Had the greatest weekend in years. It was fun, but it was important for me too.

An organization working on various activism for/in Armenia invited me to a conference at Columbia University. I went alone to hear the presentations because there were some big names in Armenian academia speaking, and the person who invited me is a role model of mine. I intentionally stay unaffiliated with Armenian-American organizations because they're always politically affiliated somehow and I can't get involved in the mess of Armenian politics yet.

I opened the door to the conference, a lecture hall in the Columbia's math building, and my heart stopped when I saw 50-odd Armenian faces looking back at me. I realized that I haven't seen my people in years, apart from my mother, some family friends and my family back home on Skype. These were college-age Armenian kids, mostly grad/PhD age, all here from all over the country just to spend the day being American-Armenians in a room together. It's very difficult to describe why being a part of this conference was so significant to me, but I felt like I was in love with 50 people at once. Some of them were activists and good-thing-doers for Armenia, others were simply Armenians in America doing their thing, but they were all high-speed individuals doing big things, and it gave me hope for my people's survival and success in the future.

I went to the proceeding dinner/social event and introduced myself to everyone. A group of kids invited me back to their hotel, to "get over the politics and start this pre-game so we can fucking party." And party we did. We destroyed midtown Manhattan.

Then I met an Armenian girl who stole me out of the bar before I could even say goodbye to everyone, and took me dancing at a nightclub in Chelsea. Getting me to dance in a group is difficult enough, I was nervous about dancing with her alone, but I fucking danced yo. She took me back to her apartment near Columbia, where it turned out she was in a grad program on economic development. For the first time in months, I woke up calm and happy instead of wired and in a hurry. She said good morning in Armenian and made Armenian tea. I was in heaven. I left before breakfast to get back to school, but she told me to let her know when I was back in the city, which will be this weekend for spring break. There are two small red flags with her but it's difficult to acknowledge them in my current infatuation, I'll call them later-me problems.

Last weekend was the closest I've been to high without drugs, even better than some at that. I realized the gigantic hole in my heart for being around fellow Armenians. I got inspired by the fact that there are Armenians that are going to be leaders in their field, Armenians that will yield power for other Armenians, and that things won't be as bad as they appear back home right now. And as touchy as it is, this girl made me realize how low I was stooping with girls at my school just to get their attention, I don't respect them for their work or their general (lack of) ambition and dialogue. I'm linking up via e-mail with the kids and some of the professionals I met, and figuring out my own shit with this girl, and overall enjoying the view from cloud nine.

I'm going back to school. How you like them apples?

Because my background and goals are unique, I'm having to carefully craft a curriculum to accomplish what I need. The past week has seen four visits to three different community colleges to cobble together an oddly specific and bizarrely random assortment of education because, frankly, nobody has a program in "lifestyle brand." I had the head of one program tell me "there's maybe one week of one class that might be useful to you, the rest will be a waste of your time" and another ask me if I knew how to anodize titanium because that was something they're looking to get into. If all goes well I'll be taking "Art 111 - Drawing" and "Machining 131 - Introduction to CNC Programming" simultaneously this fall. And I'll be spreading random crap like that across the years because I've got a large Hollywood-sized hole in the middle of my year that provides my family $600-a-year health insurance so I'll be hanging onto that for dear life well past the point where it's fashionable.

The next few years will have a focus, which is something they haven't had since 2009. Well, that's not true. For the past five years or so the focus has been "build a half million dollar birth center a thousand miles away for someone else" so this is a nice change. I will be straddling two programs in order to come up with the perfect intersection of this

and this

in pursuit of selling people with too much money things they don't need.

STOKED.

Automate this, mutherfuckers.

No, seriously, automate it. Because I know how special your Royal Oak is with its hand-turned dial on a million-year-old brocading machine but I saw CNC legos the other day and if you don't think I can program a tool path to bring the price of that sucker down a decimal point you haven't seen me work. 'cuz you know what? Ain't nobody ever gonna buy a $100k watch off of my ass but I'll bet I can sell a few for $2k or so.

let's get this party started

brb gantt charting my future

Hey guys,

Been lurking most days now, but figured I'd stop in to say hello. I ended up getting a job a couple of months ago working for a market research/election research company. It's been a lot of fun so far and I'm learning a lot about both fields (even though currently I'm leg-deep in election research). Things are going well though and it feels very comforting to be employed.

The diagnosis is Keratoconus.

Incurable, degenerative eye disease that causes blurry vision. Essentially the collagen in your cornea begins to degrade and lose its strength, allowing the internal pressure in your eye to push the cornea out of shape, thereby distorting your vision.

So things in my right eye are blurry and doubled. And they aren't going to get better. (But hard contact lenses may help.)

US medicine doesn't really do Keratoconus treatment (yet), and most insurance companies see it as elective, not required.

Europe has been treating it with well-documented success in their basic medical plans for decades.

There are only about 200,000 cases a year, and fortunately one of the leading lights in this area of research and treatment is here in Seattle, and she is affiliated with my regular eye doctor. So I grabbed her next available appointment... at the end of MAY.

So right now I am going through the Seven Stages, and have arrived at Pissed Off Grumpy Motherfucker Who Loves His Job and Desperately Need His Vision To Keep Doing It, stage.

I hope to power through that stage, and get on to "dealing with it" soon... any minute now... <drums fingers on desk>...

Hola granola! No beer for me, fellas; I'm off the sauce for Lent. Though I'm going to a birthday party the weekend after next, so there's a chance my resolve will break just as I'm about to enter the home stretch. We'll see.

I woke up today feeling like my brain had been replaced with lead, because I didn't get to sleep until around five in the morning. At one-ish I started reading Brandon Sanderson's The Way of Kings, got about fifty pages in, and decided I wasn't going to finish it. Too much "Xkrymia gingerly picked up the Thunderfang, forged in the purple hills of Zemydon where the milkbeasts roam, being careful to use only his left hand, because using the right would make his soul break into twenty-nine pieces". Then I opened Forgotten Beasts of Eld and made it as far as the prologue. I tried The Three-Body Problem but couldn't swallow the physics professor's weird second-person brainspeech to his wife about Einstein. Gardens of the Moon put me off because of the author's own claims in the preface about the ambitious scope of his work, but I did proceed to the text itself and was put off by the world-building efforts (i.e. dropping lots of weird names and replacing profanities with phrases like "Kamalon's beard!"; I know it only makes sense that they wouldn't say "Jesus Christ!" when they stub a toe, but it all feels very forced).

I was trying to read a little more fantasy and sci-fi, to diversify my reading a little. Maybe they're just not for me. To think that I've recently been feeling pangs of guilt for downloading these off of libgen; now I'm glad I didn't buy them. In the past I've rarely stopped reading books; usually once I'm a few pages in, I feel that need to see it through. I've come to realise that there's a limited amount of books one can read, so you might as well make them ones you really want to; anything else is a timesink.

So I switched tack and moved onto The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins, and while it sounded fascinating, I realised after ten pages that I didn't particularly want to read another five hundred on the subject. Which led me to move on to the shorter and snappier The Soul of an Octopus, and the decision soon after that I really should try to sleep.

I was bogged down in January with a pain in my left knee; the discomfort was less annoying than the constraints it put on my physical movement. I haven't been out to climb Croagh Patrick but once since. Thankfully, a couple of weeks ago, the time - and a few funny-looking but effective stretches I found online - seemed to have cured it. Then I started doing some barefoot walks to strengthen my soles, and experimented with different walking forms - enough to give myself peroneal tendonitis. So that's great. I'm chasing pain around my body just as I'm freaking out that I only have a few months to prepare myself for this:

It took me about four days to make that in paint.net, so don't judge it too harshly. Gonna put it up on the auld Facebook page in the next few days. My main concern now (other than actually getting fit) is organising accomodation along the way. Luckily a friend of mine has agreed to do the driving. Some of you might laugh at the "mountains" (only one of them is over 1000m), but look here - in Ireland, that's what we have for mountains.

I have no other news. Oh yeah, I've been doing a little bit more writing on My Book About That Walk I Did Nearly Two Years Ago Now: God, There's A Depressing Thought and have made it as far as finishing a first draft of... chapter three.

There is no hope for me, my friends.

As of today I'm about halfway to death. But with modern medicine who knows?

I’m here at the airport at 4:45 am. I’m earlier than expected; I’ve got almost 3 hours before my flight. I’ll be flying all day to catch a funeral tomorrow. Coffee or liquor?

The other day I was going on a country drive when a turkey flew up out of a ditch and over the road, right in front of my car. I came to a stop so a second turkey could do the same and I found myself surprised. Not by the turkeys crossing the road, but I honestly forgot that turkeys knew how to fly. Though Dala claims they can’t fly, they’re just really good at jumping and flapping their wings.

The encounter made me think of a class one time when I was younger, when my teacher was telling us about his weekend turkey hunt. He was in a brush/wooded area and had been there for about an hour waiting for a turkey to come along. Every now and again, he’d use his turkey call, and get no response. Growing frustrated, he was about ready to find a new place to try again but decided to give the call one last shot. That’s when he heard a turkey behind him, probably twenty or thirty yards away. He tried to get closer, only to have the thing fly off and disappear into the bushes. Knowing it was still somewhere nearby, he’d wait a bit and use the call, only to find it in a completely different spot than where he expected it to be, once again about twenty to thirty yards away and hidden from view. He’d use the call, only to hear nothing but silence, and try to crawl closer again, only for it to fly away. Over and over he’d use the call to no answer, then he’d get an answer, always in a new, hidden, and unexpected spot. This went on for hours before the sun was starting to go down and he had to head home. He joked that he didn’t know if the turkey was the smartest, trickiest bird he ever tried to get, or if it was just so dumb that its randomly wandering around out of idiocy saved its life.

The rest of the class that day, we joked about turkeys and compared wild ones to domestic ones and how wild ones were allegedly much smarter than domesticated ones. We debated whether or not domestic turkeys really will stand in a ditch in the rain and risk drowning because they’re not smart enough to find higher ground even as the water rises around them (I think the class was evenly split). We talked about why, if turkey is so good, it’s unfair that we use their meat mostly for cold sandwiches and leave the good recipes only for thanksgiving. We learned to make turkey calls, gobbling around like a bunch of idiots, and just generally having a good time. I don’t think I learned anything in class that day, except that if you get a bunch of high schoolers gobbling their head off, teachers down the hall will come over to complain, but it doesn’t do much good when your teacher is the instigator and loving the shit out of it.

Here’s what I know about turkeys. A single, wild turkey seems to be pretty smart, doing turkey shit and enjoying life. A flock of wild turkeys though, as I’ve had the chance to see quite a few in my time, always seems to act as if their life is one big game of follow the leader where everyone is simultaneously the leader and simultaneously the follower. Everyone seems to be making decisions. No one seems to be making decisions. Somehow, the flock functions. I don’t even fucking know.

Domesticated turkeys? I’ve never encountered any to be honest with you, so I can’t actually speak to them. People who I’ve talked to though, who have one as a pet, swear they’re great. People who I’ve talked to though, who raise them in flocks for market, seem to have less of an opinion of them. On the one hand, I’m doubtful because I often don’t think we give animals enough credit, especially when we consider them a food source. On the other hand though . . .

Still in the process of moving, but I have all my stuff here now so that’s good. The move and new (flexible) job has upended so many of my daily / weekly habits that I’m reevaluating them all.

Questions like: when should I wake? (7:10 was surprisingly doable, but I don’t want to go to bed so early) How do I get meditation back into my daily routine? (It feels kinda weird meditating at work.) Where do I prefer to work? (Office has more distractions, but also free food and more social & fun.) What should I do to keep in shape? (I’m thinking of taking swimming classes. Obviously I can swim, but I live next to a community pool that offers classes for adults and it’s a great full-body exercise.) How do I commute? (I tried some longboards and tried the Boosted...I like both but I really like the latter) How often do I want to work from home, and what do I want in a home office? (Aeron chair, finally.) How do I organize email, notes and work stuff? (With a rigid file structure, Inbox Zero, and constant improvements to The System.)

As they say, change is the only constant, but I do prefer building some solid and healthy routines so I can focus on what matters.

Starting to feel weird about my job. More conflict with my Manager, more doubts about what she's actually doing, less visibility in general from our management team and then conflict between team members because of it. Or, involvement without presence from our management team, which is just as bad. The list of grievances is growing and I'm starting to care less. Frustrating when your manager says thanks to a member of another department for work they did and not thanks to you and a coworker for working on the same problem. One nice thing was getting a Holiday card from the team at our Early Production Center. 2,500 miles away. Instead of one from my own team/manager. Yikes. Wondering how long I will actually be here or want to be here if the culture keeps drifting away from the more open, communal nature it had when I started.

Climbing is fun. My shoulder hurts.

Running is fun. My ankle hurts.

Starting to work on vacation/travel plans for the year! One is already set, but hoping for a smaller trip to Red Rock Canyon and maybe Smith Rock. Most of my travel plans are related to outdoor activities at this point, but that's okay. Plenty of other relaxation options on a daily basis. Oh and I signed up for a CSA for the first time! So, so excited!!!

Finally finished with exams. Almost good to kick back for a bit. Within the past year I developed a point of tension just under one of my shoulder blades when I'm stressed. I get the feeling its causing the persistent headache and nausea from the past couple days.

Berlin is unbelievable. Expect a trip report once I have to leave, but in brief, I've explored a ton, saw two great theatre/performance art pieces at a politically-minded experimental theatre space and then got to hang out with two of the performers and their friends, saw a mediocre thriller featuring a great performance at an independent cinema in the 6th floor of a residential building, and went to the Döner place around the corner so much that the Dönermann recognized me on, like, day 3. Oh, and my first Quaker meeting!

Otherwise going pretty well. Ramped up the dosage on the antidepressants and I think it's helping. Visiting Cumol on Sunday (can't wait!). Playing with ideas for a theatre-based honors thesis and generally becoming more and more convinced that I mostly only care about the performing arts. It's good times :)

I have news. Good news, bad news. Nothing that I really want to post associated with this username. Which is a bit unfortunate that the Internet is pure shit. Refer to my last badged post for a general mood. That post stands.

In work news, next year I get to upgrade every fucking server in the business. We are almost exclusively 2008R2, which goes EOL in 2020. I've also been doing a shitton of Linux nonsense and SSL garbage.

SUNNY DAY IN THE MOUNTAINS MOTHER FUCKERS!

practice makes perfect

This month we're trying to stay under $50/week for groceries. One week down, so far so good. It's gotten me back into baking again, so that's nice.

...

The downstairs neighbor lady has been trying to kill the decorative grass planted in front of the building. She says she hates that it grows faster than the lawn, and the seeds have spread all over "her yard".

I've started guerilla fertilizing.

---

Transitioning to windows has been weird. Relearning how to do basic tasks on the CLI sucks.

The neighbour whom I asked to check the house and water the plants while I was at the hospital bailed on it. Combine it with the heat pump turning off (I showed him what to do and informed that it happens sometimes) during one of the coldest weeks we had this winter and voila: most of my indoor plants died, the ones that didn't look terrible and wilted.

This semester I'll have a lot less major-related work (five exams instead of 11+), so I rented and started reading a bunch of geology, psychology and zoology books. It's a blast.

Duranting continues. Revisiting volumes 1 to 4 and re-reading some of the more confusing bits helped me a lot. Now I'm back to vol 5: The Renaissance.

Had a talk with myself late night yesterday. Came to recognize I'm entitled. I don't appreciate the great opportunities I have or the time of my life when I'm young, capable and able to learn more easily. I live revelling in the feeling of the whole world owing me something. Time I get over myself.

Two young women in two days called me wise this week. Not sure I'm comfortable with that.

One of the young women is a free spirit wishing to see the world and do good by herself. She inspires me for the same. Knew her for a while, but we haven't spoken. I like her. She seems to be interested in me — or, at least, in what I have to say.

My sister's coming for 24 hours to celebrate the Internation Women's Day. Haven't seen her in a while and excited to see her again.

Still working on the Hubski redesign. Have a couple of innovative ideas on how to handle comment browsing and long writing.

Internship Hunt

I'm having my first interviews for my end-of-study internship tomorrow and on monday. Yaay. It starts to take form. I'm not sure I would be that excited to join either firm though, I will need to get more informations about the missions, but I will definitely take the chance to practice my interviewee skills.

Entertainment

I enjoyed "La Casa de Papel" tv series. Loved that it was in spanish. You should watch the first ep, and you will probably be hooked. It's about a fictional heist of the Royal Mint of Spain.