bed soon or deliberately tire myself out.

slowdown

 it's sunday morning and i'm about to leave for work, but i needed to get this down. i didn't really prep for tomorrow's interview, but i definitely and desperately needed to rest. gd and i are convinced that we've both had covid. she seems to finally be getting better.

friday:

i had a chat with swordschool in the morning, but i was still in recovery mode and my brain felt like it was melting into a puddle. but he had a great idea about gamifying something and i was happy to be able to contribute somehow.

we started watching the original beetlegeuse movie, then picked mr smear up from school and bussed to dizengoff center, where we ordered mr smear's new lens prescription (that we should've done more than a month ago) and picked up a new phone for him (an entry level samsung).

so not exactly a cheap day.

the hummusia was packed with a long line so we ended up at a franchise coffee shop eating mediocre vegan sandwiches, and the rest of the day was resting, snacking, and gaming.

i started getting into shadowrun: hong kong and it's really good so far. i'm liking a lot of the added mechanics, but i think they might have been a bit overwhelming if i hadn't recently played the first two games.

yesterday:

yesterday really felt like a recovery day. i didn't feel as ridiculously tired all day as i've been for the last week or so, although when i walked up the stairs after dropping mr smear off at his friend i almost fainted and had to lie on my back with my knees up for a few minutes in order to reset.

i was a bit irritable over the course of the day, part of it being because i decided to implement a feature with my phone control solution and it took ages to figure out something that should have been really trivial to understand, but it was overall a good, restful day.

the plan was to take mr smear out on his bike in the afternoon, but his friend called and it was a no-brainer for all of us that that was a better idea :P

i accompanied him on the walks there and back, but for the most part he was on his own and it seems like he handled himself and the afternoon really well.

...

i'm slowly reading through the honest truth about dishonesty, and the chapter on how effective lobbying and pharma rep manipulation is is simply appalling. this is stuff everyone should know.

another day, another wtf

mr smear this morning:

1. thank god he asked gd before sending a message telling his new friend off because "it's rude to message people at 7.30am" 🤦

2. on the way to school: "dad, it's when you hit puberty that you're supposed to hate your parents, right?" 

"looks like you got a headstart" 

"yeah, i really don't like my teachers"

this isn't the first time i've suspected him of being a high-functioning autistic, but the past couple of days there've been a bunch of things about his behavior and his statements that really make me wonder... for example, on sunday his therapist told me that he was very uncomfortable with her drawing of a martian apocalypse being fiery because there's no oxygen on mars...

that said, he's very calvin (from calvin & hobbes) in a lot of ways.

...

i spent a good chunk of my morning at the clinic, literally for nothing. i had a nice half hour at home between that and heading to the office, and then our CEO called me in for a one-on-one and we talked about how i'm feeling about the pivot and what it means.

i'm still not excited by what we're planning on doing. just disappointed; not in the company or our product, but in our failure to find our place in the market. between that and the weather being miserable and me not having slept well last night, i had a hard time getting anything done today and not falling asleep at my desk.

...

the people responsible for taking over gd's cannabis license are being awfully pedantic and petty, so after a couple of phone calls i managed to get the pain clinic receptionist to agree to let me come in tomorrow to ask the doctor to rewrite his recommendation. we're getting down to the wire...

...

gd was feeling too sick to take mr smear to mma today, so i did that. on the bus ride there i learned that he'd had another not-good day at school, and we've had a number of follow-up chats that i *hope* have landed. who knows? maybe we'll have the same conversation tomorrow as well :/

at least he got his head right for the class. i think that's the first mma class i've seen him in in which his teacher didn't shout at him once, he got to work, he made an effort, and he kept up a positive attitude. he enjoyed the class, he did pretty well in some things, and i was really impressed.

i'd been walking around in my rain boots for nothing the whole day, except the way home when it finally rained. mr smear loves being out in the rain, which is fun to see :)

the evening went smoothly, we talked a lot about anti-bully strategy, and i had some positive interactions with recruiters. i'm not sure now if i'm going to go to bed, or try to do something constructive. it probably doesn't matter...

out of office

 yesterday:

starting the day at the mental health clinic, for an appointment which took most of the last year to arrange. heaven forbid that should be drama free - mr smear and i were waiting outside when we heard lots of shouting, and it turned out that the psychologist, who's supposed to be dealing with people with psychological issues, greeted gd both rudely and aggressively.

WTAF?!

so gd was upset, the "doctor" was behaving like gd had done something wrong, and i had to jump in to the rescue... fortunately, the manager made every effort to fix things and, miraculously, an english-speaking shrink with a good attitude and a free slot arrived and the morning (and months of waiting) weren't lost. mr smear and i parked ourselves outside, reading and chatting, and gd was able to use her time and we're one step further down the road.

...

a surprisingly productive day at work in spite of the fact that i did *not* want to do any work. also, i was still in a mind-blown state from the vr experiences from the previous evening. i did have an argument with a coworker in the afternoon, and i was honestly really irritated by him not seeing things my way, but eventually i was able to put my finger on why each of us felt the way we did and realized that he was, ultimately, in the right.

it was a huge relief to leave the office, and (on-call notwithstanding) switch off for the next ten days.

i don't remember whether we tried to watch anything last night.

today:

i slept a bit better last night, but that's off a really low bar.

today was a big day, we set out to buy mr smear a proper synthesizer and we achieved our goal! we also tried to pick up some vr games along the way, but nobody seems to be interested in stocking them. we also looked at some books, then decided to get the entire bone collection on kindle instead.

the afternoon was spent playing with the new toy, and trying to watch a 3D movie on the psvr. that proved way more complicated than i was hoping... no success yet :/

mr smear played a vr space simulator that made me queasy, which led to a shitty mood, but eventually i got over it. kiddush for sukkot with my mom (virtually), followed by a nice dinner, interrupted by a hilariously crazy call from my sister who got herself into a particularly dramatic situation with multiple job applications and in addition to being entertained, i was actually able to give her some useful advice.

i hope she takes it :P

we put mr smear to bed, and i mindlessly/compulsively played did an idle run through kaycee's mod (only the final challenge enabled), and now it's anyone's guess what's next for the evening.

...

i've been doing holidays wrong, so i don't know how this one is going to turn out. my first priority is to rest my mind, kind of. and spend some quality time with my family. my second is to make some progress on the side project that i discussed with dod. my third is to try to arrange some test prints for my comics.

anything else is bonus.

the feelings

tuesday:

my boss didn't like my approach. we argued about it for a bit, after which he decided to put the work on hold while he thought about it. it's frustrating, but the fact that i've seen that one of my coworkers is working on fixing an underlying issue, the discovery of which was through my efforts and which i've been saying needs to be taken care of, is at least a little comforting.

our new sprint began, and almost all of my work is frontend. i'm strangely okay with that.

on tuesday evening i took mr smear with me when i went to the school to pick up his books for the next year. the summer holidays are almost over...

after putting him to bed, gd told me she'd been feeling really sad. i didn't know what to do with that information.

yesterday:

yesterday morning was going alright until gd said something that triggered a fight, a fight about how she's been dealing (or not dealing) with the past 11 months of war and trauma, but really a fight about how and when she communicates (or doesn't) with me about it.

so the day started off really shitty for both of us, but by the time i got to my office building i'd managed to transform my anger into something more constructive and we both found ourselves in a better place.

the work day was alright, which was a big deal considering how not alright it's been for week or two prior. everything was okay, everything was put on the table during the retrospective and the vibe was less tense in general.

when i got home, gd and i had a talk. a lot of the time, i say things and she says things and we talk past each other, but last night we not only heard each other, but i managed to put things to her in a way that she clearly heard, and not only did she immediately feel better about things but she's been doing a lot better over the course of today.

and even that is more than either of us expected.

i passed out on the couch immediately after putting mr smear to bed. nothing knocks me out faster than reading to him.

today:

around midnight, i was able to drag myself off the couch and get into bed. doing that, however, woke me up just enough to be too conscious of the stiffness around my hips to be able to get back to sleep, but i was also too tired to get up. even for a little bit. that went on for a few hours, and although i occasionally had the strength to get up and move around it would wear out within minutes and i'd need to lie down and suffer again.

i don't know how long it was before i finally fell asleep, but i'm guessing three of four hours of that.

my alarm clock woke me up at 7am, and i rushed everyone else up, grabbed a cup of coffee in a takeaway cup and walked to the post office. i arrived there just past eight, picked up gd's shoes, then walked back. it was hot, and i was pretty sweaty by the time i got home.

i didn't even take my shoes off, just gulped down a cup of water in the entrance and then we all went to the bus stop with gd's sewing machine to head down to the sewing machine repair shop. it was a long ride, with some very... interesting... people, and gd regretfully informed me that i need to start wearing deodorant 💀

we arrived at the shop just after 9am, and we were out of there in about ten minutes. i took a bus to work and they took a bus home.

the work day was - socially - good. all good. the work itself was difficult, parts of it quite unpleasant, really, and it was really hard to focus on it. but i eventually got it 98% completed, and my boss agrees that if i can't finish it within the first couple of hours on sunday then it'll be good enough as is.

i had a long chat with our cape town community director, and it was a huge relief to hear that by and large they've shifted (ideologically) to a stronger (and right) position vis-a-vis the war and zionism. gd still has reservations, but i'm glad that they didn't cater to the pro-palestinian nonsense.

i ate too much cake during our happy hour.

on the way home, i contacted urchin who informed me that she's finally signed a contract with a new employer! we're really excited for her, she's been miserable for ages and the new gig (on paper, at least) sounds way better in every respect :)

the evening was mostly good, although we had to stop watching harry potter during the scene in which bellatrix interrogates hermione because gd couldn't handle it. our national PTSD with the hostage situation is very real.

before and after putting mr smear to bed, my mother and i had a really heavy argument about her and aliyah and a lot of it was really unpleasant. at the very end, i feel like she at least heard me, but i don't know what good that'll do.

if she chooses to stay in south africa, or at least not prepare to make aliyah before the universe forces it on her, the most likely outcome is that we'll all be in big trouble. but she's a big girl and only she can make that call.

eye gong

depression/wartime anxiety is making every little task overwhelming. gd's been having a very hard time the past few days - we all have - but her in particular. we were talking about it during the day, and i think i know what it is: being under attack is scary, but not knowing whether you're under attack is terrifying. it's a case of "the devil you know" - we tend to be more afraid of the unknown than of direct threats.

especially after ten straight months of terror and war.

it looks like a lot of the world is waking up to how they've been played by BRICS, but if social media is to be believed, places like montreal and toronto and pretty much lost. gods help us all.

...

friday:

we successfully paid a visit to the shiva house, and mr smear was relatively amazing (generally pretty good) with his little cousins. it was quite crowded, but we hung with our younger (new parent) cousins and were present.

i don't think we did anything else for the remainder of the day. i was exhausted, as i had been for a few days.

yesterday:

i spent most of the day alternating between doing not much (watching random stuff and starting to read naruto), watching the goblet of fire with mr smear*, and napping. in the evening i took mr smear to the climbing wall, and while we weren't there for very long nor did very much, we did have a good time.

* re-watching the fifth harry potter movie, and it's beyond triggering. the ministry of magic's absurd behavior EXACTLY describes what israel and the jews have been dealing with for the past ten months (far longer than that, but it's been frighteningly transparent since october 7th), it's horrifying and anxiety-inducing and wrong.

today:

i tried to look into schools in the area, but became thoroughly overwhelmed. i'm going to try again tomorrow, this time scoping it down to filtering schools by location...

my work day went really well. i got a lot done, and having completed all my tasks on time i started taking over others' tasks, and overall made my boss and coworkers happy.

we went out for a fancy lunch to say farewell to our marketing consultant; it wasn't vegan-friendly, but they made a plan and the experience was surprisingly good. especially their focaccia with jalapeño jam.

mr smear appears to be doing well back in mma. i'm very pleased.

i did eat way too much pasta over the course of the day, though. so i skipped dinner, replacing it with a walk to the supermarket for a couple of emergency supplies (and things that can't be obtained online) and text chatting with a help line that proved pretty unhelpful.

long weekend started

 i think an apt description of my mental state over the past while is "spiritually exhausted". i'm just coasting from one event to the next, living from coffee cup to coffee cup and trying to maintain sanity in the face of increasingly difficult challenges. some things are great. some things are amazing, even. but years and years of perpetually living on the edge of a chasm have really worn down my nerve sheaths.

...

yesterday was a particularly intense work day. and although it end with a surprising success (i'm code complete even though i didn't get to look at my planned work until two hours before leaving) it also ended with a shit feeling about a stupid, entirely avoidable incident during the day that may have done damage to my relationship with our devops guy :(

at lunch time i walked to pick up my new knee pads, and i bought an inflatable mattress and an automatic pump. the mattress is perfect, but the pump turned out to be with a car charger which isn't apparent at all from its packaging :/

one of my coworkers came to work *clearly* sick and infectious. i really, really, *really* hope i don't get sick like everyone else in my home.

fortunately, after wasting many minutes hurting my arms trying to inflate it with a bicycle pump, gd found the old automatic pump that she'd apparently looked hard for earlier...

... f***ing troll :P

anyway, the evening was pleasant, after mr smear went to sleep we all watched another episode of unchained, and then i went to bed.

today:

mr smear and i looked into fortnite's creative mode, which i've agreed to let him play. his argument for letting him play the battle modes? "violence is already in my head, you let me watch hunter x hunter".

he's got me there :$

gd admitted being too sick to come with to the museums, but my mother refused to. in retrospect, that was a big mistake and it was hard for her to get from the bus stop to the museum in the heat. i left her and mr smear there to go to the october 7th "exhibit" at the intelligence center, but i'm still not sure what that means because halfway there gco contacted me and asked if i would prefer going on sunday or monday instead. so i agreed, hopped off the bus, and then spent the next half hour frustrated waiting for buses that weren't coming or walking a long way in the heat.

public transportation outside of tel aviv sucks.

i joined my mom and mr smear for a short walk through the museum, he'd had and continued to have a very enjoyable time (aside from not liking being "helped" by the volunteer with no sense of personal boundaries on the fourth floor).

we caught a bus home, and have spent the past hour or two resting (my mother's been passed out on the couch for most of that time).

what's in store for the rest of the day is anyone's guess.

downer

 today wasn't a great day. yesterday continued according to plan, i got some productive time in after putting mr smear to bed, but i didn't get as much sleep as i should have and what i got done wasn't quite satisfying.

today began alright, i guess, and the weather was less intensely hot than anticipated. i rotated my wheels, rollerbladed comfortably to work, and dived in.

i think the work is what brought me down. by the end of the day i'd finally got a solid handle on what i was doing and why, but not without a lot of mental gymnastics and an uncomfortable moment with my boss, for which i ended up apologizing to him for because i made him think i was angry with him.

by the end of the day i was completely done. the ride home was fine, and the evening was fine, but i've been grumpy and grumpily doomscrolling. i guess a large part of my feelings have to do with the demoralizing lies propagating rapidly through the ether and feeling overwhelmed. what's going on out there is all wrong, and it can't be stopped fast enough.

maybe tomorrow will be better.

the world at war

the war on the west is in full swing. i participated in a psyops webinar on thursday evening, and it was horrifying to have all the pieces of the puzzle come together to draw a picture of what we are - and have been for decades - actually up against. it's a massive, coordinated campaign not just against israel, but against the west in general, and it's far more insidious than quatar funding western universities.

it's the BRICS countries working together, specifically iran, russian and china, to subvert western values and ideologies. it's the tools they're using - students, social media, and filling roles in western institutions with ideologues (like the UN, and the ICJ). the noise from the past week or two in the news is directly due to this.

it's distressing, mostly because it's hard to come up with ways to combat it. the speaker was quite pessimistic, and i personally can't abide by that.

...

thursday:

a pretty good morning, feeling less stuffy/allergic (i'm still not 100%, but i'm not feeling sick at all)

frontend magic, but with some concerning findings. leaving work with less enthusiasm following an argument with the boss

the psyops webinar, and all the while working towards proving my boss wrong (and, in my opinion, succeeding)

friday:

after three days of sticking to the fasting regimen, i broke and had breakfast early...

comics shopping, learning (again) not to ask mr smear his opinion. we picked up the second bone volume in hebrew, a miles morales comic in hebrew (although it doesn't have nikud), and הילד הכחל, which so far seems to be a winner.

picking up vegan cholent, being proved wrong about the plastic bag leaking but fortunately not losing any clothing over it.

intervening to prevent a fight on the bus (gd called out a woman with tacky facial tattoos for being rough with her dog, who in turn responded with a curse)

forgetting i was on-call, fortunately the incident that occurred wasn't too severe. spending a couple of hours investigating and putting together a runbook, but ultimately my boss had a few additional tricks up his sleeve that were needed.

joining a pre-shabbat call on antisemitism that turned out to be not very interesting, particularly after the previous psyops talk

watching the rest of ice age 5 (i've skipped a few). at this point, the characters are clearly a vehicle for a story that doesn't have anything to do with them or their world. it's a fun movie if you watch it fore-armed with the knowledge that it's just an animated series of irreverant and random jarring or subtley (sometimes not-so-subtley) age-inappropriate gags that doesn't care about making sense.

reporting a neighbor's dog stuck on the balcony

passing out quickly on the couch