Aaron's Notes

I’m going to check in quickly today. It’s about 9 PM on Tuesday and I am feeling a bit pressed for time.

Okay, on health and academics, I don’t have any big news. I seem to be stable for the time being in my fitness, and frankly, that’s great. No complaints. Academically, I’ve started my final essay for my English Comp and I’m about to finish Week 7 (of 10) in my Computer Science class. I’ve put the other classes on the back burner for now, because I just want to finish something before the end of the year, and I think focusing down will help.

I’ve been texting with a woman I met on Bumble for a little over a week. I’m not sure what to make of this. More often than not, I feel like we’re on the same page. I also find myself sometimes sharing things I generally don’t with people. But I also don’t always feel like I’m acting like myself. No, that’s not true, I am sharing a real part of me, but I feel like the most common parts of me aren’t being shared. Like, I’m not letting any of my silliness through. I’m not talking her ear off about whatever book I’m reading or Star Trek episode I just watched. I’m not making off color jokes or allusions to my various cultural touchstones like I usually do.

The other thing is that we haven’t met in person, and it doesn’t seem like we will. I don’t mean to be mean, but the state of online dating right now is just terrible, so I can’t help but feel suspicious that she is actually a bot or scammer. In the past week, I’ve had at least half a dozen run ins with exactly that, one of which asked me to send her something like $200 for a snowblower. I gotta hand it to whomever that was, at least this one was creative.

I recognize that I have been pretty down on myself in this arena lately, but in person, I rarely encounter any women that actually show interest in me. I’m pretty sure this is part of why I made an ass of myself to a friend not long ago. She – the friend that I kinda know and wish I was a better friend to – has always been very kind and understanding to me, and talking with her is really great. It’s only ever bad when I make things awkward with my insecurities or my out of practice conversational skills. I’m so starved for a woman’s romantic attention that her mere hint of friendliness read to me as something more. I saw what I wanted to see, and what I saw was something that was never there. It makes me worry that my assumption of her being open to a friendship are also not true, I’m just projecting that want of mine onto her and she is responding in a way that keeps her safe. Because, as it turns out, I am somewhat scary, which is another thing I really don’t like about myself. But this little pity-party wasn’t the point of today’s exploration, so let’s get back to that.

So now this very attractive, well put-together, smart, and worldly woman is interested in me? That seems unlikely. We met online and she’s not available to meet up in person. It seems like I’m just gullible, and this is some kind of con. But what that con is, for the life of me, I can’t figure. Would you really talk for this long if it’s a con? She’d have asked me for money by now, right? But instead, she’s made it clear that she is financially stable and doesn’t need money. So is she an AI learning bot? It might explain how she’s so often on the same page as me, just reading the obvious signs of my situation and reflecting it back at me. But there have been too many signs to the contrary. What’s the angle here?

So I don’t know. I’m very skeptical, and I don’t think this is likely to work out even if she is real and who she says she is. But you know, if this is a real woman, I don’t want to be shitty to her. I’ve been plenty shitty enough in this world. I suppose I should start trying to let some more of my personality through, though there also hasn’t been a lot of opportunity for it. Every way I think about this feels some kinda bad. If she’s real, I’m not really giving her my most authentic self. But I also feel like if I do give my most authentic self, she won’t be interested. But by giving her just a portion of the real me, if she’s interested in that version of me, she’ll be extremely disappointed in the fullness of my me-ness when she meets him… me. But if I give her my real self and this turns out to be the likely scam or whatever it is… Wow, this paragraph sucks.

And how am I so bad at talking about this? God, I really don’t want to read a relationship book. But maybe I should. But which, because every one I’ve come across looks like it sucks pure shit.

I hate dating so much. I sometimes wonder if my last good relationship was actually good or if I just hate having to go through the early parts so deeply that my memory is clouded by making it through the garbage. Like, I remember it better than it actually was, simply because I got to the part that I think I’ve gotten pretty OK at. Not good, mind you, but much better than I used to be, and I’d also wager better than the population mean of men. Sorry, I’ve been reading a lot of Statistics stuff.

I mean, we did break up for a reason. And that reason was me.

Sometimes in romance I feel like I’m a petulant child. Like I’m always just expecting much more from the woman sharing the relationship with me than I’ll ever be able to return to her. How did I get so bad at just being a person?

I gotta figure out the baseline social part. I’ve been thinking about this more and more, and have been expecting I could keep putting it off for a while. I just have too many things to work on, and in trying to prioritize, I figured that this is the last thing I need. But my dawgs, I am a yearnin’, and that ain’t helping me work on my other goals at all. So maybe I need to find a few places I can hang whenever I’m feeling up for, I guess, practicing being a person. That’s not my favorite way of putting it. But I don’t drink anymore, my dining options are limited, and I’m not very into shopping. In suburban America, that’s pretty much it. I guess I need to go back to the library or start hanging out at book stores or cafes. How do you hang out at a cafe? It seems rude, and being rude is another thing I’ve already done too much of.

Alright, I have to cut myself off here or else I’ll be up all night spiraling and editing and spiraling some more. Also, I have a headache, which I think is because I’ve had too much salt in the past week. Either way, I’m sure isn’t helping my mood. Here’s to hoping I’m less of a grouch for the remainder of this season.

I got a bit caught-up in my studies the past few days, and just did not get around to checking in. But I have some stuff I do want to mention, so let’s go ahead and do that.

Okay, I am finally in the last part of Anna Karenina, and the penultimate part ended astonishingly. Not wanting to spoil anything and also not being entirely sure what just happened, I’ll skip over that. Just know, I am definitely finishing this book this year. At this point, I don’t care how it ends, it’s already been amazing. The exploration of human experience, the depth of feeling, the economy of writing, they’re all just so wonderful. I am truly blown away by the author’s understanding of people and skill in describing them. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to write like that, but I will be holding Tolstoy as an example. A dragon worthy of chasing.

So all of my writing outside of my immediate academic needs is on hold until I can clear these first few credits. After that, I think I’ll be keeping my Sci-Fi story on hold, at least to some degree, while I do some writing practice. I’ve had an idea to write a shorter story in a fantasy world, and I’m thinking maybe modern fantasy or anachronistic, like the mix-ups of eras and technologies in Final Fantasy games or steampunk. But not steampunk. I haven’t really worked out the aesthetic, but in this case, i think that might be a little less important. I don’t know, we’ll see when I actually start writing it.

That leads me to another project that I’m interested in. I have a bunch of projects that I want to do, and this has been a problem in my past. I’d have so many on the docket, and such a huge proportion of those requiring skills that I simply don’t have, that I’d end up not only unable to finish projects, often I’d end up with a bunch of projects that I’ve barely even started. I have a few projects on my bench right now, which I don’t feel so bad about. They use skills I mostly already have and just need refreshing on. They also aren’t super timely, although some of the skills that will be needed align with some of the learning I’m trying to do. I don’t need to be coy – it’s music gear stuff. I used to do some amateur instrument and gear making. To get back into the swing of that, I picked up some kits a while back. Longer back than I care to admit, to be honest, which is part of why I’m anxious to get started. But shortly after I put them on my bench, I realized that, while I’d love the distraction, I really need to stay focused for the time being. And there will be time for me to do them, even when continuing the education load, in the not too distant future. So that’s fine.

But the other projects, the ones that will take more work, more learning, and have many unknowns, those are more complicated. What I’d like to do is to line my prospective projects up in an order that logically stacks. That’s was loosely the idea with these kits, to be honest. Some will take some woodworking, some others will take some electronics work, and they all take some project management. The woodworking is, at least as of now, just a hobby, but I think I’m going to need to continue studying electronics, and I’ll definitely need to practice my soldering. Those skills, and especially the project management practice, should serve me well in both hobbies and career. Really, I’d love to pair projects up with all of my learning, if I can. The writing fits in perfectly, though I suppose that came about more organically.

So I picked up a cheapish robot car and I think a friend of mine might have talked me into trying to make a visual novel.

The robot car has been a regular recommendation from a bunch of directions. Some version of engineering is making more and more sense to me, though I do continue to fear some of the math. But I hit a rough patch in my Stats class, and I seem to have overcome it. And that’s a great boost to my moral, so maybe it’ll be alright. The robot car rolls a whole bunch of skills and disciplines together to pull it off, and I’m really excited about that. I’ll get to practice more of that soldering, which I’m way into. It will also require me to be more care with my overall wiring, my cable management. It will also give me more practice with programming, and that’s what’s up with the visual novel. I had mentioned that I want to make a game, a small one, nothing special. And my friend told me that, with the right game engine, I can basically make one with the skills that I have right now. That was exciting enough news that I almost got started that weekend. But after a little bit of thought, it seemed a little too foolish even for me.

So I think that as an end of year project, I’m going to try and get a handle on the projects that I want to do next year, and try to line some of them up in an order that would be useful.

I’m going to give an abbreviated check-in on health, fitness, and academics this week.

Fitness first – I got in a few more runs, and they’ve been pretty good. But I have become far more sensitive to cold weather in the past few years, and it has felt so fucking cold out. I’m going to need to upgrade my winter workout gear.

Health is up next – I got back blood work and ultrasound results, though it’ll be in January when I have a full follow-up. From what I understand of the results, things seem to be going well, but I should also stop holding out hope for any miraculous recovery of either my liver or heart. Not that I’m really holding out hope for either, really, but you know. It would be nice.

Finally on Academics – I turned in that third essay for my English Comp. class and got another good grade. I think it works out to a mid-A. 230-something out of 240-ish. With the perfect score on the second essay and the first essay being, as it turns out, an F, that brings my overall score up to a solid B. So I probably won’t finish this class with an overall A, but that’s fine. I wasn’t sure I could even do it, and I still haven’t. So the real focus is still to just try and finish it before the end of the year. And I haven’t picked a topic yet, so… tic-toc. I mentioned the Stats class before, and that’s going well if a little slower than I’d like. Same with the Computer Science intro, though since getting to modern languages, things have definitely become easier. Python is a real dream compared to C. You know what? Fuck C, actually. If you are still programming in C in 2025, you deserve a medal. Fuck C. Oh, and I’m on SQL now, which is gratifying. I think after this class, I’m going to line up more in depth classes for both Python and SQL, as I’m pretty sure I’ll need both in where ever my career ends up taking me.

Alright, I’ve got some reading to do, and also I need to piss. And I think I’m getting a cold, that’s not fun.

I think I promised to give an update this week on a few things that were supposed to happen last week, but I didn’t take notes and I really can’t be bothered to reread last week’s entry. But I’ll try and check-in what I can by memory.

So last weeks’ plan to get together with friends for a gaming marathon weekend didn’t happen, and I’m a little glad about it. Not that I wouldn’t have wanted to see and hang with them, that would have been great, but my schedule just kept filling up with more and more shit every day. I do plan to try and schedule a few get togethers with friends this month. We have had a regular movie night that we’ve neglected, and I want to get in at least one more. I also really want to get in a pen-and-paper RPG session, and then there’s the aforementioned gaming session, which is more video and board games. They also don’t have the exact same rosters of friends. The week was a little strange in the moment, and a little stranger now that I can reflect on it, though maybe from a different angle.

You know, a few years ago, I think I would have just not. I think I would have just come up with reasons to skip a bunch of the invites and obligations, and just stayed home where I could be away from everyone. So much of me does just want to be alone. I have felt this way for a long time, and I still feel it every day. Sometimes I can hear myself turning something down before I even consider whether it could be something I might enjoy. But I had momentum, and lately, I have been finding that momentum carries me through. And when I do go through, usually I find myself on the other side happy that I did.

I think I should have noticed that earlier in life. A lack of momentum almost prevented my high school graduation. When I was in the service, it was momentum that kept me going through some of the most desperate of challenges. In my last job, it was when I lost momentum and got bogged down in bullshit that I found it hard to be my best, and anytime I escaped the mire, it was momentum that kept me from dipping back in. And now I’m sick of writing the word “momentum”, and I suspect you are just so of reading it.

I caught a ride with my brother and his family up to see my Dad and his family up in PA for Thanksgiving. After decades of resistance, Dad finally took direction from my brother to adjust his dishes for people’s dietary needs. He wasn’t perfect, and there were still dishes that my sister-in-law couldn’t eat, although at least one of them can’t actually be made another way. I mean, it’s pecan pie. The first ingredient is sugar. Ain’t no other way to make it, far as I know. But that doesn’t mean he couldn’t make a different desert. Thing is, I can also see the other side of this. I’m going to forgo my thoughts on nostalgia today, but even from a practical aspect, it is both completely fair to expect a dish that you can eat at an event you’ve been invited to, and also completely fair of the host to not have that when they are already making so many dishes. I think this might be one of the places where people in my position need to step up and bridge the gap. If I can remember, I may send him a desert recipe that her gut may find more friendly. In fact… I just gave myself a note to look into it. Hopefully I’ll find that when I’m in the right mood for exactly that kind of project. The rest of the night was pretty good, too. I forced myself to be more active in conversation, including engaging others in their own interests.

A thing I keep noticing in people, and I’m sure I do this as well, is that they’ll just get stuck on a thing. I don’t mean how I turn every conversation into something about Star Trek, no. That’s a completely separate annoyance, and one I’m not prepared to explore today. Rather, it’s how we’ll get on a subject and even when people are agreeing with each other, they’ll have some particular point that they want to make and will keep trying to make it if they perceive that the point has been missed. I’ll also see people return to points when it was unambiguously received, even when received well, which I think is more about a feeling of confidence when filling conversational dead space with more words.

I can really relate to this instinct, but I don’t think it’s a good one. I think we come off as needlessly argumentative and maybe even a little dim when we circle this drain. There’s a trick in active conversation I think I’m coming to find, about engaging in other people interests, that I find particularly helpful here. You can really derail a runaway conversation by grabbing hold of someone’s attention with something they care about way more. I think in the wrong hands, this can be a really shitty tool of manipulation, and to be clear, I also think it is manipulative when used well. But we’re all manipulating ourselves and one another all the time anyway, perhaps we should be more aware of our actions and their results, and try to treat each other better by guiding conversations to places we know our loved ones will shine.

Or maybe that’s all a bunch of hooey, I don’t know.

The day after Thanksgiving, which is definitionally a Friday, was marked with a Friendsgiving. I think it received a few more loathsome monikers, like “Boyzgiving”, “Hugsgiving”, and my favorite “Boiz-2-Giving”. I don’t even get the joke on that one, but it does tickle my ribs. It was a great time. I got to hang with most of my closest friends, share some of my cooking, and stuff my fat face on some of theirs. I did end up making that French Onion Soup. I did not find out if the woman I wanted to impress liked it, but I did hear some good reviews from other friends.

I do think that woman is happy with our friendship, which I am grateful for. However, I did spill that I am romantically interested in her, and she was clear that the feeling is not mutual, and I feel like a real ass about that. I think I knew it was the case going in, and yet I still felt compelled to share it anyway. And now I’m worried that I’ve made her feel uncomfortable, and I’m not sure where to go with that information. If it did, then I think I should really just leave her alone. That would be a real bummer, though, because I was quite genuine in my pursuit of her friendship. Not knowing makes things difficult, because if I didn’t alienate myself from her, then this is actually great – it’s taken an unnecessary concern off of my chest, and I can just treat her like the friend she should be, like I thought I had been treating her before hearing some offhand comments (that I don’t think I was meant to hear) to the contrary. Going by previous history, I probably won’t see her again for a few months. Unless I do reach out, but if I do reach out, and it was uncomfortable for her… I am really not in the right headspace for this line of thought. I think I need to keep myself real busy for a while.

Saturday was meant to be a “free day”, but it became another family dinner. It was my brother’s team again, but instead of my Dad’s branch, it was my Mom and her husband. They decided to split dinner, so I ate for free, which was nice. My niece brought her boyfriend, conversations were mostly good, and I think I gave some solid book recommendations. Well, here’s to hoping they at least weren’t bad.

I was worried that Sunday’s band practice would be awkward, given that I made a pass at the bass player’s sister. He’d be well in rights to whip my ass, frankly, but nobody seemed bothered. I’m really hoping this whole incident can be treated as though it never happened, and I can go back to being my normal, hopelessly single, miserable self. Anyway, the practice was pretty good. Good, hearty laughs, and some strong performances. The week before, we all felt really off. But this week, I felt like we all leveled up a bit.

I have so much more to catch up on, but this has already been far too long a post. Maybe that should be my angle to try and post more – smaller posts. Well, I’m not starting that today, in fact I want to check in just a smidge more before I close out.

Academics – I finally revised that third essay enough to feel comfortable with turning it in. I kept wanting to just turn in a draft that I knew wasn’t great so I could get the actual teacher’s feedback, but something told me to that the pattern of small adjustments off of regularly updated feedback from tutors would make for a good process. I think the essay is pretty good, and I’m eager to find out if my grade agrees. As long as the grade isn’t total dogshit, I think I am going to take this as a good sign for this process. Now if I can just speed the dang thing up.

I have, however, neglected much of my other studies. So while I do want to spend time this week on any cleanup on that third essay, and/or hopefully get a strong start on the fourth and final, I really don’t want to spend the lion’s share of my time there. I need to spend time making progress on my Stats and Computer Science classes if I want any chance of finishing them this year. It’s already December! Fuck me! When did you get here?

Fitness – I got in exercise the last couple of busy and weird weeks. It was more than I expected to get, but less than I would have wanted. I forced myself to get back on it today, and I’m glad that I did. I’m gong to do a little calorie tally to make sure I’m good for the day, and if I’m where I think I am… I think I might use up some extra calories with a little treat. When I have a free afternoon, I would like to spend some time adjusting my diet, though. I am feeling more of a need to do something like gym bros do, that ol’ hitting macros thing. But I think my macros might be a little different from theirs. They’re always trying to max out their protein, and protein is a concern of mine, too. But my concerns are much more about my longevity than how jacked I can look. Not that I wouldn’t want to look jacked, in fact, I don’t mean that as a dig at the gym bros. I wold also like a six-pack. Well, with my weird body, I guess it would be more like a sevenish-pack. I don’t know, I haven’t seen my abs in a long time, and I can’t remember quite how they actually look. But the number of scars didn’t decrease, so… I think I’ve got a pretty good idea how that’s going to turn out.

Anyway, I didn’t loose significant weight, but I also didn’t gain any. So we’re gunna call that one a win. If I can make even a smidge of progress between today and Christmas, then I’ll hit my last goal of the year to get under 240. I’m not going to beat myself up if I don’t make it, but I will be so fucking jazzed if I do. So let’s try.

Trying has been the name of the game this year, and it’s mostly been working out. Well, maybe one thing to try in the future is to not be so incredibly thirsty. It’s hard not to be when you’re in the desert, but I suppose finding an oasis is another thing I should try a little harder at. This metaphor sucks, and I want to play a video game before it gets too late. And grab some of that low-cal ice cream. So that’s it for today, now kindly fuck off and have a lovely night.

The last week included moments of productivity, some catch up on reading, and setting up (but not actually starting) a few projects. Those projects are future stuff, so I’ll hold off on talking about for now. Today, let’s check a few other things in.

In the health and fitness zone, I’m still in the turn-over phase of my new routine, and I haven’t really had time to give it the full run-through. So other than being very sore, there really hasn’t been sufficient time or use to judge the change-up. Given the season, it may be a while before there is, and that’s fine. I’m still quite happy with my progress thus far. What is on my mind, though, is recovery time. I think it may be a subject of conversation this week. I mean, I know I’m older and recovery takes longer as you age, but goddamn. Is it just age, or is my recovery time taking longer because of my compounding health issues? How long is this taking my friends and otherwise contemporary’s?

Also I finally got around to fulfilling my orders for blood work and an abdominal ultrasound for my GI. The GI’s office got back to me very quickly, which was pretty dope. Everything seems good, though no miraculous liver recoveries. So boo to that, but it’s not like it was expected anyway. Unexpected, it turns out I am extremely B12 deficient. The PA who called me about the results did explain, but it’s all doctor speak, so I don’t… I’ll see about looking it up when I get a chance. Will I, though? Anytime I look up any medical issue, the results are always either it’s completely fine and I shouldn’t worry or I’m definitely going to die tomorrow. What I do remember is the PA said it wasn’t super urgent, but she did consider it a big enough problem that I should get in touch with my primary care for injections, because she thought that the normal route of supplements wouldn’t be enough. And that I should get on that soon. So… that’s not promising.

This is Thanksgiving Week. If I can find time, I’ll use it to wrap up some of those half-written posts that I’ve been sitting on. I do really want to talk about my current state of romantic feelings and pursuits, but that has turned out to be much harder for me to express than I had previously thought. Not that anything has happened, it’s more about just how lost and mired I feel, and also confused about a few interactions that I had thought were friendly and others seem to think were more. Writing that just now made something click, so maybe I’ll have an easier angle to get into it.

So far planned for this week, I have a trip up to PA with my brother and his family for Thanksgiving dinner at my Dad’s on Thursday. Shoot, that’s tomorrow, I guess I better make sure I’ve got my shit together. Friday will be Friendsgiving at Manny’s, which I am very much looking forward to. There are loose plans for the rest of the weekend to gather with a few friends and play some video games. I’m not sure that last one is going to happen, it was a very loose idea and involves friends that are alternatively chronically busy and chronically forgetful, not that I’m one to talk. But it would be quite nice if we did so.

Friendsgiving is with my closest friends. It’s always great to spend time with them, but I believe this will be the first year we’ve done this sort of thing. I’m hoping it will become a tradition, and I’m also scheming a similar summer get together. Ours isn’t the type community to have festivals or celebrate seasons, but I like the excuse to get together and overeat with my friends, so… I don’t know, I dig the idea.

Anyway, I’m hoping to see some folks I don’t see often. It’s also an event to bring a dish, which I’m usually super into, but I have a little trepidation about this time. At the behest of one of those closest of friends, an impromptu get together was formed yesterday. It was just a sort of “happy hour” type of thing, which I have shied away from in the past, even when I did drink. But I’ve come to really trust them, and true to that trust, they were helpful in keeping others from antagonizing me over my (semi) sobriety. This hang was comprised of a small subset of those expected in attendance of the Friendsgiving, and around the end of the night, or at least when I was on my way out, much hay was made in giving the event increasingly cringe-worthy names. This is a game that I very much enjoy, especially at how one half of the group love the activity and the other half of the group despises it. Well I wasn’t sure what I’d bring as a dish, thinking I might go with a standard Midwestern holiday or banquette dish, but it seems that noone is sticking to that kind of fare. Now, I love holiday foods, but life events have soured some of the experience, and I think I’d rather prefer the change up given the proximity anyway. One friend is apparently making chili, and I love chili, so I’m super fucking into that idea.

Over the past year, I have been either picking up new recipes or reworking old ones to fit my new needs, but very few of them would really work for a crowd. Hell, very few of them are more than a single serving. Well, a single Aaron-sized serving. Also, most wouldn’t travel and would be a real hassle to try and do on the spot in someone else’s kitchen, which isn’t to knock Manny’s kitchen. He has a very nice kitchen. But you know, it’s not mine. One dish I have figured out that would fit a crowd is French Onion Soup, and so I have made that. Entirely from scratch, perfectly caramelized onions, a mix of broths, herbs, settle spices and seasonings. I’ve even got some baguette croutons, which I sorta half made. I didn’t make the baguettes, I just cut and toasted ’em. So like… maybe a quarter made. Anyway, hopefully others like it. It’s been a long time since I’ve shared my cooking with anyone.

And I would like to share it with people. I’d like to get some feedback from others on whether my cooking has become bland or overdone or, I don’t know, anything. Also, cooking was one of the ways I could impress in previous romantic pursuits, and if I’ve lost that, man… I don’t have a prayer. Is that how that saying goes? Seems about right. Anyway, it’s also a risk. Not so much with my closest friends. If they don’t like it and talk shit, that’s fine. I’d expect nothing less – give me the honest feedback. Especially after years of me talking my cooking up so much? Yeah, I’d deserve it. But there will be others there that aren’t close friends, some I am hoping to become closer with, and others that I really don’t know what to think of. I do think my current state makes me better poised to handle however people take my cooking, and I suppose even if it is bad, it will still be a good topic of discussion. And there is one woman in particular that I’m hoping will be there, because I do always enjoy our discussions. I do also worry about those discussions in that I think I may be a nuisance to her, and I don’t want to be. I’d worry that my ego couldn’t take it, the knock on my cooking or the affirmation that I am a nuisance. But then, what ego is left to be bruised anyway? Oh, I gotta remember to dig up my torch. For the Gruyere.

I am approaching the final part of Anna Karenina and I’m totally losing my shit. This book is incredible. I just finished a chapter in which the titular character went round and round in her head suffering the assumed motives of her lover while trying to ignore the counter-wounds left by her husband from whom a divorce he refuses to grant, which plagues her so. She is a deeply flawed person and her situation is entirely alien to me, and yet I can’t help but to sympathize. I would give nearly anything to be able to write like this. I think this might be what my silly little sci-fi story needs, for me to take some of my actual, lived experiences and feelings, and put them on the page through and in the context of my strange, futuristic scenarios and characters. One thing is for sure, it no longer feels entirely self indulgent to have fragments of myself written into each character. So I think I will do exactly that.

Anyway, that’s enough for now. If I can remember, I’ll fill in the outcomes of any lingering questions that have found answers in the next check-in. Did I ever come up with a parting salutation for this thing?

I’m kind of glad that I’m keeping myself a little too busy to focus on what’s happening in the news right now. I mean, I’m still following it well enough, and wow, shit is nuts. Shit has been nuts since… well, always, but even grading on the curve of “modern politics”, like, is there anyone left who still thinks that this whole thing is actually working?

I don’t want to get into it tonight, but I just want to plant a thought here, what I hope will happen and what I worry will happen. I don’t have a prediction, I really can’t see where things are going. What I want to happen is for this and all the other stuff culminating in the end of another batshit era is that people finally wake up. You know, how the term “woke” was originally intended. Our collective nightmare was not our doing, but its perpetuation is. We don’t have to live this way. We don’t have to generate all of the value, toil our lives away, just to line the pockets of the rich. We don’t have to constantly feed a loop that not only makes them richer but also, even when it appears that we’ve made gains, only serves to further separate us from them, and by so doing make us truly poorer even when nominally or even relatively better off. Enough of us could finally see that we’ve been fed a steady diet of lies that just served to create a new aristocracy, that party lines don’t really matter, and even the most hot button issues, though they do absolutely matter, aren’t the real issues. We’ll wrangle in the rich and powerful, shut down the system that allows the evil to become so powerful, and finally start living for ourselves and each other in our best, most nurturing ways. We can do this, we already have all of the building blocks and are more than capable of providing all of the necessary resources. We just need the will.

But I worry that is not what is going to happen. I worry that things are just going to get worse. We may have a brief reprieve, though I doubt it, where an FDR type leader will recognize the pressure is too high and instead of having the courage to usher in a new era of equity, prosperity, and kindness, they open the valve just enough to quiet the majority back down. We won’t have a golden age, but it could be covered in gold leaf. Or, like so many tacky decorations new to the White House, gold spray paint. We need this change, even if things weren’t so crazy right now. The crazy is just the piss icing on the shit cake that has always been, and the only way that we can move forward without eating shit is to make a new cake. If that seems extreme, perhaps it is, but many, including reliable experts, believe that even throwing out the cake isn’t enough. Maybe I’m just too naive, but I don’t think we need to throw out the plate. I think the plate needs to be cleaned, but we can use it again. I’m hoping the water in the sink is potable, but this metaphor is well past its expiration, so I’ll dispense with it for now.

My real worry is that it will be much worse. The people too riled up, especially on the Right, are just too hopped up on that malice, and they might not be able to come down. I refuse to equivocate about the Left like so many others do – one side wants literally everyone but themselves imprisoned or dead, and this simply is not true of the other. I’m pretty lefty myself, and I can tell you that the majority of those that are, including (especially, really) people further to the left from me believe very strongly in the power of Restorative Justice, which isn’t interested in capital punishment or the over-packed carceral system. But that’s not the side that will come about, because the Centerist is always waiting for the next fear to be just enough to convert them into the Fascist who’s been living in their hearts all along. But I’ve already gotten way more into things than I wanted, so let’s leave things here for today.

Let’s check in where I’m at, which is what this was meant to be. Okay, I didn’t get in as much exercise or studying as I wanted to last week. I did get in enough of each to maintain momentum, so it’s all good. Between the gas leak, the cold, getting busy with chores and tasks, and just not entirely being able to concentrate, I was really in danger of getting behind. So I’m taking it as a win that I didn’t. I spent some of that time that I couldn’t concentrate on what I wanted to on other productive things, including working out a more concrete plan and schedule. I need to do something similar this week in regards to health insurance enrollment and school plans. In fact, I need to start dedicating a portion of every week to school plans until I’ve got that all worked out and nailed down. I should get something down on paper so I can get an idea of what needs doing, now that I’m thinking about it.

The gas is back on, which means I once again have heat, a working stove, and hot water. In case you missed it, check out last Monday’s post.

I worried about my neighbors, some of which had kids and had nowhere else to go while the gas was out. I’ve had it in the back of my head what I might be able to do for them in the future, but outside of spending money that I don’t have, I can’t think of much. The power was still on, so most of us that stayed in the building just got a space heater or two and used our alternate cooking methods – microwave, slow cooker, air fryer, that sort of stuff. I didn’t ask anyone how they were handling showers, but I was bathing in the sink. I hadn’t done that since my mid-twenties, and let me tell ya’, it sucked just as much now as it did back then. I’m a single weirdo veteran, so all of this was, you know, fine. But pretty shit for everyone else, and that really doesn’t sit right with me.

Anyway, before that gets me all up in my treehugging feelings, let’s get back to my check-in of my me. When the hot water was back to full capacity, I indulged in a truly glorious shower. With the stove working again, I also celebrated with a nice steak. Ribeye, just an 8 ouncer, but a very nice and well marbled cut. I carefully rationed out my days’ salt to be able to season it pretty well (relatively speaking), along with sauteed lacinato kale, roasted green beans, and even a massive potato. Oh, what’s that, did someone also make a wonderful mushroom pan sauce from the fond and drippings? How about a delightful horseradish cream sauce? You bet your sweet ass I did. And I somehow managed to keep momentum on my weight loss. How rad is that?

We are coming upon the holidays, and while I’m not planning to pig out, I’m also not planning to hold myself back too much during them. I’ve had some wins this year, which has been nice, but I could also use a couple rewards and breaks as well. At this point, I’ll be happy if I finish the year still around my current weight, but I think there is a very strong chance that I’ll hit my goal of getting below 240 lbs, and I’d like that very much. I feel like I met my initial running goal well enough for now, so we’re going to count it. I can’t believe just how much I’m feeling the cold on my walks these days, so I think the expectations of my running progress need to go on hold until things warm up again. Fitness goals aside, the rest of the year is focused on finished those early credits, spending time with friends and family, and wrapping up any outstanding items lingering on my “TODO” list.

End note: the “Bubba” thing can’t be real, right? Yeah, but we can dream. You can’t stop us from dreamin’.

My mouth still hurts and now my ass does, too.

Not terribly, I’m  fine, really. The mouth has healed a lot from the dental visit that turned out to be minor oral surgery. The dentist gave me a warning about this along with potential concerns to look out for, which I really should have written down. Given that I have a bad tendency to ignore pain, it may not have mattered anyway. Well, he said he’d check in with me in a few weeks, so I guess I’ll keep an ear out for that call and ask about it then. As for the ass, I switched up my exercise routine. That included leg day, and that is why my rump is wrecked.

I had been doing squats in the previous routine, and quite a few of them. The old routine was a modified version of Germany Volume Training, but not for gaining muscle volume, rather for using the volume of sets x reps to accelerate progress. It was a 10 x 10 routine, which I thought was pretty brutal, and it gave me the apparently false sense of having bulletproofed my legs. The new routine has about the same volume of squats, but where the previous program was all just standard squats, the new one uses a combo of three types: Goblets, Cassocks, and split squats. That combo absolutely beats the tires off of me. Glutes, quads, hammies, whatever that part in the inner thigh that I didn’t realize was a muscle until it started hurting is, all that stuff. It’s all on fire and also completely stiff. I’m taking this as all good news. For one, I don’t think I could have done a Cassock Squat a few months ago, as I did try to do split squats and failed. For another, I think the soreness is indicative of some gaps my original routine had towards my goals, and while I can’t be sure this has filled them all, I am at least confident that I’ve at least filled some important ones. I’d really like to keep walking around without help as I age.

It’s a 4-Day plan, and I’ve not really had a chance to give it a full test. Hopefully I will in the next few weeks, as I think the power of this is in the full and short cycle. We’ll see how things go.

Also happening right now, the gas is out in my building, which is super fun. My heating is gas, my stove is gas, and my water heater also runs on gas. The condos I’m in have some extremely janky pre-1980s-assed plumbing and electrical systems, so when another unit in my building developed a gas problem, the nature of which I’m unsure of, it meant the gas for the entire building needed to be shut off. Oh, actually, two entire buildings, because the jank means that any one unit’s gas, water, or electrical problems are actually the problems of two entire buildings that share a system, containing at least 24 units. But the lights are still on, the water still runs, and it’s not yet freezing outside, so I’m fine. Though if it doesn’t get fixed soon, I will have to figure out another solution. 

It’s mid-November, so the temperature is about to take a dive. It already took one as of today, dropping to the 50s-60s during the day. It’s not quite to freezing at night, but easily could be. With the day time temps as chilly but moderate, that can be solved with a space heater, which I should get if this is expected to last a few more nights. But it prompts my thoughts because as is, freezing showers are a complete no go for me. In my younger days, I was in the military, and cold showers were just a thing you’d sometimes have to do. I’ve also been varying levels of poor which can also come with that price tag. Fast forward to now, if I absolutely need to hop into a cold shower, I’ll do it. But I’m older and more accustomed to a life of comfort, and I have so many other options, it’s neither preferred nor necessary.

For the time being, I have plenty of warm clothes and blankets, many cooking options, and my electric kettle makes bathing in the sink viable for a few days It’s far from my favorite, but works just fine for the weekend+ that I’m hoping this won’t extend past. The timing kind of works out, too, because I needed a little fitness break from apparently overdoing the workout routine turnover. Less sweaty means less shower concern, but if this outage persists into the week, I’ll have to relocate for a while. Honestly, it’s nice to know that I have the options, and maybe a little hotel stay could be fun. 

But the thought prompt mentioned earlier stems from the stuff I’ve been thinking and writing about lately. This situation has me thinking what I would do if I were in a relationship. The last time that I was in one, it wasn’t a long or serious enough relationship that we were living together. It did last long enough for both of us to encounter similar needs, easily solved at the time by just staying at the other person’s place for a few nights. So I guess it was fairly serious, now that I look back on it. I personally wouldn’t even consider the option of staying with a romantic interest for more than a night if the relationship wasn’t already fairly far along. It baffles me that I’ve known folks letting new partners stay for longer than one night.

So you’re basically letting a stranger stay for over a week, including when you leave for work, in the place you sleep, shower, and keep your favorite toys? That’s fuckin’ crazy. Have you even known them long enough to figure out if that weird thing about them is actually endearing and not just an obvious red flag? You’ve known this dude for a month and they have family in town and they still needed to move in with you, and that doesn’t seem sus? Just how good is that dick? I guess it must be pretty amazing. Sorry, I’m just remembering two different friends/acquaintances that did exactly this. Both women, both had literally every friend (sex/gender agnostic) in their circles telling them not to do this, and both had the situations end badly. I could never.

If I were in a relationship where we already lived together, I don’t think there would be a question – we’d stay somewhere else. Unless she, like me, is always down to tough it out in favor of some other convenience, I wouldn’t want to even suggest that being cold and smelly is a viable option. Though I guess there would still be a question of where. We’d have to consider money, location, and any other needs. I know plenty of folks that I can ask to stay with and many would be cool with it, though it always makes me feel a little weird. If it weren’t financially or otherwise burdensome, I’d lobby (ha!) for the hotel option 10 out of 10 times. But I’d also be pretty open to her preferred option, because I just can’t see this being a hill I care to die on.

So that’s what’s going on with me this week. Other than that, I want to try to make a strong academic push with what remains of the year. I want to make sure that I finish my current set of classes, and preferably more if I can. I think the English Comp. class should be an easy win, now that I’m starting to get a rhythm for it. If I can, I’ll move right into English Comp. 2 and try to nail that this year as well. I feel the same, individually, about my Stats and Computer Science classes, but the three together reminds me of my time management gaps. I was also hoping to get into Calc I this year, but I think I need to reset my expectations on that. I think it’s possible that I’ll get started on Precalc, but probably won’t finish that before 2026. That’s fine, I want to make sure I give myself time to actually study and understand the material, but I need to keep an eye on the speed of my progress so I can better plan for the future. You know, enrollment, tuition, grants and financial aid, all that stuff. I want to finish quicker than four years, and there are definitely ways to do that, but I’m still skeptical that I have the capacity to do so.

I did finally make it to Week 6 in CS50x, which I’m told is the start of the down hill. I can say this much so far, Python is definitely easier to work with than C. The amount of stuff that I don’t have to worry about in Python is already quite the boon. Hopefully it will continue to feel that way, because I could use some momentum behind this push.

I mentioned on Monday that I’ve got something cooking about romance and hinted that I’d throw that up sometime this week. That’s not what this is, that idea is still cooking. I’m trying to work out how to be honest without being too presumptuous, too specific, or too vague. It’s possible, but needs editing. But I’ve had a lot on my mind, and those conflicting wants to both write more but also be cautious with my time. I’m half-watching a long lecture and stewing on some things, so I’m gunna split focus and slap some keys.

I’ve recently had a few incredibly unsettling experiences from data apps. A quick note, this isn’t an academic paper and I’m likely to get some facts wrong, also I’m not going to be a stickler on language. Off the break, I’m going to use the term “app” for all internet dating options, many of which somehow don’t have actual apps in 2025. There are reasons for them lacking apps, but that’s not the point of this. I’m also using “dating” pretty liberally. Some of these apps are meant for what I’ll distinguish as traditional dating, with room for anything from somewhat casual to the most serious. But we all know that some apps aren’t meant for a shred of romance, just the hookup, and many apps that are advertised for classical dating don’t get used that way.

For my part, I keep coming to the same thought that the apps aren’t what they used to be, that what they used to be may not have been good to begin with, and it’s probably not what I’m looking for now even if it was. I need to just quit them, but I don’t. Most of the last year or so not deleting them has been more about laziness and convenience. I would not go on them most of the time and then pop in when bored, not really having expectations and just having an alternative to doom scrolling. But I’m not much of a doom-scroller otherwise, and I have plenty of idling alternatives. So it’s really just a part of me that holds out hope there are real people still on these app and that one of them might just be interested in me. It is, frankly, not a sound theory.

It stems from an era that I think has long since past. At the risk of making it sound like this is all the apps were ever used for or blowing up someone’s spot, there was a time when you would just get on one and you’d have a “date”. That “date” was usually just a pretense to a hookup, and sometimes you wouldn’t even bother with the pretense. You’d just hook up. Actual dating did exist, and I have met a surprising number of couples that started from online dating. Go ahead and add that to my growing list of regrets, because I don’t think I used it for that even once during that era, and now I wish I had. I worry that might have been my best chance at something real, but we’ve gotten off track.

Then or now, there is a sort of dance, somewhat a simulacrum of the real world version of an opening. There are many versions, one goes a bit like as follows. You match in the middle of the work day and spend the next few hours excitedly pinging each other with questions you hope will help you learn more about each other and get you closer to finding out if you like them. If you do, you start working on closing that deal. But while the questions seem good and useful, they don’t really help, and sometimes get you to resent the other person for some small thing that, if you really knew them, you probably wouldn’t care about. With every message, you risk either side of the dance, endearing yourself to or alienating yourself from them. You need to make a move to get out of that app quickly or the momentum you had at the beginning starts to accumulate drag. As the days drag on and the rapid back and forth draws down to a trickle, if something hasn’t happened, one of you just stops contacting the other, and you both stay in each other’s match list forever as ghosts of what never was. But you do that dance because if you make a move too early or improperly, you risk ending the entire interaction without satisfaction.

This is not true for everyone, but since everyone has their own pace and their personal set of dating rules, often specific to just that app, it can be hard to intuit just when it’s appropriate to ask for more, and what that more should be. For a while there, I would throw out an option to meet at a local bar within the first few messages. I don’t drink anymore, so that option doesn’t really work for me, but similar options exist like cafes, movies, or other tried and true dating staples. But people are very cautious these days, and rightfully so. As frustrating as that dance could be, these days you’re lucky if you even get to it. Sometimes people will make their decision based on your very first message, and while it’s not uncommon to see the phrase, “‘Hi’ gets blocked” in a profile, it’s even more common for people to have this attitude without the warning. Fair enough, we can all do better, but the alternatives that this attitude generates can often be far worse. With the shift in attitude in genuine daters, it means that most friendly interactions on these apps are now suspect, and you should also be cautious. The new game is also to get off of the apps, but that has become an incredibly dangerous gamble, whether you’re being asked to move to another app or meet in person.

Crucially, it’s not to meet in person. It’s never to meet in person, which makes some real world sense, given the various dangers. There is a whole set of meeting etiquette that I’ve yet to decipher and seem to be getting worse at, because the game of jumping from app to app is both tiresome and worrying. Moving from a dating app to a chatting app always strikes me as a little crazy. I know there are dating apps that made staying on them difficult. The business models often mean that users need to pay for a subscription to be able to have conversations and some require it to contact anyone at all, which like, how exactly is this thing supposed to work at all? So it makes sense that people got used to the idea that they might be able to spit out a few short messages to get to a free chatting app, but most of the dating apps today don’t have that model. So ignoring how unnecessary this jump is, it still happens almost always.

Some chatting apps are probably safer than the dating apps, but that bar is extremely low. More often, most chatting apps aren’t really safer, they just give the impression of being safe. Some should be obviously unsafe, as they tie directly to your cell phone, so moving to that app means you just gave a stranger your actual real phone number. Sometimes your matches will just bypass the safety theater entirely and just ask for your phone number. In an earlier era, this would be great – it meant you were about to meet up very soon. But over the past decade or so, the technological bad actors have become incredibly sophisticated and giving them any bit of personal information, no matter how disconnected you think it is from your important stuff, can give them a foothold on scamming you, especially your phone number. I need to recount some of this, but I can already see this post being far too long, so let me borrow some lessons from that English Comp. class and try to tighten up. I’m going to tell you about three levels of current, unexpected dating app problems.

Sex workers

This is the first level, and while I do find it disappointing, I’m not terribly bothered. 

A week or so ago, I got into a fun conversation with a woman on one of the apps. It was playful, a little sexy, and it seemed like we were both interested and having fun. She even took my many faux pas as charming, which is nice. Then I did an image search on her profile picture, and it turns out that she’s an Instagram model. That’s not immediately damning, but it usually means one of two things. For the first, if she isn’t using the same name or a similar handle, that isn’t the same person. It’s someone who stole her pictures and is using them to scam you, more on that in the next section. The second version used to be less likely, but seems very much on the rise, and it’s exactly what my experience was – this was advertising. She is a real woman and that real woman is the one with that Insta account, but she is never going to date me. She was trying to get me interested so I would follow her to an Onlyfans account, and become a subscriber.

My view on sex work is that it is extremely common, perfectly normal, and frankly and good service that should exist. What bothers me about this, I think, only exists because many forms of sex work aren’t legal, and those that are legal are also heavily stigmatized. As such, the market that undeniably exists for people to pay for sex, companionship, or sexually related materials as was this case gets pushed into hidden, creepy, and dangerous corners. Since there aren’t legal and fair places for providers to advertise and manage their work, they are naturally going to make space for themselves in the closest versions of existing infrastructure. Sex workers are selling sex, dating app customers are often looking for sex. So they are, of course, going to join dating apps to look for patrons. Many legal versions of sex work suffer from the same stigmas and can’t really practice their profession anywhere but places already considered porn. Yes, you can have an Onlyfans account, but you can’t advertise it on Facebook. Because of the legal and social mess, sex workers can’t even be fully honest on the dating apps and find themselves having to pose as potential love interests, later springing the sex transactions on their confused and likely upset matches. That has the potential to ruin the matches’ day, and the impression I get from sex workers is that they don’t much like it either. While it’s fair to be upset for being tricked, when that’s how you put food on the table, I frankly can’t blame the sex worker, either.

From what I can gather, sex workers would much rather have things as I described earlier and there is a ton of evidence from places with legalized sex work that it benefits basically everyone. Perhaps surprisingly, that everyone includes people who don’t want anything to do with sex work, and even those that actively dislike it, as it gives the activities places to go that aren’t the back alleys of literally everywhere else.

Classic scammers and bots

If you’ve not been on a dating app before or in some years, count yourself lucky, because the scam game is out of fucking control. The story I related above is not uncommon, and frankly the best version of what could happen. I had a pleasant conversation and declined to become a patron, not a big deal. Most of the time, when you get a match on almost any dating site these days, that is not someone there to date. That is someone, or some thing, there to take your money. Not a provider looking to exchange materials or services for money, but rather someone looking to get a hold of your personal information so they can hack, social engineer, or otherwise scam their way into your bank account.

I don’t have a story for this one, instead I have what feels like a million instances where I’d have a somewhat off but otherwise OK seeming conversation that always ends up with them trying to get increasingly private and unnecessary information out of me. Phone numbers, email address, locations, names, all the stuff that you should not be sharing with strangers. It’s kind of amazing how many of these scams are going, and how few apps seem to even try to stop them. They certainly take no responsibility for them.

The new AI scammers

The scammers and bots have been a problem for a good while now, and usually, it’s not very hard to catch them. There will be something obviously wrong with their account, or a picture that’s way too professional or clearly something from the late-90s or early-2000s that the scammer scraped off of a different app, facebook, or a porn site. But sex always finds its way around every new technology and social movement, and with the improvements to AI chatbots, it was just a matter of time. And it seems like the time for dating app AI scams is now.

I was on another dating app, I don’t recall which. I was in good spirits and feeling charming, so when I was contacted by an account with the pictures of a very good looking woman, I was suspicious, but completely game to give it a go. We shot a few messages back and forth, and before long, she wanted me to go to a different app. She didn’t opt for the normal shady apps already known to be scammer friendly and she didn’t ask for my phone number. She suggested going to google chat, which is both practical and, as I don’t have any important information attached to my account, safe enough for my estimates. But things did seem off, and this extremely good looking woman was a little too into my extremely not good looking self. I can be quite charming, it’s true, and every woman I’ve ever dated has been entirely out of my league, but this woman has never met me in real life and she’s acting like I’m the most attractive and most interesting person to ever live. She sent me some pictures, tasteful and not nude, and asked me to share one as well. In retrospect, I perhaps should have been more cautious, but I agreed. And then I was absolutely sure she was not a real person.

In the background of my picture were posters from a podcast that I listen to. Now, I love this podcast, and it’s probably my favorite, but it’s not well known. When my match casually mentioned how I’m interested in “some good old tabletop games”, it became obvious that my Spidy-senses were right from the beginning. Below is a screenshot of that conversation, if we can call it that. I’d normally redact the name, but being that this isn’t a real person and googling it only produces various celebrities that look nothing like the person in the photos, I don’t think there’s anything to worry about. Though I won’t share the photos, because I have a strong feeling that they are of a real person, probably not going by this name, and they don’t deserve to get their spot blown up because some shithead scraped their pictures to support their weird scam. Or maybe the pictures are also AI. They didn’t include hands or spaghetti, so it’s hard to say.

This response is off the charts unsettling. People do not talk like this. What the fuck are we even doing, some pretty lady with the boots with the fur isn’t going to casually be all “that’s a great TTRPG podcast.” and then recite almost verbatim the ways the podcast is often referred to on streaming and review sites. 

I almost gave up the game too early, though, asking if she’s an AI chatbot. Rookie move on my part, really, but I was caught off guard and I didn’t know how to proceed. But her claiming to not understand what I meant and trying to pass it off as her being super fluent (whatever that means) gave me room of my own to pass off my comment, claiming that I was just being silly. So I asked if she listened to any other podcasts, and she gave me a pretty strange response. If you read through it quickly, it seems passable, but pay attention even a little and it’s pretty obviously the results of LLM processing. Can you imagine a person writing like this into a google chat? I figured that I’d string her along with some simple questions and eventually trap the AI, but I accidentally stumbled into confirming my suspicions immediately. I asked her for recommendations, and boy did she ever deliver.

Four popular and acclaimed podcasts in a perfectly formatted, numbered list with standardized blurbs that must have come right out of an AI generated slop article, complete with technically correct but socially weird punctuation like semicolons and, as always, the em-dashes. Absolute madness. I’ve been too disturbed to look into it, but I am quite curious just what the point of this is.

I’m going to now speculate wildly, please don’t take any of this as confirmation of anything, I’m just guessing and trying to make some sense of things. The time between responses was very long, which suggests that there was a person in there somewhere. Perhaps someone at a desk in a scam farm hilariously copy/pasting between the chat window and an AI chatbot window. But is this just an improved version of the existing scams, or is this a (slightly) more sophisticated operation? Could this be part of the legit AI companies trying to gather more data to make more natural sounding bots? Make no mistake, the existing AI companies are extremely unethical, so I don’t think any of them would have qualms trying to train up a “digital real girl” by seeding feelers into existing dating apps. Given that both the dating apps and the AI chatbots are rapidly approaching an oncoming bubble burst, I could see them doing this as part of an agreement to try and find the money from each other’s products. I should really look into this, but I don’t want to, and I’m hoping someone who knows what they’re doing like some Jamie Loftus or Ed Zitron sort could take this on. Because this is absolutely bananas.

The Takeaway?

I don’t know what to take away from this. I’m going to open up the comments on this post, at least for a little while. I don’t think I’m getting any traffic, but on the off chance that someone drops by and has something to add on the subject, I’m extremely interested.

Honestly, I can’t see a way forward for the apps. That’s not true, in fact, I can see many ways forward, but few that actually make any of them sustainable and useful. It’s entirely possible that the current owners of these apps might make them financially sustainable, albeit on a foundation of stacked bubbles. They could convert their business model to advertising and fill their slop app with slop ads being viewed by endless slop AI bots. The advertisers won’t be advertising to any real people, but whatever, a significant portion of the advertising game is bullshit anyway. It’s just rich pricks passing the same bullshit money back and forth between each other, so who cares? But the apps are already a mess, and this sort of thing isn’t going to make them any more useful. No, I think for the actual humans, the dating app world may very well be dead. I guess we’re all going to just have to learn actual interpersonal skills, and man, that’s a real drag.

That’s it for now and probably until Monday. Have a good weekend and watch out for overly friendly matches.

Another pretty good week, let’s check it in.

I’ve been thinking a lot more seriously about my plans in academia and beyond. When asked, “What are you majoring in”, I’ve either been saying Computer Science or the more honest answer of, “Oh, I don’t know yet.” I think I’m going to drop the first answer, because I’m increasingly of the opinion that Computer Science isn’t quite what I want to do. This doesn’t really have much to do with the whole AI bullshit of it all, actually, that makes me want to study it more. You couldn’t possibly ask for a more exciting time to be studying a subject than when it is in total upheaval, at least as far as I’m concerned. However, I’m getting both a different idea of what CS as a college major is all about and also a better idea of what I want to do with the education I’m hoping to get. I am also feeling the pressure of not having a concrete plan as the end of the year rapidly approaches.

Given what I do want to do with my education, I think I need to be taking a more serious look at the various schools of Engineering. Since we’re being honest here, I’m also a little intimidated by the idea of Engineering. I still feel pretty behind on my math, and the fields that interest me most are all very math heavy. Add to that the breadth of subjects I want to be ready to take on, it means strictly limiting my electives to make sure I can cover as much ground across fields as possible, which is great, but also means fewer classes outside of the Engineering realm. Like, can I really afford taking a creative writing class if I need to make sure I’ve got three Calcs and every science Intro class?

I should probably figure that out soon.

Also a thing that I should probably figure out, just what the hell am I up to in the world of romance? I’ve been alluding to this for a while, and I think I’m still not completely ready to talk about it, but we’re gunna wade in pretty deep today. A big part of that is just that I don’t know, and what I do know I don’t really have my thoughts together on. I had, at least for a while, thought that I should just put that all aside for the time being. I need to focus on me for a while, right? Health, fitness, school, fixing my various social problems, that’s quite a lot already. I figure those are all things that get easier with momentum, so I’d think more about romance when I got the rest of it all in motion. But it’s starting to feel like it’s coming up due.

I’ve got an additional piece on this subject that I’m mulling over adding later this week, unsure if I should. It’s very personal, but I guess that is the point of this. I haven’t told many that I’ve started blogging again, and I don’t think I’ve told anyone where they can find it. I haven’t checked my site traffic in a good while, but the last time I did, it was exclusively comment bots, so I do feel a bit of security in anonymity. Either way, this will just be an opening on the subject. I want to start by saying, this is like, some journal thoughts, right? So it’s going to come off as a little “woe-is-me”, but I’m fine, just let me cook for a minute here while I explore some thoughts and feelings.

I can’t shake the feeling that I might just not be a person for whom romance is possible. And now you can see why the preamble – we’re in the Sad Aaron Zone again! Look, I’ve had romance before. I’ve been in love and at least one woman that I’ve been in a romance with seems to have genuinely loved me back. Saucy times aren’t really the problem, though having my libido come roaring back over the past few months has not been my favorite. It’s hard to concentrate when you’re pent up, you know? I got a haircut the other day and it took all I had in me to just act like a normal person that wasn’t totally horned up for his stylist. To be fair, she was quite good looking, and while I might have tried some game on her in a different context, I think not having an appointment may have been rude and started us on the wrong foot. I also think it’s just rude, in general, to throw game at someone while they are on the clock. Frankly, it’s a dick move to force someone to deal with your personal-time flirtations while they must adhere to business-time rules. It’s a trap, and a person’s place of work isn’t fair hunting grounds.

It may be that I need to get back into therapy sooner than I had been planning, because I do think I need to work through what it is that I’m thinking and feeling here. I have definitely got to find a safe and healthy outlet for the urges, because the solo method just ain’t cuttin’ it, ya dig? But I don’t really want to cat around like I did in my younger days. Not that I really know how to go about doing that anymore. When I was the age to do so, the romantic landscape was perfectly poised for me to just find someone online, send a few flirty chats over a few sweaty days, and when the weekend came, I’d have company. The online dating scene has really changed, which does make things more difficult, but not impossible. I’ve chatted women up in person, I’ve closed such deals before. But while I do desperately need to smash, that need just isn’t connecting with my otherwise desires the way it used to. Something is missing, and I’m well aware of what that something is. But that takes me right back to it, I just don’t think that I can.

And I’m not sure how to even begin exploring what I mean by that. For starters, I might just not be ready, which is fucking nuts, because I haven’t been in a serious relationship for so long, I can’t even picture cohabitation anymore. None of this is new to me, so there really shouldn’t be a reason to feel anxious about it. But I am anxious about it. It’s been a long time, you know? Even just the sex part, I’m fairly certain that I will be terrible. It’ll be a good bad couple of seconds, and then I guess I’ll awkwardly fish around the sheets for my undies and try to slink out before she says anything.

I wish that were more of a joke than it is, but in truth, that part will work itself out. The anxiety I have for that is mostly surface level. I know what I got goin’ on, and while it may take me a few tries to get back up to speed, I’m sure I can get there. It’s really my relationship track record, though. Sure, I’ve dated a few not great woman, but for the most part, the woman I’ve dated have been pretty amazing. No, it’s me, it’s definitely me. I’ve been a shitty boyfriend, more than once. Nothing abusive, or at least I hope nothing abusive. I certainly don’t remember being so, but I did spend a lot of years being a lot of drunk.

The drunk part itself is pretty shitty, so there’s that, but that was just one part. I was often selfish, distant, unwilling to address my PTSD, and you know, the standard crummy boyfriend stuff. The last girlfriend I had, I never introduced her to family. I don’t think she ever met my friends, unless by accident. I tried to keep her separate from the rest of my life, and I had reasons that, at the time, seemed reasonable. My relationships before here were almost all too clingy, on both our parts, and that made for both bad relationships and awful breakups. In the last one, my being distant and forcing things to stay more casual than she wanted made that breakup quiet. But in retrospect, I think it may have been the worst of them. She was trying so hard and in my malaise brought on by a collective of previous bad relationships gave me the attitude that I couldn’t give her anything or she’d just be another one to hurt me. But by giving her so little, perhaps predictably, I ended up hurting us both even worse.

That pendulum has been swinging back and forth for years, from me being one version of a shitty guy to another. And now, I feel like I don’t even know how to be a good one. Add my general fishy history on top of the shitty dating, it’s hard to feel like I even deserve it. How can I?

I was hoping to put these feelings off for a while longer, but I think I need to confront them now. This needs to be on the list of things that I’m actively working on. Because all of that has the potential to be a real dark cloud hanging over a relationship. I also need to stop acting like a relationship isn’t something that I want. I do want that, and hope I can handle things well the next time I give it a try. How can I expect to give to a relationship what it deserves, what the woman sharing it with me deserves, if I’m preoccupied with the consequences of my own failings and inadequacies? I have embarked upon a journey to become a better man, and while I recognize the mechanical direction and have given myself room for side quests, I don’t think I’ve yet fully accepted the core mission. I haven’t been thinking of delivering the me part, and that’s a pretty heavy pack to carry.

It’s been a good one, so let’s check a few things in.

Okay, health and fitness update first. So my mouth hurts pretty bad. That’s a line that would open up some good good riffs in my friend group… might have to remember that one for the next hang and throw out an easy one for the boys. But honestly, I’d rather it just clears up and I forget. I should explain why it hurts before you come up with wild ideas of your own – I had some dental work done. There are a few items in my dental record on watch, and when I recently went in for a routine cleaning, we added a new one. Somehow, I still have all of my wisdom teeth, and one of them has fared a little worse than the other three. I think it might be the one that took a drumming from a rifle-butt in my 20s, though I don’t think that would have affected this situation either way. Anyway, that one got a filling some years back and that filling popped out recently between dental visits. My dentist, my usual dental hygienist, and everyone else in that office rules, so they immediately got me booked to fix that just a few weeks later.

Time for a quick side thought – with my ongoing schoolwork, I have a strong urge to tighten up that last paragraph. It’s late and I want to just bang this out before I retire for the day, so I’m going to resist that urge. But just so you know, I see it too.

Okay, so the dentist got up in the cavity left by the missing filling and found some rot. He cleaned it up, filled it in, and polished up some of my existing metal fillings while he was in there. Pretty sweet bonus, that last bit, which will hopefully add some life to those old fillings. But this wizzy needed more work than expected, which resulted in some pretty serious ouchiness. The healing and swelling have not been super fun. Well, not that I expected them to be fun or anything, but I guess I wasn’t really expecting anything when I walked in. Before I left, he warned me there would be not only some soreness but also possibly some pain, and he was not wrong. As a surprise, being not constantly drunk and/or hungover has made pain medicine extraordinarily more effective. I cannot believe how quickly and how thoroughly just a pair of over the counter pills can evaporate the unreal pains I’ve been having in my stupid face, but there it is.

In the fitness portion, it seems that my unlikely weight loss may have been real. I had clocked in at 240 a few weeks ago, which was the huge drop, and I had a feeling it was a fluke. I guess I’ve become accustomed to just failing to meet health goals for so long that it’s hard to believe when I make progress, even when I reconfirm multiple times with different sources. On top of that, I also had to figure that I’d lose a lot of progress on the give-or-take week that I had to take off from regular exercise. In case you missed it from last week, I had some serious foot blisters that I needed to stay off of, results of some bad gear and a little smidge of overdoing it. But I clocked in my weight today, later in the day and not with all the measures that help for a lighter weigh-in, and still came up with 243. I even had icecream sandwiches, plural, over the last few weeks. So I guess I must be doing something right.

I do want to also mention that I haven’t forgotten about the things I keep saying I want to talk about, but I am going to note that the timing on when I get around to any of them is now unclear. Though I have started writing on a few of those topics, which puts me further on the path to completing than previous projects. Really, they just aren’t the priority right now. There is room for them to be in the higher priority, because they are writing, and all writing relates to my top goals. However, I need to make some more tangible progress on those top goals before I’ll feel comfortable dedicating that time to what are, let’s be honest, side projects. This whole blog is a side project. At this pace, it feels worth doing. But much slower and things get in question and much faster puts the same questions in a different though equally unflattering light. Still, I do want talk about these things. I especially want to hurry up and talk about this board game I’ve been playing with a couple of friends. Others on the list that come mind include some music practice sessions, some media I’ve been enjoying, my utter lack of romance, and also some new clothes that I’m both a little embarrassed about but also think I rather like. We’ll see how I feel about any of those when I actually get around to finishing the thoughts, but there they are. I don’t know when, and don’t hold your breath, but I do plan to eventually get around to each of those thoughts. Oh, and I’ve been sketching some more, but that’s an easy update – I’m still bad. I mean, better, I suppose, but still very scratchy and not where I’d like it to be.

On another note, I’ve been wanting to take a bit of a train journey for a good while now and never got around to it. I’ve had a lot of things I’ve been wanting to do that I’ve not gotten around to, and there have been plenty of reasons. I think that might be a future subject, separate from this. This specific one has mostly just been dreaming without commitment or follow-up. Right now, it’s still pretty easy to put off and ignore, but as I’ve found myself getting stuck in the idea phase of things, I figure I need to start getting some in order. Ideas, that is. Some of the key ideas I need to start nailing down are when and where to. There are more items that need considering, of course, it is travel. And I haven’t traveled in a good while, so I will need to re-familiarize myself with some of my preferred practices as I approach it. But with a “when” undecided, that basically just means “never”. And I don’t want this to be a never.

So I’m going to use this space to log a few of those thoughts right now. The first is on the when, which I’m still going to leave pretty wishy-washy, as seems appropriate given my current state of being. For a little more solid ground, I’ve decided to tie it to my academic progress, though I’m not exactly sure how. Were I already lined up for a traditional college experience, I would schedule this for the end of a semester or sometime during one of the longer breaks. I’d prefer winter, because I love the cold and the snow, but we’re coming up on that mighty quick, and I know for sure I’m not doing that this year or early next. The other option, which might make more sense if I go with the less traditional self-paced college, is to tie it to credits. Plan the trip for when I hit the halfway mark. Seems reasonable. So by the end of this year, I’m going to decide on what to tie it to exactly, be it season or benchmark. An autumnal trip would be lovely, though.

Location wise, I just found out that Amtrak goes right into Glacier Nation Park. From Baltimore, there are no direct routes, but that’s fine as well. I could either be happy with the most direct route and make sure I have sleeper cars booked for the longer stretches, or make more of a laid-back journey of it, which is currently my favorite idea. I’d have to be careful about my budget and also make sure I’m not missing any serious health considerations, but I like the idea of a stop in Chicago, which is a place I like and haven’t been in a very long time. The destination of Glacier would be really quite great for me. I love that park, and I love Montana in general. I think gettin’ in some Big Sky would do me a spot of healing, too. It’s not the only option, and I can see myself changing those plans for a variety of reasons, practical and otherwise, but it’s at least a good place to start.

And a start it is, albeit a bit loosy-goosy of one for the time being. With that, I can begin looking at the viability of this plan, considering other options, budgeting and comparing, and so forth. You know, the fretting about shit part. I’m pretty good at that part.

And that’s it for today. Wow, just over an hour. Not much editing, which ain’t great, but we’re going to call that a win anyway.

This is going to be another progress one, because I’ve made some and I’d like to check that in. Plus it’s always worth it to log where I’m struggling. I’ve found that both cathartic in the moment and useful to review and reflect on.

Before we get to that, let’s have a slightly related aside. I’ve been thinking a lot about what I should and shouldn’t share on here. In my day to day, I make a lot of irony soaked jokes and comments and those get read fairly well in the moment, but there is something to the tone and context that I don’t think comes across in my writing. Yet. But my writing is among the skills I believe that I am making progress on. And that’s part of why I’ve been thinking about it. I have my sense of humor and all, but sometimes I wonder if it’s coming across or if I sound like I’m a Lincoln Park song. It’s true, I am a fairly depressed person, but all of my whoa-is-me sadness in recent days has been pretty low stakes, and I have consistently felt better physically, emotionally, and whatever that third thing is, at least for the last year or so. Sometimes I’ll read a previous post (which is part the purpose of the blog), and I’ll be like, “What the fuck crawled up his ass?” I’m fine. I am sad, but I’m always sad, it’s my natural state, and I’m quite comfortable in it. Besides, lately, my personal life has been quite joyful, or at least by my meager standards.

Okay, I feel like I’ve sufficiently talked that out for now. I’ve started to feel like I’m making progress on my writing. I don’t have a lot to show for it just yet, but just by paying attention on my assignments and in feedback from instructors and friends, I feel like I’m getting a stronger grasp on the process. I suppose it’s progress just to grasp that it is a process, you dig? Because I’m increasingly feeling like it’s something for me, something for my future, and even something for right now. I feel like every past attempt at taking writing seriously, I was still stuck in a childlike mode of thinking, that it would just come to me and I’d just know, understand, and place the words perfectly and as simply as going for a walk – just one foot in front of the other, and before I know it, I’m there and it’s exactly as expected. It seems so foolish now.

I was in a ride share with friends on our way to an outing. One of my friends is a teacher, and he was relating a story where he combined some of what he’d learned from boxing with with his own personal brand of tomfoolery to get his students more engaged in class, and all I could think of is how common he’d basically just created a Shonen style anime. I’m no anime expert, and I’m not going to write an essay on it today… though let’s do stash that in my back pocket, please and thank you. I do want to just state the thought outright, that one of the lessons I think is often being put out there by many coming of age fictions is that you need to work at shit, fail a good amount, and just keep trying. And it could be years before you get to where you want to be. And I imagine his lesson had some reach, even if it was just a few folks. It seems to me that layered learning and complex problem solving are, of all the creatures we have ever know, uniquely human. Along with our incredible endurance, they are among our super powers. We shouldn’t waste them.

I occasionally lament my lack of progress, but so much of that is rooted in the pace. Though I’ve certainly felt this way before, these days it is rare for me to feel like there is something I truly cannot do, that I am simply incapable of learning. It’s just that I feel like I’m learning too slow, or that my fitness progress isn’t significant enough within the time allotted. It sometimes feels that I’m putting up roadblocks around my progress by missing or neglecting something key. Letting go of some of the past notions I’ve had on what is possible, on talent versus diligence, for example, is freeing up space in my psyche to place more progress. Plus, it’s very fun to kick over roadblocks.

I’m still quite anxious to actually finish some classes. I think once I get a few credits down, I’ll feel less anxious about things. After a lifetime of working, it’s hard not to feel like all I’m doing is spinning my wheels and getting nothing done. But I need to just keep reminding myself that I am doing something, and this is the point of all of that. It does, however, help when I really nail a test or capstone.

I also got a bit bogged down in my fitness journey, which makes me very antsy. I’ve had some surprising gains in the last few weeks, gains that I’m both skeptical of and also concerned that I’ll lose. I didn’t get as much exercise in as I wanted to last week, because I blistered up my feet real bad. Nothing crazy, just being a silly goose. You see, I’ve come to prefer wearing compression socks when I go for my walks and runs. It was a suggestion from my Cardiologist, and also it turns out that they feel great. A thing that I’ve learned about compression socks, though, is that most of them fall apart almost immediately. And price doesn’t seem to be an indicator of quality, or maybe I’m just wearing them wrong? I don’t know, they’re socks, how are you supposed to wear them? Is there a special procedure for putting compression socks on? Maybe I just don’t have perspective on the quality I should be expecting. I have some super-duper nice (and quite expensive) internet-ass socks, and even those caught holes after just over a year’s use. Is that normal? How long should these things last? Do I need a deeper rotation?

As a former TACP, I should really know better. Every deployment, sooner or later, we’re all just dirty, nasty legs. You will be on your feet and for a very long time, with everything you have on your back, and if you don’t got your sock and shoe game right, it will be a problem. And yet, in all of my wisdom, I still found it find to just done some very holey compression socks and go for a little jog. Revved up to a full run on the last mile in, my big dumb clown feet did not like that lack of support, and reminded me of my mistake with some sizeable and quite painful blisters. And I’m fresh outta moleskin. Knowing I needed to give them time to heal but also not wanting to lose the momentum I’d built up, I then proceeded to re-agitate the blisters every few days, including that outing with friends, which was for dancing. You know, a thing you famously do on your feet? And followed the next morning with another round of cardio. Needless to say, I was quite off my game on Sunday’s band practice. I need to remember that I am no longer in my 20s, no longer the Invincible Aaron I once was, and to just keep off my goddam feet while they heal. Wish me luck, or at least the tiny bit of good sense needed to follow through.

Fitness and academics are going about as well as can be expected, and I’m happy about that. I feel like I’m making some good social progress, too, though the bar is admittedly pretty low. I’m also not sure how I want to measure that, because the ways that I see others measuring this just do not suit me. I don’t care about social standing in a hierarchical sense. This stands in all senses, professional and personal. I’m not trying to be king of the cool guys, I just want to be my weird ass self and surround myself with the people that I think are cool. And I don’t want to be in charge of everyone, anyone really, but I do want to be able to pursue my ideas and have a way of presenting them where appropriate.

So to those ends I think I can count things as progress. I feel closer with my friends lately, which I wasn’t expecting. That dancing outing was at a friend’s request. It was the teacher’s birthday / Halloween event, and while my feet might not have loved it, the rest of me had a great time. I think a lady might have even tried to flirt with me, but as I am socially inept, it did not occur to me until well after. It’s extra funny for the in group, as self deprecating around similar situations is a recurring in-joke that came up frequently this night. What fools we’ve been.

In defense of this stance, I have an abysmal track record of mistaking friendliness for potential romance. Frankly, I think I’m better off with the assumption she was just looking for a place to dance, and I had the most open floor in front of me. I must presume woman came that night to dance, so they probably don’t need sweaty-ass me getting all up in their space.

I’ve also been having friends come by during the week for some shared work/study time. I’ve already found this quite helpful, it really is good to have someone I can bounce an idea off of right in the moment. I think they’re finding it useful, too, so we’re turning it into a regular thing. Of course this gives me more opportunity to feel like I’ve been incredibly rude and worry all night about it, but I think that needs to be a part of the mission as well. It’s time to relearn some social expectations and become more adept at applying those lessons, and you just can’t do that while keeping to yourself.

Okay, that feels like we’ve said something today, so let’s call it. I’ve got a smidge more keeping me busy this week, but if I can manage to keep off my feet, I should be caught up by the end of it. I’ll pop in again around then.