Short takes

by Jon Sullivan - 2024-04-07 - Status

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Jon's short attention span has reduced us to blogging in short boring chunks of babble. Thanks Trump......

- Crazy. One of the things I focus on more than any other is the "happiness through insanity" story arc I've been going through the last few years. Short version - I'm always happy. Always. And my 60+ years in this body/mind have taught me that this sort of inescapable positivity is not sane or healthy. You can't just be happy 100%, no matter what the context or condition. But I am. And it bugs me. Not enough for my confusion to kill my happiness. But it bugs me. But.... more than anything..... it makes me wish I could bottle it up and hand it out in times of need. It doesn't seem fair to me that I get happiness and others get crisis and worry. I don't need anything, others do. But the economics of happiness are personal. I can't make a funds transfer to someone else's happiness account. It bugs me.

- Happy birthday. I famously do not celebrate holidays. Other than my beloved Thanksgiving of course. Which means other than childhood I've lived 60+ years without a birthday party. For me that was perfect. Such celebrations lead to all sorts of bother and obligation and social norms for me to screw up. So my birthday this year was supposed to be the usual non-event. It would have passed without me even realizing it. But friends secretly vetoed that idea and, for the first time in memory, I had a real birthday. Someone cooked for me, which is always special. Someone made me a cake, which is a "trying not to cry" sort of special. I don't know how I feel about this. It was wonderful. But I don't suddenly like holidays. It doesn't make me want to celebrate my next birthday. Having friends and socializing is so complicated.

- Soup throwdown. I've been talking about the soup throwdown for weeks now. And how it turned out is perhaps the best allegory for "broken Jon" one could come up with. Soup is warm and comforting and nostalgic. Where my cooking tends to be over-engineered and weird, soup should be simple and relaxing. Which is why the other chefs showed up with delicious warm comfort dishes, and I brought a cold soup made mostly from beets. And why I got dead last on a cooking throwdown, yet again. Cold beet soup is hermit food. I keep forgetting we're not in the hobbit hole anymore. You do not serve judges cold beet soup. Though it likely doesn't matter. I cook weird shit, and probably always will. Next throwdown = Stew. We shall see if I've learned. Spoiler alert, I haven't.

- What am I watching? Twitch streamers and video games make up 90% of my media consumption. This isn't good at all. It makes me a total degenerate. But it is what it is. It seems that, even at 61, I am still a bit of a child. Childish? Maybe let's go with "young at heart".

- What am I playing? Last Epoch, which is the Diablo killer we all needed, though the end game is a bit slow. And Dyson Sphere program, which continues to add free upgrades to keep it the best builder IMHO even four years after launch..

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