veen recommended The Body Keeps the Score to me.

It's the doll the shrink gives you and says "point to where the bad man touched you" in book form.

I'm doing it as an audiobook. I can do it about 20-30 minutes at a time before intense woolgathering hits and pretty much leaves me incapable of thinking. I've debated buying a hard copy and going through it with a highlighter to point out the stuff I relate to, then give the book to my wife. It's one thing to casually say 'my ACE score is a six' because nobody knows what that is so you can toss it out and move on and not have a conversation about it. To toss off a line about how according to the statistics I should be dead and then change the subject. It's quite another to read, over and over and over, "normal people aren't like this. Normal people don't think like this. Normal people never had to do this. Normal people don't understand this." Suddenly remembering your mother telling you that you are only allowed to refer to your parents by their first names and then two years later when your sister starts talking "mommy" and "daddy" happen and nobody says shit. Suddenly figuring out that your 2nd grade teacher sent you to the guidance counselor not because she was pissed off at you mouthing off but because she knew something was up, which is probably why your father gave you "keeping it bottled up so you don't get noticed" tips. "Whatever you do, don't get caught." "Swing first, swing hard, make them pull you off him, we'll sort it out later." "Any weapon short of a knife isn't technically a weapon."

I was talking about leprechauns with my daughter yesterday. I guess you wear green now so the leprechaun doesn't pinch you. I explained to my daughter that growing up, you wore green so no one could punch you. She thought that was barbaric. I laughed and said "well when I went to school we still got paddled by the principal." Then I had to explain paddling.

And I mean... the lunchroom aide threw Holly to the ground and sprained her elbow. So we all piled on and beat the shit out of her. Sent her to the hospital. She got fired, Holly got a sling, and nobody ever talked about it again. Nobody even got in trouble. Fifth grade. Sixth? It seems like it was the year before Travis' brother blew his brains out so fifth.

I'm coming to terms that the little anecdotes I share are the highlight reel of an objectively horrific childhood. It's rough 'cuz bad shit always happens to other people, we're always thankful for what we have. And I'm realizing I hated Running With Scissors because that dude was a pissy little bitch who lied about his rough childhood and not even the lies were that fucking rough. Fucker never stood his dad down with a machete.

The fucked up thing is the stuff that doesn't make for pithy anecodotes comes back to you when you look at it. I didn't remember my mother telling me I wasn't allowed to call her "mommy" until yesterday.

They kicked my friends out of high school to keep their SAT averages up

I didn't get the groovy job I really wanted... I think they probably gave the job to a woman. The company has a LOT of really amazing women working there already, and when faced with a generic middle-aged white guy with a broad work history and widely varied talents, or hiring a woman with specific relevant skills, I suspect they went with the woman.

And that's cool. Honestly, more power to them. Just makes me want to work there more, honestly. So tired of companies run by sad old white men... it'd be refreshing to work with people who have the actual skills to do the job, and aren't simply white men that failed their way to the top. The longer I work in corporate America, the more I realize that the men at the top are simply the survivors of attrition ... not the talented ones. The good ones leave. Old men just get promoted to the C-suite.

---

My sister is - right this moment - texting from the ER where she is with my Dad, who is experiencing severe dementia (Alzheimers with Loewy Body diagnosis), after only being diagnosed on Friday. The Alzheimers came on like a truck, and by Monday he was fully deeply into the Alzheimers journey. He's manic and hasn't slept much, and is hyper-fixated on irrational things ... the one that sticks with me is that he was insisting he needed a pair of scissors so he could cut circles out of the LED clock next to his bed ...

Meanwhile, Mom's breast cancer surgery on Thursday went well, and she is in recovery... where she can't raise her arms for the next 6-8 weeks. With Dad's mania running through the night, she's unable to sleep, but is still feeling better and healing well.

My dog and I are gonna head up to their house in a few minutes to see Dad when he gets home. Both me and the dog have the power to pull him out of wherever he is, and into the present. Hopefully we can connect with him, give him some peace for a bit.

But ... this is Alzheimers. This is the journey. He won't get better. And every day his brain will be different, will work differently, and he will be a different person. You just grab on to the seat and take the ride...

I really like my job, but I've always known, even before signing on the dotted line, that I work for shitty people. Just how shitty is coming into focus after 15 months on the job. Thinking about actively searching for something else. Actually, to be more honest, it's at a point that if I didn't have kids and a mortgage I would have resigned in protest already. My area isn't a hotbed of biotech research and development, so hoping I can find at least a part-time remote situation. I won't do anything I don't find interesting no matter what the pay and convenience, so that's always problematic for me.

This week is exhausting. Turmoil in some of the admin parts of putting on a mountaineering course, where everyone has different opinions on technical details, and people not always attending instructor review sessions, impacting the efficacy of the course we're trying to put on. Meanwhile, have a new team member at work next week which I know will take up a lot of my time, and just barreling into the spring/summer when my team is mostly out...I was thinking about, and it's so diverse for how small we are. Team will be 5 effective next week. 60% of the team has masters degrees, 60% female to male ratio, 5 languages spoken at a professional level or higher. I think that could work very well in our data and analytics space.

Running a 50k this Saturday. It's going to be wet as shit, and muddy as shit, so this should be an experience...at least there's free coffee and apple crisp at the finish line!

Most midterms almost are done, but I have one in 20 mins. It's 20 questions and we have 40 minutes then are learning the other half of class. You really hate to see it. See y'all on the other side!

Update: all done, not bad at all I think I did well. Questions much more straightforward than I thought they'd be.

We got nine new people last week as a bit of an emergency. They won't be staying for long, a couple of weeks max, and simply need a place to stay while waiting for transit to Germany. Suffices to say, things got more chaotic. Apologies, there have been problems along the way.

Many of you reached out, but consider directing your help to official channels instead of us; they have a broader, deeper reach. Below is a post I made with a compilation of charities and funds:

I'll try to keep it up to date. Consider pinning it, if you can.

Chess:

am_Unition correctly solved last week's puzzle, here is the link to his comment.

I decided to move chess into their own thing, give it a look, and feel free to suggest problems/improvements/ideas. It'd be cool to have a periodic analysis thread, and I'd hate to see anyone feeling excluded.

Other life-stuff:

IIRC, only c_hawk heard it on meetup, but one of my recent papers caused folks in peer review to contact me with a professor in England because we essentially wrote the same paper coming into it from two different areas of mathematics. It's been an extremely fruitful discussion and one of those circumstances where it isn't a stretch to say I learned more in the last couple of weeks than during the entire master's program. I'm still processing, glad to have the experience, hoping it won't stop when the paper is published. It also steels my desire to leave for studies abroad -- there is a lot for me to learn here, in Poland, but because it can no longer let me experience such a drastic change in approach or point of view, it simply won't do as much for me.

One of the options is Neapol, again. Really. Since undergrad, whenever something piqued my attention for more than a semester, that city usually ended up on a shortlist of related centers. Adsorption/interface effects in ultrafast optics? Neapol. Dark matter in non-commutative general relativity? Neapol. And now they do some impressive topological matter stuff. For what I care, they focus their efforts on physics and pizza, and that's some Platonic convergence in my book.

We finally had a game as a whole group, and it's been glorious while transitioning from scenario finish into a late-night Battlestar game. Still can't figure out how such a terminally-boring series spawned a board game that's this much fun, but miracles happen. Anyhow, in D&D, we're advancing really fast, but that's intentional. Slow enough to let beginners learn the rules, fast enough to get out of the "dies in two unfavorable rounds" hell of early levels. I'm really, really glad we don't have casters in the team.