Unsolicited Advice

The slightly-overdramatic juris doctor  has been waging a campaign to get me to take his class. And more recently, to take all of his classes. I didn't... miss  it, exactly, I just doubted my perception of causality.  To now get too far into the amateur psych profiling, he is surprisingly rule-based. I think most people just think he's super on top of everything, and highly self-critical when he does miss something, but it also comes out in socialization, and I suspect is a lot of the reason he comes off as eccentric. I accidentally instantiated a rule about answering my emails with emails and not randomly in person next time he saw me. It was only relevant once, when the office wanted a written confirmation of something, but it's stuck very, very hard for several months now. I have to interpret him for my smart-but-normal coworker a lot. He has this schtick where he borrows the staff to come in for the last five minutes of his classes to watch the choreo and give feedbac...

I have signed up for class with the somewhat-overdramatic juris doctor from previous posts. It is... interesting. Not getting too far into the amateur psych profiling, he shows every sign of being someone who was tracked into every gifted and talented program they could find as soon as they figured out he could read. Which was probably before anyone else got around to teaching him. He is pathologically observant and terrifyingly smart. I like him, a lot. The popular concept of what happens when you tell a kid they're exceptional from day one is basically House, the intolerable asshole genius. I won't say that never happens, but it's pretty rare. Getting that result involves a lot of confounding factors, and, let's be honest, some significant inborn asshole tendencies. More often, you get someone who is no better or worse a person than anyone else, but is really  oddly calibrated in many regards. One of the earliest things you learn as The Gifted Kid is that the other k...

I hate heat.  Normally I write these things at 2 am because that's when I'm awake. I'm writing this particular thing at 2 am because that's when it's not 95F outside. It's not quite 95F inside, but it gets stupidly close. My room only has one window -- so, still legally rentable as a bedroom in the state of Massachusetts -- and for some reason only the upper sash will open. I'm not dumb enough to wedge an AC unit into the top of a busted antique double-hung window, so my bedroom has been temporarily converted into a large solar-powered oven. The rat has been spending his days in the living room, where it's climate-controlled. (Rat, singular. I am down to only Tseng at the moment. If you don't keep up with my Facebook, Errand, the remaining old man foster, finally got to go back to his original mommy. He was very weirded out by being packed up into a carrier and trundled out to the Fenway, but happy to be returned to someone who is home enough to sati...