Unsolicited Advice

Ratmas has come slightly early this year, as two of the four are on their way out, and I didn't want them to miss getting a third holiday just because I insisted on hewing to human schedules. They don't know what day it is anyway. They got new bowls, new boxes, new hammocks, a new cage cover, and more food than any four rats can reasonably eat. One of my dear friends gave the rats a chew toy and a bag of yogies to share last year.  This year, she has escalated, and got them each a bag of cookies. Tagged and everything. I can only assume one of the tribbles figured out how to work the phone, and got to her in the meantime. Plus they got a dish of egg nog, because everyone loves egg nog. I used one that I sincerely hope they cannot tip over. It is not the most elaborate Ratmas I have ever come up with, nor the most thorough cage cleaning I've ever done, but I'm sick and exhausted, 50% of them are sick and exhausted, and I figured we'd all rather be warm and comfor...

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...

Apparently the only interesting thing I have to write about right now is the ongoing saga of some random dude I know. I still have no idea why other people are interested in ye ballroom dance instructor and what I think about him. I try to justify the existence of this blog by using stuff in my life to launch into actual important thoughts about people and experiences and how social interactions work, so I hope you all get something out of this. The important part, so far as I'm concerned, shook out several months ago. I was assistant stage manager on a show that ye ballroom instructor was arranging, liasing, producing, and performing in, because sometimes the really talented ones are also slightly insane. It was about 85% brilliantly orchestrated, but we kept running into things that should have been done but weren't, or information we should have had but didn't. The stage manager and I both finally popped a sprocket at him when he remembered to tell one of us (me) tha...

Two of my housemates are learning things on the Duolingo app right now -- I think one of them is doing French and the other Spanish, but don't quote me on that. I signed up for the free version, and currently have nine languages running, because that'll keep me from getting bored and blowing through the entire skill tree on any one of them in like three days. I've spent the past two hours poking at it, because I currently have one of those plagues that's long on extra snot and short on oxygen, and I can do nothing that takes me more than lunging distance from a box of tissues. Au début, j'ai découvert que je fais du français encore assez bien, lorsque je me suis remplie des drogues. Duolingo will give you a fluency score; it tops out around 50-60%, because Duolingo isn't life, and right now my French hovers around 53%. It would probably be higher, but I'm far enough into it that it's asking me to translate things that can be said in a number of slightl...

So apparently I'm being rewarded for dissecting my own psyche in public now? Really? Hokay, I guess that's where we're going with this. While I appreciate the intent behind all the advice on what to do in re: ye ballroom dance instructor, I would like to note that at no point in all of that did I ask 'what the hell is going on here?', or did I solicit suggestions on what to do about it. I know what I'm going to do about it, which is exactly the thing I am doing already. I've generally been treating him like he has a charmingly obvious squish that by now is probably visible on Google Maps. He is neither acting confused nor backpedaling as fast as is humanly possible, so that seems to be about right. The tl;dr for those who don't feel like going through the AVEN forums is that a 'squish' is what the asexual community calls the ace version of a crush. Isn't that just wanting to be friends? you ask. No, wiseass, it's not. The salient dif...