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Kial mi skribas?

Tio ĉi estas demando, kiun mi neniam ne demandis. Mi iam aŭdis, ke la homoj estas denaskaj rakontantoj. Mi ne aŭdacas nei la ideon, almenaŭ kiam estas aplikiĝata al la homoj ĝenerale.

Aliflanke, mi ne estas tial certa, ke al mi aplikiĝas. Mi ne komprenas aliajn homojn, do, kiel mi scipovus skribi aŭ rakonti pri ili? Ĉe elpensi ĝin, la rakonto ĉesas min interesi. Sed samtempe, mi ne scipovas vidi ĉian rakonton. Alivorte, mi enuas antaŭ me finas, sekve mi sentas la malbonon de ambaŭ situacioj.

Mi povus titoli tio ĉi afiŝo Ĉar ĉiu fojoj, ke mi pensas, ke mi ne havas nek celon nek kapablon, mi ŝanĝas la opinion. Sed post nelonge, la opinio reŝanĝas. Tiel daŭras la ciklo.

Kiel antaŭe, mi pensas, ke la plej grava afero estas la espero. Mi sole deziras, ke la espero estu pri konstanta kunulo.

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Manic Technicolor Exoskeleton

Oh, yeah, Chloe... Chloe looked the way Meryl Streep's skeleton would look if you made it smile and walk around the party being extra nice to everybody.

I can kind of relate. ADHD isn't actually a condition of attention; that's just its most obvious (or at least best-known) sign. Really, though, it's a condition of executive functioning. It means that the part of your brain responsible for mediating what the rest of your brain does or imposing discipline doesn't work as well. This can often show up as difficulty paying attention like I said.

The big struggle for me is dealing with boredom, which is almost physically uncomfortable. The result is a great deal of difficulty in sticking with things that aren't immediately gratifying. The result of this is that, on the one hand, I don't really know how to let my brain rest, so I spend a lot of time in full-burnout mode. The other is that growing as a person, learning new skills, figuring things out generally, are all very elusive things.

So it is that I feel like I'm spending my life just trying to kill time as fast as possible, which is hardly a recipe for feelings of pride, satisfaction, or meaning. On a related note, being put on meds as an adult meant that the initial change was mind-blowing, but I think that, in turn, gave me an exaggerated sense of control over my own mind. I ended up believing that I would be able to control or mitigate my symptoms a lot more than it turns out is realistic.

So, it's back to square one. Too little identity, too little reliable ways of spending my time, no real sense of purpose. I have gotten some impediments out of the way, and I suppose that sometimes, going the wrong way more slowly is still progress.

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Vainity

There's a question that I can't stop asking myself, and that seems to be at the core of my entire mood and outlook: what's the difference between realistic expectations and giving up?

A pattern I've noticed about my life over the last, well, life is weight. Not in the physical sense, but in how just plain bogged down I feel all the time. Well, now I guess it's "all the time" except for a few hours when my meds are at full effect. Some of this is depression, some is how difficult ADHD makes staying occupied and feeling like I'm making any progress.

This is not something I've really been willing to consider fully. It's not that I don't want to admit I have a problem (so to speak), it's that I haven't wanted to accept or even really think about the idea that I might simply have to accept less from myself. All my life I've been told in one way or another that I can do whatever I want. But as time went on, that mythical future never really seemed to materialize. At first, I began thinking that I simply hadn't figured out what that thing was, what I wanted to do. I'd sort of coasted along most of my life, and most of my major decisions were based on either avoiding an ill or just sort of going with the default.

Lately, however, I've been realizing more and more how worn out I am. Just basic functioning takes hours of recovery. But this isn't actually new; I've just never really thought about it before. So it is that now I'm left having to wonder not what "whatever I want" means, but

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About Me

As the description above says, I teach Ving Tsun Kung Fu in Richmond, Virginia's West End.

I began training with my sifu in July 2010. I had tried other martial arts before (including Brazilian jiu-jitsu, Aikido, and Muai Thai), but never found anything that grabbed me. After meeting my sifu and going to my first class, I knew I'd found something different.

I've trained continuously since. I was inducted into my sifu's inner circle in August of 2014, and became an instructor at that point. After teaching the beginner's class for another couple of years, I was given permission in late 2016 to start taking students in my own right. I officially began in early 2017, with my first student joining a couple months later.

The Road to Here (aka The Long Version)

As with most important things in life, I came upon Ving Tsun somewhat by accident.

Sometime around 2000, I was at a party thrown by a family friend. I can't remember if it was for a specific holiday (I seem to recall it was summertime, but it could have been anything from Memorial Day to Labor Day). At some point during the night I ended up talking to a guy who did some form of kung fu. From what I remember it almost certainly wasn't Ving Tsun (too flashy), but at the time I was suitably impressed.

Since this was before the internet was really a thing, or at least to the degree it is now, it was much harder to find out about this stuff. So at that point, my only first-hand experience with martial arts was the karate I took in elementary school, and that had never done it for me. But I had seen plenty of movies, and was excited about seeing something so different.

This being the pre-internet days also meant that I had to look elsewhere for a school. So I did what made sense at the time, which was look up "kung fu" in the Yellow Pages. I don't remember how or why I chose a Ving Tsun school, but I did. This wasn't my current place, of course; this was a different lineage (Ip Chun or Ip Ching, I don't recall now) and located in eastern Virginia where I was living at the time. I called them up and scheduled an intro, and off I went.

What I was shown there was nothing short of awe-inspiring. The sifu there gave a couple demonstrations of how Ving Tsun body mechanics work (showing how a small change in arm positioning could change a punch or make a block almost uncollapseable), as well as showing a one-inch punch. I also saw a couple students doing chi sao (sticking hands), and it was like nothing I'd ever seen.

I signed up immediately, and trained there for a little over a year before moving to Richmond for college in the fall of 2002. I had intended originally on commuting back, but that ultimately wasn't realistic due to cost and time. (To be fair, I'm sure I could've made it work if I'd really wanted to, but I wasn't willing to make the sacrifices necessary at that point.)

Over the next several years, I went on to finish undergrad and also get a law degree. During this time I tried a couple of other martial arts, but nothing ever satisfied me the way Ving Tsun had. The main thing I noticed (aside from when stuff wouldn't work on me thanks to the Ving Tsun training I'd had) was that there never seemed to be a coherent underlying way of thinking. Everything was just techniques thrown together, and there was no attempt to form an actual system.

After trying an MMA school in 2010 and being deeply dissatisfied (if you weren't already able to get in the ring and make them look good, they weren't really interested in teaching you), I decided to look for a Ving Tsun school again. At this point Google was around, and so it was easy enough to find one nearby (specifically our family's Fan location, as our West End school hadn't been founded yet). Of the two teachers there at that time, my now sifu's schedule worked better for me, so I set up a lesson.

I can remember two things about that first lesson. First, meeting my sifu: I knew as soon as he introduced himself that this was someone who was the real deal. There was just something in the way he carried himself, a calm and lack of pretense that immediately said volumes. The other thing was the first time I did pak sao with one of my brothers (who still trains with me to this day); as soon as I felt that energy, I knew I was where I wanted to be.

After that I was hooked, and it's remained a passion ever since. Teaching started to become a specific goal a couple of years in, but of course it would take longer than that to get there. After being inducted into my sifu's inner circle in August of 2014, I was able to begin serving as an instructor for the si dai (beginner) class. This gave me a chance to start teaching but with continued supervision, sort of like being a student teacher in a regular school. It also got me used to the idea of having to go to class, rather than going because I wanted to. It's surprising how different the two can feel.

Eventually, in late 2016, my sifu and I started talking about my taking students on my own. We'd figured out the logistics by the end of the year, and I officially "opened" (even if at the same school) on February 1, 2017. After a couple months my first student joined, and I've been slowly building since.

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First Impressions: *Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice*

This is one of those times where I realize I'm not really "with it."

I hated Dark Souls. I'd heard how hard it was, but how it was worth learning to be good at. So I finally tried the remastered version a few months back, and I feel like I was playing a different game from the one I kept hearing about.

Challenge is great. Unfairness is not. And the deal with Dark Souls is that I don't think it's hard because of specific design choices that create player challenge. It's hard because of lousy design choices that hide information. It's like moon logic in adventure games: something that forces the player to try completely out there, illogical stuff out of exasperation because there's no way to logically figure out what it is you're supposed to do.

People talk about how Dark Souls is all about learning boss patterns. But the thing is, those patterns change far too randomly to be enjoyable for me. I had monsters that I'd fought a dozen times suddenly do something I'd never seen before. Contrast this with Deal Cells, which I love: it's a side-scroller that involves lots of hacking and slashing and a whole ton of deaths. But I've never felt like I died because the game hid the ball or did something that it had previously taught me it wouldn't do. Celeste is another example of this same thing. It's difficult, but the rules are clear and consistent, and it teaches you stuff clearly and then makes it hard to implement.

Dark Souls, by contrast, just sort of throws you in, doesn't maintain consistent rules, and then tells you to fuck off. The result was that deaths rarely felt like they were my fault. I don't need a game to simulate a capricious universe; that's life.

So it was that I came to Sekiro without a lot of optimism.

At first, I was optimistic. It's gorgeous, and I love the aesthetic. It reminded me of Tenchu for the original Playstation, and I found out later that it had actually begun as another game in that series. But unfortunately, Sekiro can't decide what it wants to be. Does it want to be a stealth game or a Soulbourne?

Most of the time, it seems the former. You have a lot of mobility options: you can climb, wall-run and -jump, and you get a grappling hook really early on. You can sneak, and there's some really cool mechanics where objects on the ground that you'd normally just walk over are things that you can accidentally kick, whether it's rocks on the ground or books on the floor. And of course you can one-shot enemies who haven't seen you in suitably graphic ways.

But then there are the times where it forces you to fight, and ugh.

I'd hoped that patterns were a thing. With regular enemies it's easy enough to time parries and counters like you'd expect. You don't have a dodge-roll, although you can do a kind of quick leap thing that unfortunately doesn't always take you out of range. As far as I can tell, i-frames aren't really a thing. Again, though, for regular enemies it's not particularly troublesome, and they're easy enough to deal with.

Then I came to my first boss fight.

It reminds me of the first version of Deus Ex: Human Revolution before the Director's Cut. If you're unfamiliar, that game was a third-person action RPG in a near-future cyperpunk world. It's fantastic overall with some glaring exceptions. See, the game was designed so that you could do an entirely stealth-based, kill-free path. Except the boss battles. You would have a character where you've put all your upgrades into stealth and hacking, and only used non-lethal weapons. Then suddenly a boss comes along and you can't use any of that stuff. It sucked, and they revamped that system for the Director's Cut.

Sekiro doesn't seem to have learned from this. The first boss battle I've come across, it takes three finishers to kill him. This involves getting his "health" (called "posture" in the game) down to the point that you can do the finisher. It's a cool mechanic most of the time. But with this boss at least, the combat just doesn't work. His attack patterns are random as far as I can tell, and bosses apparently have three separate unblockable attacks, each of which requires a different response. So imagine Dark Souls with no dodge-roll and quick time events, and that's what a boss fight feels like in Sekiro.

At this point I might go back once I've set it aside for awhile, but I think I may just have to accept that this kind of game is not for me.

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Own Goal

I've been thinking a lot about what I want to be spending my time on. With ADHD, boredom becomes disproportionately to the forefront.

It's ever-present and almost physically uncomfortable. Its constant stalking means that my focus was never on figuring out what I enjoy, just on finding things that could reliably keep my brain occupied. These two things are not synonymous. The result is that I managed to make it into my mid-30s without having a clear idea of what I'm passionate about.

There's a secondary factor too, which is that my brain simply works differently now that I'm medicated. So even things that I used to be into, or at least thought I was, don't really have the same effect anymore. I'm also not sure that I've changed enough, in that I'm just looking for things to keep myself occupied under the new regime rather than the old.

In other words, I need new metrics.

A couple possibilities come to mind, or at least axes. One, what the ultimate outcomes are for whatever I'm doing. Two, how I handle the interim. This second one includes questions of how short- or long-term I need to be looking. For the first, meanwhile, I think it comes down to whether I value the result.

This seems blindingly obvious, but remember that with ADHD it's hard to think things through beyond the initial step. So I might think "I like doing x" (and more likely I'm thinking "x will keep me occupied"), but I never really think about what will happen once I'm done. And this is doubtless why I tend to bounce from one thing to the next as soon as the novelty wears off. If the only metric I know how to use is "interesting or not," it's not hard to see how that initial "oh cool this is a new thing" feeling could become the only thing I think about.

As I'm starting to figure this out, the Should I Do the Thing? questionnaire from How to ADHD is starting to make a lot more sense. I think I need to make some copies and start spending time with them. Actually, before that, their One Page Miracle seems like a better starting point.

Back to the drawing board.

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Public-Facing

Writing generally, and a blog particularly, has always been a source of a great deal of conflict for me. I go through this cycle of being super excited about it (usually when I start a new one) and then inevitably get overwhelmed with a combination of self-consciousness and ever-expanding focus.

I've been thinking about the self-consciousness element a lot lately. Isn't there some degree of egotism whenever we put out something for consumption by others? Aren't we on some level saying "this is better than other things you could be doing"? At the least, I worry that I'm vulnerable to that criticism. The result has been a tendency to only write when I have something that I think is "interesting" enough, but without a clear metric for what that actually means (leaving aside the question of whether that's a valid standard to begin with).

I was reading The A.V. Club yesterday, and came across a story about how the daughter of one of the people (Lori Loughlin) involved in the recent college admissions bribery thing got some kind of sponsorship from Amazon. It involves her showing off her doom room online or something, and kind of ties into the broader "social media influencer" phenomenon, which for better or worse I'm too old to really be into.

My initial reaction was that the whole thing seemed really egotistical and shallow. Then this started to seem like a counter-example to my earlier question. In trying to think about what distinguishes someone whose sole appeal is commercial versus someone who, say, writes a novel, it made me think that the distinction is aim rather than skill or something as nebulous as "artistic merit."

Meanwhile, I've been re-reading Preacher, probably my favorite comic of all time. There's a brief bit where two of the characters are talking about Bill Hicks, and one of the characters says something about how he was just someone telling what he thought to be true.

I realized that this is part of why I feel compelled to write all the time. It's not necessarily that I think I know all the answers, but there's a difference between knowing I can be wrong (and doubtless am in some cases) and believing that I'm always wrong, or that I can never say anything of value. But beyond that, I do think there's something to be said for the idea of simply putting oneself out there and seeing what comes back. The universe is a funny place sometimes, and energy out often returns in strange ways. Granted I find it easier to have a starting point (ideally something someone else says that I can respond to), and admittedly I often feel more compelled to respond to something on someplace like reddit than I do writing on a blog, since the latter can feel so much like pissing in the wind.

So with that preamble, I'm going to try two things. One, not apologize for what I think quite so much, and as a corollary, be willing to say when I think something is wrong. Reasonableness and open-mindedness is one thing, but without any "closed"-ness, it's impossible to think (and, more importantly, stand for) much of anything. But I hope that I can actually take a lot of my alienation and frustration and channel it.

The second thing is not to worry quite so much about meeting some minimum profundity standard. I'm not sure I'm ever going to be able to judge that effectively, and I'm tired of this start-and-stop cycle that happens with every blog I've ever had. Instead, my approach is going to simply put something out there that is important to me, and see if maybe it doesn't resonate with someone else. It's better to admit the possibility than refuse to do anything out of some misguided humility.

So let's see where this goes.

meta #blog

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The Hard Part

There's a great scene in The Wire where a supporting character named Walon is talking to Bubbles, a homeless addict who works with the police from time to time. Early in the show, Bubbles dances with the possibility of getting clean.

After an NA meeting, he and Walon talk:

Walon: Look, forgiveness from other folks is good, but ain't nothin' but words comin' at you from outside. You want to kick this shit, you got to forgive your own self. Love yourself some, brother. And then drag your sorry ass to some meetings.

Bubbles: Meetings?

Walon: What the fuck do you wanna hear? That you're strong enough to do this by yourself? Gettin' clean's the easy part. And then comes life.

Addiction is a good metaphor for depression, or at least how it shows up in my head. I saw a meme on reddit a few years ago, and it said something like:

People say there's a light at the end, but I just want to stay in the tunnel.

There's something to this. There's a lot of safety in feeling like you have nothing to lose. We notice the fall a lot more than what comes after; something about our brains sees change a whole lot more clearly than the new normal.

But beyond that, there's also a simple matter of habit. Addiction becomes something that you do because that's what you do, and thinking of the world a certain way is no different. Once the drug is gone (or in my case, once the drugs have come), you're left with a void. Once something that ingrained disappears, it can be difficult to know what to replace it with.

The best answers to that question, at least in my case, have been re-evaluating what's been there before. Initially, I tried to go broader: assumed everything I knew was wrong, and tried to go about re-inventing some sense of identity from scratch. Granted this wasn't all that different from a practical level, but the broadness actually slowed me down. Because who I am hadn't actually changed all that much. However disproportionately it occupied my attention, whatever illness I have isn't all of me.

Where things have started to get better is in thinking not about where to go, but what's still getting in the way. It's not about finding new things about myself, it's about allowing what had been held back try to grow now that there's less overall weight to everything. I don't need to find new ways to do things, I have to be willing to risk frustration and failure by trying the stuff that's never worked again.

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Smooth Seas & Skilled Sailors

We had dinner with some family friends over the weekend, and of course the usual "how are things" conversations come up. My usual line in response to this question, after the standard "nothing new is happening," is that the older I get, the more excitement usually means something has gone wrong.

I'd never thought much about this, but it connected to something that came out of therapy recently.

Something I've struggled with a lot is forming a self-image. I consistently found myself unable to really determine my own strengths and weaknesses, because I had no idea how I am compared to anyone else. This begs the question of why the relativity is so important. My counselor asked me, in essence, why I can't be happy about aspects of myself for their own sake?

My answer to myself, any time I had tried to do that, was some variation on "for all the good that has done me." Because even if I could say that I was successful at something, this didn't necessarily corrolate to any feelings of accomplishment. They weren't always absent, but in my case, everything has the volume turned way down. Or at least everything positive does.

Having persistent depressive disorder (previously called dysthymia) means that my default emotional level is lower than the norm. If you think about a day where it just feels like nothing is going right, the weather's gloomy, and you'd rather be in bed, that is my default state. If a "normal" person's normal happiness level is 0, and being really happy is 50, then my default is somewhere around -25. This means that something that would put a normal person up to 25, which is pretty good, for me doesn't even register, or at the least doesn't register as "happy." Instead, managing my emotional state became about avoiding negatives rather than finding good. Oftentimes, the only way I can judge whether or not I like or enjoy something is whether it's avoiding something bad.

This ties closely into having ADHD, where boredom can be super uncomfortable. A related thing that I've very much struggled with is identifying interests. So much has been centered around avoiding boredom that I'm still unclear where something is a genuine interest versus a way to kill time. It can be a fine line under the best of circumstances, and for me, I'm generally not sure what a meaningful way to distinguish these things would actually be.

Another example of this is knowledge. Many times, I'll find myself wanting to learn something not because of an actual interest, but because I want to avoid being vulnerable to someone who may choose to misuse or misstate something (this is especially true in the case of history, which gets misused a lot). Or in the alternative, I will seek it out in order to solve a problem, or avoid one more generally. This is all well and good, but it's not enough to sustain me when I get frustrated (and ADHD on top doesn't help). Many times, I like the idea of knowing something, but not the experience of learning it or the practice of actually using it after the fact. This isn't always the case, but I haven't yet figured out a pattern. Meanwhile, there's no real emotional response to get me through, or if there is, it's too short-lived to be sustainable. I've been struggling for as long as I can remember with how to deal with the novely wearing off.

Still, I feel like I've gotten a little better handle on all this than I've had in a long time. I have to hope that this will lead somewhere, even if I don't have the foggiest idea how to go about improving it.

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This sums up my experiences with PDD perfectly.

On functional depression and anxiety

I keep seeing an inability to function posited on this site as the absolute nadir, the holy grail of depression, as if mental health problems are only real if you are in bed, refusing to shower and forgetting to eat.

I think this means that those of us who are ‘functional’ are often seen as suffering less, or that we have not truly hit rock bottom. A large part of this may be that a sizeable portion of the Tumblr demographic is quite young and composed of people who have not yet had to fend for themselves.

The fact is, for many of us, the terrifying threat of poverty simply has to come first before getting better in any way or allowing ourselves to address issues. I have wished in the past so much that I could just stay in bed for two weeks and sort out my head, cry, have a meltdown, and perhaps go some time without showering.

I’m not depressed now, but my generalised anxiety makes working an ordeal every single day (lmao my brain doesn’t rest from work anxiety over the weekend, I’m afraid).

But there are bills to pay, and some of us have kids to feed, pets to look after, and no sick pay or vacation days at our disposal. So even if you have lain awake all night in existential dread, even if you have to stick your headphones in and turn your music up every morning because you can feel a panic attack coming on when you are on the train to work or college, and when one small bit of criticism from your boss means that you cry in the bathroom and have learnt how to splash water on your face to stop the telltale signs of your misery manifesting themselves in the office, you go on. You have no choice, none whatsoever.

So my point is this – even falling, even being depressed, is mired in classism to the point that not functioning is some kind of weird privilege. And don’t get me wrong - if you can’t function, it’s hardly something great. It’s terrible and crushing and damaging. Even those of us who are ‘functional’ can’t go on and almost always end up having some sort of meltdown. But please don’t think that it’s any easier for the functional ones - it’s often exactly the opposite. It’s torture because it’s relentless. Bills and responsibilities don’t give a shit about your mental health, so if you have a good support network and your finances don’t rely on you turning up to your job every single working day, be grateful for that.

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Post-glutton

A new week. The holidays were much less stressful than I expected - it helped that one relative didn't bring their pit bull as usual.

Now, I know everyone has a pit bull and that they've never done anything, and that my unease is probably disproportionate to the risk. But, I have seen research (based on self-reported figures from owners, not something like dogbite.org) that showed pit bulls to have a small edge in terms of frequency of attacks over most if not all other breeds. Where they're especially dangerous, though, is (1) they are bred specifically to not give warning before they attack, and (2) they are bred to have an extraordinarily strong bite and to be completely unwilling to let go once they latch on. So even if the risk of attack were equal, the consequences could be much worse. This is especially true with a small child around who does not necessarily know what not do do with dogs. There's a reason we treat a loaded handgun differently from a full water pistol: the risk of abuse may be the same, but the possible outcomes of that abuse are far different.

I recognized that this was just something I was going to have to deal with, but I was more than a little relieved when it turned out to be moot. I found myself sleeping a lot better than I have in years past, although I don't know to what extent this was a factor (and it may simply have been a case of lowered expectations).

We spent Thanksgiving proper with my dad's family, which mostly involved me getting drunk in the garage with my dad, brother, and uncles (the introvert-extrovert division in our family is almost perfectly along gender lines). Then we went bowling, which the youngin had never done before. Most of us got breakfast out on Saturday, then everyone started heading out, and we went and saw my grandparents. This was nice, and my grandmother behaved herself quite well: she wasn't anxious about the kid doing anything untowards, and also avoided saying anything inappropriate.

Random aside: It is kind of interesting that my paternal grandparents (RIP), both born in the South, never displayed any racism that I'm aware of (and my grandfather was on his town's school board when integration happened, and as far as I know did not fight it). My Canadian-born maternal grandmother, though, is another story. Although she's not generally super overt about it, because she'd never put herself in a position where she could be justifiably criticized.

Anyway, the weekend was cold and rainy, so any residual "we need to adult" energy was long gone by the time we got home late Saturday afternoon. Hence, pizza delivery and YouTube.

I'm not sure if it was the weather, the general fatigue, or not having taken my (prescription!) uppers, but my mood definitely fell off some. Not having been to kung fu in a bit may also have contributed.

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(En)cyclical

Fairly meh mood day. I guess days like this are to be expected, but one of the things with having a mood disorder is that it's hard to take that for granted. The whole problem, after all, is that my emotions can be disconnected from what I'm actually thinking and feeling.

It also makes them poor feedback. After all, I can feel down just because; there doesn't necessarily have to be something wrong. This in turn means it's much harder to figure things out: do I try to make changes based on this new information or not? It fucks with my priors.

One thing I was thinking about today is that I struggle with goals and satisfaction. For whatever reason, my planning tends to focus on avoiding an ill rather than achieving a good. So hitting certain milestones is too often a case of preventing a negative, or at least checking off a box, rather than actually accomplishing anything. Put another way, it's like I'm spending all this energy just to stay put, rather than moving forward.

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In Medias Res

I'm not planning on doing some formal introduction, as I'd rather things evolve a little more naturally. I also have a bad tendency to be too audience-conscious as it is, so the last thing I need is to begin by writing specifically for some theoretical reader.

Anytime I find myself feeling like the only sane person in the room, I start getting nervous. My assumption in this situation is that I've missed something. Maybe it's simple odds, or some pathological issue with self-doubt (por qué no los dos?). As someone generally left-leaning, this seems to mostly come up on social issues. I've never really bought a lot of the current thinking in this area, but on the Internet this makes me per se sexist, racist, and homophobic. Of course, I have to then wonder: is it really that the thinking on this one issue is especially warped, or is this just a case where I'm able to see it because I disagree? It's easy to drive oneself crazy, and I can see why philosophers have been struggling with epistemology for so long.

Ultimately, the only sustainable thing is to trust what I think until I have reason to do otherwise. Looking hard enough, I'll always be able to find a reason to do otherwise. And the seeming popularity of an idea is both misleading (since Internet communities are not necessarily representative of people more generally) and not an automatic guarantee of correctness. Every good idea is a minority idea when it starts.

I have a pathological dislike of elision. The world is a complicated place, and we've become increasingly lazy in how we think about it. We don't respect mistakes, and are unwilling to do anything that suggests giving ground to the "other" side. So to be fair, it's far from just social issues where this is a problem, that's just what's been coming up lately for me. It's frustrating, though, to find it so difficult to find some semblance of community that actually respects this, and I'm finding it to be only a matter of time before no matter where I am, this becomes an issue.

Possibly related to this, I've always been strongly introverted, but I find that this is increasing more and more as time goes on. I'm also finding more and more that people are boring.

All of this I'm sure sounds incredibly neckbeardy, and it's of course only one side of things. Still, it's dangerous to pretend that thoughts don't exist.

Anyway, it's the last day of work before the holiday. Thanksgiving is fun enough, getting to see some relatives, but also generally exhausting (largely for the same reason). I get along fine with my family, it's just a lot of people, many extroverted, and I have no doubt that by the weekend I'll be more than ready to be home.