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.

lockdown imminent

it's been almost two weeks. it feels like almost three. other parents aren't playing ball, so mr smear's pretty much been stuck with us. it doesn't seem to be the end of the world, but it's really hard to get work done sometimes. it also doesn't help that today and tomorrow got messed up because a physical playdate from a few weeks ago left us with ****ing fleas, so we had our place sprayed this morning and we're having my mom's done tomorrow.

it's been hard getting work hours made up, the world seems more demanding than usual (it's probably not), every time i go out and see people i come back more happy about being isolated from them. people are ****ing stupid and nuts, half the people outside are acting like there's nothing going on and the other half are wearing masks that aren't really covering their faces. ffs.

but hey, we're (as a species) learning to operate remotely. this is good. very good. i'm giving a talk to some other parents tomorrow about tech literacy and parenting, mr smear's learning to amuse himself (mostly) for hours on end, and we're making a point of taking him outside (yard time) and being very grateful that we live in a complex with a foresty garden and a swimming pool. this past weekend we experienced an historic series of moments with an online temple service and even a barmitzvah. i've finally bought tabletop simulator and we're gearing up for a game on saturday night. the toronto poetry slam has been online for two weeks now, which would be fantastic if i was able to watch it (2am on a monday morning, nuh-uh). the world's getting smaller, in a good way.

we're still paying our cleaning lady, but we (mostly gd) have to do the actual work. i don't know how this is going to work out. protoplasm was telling me he's paying his hairdresser regardless of whether he sees him, i've just sent an email to my tattoo artist to see if i can purchase a voucher now and cash it in when the lockdown is over.

stay safe, everyone. look out for each other. we need to get through this.

time flight

this week has been a bit of slog, though it's had some good points. i'm feeling a bit disconnected work-wise, and i've got lots of hours to make up, my torah reading for the weekend is alright but not fantastic, it's tough making sure mr smear spends enough time outside (it's fun to do it, but gd's not in a great state at the moment so it's feeling a bit single-parenty), and i'm really struggling to find time to do the other things that need doing like taking the UPS in for repair and writing. and there's two hours scheduled tomorrow for our front door being reconstructed, which will hopefully go a long way to reducing our electricity bills.

i'm starting to wonder if it's not a good idea to throw coronavirus parties for young healthy people who subsequently quarantine themselves and are then pretty much guaranteed to not be a disease vector. am i losing it?

the witching hour

hmmph. that's how i feel about the workday. hmmph.

it was tough to keep focused - a million distractions now that i'm stuck at home, and mr smear and i have both started an unpleasant cough and we're praying this isn't it. but it's theoretically possible. so there's that. some of today was heartbreaking, but most heartwarming. in particular, the good night hugs; i had a flashback to our midnight corridor walks when i was having a flash-forward of hugging my much older son, and there was something about tonight that seemed to connect the two moments.

travel plans? holy shit that's a lot of money. maybe... maybe not so much.

i've finally got my side-project pretty functional! needs a fair amount of TLC, but the bones are solid ^_^

right. bed.

you know you're the a**hole when...

that previous post actually got me blocked from the amitheasshole subreddit, what i *should* have done was report the dude for harassment but instead my response was read as threatening (which wasn't the intention, but it was poorly worded). anyway.

the rest of the week was a bit nuts, lots of frustratingly slow going at work and mr smear's school shutting down due to the covid-19 story made things very complicated. not helped by the fact that gd has had a bad cough / lung infection for a week.

i'm not impressed that she decided to test a food allergy last night with everything that's been going on, she ended up in the hospital again :/

this weekend's been... full. i've spent a lot of time writing, i've finally (as of a few minutes ago) brought the personal project i've been working on to a point where i can actually use it for its initial intended purpose. i've had some good times playing outside with mr smear, but also a lot of really unpleasant moments - mostly him just being mean or rude to us. but the good times have been good, and being stuck indoors (bad weather + no playdates due to "social distancing") we've watched star wars iv, spiderman into the spider-verse, the nightmare before christmas and toy story 2 together.

we also played about three hours of samorost 3 this morning, which was excellent.

i didn't mean to go to bed so late. damn.

press my buttons

go on. do it.

i tried to back out of being harassed on reddit:

you might be surprised to learn that your opinion, based purely on a few lines of text written in a reddit thread, is missing a whole lot of facts and nuances that provide context. honestly, as enticing as it may be to respond with all the details, i don't feel that this is going to be a constructive endeavour as you're clearly not interested in learning anything that might change your mind, so i hope it's okay with the gods of the internets that i walk away from this encounter.

but the asshole was insistent. so i responded as follows:

damn, you're unpleasant - i'd love to have a chat with you face-to-face, see how ugly your behavior is when you're faced with potential consequences.

1. my wife has character, agency and backbone, we discuss everything and we debate constantly. you might not know this, but it is actually possible to convince people with data and by setting an example (until she got pregnant and needed me around more, i was in MMA training and in incredible physical shape... now i've been out of the gym for a few years and i'm just in good shape)

2. the tension during pregnancy was due to the fact that she insisted on eating things that are known to harm a foetus in utero. seafood, in particular - with the amount of mercury having long surpassed all safety limits, children whose mothers eat seafood during pregnancy are born with significantly smaller brains. pardon me if protecting my child's future cognitive abilities took priority over keeping the peace. i learned over the course of the pregnancy how to share data and then keep my opinions to myself, and we figured shit out, which is what responsible, mature adults do.

our son has two parents, i'm not just a sperm donor.

3. by the time our son was born i did not insist on him being vegan, and sadly that decision led to him developing a life-threatening dairy allergy. no, soy milk is not a replacement for breast feeding or formula. neither is cow's milk, so that's a strange twist you've got going on there. soy formula is as nutritious and much safer than dairy, but my wife chose to supplement breastfeeding with dairy initially until she realized there was a problem and from that point he became a soy-formula kid for the months it took for her to be able to breastfeed exclusively*. which was fine. i pretty much left her alone with the solid food decisions when the time came, until she eventually had her "ah-ha!" moment. once she understood that there was nothing in animal products that he couldn't get more and better from plants, that was when SHE decided that we should all be vegan. some important information that she learned in those documentaries were a part of that "ah-ha!" moment. if incorporating new facts into your life is "brainwashing", well, that's your problem.

* and because you're so *good* with parsing what i write, i feel like i need to specify here that she had a *really* hard time breastfeeding to the point where *i* was encouraging her to give it up, but she insisted and persisted and courageously pulled through

4. we have had excellent pediatricians, and we regularly do blood-work and check in with dietitians to ensure that we aren't missing anything. i came to veganism through a desire to learn - i was actually anti-vegan when i started reading research papers on nutrition because i began my journey with a b12 deficiency (on a decidedly animal-based diet) - and it was only after i realized that the more i followed an evidence-based diet the more plant-based it became that i was able to let go of the cognitive dissonance surrounding our food choices and started becoming vegan.
like most parents we care deeply about our son's health and welfare, and while he's the only vegan in his last three preschool classes he's usually among the biggest, toughest and most active. he's also really smart, constantly impressing his teachers and other parents, so i don't think we're completely failing.

5. if you're going to call the aforementioned documentaries brainwashing, i suggest you take a step back and consider where all your dietary information is coming from. who's informing you? who's informing your doctors? we've all been brainwashed by about a century of marketing, we have to train our kids to deal with the dissonance of eating animals that we'd otherwise befriend, and watching my non-vegan friends deal with these issues with their own kids has been eye-opening. it's easier to teach compassion when you're not being a hypocrite.

next time you're reading an article demonizing plant-based diets and promoting animal products, do yourself a favor: check the sources. and when you read the sources, read the abstract, and the conclusion, and then look at how the study was done. you might actually learn something.

a full week

highlights and lowlights. a whole bunch. some more memorable than others.

1. the saturday morning reading. i have learned not to say "sure!" when i have only two days to prepare. i practiced until i arrived at the synagogue, kinda had a handle on it. then i went up and had forgotten... everything. it was super embarrassing, less because i cared about what others thought and more because i felt like a proper idiot.

2. the financial advisors have been really pushy, generating a lot of drama. i'm inclined to figure shit out myself.

3. an uncomfortable event that took a day to sort out.

4. i was late to post my creative writing submission, but i ended up quite happy with it.

5. i left work on friday feeling really good about my week's achievements. i'm quite satisfied overall.

6. mr smear has been testing us really hard. but he's also been really cool. in particular, we've had some interesting bedtime conversations about the nature of god (i already need to correct some oversimplifications he's gotten from the school); yesterday i picked up the first seasons of batman: the animated series, x-men and the fantastic four from 2006 and we watched an episode from each this evening, he was over the moon :)

7. mr smear swam by himself yesterday for the very first time! the combination of pride and relief made me emotional, and then the teacher came over to comment on how fast he's learning ^_^

8. purim was fun! i took mr smear to the wynberg temple and he really enjoyed it, i had a couple of interesting conversations and the little musical play before the megillah reading began had the desired effect on him. it was only yesterday that we received photos from his teacher and discovered that the "secret" he'd kept from me the other day when i asked him how his day went was that he was haman in the class play :)

9. oh! we finally got the projector up and running, it's awesome having it back again.

tuesday

i'm feeling a bit... tired? not really, certainly not like the past week or two. antsy? possibly. anxious? hmm, a little.

the anxiety is partially fueled by insurance broker drama that's been unfolding and folding and unfolding again over the past couple of days. also, by my almost posting a submission to the AITA subreddit and receiving a clear YTA from my wife regarding about five years of taking every opportunity to remind her that once upon a time she told a burly hardware store dude that i wasn't good with my hands. i didn't realize just how bad i've been making her feel, so i feel kinda shitty now.

the trigger for this whole thing was that yesterday evening i attached a shelf to the top of our bookshelf for the projector, and this morning i put up another shelf for our router which i've been talking about doing for at least half a year now. the resulting wifi coverage is very satisfying.

at work, i've been the git police since thursday - it panders to my ocd and it seems to be appreciated, so double win!

sunday: after shelf shopping with my mom, we took mr smear to the big herzlia school 80 year celebration thing. it was exhausting, but he had a lot of fun and we enjoyed running into some people we haven't seen in a while. it was crazy hot, so we swam for a bit when we got home although the water was surprisingly cold.

i think tattoo season is on its way.

last night i got down to some writing, i'm loving the concept but not keen on writing dialog. huh.

okay, now i'm tired.