Five hundred freakin' posts for this year

 I haven't written one of these in a while, because I'm always playing catchup and never know where I am and then feel too guilty to write these. But I need a pickup and this is as good as it gets, despite all the internal resistance, the lack of motivation and total collapse of any form of writing several times this year, I've made it to 500 freakin' posts this year. Which is an amazing achievement for me in recent times.

I know, the rule for me is/was supposed to be to write daily, that's not happened lately because i'm so damn overwhelmed with the idea of having to 'write back'. But I'm getting there, I should really start from a clean slate and I'm not going to surrender to the vagaries of the universe. I've made it to this number of posts, I'm so glad, so proud, it's s sign nobody's giving up. Suckit universe.

as if I needed a takedown

As the awaited annual walking competition arrives I screw up my knees while training for it. Probably cos I had sOoOoOoo many wins recently and needed to be taken down a peg. Well done fuckers well done those in the heavens.

don't need the keys

Maybe

I don't

Need

Direct access

To your heart

And your feelings.

Lock me out,

Love,

Change the keys

And hand em over

To somebody else.

Friedrice egg yogurt lunch, shave, hurt walk in the park, more writing [Tue 31]

 For lunch I had friedrice with egg and yogurt.

Shaved my face because I'd started to look like a homeless person.

Walked to Volunteer park with AR(y) but it was so freakin' painful as my knees were still hurting, the recovery had gone way slower than I had hoped. She lost her bus card, I tried helping her find it, but we were unable to. 

Dragged my feet back home and rested for the rest of the day, wrote a bunch more posts.

And with this post, May is fuckin' finally done, on the 8th day of June. I can get the 'coverup' done tomorrow, no big deal, this is gunnabe goood.

Escape from belltown, shopping at tj's, long walk with the gang, high talks, early dinner at my place, second round of dinner with sandwiches, chhyang party with new folks[Mon 30]

 Got out of Belltown in the morning with Ar(y) in the bus, came to my place, picked a few supplies, went to TJ's bought a bunch more of the supplies, went to Sk's place, waited for AKS(e) and then wallked to Cal Anderson where we waited for AR(e) who was very traumatised from the news of the air crash from Nepal. So this was our extended gang besides AS(y) who couldn't be there because he was at his place and didn't make in on time. We all got very high, teased each other, and gave shit. Aks left after a while because even though the rest of the gang had the day off, he didn't.

We walked to Volunteer, then to Interlaken, and thought of going all the way to Arboretum but my knees were giving me trouble so we didn't instead we ended the trip at the uppermost end of Interlaken park, and walked through Volunteer. The girls wanted to go to Asian place for dinner, I promised to make lunch instead, so the gang had nice filling dinner at my place, sans the two AKS brothers.

There was a lot of leftovers, and I was glad because I was fairly certain there was going to be a second round.

And that's exactly what happened AKS(y) called me to say they were coming over, a bit after the original gang had left so I got them to bring Ciabatta and tomatoes, and fried up the leftover soup noodles. Fed them sandwiches and fried noodles. AR(y) was there too but she didn't try the sandwich which was just as well because it was such a filling meal for me the next morning. 

Had a nice dinner and chhyang party with those folks, including the roommate bro of AKS(m) in Minneapolis. Roommate connections are so interesting!

I'm so so lazy about these journal posts, how come, they should be the easiest to write, no?

 Not to mention the fact that I started writing regularly mostly to complete the journal posts, that was the motivation for me to write daily. And it was so easy, just write down what happened to me during the course of the day! Sad that it didn't work out, big big big fat bummer, I hope I can get better on that regard. Ugh.

I've been eating great, somehow, part II

I wrote in an earlier post about despite most things not working so great, I've been eating quite decently, with sandwiches and noodles and rice dishes and what not. It's been two weeks since, and I think that my diet is terrible and I'm unmotivated and I need to steer my life towards the right direction. Before realizing that actually that I'm eating quite well, fancy great tasting food that I cookup out of nowhere and it's amazing? And when I offer what I consider to be trash to friends they seem to love it, which suggests the problem is not my eating habits but my perception of it.

Case in point a couple of days ago I decided to eat TJ's pre-cooked fried rice. Except I added tonne of coconut milk, frozen spinach, frozen vegetables, spices, soy sauce, vinegar, and other greens. Which means that I used the fried rice as the raw material, and at the end of the cooking it became quite a feast.

And it's not just that. I've been eating oranges daily, to finish them if nothing else, as well as all the fermented foods because I've made so much. And the chocolates go daily, and so do different kinds of cheese. It's wild. As long as there's stuff in the fridge, it's in my mouth. And even when there's not much in the fridge, I eat fine anyway. I should be proud. I'm lazy but not completely out.

Hurray?

It's clear I'm never gonna do a 9-5 job, according to my wishes. Now what?

As a young man...a younger man...eleven/twelve years ago, I decided something. That I never ever wanted to do a regular 9-5 office day job because it'd be too boring and I wanted to do other things with my life and explore the world.

Turns out I'm living the dream right now. Because my job's not 9-5. It's an office job, yea but the hours are flexible, and even those flexible hours give me a whole tonne of leeway to figure out what i want to do. I have so much goddamn free time, get off work at 1.30 and the rest of the day is mine. TO cook, write, avoid writing, watch tv, walk so much, hang with friends, avoid writing, read, workout, avoid writing, write, and avoid writing more. Also work on my various fermentation and growing projects. So that has been very rewarding.

When I dreamt up this life, the 'setting my own hours' was the goal, and not a means. I didn't know why I'd want to do that, and what would come beyond that. Now that I have things under control, and my dreams have been fulfilled, it's time for me to figure out, what DO I want to do with this free time. What is my actual dream that having control of my time was the means to achieving? Where do my priorities lie? What do I care the most about in life?

Turns out I answered the easy questions early on. Now comes the hard part.

My life is just one long vacation

 My life is just one long vacation, I've realized.

As in, I'm always hanging out with friends and family. Always having fun. Never in a rush for anything. Always kind-of in the chillaxing mode. Never under intense pressure or rush or any sort of fear for the workday. Never in 'do or die' mode. I go on hikes and walks and lovely picnics on weekdays and weekends, all the time. I go meet and crash and friends and family three/four months a year. I'm travelling casually all the time -- a bit much as I've recently observed and written -- like it's no big deal. And there's no proper 'closed-off' time periods for me. If I'm hosting people, I'll clear up space for them. When I'm in Nepal I go all out on fun-having even when I'm technically working. I'm always watching tv, reading, walking talking, going out, whatever. They say Americans work for the weekend, or the vacation, or whatever. Not true for me. I'm living one day at a time.

It's not always happy happy though. Because every day is a vacation day, I feel guilty when the days go wasted napping or watching tv. I want to be productive -- in having fun or doing something 'useful', so when that doesn't workout I feel useless. And often I look back at the days and weeks and months that have gone by and feel somewhat lost, and look fondly at all those good times that were had.

But like, that's the fun of it, right?

One thing I need to absolutely learn to do to make my life #1 is to get in a personal routine and live up to it every day, whether I'm traveling or not. Even if I'm not in my bedroom or things are beyond my control. Then, the days will truly have been conquered and I'll be living completely on my own terms.

emotionally draining situations

One would rather always avoid circumstances that are emotionally draining and have unpleasant consequences in the short to middle term. But doing otherwise would have terrible consequences in the long term, and that's a very safe bet. Not to mention incredibly awful optics for all the parties involved. What must be done must be done alas. That's the curse of adulthood.

On cooking: I do random shit and people love whatever

 I've wrote quite a few posts in recent days about how despite not having much else in order, my diet seems to be...fine...actually. Quite well, if I may say so myself. I have a healthy diet of fruits, cheese, vegetables of some sort or another, fermented foods, nuts, chocolates, carbs in the form of bread, rice, oats or potato, and a bunch of random stuff here and there.

But this is not about that.

It's the other side of the equation: how folks seem to enjoy whatever I make no matter how bad it turns out to be. For example the Shin Ramyum I make folks. It started last year when a group of underfed youngsters showed up and I made noodles for nine. Then that kind of followed and people just wanted me to make them ramen. And I did. Out of the packet. With some spices of my own. And every time it's a new recipe because there's no recipe so I don't keep anything consistent. Whatever's on my pantry goes. If I have garlic, in it goes. Same for tahini, and cheese, and tomatoes, and green onion, regular onion, and what have you. And people love it. Every goddamn time. It's not just that they're thankful for being fed, but they're actively appreciative, and ask for recipe. There's no recipe people! I just dump whatever shit I have lying around into the 'stew'. And you don't ever get the same flavor repeated because again I have no clue what I'm doing, you gotta learn this shit yourself peeps. As if there's anything to 'learn'.

I gotta experiment with more cooked stuff, sandwiches and fried rice and as such when people are over.

my left knee hurts

I've been doing multiple 20k steps days and now my left knee fucking hurts. Not since my four day thru hike has it hurt so bad.

Stupidity

Stuff one should never have to have the situation to ponder on or say, "well he's not exactly a pedo and it's all legal but the situation is the next worst thing".

Some random thoughts about pumps and shit

Pumps are great. I have a couple of water pumps I bought to make indoor fountain that I haven't gotten around to working on. And an airpump to circulate air inside my ferments. Thinking of getting a peristaltic pump, so I don't need to manually pump my ferments in and out of containers. Peristaltic pumps are cool because they never touch the liquid/substance being pumped, which greatly expands their usecase. In cryo pumping situations, bodily functions (blood pumps, etc) and food uses. It's cool.

You can also have solid state pumps where there's only one piece moving, and it's doing a simple linear motion covered away from the pumped substance, so the possibility of failure is low. Also pumps need to be primed to start working, many large pumps have separate pumps that are used to prime them. And sometimes even those priming pumps have their own pumps. So you start by manually (or starting with a non-prime pump) priming a small pump, which then primes a larger pump and so on and so forth until you get to the largest pumps.

Pumps can work on various principles. There's the 'scoop' based pumps. Then there's peristaltic pumps. And then we have electrochemical pumps, there's even biological pumps!

Etcetera.

Bob's burgers movie is out!

 So Bob's Burgers the movie is out and I'm super excited about watching it. I gotta watch it before it's out of the cinemas, which I imagine is likely because it's a small movie without a large studio backing and an animated one at that, of a somewhat niche tv series. So probably today, Thursday is what it's going to be. But only after I'm done covering up for stupid May. Man I'm three weeks in and *still* 'covering up'. Jeeeeez.

Gotta take it easy with travel after Colorado

I've written quite a bit about my travel plans in here. And have no doubt, I do love going from one place to another to see friends and family, or WITH friends and family. All by myself, not so much, but that's besides the point. Over the course of the summer if I wanted to, I could easily have good time in Minneapolis, Chicago, Philly, SoCal and other places. And Mexico. Now however I'm thinking of taking it easy with the travels.

The next trip is to Colorado, Denver specifically, for eight days. Sb's side of the family, S from the UK is going to be there too. It'll be great, I haven't hung out with his side of the family in over a decade.

I'm thinking of slowing down on my travels after the trip because I'm finding it really difficult to ground myself. Because if I'm going places every three weeks, and it takes me a week to get back settled in, and one week before departure to slow down on groceries, the one full week of 'living' is not really...too great. So to ground myself I will stop moving about for the rest of the year. Thinking the next trip should be in August/September.

Seaward park walk, most disappointing lunch at Don't Yell at Me, rest at home, kidnapped, crappy movie nice movie [Sun 29]

 In the morning AR(e) and I drove down by Seaward park and walked for about two hours. First signs my knee was starting to hurt. This will come back later and become a theme for the coming who knows how many days so pay attention.

We went to Don't Yell At Me which is supposed to be like a nice hotpot restaurant but I got a veggie tomato-base broth and it was yucky and the soup wasn't very good and the veggies were too harsh. I didn't have a good time, it was not worth the twenty-six bucks.

In the afternoon I wrote a bunch, made plans to Aks to hang with him with chhyang in the evening but it was raining heavily. Just then Ar(e) asked me if I wanted to come with her to the potshop, I said yes, she bought and then kidnapped me to take to her place, and we hung out. Ate a bit, smoked up a bunch, watched an awful movie about some 'sheela ki jawani' or whatever, what an awful, incredibly shitty movie, thankfully it'd got only 3/10 rating on imdb. Then we watched something better, maybe phir hera pheri, which was a pleasant change ugh.

Lake Union trip, walk at Greenlake with the girls, Belltown hang, dalbhat lunch, bhujia snacks, spinach and rice dinner [Sat 28]

 AD(y) and I walked to Lake Union park in the rain, it was quite nice actually. Got tea and used the restroom at the cafe there, maybe we didn't need to get the tea to use their toilet.

Ate chocolate and nuts as we waited for AR(e), she picked us up and we drove to Greenlake park where we walked for a decent amount of time. Because AD wanted to see Space needle, we dropped her there, and I hung out at Belltown at the girls' place. Ate bhat dal (which their relatives had cooked days before) and it was simple but so good. Also had bhujia snacks because that wasn't enough.

The girls slept, AD came back in, we chilled for a bit, because it was raining heavily we took a lyft to my place. Chilled some more, talked a bunch, I made her sandwiches for dinner, she took one for the road. Packed up, she got a lyft to the train station, I bid AD farewell. She made it to Boston safely.

I got back and made spinach and rice dinner, inspired by TJ's frozen meal. It's been such an inspiration, I'll probably be talking about it a lot more in the coming days.

Chickpea-carrot-mozz ciabatta sandwich breakfast, Sichuanese cuisine lunch mapotofu, AD arrives, prep, extensive walk in the park with the gang, chau chau dinner, chhayng hang [Fri 27]

 For breakfast I had chickpea-carrot mozzarella on ciabatta sandwich, the carrot was a bit much, too sweet, what a sad pathetic thing and also maybe I should have cut less of it.

In the afternoon AKS(e) and I went to get lunch to the international district, got mapotofu and sichuanese cuisine. It was cool.

After work I cleaned up my apartment and cooked food and cut fruits and got everything in order because AD, who's AD(e)'s sister who came in from IDAHO, came in. Didn't give her too much time to rest unfortunately, we talked, she ate, and very soon we headed out for a walk. Went to Cal Anderson where we got caught up with SK, AKS(y) and Sb who I'd also invited, and the two of us joining them made it the five of us. We talked to Volunteer park, then to Interlaken park, all the way up from the interlaken park to its end and honestly I don't remember how good or bad it was, just that we saw lots of flowers it smelled really good and everything felt awesome.

Walked back home through volunteer, I made everybody chau chau, the regular shin ramyun. Some of the rest of the gang came in too, including Aks and Bd who uggh I don't want to talk about it, and we had a nice long chhyang hang, everybody enjoyed my rice drink.

Night ended pretty early all things considered at 1am.

Liar liar, crazy bragger

Don't tempt me, don't tease me,
It won't me just a ruse
For if you dare be my muse,
Trust me things will quickly get outta hand
In ways that'll be nice but is that what you want,
Some sort of less stable stand?
Can you still be friends,
When you've touched your ends
Or might it end all the fun
And you know, you know
I gotta be the one on the run.
Is it going to be okay, all tame and good
Or will I mess things up
For no good reason?

Allergy season and the curse of the pollen

 I've written here about that day a couple of years ago when our entire apartment in Boston (Mefferd, yes) was feeling unwell for some unexplained reason, and we all slept to sleeping pills/allergy medications because we didn't know what was up. And the sleep was real sound. Turned out that the pollen count for the day was off the charts and low-key allergies had messed up everybody's moods.

I suspect that might be happening to me this week. In addition to the knee situation, yes because I don't feel too good, unexplained headaches and weird mood swings for no clear reason, feeling of general miasma. Not too good.

But the pollen are going to fuck up a a tonne of flowers and we're going to get an amazing bloom, that's something worth the weird feeling I've been having for the couple of days.

Things on the up and up!

Tighten the purse strings

It's looking like the market ahead of us is going to be not doing great. The interest rates are rising, depriving capital from the otherwise wildly inflated companies and assets. It'll suck air out of those balloons, and might leak on to the otherwise healthy normal economy too. The governments want to curtail demand, mostly to control the price inflation but also to ameliorate the downsides of the supply-side constraints caused by various geopolitical events. Tourism might be down, so could foreign employment. It could be a few rough years for folks in Nepal. And not particularly better for folks here either.

This might be a good time to hunker down and get on a 'money-saving mode' for a few months (or years ahead). Meaning casual eating out has to go, along with extra vacations and other unnecessary expenses. Any subscriptions I don't need, or regular expenditure beyond daily living and socializing. It's time to be on cash basis for a while, still supporting base habits and hobbies, but nothing beyond.

Drunk on endorphins

Hungry and happy
In the early morning
Of the weekend, long.
On the bus and on the trail
With the gigglies, and when sober,
I smile and I giggle.
It's only because
We've met after so long, cuz
And we should get about to eating
The hunger, surely that must be why
My heart's jumping and thumping
And the pressure is all off
And surely it's nothing more,
Please, lets not make this rough.

Practically a human fainting goat

At the slightest hint
Of dangers that lie ahead
I collapse and freak
Like the Carolina Fainting Goat.

Texting and calling
And thinking and blogging,
And yet nothing done
Towards the real fixing.

Because why bother
To get yourself
In trouble yet another
When it doesn't bother
The brother and the sister,
It doesn't to me either.
It does to me, a bit
For real,
But what does it matter
Yet another day
And another week
Down in the gutter.

The one good goddamn thing, orange

The one good goddamn thing
To come out of all of this
Is that I can peel
Orange, blood, a much better deal.
Or all sorts of citrus,
I can unwind at great rush
Without juicing or the crush,
All in one long ribbon
That's the least I can do for you hun
And feed you the slice, individual.
And that's me, a man in his thirty

Cool technical links for starting a cheap science research lab

Lab on the cheap

Public lab

Been perusing these a bit lately.

Alexis can't a-sephora go

Alexis is moving
To a place
With no sephora
For twenty seven hundred miles
And a HUNDRED MILES
AND A HUNDRED MORE
A hundred miles,
A hundred miles,
A hundred miles,
A hundred miles,
You can't a-Sephora go
A hundred miles
A hundred more
And a hundred more
And a hundred more,
No sepho-ra no mo', 
For Alek-sis,
Naah naa naa
Nuh nuuh nuh nuh
Nan nan naa nun nun nun nun
No more sephoraaa.

Congratulations to the bro who didn't burn

 IN Kathmandu, he won as an independent candidate, fuckin' finally, by almost twice the number of votes of his nearest candidate. This is flippin' chill, hoping this goes on for ever and ever and ever. And things work out real real well, everything turns out to be be perfect I hope.

Oh no not again

Why
Are you single?
They ask me
And I wonder
What's actually the
Expected answer?

Because the question
Seems rather
Rhetorical?
If things could be
They would be,
But they can't,
So they aren't.
Pity,
That the answer
Never seems to
Satisfy the asker
But brother,
What the hell
Did you want to go
With the question?

Existentialism is uncomfortably close to essentialism, and in that takes the wrong approach to understanding life

Camus's allegory of life using the Myth of Sisyphus is incomplete because Camus asks the wrong question. He considers 'why' to lead to a revelation and not the 'how' of existence. For him the absurdity of existence lies in the 'why' of it, and the considerations of the 'what' are used to guide the argument towards answering the ultimate 'why' question. In that it is too reductive, it focuses too much on the essence of life, the meaning of it, the one archstone that completes the large edifice of argument.

Instead if he'd asked the 'what' question, he'd have understood that there is no absurdity in existence. Existence is a functional property of 'us', to exist is to 'be' all the atoms and subsystems in one's body. The 'purpose' of human existence is nonsensical, as much as the purpose of an atom's existence is. Instead if we understand what it is that makes us, and how it works, he'd have started much revealing arguments. "What are we?" and "How are we (how do we work)" are questions that can answer questions raised by Camus, and existentialists much better than the approach they themselves took.

I'm just understanding industrial processes and logistics and supply chains and values

I've been having conversations about this with AKS and SK and all my friends around here. Industrial production, and how it works, and logistics, and optimization and industrial scale.

It started with a couple of youtube channels from Nepali industrial equipment suppliers, I finally figured out the missing connection I had never considered in my understanding of 'how things are made'. And how custom hardware is made. And how PCB's work, and how supply chains work. And how value-add works in logistics. Like take transportation in Nepal. It's hella expensive because of various supply issues. You want to optimize the value of the transported goods: since you're paying by the kilo, the more expensive (aka 'value add') the good you're transporting is, the lower the proportion of transport costs, and therefore more efficient. If you're spending 100Rs to transport mangoes worth 1000Rs the transport costs are 10% of the item. If in the same weight you're transporting processed items (mango juice, dried mangoes, etc), then you've got, say 10k Rs worth of goods that still take 100Rs to transport, meaning your transport costs are only 1% of your costs. Additionally, if you're moving equipment to where the raw material is (aka decentralized processing) to add value to industrial goods, you're saving on production costs in terms of manpower costs, rent, etc. Which means you want to transport your machines to where the fields are and to in-situ processing. One downside of this is that if your production pipeline is not supply heavy, your capital efficiency is not very high. Aka you're using your expensive machines only 10-20% of the time, meaning your averaged capital costs could be higher. But then capital costs could not be that high of a proportion of your expenses, or they might not even matter. So it's not a big deal.

Anyway, it's super interesting to learn of these this, my understanding of the world has expanded pretty wide. I hope to have a lot more of this understanding. So rich.

Mitchell and Webb is my writing vibe, James Acaster is my standup

 I've been watching a lot of Mitchell and Webb collection stuff on youtube. Their audio skits, their tv skits, peep show, and bunch of other content, including their interviews. Man, if only I'd known of them when I was earlier, around the time of Peep Show in mid- to late- 2000's, I'd have tried to write just like them, and the synergy would have been great. At that point that was my writing vibe, absurdity with a hint of social relevance, and sometimes just raw absurdity that exposes the strangeness of the human condition. Loving this stuff. Peep show is so friggin' ridiculous, the characters all so pathetic so challenging to identify or like any of them. It's perfect.

And oh yeah, James Acaster's standup is perfect, that's the sort of performance I'd like to do if I ever got into the scene. Ironic because apparently he's quit doing serious standup shows and might come back but maybe not and even if he does he'll be back slow and easy, one-off random shows at some small venue at a time.

I'm glad I've identified my sensibilities and the works I'd be okay shamelessly being inspired by.

I've been so busy socially lately and I love it

 I wrote the title when I was way more socially busy versus this week when I've spent every day of the week writing on this blog because I feel incredibly guilty about not having maintained proper writing discipline.

So last week I was hanging out with friends and former coworkers and coworkers every day of the week, all in different circumstances. And man I felt tired yes, and busy, but so goddamn satisfied. I like to say that maybe I'm not as extroverted as I might originally come off as, and I believe that. But man sometimes I do want to spend every part of the week talking to people, getting caught up, and meeting friends and acquaintances, doing new things. It's a part of me, I feel nourished. Which means I'm probably more of an extrovert than an introvert?

It was good times, and I'd like to do that again please, preferably all the time. It was like I was in NYC, meeting people in town everyday of the week!

Skinheads and other dumb shit

This will be short. Don't want to give this sort of nonsense a lot of attention. Unclear if it's even a real thing. Regardless I'm writing it down to remind my future self that this happened.

On the day I returned from VA I was on an elevator at the CapHill train station, two backpacks in tow, and there were two men who looked like tweakers. One had a bunch of chinese characters on his bald head. They joked about me being short something something, I didn't get. And I forced a laughter. And then he said something else, I don't remember. And then that dumbass said I shoulda been glad he wasn't making a racist joke about black people. Which was a bit confusing because wtf but I had a mask on and bald and of course racist dipshits are not really known for their racial sensitivities etcetera. I felt very very uncomfortable, thankfully they went a different way out of the station. That was it. I dunno if this was even 'racial' situation but god how I wished at that point to be armed at that point so I could feel safe. It's sad but real.

Jammin' with the buds

 Last weekend we were jammin' up and down AKS(e)'s apartment. There were drums (table), there were guitars, and there was background music playing. And I don't know if it was the half-puff of weed or the drink or two I had but maan I was feeling really good and thought my voice sounded amazing. It's a new feeling. Normally I hate my voice, it sounds too... raw and unmodulated. But not on this occasion, it sounded like the tortured voice of a jilted lover. So powerful, deep, loving. Felt good.

And then reality came crushing in. You can't just 'sing' and expect to become a singer. Your voice needs range, you need training, you need to sing the notes, you need to train to get the timing right. I got none of those. And a barely decent voice, perhaps that too is overselling myself. So it's not a real band and it was not a real jam, but we got so close. So goddamn. close.

Since AKS(y) was in a band in his college days, maybe we can start a band once again, and I could be a singer in it. And the composer for the song and music. Nobody would mind. Except perhaps our audience but fortunately Seattle is a tight market music-wise and nobody would be tehre to come watch us. Luckily for me.

More on the jamming situation as it develops...

Some more stuff that I'm writing

Bear with this nonsense baby bear, because this is a whole lotta trash, by the standards of this blog. Which is submarine. Alas.

So if somebody asks me what's up and why I'm not doing anything with my writing I tell them it's because writing needs a lot of discipline and commitment. About two hours per day, something which I haven't been putting in. And when I do shitty stuff like this, writing thousands of words every day over weeks, and not writing anything for the following months, it's painful, the rest of my life stops. Then I tell myself it'll end I'll start writing again, get shit together. It never happens. Not even once. I get lazy tired and forget what an awful time I had trying to cover up for months' worth of writing. I try to convince myself it'll be fine, I'll cover things up. Or even stop writing because I don't have it in me. But I can't do that to myself. I've been writing consistently for four years at this point and stopping the process is not something I am open with. I need to keep writing, if not regularly then to 'cover up' for it. Which, as I've iterated about a thousand times on this blog, is not how it should work. The writing is for maintaining the discipline not for throwing out the words in here. And I remind myself consistently. Yet that don't work, I keep getting lazy and tired and bored. Afraid of failure is where it's at. What I fear is unclear. Just words which nobody reads. It'll never be published. There's not a hint of talent in these words. That's very freeing because I have no standards to live by, no expectations to meet. I tell myself that anyway. Tough to fully convince yourself of that though. So push push push, the writing does get. Until it's unbearable. And I live like a loser with a nasty apartment who only writes and does little else. Doesn't even reply to cute women's text messages what an awful ass.

Building a strong habit of writing is important. I've completed one part of the habit forming over the last four years. Which is that writing is an inseparable part of my life, like showering or eating or brushing. If I don't do it I get uncontrollably guilty. Do everything to make up for it. Which is a part of the problem now. It's like not eating for a week and making up for it by absolutely gorging for two days nonstop. At the cost of one's health.

Now onto the second part of the habit formation. It needs to be done daily. Regardless of where I'm at or what I'm doing or how I feel or who I'm hanging out with. Because it's a part of my life now, it tortures me to not do it. I'm not good at it, and that's no big deal. I'm not the best toothbrusher in the world and nobody ever complained about that. Writing in this blog is like that. It's about the habit-forming, getting out of the bed, and getting the words out. No matter what. What's my problem with that?

This is a list, and nobody's saying otherwise

1. As you can see
2. This is a list
3. Where I come
4. Up with random
5. Bullshit
6. To fill up
7. The words
8. That go nowhere
9. Why, you may ask
10. Who really cares
11. It doesn't matter
12. As long as there are numbers
13. And they count up or down
14. Followed by words
15. And they're in this blog
16. It's all good
17. Much like a shitty math test
18. Which reminds me man
19. I need to be better at maths
20. An research math too
21. So bad at calculus two
22. Shame shame shame
23. Maybe I had it in me
24. Experimental math
25. Highly theoretical
26. Think most of the time, write a little
27. And that's it,
28. No need to worry
29. But that's not how it works is it?
30. Alas alas alas.
31. Not so good, such things.
32. Shit.
33. Sorry about the low quality content.
34. This is how these things work alas.

Potato-cheese-egg sammich, peep show overload, writing more, plants rejoice, apartment cleaning [Thu 26]

 For lunch I had potato-cheese-egg sandiwch, as in the sandwich was made on TJ's potato things with egg and cheese in between. It was an experiment and unlikely to graduate to everyday cooking because it was just meh for all the effort that went in.

Watched Peep Show all day long, wrote a bunch, watered all my plants and gave them a throrough tilling so they're forced to redo their roots etcerera.

Cleaned the apartment, freakin' finally folded the clothes from the laundry I'd done like two days before.

Fruits and yogurt lunch, roasted carrots and potatoes dinner with special sauce, chyyang hang with Aks(e), so much writing [Wed 25]

 For lunch I had fruits and yogurt and nuts. By fruits I mean peaches, banana and orange.

For dinner I had roasted potatoes and carrots with some special sauce version again, it was kinda sweet, the over-roasted carrots were just like alright.

IN the evening I went to AKS's place, hung out for an hour or two drinking some chhyang, came home to write a lot more on this goddamn blog where I've been lazy writing for the last four days or so ugh.

Smashed chickepea-carrot-garlic lunch on Ciabatta, writing, hang with the dinner, expensive farewell dinner for K [Tue 24]

 For lunch I had smashed chikpea, carrot garlic and mayo on ciabatta for lunch. Man my sammich making skills are on the up and up.

Wrote a bunch after work.

Went to Nio thai or whatever thai place in downtown Seattle for K's farewell with the boys and Sb. He's moving to NYC for work and to get a new life etc. Saw a couple of cute girls, the food was just alright but the price was hella lot. Paid sixty buckaroos per person. Totally not worth it. I effing hate eating out, the prices are insane.

Massive TJ's grocery trip, Microphone arrives, I dunno english, amazing pesto sandwich dinner, so much writing [Mon 23]

 Went to Trader Joe's for a grocery run in the morning, it was lots of cheese and fruits and bread and milk, and veggies and other random stuff. Very heavy, but I've realized the more groceries I have in the fridge the more motivated I'm to cook and not eat out. So it was a good investment.

In the afternoon the microphone arrived and I spent a few hours playing around with it to realize that oops, that's not the solution to all my problems. I discovered I don't have quiet room, I don't have good speaking ability or english skills at all.

For dinner I had the pesto tomato sandwich as usual. Yum yum. So much writing in the evening, got close to 'catching' finally lol, he writes ten days later, running behind six days worth of posts.

Egg sandwich lunch, headphones arrive, I write a lot, roasted potatoes and special sauce, three loads of laundry, deep in twitter hole [Sun 22]

 Had egg sandwich on regular fried bread for lunch. Nice set of headphones arrive, they don't get in my ears well but the battery life is decent and the sound quality is alright.

Wrote like thirty posts over the course of the day because I was feelin' a lot of heat.

For dinner I had roasted potatoes, and ketchup, sriracha soy sauce and mayo sauce.

Did three rounds of laundry, so much laundry, took forever to fold ugh.

Got deep into twitter hole until wee hours of the night, found some cool people online.

What I might say

Oh no no no,
I will say
To her coworker
When they ask me
If I'm her partner
No I see myself
Rather as a consort
(Pronounced as kunh-SORT)
A supporting character
To the whirlwind of her.
Kind and loving
Magnanimous and caring,
For her,
I'm on the supporting role.
Though I do wonder
If the messaging
Doesn't come off
As being terrible?

The apartment is a mess, this blog needs to finish for my life to start

 This is yet another post about the toll the terrible writing backlog has taken on me. My kitchen is a mess, my bathroom is way past a nice cleanup, and there's a dirty backpack needing a wash that's been lying in my bathtub for a week. A large pile of sorted clean laundry lies on my living room, ready to be folded and neatly packed in the closet. The trash needs taking out. The bedroom is a bit of a mess. And oh I do need to give the entire apartment a nice broomin', vacuuming and mopping. None of that's been happening though because when I'm not writing I'm sleeping because my sleep cycle's all fucked up due to the writing situation. Everything's effed up. And also I haven't worked out or gone on nice walks in the last several weeks. Nothing good can come out of this.

Only thing to do is force my into finishing this, and be back to acting like a normal human being.

The only booze I drink should be the one I made

I figured something out. I don't want to be doing weed long term because it's got all these negative side effects. Booze is not so great either because number one it's hella expensive, number two you have to buy stuff you don't know how it's made and three bleh, it's not that great, you know?

So I've decided to come with a solution: what if I drank, but only the one I made by myself, my own brews. Like some people don't eat food cooked by anybody else, I'll drink only self-brewed booze. That way I save hella lotta monies on the booze, I maintain quality control, and then I can also impress friends and family with my exciting brews. It's so lovely, the whole thing.

The work situation is hella productive sometimes

 This isn't a big deal or anything, but most days at work feel low key slow-moving and not particularly productive. But some days are super duper duper extra productive and you really know that you earned your money's worth and maybe more.

Today was one of those days. I created a machine image from another machine image, after working through weird quirks and versioning issues with about seven different tools. It takes people a couple of days and it took me one single day. At this rate I'll have had a cluster of GPU's by tomorrow or the day after. Then I have to pretend that I wasn't very successful and work at a 'real person' pace, and do nothing for the next couple of weeks because you don't want to be known as the extraordinarily productive person or else they'll give you all the work in the world.

Twenty things, because this needs to have been done yesterday

1.  Jalapeno sauce
   
   
2. The Japanese flag
   
   
3. Ships
   
   
4. Sympathy
   
   
5. Earthmoving equipment
   
   
6. Losing all your money
   
   
7. Propaganda
   
   
8. Schadenfreude
   
   
9. Falling in love way too easily
   
   
10. Wearing your heart on your sleeves
    
    
11. Accidentally running 50 miles because you quit your addiction
    
    
12. Working like an ox
    
    
13. Confusion
    
    
14. Acting
    
    
15. Band
    
    
16. Nevada
    
    
17. Mountains
    
    
18. Noserings
    
    
19. Bright red lipstick
    
    
20. "Dino-prick"

The airfryer is quite nifty

 I ordered an airfryer from my work-points system thing. In one week I've made two meals from roasted potatoes.

I'm quite positive on the airfryer, kind of unexpected. I don't have to wait ten minutes for the oven to heat up, and then heat the entire apartment to cook like three potatoes. Plus it's real nifty, it's like cooking on a dish and not doing something wild and different. Also the convection oven feature is convenient, cooks food real fast, nice char so early.

Finally there's the dehydrator feature which I imagine using a lot more for orange slices and lemons, dehydrating has been rough since I moved to Seattle, my one-bedroom place has no place for a dedicated equipment like it. But that's been solved now.

The possibilities are endless. Keep an eye for more fun posts on this topic.

Four fruits, three cheeses and three chocolates, I got a good thing going finally

Yes, on one hand my life has been a mess this week, poor sleep hygeine, haven't folded my laundry in two days, haven't walked really and limited outside going.

But surprisingly my eating habits have been...quite nice actually, relative to how everything has been. I'm so well stocked thanks to the TJ's and Costco trips that eating's been pleasurable once again. I have in my fridge four different kinds of fruits, grapes bananas grapefruit and peaches, three different kinds of cheeses, and three different kinds of dark chocolates. I'm eating regularly, until I'm full. And the sandwiches I've been eating feel so good, so rich, I keep imagining selling them to other people for money because I can't believe I'm eating so well daily. That's one thing on the up and up. Stuff to look forward to.

There's a long weekend coming ahead and I'm considering making it extralong

I write this on Wednesday evening, after having written maybe 35 posts over the course of the day. This is important context because I'm only two days away from the long weekend and i'm wondering if I should take friday off and make it a 4-day weekend. That way I can sleep relax, walk a lot, do my urban trek, and hang out with friends, possibly even camp. Campsites are probably way overbooked.

The downside of taking a day off is that I don't have much happening on Friday anyway and it's mostly a waste of a good holiday, plus since I get off of work when other people are having their lunches anyway, most of the day off is spent in bed not doing anything particularly productive, most certainly not hanging out with friends. That's something I consider to be never a waste of time.

Probably no time off though. Gotta go to Colorado in a few weeks.

My sleep cycle's a mess, thanks to this whole situation

So I want to make this quick because there's so much more goddamn to write and I cannot keep doing this day after day. I'll be writing a couple more very related posts explaining how the situation's upending my lifestyle.

Here's the deal, I'm very much behind on the posts on this blog and it doesn't feel right to me that I'll just give up on writing because I was chillin' during holidays and didn't have my shit together. So I'm writing like a lot lot lot every day, tens of thousands of words either, or many many lines of poems and bs top10 lists etc.

Which has meant that I go to sleep late. And since I can't wake up late, I go to sleep after work ends, which means I all the day is gone, and I can't sleep on time in the evening, that five hour nap killed all the interest for sleep in my body. Which means the cycle goes on.

It's not the first time this has happened to me, not the last time for sure. Just need to get the goddamn writing in order.

There's been a tonne of other second-order effects of the writing situation. More on that latre.

Picnic by the lake pre-wedding a poem (Peep show)

I just wish, says Jeremy, word-for-word
That there was a way,
Without doing a porno
There was some way
For us to make money
From how good we are
At doing it to each other!

Elena's ecstatic,
Remembers how much she's in love
With Gail, her partner and fiancee
And Jeremy.
Mention of her Quebec move comes up
Post wedding (lol)
And Jez plans her passport robbery.

Gail and Elena's pre-wedding party
A picnic for london friends by the lake.
Mark finds Sophie plans to name
His unborn child after her boyfriend.
Superhans mentions his kids, the twins
Lazy kids, he says, doesn't know their ages.
Jez invites Elana to boat
And Gail comes instead
Jez has to save her from drowning
And believes he can kill enemies without trying

The Sally-Patrick situation, part I (coupling)

Jeff comes home late
To find out Susan's re-decorated
And now there's no lock
On the door of their toi-let.
Jeff has some concerns
He needs safety and security
To do the toilet party.

Sally finds out
Patrick has a girlfriend
Gets thoroughly offended.
At dinner at Susan's,
That chick will be his plus-one
Jane says she too has a man
A crazy loving relationship
Where that stranger
Doesn't know he's in one.

We find out Jennifer
Likes her boy as she likes her girl.
Is in an open situation
With the eager lying Patrick
Has been told Sally's a Lesbian.

Sally's full of envy and she goes the other way
To Jenn she gives the best of compliments
Until it sounds like,
She too is into the sexy young musician.

The mole, the virgin biker and the asshole boyfriend (Coupling episode)

The man, clad in leather
A villain, we know by his demeanor
I'm Joe, he says, Julia's boyfriend
And Jeff's confounded,
For three months they've been together.

James and Susan, as they talk
Discover they've known
From back in the day, from the pub
And Jeff is stuck with Joe

Jane does a drawing
Of Steve's mole
And does Susan 'freckles' discover
That Jame's man, she's known
For a while, as 'saddleman'.

Joe the villain
Discovers the cuffs
When Jeff, fumbling
Claims it's not sexy, he's just so rough
It's been two years,
Says Julia
At least Jeff finds the key
Laxative-free
When Joe the villain
Strangles him.

The freckle and the key, part I (coupling)

It's not a death book
Susan tells her Steve
It's a pedia, of health.
As our man, obsessed
Flips through the pages
In search of the malady
That caused the freckle
Which he thinks will
Off him, while in bed.

And Jane, our very Jane
So much not the Virgin
Is with the virgin the Vicar
No apparently,
He's just religious, a podcaster
A well-built nice man, not a harm
Jane cannot cope, she's insecure
She wants Jane
To turn down her charm.

Sally and Patrick, playing it cool
When Jeff appears, what a fool
With his head ensconced in a mask
Of what matter, one might ask
Of the type, that rhymes with 'pimp'
There's been a swallowing situation
Shows the gang laxative of every kind
When Steve asks if he's a vigilante, the spankman
Curious why he's dressed like a gimp.
We find Jeff's chemist run
Mighta' been accidental robbery fun!

Julia unable to move
And looking very disappointed
Who doesn't yet know,
Of the swallowing incident
That's going to make her
Getting out of the bed
An act quite complicated.

Sally and Patrick, the OG story

Sally in front of
The meats and cheeses
That first meet of theirs
With Susan and Morag
When Patrick the fool
Completely misses
Their third friend
Morag
The one not light
On the eyes
Who he thinks,
Is a man,
Also we do know
He's a Thatcher fan,
Oh Sally poor sally.

Rubs it on the face
That sad sick bastard
On the face of Morag
The first meet of Sally
Coulda not gone worse
Really really really
And then he asks
Her number, Sally's
And she gives Susan's
They almost kiss
And on the player
Madame Butterfly
Plays, almost
But not, we find out
The music of the night
Was the Spiderman
Theme song.

So now we know
The long and the short
Of their first meet
And that faux spider greet.

What patrick doesn't know, from Coupling

Why should I worry
About Sally
Says Patrick,
She's a friend.

Oh you simple man
You got up at 3am
Rushed to her place
Oh you brave strong fighter
You had to get rid
Of that pesky spider
In her apartment?
Except there was
No bug there, none
And she never called you hun
There was however
A man on her bed
She'd been on a date
The evening before.

Might that shed
Some light
On the issue, spiderman
On what you think
About Sally who
You insist, over and over
Is just a friend?
Did you forget
That kiss she tried stealing
Way back when, the first time
When she was very much
Not sober?

Poem on Jane, from Coupling

The people,
Are they real
Or aspects of
Your sub conscious?
In your dreams,
I mean Jane,
You delusional and insane,
And not out there
In real life.
Remember that snake
That spoke the truth
When it shouldn't have
That came over
As a result
Of that party mix
Of your medical closet?
Took you a while
To get it out
Are you real
Or are you the twin, insane
Who you claim
Tried to take over
Your life,
Last summer?

I should start seeing the my EAP provider again to get my money's worth

So my work gives 10 EAP sessions for free and I haven't started using them this year, gonna setup the call and start it again. Not necessarily because I need it -- feels like I've been needing it lesser and lesser since moving to Seattle and being able to figure out myself and my needs more in depth -- but because it's at least a thousand buckaroos worth of benefit I don't want to let go. Plus it never hurts to talk to a random person unrelated to you who has to professionally listen to you for every month or so and make no judgment, and provide positive feedback and be paid for it.

And who knows maybe I'll get some quality advice I can use in my life, though I find that not very likely. But either way this is going to work out so well, I gotta put myself on the appointment scheduler.

In retrospect, twitter is actually pretty decent, if only they'd remove trash more readily

 So there was a time when everybody thought twitter was no big deal, an evil cesspool of evil awful people who just want to pick fights with little to no redeeming value. And that very soon nobody would want to use it because who the hell wants to know what you had for lunch and dinner every day, the thought went. Trump made it his bully pulpit and then there was no stopping it. Then he stopped using it, which created a lot of safe space for other people to move in, and so it got more popular among academics, journalists, researchers and other experts in field, particularly to talk among themselves, but also communicate clearly to the public.

What was thought of as its weakness, the word limit, ended up being a strength of sorts as people starting writing short essays based on them, each tweet a sentence, which allowed people to digest essays one sentence at a time, and respond to them one statement at a time, something that's really inconvenient to do with blogs or proper essays.

So yeah it turns out twitter's pretty decent, as long as they're aggressively removing bots and fascist murderous racial supremacist accounts, they might end up as the winners of the long battle of social media.

10 things I'd do at work if I could

1.  Start a GPU cluster, get my experiments going, and have it available to other folks/teams if they follow my guidelines!
   
   
2. Analyze the IT expenditure of the company and attempt to save the company hundreds or millions of dollars a year so I may get a promotion and double my salary.
   
   
3. A super fun way to do technical interviews, ask candidates to modify an existing large piece of software within a given timeframe. Compilation and all.
   
   
4. Start regular one-on-one conversations between engineers and data scientists so there's higher level of trust and stronger bond between the two functions.
   
   
5. Make offline GPU instances available to engineers who come to work physically, as a reward for coming to office. They may use it for gaming purposes, or experimental work purposes.
   
   
6. Start an initiative with HR where employees select a couple of really cool things from a shopping page, and they're randomly send one piece of gift every few weeks without warning. Becomes more regular if they're working from office, so they're incentivised to come to work.
   
   
7. Blog about the stuff we do at work.
   
   
8. Lead a large group of people who respect me while making a whole lot of money.
   
   
9. Put in minimal effort while getting maximal returns.
   
   
10. Chill, spend most time with near and dear ones, while working when I want to have a good reason to avoid them couple of hours a day. 

Parents are having hiking time of their lives

My parents are having the time of their lives going on weeklong trekking trips, and then chilling at resorts for days and days after, spa and swimming pool and everything inclusive.

My mom couldn't walk before she was here, I made both of them walk a few hours every day, up and down the hill, and now apparently my mom can walk, something wild to happen to you in your fifties. And she took that opportunity to go on the Langtang hike, all the way to the basecamp. Wild times.

Hope my parents do a lot more of walking and trekking and hiking and maintaining a healthy physical and social lives.

The one good piece of news from Kathmandu: the elections

 So after a long time, some good news from Kathmandu. The voters have thoroughly rejected candidates of all the mainstream political parties or their coalition, and voted for an independent, and otherwise unknown who used to be a rapper. Limited experience but they wanted to tell the parties how much they freakin' hate their guts they'd literally vote for somebody random. Now the parties are threatening to not let the mayor work at all, in effect daring the voters to put somebody else in power because if they do that nothing would ever get done, but the likely outcome of that would be, they're going to lose in all the local elections or national-level elections because the electorate does NOT like being threatened by its politicians, the immature manbabies who can't understand that people are not voting for them because they know they deserve better.

The electorate is getting smarter, wild things are ahead, one tiny sliver of silver lining in all of the darkest of clouds.

Well maybe it's not going to be a full master's degree but I'll live with it

 So I really wanted to do a master's degree here in Seattle and make my pay for it but it happens so that the program I'm interested in needs 13 courses and that's about 40k, which means my work would pay for a max of 27k over three years, so I'd have to work in the same place for 5 years to earn it back, which I don't mind too much but it's such a slog for a second goddamn master's so maybe I'll take it easy. Get away with just a certificate degree of four courses because there's such a thing is overqualification, and maybe having two very prestigious technical Masters might be it?

So yeah it's going to be a great certificate but it ain't gonna be a full degree.

Sona Movsessian is a gem of a human being

 Her book released, The world's worst assistant, heard it on 3 Questions with Andy Richter. She's a gem of a human being, talked about being Armenian in America, the relationship between different immigrant groups of Armenians, her two tracksuit-wearing infants, her experience working in Hollywood, being Conan's assistant, getting into real fights with him, and finding herself in tricky situations where she almost had to quit because she disrespected her boss too much. Because they became way closer friends than employer-employee. So the book's going to be incredible obviously, but a very different perspective compared to the out in their luck, struggling actress fucking her life over and over again kinda trope too, since she lived with her parents when things were doing just alright. Should be fun, I'm excited.

Seattle is a city for people in transition, mostly

 Kailash is leaving Seattle. Ar(e)'s friend and classmate recently left for LA, SB the singerbro left for NYC, Sb says he'll leave as soon as he gets his gc, SK wants to go to Nepal indefinitely once his gc comes over etc etc etc. It appears that for most of the folks who're in Seattle, settling nearby is not the long-term plan. It's most definitely not for me, but I'm surprised because I knew Boston was a city in transition since people come there for college and grad school and work a couple of years after and once they're ready to settle down with a partner they realize the place is unaffordable and move elsewhere for living properly.Thought Seattle would be different since it's not a college town, rather if it weren't for transplants it's my impression the city is rather undereducated compared to Easy Coast cities.

Anywho, not that I was planning but it doesn't seem too feasible to hang around the area for long term if one's priorities are having friends and family around.

I'd forgotten I wanted to get away from the gigglies, such bad habit

I did a very small hit of Sk's gigglies today. I've been avoiding doing the giggles lately because it makes me tired and lazy and sleepy and a bit paranoid even if I smoke just a little bit. Not that I've been imbibing a lot, maybe once or twice a week at most, and only when offered by others, haven't bought anything good in a long while. And then there's the hangover, when you're feeling tired and lazy the following day. If headache and hangover wasn't as much of a big deal with booze, I'd rather do some booze than some weed because I can be productive that way instead of paranoid beyond imagination.

Which reminded me, I wanted to quit this thing completely when I originally moved to this place, which is why I bought hella lotta kava and other stuff, that didn't work. Then I went to Nepal and got back but didn't settle well then the east coast and now that I'm back for good, I gotta find an alternative to the pot. Maybe I should drink, but only stuff that I brew. Good plan right?

The one good thing to come out of this inflation thing

Eating out has become comically expensive in Seattle, we went to get farewell dinner for Kailash bro this evening and ended up paying fifty five buckaroos per person at a very regular Thai restaurant.

And that ends up working out well because it's not just the Italian or French restaurants that are expensive now, all ethnic food is hella pricey around here. Like, $25 entrees at middle-of-the-road Thai places, $30 entrees at Indian restaurants, etc. So the class/race/price disparity between different international cuisine will have disappeared by the end of this run, Asian/Chinese/Indian food won't be the affordable food for the poor, racial/class assumptions associated with food will have disappeared.

Sucks for people who actually want to eat affordable food and go out, but in the long run maybe it'll have positive repercussions? One can hope!

This is some third rate bullshit but you'll have to live wit it sis whatchu gonna do

The group claps, the rest of your life, the girlfriend asks Steve, he's nervous and says yes, Jane the ex is seething, burning, the therapist interrupts and sets a date for a meet. Because Jane is going to interrupt her regular sessions anyway.

Georgia, or Sophia, they're trying to figure out the name of the girl. Who is reading a foreign language book. Learning a new language is a whole new workout for the mouth, Jeff says. I see women as people in their own right, he says. I can see more than past breasts, I need breasts with brains, he says. I don't mean individual brains, I like intelligent women but you gotta draw the line somewhere, he says. And I draw the line at independent breasts, and what if there's clash of personality between two breasts, he says. What if a fight broke out, Steve juts in.

Patrick is sweating bullets. Jeff declares if women were telepathic, and could read men's thoughts (disgustoids in human forms), he thinks the world would end soon. Women think men are normal like them, because men talk like them, but men have got the word breasts in their mind on loop. Breasts breasts breasts, he chants. Jeff discovers she's looking at him. I've only been looking at her for the hour, I'm way past the nudity barrier, he says. When you first see an attractive woman, you have five minutes before you fully map her naked he says, you gotta map out her nipple type, and it takes quite a long time, he posits. It's hard work.

I'm transcribing from Coupling playing in the background.

Ten questions I'm asking myself because of things I received in more recent times

1.  Should I go there, or what?
   
   
2. What could be the motive behind people saying things they might not mean? Maybe just innocent wondering?
   
   
3. Is it possible maybe I'm secretly a really good performer, standup or otherwise, and should try my hand at acting?
   
   
4. Is it possible I can craft a response that's not too desperate while also favoring me in forward conversations?
   
   
5. What would be the nature of one's practice in such a scenario, and would the effort being put in there be too embarrassing or what?
   
   
6. Should I write things as well, and become the complete and total package like some of those talented people?
   
   
7. Teeheeheee, is that a good response, or does it not jive in with the seriousness of the things at hand?
   
   
8. How buzzed am I really, because this feels like one of my drunk posts, no?
   
   
9. Godd, i hope that kombucha doesn't give me diarrea?
   
   
10. Where the cuties aaatttttt?

Maybe I overboozed my Kombucha, and fuck it doesn't feel that way, yanno?

 SO I just had a small cup of my overfermented kombucha that I tried to overcompensate the dryness of by adding extra extra sugar during the second fermentation and fridged it. I figured it'd fill me up before I left for dinner with the folks later this evening, held me up until the big heavy dinner, not considering the possibility it might get me boozed up. And here we are now, and it feels like I might have drunk a pretty strong beer or light wine because that small sake cup of kombucha later I'm already feeling so very buzzed. It's possible the more fundamental cause is that I haven't had a drink in...forever, and when I do I'm very unexcited with it, but ahh it feels good but not in a good way and i'm afraid the hangover it'll give me later this day or tomorrow will be ...not great. Hmm so many complaints.

Are you ready for the giggle loop?

As coupling plays in the background and Jeff talks about the giggle loop -- aah what a classic episode this one -- I'm reminded of an awful giggle loop I found myself many years ago and the awful consequences to myself and a friend as a result of the inappropriate loop.

A friend's grandparent (or grandparents) had passed away and our art teacher Mr. P. Sharma made somebody give a talk stuff remembering them. Except the friend who talked made basic errors in his speech, and I tried to hold my laughter at the implication that the dude's entire family had passed. I held for longer and longer and longer until I burst out laughing so hard, and so did a friend at the most inopportune time when everybody was doing the moment of silence thing. And then the art teacher punished us by making us stand against the wall outside the classroom. Both of us. I cried, so much, unclear why but I did. And also I always got awful behavioral grades at that class, maybe it was due to that one occcasion?

I hope to never have to read anything about that one mfking billionaire, goodnews or badnews

 This some lowkey tweet-style commentary because number one I haven't done those in a while and this blog was supposed to be for those simple thoughts and not extended essays, I have another blog for that where I haven't written and second and more importantly there's not much to write about when you're churning out thousands of words and hours for days at a time so you gotta go with the first effing thought that comes in your head, this is something that's bothered me for years though.

So felon muskiboi is a freakin' loser, the enron of our modern world, it'll get clearer and clearer by the day what a goddamn scammer lying piece of shit that man is, something I've told anybody willing to listen to me for almost half a decade now, and I don't really care anymore if he goes to prison or becomes the god emperor of the planet and all the surrounding heavenly bodies like he wants to because I'm so done with his attention-seeking low-effort antics that child of a immature boi needs to go, out of my mind and out of news. Which he won't because it's like air to him, he goes out of news and his investors stop paying money to his companies. It's strange, movies and books will be written about what an awful situation he's created. They're already being written and published!

Steve's song

Steve oh steve
You goofball of anxiety
When will you ever
Get your shit together
And not just say,
Perhaps perhaps perhaps
Traumatized by Jane,
But you've not grown
Why are you so very afraid
And oh so confused
All the time
Specially when the cuties tell you
Oh steve, your're mine, you're mine, you're mine!

Eleven things I have made and fermented

1.  Hot sauce
   
   
2. Carrots, Indian style, aka Kaanji
   
   
3. Soybean, multiple ways
   
   
4. Veggies, German way (sauerkraut)
   
   
5. Napa Cabbage, Korean way
   
   
6. Radish, Korean way
   
   
7. Rice
   
   
8. Banana
   
   
9. Kombucha
   
   
10. Milk
    
    
11. Carrots

Nine things that are oppressive, or maybe not man who am I satirizing even

1.  The patriarchy, of course.
   
   
2. Heat
   
   
3. Working conditions
   
   
4. Dictatorships
   
   
5. Military regimes
   
   
6. Behavior
   
   
7. Thoughts
   
   
8. Clothes, more specifically the bras
   
   
9. Culture
   

Just type something man, anything you just gotta get the words out, yeh?

 This is exactly what the title says, I'm running on fumes on trying to finish the number of posts because man I need to get caught up with writing, and I know I've said many times I won't do it, and made the same rant but it's blocking me from doing anything else, and I just need to get the goddamn shit together and just throw some junk in there you know, don't even need too many words out there, maybe a hundred or two hundred words, about nothing in particular, whatever, and then I'm done. yeah I'm not improving my writing skills and yeah my goals of completing a novel in the foreseeable future are not int he horizon and they're most certainly not going to be helped by any of this bs, but there's going to be some good outcome of this bs right? Just writing out of your mind, making the fingers do the work -- heh heh heh it's funny right now because I'm watching Coupling in the background and they've recently made fingering jokes, which works out so well -- and you know get my shit together. Two hundred words, two fifty is not nothing, I used to write entire freaking essays back in the day, and they had three paragraphs and everything, the first was the intro, the second was the meat and potatoes and the final para was the conclusion. ic ould get so much for so few words and now I'm saying a whole load of nothing in all these words.

They're saying facebook is dying inside out, the future is full of potential

 I read this newsletter yesterday from these people who are big on internet meme culture and websites and different communities across the web, who use analytical techniques to understand traffic and user patterns etc, and it appears that facebook is indeed dying finally. From the inside. It's full of hateful old people who have been left to their own devices by friends and family and the younger generation, who spout nonsense and genocidal maniacal thoughts, and even then they're not consuming the content or really liking stuff or sharing them. Advertisers don't care for facebook anymore because the value of its users has gone down considerably, it's a dying community.

I've made similar claims in the past, starting at 2014, and since then the website has only grown and grown and grown. It took me a long time to figure out that you can be right, eventually, but if you don't get the timing right for your predictions, you might as well be wrong. Which means yeah maybe I've been wrong on this matter, but it's come around eventually, facebook sucks it's awful and now everybody knows about it. Fun fun fun.

Ciabatta is da best

 The other day I got a nice large pack of Ciabatta because I was craving it, which reminded me what a great invention the bread is. Like it's the best bread there ever was to make a solid sandwich, particularly those heavy on dips or spreads, such as hummus or pesto sauce. And nice bright fillings, I made a pesto tomato mozzarella yesterday, and it was heavenly. I remember having egg sandwiches almost daily in ghana on Ciabatta and it was so very good, yum mayo and eggs on ciabatta. YumYumYum.

I should make no-knead ciabatta.

I should start baking again

Now that I have bread flour, two pounds of yeast, baking supplies and equipment, there's no reason for me to bake, also baking soda and baking powder. All that I need now is the motivation to start baking again. Yes it's so much better baking at home but it takes a lot of manpower to knead the dough. But on the other hand there's a lot of no-knead recipes for most popular types of bread, including Ciabatta, so that's something worth looking into. Only two problems. I can eat only so much bread, there's no way I can eat up all the bread I bake, but on the good side I can offload it to friends now, since i've got a healthy group of folks I spend time with in here. And the other thing is, it takes a lot of investment and work, it is a bit of a hassle, so much more than going to the store and paying like three or four bucks. There's such a difference in amount of effort.

I do bake kickass cookies though, so that translates to general cooking hopefully?

Also fried bread is so good, I gotta get in that zone too, remember that time from two years ago in NoVa Arlington when we were doing new kinda sourbread crepe every day. Those were goodtimes, need to be back on that.

I need to avoid all news for the next five years, is it possible?

The new from last week was terrible. The news from today is awful. The political situation happening around is so very bad. National politics is unbelievable, news from Nepal isn't specially good either, and the likelihood of anything good happening over the course of next five years seems minimal. So just like I completely avoided any sort of news between Trump election and times close to Nov 2020, I need to get back at not reading the news or engaging myself with it in anyway. Just shut it down, turn it off, don't even let people talk about it. And with the economy situation taking the dump, I don't even have to worry about timing my investments. Just have to close my eyes and ears and that's the end of it. Let's avoid the news for the next five years and see if we're feeling better or worse at the end of it, then we can re-evaluate the situation.

I should start transplanting indoor plants because it's time, I have groweth

Against my good judgment I have grown, much like my plants, and I'm not completely hating it. The growth has been nice, I've learned to put my roots down, reach high up into the sunlight, and uhh I'm attracting bugs too. And not the fun kind. Never the fun type.

I wrote in the previous couple of posts how I want to put vines and moss in the apartment, and how I want to do agar culture with plant tissue to have a biology lab of sorts. Now I'm thinking I go the other end of low-tech and transplant my existing plants, aka make them reproduce. My bird of paradise plant is already separated into two distinct plants, and my succulent has grown massive, half a feet from the two incher it was when I bought it 10 months ago. It's the perfect time for me to cut them into pieces and make them have babies so for minimal investment I can double or triple the number of plants. To put it in animal-rearing terms, I've been raising plants, now it's time for me to breed them too.

I'm going to get vines and moss for my apartment

 I wrote about a year ago on this blog, maybe 10 months ago that I'd steal a whole lotta plants for the apartment and get it so green. I did get plants, didn't steal them, and it's not as much of a forest as I anticipated it to be.

But now I'm going to work towards that in a more legally manageable manner. Such as taking moss from trees from the park, something nobody will mind, and buying several kind of vines or creepers and covering the walls of the apartment in them. Freaking finally it'll become peaceful green meditative sanctuary I wanted it to become.

Indoor herbs, even on west-facing window sills never seem to work out though.

Freevee (formerly IMDB tv) is a surprisingly tolerable app to watch tv, even with the ads

 AKS(e) put FreeVee (formerly IMDB tv) on my tv last weekend to watch Baraka. I didn't care for the documentary but I found recently it's got pretty great shows too, including Peep Show which I've been watching on tv for the last week. That way my tiny laptop is not resource starved as I watch the show on background while writing, and I don't mind the ads too much. They have so many British series, including Coupling, all that stuff I'm used to watching, so it's pretty amazing. The only (partial) downside is the shows are not HD, but you can't help something that was never taped in HD.

The app is amazing.

A very very bad, awful terrible thing happened in America and I don't want to hear about it

 Ugh, thoughts and prayers, thoughts and prayers, I wrote about it two days ago and now it's much much much worse, really sad it's awful but it's this fuckin' country and nothing will change and these sorts of events will keep on happening because Americans have stopped valuing life of any kind because they're so up their asses and there's nothing I can do to change it. So the awful terrible thing that would never ever in a fucking billion years have happened anywhere else in the world comparable to this place happened here yet again and I don't want to read about it, hear about it, talk about it, discuss about it nothing. I'll ignore, cover my eyes and ears and mouth until it blows over and I can pretend I wasn't around to have learned about it. It's a defeatist way of dealing with things but what are my options?

On the upcoming uhhh market turmoil

 On the one hand they're saying the markets might be terrible, and by them I mean the financial twitter people. On the other hand they seem to be unreasonably pessimistic about the systemic changes in an economy. But on the original hand the macroeconomic signs do suggest we're in for a year or two or three of pain and hurt. My idea to live through it is to take my non-consumption expenses down by a lot, and pretty much stop eating out. Because I can't afford to be spending hundreds of dollars a weekend just for fun and chill times.

If things are real bad, might have to worry about job situation, law and security situation and homeownership considerations. As in, I might be able to own a house finally because it'll get to my range, but then do I want to spend on a loss basis? Or I should just hold all cash until then before making the big investment.

Also something that's been worrying me a hella lotta tonne is the future prospect for Nepali economy. One one hand if people stop traveling and the gulf economies don't do so well there's going to be no demand for Nepali economy, but on the other hand because the country is great for value tourists, maybe it'll be able to attract the traditional set of tourists more, and the market might actually go up?

I got new pair of earbuds

 It's sad that the pair of bluetooth earbuds that's been with me for the last three possibly four years was left at PN's place in NoVa. So I got another pair of earbuds, from Wicked Audio, it's supposed to have much longer battery life and generally lotsa other features. It's less portable but it's stiff on the neck so it won't fall down, I won't have to find a pocket to stuff it in. Ordered it through the work store where you can cash points for stuff.

I haven't gone out putting it on but it looks great. Just hope it fits my ears well.

So I guess a general update for upcoming projects

So, upcoming projects. This is just my more 'sciency' projects and not the house improvement projects.

If i can acquire tofu press I'll look into seriously making tofu and paneer. Probably hard cheese from kefir as well.

And of course kinema (a replacement for natto because too much work) and tempeh are still on the process. And homemade yogurts too but there's only so much yogurt or dairy products a lactose intolerant person can eat in a week.

What I'm excited about is mushroom growing, something that I've failed in the passed once or twice. The mushroom block that gave me 2 lbs of output a month ago I'm trying to get second flush out of. Then the idea is to innoculate a few bags of mushroom grainspawn and then to fruition. And in parallel try a lot of agar culture, first on mushroom then on yeast and other organisms. Mostly I'm just excited about implementing an agar 'protocol' teehee sounds so sciencey.

My workstation is turning into more of a homelab, with the aerator, the temperature sensor and the heating pad. I've ordered a couple of sensors, and if I can get good use out of those, I'll get a bunch of actuators to improve the numbers. I've already got an esp32 but the sensor's not here yet, gonna be fun when it's here and I'm seriously working on that stuff.

Doing plant agar culture would be great too, such easy way to propagate!

First batch of aerated water kefir goes gangbusters

This blog has seen me complain about how all my ferments have been pretty successful lately besides the water kefir which hadn't really taken off. Various issues, I was trying to take care of one and it wouldn't work, I'd try something else and that would help with the issues I was having but nah it'd go back once again. I changed the water, I changed the sugar, I changed the container, I changed the nutrients, I even added the levels of fermentation. And the fermentation time was taken up to the wazoo. The furthest I got was to have it taste vaguely alcoholic but so yeasty and gross.

Since I revived my otherwise sleepy milk kefir jellies with the aeration method I've talked about in the past, figured it was worth replicating for the water kefir too because why not, the jellies are already underperforming and there's no losing I mean what's the worse that could happen. If it turned south I would just abandon the project because it'd been taking too much of my time without any fruitful outcome.

So I used the aerator on the sugar water with kefir.

And it turned out really great! The first round, a super small test batch of grains turned citrusy in a matter of a few days. So I quintupled the volume, and the amount of sugar and it's still going great. It takes a couple of days of aerating the liquid to get good flavor out of it, but the taste is great without any additives and the number of days is actually quite manageable. And I'm thinking if I do it for long enough I can get the jellies strong enough to not need the electric assistance.

Now the only project that's not doing as well as I'm hoping is kombucha. Far far too tart, probably because I overdid the tea. Take it easy with the teabags, and go overboard on the sugar. Have it be more sour than tart or dry. That's the plan ahead.

Plans for kinema and the other soy based ferment are still on the table, I just need my head cleared up with this blog and everything. Gotta write more regularly.

Greenlake park things

 Greenlake park is great, it takes me 45 minutes to take a lap and there's so many people of all age groups and races and work situations and pet ownership there. Also hella lotta single persons toward whom I might be interested in engaging in long term situations, and they're so fit and well put together I get afraid. But also apparently all of them are single somehow or I was grossly misinterpreted, don't understand what that's about how is everybody single in this fuckin' town even the attractive women who knows. Anyway the park is amazing, nice park it's a bit chilly even in the warmest of days, can always use an inflatable boat or paddleboard if one is so inclined, great place to meet other people or hang out or just picnic with friends and near dear ones, it's growing on me.

Now I understand why Ar(e) loves it so much and takes like two laps around the lake every day of the week. I mean I'd prefer it while sober and she does it the other way, but still, it's a fun place to be, sober or high off your ass.

Yeah I guess that's how these things happen

 I mean yeah I wouldn't have had to talk to people about these things but it makes total sense, about how a friend of mine was asked by a supplier of inside garments for women in Kathmandu if she was nursing a child because she asked for padded undergarments covering the upper part of her body because her nips are too big and pokey and if she doesn't get them padded they kinda' poke out, a lot, and are super distracting to her and everybody else. Question to the reader, figure out how this jives in with the 'free the nipple' movement going around among young women in Kathmandu, I'm fairly certain it's not just the vaguely related people I'm friends with on snapchat who are so edgy?

Things I got at Costco

1. Pesto sauce (finally!)
   
   
2. Large jar of mayo
   
   
3. Grapefruit, lots
   
   
4. Peaches, lots
   
   
5. Lots of toothbrushes (8)
   
   
6. Lots of toothpastes (5)
   
   
7. 2lb. yeast (yes, finally!)
   
   
8. 10lb potatoes
   
   
9. Oil

Here's my grocery list from earlier today

 Because why not?

1. Garbanzo beans (cans, 2)
   
   
2. Whole milk, 1 gal.
   
   
3. Organic Baguette
   
   
4. Chana Masala frozen (2)
   
   
5. Whole milk mozzarella cheese, 1lb
   
   
6. Mostly Mesquite Honey, 24oz
   
   
7. Paneer Tikka Masala, frozen
   
   
8. 1lb butter, salted
   
   
9. Extra sharp cheddar cheese from Wisconsin, 1lb
   
   
10. Hash browns
    
    
11. Chopped Spinach, frozen
    
    
12. 1lb+ chopped nuts dark chocolate
    
    
13. Sliced mushrooms
    
    
14. Baby carrots
    
    
15. Garlic naan
    
    
16. Veggie fried rice, frozen
    
    
17. 2lb sweet onions
    
    
18. banana
    
    
19. dozen cage free eggs
    
    
20. ciabatta rolls (4)
    
    
21. 1lb bruschetta dip
    
    
22. Spicy hummus 1 pack
    
    
23. 1 eggplant

Ten signs you might be a drug dealer

1. You sell drugs
   
   
2. You offer 'lunch' to random strangers in return for money, and you claim it's not really yours, a friend had to leave the country in a rush
   
   
3. Your excitement for untraceable digital currency beyond the control of government is extraordinary, and you keep talking about how you should never ever trust 'the man'
   
   
4. You get like three large packages shipped from remote locations every day, and you ship like twenty smaller packets, and no you don't run a formal business
   
   
5. The one U.S. government institution you're afraid of the most is IRS, you're paying wayyy more than your W2 would otherwise suggest.
   
   
6. You stand outside clubs and bars on weekends, your hands in your jacket pockets, looking sketchily at the people coming out and ask if they're looking for 'a special deal'
   
   
7. Your passport has stamps from Colombia and Mexico and yet you never tell anybody about the trip you took to those countries
   
   
8. You have a very large number of very transactional friendships with people you meet rarely.
   
   
9. You are interested in rearing Hippos.
   
   
10. You're thinking of getting a pilot's license because those non-commercials are just not doing it for you.

Ten insects and related creatures that freak me out

1. Ants
   
   
2. Gnats
   
   
3. Fruitflies
   
   
4. Large blue flies
   
   
5. Grasshoppers
   
   
6. Earworm
   
   
7. Mosquito
   
   
8. Red biting ants
   
   
9. Maggots!
   
   
10. Snakes

Ten things I want right now, generally

1. That cute silverblonde with bunny teeth
   
   
2. Travel to Europe
   
   
3. Mangoes and Litchi in Nepal
   
   
4. Celebrating Dashain in Nepal, after what's it been at this point, fifteen years?
   
   
5. GC
   
   
6. More hotstuff at work, more motivation, more push, more intensity, onto great things
   
   
7. Cook twice every day all the days of the week without feeling tired or annoyed
   
   
8. To act, why not?
   
   
9. Own two pieces of property, one in the city, and one like 1.5 hours away to live in peace
   
   
10. Large business owner, bringing positive changes to society

This is just a filler, and I gotta write more fillers so don't mind me

 Yeah I should have written this way way earlier and now at this strange hour of night is not when this should be happening but it's done is it not, no way to claw back, what's done is done so let's just do some bullshit until my fingers tire hour, I'm thinking of writing for the next thirty minutes, maybe an hour and call it a night, so I can get back at this later tomorrow. Should have written earlier but I slept and watched tv and felt gloomy about the situation of the world, the thing is not being on top of this thing is dragging me down massively so much so that I can't be productive even when I want to because it's a promise I made to myself, a commitment I made and not backing it seems weird, strange and also it's slow and lazy, where's the fun in saying you'll do things and become a different person but not do it, whatever, just talkin' alright, let's get this over with, ok?

Freakin' finally got a nice round of groceries

 Spent a hundo ten bucks at Costco over the weekend and then 70 bucks at Trader joe's today and finally now I have a decent amount of grocery. The greatest trick in keeping yourself occupied and full and interested in cooking is too keep your fridge well stocked, I've discovered. Quite obvious in retrospect but it's hard to figure it out because you can't think what's wrong, the debugging process is hard, and you're confused why you're hungry and lazy and tired and uninterested in cooking all the time. The richer you are, the richer you get.

Yum yum yum, some random idea fun

 I made pesto mozzarella ciabatta sandwich earlier today with tomatoes and had this fantasy of what I should have done in college.

Learn to make like six to seven amazing sandwiches, like mindblowing, with simple raw materials. Buy them high-quality and cheap from places like Costco. Practice practice and improvise until I excel at them. And sell them on reservation basis on campus while I was still in college. Sell hundred sandwiches each for five dollars per sandwich. Cheap enough for a lunch deal. And cheaper than library cafe. Five hundred buckaroos and I'm making 150k revenue, at 50% margin it's 70k nice tidy earning isn't it?

Of course that'd never work, the university wouldn't let me, there's no market for that many sandwiches and The Man doesn't want to let you do that, but still, what a dream, what a dream, I need to sell something, anyway, to prove myself.

20 pretty bad things that can happen to somebody

1. This one's a classic. You think you're going for a fart but OOPSIE, your body thinks otherwise and now you've stuck up the place real bad also you need a change of clothes.
   
   
2. Allergic to your date's pet/scented candles/'homebrew' but you think you're better than they are and chances like these don't come that often so you soldier on, until you're pretty much sobbing
   
   
3. Embarrassing sex sounds and weird things that happen, and then the other person laughs (or you laugh) and the mood's gone and it's just...so weird ugghh where do you go from there?
   
   
4. You're bringing somebody home but oh you misplaced your apartment keys OOPS
   
   
5. Hunger and/or cancer
   
   
6. Global climate change/world war/nuclear holocaust
   
   
7. Trying food you don't like but you have to because they're your friends or nice people and you don't want to be an asshole
   
   
8. You have people over and ready to serve dinner before you realize oops you forgot to turn the cooker on for the brown rice, so that's going to be another hour guys, sorry!
   
   
9. Not getting out-of-valley buses during Dashain
   
   
10. Not getting public transport during dashain, inside the valley
    
    
11. That fucking loser of old mayor is re-elected as the mayor
    
    
12. Thinking Nepali celebrities actually believe the things they say with regards to social values
    
    
13. Too embarrassed to buy birth control in Kathmandu because you're afraid somebody you know might see you and your friends don't want to help
    
    
14. Altitude sickness
    
    
15. Getting two days off for the weekend because of the fuel shortage but now your work makes you work 60 hours a week almost and it sucks plus you need to do household chores before heading out and at night
    
    
16. The housecat is gone!
    
    
17. No more garbage collection because there's issues at the dumping site and also because the mayor and the deputy mayor are of different parties and the mayor is an independent, they want to make sure nothing productive gets done
    
    
18. Something about cars that run on water, or a modern avatar of Buddha who's actually just a fuckin' creep
    
    
19. Being eaten alive by a leopard
    
    
20. Leprosy

What to do; In times of Danger

The future looms ahead
Foreboding, confusing,
Terrifying
More so than usual, anyway.

What's the plan,
For the emergency situation
That's likely coming
Anyway?

I have said
Getting married
Is the way to get ahead
In times of danger and mistrust
When institutions of the man
Fail in helping with your plan
You take the lead
And become one yourself
Metaphorically of course
And you jump in
Oh dear!

Does danger produce kids?
Must the young ones come
When the world becomes terrible place?
Is this a good idea, or one of surrender?
That's something we all must
Seriously consider.

Yo gurl gimme a ring

Ding ding ding,
Yo girl gimme a ring
Once awhile, sometime
No pressure, it can be benign,
We can talk about our days
And what we do on our days, all the ways
Like jobs or classes or dances
We'll talk about our trips
To Japans and Germanies and Frances.

Be mine be mine be mine,
I want to be shoutin'
But I can't, I got me some noggin
Seriously though, we gots to be hanging
chillin' laughing and just shootin'
No pressure, nuthin' more I promise
Unless...unless you want me to give you a kiss?
Gimme a hint here, some hint there
Communication's the key, that's only fair?

That's all I got, I gotta go
Can't wait forever for you, I can't wait no 'mo
Lets have us give it a try
Imagine all the things we might get into,
Oh my!

Jeremy from Peep show

Jeremy, Jezza, Jezz
What a pathetic little fool
Inside his head he's the epitome of cool
Not a clue in the world,
Nary a thread of talent
Yet he'll work so hard
For his musical dreams.

His interests are base: sex and drugs
Oh and of course, lack of jobs
Always dragged along by Super Hans
He's stuck in this terrible toxic dance
With his pal, his mate, captain Corrigan
Oh and that man, he cannot love, nobody, none, hun,
Jez the fool, is free with love
It's a pity he lacks the blood to follow up

Dropped and abandoned, over and over
In the end he does find himself a strong lover
Does he deserve, that strong young man
Or is he stuck in the abusive trap
Of super Hans?

Mark and Sophie, a Peep Show poetry

Poor Mark, the asshole
Stuck in the whirlpool
Of Sophie, his personal goal
Can you anchor down
A swirl of mess
Or is it the other way
Or perhaps they are both
And unending dive
Into the depth
Of nothingness?

Or must we wonder,
If it's Sophie,
Who we must pity
Stuck with two fools
Assholes, uncontrolled antisocials
Poor pathetic Mr. Corrigan
Pretends to have fun
When he pathologically can't
A miserable bore
At his very core
What a terrible partner
For any decent gal.

Greenlake, costco lunch, shopping, uhaul, tv, getting in the apartment, truck return, evening writing [Sat 21]

 In the morning went to Greenlake with Ar(e), took a lap there while she worked on Uhaul stuff, more on that later. We'd planned on heading out at 9.30, it ended up 12.30, but like whatever.

After Greenlake we drove to Costco in heavy traffic which is why google routed us into the city and back out instead of taking highways straight away. There I had two slices of pizza, yum yum, very limited menu options though.

Bought like 110 bucks worth of stuff I didn't really need but got anyway because they're so goddamn price effective.

From Costco we drove to UHaul, got a van, drove back to Costco, got ourselves some water, loaded the tv in the van, and drove over to another friend's place where we loaded bed. Drove to Ar(e)'s place, took a hella long time to unload everything, drove back to uhaul and filled up on gas, dropped van at uhaul, got the car, and the girls dropped me at my place.

Wrote a bunch of posts in the evening because I hadn't done in a while but I was so tired I didn't get much writing done. Watched Seinfeld as I fell asleep.

Subway sammy lunch at USeattle park, kefir goes gangbusters, hang with the gang at Ak's place, early night [Fri 20]

 For lunch I had subway sandwich, half incher because I don't need to get footlongs they're not the best value for money. Also I need to figure out my go to work schedule because getting a nice sandwich at $3.70 per day is an amazing deal, probably cheaper than making it myself or very comparable. Buffalo sauce on this is awful, not a good idea, so glad I didn't put that in. Had the sandwich at USeattle park, nice peaceful place to eat.

Got amazing kefir from my latest batch, the kefir seems to be superpowered since I bubbled air through it for two days in a row. The water kefir situation turns as well also I sure hope.

Read a lot of finance twitter in the afternoon, maan there's a tonne of high-quality stuff in there that I'm shocked we're getting for free.

In the evening I went to AKS's place, the whole gang showed up except Sk, we had drinks and smokes ans usual, so much snacks too, I did captain morgan with mango juice, it was not particularly good the hangover for the next day was terrible, shouldn't have had it.

Still concerned about a certain situation brewing, really hope it's in my head and not a real thing but it's increasingly unlikely. A lot of unpleasant actions will have to be taken to ameliorate the consequences of the thing, I really really hope I can pretend things didn't happen but the unpleasantness might arise once various parties acknowledge the existing situation

Headed home early, back by 12.15, and slept pretty soon after.

The perfect omlet I ever made, sammich, train to work, getting to know coworkers, ice cream social, walk back, groceries at QFC, cheetos mac and cheese dinner [Thu 19]

 In the morning I made the perfect omlet ever, that I made or anybody I know's ever made. Lots of butter, very low flame, and use the strainer to strain the egg mix, so no bubbles or unexpected browning, and no strands all over. So very good. Made a sandwich out of it, good times were had!

Around 1ish I took the train to downtown went up 9 floors in the work building and attended my first hangout at the Seattle office! It was lots of fun, got to know many coworkers, the office space, and made so many connections. Good times were had! I should go there more often! Also had ice-cream since it was an ice cream social.

Walked back from the work, so chill, I could see myself doing it every day listening to podcasts. That way I can 'save' on the walk time, and explain the wasted time away. Also there'll be a strict boundary between work and leisure that way.

Did groceries at QFC on the way, just some frozen spinach, mac and cheese, and small things here and there.

For dinner I made the mac and cheese cheetos one with kefir and garlic and kefir cheese second version, it's not as tangy as it used to be but still goddamn good. Also talked to P.K after quite a while.

WeWork work, amazing free sammich lunch, experiments with mini Dall-e, business proposal, target trip, mushroom plans, water kefir starts [Wed 18]

At 8.30 ish am I took the bus (in the rain) to get to the downtown WeWork where GF was working. We reserved a meeting room and worked in there for the rest of the day.

Most of the working day was spent by playing around with the dall-e mini model on huggingface. It was so much fun but we discovered the limits of the mini model at least.

For lunch we found amazing sandwiches in the common area of WeWork, open for all to grab, they were so good, so filling, ohh man I wish I could make sandwiches as good, including the bread, if it's just the sandwiches that are top class I think I'd be down to eat them all the time. It's only the lame pitiful sandwiches that don't inspire excitement.

Later in the day I put a business proposal to GF and he was sold, the next step is to write a formal presentation and a longer proposal. Gonna get on that.

In the evening I bid GF farewell, they're going back to Boston, probably gonna be back soon enough too. I caught the train right from under that building, went to the Target in UDistrict and got some supplies for mushroom growing I'd ordered. I'm going to have a solid mushroom growing hobby going on, quite excited about that.

In the evening I had some dinner or other, don't remember exactly, and then put the bubbler on the water kefir so it got stronger, my water kefir grains haven't been doing great, so something to work on there.

Jam-bread, homemade cookies, boiled eggs lunch, catchup with old friends at Rapport, reunion, walk and talk, mushroom pizza dinner, I start writing again, finally [Tue 17]

For breakfast I had jam and bread, it was yum and simple but I didn't have much else going on.

Made cookies with extra added salt, cocoa powder, and kefir instead of the water, it was good stuff, so I had two of them, and took the rest to share with the people I was meeting later in the day. Also had two boiled eggs for lunch in addition to the jam sandwich and cookies. Not the greatest lunch I know but better than an everyday office worker's for sure, I'll take this everyday.

After work I met up old friends at Rapport which is an unreasonably priced American pizza place with a bunch of random stuff thrown in. Met GF and his husband M, KB, JGC and his (now wife) R. Good conversations were had, we got caught up on the previous team that connected us all, the company from before that, people's impression of Seattle and where we're all going to go in life. I had mushroom pizza in there.

We walked altogether to the CapHill station, kept talking until the trains came in, and I bid them all farewell. KB was the last to leave, we had a pretty nice emotional farewell.

Back home I started writing after such an effing long time, with the goal to 'get caught up' to my pre-vacation stats at a pretty decent date. It's been five days since and i haven't met my goal at all but I'll eventually get this month caught up I think. I dunno how I'll deal vacations, weekends I don't mind because they're way chiller lately and I can work on writing everyday. With Vacations you have to be up your stuff all the time and it's rough.

Things to consider, ugh.

Early lunch at Due Cocina, hang with coworkfriends, multiple parks, boozed up, volunteer, interlaken cal anderson, picnic in the park, houseclean, hang with Sb, light drinks, advanced kefirmaking [Mon 16]

 Bailed out of work at 11.30 ish because the work was slow and I was going to be meeting a bunch of coworkfriends in CapHill.

Got to Due Cocina at about 12 and spent talking to GF for thirty minutes, when KB joined us. We talked a whole lot more and got our orders, I ordered the eggplant parmesan with sour bread, it's as good as anything, great meal for $13.50, good stuff, they enjoyed there meals too.

We walked to Volunteer park after, and then kept walking to Interlaken park, talked about our families, hopes desires, how KB bought a house in Kentucky, and what we wanna do with the rest of our lives, also she's going to grad school and also going to be taking over her parents' business. Maaan life comes at you real quick huh?

Got to TJ's bought some oranges and chocolate for us to eat, came to my home, picked cheese and chhyang from my apartment, and we spent the next hour picnicking at Cal Anderson park it was one hell of a picnic really,s o much fun was had.

After the folks left, I came home and started writing, Sb texted me and said he might come so I cleaned the house, he came over, we hand a couple of rounds of chhyang and a beer, talked through the evening, good times were had.

Later at night I setup my smart plug and aquarium bubbler on milk kefir to increase the kefir mass, that was a fantastic experiment after reading scientific journals, a great progress really. My water kefir is not doing so well but the milk kefir is going gangbusters.