Words are inadequate

2024 was, in a lot of ways, 2023 redux. Not super surprising, I guess.

( another year in the rear view )

Election's over. I mean, not OVER over, we don't even really know who won yet. But barring something seismic it's another NDGreen like 2017. That one worked out alright at least.

Mostly I'm disheartened that the US "culture war" nonsense has finally spilled over wholeheartedly into Canada. For a long time in BC the Fiscal Conservatives ran things on the right and the Social Conservatives were sidelined, but a couple years back my former MLA got himself kicked out of the Fiscal Conservative party and decided to form his own party, with blackjack, and hookers revive the Social Conservatives. Meanwhile the Fiscal Conservatives were busy driving themselves into irrelevance, and finally hung up altogether six weeks ago.

Now if we're very lucky the Official Opposition in BC is ... well. Same sort of shitheads one finds south of the border among my blood relatives. If we're unlucky, a couple of close-race recounts will go the wrong way and they'll be the Government instead. The trend is clearly favoring the shitheads so who knows. (Answer: us, as of this time next week.)

Saturday night was not a good time, is what I'm saying, and that's without accounting for nine and a half hours of workstress preceded by eight hours of workstress the day before getting all the equipment loaded out and polling places set up. I have no real regrets about this job but it has for sure been more stressful than anticipated.

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It's also just been a difficult month and a half. An uncertain and full work schedule means not being able to schedule social things, and then I end up being too ... something, tired, wrung-out, something, to do them even if I'd scheduled them. Result: tired and lonely, which is a bad combination.

I don't know that it's depressed but I don't know that it isn't. I slept poorly last night and it's been rainygrey for the last week or so, and those both contribute heavily. But: feeling withdrawn and anhedonic today. Decent amount of "oh yeah i remember liking that, maybe i should do that" followed by not doing it. Hoping that getting some sleep tomorrow, and not going to work for a few days, will help matters.

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I'm "keeping up" in classes, by which I mean I'm keeping up in the one that's not got a lot going on, and have done about a third of the work for the other which is a little over halfway through. Credit where it's due, stupid Rob's stupid assignments etc have no due dates other than "end of term", so I'm still in okay shape there.

And I managed to get a practicum (unpaid internship, required for graduation) with BCGEO, the GIS arm of the BC government. Still not sure what it is I'll be doing, but I'll be doing it from mid-January through early April. That will overlap with Databases 2, which I believe will -not- be taught by stupid Rob, so hopefully that will work out okay. And then in the spring there's "Management Issues In GIS" and then ... I'm done. Time to find a Real Job and all that.

Honestly I'm a little worried about winter term. Not about the class, not really. About being able to handle a normal 40-hour work week while maintaining my own health and happiness. The class is just the cherry on top of the anxiety sundae.

But I'm also ... curious, and a little hopeful, about the actual work. Which is nice. Not something I've ever felt about a tech writing job, for sure.

Why I Left Google: "Or: How I became the focus of a mass ritual against generative AI, and what I did about it."

I've had this open in a tab for, well, looks like three days per the post's datestamp, trying to figure out what if anything I have to say about it. It's good, and interesting; jmac might have a future in this wordsmithing business. And I clearly want to say something, and not just point and say "yes, this", though there's some of that as well.

I left / am leaving software in part for similar if less dramatic reasons. "Because 'tech' is three garbage fires in a trenchcoat" is my usual pithy summary. Maybe it always has been, maybe I've just been unlucky in employers. When you open with "defrauding the Virginia state police" it's maybe a sign. Three years ago it was "crypto" and NFTs, now it's AI. Everything gets a little worse every six months. And for two decades my job was to make it easier for people to make things worse.

Maybe it's the pivot point of ritual in jmac's post that gets me, the sharp demarcation between knowing-but-not-knowing and knowing-and-not-denying. Most of the time I keep on doing whatever it is because I don't think about doing anything different. Or when I do, the costs of not-doing overwhelm me. Sometimes choices get made for me, like last April. Sometimes I make them and don't realise I've done so. Both of those feel dishonest to me, I think. They're abdicating the responsibility for directing my life.

Or maybe, for instance, getting laid off was just a wakeup call, similar to jmac's experience. Only for me it was less This is morally repugnant and more This is not what I want to be doing. Sure, the moral repugnance makes a better story, not least because it's true, but it's not the main motivator. I left 'tech' because tech writing is a thing I do well and do not enjoy. I can keep doing things I do well and don't enjoy for a really long time, it turns out. It's just no way to live.

There's a ritual in a few weeks that I've been invited to. Same as last year: couple dozen folks camping by a river in the mountains of western Washington. I'm looking forward to it.

I just vacuumed my entire apartment. This is amazing.

I got a Dyson stick vacuum when I moved into the first condo, Xmas 2016. It's fantastic for small spaces (like apartments), especially when it's mostly running on hardwood floors. Going through once a week or so means my feet are much happier with not stepping on random crunchy bits. Or, now, getting cat-hair clumps in my toes. Yes, I could sweep, but sweeping is a task that's aggravated me literally forever. It's obnoxious enough that I just Don't Do It when that's the option.

A couple of years ago the battery stopped holding much of a charge. At first that just meant not running it on the 'turbo' setting, which meant the rug and the carpeted bedrooms in my last place didn't get as clean as I'd like. Over the last six months, though, the charge has dropped off precipitously. At this point it runs for less than a minute before dying. This is still, barely, usable in here. Turns out it takes about three minutes to vacuum this whole apartment, so I got in the habit of running it once every day or two.

It is, however, Annoying. So over the summer I finally got around to ordering a replacement battery. It came in back in August and I tried to replace it.

One of the battery screws had stripped the plastic housing enough that it wouldn't come out, and it was recessed enough that I couldn't get in to get it out.

So I called Dyson's support line and they offered to sell me a new vacuum at twenty percent off. This is more money than I really wanted to spend at a time when I'm not actually bringing in any income. They allowed as how they could maybe sell me a replacement housing for the vacuum I had, maybe, if their warehouse stock indicator wasn't lying to them.

Spoiler: it was. I waited three weeks and it never shipped, which they'd warned me might happen.

Today was the last day to return the battery. I had two options: give up and return the battery and spend too much money on a replacement vacuum, or deal with vacuuming for a minute every day until the battery completely died. Instead I took a third option: break the plastic cover off the handle so I could get the screw out, replace the battery, and hope there was enough handle left for it to still be functional.

In the event, I was able to pry the cover up enough to pop the loosened screw out, without breaking anything. The new battery went in with no problems at all. It even came charged enough to vacuum the entire apartment. The handle is now a bit warped but I don't notice when I'm using it.

Turns out, in order to fix things sometimes, I have to be willing to break them.

This feels like a broadly applicable principle.

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Mostly unrelatedly, my parents came up last weekend. They were on a riverboat cruise in Oregon, so they took the train up from Portland for the weekend. It was ... fine? We all more or les behaved ourselves. They saw the new condo and the new cat, and we went up in the Vancouver Lookout and down to Granville Market.

I'm missing something in that relationship and I don't know what it is, and that frustrates me. I guess this is part of what counseling/therapy is for.

In my experience, the usual pattern for the beginning of summer in Vancouver is for the long weekend to be sunny and Pleasant and feel like summer is here! and then for the temps to drop and the clouds to return and "Juneuary" to take hold. Then summer proper gets into gear just before Canada Day.

In the event, it was Too Warm a few weekends ago; last weekend was the long weekend and my understanding is that it was rainy and chilly. (I was up north, where it was also a bit rainy and chilly.) It's been clear and warming up the last day or so, though. Yesterday I was vaguely irritable and lethargic all day, which has an obvious source that I didn't even consider. I was, of course, Too Warm. I didn't realise this until I woke up at 12:30 in an absolutely stifling room. Set up and turned on the fan, and that was enough to get me back to sleep until 4:30, and after a bit more tossing and turning until 6:30ish. So, that's like eight hours of sleep, which should have been plenty but due to interruptions left me feeling grumpy and, well, tired. But not the "falling back asleep" kind of tired.

So I grumbled and got up and did an hour of yoga for the second time this week, and ... that seems to have helped. Most exercise doesn't. Sunlight reliably helps my mood, but exercise as such does nothing for me. Except, for whatever reason, for yoga, when I can manage it.

I am also reminded that my body likes to do physical things, and likes to get better at them. On Wednesday I biked from Joyce Station to the optometrist, about half an hour, and then from the optometrist all the way back home. No trouble at all. (I also got to stop and read my book under a tree for half an hour or so, which was entirely lovely.) Tuesday morning I did a round of yoga; Tuesday night my muscles and joints ached from being stretched weirdly, but it was the kind of ache that I knew would go away if I just did that a few more times. My breathing's improving, at least when there's not a ton of smoke in the air.

I used to land somewhere between hating my body unerservedly and thinking about it as little as possible. Since Erin and yoga, I've been able to come to more of a detente, off and on. It's complicated. But it's nice that it's complicated, instead of straight-up loathing.

Anyway, the cold robot is active today, which is good because it's been up around 27 our there, and things are mostly alright. It's nice.

I did in fact make it down to Bellingham on Saturday. I shipped out a number of games I'd sold last month, and exchanged most of a tub of books for substantially fewer books and also cash. I did not manage to exchange CDs and DVDs for cash as the place that I normally do that at is not taking either CDs or DVDs these days. Ah well.

One of the books was Dean Spanley, by Lord Dunsany. Which ... did you know they made a movie out of a Lord Dunsany story? Or that it starred Sam Neill and Peter O'Toole? I did not know this, and now I do. The book includes the Dunsany novella, the screenplay for the film, and a number of short essays about the transition from the one to the other. I am looking forward to both reading and watching.

I also had a bison burger for the first time since, well, the last time I was in Bellingham. I like bison. Someone near Blacksburg had a herd, so bison burgers were a Thing at a couple of restaurants there. It's ... smoky? Not really 'gamey,' but maybe that's the right adjective after all. It's got a stronger flavour than ground beef.

And I went out to Whatcom Falls and sat under a tree next to a waterfall and read my book for most of an hour. That felt genuinely soul-healing, forest and water and mostly-quiet and just sitting for awhile. Whatcom also has an amazing stone footbridge that was built by the WPA in 1940, so I admired that for a bit as well.

And then I came home and passed some sort of street festival a couple of blocks from the condo, so I went out and wandered that for a bit and had some sort of Indian tacos for dinner. (Round naan, more or less, with in my case korma and tikka chicken, and a bunch of veggies. Very tasty.) A fine way to end a good day.

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I don't know. Back when everything with Emily was collapsing for the second time, in fall 2009, I had a ... vision, I guess, of walking into an empty apartment in Bellingham that was full of light and windows, and looking around, and thinking, "I could write here." I like the medium-town college-town feel of Bellingham, I like the walkability, I like water and the deciduous trees and the book-overflow of Henderson's.

I don't like that it's in the States, though. Not worth it.

But it's nice to remember that there are places I like. So: noted. I like Bellingham.

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Today I reorganized my booksshelves a bit. I now have a shelf in my bedroom that can hold Random Stuff, and space in the main room for musical instruments in the hope that I'll actually make use of them if I can see and reach them. More importantly, the top of my dresser is clear, which means that there are now several places that can hold Art. Which means that I can break into the Pack O'Art and figure out what goes where.

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And Erin is coming down later this week, which means she'll get to see the place when it's not full of a panicked Tucker and nothing else because the movers were jerks. I am looking forward to that. It's nice.

Last night I emptied one more Office/Misc box. I'm down to three of those, plus some random stuff on top of the dresser that needs to be sorted and sent to storage. I think I can get the Office/Misc down to two boxen but beyond that I'll need a hanging file or something.

Among the things I excavated was the blue folder of memories. I no longer remember where the folder came from, but when I moved out of my dorm room I took down my photos of people I knew off the wall and stuck them in there, along with a couple of letters and such things. Over the years it's become the repository for Things From Important People.

A brief and incomplete list of what I dug up:

• A card from my parents on the occasion of the death of Tommy (the family cat), including a few photos of him.
  
• A list of things my Calculus teacher said during class, including "The AP exam will be the easiest test you take all year" (accurate), "The numbers are getting bigger and bigger in a negative sense," "We're going to start out with the concept of ... of needing more chalk," and "Never use a physics equation in my classroom again!" Educationally speaking the back half of high school was an almost unmitigated disaster, but I really, really liked Dr Stallings.
  
• Rare photographs of me: Lion In Winter (I was Richard), pre-Homecoming-dance in fairegarb with Shaye and Scott and Kirsten, me and Mo looking content.
  
• A certificate from college confirming that I made the Dean's List one semester in 2004. (As opposed to the Dean's Other List, which I made repeatedly between 1996 and 2000, and which eventually resulted in me taking the Dean's Vacation.)
  
• A photograph of the apartment building in Fürth that I lived in from 1979 to 1982. I remember it as being this towering edifice but no, it's a three-storey walkup.
  
• A couple of the photos I took in photography class senior year, including one of Jynx looking impish through the spokes of a bicycle wheel she's holding.
  
• A postcard from tam_nonlinear.
  
• Stuff from Andy McCoy's Eagle Scout Court of Honor, over which I was privileged to preside.
  
• And of course letters and cards from high school and college girlfriends and friends, including one from someone I hadn't thought I'd had any written relics of at all.

This was easier than the journals were. It's the view from outside, and that's always been easier on me. Even the pictures of me, something I usually hate with a passion, are ... jeez, that guy. He had no idea.

Notably absent are any relics of Kelly, with whom I had a rocky relationship and very bad breakup in the 2000s. Those are all in a bag in a different box, specifically to keep them away from the good memories. And while it's getting on time to revisit those so I can finally discard most of them and filter the rest to the folder... not yet, not yet.

I kept a paper journal from the summer after freshman year of high school through the end of January freshman year of college. For reasons that are opaque to me, I've just finished rereading it for the first time in at least twenty years.

I do not recommend this course of action to anyone else.

Two main takeaways that I'm willing to admit to in public:

1) I was depressed, not infrequently suicidally ideating, and (in retrospect) burning out as early as second quarter sophomore year.

2) I was a walking disaster area of interpersonal relationships. And while I knew at the time that I was doing it wrong, I couldn't see what the path to doing it right was. It took me a hell of a long time and no small amount of therapy to even begin to learn my way around that.

I'm intensely grateful to the people I knew in high school who I'm still in touch with now, and sad for the connections that have fallen by the wayside.

When I got laid off from my previous job seven (!) years ago I took up viola, on the grounds that it was portable, had the same strings as a cello just an octave up, and (most importantly) wasn't a violin. I may still have a chip on my shoulder from years of bad cello parts in junior high orchestra. I never got "good" at viola but I'm good enough to get by. For awhile in Vancouver I was playing fiddle tunes with a weekly group, and that was fun.

In November Erin pointed me at a Facebook post from Vanderhoof, the next town over, where the high school was putting on Sound Of Music and wanted a pit orchestra, and would anyone from around be interested in playing in that? This seemed weird but on reflection it's more that I was spoiled: my high school did a musical most years, with full orchestra, but this is also a high school in a wealthy suburb that gets tons of money shoveled at it. Anyway. I wrote to Russell the music director and said "if you need people i can play viola or cello" and he said "OH GOD YES A VIOLIST". At which point I remembered Tegan my viola teacher pointing out that there's always demand for violists.

So I shrugged and spent the winter driving down to Vanderhoof and back roughly one night every couple of weeks. There was supposed to be rehearsal every week but there was a month break at Xmas, and frequent "yeah we're calling it off due to bad road conditions."

Rehearsals were ... alright. The music tended to be like the dullest cello parts I'd ever played, a lot of rest-bum-bum rest-bum-bum. Occasionally Richard Rogers will take a song that's been quite pleasantly bopping along in a reasonable key like G or D and drop it half a step into Gflat or Dflat. I assume for the vocalists this is just, oh, whatever, modulate a half step, sounds nice. For strings it's "we will now modify five or six of the seven notes that you're playing, have fun with that." So, music that's both dull and difficult, which is not a good combination. And I didn't really break it out to practice at home much, because, well, dull, and even more dull without any melody to play off of.

There's one bit that I regret not having practised: the entr'acte combines Sound Of Music, Sixteen Going On Seventeen, and Goatherd. And the viola part for Goatherd isn't the normal oom-pah-oom-pah, it's ... it's the equivalent of the yodeling, fast eighthnotes dancing between strings. That would have been fun to practise and would have sounded good. Unfortunately we never rehearsed the entr'acte until the tech rehearsal a week before opening, so I didn't realise that it was actually interesting. Oh well.

There was one other violist, an older woman named Thea who I think is actually a violinist but plays viola because someone has to. So that was alright, good to have someone else to keep me on track and vice versa. She and the two cellists and the bassist (and, come performance time, the guitarist who got moved over next to us) were friendly and chatty, a bit more than I was really up for but not too bad.

The thing is... the thing is. Only once did one of the cast show up to rehearse with us: Maria came in one evening, so we played through all her songs. And that made just such a huge difference, it was no longer playing harmony to other harmonies with no real melody, it was actually harmonizing against something. Still somewhat dull but not pointless. And then we did tech rehearsal all day Saturday before opening, and while it was A Mess it did give that feeling of making music instead of just noise.

And the show itself ... "by thursday it'll be art," as my theatre ex Steph said. And it was. It came together, it worked. It was fun, an energy I've not really felt in ages. Show energy, performance energy. I got bits of it when I did Orpheus several years ago but that's a different thing altogether.

... and this has sat half-finished for so long I should just wrap it and backdate it. So.

Two months ago I was able to start having actual future-of-relationship conversations with Erin.
Six months ago I dropped back to 80% time at work because I was overstressed.
A year ago I started working on my avoidant tendencies during counseling.
Two years ago Sarah kissed me, after a lead-up that took either ten seconds or twenty years.
Three years ago I decided to sell the condo and move to Fort.
Five years ago Erin kissed me, after a lead-up that took either a week or three years.
Seven years ago I got laid off from MSTR and took a year of sabbatical.
Ten years ago I was just starting to let myself get depressed and lonely in Vancouver.
Twelve years ago my awesome boss Roxy suggested that MSTR could sponsor my immigration to Canada.
Sixteen years ago I realised/decided I was polyamorous.
Twenty-four years ago I'd made a home in Blacksburg after a big fight with my parents.
Twenty-five years ago I met Emily.
Thirty years ago I started finding a home in Shakespeare Troupe at my sci/tech high school.
Thirty-five years ago I moved to Fayetteville NC for the most traumatic five years of my life, and also the longest time I've ever lived in one place.

Life flies when you're living it.