Unsolicited Advice

How could I possibly not know my attachment style until I was a teenager, you ask? Well, mainly because I had nobody to get that attached to. My mother likes to tell people the story of my first steps. I was sitting on her lap one day at a family gathering, while she was chatting with the other adults, and I let it be known that I wanted a toy that was across the room. Nobody could be arsed to get it for me, or even walk over there and crouch beside it to encourage me to go get it myself. Eventually, I got tired of squalling, squirmed free, and toddled over to get it on my own. No stumbling, no falling; I just walked over, plopped down, and focused on my toy to the exclusion of all else. She thinks this is an adorable story. It would be if it were a case of 'took our eyes off the baby for two seconds and look what happened'. It was not. This was my mother's parenting technique through my entire childhood: Whenever the baby wanted something inconvenient, ignore her until...

I'm giving up on Duolingo Korean lessons. I'm going to have to learn hangul before that will make any sense. Those blocks are not only constructed on a logical basis, but the shapes of the consonant pieces are meant to represent the shape your mouth makes when saying them. It takes a lot of effort to make a system like that confusing and evil, but Duolingo has managed it. They really do want you to memorize the han like they were kanji , and... no. Everyone I have showed this to thinks this is the dumbest possible way to do it, including the Japanese lady who has personal experience with memorizing a bazillion kanji in order to read things, and the actual Korean lady who works at the desk on weekends. The Esperanto lessons, on the other hand, are working out fairly well. For starters, the software will accept, or at least overlook, the ASCII-X convention if you don't have an Esperanto keyboard, which is nice. Esperanto involves circumflexes -- aka 'hats' -- on ...

Another story, or: Why I don't bother lying to ye ballroom instructor anymore: I do not remember exactly what was going on, but I was having A Day. I was sick or in pain and hadn't had one or more of the normal meals, I was probably behind on the dishes or the laundry or something, and possibly I hadn't slept. I was definitely staring down the barrel of a five-hour shift running a theater. I do rather like that job, but it involves a lot of running around setting things up and standing at a lectern selling tickets, so I was not looking forward to it just then. I'm not fond of passing out, so I picked up something that could be mistaken for food if you didn't look at it too closely, and hid in the studio office to eat it. I didn't expect to find anyone there, but in fact ye ballroom instructor had had the same bright idea. He's not normally in on weekends unless he's in the show or running it, but apparently he wanted to see that one, and decided to g...