Live theatre, sort of

WHEREAS the ongoing pandemic and various other elements of environmental, social, political, economic, and biological disaster loom large, and

WHEREAS the rational fairly strict self-quarantine (of those who are able) has, since March, severely limited occasions to socialize and gather in groups for the purposes of mutually enjoying culture and company, it is

HEREBY ACKNOWLEDGED that having so many performers shift to an online method for displaying their art to a geographically disparate crowd has, in fact, WIDENED this reader's ability to financially support the artists she loves while appreciating their performances in real-time.

Everything's on a screen, and frankly having to see my family only in delineated, buffered, pixelated windows feels much more limiting than having to see live performers in windows. Realistically these performers would have been mostly inaccessible because they were not touring my locality; so I find a tiny sliver of redemption for 2020 in the broader access to live art. The rest of 2020 should consider itself still on blast for its shortcomings.

This post's theme word is rort (n), "a wild party." I have tickets to watch shows three nights this week, from the comfortable pajama-clad rort of my own sofa!

Cobwebs

I went outside and discovered a spider had built an extensive web across the rear entrance of my house, spanning the door, deck, and stairs. This is some sort of arachnoid commentary on human self-quarantine and it struck me as both sticky and humorous. (Zeugma!)

This venture into the horrible humidity was made in order to chip away at emptying my office, which I'm not-really-using, for sabbatical so that someone else can not-really-use it. (Everything is wonderful, the world is totally fine, don't look too closely.) My two most neglected plants stubbornly hang on in what is surely the most arid, frigid, inhospitable summer that southern Pennsylvania can artificially offer to indoor plant life. An enterprising indoor spider, hoping in vain to capture prey in the abandoned, sealed, locked building, had constructed a foolishly hopeful web from the ceiling down to the desk chair, completely blocking off the shelves and the keyboard. This struck me as sticky and a silly emerging theme.

Are spiders everywhere just constantly walling in everything, and only the entropy of weather and large fauna keeps pathways clear?

Given the prevalence of webs, the visible black cloud of mosquitos that chased me from my car back into my house seemed incongruous. YES, I had to pass through a partially-reconstructed deck-spanning web to reenter the house. NO, it did not appear to dissuade the accursed vampiric horrors. Please, can we get some mosquito-eating bats to colonize my block?

This post's theme word is durance (n), "confinement or restraint by force; imprisonment." In this grimdark modern fairytale, the protagonist is self-quarantined at home and entirely encased in cobwebs and loneliness so thick that the quarantine becomes permanent; "Dream Durance" is rated NC-17 for psychic damage inflicted on readers and anyone attempting to engage in concurrent political discourse.

A hundred days of quarantine

We've passed 100 days of self-isolation but, in the tradition of this blog, I missed it exactly and will just post some half-finished thoughts here to expurgate them from my mind. Welcome to approximately the 112th day of solitude. And unlike grad school, there's no end in sight.

I miss people. It turns out that many of my pastimes actually required people, or at least the passing proximity of others, and are now extremely ill-advised and mostly unavailable. Board games are so great in-person as a way to escape into a shared brain-space with friends; at a distance, board games (and pretty much everything else) take a lot more effort and yield a lot less feeling of shared camaraderie. Ditto rock climbing, but extremely more so. And forget singing along during road trips --- the travel, the singing, the enclosed space, all of it is now verboten to the pandemic-pragmatic.

I miss the full-bandwidth promise of a real-time in-person conversation, one where no one drops out, no one freezes, talking over each other can be moderated by subtle physical and social cues, and my headphones do not leave a grooved imprint of my glasses on my skull.

I miss the fantasy I once held, maybe a decade ago in the midst of my extremely academic studies, that I might be living in a golden age of rationality and scientifically-founded decision-making. I miss the feeling that I might be effective or a positive influence on others, and I'm struggling to see how to "pivot" (eugh) my skills, which are almost 100% cultivated for in-person activities, to be effective and useful in a permanent pandemic world. I miss feeling like I can be effective at all, beyond donating my money and privilege to try to ameliorate the many ravaging horrors of our age. From a distance, of course.

Positively: I've cleaned my house, and it's staying quite clean. (I'm the only one who can enjoy this or pass judgment on inadequately-dusted ledges, anyway.) All houseplants are flourishing. I'm doing yardwork. I'm 2 full weeks ahead on my workout plan. I'm working on a lot of solitary at-home projects that would otherwise have languished. I'm contemplating what I want to do with the rest of my life to try to have a positive impact; I'm answering emails, letters, and postcards, and pumping the snail-mail system full of words, feelings, and time-delayed connections. I've learned to bake cheese in pastry crust. I've reworked my budget to enable more donations. I'm watching performances from artists I would never get to see in-person, as everyone has been forcibly shoved online, so they are effectively closer and more available to me than previously.

I'm waking every morning to shake my fists at the Gods of Bandwidth and propitiate the Lesser Deities of Lag and Latency.

I wonder...
... when was my last hug? I remember one pretty late, but was that truly my last hug?
... when was my last handshake? Will that be the final handshake of my life?
... when was the last time I ate in a restaurant? I don't remember. Maybe that will never happen again.
... when will I next see my family? Paradoxically it will probably not be enjoyable to see them because of the apprehension that the very act of meeting will impose a danger on everyone involved.

I think I could last a long time, a psychologically inadvisable time, in socially distant isolation. Comparing it with the risk of transmitting disease, contributing to transmitting disease, or myself becoming sick, and remaining isolated looks like a moral imperative. Whether by my example or by the incidental impact of self-selecting out of the situations where transmission occurs, this seems like my only acceptable mode of conduct. YMMV.

Don't worry. I'm not a hermit. I have an extremely healthy correspondence; I am an active letter-writer. And of course, now as always, I am a being that consists 80% of Simply Being Online.

Plus ça change.

This post's theme word is empanoply (v. tr.), "to enclose in complete armor." We are advised to empanoply ourselves at home, and I have empanoplied this cheese in flaky pastry.

Reality dissonance in POV

One of the continually fascinating and renewed interesting things about being... alive? Just about being a person, just about being, is of course that my first-person experience is incredibly different from everyone else's impression of me.

Obviously yes: how could it be anything else? I have access to lots of extra internal state information, plus the impression of free will to affect my actions. And on the other hand, everyone else can see information hidden from me, for example bugs crawling on the back of my head, or involuntary nervous tics.

Obviously no: whoever I am, that's who I am. Who I feel I am is who I appear to be, it's just that there's a change of perspective. How could they be different? There's only one objective reality, and we're in it. I'm myself and you see me; when I take an action, you see it. This is consensus reality, and no one has yet been able to escape it (as far as we know).

Every once in awhile the contrast of perspectives is thrown into sharp relief, and I just had one of these moments of reality-dissonance.

Here I am, innocently tootling along and doing a language-learning exercise which is trying to teach me new Japanese vocabulary. It brought up a word I definitely think I do not know --- "stylish" (adj), "oshare(na)" --- and I look it up. As soon as I pronounce it aloud, I start to rap in Japanese in my head. Why? Well, it turns out that 15 years ago I memorized some Japanese pop-rap entirely phonetically, with no regard for word breaks, grammar, or in fact content, and not only does my brain still have that stored somewhere (team: Never Garbage Collect), but it is still indexed by phonetic lookup and also immediately available. And also, now that I am hearing the sounds I memorized in my head, my brain is cross-referencing with a lot of new vocabulary I've learned in the past year and translating the rap.

I look down. My phone screen has not yet timed out, so this entire revelation - realization - translation phenomenon has taken < 30 seconds. And now I just know a verse, in English, of a series of noises I memorized without linguistic structure 15 years ago.

This just happens, sometimes.

I have been told that I give the impression of being "quick", very clever, very smart, always ready with an answer and a call-back reference. Intelligent. The first-person experience of this is that I am strapped in to an involuntary rollercoaster, my brain whipping me through tangentially-relevant memories in a barely-controllable whirlwind. It's just lucky that I set myself up in situations where "here's a  related memory" so often contains the nugget of truth that I need right now.

Also possibly I am dissociating because it feels very unreal to be still performing my extremely socialization-based job but also to be completely isolated from all other humans.

Hello from my isolation to yours!

This post's theme word is mimsy (adj), "prim, feeble, affected." This blog post gives the impression of a mimsy humblebrag: oops.

One-person projects

It seems to be a season to do one-person projects. Naturally, I have chosen to move a fainting sofa through my house and down some stairs.

It was ... challenging. As a one-person project, it encouraged me to be creative about tool usage, problem-solving, and how not to crush myself to a paste beneath a sofa on my staircase.

This post's theme word is inquiline (adj), "an animal living in the nest, burrow, or home of another." Tired of quarantining alone in your home? Cultivate an inquiline pet!

Things I miss about Europe

Things I miss about Europe (month 1, withdrawal edition).

Accents, and the mental work of untangling them.
Beautiful and old architecture.
Having the best baguette in Paris available, at my doorstep, baked fresh thrice daily.
Free blank-faced eye contact in public, with no requisite smile or interaction.
The added level of mental friction and difficulty of doing everything in another language. Things here seem easy (which is not to say straightforward or simple).
Being able to attribute any social misstep to my incurable Americanness.
Freshly-imported Italian delicacies.
Everyone expects to go to public parks to socialize, so parks are frequent and pleasant.
Inexpensive Swiss chocolate.
Being in a time zone ahead of GMT, so: always living in the future.
Children speaking foreign languages with perfect accents.
Reliable, fast, inexpensive internet connectivity.
An electrical wiring standard which does not threaten electrocution at every plug/unplug.
Cheese.
All my friends.

Those last two rank very closely. I'm not sure which is the more acute pang of separation. (Just kidding. It's cheese, of course.)


This post's theme word is escutcheon,

1. "an ornamental or protective plate surrounding a keyhole, light switch, door handle, etc."
2. used in the phrase: blot on one's escutcheon (a stain on one's reputation).
3. "a shield or shield-shaped surface bearing a coat of arms."

The buildings look naked without the usual crust of escutcheons to mark their history, ownership, and affiliation.

I become bland

Unsure of myself with new colleagues and a new position, and wanting to maintain a certain dignity and thus obtain a level of respect (and respectability), I find that I am curbing most of my sotto voce comments and asides.

I want to appear pleasant and personable. (I am in fact pleasant and personable, although the way in which I express it is different from others... more prickly and dry. My personality is a cactus.)

Perhaps all my stifled remarks will harden deep in my core, and form an iridescent pearl of sarcasm, glistening with wit, and at some future date, a metaphorical conversational trawl will haul it up and expose it to the world.

In the meantime, I am content to be a little bit socially quiet, observant as usual, and with a vibrant inner life of narration and context-driven jokes.


This post's theme word is hebetate, "to make dull or obtuse." My temporary period of retirement from society shall not hebetate me.

On social niceties

During this lull in my professional life while I wait to hear from job applications, I am spending some extra non-research mental cycles going on dates. Other people might just say "I was lonely" but my self-rationalization has long since surpassed such a simply summarized state. Welcome, this is my blog, have we met?

A frequent remark I hear is, "I felt so natural and relaxed around you! Like I could just be myself." This comes, I think, with an subtext (conveyed by delivery, framing, nonverbal cues, etc.) of "this was so special and unusual, we really got along and are a good match!" If this were a movie,it would cue some emotional, peppy music the viewers would be swept into a montage of cutesy date things: riding the merry-go-round, pointing at something together off the Eiffel Tower, sipping drinks at a café while illuminated by the soft glow of sunset. I'm pretty sure it is intended as a compliment to me.

But what I hear is, "You were successful in your cognitive and emotional labor to set me at ease, and I am completely unaware of how much effort goes into social niceties! I think everything just happens."

Because of course we had an easy casual conversation. I worked hard to make it so. Rather than tap my feet, or shift uncomfortably, or fail to make eye contact, I redirected my anxious energies and spinning brain to the Jane Austen circuits: I spoke calmly, I set you at ease, I redirected us from unproductive topics and smoothly suggested interesting topics. I did not comment on your awkwardness, unless I thought it would help. I put a lot of meta-thought into the first date, and I have the conversational skills to show for it: my statements are precise, and clear, and friendly, and pleasant, with a flair for the bizarre, sarcastic, and intellectual to avoid actually appearing anodyne. I'm myself, but the nice version that goes on first dates. If you are fluent in English, you might also appreciate my wordplay and the careful phrasing --- again inspired by Austen --- by which I express both a nice idea and a smirk. If you're not fluent in English, I did all those things anyway; there's no "off" switch.

Then I probably went home and typed up a report and sent it to my Date Review Committee for feedback.

It's interesting to receive so many of nearly-identical compliments. It reinforces that I actually do have some consistent skill, as witnessed by independent observers.

It's also interesting that the meta-level deduction "That date was good because the conversation was so easy and relaxed" doesn't go one level higher. Or, you know, maybe it does, but perhaps my interlocutors' social niceties are preventing them from conveying something more than the simple compliment to me. (That would be neat. If you're one such date, who found this blog and read this far, I'm interested to hear more.)

Lest this post appear to brag, I apparently lack this skill and aura in the workplace. Today I was eating lunch alone at the communal default lunch table, and a colleague came in with his lunch. We know we have two languages in common, as well as a common workplace and intellectual interests. He chose to sit at another table, by himself, rather than joining me. So my appeal as a conversationalist has limited context.


This post's theme word is ugsome, "dreadful, loathsome." The ugsome interlocutor is not to be endured.

Empty

The temperature this morning hovered at freezing as I walked to the office, and campus foot traffic was absent. I passed a hedge, defoliated for the winter, a collection of brown twigs protruding from the ground. It was making a strange noise; the plants sounded like a water fountain. No one else was walking by to corroborate my observation.

I stopped and listened for awhile. Light hailstones, or perhaps heavy snowflakes, were falling. As they hit the hedge, they ricocheted down the branches and made a soft pitter-patter rattling sound -- which I had mistaken for water drops falling into a pool.

The hail made no sound when it hit anything else: pavement, sidewalk, cars, me. I trudged off, across the salted ground and the lumpy frozen mud, denuded of grass. When I got to the office, it was empty of people, and light, and (mostly) heat.

This suits my mood.


This post's theme word is elacrymate, "to emit as tears." Elizabeth elacrymated her excessive emotions.

In which I wish gchat were real life

If I could only be physically present with all my gchat co-existers, I would be in a room with the most awesome people all the time, from all over the world. My gchat list reads like a dream team of the best party I could think of... and between us, someone is always awake and logged-in. So there's always someone available for solace.


This post's theme word is locum, "a person filling in for another, especially a doctor or clergyman." Modern conveniences like gchat provide locums at any locus.

International Day of Sadness

Commemorating bad feelings experienced on this day, I declare it to be an International Day of Sadness.

My motivation is that one day a year, I should gather up all my sadness and regret and just get over it. Today is that day, a day for wallowing and self-pity. Tomorrow will be a new day. This date nicely coincides with the beginning of a new academic year almost everywhere (a little late for A., just about right for me, a little early for E.).

I had decided on this strange holiday a few months ago; I knew I'd probably feel bad today, and resolved at least to feel better tomorrow. Ever self-thwarting, my subconscious arranged it so that I awoke this morning feeling great. I am fairly certain that my stepped-up workout schedule is to blame for that; I am sore all over, and energetic, and sleeping well.


This post's theme word: roborant, "strengthening."

Fourth of July

This is only the second time I've ever spent July 4th outside of the US. It feels a little hollow. It was a normal work day. There are no fireworks, there are no people wandering the streets with picnic blankets and shoestring licorice (a childhood 4th of July necessity). There's nothing special at all. I'm not an overbearing patriot, but I associate this holiday with good memories, so I'm a little sad to be spending it in Canada. If I had television, I could watch the fireworks (with the added bonus of annoyingly patriotic American TV commentators!). Happy 4th of July, everyone.


This post's theme song: "America, **** yeah!" from that most offensive of movies, "Team America: World Police."

Other people are different from me

Let a worldview be an n-dimensional real vector, where each entry represents a weight (relative importance) of some aspect of the world. WLOG we can normalize these vectors, and consider them as a solution space for the problem of "how do I prioritize things in the world as inputs that influence my life?" For example, I'd have a heavy weight for, say, mathematics, and a low one for 18th-century French literature; a devoted humanities student, vice-versa.

But it's not that the humanities student's vector is nearly orthogonal to mine. It's that he has a paintbrush and a palette of oils representing different philosophical schools, and he's riding a unicorn through clouds of poetry. He's operating in a totally different paradigm. He doesn't even have a vector. Yet we inhabit the same world -- we can meet and interact, so some parts of my worldview must align with his.

This is what it is like to be trapped in my head. I've no idea what it is like to be trapped in anyone else's head -- I've never been there -- and at best I can simulate it according to parameters I conceive and choose. If I'm running simulated annealing on a solution space and you are gimbling in the mimsy borogrove-infested wabe, how can I grasp anything about you? Even if you describe it to me, I will still have no sense of it, just a description.

That inadequacy is apparent here (oh, irony): I write, but what can you really understand from this about me or how I work?

And if this gulf of unknowability really separates people, how do they "get to know" each other? You are just "getting to know" an increasingly detailed abstraction of me that you construct in your head based on my observable behavior.

Sometimes I want to abandon the meta-abstraction and go distribute food in third-world countries. Then I remember how bad I am with people, and how much I love the power of meta*, and I stick to academia.

My apologies for making these existential high-school-level musings so frequent. I've drafted lighter posts (with pictures!), and they'll be up soon.


This post's featured writing implement: my science pencil, which heat-sensitively turned from green to yellow as I wrote.

This post's theme facebook group: Currently Undergoing an Existential Crisis.

Social peanut butter

Other people are mysteries. I cannot understand them.

A. and I discovered that we both use the following scheme to model other people's behavior:

Assume other people are thinking, behaving, and decision-making just like you are.

After all, your only known model of the inner workings of a mind is your own. This may be a terrible approximation, depending on the person you are trying to simulate.

When this model breaks down, I default to viewing other people as enigmas. (For example: inexplicable-to-me behavior at airport security checkpoints, odd supermarket-traversing paths, abuse of sidewalk-usage protocols.) This default case is invoked quite frequently, as I am a compulsive, acute observer of others' behavior.

What does this mean to everyone out there who is not me?

By being silent and awkward around you, I am actually demonstrating my respect for you as a unique person (in my own odd way). I'm quite outgoing around people I already know, those who have put in the long months/years to get to know me to the point that I'm comfortable around them. I'm also social around those with whom I share an instant recognition of common background. (College roommates are examples of the former; conference nerds, the latter.)

What does this mean for me?

The accumulated effect of this strange policy is that it takes me a long time to warm up to you, and once you're my friend, you're stuck. It will take a long time for me to forget you. This is why I've been sending postcards and letters to my dispersed, graduated friends around the world: I move in social slow-motion. Like walking through peanut butter. Even after eight months here, I'm still not adjusted; my mental self-image has trailing emotional tentacles stretched back to college, and no firm roots yet taken in Toronto (mmm, mixed metaphors). (At least, I don't feel adjusted; what does adjustment consist of, but feeling adjusted? Objective self-assessment is difficult if not impossible.) This is all amenable to posting online, somehow -- I don't know how -- if I don't understand myself, how can I ever understand others?

I sometimes spend entire days here working quietly by myself. At the end of the day I realize that I haven't had a single face-to-face conversation (of more than a few words) with another person all day. I wonder: how will I make friends if I'm no good at socializing? Then my other obsessive thoughts crowd this out, and I have no worry left over for the friends I don't have yet.


This post's theme word: paroemiology, "the collecting and studying of proverbs."

Why don't you write back?

Dear all,

I know I tend to be secretive and defensive. So maybe you don't know, and have not yet figured out, that I am very slow to warm to new people, and even slower to make friends. You may not realize your membership in a tiny elite. Remember how you thought I despised you for the first months or years of our acquaintance? Well, I hope you overcame that just as I overcame my unfriendly nature. However you managed it, you wormed your way into my confidences. And I do not intend to let you slip out of my grasp. (Cue the lightning, evil cackles, menacing shadows cast on a dungeon wall.)

Well, I'm still well within my experimentally-determined 2-year-minimum friend-making timeline here, but I have been trying to maintain my connections with you, my friends, across the globe. I think of you. I write you letters and send you packages and postcards. Why don't you write back?

I know you're busy. I'm busy, too. And you probably make friends faster than I do, so you are spending time with your new friends. But I am eminently reachable -- you have my mailing address, my email address, my instant messaging identity, my phone number, my facebook account, my skype information. You don't have to reply at length, or in finely crafted language, or even with substance. It would be nice to hear from you, even just a one-sentence email saying hello. That takes, what, 30 seconds to think about, write, and send?

I miss you guys and wish I heard from you more often.

Lila

P.S. And to my readers here in Toronto: hang in there. I warm up, I promise.

I'm a big girl now!

I've had the jingle from that diaper commercial in my head all day. Today (despite accidentally spilling boiling water on my hand -- because of my hurt knee -- so that I was icing my hand and knee all day -- crutching was painful -- sometimes I just channel Miss Saigon: "Why, God, whyyyyyyyyyy?") I made an independent foray to the supermarket and back. I will not starve, at least not in the next few days. Groceries are heavy, my hand hurts, and the rain made the sidewalk treacherously crutch-slippery.

Yours in overcoming adversity,
Lila

This post's theme biological trick: freezing nerves to prevent them from signalling pain in the brain. It is fabulous.

I'm twisted (@ the gym)

A few times, guys have hit on me at the gym. I don't know why -- I'm all sweaty, I'm out of breath, I'm listening to music, I'm not exactly the picture of romantic attraction. Yet they do it anyway. Mostly I'm amused, sometimes I'm offended. Is the gym a good place to go trolling for dates? I've never seen a girl hit on a guy at the gym, so maybe the appeal of the gym as a romantic starting-block is one of the masculine mysteries forever unknowable to me.

I think of the gym is as an insular place. We're not participating in a group activity; each person is there for his own self-improvement. People who have conversations at the gym are a rare and unwelcome breed. And yet, we are all watching each other, gaging each others' relative fitness and strength levels. There's nothing else to look at, really.

So I do occasionally find myself noting particularly handsome boys at the gym, despite my asocial nature and my aversion to gym-spawned romance.

Today I noticed a boy who had strikingly blue eyes. They were pure blue, unspoiled by flecks of other colors. He kept moving back and forth across the gym to different machines, crossing my (better-planned) path through the machines. He was, in a word, "cute"... until he started to do push-ups next to the erg where I was rowing. Rowing is fairly monotonous, so out of the corner of my eye I counted his push-ups: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 (strain begins to show), 7, 8 (pause for breath), 9, 10 (collapse to the mat in exhaustion)!

Wow! Ten whole push-ups! His mysterious cuteness was instantly dissipated in a poof! of wimphood. I snickered out loud. I am twisted. But I'm far stronger than he is, that namby-pamby posturer. A cut-off t-shirt does not an athlete make.


This post's theme word: caducity. "Frailty, infirmity."

Now available on video!

It used to be that live Lila interactions were limited to the range of the audible. No longer shall Lila be limited! I am now skypeable by audio and video.

Of course, time-lagged interactions are still available in a variety of print media (email, proper mail, some blogs).


This post's theme video: Michael Jackson's "Thriller." It's marvelous.

Right where I need to be

Since arriving alone in this foreign land (O, Canada!), I have frequently doubted myself. In the spirit of “fake it ‘til you make it,” I embraced my new life with confidence, or the best approximation I could rustle up. I have never done anything like this in my life – not just graduate school, which is of course new, but living off-campus, grocery shopping and preparing food for just myself, existing in the real world.

Of course, graduate school is not the real world. But it’s the closest I’ve ever been, so indulge me in my drama! Although I rarely venture out of my academic shell, I do spend about an hour every day reading the news (Slashdot, Boing Boing, my friends’ blogs, and occasionally the real news), so I have an increasingly good view of [my small corner of] the real world.

G likes to remind me that is what I chose for myself, and although she means “how wonderful that you get to live your life as you want!”, every time she says it I hear an undercurrent of “don't be dissatisfied!” Both those messages are worthwhile, since I could leave at any point if I realized that graduate school, or my current way of life, or even this looney country are not what I want to do. So it’s important for me to remember that I’m in control. That said, I have been living mostly alone, mostly in my own head, much like L, and like C I am slightly wistful for the society I am missing, though not enough to make me leave graduate school for anything else.

Could I even meet the right kind of people elsewhere? A while ago I exclamatorily wrote, “I found my people!” upon discovering a group of graduate students who meet once a week to play board games. (I am a strategy fiend, and live for the kind of 12-hour-long, friendship-ruining games like Diplomacy.) Unfortunately we seem to have stopped meeting since the semester’s work began in earnest, sending us scuttling back into our offices.

Luckily for me, I was bold enough to blindly email my entire department and get a four-person team to compete in last weekend’s College Puzzle Challenge, an “an annual puzzle-solving competition held simultaneously on college campuses across North America.” It’s a twelve-hour nerdfest, with staggered release of packets of devilishly obscure puzzles. (And no instructions. They are for the weak.) I found my people again! It turns out that, much like X-men, the Incredibles, or heroes, sarcastic, hilarious math and CS nerds are all around us. They keep their abilities hidden to avoid ostracism/exploitation/genocide/your-favorite-sci-fi-disaster-here.

The puzzles were difficult, and my team didn’t pick up steam until the final three or four hours, but it was still lots of fun, and made me happy. I have been laughing to myself intermittently since then, something I hadn’t done in a long while.

In sum: it’s good to be me, everything about my life is perfect, and I love what I’m doing! Now back to the grindstone.


This post’s theme song: the eponymous Gary Allan song.