Yesterday, I joined Hubski for the first time!

I was intrigued by how it all works, and from my lurking I noticed the high quality discussions being made. So, I was only too happy to join!

I really haven't done anything that warrants a wall of text. I have been at university studying a professional writing degree. Classes are interesting, mostly, and I do feel I am improving in my writing. Of course, I am cognisant that nothing I write is going to be perfect, but simply trying is the best way to go.

Although I don't exactly relish getting up early in the morning for early classes, where I live in Australia, the sunrise often looks beautiful! It'll be streaked with purple or perhaps light pink. It's simply delightful.

Have a great day, everyone!

I am with someone who is a kind, patient, and talented person. Whom I like a lot. But I don't know if I want her. Or a relationship. I feel guilty over how crazy my schedule is, and frustrated over the state of my body, and unsure of where I will be in a year. She's great, but I'm not as excited, and wondering if I will end up in love with her or not. Wondering what that even feels like. I've felt love once in my life, and that was five years ago now.

Job’s going great. Need to make sure I don’t spend too much time on it, because extra hours doesn’t mean a fatter paycheck. I also wanted to share some of the maps I’ve been working on this week. The first of the two was a demo I did on Monday for a product idea I’ve been developing with a colleague. If the business side of things work out as we hope it will, we might be able to sell it for somewhere in the six figures.

The second image shows some demographics in a neat hexagon grid. I know it is not much better than a pixel grid, but pixels will never make me want to trade sheep for wheat so I can build my city, meaning it’s clearly inferior.

Had my first swimming class this weekend. The course is to learn the front crawl and backstroke. I was slightly nervous - I used to hate the ever living fuck out of mandatory school swimming classes. That was entirely because of my clumsiness, the risk of being singled out for my ineptitude in front of peers, and the proximity of swimming to drowning. I’m still clumsy and suck at swimming, but I now know I just gotta practice and suck for a while until I get better.

The teacher mentioned that you need to get your breathing in a calm, regular pattern before you can even begin to do proper strokes. Yesterday, I went on my own, practicing just that and he’s totally right. It went much better when I focused on my breathing - funny how meditation breathing exercises come in handy like that. I did seriously hurt my leg though. It felt similar to a leg cramp (which runs in the family) but much worse. I didn’t realize you should be drinking enough, so it might be just serious leg cramps, but shouldn’t those be gone after a while? My leg still feels a bit sore from it...

Left the iPhone ecosystem today.

Every Wednesday I think something happened and I have a life update to share that's worthwhile. And every Wednesday I blank and post a drawing of a cat or something because my problems aren't that bad and my life isn't that interesting. Anymore.

Quarterly recap:

I had a girlfriend, technically, for about a week. I thought it'd be a good fit since I assumed a much younger woman would have relationship goals that were not very serious and would work with my situation. Nope. She was naive and desperately in love with being in love so I bailed. She also wrote fan fiction which I have about no respect for. She should probably find a man who writes fan fiction. Ignored red flags but didn't stick around and make it worse.

Pretty much done with the grad school application. Now I need letters of recommendation. Which I have no control over. And for reasons I took the same professor in my department like nine times. And he does not use computers. And his wife told me he is recovering from tongue cancer. So even that letter isn't guaranteed. I'm also very upset to hear that and other details from her. I'm not a complete selfish prick.

I got a job and quit a job and got a new job and quit that job. I guess I don't like being micromanaged. And not all similar positions in the same field are in similar work environments. Because individual employees can be colossal dicks. I was incredibly lucky at my last long term job and now I know that. I have two interviews today. When you work for not much money and you can bail easily and not worry too much about job insecurity since there's probably another shitty job closer that pays the same.

I should probably maybe have a date this weekend that's like five years in the making. I've been texting a girl for six months who I kept meeting on the old dating apps repeatedly over the course of said years. I was not in the place to want a relationship or feel anything for anyone but over six months with her I think I have developed something and I've also got over a bunch of my own shit in the interim.

Other stuff too. Whatever. I want to write. Reassessing the direction of the large writerly output I produced last year that I had planned to mostly discard. Sometimes the success of Ernest Cline or Bret Easton Ellis being published at 21 seem to light a fire under my ass but then I just watch MST3K because I deserve to relax or something.

I'm fuckin' beat. I just played tour guide nonstop for two weeks because my best friend and then my sister each spent a week at my house. The first week was fun, the second less so - I ended up basically repeating the first week note for note because I didn't want to think of new things to do. I mostly stay at home or within a mile of my house, so I had little to no idea of what would constitute "sightseeing" in Portland.

On the plus side, I have an 11 day break starting tomorrow. Lots of plans.

Pictures I'll upload after work: socks and hats I've been knitting, sweaters I've been sewing, maybe some of the pastel stuff I've been drawing.

Poop quality picture. I've never worked with knits before, sewing jersey collars suuuucks. Getting better though.

Lots of socks! Lots of hats! Trying to turn all my leftover yarn into finished projects before moving in May.

Pastels. Mostly just been working on Bob Rosses, finally moved beyond using black 400 grit sandpaper as my pastel paper.

"I don't know why you'd get into watchmaking because everyone just has a phone these days."

The value of the worldwide watch industry in 1970, adjusted for inflation, was $460m. Last year, the value of the Swiss watch industry alone was 21 billion dollars.

I don't need to make 21 billion dollars, I need to make a living. My chosen industry's exports were up double digits in its top six markets last year. And there are so few American watchmakers that nobody can even definitively say who they are.

Registered for classes. Staring down the barrel of 26 credits. Nice guidance counselor at one of the schools looked over my transcript and said "I see you're grossly overqualified in math." Fuck yeah. You want trig. I got finite element analysis. I also just trimmed an eyebrow and am developing what looks like a skunk stripe from my widow's peak so really, I guess I'm earning my midlife crisis. Or is it a second-life crisis? It isn't even really a crisis; I've arranged things such that I can continue thriving off the terrible television viewing tastes of the American Midwest for so long as they hold steady. Are you allowed to have a midlife crisis with a 5-year-old? I've still got a damn crib folded up in the garage.

My Precious doesn't run well. This is partially because it isn't lubricated and partially because apparently someone dropped a caliber covered in cosmoline in the ultrasonic cleaner because me and another guy now have funky white crystals growing on our watches. Looks like naptha. Gotta take 'em apart and run 'em again. The more you do this the easier it gets. it was discussed that I might have trouble fabricating a winding stem to make it work as a wristwatch until I said "I'm gonna be half a day in a CNC shop five days a week for the next year" at which all problems are assumed solved by inspection.

That said, My Precious runs better than the piece-of-shit Troy-Bilt chipper that decided to up and die in the middle of chipping goddamn pinecones yesterday. Got spark. Runs great on ether. In consultation with certain small engine repair technicians it has been suggested that carbs don't get along with modern gasoline these days because it's dirty and full of ethanol. Okay, fine. Seven tanks. Seven tanks should not kill a fuckin' 250cc OHV briggs and stratton, except of course it should because their initials aren't "BS" by coincidence.

If your only exposure to American engineering was Briggs & Stratton you'd wonder how we won the war.

Bought a thousand dollar tent for my Porsche yesterday. Will keep it from bleaching while I'm enjoying the too-hot summer weather and earning a year's pay. I figure keeping a Porsche in a tent keeps it real. Said tent was unfortunately unavailable in RealTree. Which makes it one of the very, very few things not available in RealTree.

I've decided that "RealTree Cult" would be an awesome HickHop band name. At the moment it's a disappointing image search.

20 million views, fuckers.

Somehow got into web novels. Enjoying Release that Witch so far. Also, Altered Carbon on Netflix is compelling. Found out a couple of minors I was going to pick up along the way need to fall by the wayside in order to graduate, but it's no biggie. And off to meet a lady friend I've been seeing consistently of late.

Still chipping away at my mid-term New Years goals. Feels good.

The RPS has been doing resoundingly well in school. Only her second semester back and her grade is less than 3% shy of perfect in every class, including her honors courses in nutrition and child development, with every indication she is going to end the semester with aplomb. She likes to send screencaps of her GPA to her parents/grandparents, and we usually get a reply that is something to the tune of 'Move back home/stop living in sin and we will pay for school :))).'

So that's fun. I asked what she wanted to do to celebrate her good grades, she asked me to learn how to make cha siu bao because the frozen ones from the chinese grocery aren't quite the same as fresh. I'm watching a few videos and starting to sweat a bit. I'm a pretty competent cook but a baker I ain't. I'm gonna approach the bun-making process like Walter White as opposed to Julia Child I think. Baking requires too much precision to do otherwise.

Semi-related, I was looking over my financial stuff on Monday and evidently I owe a ton less on my student loans than I ever thought, just looking at the balances on the accounts. I'm doing some digging to make sure, but it's not a far fetched idea to say that I could be student debt free in less than a decade. Fingers crossed that this is legit and not just an accounting mistake.

We're going to spend a weekend at a lakeshore cabin with some friends to celebrate a birthday on Saturday. The plan is intoxication, Dominion and Mario Kart 8 and I'm looking forward to it a lot. I'm responsible for the omelette bar on Sunday and I'm excited to break out all the bougie fillings. Right now I'm leaning towards something like prosciutto, asparagus and caramelized onions with some kind of stinky cheese.

I found a Polish version of America. A Narrative History by Tindal and Shi in a bargain bin. So far I'm eighty pages in and continue to find myself enjoying the book. It still feels weird to admit something like that.

My underlings/students are great, but whenever they get stuck it looks like they lose all hope. It's a tad annoying to deal with. That said, I see some remarkable progress they made in the last six months.

Mornin, states.

Currently sitting in the ICE from Regensburg to Passau, writing the Berlin trip report. (It's coming, I promise!! Just a bit difficult to find time since I'm still unterwegs.) Thankfully, we booked 8 seats together and 2 separate, so I'm next to my prof enjoying a bit of a break from the others' chaos. It's been... a lot. I like most of them as individuals, but when 10 non-native German speakers spend all their waking hours together, it not only becomes annoying, but also actively harms my language skills. (We become an echo chamber of grammatical errors and broken German.) And we're on the road for almost another 3 weeks. (Anyone in Austria, Berlin, or Leipzig, shoot me a message if you wanna meet up!) So I'll be doing my best to split off from the group as much as possible :) Fortunately my prof is very understanding, so it should be better from here on.

On a larger timescale, I don't want to go back. Or, at least, if I have to go back, I want to come back to Germany after graduation. That is, however, made difficult by the fact that I'm also less and less interested in anything resembling a stable job, and definitely anything resembling sponsorship for a work visa. So we'll see where that goes.

I've started playing LISA. Really digging it so far; it is even more surreal for me as Olathe is a stone's throw away from here. Very undertale and/or earthbound feeling. I also gave Forza 7 a shot, and hated it.

Speaking of things that are a stone's throw away, turns out that the library from our defunct anarchist infoshop survives. Gonna go check it out while I'm on vacation in two weeks' time. Hopefully the weather will be nice out, didn't really go out much over the winter compared to the past. Got sick after my first freezing bike ride, and just said fuck it. I used to not give a shit about the cold, since the trailers at work were freezing anyways. But they fixed the heaters, set them to "inferno", and left them on well into the 60's.

In light of warm weather happening earlier and earlier every year, we've got a buncha tomato and thyme sprouts going. Kale is doing well in the planters, and there is a packet of borage seeds sitting on the counter that need to get going. Picked 'em up from the public library (along with the tomato and thyme seeds). Apparently bees like borage? Never really seen it before.

Battening hatches for the fourth nor'easter of the season. Made beef stew last night, and got home early to clean up the apartment for the wife. Let's hope this is the last bit of weather...otherwise Shani might lose it.

I got approved for an innovation grant on a summer project I'll be working on anyways - a good win. Even better is that I got my little sister an internship at Harvard! If there's something redeemable about living in this windswept, snow-covered desolation of a city, it's the local universities. She'll be rocking around this summer, tinkering with toys that her state school down south can't afford. For kids who grew up not even expecting to go to college, this shit ain't half bad :)

For spring break, I paused my semester-long project of not drinking alcohol. Last weekend I headed up to New York to visit friends and we went out to some bars and clubs. It was fun, but... deeply demoralizing. I didn't realize how little I missed berserk drinking and staying up all hours of the night. Not to mention spending hundreds of dollars. Back on the wagon, and couldn't be happier about it.

Riding out the snowstorm hitting the eastern seaboard in my house. I have to write a paper on a completely open-ended prompt dealing with constitutional law. The assignment is so open-ended that I can't even pick a topic, even after spending the last day and a half reading. Halp me snowy spring break gods.

finiklimt

Leaving to Berlin and eastern Europe for a month on April 9th. I'm in this wierd limbo state I hate, where i've tied up all my loose ends and unfinished projects a little too soon. And now it feels like there is no time to start anything new. But I got to push past that stupid state because I still have many week before we leave. I kind of want to shoot some Montreal stuff for my vlog but the city's looking gross as the snow is melting... I have to figure something out.

ButterflyEffect: Do you have any recommendations for 8000-10000' summits that are well tracked but not necessarily extremely busy? And non technical (scrambles are ok)? As a bonus, maybe something that would benefit from camping one or two nights?

Also, what are the good summer months for mountain hiking in the Cascades? I assume it's winter until May and spring until July?

I'm trying to sprout apple seeds. I don't really know where I'm going with that project, but once I transplant my succulent into a bigger pot, I'll have a spare small pot. Apples come with free seeds, so I'll see what happens.

This has been a week of self-discovery. I seem to be an HSP — a Highly Sensitive Person. Part of the reason I was unwilling to accept it from the beginning was the corny name. Then there's the fact that HSP sounds like ADD: that is, an umbrella diagnosis with little basis in reality for people who don't fit in with the societal order. I'm still skeptical, but what I read about it describes my experience awfully well.

Being an HSP means that I'd find it very difficult to timely process unexpected criticism. It has to do with a lot of things, but mainly — with the bluntness and the lack of nuance to certain responses I might get. Give me data ("here's what, here's why, here's how"), and we'll talk. Make it personal ("you're a dick"), and there ain't no conversation to be had — even though I try.

I thought I was just weird. Turned out, there's a reason, and that reason's existence justifies me being myself. There's a sense of liberation in finding out your condition is not unique.

There's a note on my smartphone. I wrote it after going out in the street at 2 AM, unable to sleep from being sick with cold. It's the most honest thing I've written in ages. It reads:

- I dont wanna learn languages

- I dont wanna be a teacher?

- I dont wanna tattoo

- I dont wanna stay at the uni

- I need purpose

In order:

I got it into my head that I'm interested in learning languages for some reason. Latest events prove that it isn't the case. I still find languages interesting (and I do speak English), but making it into a life goal seems unappealing. That I'm going to need to pass a foreign language exam at the end of the semester complicates matter.

This semester sees us studying Economics. The lecture is first thing in the morning on Monday, and it's an exercise in anger management every time because of the teacher. That night, I started reflecting upon my future career, and I recalled wanting to teach children more than just a foreign language. I want to tell them about the rules of engagement in an unfamiliar and harsh world that their parents are unlikely to part with. Then I looked at the Economics teacher and the way she dispenses her "wisdom" (like how men can't be trusted and, therefore, women should always be a bit bitchy, in a "can't handle at my worst, don't deserve at my best" kinda way), and the thought horrified me. I absolutely do not want to be anything like her — and if that's my destiny, then I'd rather not teach at all. Things settled a bit since then and I realized that I don't have to be like her, but the thought will stay with me for a while.

I wanted to get a tattoo on my left arm to celebrate the personal growth as well as getting out from under my parents' wing and stepping forth to become my own man. Been dreaming about the tattoo — this particular design — for maybe a year or two. Last week, after asking around and reading about, I'd set up an appointment with a respected local tattoo artist. The night before, I realized, quite vividly, that I do not want a tattoo. I like the idea, but I don't want to wear one. There's something disconcerting about committing my skin to a permanent story.

The thought of having spend any more time at the uni, doing things I don't want and performing to a certain level, earns me the blues. I feel stuck in a cubicle-esque existence, doing work that dries my soul out. It's telling that any day I decide to skip nowadays feels like a breath of fresh air that fills me with joy and desire to do good by my life. That said... I feel like I'll be better off with the diploma, because at least it will serve a formal certificate of my skillset, which would (hopefully) make it easier to find a job. I have less than a year and a half until that. I'd rather persevere than regret later.

"Purpose" might not be accurate. I need the kind of drive that makes me people do stuff they're passionate about. Right now, everything in me says "Be lazy", and I find it hard to resist most of the time nowadays. It probably has a lot to do with the uni situation, but isn't it possible to work on something good in the meantime?

Someone shared The Oatmeal's piece on creativity on Hubski recently. Whoever you are: thank you. I needed to read that.

Oh, and Rosa's not dead.