Unsolicited Advice

Hello, rat-fans! I hope you have all enjoyed your holiday weekend. The rats did! As a reminder, this year's advent calendar is now running on the public blog, but to see the regular weekly-ish blog entries in the month of December, you can become a Patron . This is especially important right now, as I've just found out I'll have to move again by the end of February. I hate moving and was on track to deal with it again "by September", not "by March", so I spent my holiday weekend either in a dead panic, or trying to ride that fine line between medicating myself out of a dead panic and being in a coma. Yay. If you're in need of some holiday gifts, you also have the option of buying some of my hand-knit creations over at Etsy, or splurging on a Ratmas gift set . This serves the dual purpose of funding me and  giving me less crap to pack later, so consider it a mitzvah . Now that's over with, on with the show! First we have Ratsgiving Br...

Helo! -- Durnik I have new rats! Meet Durnik (above) and Barak (below). In accordance with internationally-recognized Rat Law, these little widgets are now the exact geometric center of my entire universe, and will be treated accordingly. 'Sup. -- Barak These guys are re-homes, about a year old. A short list of things Barak and Durnik like: Each other. Humans. Food. Conspicuously absent from that list is 'other rats'. Which was a problem, because they were brought on as companions for an only whose rat-bro had sadly passed away. From what I gather, the singleton is happy and friendly and also ADHD in the form of a rodent. So while Barak and Durnik were settling down into being asshole teenagers (~6 months, for rats), Attention Deficit Rat would basically land on their heads at random going HAY LETS GO RIDE BIKES!!!11!!! or whatever the rat equivalent is. Barak would go JESUS FUCKIN Y U CHOO ON MY HED AGIN?, Durnik would follow, and it would all end in a lo...

My response to extended periods of stress is to distract myself by cramming new things into my head. I had a terrible semester at college once and front-loaded the entirety of the sci.electronics.repair FAQ into my brain. It wasn't useful at the time, but I can repair the shit out of a VCR now, so I assume I'll use it someday. I am so overloaded I am about to claw my own face off, so naturally I am teaching myself Hebrew. I've been using Duolingo to do it, which is frankly a very bad idea. (I should really be using Ha'Ulpan, which is where you'd typically go for a crash course in Hebrew before emigrating to Israel, but that costs money, so no.) Duolingo is billed as a way to teach yourself a language, which it is not. It is a way to memorize a bunch of interactive flashcards. This might be effective for people who don't care how language works -- which is most people -- but it's awful for people like me, who hang all of their memorization off of a framewo...

Brains are weird. I have first-hand experience in this. Weird doesn't always mean bad, however, so occasionally I rummage around the internet trying to figure out if any of the weird things work to my advantage. If you've ever heard of ASMR ( Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response ), your reaction was likely either, "Hey! It has a name!" or "You people are bizarre." It's a little complicated, but the gist is that it's the exact inverse of that cringe response most people have to nails on a chalkboard: Some sort of stimulus, often but not always auditory, makes you melt into a puddle of goose-pimpled goo. The ASMR community is pretty adamant that it's not sexual, despite the existence of ASMR erotica. (I'm inclined to believe them. I feel like this is less a case of 'the lady doth protest too much' than of just plain ol' Rule 34 .) Common triggers include whispering, the rustle of book pages turning, tapping of rain on a hard surfa...

I'm still alive. Sort of. In the past few weeks, I've had a grand total of twenty-one hours where things felt like they were going reasonably all right. Twenty-one. I went back and checked timestamps and counted. I landed a short-term gig teaching dance for a bunch of kids. It wasn't absurdly lucrative, but if I could earn that much money every week I'd be fine long-term. I was on site for 6 hours a day M-Th and had a four hour evening on Friday. I wasn't even running around with the kids for all that much of it, I just had class periods separated by free time. It ruined me to the point where I was having trouble feeding myself and showering consistently. I would get out of there and try desperately to get something useful done and just stare at a wall, if I didn't lay down "just for a minute" and wake up hours later. I don't think it's necessarily the physical activity that's the problem. I can do four hours of hardcore dancing in...

So the confusing unexpected birthday party went pretty okay. And by 'pretty okay' I mean the room as a whole achieved a level of drunkenness that inspired everyone to share reminiscences of previous instances of drunkenness. It turns out that several of the old guard went to college together, so I got to hear tales of shit-faced shenanigans that occurred while I was still learning to walk. One of them brought his sister, with whom I had a thoughtful discussion about how tequila is a series of terrible decisions in a bottle. Helpful hint: When someone starts out their story with a trick question like, "Okay, if you were completely hammered, would you rather crawl naked into bed with [dude who is standing RIGHT THERE, participating in the conversation], or crawl naked into bed with a total stranger?" the only reasonable response is to pause thoughtfully for half a second and say, "Well, what does this total stranger look like?" I didn't get to hear the res...

Still can't wrap my head around being invited to this birthday party. There isn't technically a C-suite, as we're a non-profit and everyone answers to the board, but there are executive operating officers, and the guest of honor at the party is top one. It is beyond me why anyone would think I'd be invited to this in the first place. I find it interesting that someone coming in from the outside looked at me in situ  and came to that conclusion. The rest of them are shocked when I demonstrate knowledge of something they had an entire meeting about, four feet from the reception desk where I was working, in a totally empty lobby. I literally have nothing better to do than knit and eavesdrop. Have none of them ever read a Miss Marple  book? On va voir  what will happen when I actually show up to the birthday party. Mr New York Producer-Person will probably be delighted; other people might be confused. The director will probably be mildly surprised. I seem to have inserted...

About a week ago, I crewed a show at the studio theater for a non-profit outfit up from New York. The guys who run it are friends of our executive artistic director, and they come up two or three times a year. I like them; I dealt with them a bunch when I was at the box office, because when you're the most experienced person they have around they hand you all of the EAD's friends, and I have an unofficial standing request to work their shows even when I'm not the only crew who is both in town and not drowning in finals. One of the guys, as it turns out, is laid up with an injury right now, so the other one had to fly solo, on top of performing in the show. I ran into him coming down the stairs as I was going up, and as soon as he saw me he just lit up like, oh, it's you!  How are you are you working are you going to be my box office again! I told him I'd swapped over to doing tech and he asked if I was disappointed that I didn't get to dress up anymore. I...

I went out dancing after work a couple of weeks ago. Apparently I am a person who does that now. I try not to think about it too hard. This is my strategy for pretty much anything that involves the Eccentric. The club our group descended upon does salsa and bachata. Bachata is notorious for making boyfriends angry. This is because it often looks like this . It doesn't have to, but you do get pretty close. A lot of the directionality and rhythm from the lead actually comes through your right knee, so you pretty much have to be in each other's pockets the whole time. Properly executed, bachata combines two of the Eccentric's favorite things in the whole wide world: Showing off, and being used as a giant teddy bear. He is very cuddly. His friend-radius is about five inches, give or take. At one point about two weeks into our acquaintance, he was telling me all about how I'd get a chance to meet his wife when she came to the show that night, while standing practically ...