Words are inadequate

I'm ... approaching done with coursework? I just turned in the practicum report and timesheet. Left to do: finish and polish a groupwork report (due tomorrow); record a five-minute presentation that someone else will stitch together with the rest of the group's presentations (gonna try to get that done by end of Monday); final exam for final class (before end of day next Thursday). Oh, and submit my Application For Credential, I should do that tonight or tomorrow.

It feels a bit of a relief, and a bit of "what next?" and a lot of frustration at the state of the world / economy for having gotten worse since April 2023 when I decided to hide out for two years. It feels more like an Accomplishment than I expected it to, but not much like one. But then very little ever feels like an Accomplishment, except in deliberate retrospect.

Counseling last week and this has been a lot of deep diving into my inability/reluctance to be proud of things I've done. This is gonna require some retraining of my brain. I grew up inculcated with a firm belief that the standards were different for me. Doing something 'normal' is not worth mentioning (though failing to do it is deeply shameful), and doing something extraordinary is worth at most "i knew i could do that, i am Living Up To My Potential." The agon of the Gifted Child: you must do Great Things because you are Gifted; but because you are Gifted, anything you do is no more than what's Expected Of You and thus insufficiently Great.

A couple months back, on the death of Val Kilmer, a friend wrote "The most important moral lesson of Real Genius is that failing to live up to your gifted-kid potential is praxis." I appreciate this a great deal.

Well. After that I had a nasty breakdown last week. I'm, hm. I won't say I'm fine now, but I'm certainly out of the worst of it and I seem to be doing alright. It was a particularly nasty combination of acute depression (state of the US, digging into some rough stuff in counseling) and difficulties in keeping going on practicum stuff. The acute depression passed eventually as these things do, and I managed to drag myself out of the avoidant part of 'difficulty keeping going on the thing i'm supposed to be doing,' so that's all for the good.

Registered for my last class this morning. Bit of drama in that; I went to confirm the amount I owed and they'd stuck a $4900 "Technology International Fees" in there. Spent a couple of hours trying to figure out what that was, including an hour on hold. It got mysteriously removed about ten minutes before they connected me with someone who said they'd mistakenly applied it to all student accounts. Frustrating to have wasted my time chasing it down, but at least it wasn't a real thing. Four more months, and this will all be over with. Need to figure out what comes next, I guess.

I've made a space on the table for Mr Tuppert to sit next to me while I'm working, in the hope that he'll stop biting me for attention. This ... sometimes works. In general we're getting along better. He'll come sit with me when I watch TV at lunchtime as long as I put a blanket down for him to sit on, etc. I'm glad he's here.

I watched the first two seasons of Black Lightning, and now I'm watching Arrowverse again in half-season increments (because they put the crossovers in the middle of the seasons). Black Lightning takes itself pretty seriously, but it's about Black issues so it's got a good reason to. Arrow just takes itself more seriously than it needs to. As I recall this season of Flash is angsty as well (I got about three episodes in before Erin gave up). Looking forward to Legends, and Supergirl, to break that up somewhat.

I'm personally unfamiliar with the word 'practicum' so I've been describing it as "an unpaid internship."

Noel just pointed out that it's actually worse than an unpaid internship: I'm paying for the privilege of providing unpaid labour. And since I'm not a wet-behind-the-ears college student, they'll be getting a decent amount of actual labour out of the process.

Sigh. At least there's the credential at the end of it.

(Starts Monday, with a week of actually-in-office.)

Been a minute. Have a ramble.

I spent last week up north with Erin, which was ... it's good to see Erin, and the critters, but the weather was mostly grey above and rainy and muddy, which all makes it hard for me to, well, function. In my own space that manifests as just kind of zoning out a lot. Around someone else or not at home, that's less of an option, so it was hard. But there was tasty food, and snuggling, and talking, and overall it was much better than not.

Now I'm back and have a bunch of classwork to get through in the next week and a half: four lectures, three assignments, two quizzes for stupid Rob, and a video presentation and a practicum proposal for the other class. Doable but I'll be busy.

Canada Post workers are on strike. I'm planning to go out and support a picket location on probably Wednesday, will be good to get out for a bit anyway.

The strike, and the fact that the union and management are apparently pretty far apart so it will either last for awhile, or they'll get ordered back to work, is colliding in my head with the recent elections (etc) and the way that lots of folks I know are having a particularly hard time the last while. No particular coherent thoughts, and certainly nothing actionable. Just noting that civilisation, society, is in fact slowly crumbling as all the money concentrates at the top.

I read David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks a couple of weeks ago (on William Gibson's recommendation, whenever I heard him speak at the one VCon I went to), and it was quite good. The part that stuck with me is the last section, 2045, set in a rural community in Ireland where the civil government is collapsing and pulling back, and people are struggling to Make Do as the twilight deepens. It's sort of hopeful, I guess, overall, on a longer timeframe, for other people. Felt real and immediate, though.

My passport has made it to the passport office in Philadelphia. An acquaintance observed in passing that there's a good chance that passport renewals with X-gender that aren't processed before mid-January could be held indefinitely, so maybe that was an error. Guess we'll see.

I did bring a big jar back from Erin's with me, so this weekend I was able to put up my cinnamon to make into extract. That'll finish out, mm, four to six weeks, so either just before or just after solstice. (Cinnamon extract is supposedly good in anything you'd use cinnamon in, but especially in things where it's nice for the cinnamon to dissolve, like french toast.) The vanilla from June is still going; decided to let it keep soaking. I'll decant it this spring and make up sugar then, and it can be 2025 xmas presents or something.

Right. Lunch, and then back to presentation work. I hope you're doing well, and keeping warm physically and emotionally as best you can.

I'd poked at the Elections Canada website a couple of weeks two ago but there weren't any job openings. Over last weekend it occurred to me that that's because the upcoming election is provincial, not federal, and it's Elections BC that I should have been looking at. So I put in an application for various electoral-support positions in all the electoral districts within about a half-hour drive of me. I knew it was kinda late notice: the election's on 19 October, so they're at the very tail end of hiring. But hey, they were all still accepting applications, maybe I'd luck out.

In the event I got an email early Monday morning from the North Surrey office saying "hey can you come in for an interview this afternoon." I immediately said "sure" and dug up some vaguely presentable clothing.

Thank gods for West Coast casual. I am just about dead certain my actual suit doesn't fit me anymore, and neither do my two sport coats. But I do own long pants (black), and a long-sleeved shirt (also black; I have one or two in other colours but "bright satin silk" seems counterindicated for employment-seeking). My ties are mostly meant to go with a white shirt and dark suit but I've got a nice dark red one that I'm pretty sure I bought explicitly for my Le fils de l'homme Halloween costume. It wasn't until I was actually out the door that I realised I'd reflexively put on my sandals, and had forgotten entirely about socks and nice shoes. Oh well.

I got there exactly on time. The office is in a warehouse/industrial stretch; I drove past it once, expecting it to be, I don't know, bigger, or more permanent, or better signed. They let me in and put me through about ten minutes of grueling Generic Interview ("describe yourself in five words" type of thing). I stumbled over this somewhat: I'm used to "convince us you're able to function in an office environment" and "convince us you're able to write" interviews, not ... whatever this is.

At some point while I was stumbling through "three strengths, and three weaknesses" ("well obviously Talking Off The Cuff is a weakness but I can do alright if I know what I'm doing and basically prepare myself a script beforehand") the lead interviewer started nodding and maybe smiling a bit, and eventually held up her hand and said "I'm gonna ask you a question, and you absolutely don't have to answer, but ... are you neurospicy?"

Record scratch, freeze frame.

Thought process:

• ABSOLUTELY DO NOT DISCLOSE
  
• What the fuck positive relevance could it even have?
  
• She said 'neurospicy,' that's a shibboleth
  
• You know, whatever, if this loses me the job I didn't want it anyway.

"Yeah, I am."

Ice completely broken. "Yeah, I thought I recognized that. I am too, and so are three of my five kids. This is a neurospicy-friendly office."

... well alright then.

We talked through some slightly more job-relevant things ("if someone comes in to the office to register to vote and gets really agitated about the requirement to show ID what do you do?" "I go get my supervisor!" etc). They showed me the big training room, which was warehouse-y and full of VERY LOUD fluorescents, with "if this is a deal-breaker for you I totally understand." If I had to do office-type things in there all day it would be a problem but as it is, I can handle it for a couple of hours at a stretch.

I left feeling pretty confident that I'd done well but not at all confident about getting the job. They only had the one position and had had an awful lot of applicants. But as it turned out at 10PM I got an email saying "you're hired, send us your references so we can check them."

As of today, nearly a week later, they still haven't called at least one of my two references. I'm probably bottom of the list, though. I guess we'll see. My official first day is 15 September. Things will ramp up from there through the election on the 19th and then taper off again pretty quickly. I'm not entirely sure what I'll be doing, even, other than "voter registration" and "tech support for the voting teams." But it'll be good to have an actual income again, if only for a little while.

---

Still no real word from the BC Ministry of Forests on getting a practicum placement for spring. This is way over in the category of Stuff I Can't Affect at the moment. Classes start in just under two weeks as well; hopefully the Project/Practicum Prep course will include "how to get a placement".

Other than that? I'm doing alright, I think. Happy meterological autumn.

I am home, after having been away for two weeks, which is (it turns out) a long time. Mr Tuppert has mostly forgiven me for the twin indignities of leaving him alone and then brushing him vigorously.

In Minneapolis I visited Uncle Hugo/Edgar's Bookstore(s) and met some of Steph's friends, and also her two cats. Then in Fort I petted a lot of cats and not a few dogs, and stacked wood and fed geese and pigs and helped plant some ritual-space trees. Also I made a second key lime pie (with normal limes instead) and it turned out pretty well.

I finished my classes and I believe I passed them all, for credential-granting values of "passed." Pretty sure I did quite well in three and acceptably well in a fourth. As for the fifth, I consider it a triumph that I managed as well as I did. Bah. And I have at least one and possibly/probably two more classes with this instructor.

I have also received an unexpected US$2000 check from the IRS. I have no idea why (I have a couple of theories but that's all they are) (UPDATE: It is in fact the stimulus payment from 2020/2021 that I missed, plus interest), and after spending an hour plus getting Verified, the account page is useless. So tomorrow I will spend some time On Hold figuring that out. Tomorrow is also for groceries and journaling.

Tonight is for petting the cat and staring at the wall. And also blathering about books, because Wednesday.

What are you reading now?

Deadhouse Gates, Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen #2 of 10 and then some. This one has taken a bit to spin up, I guess in the same way that Gardens of the Moon (#1) did, but it's rolling along quite nicely now. I'm enjoying most of the characters and much of the complex worldbuilding. My sole problem is that I can't tell if I want to be reading an ebook or not.

What did you just finish reading?

Rereads of Gideon/Harrow/Nona The Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. Gideon remains a triumph of imaginative storytelling, narrative deftness, and voice, and I unreservedly recommend it. Harrow feels sluggish and pointless until three-fifths through (specifically, page 302 of 500ish) but the last two hundred pages are worth the price of admission. Nona does almost exactly the same thing but on reread I find Nona hanging out with the kids to be less annoying than Harrow's angst. On the other hand, to quote Douglas Adams, "I think this is getting needlessly messianic." If I wanted to read far-future sci-fi with crypto-Catholic mysticism I'd reread Gene Wolfe. And sometimes I do want that! Here it just annoys me. (Granted, I am partly annoyed because Camilla Hect, the absolute best character in the series, has been SPOILERed.)

What do you think you'll read next?

Deadhouse is gonna occupy me for awhile. If I'm wanting something hardcopy I might dig into The Saint Of Bright Doors which I picked up in Mpls, after seeing recommendations from a rather diverse set of people. Or I might get into one of my Silvia M-G books. Or I might reread Fonda Lee's Green Bone books. Who knows.

Erin came into town the weekend before last, which was lovely. I am still unaccustomed to people actually coming to see me; my mental framing, which has held sturdy since at least 2006, has been "people don't come to me, i go to them." But now that I've had two in the space of six weeks, plus Mya coming over I guess once a month or so for dinner, I should perhaps re-evaluate that.

As a result of Erin driving down, I now have a fridge filled with eggs: two dozen chicken eggs, nearly a dozen duck eggs, and unsure but probably not quite a dozen goose eggs. In my experience duck and goose eggs are great in baking (one goose egg is about three chicken eggs, depending) but have a weird texture when cooked on their own. Will see how long this lasts me.

I also had my first cookie fail (hubris ftl): creamed the butter and sugar, added in the (duck) egg and vanilla, and then let it sit for half an hour or so while we had dinner before finishing it off. Result: dry and crumbly cookie dough, dry and crumbly cookies. Ah well. I'm assuming this is a result of leaving it to sit rather than the duck egg. Will conduct further experiments (involving duck eggs rather than "leaving to sit") to determine.

Sunday the weather was quite nice, and we went and hung out in Pier Park with a bunch of mugs and a butane stove and a kettle and some tea, and some folks dropped by and chatted and drank tea and went home with mugs. Erin's been doing pottery fairly intensively for the last ... while, I guess, several months? Which means that she ends up with an awful lot of different pieces, mostly mugs, in different glazes. So some of them found homes over the weekend. It was lovely: beautiful pottery all shimmery and bright-coloured in the sun, and tea, and people I don't know terribly well but generally like.

On Tuesday we drove north, for a generally good and low-key not-quite-week. I managed to forget my toiletries, which meant that I got to once again experience several days of beard growth. This is definitely Not For Me. I like the look of a goatee, but that takes actual effort and morning thought to maintain, so it just all comes off. Quite relieved to be home to my razor on Saturday evening.

More importantly I also got to experience life without ADHD meds. It's hard to say what effect this actually had on me since there wasn't really much that needed doing in a specific timeframe while I was there. The main thing I noticed was a return of sugar craving. Thankfully a couple days back on the Concerta has squelched that down again.

Winter term is complete; spring term starts tomorrow, and on Friday night I fly out to Ohio to hang out in what looks to be heavy cloud cover for a total solar eclipse. I am of course pleased that folks in Niagara will get a clearer view but also irritated that it had to be -this year- that I'm missing it. C'est la guerre.

My ability to make consistently Quite Good cookies is, I think, a direct consequence of a) a good recipe (Betty Crocker, in this case), and b) measuring by weight and not by volume. It's also just easier, at least for me: no digging around to find the right size scoop and hoping it's clean, just leave a 1-cup in the flour and a 1/3-cup in the sugar.

(My mnemonics do annoy me: a cup of flour is 5oz, a cup of sugar (brown or white, I forget for powdered) is 200g. But I'm usually adding flour and sugar at different times, so it's not as bad as it might be.)

Good tools help, too. Stand mixer for creaming the butter and sugar (overkill), a ridiculously overproduced paddle for mixing the flour and then the chips (do not use the mixer for the flour, you'll overwake the gluten), silicone baking mats for my trays so I don't have to deal with parchment paper, a cookie-baller to make them consistently the right size so I don't have to mess around with two spoons or hand-rolling things. I kind of wish I had a full sheet baking tray so I could do them in two batches instead of four, but where would I store it? "In the oven" is absolutely the wrong answer.

Also it appears to take me about twenty minutes to go from "I should make cookies" to having the first batch in.

---

Stupid presentation for stupid Josh's stupid barely-a-class is done, another group member uploaded it an hour ago. Spent today wrestling ArcGIS into submission for a Cartography project. This is using a bunch of stuff I've learned in several classes, which is nice. Feels like I'm actually learning how to do things. It will be messier than I'd like by the deadline tonight but I'll get good feedback from Tony and then the actual final thing will be decent.

Part of why I've liked Tony's classes (Arc1 last term, Cartog this) is because they're project-focused. I'm not just going through exercises-- well, Arc1 mostly was, but the final project was "make this map" and the final exam had a practical "use Arc to solve these problems" component that I quite enjoyed. That's been mostly lacking from my other classes. Feels ... well. Practical. Able to be put into practice.

Just got done writing a program in Java that encodes a text file using 'run-length encoding'. Simple but kinda interesting. Marred by the assignment's insistence on COMMENTING EVERY LINE (heck with you then, you're getting comments on my open and close braces) and on the class's non-ChatGPT policy: "If you choose not to utilize generative AI tools to assist in completing this assignment, provide a separate reference document indicating this. Also, provide a list of the resources (course materials and/or external) that you did use and how they were used." I USED THE PDFS YOU PROVIDED BECAUSE THAT'S WHY YOU PROVIDED THEM.

Rob's two classes last term annoyed me. Comp in particular felt like he'd done a half-assed job of slapping something together from previous notes and just kind of left it. This (non-Rob) class is making me actively angry. Between the 'generative AI' stuff and the fact that there are only four lectures in a twelve-week course (one week each for midterm and final, which, fine, and the rest are for "group work") I am unclear why I have paid money for this. Apart from credentialism, yes yes.

Spoke with the ADHDoc today. She re-upped the Concerta and we'll talk again in three weeks, which should be plenty of time to decide if I want to up my dosage.

And also books.

What are you reading now?

Beasts of Ruin by Ayana Gray. Pan-African-inspired YA fantasy, sequel to Beasts of Prey. Good worldbuilding and atmosphere, decent characters and plot, okay writing. I'll read the third when it's available but I'm in no particular rush.

Also one chapter left in Polywise, which is unsurprisingly quite good if not as revolutionary as Polysecure.

What did you just finish reading?

Mm. System Collapse, the latest Murderbot. It reads like a coda / second-half for Network Effect. Suspect I will consider those two as a unit, in the same way I consider the first four novellas a unit. Annoyingly this means that I will now be reading Fugitive Telemetry in chron order (before Network Effect) rather than pub order (between NE and SC). Pro: going straight into SC from NE means all of NE is fresh in one's mind, which is helpful since SC really does read like a second half of NE. Con: the ending of both Exit Strategy and FT feature fights with nonsympathetic bots, which feels less repetitive when there's NE to break it up. Oh well.

Murderbot is coming to terms with its massive untreated trauma. I think I liked SC not quite as much as NE but NE was so very good that that's a high bar. Also, with Murderbot hacking governor modules / teaching other SecUnits how to hack them, it feels like we're moving towards some kind of world-shaking tipping point. Very curious to see where things go from here.

Before that, Scholomance 2 and 3. I continue to love these, between El's voice and the way the books make their commentary on modern (western?) crab-bucket society ever more overt. ("Oh, it's Omelas," I said when I got to a certain point in the third book, and then a chapter or two later IT LITERALLY WAS OMELAS.) The third, which takes place out in the Real World and away from the Scholomance, is ... certainly different, and maybe feels overcrowded? Suffering from the corresponding lack of tight focus? I dunno. I'm vaguely unsatisfied by it and I'm not sure why. Will need to reread at some point and see what I think.

What do you think you'll read next?

Nth reread of The March North, because I'm traveling north myself next week and want ebooks, and because it's been too long, and because Rachel Manija Brown wrote a great review of A Succession of Bad Days. "In a world rendered post-apocalyptic by thousands of years worth of warring Dark Lords, a group of adult students attend magic school to learn how to do civil engineering with magic. ... It's the sort of book bound to attract a following whose numbers are inversely proportional to their enthusiasm."

After that, if I don't just keep rolling on the Commonweal, likely either Discworld (Men At Arms) or Craft (Full Fathom Five). Probably not an immediate reread of Scholomance but no promises.

This week was crappy on a couple of fronts but at least classwork wasn't one of them. I took my Mapping final on Thursday, and it ... it felt more like an exam than any of the others. Might be because those have all been tests where either I knew the answers, or I knew pretty well where to find the answers in the lecture notes. This... some of it was reasoning through things, and some of it was complicated math problems, and very little of it felt easy.

It lasted two hours and I ran out of time with about a question and a half unanswered. Pointswise that was around ten percent of the final. So, another five percent of my final grade in Mapping has flown off to join the 15% from the missed midterm. Having said that, I'm still relatively confident, I've just adjusted my expectations way downward. I need about 40% on the exam to pass the class. I am pretty sure I'll end up with at least 70% and possibly as much as 85%.

Other class grades are mostly in: 95% in ArcGIS, 89% in Python and in Intro, and 77% in Computing, which for a class that I stopped being able to make myself care about three-quarters through seems reasonable. I'll take it. (The only one of those that's official is Intro; the others are based on coursework grades as recorded in the online course, so might be off by a percent or two.)

Could be worse. I have no idea how an average of ~80-85% translates into being able to get scholarship-type money. Guess I'll find out in a month or two.

And... that's it, all over for a month and then I do it again twice running. Next term Tony my Arc instructor is teaching Cartography & GeoVisualization (the InterCaps are in the course title), someone I don't know is teaching Technical Issues In GIS, and I have no idea who's teaching ArcGIS 2 and GIS Remote Sensing but it is almost certainly not %&$ Rob. Small favours.

I am honestly somewhat nervous. I was running out of steam by the end of November here. Hoping that between fewer courses, a lack of the most difficult-for-me instructor, and whatever assist I can get from the ADHDoc in two weeks, it'll go more smoothly.

In the meantime there are packages to ship and Murderbot to read and a somewhat bitey cat to pet. Winter is wintering.