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Posts published in “Real Life”

It’s what happens when we’re not working or playing or thinking or doing. That thing we do that doesn’t fit into all the other categories.

Sometimes we call it living.

[twenty twenty-four day seventy-seven]: i now look on my favorite food with suspicion

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Thanks, mold, for making me suspicious of every new pummelo, no matter how fresh and delicious. When I have actually gotten sick off a food, sometimes I develop a lifelong aversion to it - like chili burgers, lemon bars, and pump-flavored sodas, the three things I remember eating before my worst episode of food poisoning. However, apparently finding something rotten just as you eat it is a close second.

Sigh. Here's hoping this fades.

-the Centaur

Pictured: a tasty and delicious pummelo, but even so, I can't look at them the same. Is there an evil demon face embedded in that, thanks to pareidolia?

[twenty twenty-four day seventy-six]: i did not consent to be photographed, man

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Hey, man. Back off. I did not consent to be photographed. Geez, Louise.

As it turns out, a pair of male turkeys gobbling at each other on your front doorstep sounds a lot like two small barking dogs yapping at each other, at least when heard through the glass.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Two formerly gobbling turkeys, having noticed me trying to take a picture, hightailing it.

[twenty twenty-four day seventy-five]: i’m not your sphinx, man

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Cats supposedly have brains the size of a large walnut, and are not supposed to be intelligent according to traditional anthropofallicists. But there's something weird about how Loki remains perfectly still ... right up until the point where you want to take a picture, at which point he'll roll over. Or how he'll pester you, right until you're done with a task, but when you are done and can attend to him, he'll walk away.

Almost like there's something devious going on in that aloof,yet needy little brain, some thought process like, I want you to pay attention to me, but I don't want you to think that I need it.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Loki, who looked just like a sphinx, until I pulled out my camera and he immediately rolled over.

[twenty twenty-four day seventy-four]: damn you google spotlight

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Damn you, Google Spotlight: it's a nice-sounding feature to pop up images from the past, but there's always the chance that the person or thing you pop up will be gone, and you didn't think of that, did you?

I miss you, little guy.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Gabby. No offense to any other animal I've ever owned, but Gabby was my favorite pet.

[twenty twenty-four day seventy-two]: right there buddy

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I can't tell you how frustrating it is for Present Anthony for Past Anthony to have set up a single place where all tax forms should go during the year, except for Past Anthony to not have used that system for the one paper form that cannot be replaced by looking it up online.

I'm sure it's here somewhere.

-the Centaur

Pictured: I have been working on taxes, so please enjoy this picture of a cat.

[twenty twenty-four day sixty-nine]: dodging a bullet

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SO! I’ve spent more time than I like in hospitals with saline drips restoring my dehydrated blood after food-poisoning induced vomiting, and pretty much all of those episodes followed me thinking, “Huh, this tastes a little funny … ehhh, I guess it’s OK.”

That led me to introduce the following strict rule: if you think anything’s off about food, don’t eat it. 

Now, that seems to make sense to most people, but in reality, most people don’t practice that. In my direct experience, if the average person gets a piece of fruit or some soup or something that “tastes a little bit funny,” then, after thinking for a moment, they’ll say “ehhh, I guess it’s OK” and chow down straight on the funny-tasting food. Sometimes they even pressure me to have some, to which I say, "You eat it."

Honestly, most of the time, a funny taste turns out fine: a funny taste is just a sign that something is badly flavored or poorly spiced or too ripe or not ripe enough or just plain weird to the particular eater. And in my experience almost nobody gets sick doing that, which is why we as humans get to enjoy oysters and natto (fermented soybeans) and thousand-year eggs (clay-preserved eggs).

But, frankly speaking, that’s due to survivor bias. All the idiots (I mean, heroic gourmands) who tried nightshade mushroom and botulism-infested soup and toxic preservatives are dead now, so we cook from the books of the survivors. And I’ve learned from unexpectedly bitter-tasting experience that if I had been a heroic gourmand back in the day, I’d have a colorful pathogen named after me.

So if anything tastes or even looks funny, I don’t eat it.

Case in point! I’m alive to write this blog entry. Let me explain.

When I’m on the high end of my weight range and am trying to lose it, I tend to eat a light breakfast during the week to dial it back - usually a grapefruit and toast or half a pummelo. A pummelo is a heritage citrus that’s kind of like the grandfather of a grapefruit - pummelos and mandarins were crossed to make oranges, and crossed again to make grapefruit.

They're my favorite fruit - like a grapefruit, but sweeter, and so large that one half of a pummelo has as much meat as a whole grapefruit. I usually eat half the pummelo one day, refrigerate it in a closed container, and then eat the other half the next day or day after.

You can see this saved half at the top of the blog - it looked gorgeous and delicious. I popped into my mouth a small bit of meat that had been knocked off by an earlier cut, then picked up my knife to slice it ... when I noticed a tiny speck in the columella, the spongy stuff in the middle.

Now, as a paranoid eater, I always look on the columella with suspicion: in many pummelos, there’s so much that it looks like a white fungus growing there - but it’s always been just fruit. Figuring, “Ehh, I guess it’s OK”, I poke it with my knife before cutting the pummelo - and the black specks disappeared as two wedges of the fruit collapsed.

A chunk of this fruit had been consumed by some kind of fungus. You can kinda see the damaged wedges here in a picture I took just before cutting the fruit, and if you look closely, you can even see the fungus itself growing on the inside space. This wasn’t old fruit - I’d eaten the other half of the fruit just two days before, and it was beautiful and unmarred when I washed it. But it was still rotten on the inside, with a fungus I’ve not been able to identify online, other than it is some fungus with a fruiting body:

I spat out the tiny bit of pummelo meat I’d just put in my mouth, and tossed the fruit in the compost. But the next day, curious, I wondered if there were any signs on the other half of the fruit, and went back to find this:

Not only is the newer piece visibly moldy, its compromised pieces rapidly disintegrating, the entire older piece of fruit is now completely covered with fruiting bodies - probably spread around its surface when I cut the fruit open. From what I’ve found online, the sprouting of fruiting bodies means this pummelo had already been infested with a fungus for a week or two prior to the flowering.

So! I was lucky. Either this fungus was not toxic, or I managed to get so little of it in the first piece of fruit that I didn’t make myself sick. But it just confirms my strategy:

If it looks or tastes funny, don’t eat it.

If you don’t agree with me on a particular food, you eat it; I’m going to pass.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Um, I think I said it. Lots of pictures of bad grandpa grapefruit.

[twenty twenty-four day sixty-five]: it’s gotta get done sometime

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SO! I am still chasing down places in my life where I have been “letting things pile up” and, as a consequence, causing myself stress down the road when I have to clean it up. And I found yet another one - tied in with my drawing / blogging projects.

I have a tremendous complexity tolerance compared to some of the people I’ve worked with, to the point that I’ve been repeatedly told that I need to focus the information that I’m presenting in a way that more clearly gets to the point.

But when piled complexity passes even my tolerance level, I get EXTREMELY stressed out. I knew I got stressed from time to time, but as part of examining my behavior and mental states looking for triggers - inspired by Devon Price’s Unmasking Autism - I zeroed in on dealing with the piles as the actual problem.

Online files aren’t quite as bad - I think it is the actual physical piles that become intimidating, though I think any task too big for my brain to wrap around all the things that need to be done, like editing a novel, may cause the same problem - and so, as part of working on Drawing Every Day, I decided to clean up those files.

I already had a good system for this, broken down by day and year … which I was not using. Now, in theory, you could throw all these files into a bin and forget about it, or even delete them, but I hope to use my files for a deep learning project, so it will likely benefit me to categorize the files as I go.

But, as part of trying to “get ahead”, I’d been working fast, letting the files pile up. This, I realized, easily could turn into one of those aversive pile situations, so I dug in today and fixed it. As a result, I didn’t get to all the things I wanted to get to over lunch.

For decades I’ve had the habit eat-read-write, and my weekend lunches and brunches are a particularly precious writing / coding / thinking time for me. I gets a sad when I don’t get to fully use that time, as today where I spent time on cleanup and I have remote meetings with my friends and my small press in the afternoon.

But this work has to get done sometime, or it won’t get done. And for this project, my collected files for Drawing Every Day will become useless if they aren’t organized - not just for the hypothetical deep learning project, but also for me, in reviewing my own work purely artistically to decide where I should put my learning effort next.

For me, I’ve had to learn not to be so hard on myself. By many metrics, I get a lot done; by other metrics, I feel unproductive, disorganized, even outright lazy. But the truth is that there’s a lot of groundwork that needs to be put in to make progress. 

I’ve been trying to teach myself game development since, hell, the early 2000’s. Most of the time, other than a little side effort on interactive fiction, I didn’t make any progress at this, because it was always more important to code for work, to draw, and then, after I got my drawing laptop stolen and got a novel contract not too far apart, to write.

After I got laid off, I decided, “now’s the time! I’m going to do games!” Of course, that didn’t happen: I and my research collaborators had a major paper in flight, a workshop to plan, and I had to launch a consulting business - all while still writing. While I did read up on game development, and spent a lot of time thinking about it, no coding got done.

But most of your learning is on the plateau: you don’t appear to be making progress, but you’re building the tools you’ll need to progress when you’re ready. So all the work I’ve been doing on consulting and for the research projects is looping back around, and I’ve used what I learned to start not one but three tiny games projects.

It’s not likely that I’ll release any of these - at this point, I am just futzing around trying to teach myself - but it is striking to me how much we can accomplish if we put in continual effort over a long period of time and don’t give up.

I can’t tell you how many people over the years have told me “well, if you haven’t seen progress on something in six months, you should quit” or “if you haven’t worked on something in two years, you should get rid of it”. I mean, what? This is terrible advice.

If you want to be productive, don’t take advice from unproductive people. Productive writers and artists typically have apprenticeships lasting anywhere from a year to a decade. It can take years of work to become an overnight success.

And many of the steps leading to that success are unglamorous, tiresome, unsexy scutwork, like organizing your files so you know what you have, or reviewing them so you can decide the next learning project you need to take on to master a skill.

The work has to be done sometime. Best get on with it.

-the Centaur

Pictured: the Drawing Every Day project files, post-cleanup and organization. There’s still a bin of files that need to be filed, but they’re a very contained bin, compared to the mess there was before. Also, a picture of this essay being composed, at my precious Saturday lunch-read-and-write.

[twenty twenty-four day sixty-two]: and you really can’t tell

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Following up recent posts about things taking longer than you think.

Trying to do cleanup, laundry, and organization before starting my next task? I predicted “a few minutes”. It took a bleeding hour.

I need hours at a time to get coding done. I need focus. 

I don’t need to be interrupted by rescuing a cat from the rain! 

But you have to anyway. Argh!

Time tracking (I use Clockify), if done pretty rigorously, can really dispel some illusions about how much work we can get done in a short amount of time - and, conversely, about all we did do in that block of time that didn’t feel productive. 

Case in point: I’ve already done 6 hours of stuff today that wasn’t on my agenda for today. And all this stuff “needed” to get done - at least for a normal, human interpretation of the word “need”. 

I feel the need to qualify that as I’ve been through cognitive behavior therapy (CBT), an evidence-based approach to dealing with stress, and while it is wonderful, it does have some intellectually dishonest components, like throwing out “need” language.

I get it — there are things we think we “need” that we really don’t — but some of the therapists I worked with pushed that to an extreme that didn’t make sense. Sure, you don’t “need” to breathe, but if you don’t, you’ll pass out and/or die. 

So, yes, the stuff “needed” to get done in the normal, human sense of the word. I mean, sure, you could throw out all your clothes instead of doing laundry and order new ones online, but that would neither be efficient nor sustainable.

But more directly, some of that was organizing my files for my current active projects, some of which I did indeed need to pull up and organize in order to take the next steps on those projects. 

Funny how our busy-beaver selves sometimes try to convince ourselves that certain things don’t “need” to be done … but if we don’t do them, we won’t get anything done. 

Or the cat will have to stay in the rain.

-the Centaur

P.S. And this post took another 15-30 minutes, as I came back to it later.

Pictured: the bottom coming out. It was short, but it was a hell of a rainstorm.

[twenty twenty-four day sixty]: why i have to be hard on myself to be easy on myself

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SO! Working on The Neurodiversiverse led me to writing again, and writing those stories led me to Devon Price’s Unmasking Autism, which in turn led me to realize I have undiagnosed social anxiety disorder with autistic / ADHD / OCD tendencies.

“Unmasking” is an important process that autistic people can elect to undergo where they stop putting so much effort into conforming to neurotypical expectations - “masking” - and start building a life which is built around how their bodies and minds work.

While unmasking can be risky, with a real threat to life, limb or livelihood even for autistics who are privileged, much less people from other disadvantaged groups, it often comes with great benefits - not just to mental health, but physical well being.

But, if you know one autistic person, then you know one autistic person, and advice that helps one autistic person may not help another. So I found some of Price’s advice to be helpful - even as I had to subvert it for my own use case.

In particular, one thing many autistic people who are stressed out by trying to keep up with neurotypical expectations of cleanliness is to stop worrying so much about it. The thinking goes, if it stresses you out to put clothes in a hamper, who cares? Just change clothes in the same place and let them pile until you take them to the laundry.

But what I realized is that I was unconsciously doing this - letting mail, dishes, or laundry (cleaned or dirty) pile up until I had enough spoons to deal with it. My thinking went, if I am doing my work and keeping the lights on, who cares if the mail piles up for a few weeks? I’ll get to it when I deliver what I am responsible for.

But what I realized was, this was hurting me. The bigger the piles were, the more intimidating they became, and the more I put off dealing with them - a vicious cycle. But when I finally was forced to deal with one of the piles, I found myself infinitely MORE stressed than I was taking care of things a step at a time.

A habit I had adopted to deal with one aspect of my undiagnosed neurodivergence - a possibly autistic avoidance of organizing chores in favor of focus on work that kept the lights on - was really messing with another aspect of my mental makeup: an obsessive-compulsive need to have everything organized and in its place.

I went through this before with the library where I’m typing this; it used to be so disorganized that I didn’t want to spend time here, but once it was organized, I loved spending time here. So I am rewarded to expend this effort.

So, in an effort to go easier on myself, I have started being harder on myself about piles. Not letting them grow; dealing with them right away, before they become intimidating. The hope is, if I can keep the space around me organized, maybe the stress I feel about dealing with piles will fade away, and I can really focus on the work I want to.

Let’s see how it goes.

-the CentaurPictured: The afternoon lunch-and-read habit, featuring Unmasking Autism.

[twenty twenty-four day fifty-nine]: it’s good to take a break sometimes

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So, my “blog buffer” enabled me to spend most of Tuesday focusing on work and writing. (And even doing a little game playing in Infinite Craft.) When I crashed out, I remembered, “oh, I need to blog” … but checked my blogroll, and saw that the buffer had posted for me. So I instead got to turn in early and get some much-needed sleep.

I’m going to need to catch up today and tomorrow, of course, trying to get four posts in two days so I have time to chill out over the weekend and focus on editing the rough draft of Spectral Iron and the returning stories on The Neurodiversiverse. But it sure is easier to keep a commitment when you plan ahead to make sure you fulfill that commitment than it is to commit without thought and hope that muddling through with “hard work and discipline” will somehow manage the job that should be done by actual thinking.

-the Centaur

Pictured: breakfast at Nose Dive, one of the many places in downtown Greenville where it is impossible to eat breakfast on Sunday morning without an hour wait - unless you reserve ahead.