Unsolicited Advice

Those of you who have been hanging around for a while know that I am badly addicted to the Professor Layton games. Every time I get a new one, I sit down in the evening to start the story and then whoops! It's dawn. The main series of games have all been for Nintendo handhelds, but the spinoffs all seem to be coming out for Android/iOS, and I have a Kindle Fire, so... To be fair, Layton Brothers: Mystery Room is not really a Layton game. Also to be fair, the Layton name got me to buy it (well, "buy" it -- unlocking all the episodes costs about $5 total, which is the kind of credit I can rack up on Google Opinion Rewards ). What it is, is a rebranded Atamania game, which is how all of the Layton games started. Atamania is a portmanteau of atama  (lit, "head"; atama ga ii , or "head is good", is the colloquial phrase for "intelligent" or "clever") and the English word "mania", and is the title of a series of puzzle ga...

I found out a few weeks ago that ye ballroom dance instructor fusses when he's anxious. Just wanders the building, doing tiny, neglected, low-priority maintenance tasks. I have no idea if he does things because he can't sit down, or can't sit down because he feels like he should be doing things. Haven't asked, at least not yet. I had friends like this in high school. I used to think it was my mission to "calm" them by getting them to sit down and stop twitching. I honestly couldn't tell you what gave me the idea that I was personally responsible for making other people stop wigging out, except that I was miserable as a teenager and assumed that pretty much everything was my fault, pretty much all the time. I don't think I quite grasped that the fussing and the nervousness were not the same thing, or that forcing someone to stifle all their anxious tics would make things worse, not better. In my defense, nobody had ever done anything but shout at me o...