Gary Chapman’s five love languages paradigm categorizes the kinds of things that make people feel loved/valued. Here’s the original list: receiving gifts quality time words of affirmation acts of service physical touch I find this general paradigm useful—the idea that different people have different modes and approaches that make them feel valued—but I want to […]
[Note: This post is not in response to any particular instance; it’s about a longstanding pattern.] For many years, I’ve been seeing a certain specific kind of response to people expressing pain, and I’d like to respectfully ask people to think carefully about it before giving this particular kind of response. The pattern goes something […]
At some point in the early 1990s, I spoke with my college friend Alex on the phone, and was surprised that his voice had dropped in pitch by at least an octave since I had last talked with him. I think he told me something about having belatedly gone through puberty. It turned out that […]
(Content warning for discussion of a suicide.) A little under two weeks ago, around the start of Labor Day Weekend, I had an anxiety spike, which was made worse a couple days later by various things around the statement from the Tiptree Motherboard about the award’s name. At the time, I couldn’t figure out why […]
In 2008, I stayed at the Howard Johnson in Springfield, Pennsylvania. I had a bad experience there; the card-key reader on the door of my room stopped working in the middle of the night (so I was locked out of my room), and the staff couldn’t do anything to fix it, and the owner handled […]
Mostly good day. Today (the 17th) would’ve been my mother’s 76th birthday. I wasn’t as fragile or distressed as I sometimes am this time of year, but nonetheless decided it would be good to keep social interaction relatively minimal with people who I don’t know. In the morning and early afternoon, I helped Mary Anne […]
Two years ago, the first time I attended an all-group meeting for the Cloud Documentation group at my day job, I noticed that people in the audience were asking questions that were largely inaudible to much of the rest of the audience, including me. (And completely inaudible to people who were attending the meeting remotely, […]
This weekend, I started off with a goal of dealing with at least three of the four or so highest-priority anxiety-inducing things I was avoiding dealing with. I ended up dealing with only two of them. (And not dealing with the most important one, a day-job thing that’s now very late and that I really […]
I understand why people who are giving talks or writing articles use phrases like these that assume a shared experience: We’ve all had the experience of … Everyone here knows … You’d be surprised at … But I’d like to recommend not doing that. Such phrases are very often inaccurate (twice yesterday, presenters said things […]
I just finished reading/skimming Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Here’s my summary/paraphrase of the book. When I list items in {curly braces}, pick one of the listed items. Spoilers here. Content warning for mention of sex with underage girls. I had no money. I decided to go to {Denver, San Francisco, New York, New Orleans, […]
Books! Free to a good home. Let me know if you want any of these. Also some CDs, DVDs, and VHS tapes. (All at the end of this post.) This list contains 100+ more books than the previous list I posted (a couple months ago), so even if you’ve already looked at the other one, […]
My father was a big fan of Robert Anton Wilson. I read the Illuminatus! trilogy in the summer between 8th and 9th grade (it changed my life). All through high school, I would occasionally pick up one of my father’s Wilson books and read some random bit of it, but aside from Illuminatus!, I never […]