reflections on wayfinding

I had a few thoughts yesterday and today.

You and they are your own

When I anticipate disapproval or ridicule, I have the impulse to think, "I am bad," or "I am crap at this," or to get into an anxious spiral about why the disapproval or ridicule is unfair or wrong. Maybe you are like me sometimes.

Here is something obvious I verbalized last night: when I actually insult myself because feel shame about who I am, I am also insulting people like me.

It is important to note that feeling shame, or insulting yourself does not mean you are now double bad. It is not about being here. It is just something you should not do, and that is important. The whole badness or goodness has faulty premises, and the tendency to feel shame is not your fault, and it's not mine. Let try to do something about it, though.

Anyway, when you say you are bad, that it is reasonable that you should be despised, you are saying that people like you, good people like you should also be despised.

Here is a distinction.

"It is reasonable that people would despise me for failing at this." This is an empirical statement. You expect people to despise you when you exhibit this behavior.

"It is reasonable that people should despise me..." --that's different. No. They should not despise you, no matter how much they despise the behavior. Maybe not expect more, but at least be open to better from your fellow humans. And be open to more from yourself.

Then, think of the other people who are like you. You may not think there are other people who are like you. You can always filter the several billion population of the world down to one person with a few overzealous criteria. But there will still be groups of people with strong common experiences and struggles. Otherwise art, for example, just wouldn't work.

There is someone out there who in some weird way is dealing with stuff just like you are dealing with your stuff. There are people in the past and future facing the same challenges that you are. Some of these past or future people will be you, on a different day, in an ever so slightly set of circumstances. Other people may not be in a position to have understanding and compassion towards these people. You might be. At least be open to that. Maybe you might be the only one.

Then: you might be that one who says, "I know what you're dealing with. I know you might be suffering, that you might be feeling shame. It's natural to feel shame, even though there is no need. You are trying to live and find your way."

Be open to being that one.

What you know and what you learned can help someone, somewhere

So you're going through a lot of crap. You're trying a lot of different things, or maybe just trying your best to get that one thing to work consistently. And maybe it doesn't feel like you're contributing very much to the world--you just happen to be one of those people who cares about things like that.

You can help people!

The solutions you tried that helped you might help other people.

Even if they don't apply to other people, the solutions you tried but didn't work might be good information for others.

And even if neither really applies to a lot of others, your process of finding solutions and understanding your situation might be of use.

And even if your process of understanding is too weird or inapplicable, the failures in your process of understanding your challenges and the world can be of great use to people.

This all assumes you have some grasp on reality. If you are doing your best to a decent grasp on reality you can probably help people by describing what you went through, what you tried, what didn't work, what helped you understand things, what set back your understanding.

But even if you don't really have that good a grasp on reality, if you are honest about what you experienced while going through these things, at least someone might be able to glean some insight.

You can get better at all of these things--and by following the process you've developed to solve your challenges, you are already doing so in some sense. By getting a better grasp on reality, a grasp that makes sense to you without internal conflict, you get a better understanding of what is helping or hindering your understanding, what is working and not working. You can improve those in turn. This is the best practical case for what my friends like to call "rationality".

There are some potential blind spots and problems. They mostly have to do with becoming narrowly attached to a certain way of viewing things. It may be simple confirmation bias--you take in information that says you or things you like are right, and throw out information that says you are wrong. It may be overgeneralization--the pattern you see in this place is so appealing you begin to think it applies everywhere. That's why you should practice being skeptical of your own conclusions, and why you should read and learn a very wide variety of things.

(Or so I say. The reason I read a wide variety of things is because I happen to find a wide variety of things interesting, and I'm easily distracted!)

In the end, through your process of trying to understand and overcome your challenges, you can probably generate something people can learn from. And likely there is someone out there who can learn a lot from what you've lived and tried to understand. And if you get better at all this, there is the greater possibility you can really help someone who was stuck like you. Or stuck in their own way, but enough--analogously--like you.

If you want to. I don't think anyone is under the obligation to do so. I look around at people who have dealt with complex challenges that required understanding to overcome (admittedly I'm only talking about a handful of people in the several hundred people I know). And I find that they may have had to develop an understanding at some point, but then they outgrew the need to have the understanding be an explicit thing. It's like the skill progression thing: unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence to conscious competence to unconscious competence. So, if they did not preserve their lessons and the intermediate frameworks they used, it might be hard for them to teach. I think of myself as someone who likes to extract useful insights and methods for other people to use, but I also just forget things. It's likely I've forgotten a bunch of stuff whose intermediate forms I no longer really use.

But still: the possibility of helping other through living and taking the risks of discovery remains something that inspires me. At least it does when I can remember to see things in that frame of reference.

I just got back from lunch with my friend Angela. We ate at Shanghai Bun, which we've eaten at a bunch of times, and provides pretty decent and authentic Shanghainese fare. Angela is Chinese but is really enthusiastic about stuff that falls under the American stereotype of Chinese food. She likes General Tso's and fried rice in particular.

"I'm apparently a bad Chinese person," she said once, referring to the time her parents visited her in D.C. They went out to a Chinese place that she thought was pretty good. "They were just clearly disappointed. It was just not up to their standards."

Angela's birthday just passed this Thursday, and her Dad's birthday on Monday, so she came all the way down from Boston last night to celebrate with her parents and also take a few things from their house in West Windsor back up to Boston.

It was pretty refreshing to hang out. Angela was one of only really two friends I have around these parts--friends who are not also friends with my brothers. Zarrar got his approval to return to Yale a few months ago, and had been living in NYC, anyway, closer to his work. Angela left for her MFA program at Emerson as August was coming to the close. It was the middle of my trip to Minnesota.

The stack, bundle, or heap of unentered receipts still in my wallet attests that I haven't really recovered from drive out to Minnesota. It's not as though I've really recovered from 2013, 2012, or even 1998. The receipts form only the newest layer of the newest stratum of personal backlogs.

Minnesota--I like Minnesota a lot, and I'm glad Bryce is out there. It's not as diverse as the East Coast (and there's little way it could be as diverse as the school district that Zarrar, Angela, and I grew up with) but it's more diverse than I expected. And it's not a complete, made up generalization that people there are friendlier and a lot more laid back. They're focused more on living, and less on superficial achievement--was Bryce's characterization, which I think works all right.

It makes sense why my mom's family settled just fine in tiny Brownsdale, Minnesota, coming straight from the Philippines. The climate and the typical hair color (more blonde people in one place than I have seen in my life) were different. But the openness, friendliness, and expectations of politeness work just fine. And the folksiness! Filipinos can be folksy to the max, and that worked just fine in that tiny, tiny town. I'm the eldest grandchild on my mom's side, and before my cousins were born I grew up with the coming to America stories. My Uncles and Aunts racing snowmobiles, the kids being in the July 4th parade, getting snowed during the heavy winters and having to climb out the second floor window to get to school (Neil Armstrong high school--best name.)

I'll have to write about our actual Minnesota trip (and my crazy solo voyage back) some other time. There's too much to say.

I do wonder what it'd be like if I uprooted and went there for a while. The Twin Cities is a pleasant, affordable place to live, especially around Dinkytown--and of course I'm saying this as a person with by crazy preferences.

But my trajectory is probably taking me elsewhere. In a couple months, back to NYC--a city with less of a reputation for friendliness, folksiness, or affordability. If I don't end up staying, it's probably off to a different hub of happening things, a different gathering place for misfits of the world.

Angela just celebrated her 30th, and just about everyone else in my graduating year is due for the three decade stamp if they haven't gotten it already. I'm up in--what? Nine weeks? Eight weeks? It doesn't register a bit. Most of my social world--my brothers, my cousins, our mutual friends--are all much younger, still going through college.

My friend Jerome (meanfreepath) gets to wait for next year, but he's getting married three weekends from now. I'm really excited, except for two things. One: I'm showing up for the special event still obese, and I hope the nice-fitting tux I've ordered will smooth things out. Two: dinner table small talk with some people. But I'm only just a little unexcited. I get along with Jerome's crowd just fine; I used to visit him every once in a while during his days at Swarthmore.

It's really just: time is going by so quickly. What did I do with it? Will I think the same thing come December? Will I have finances and logistics lined up to move back to the city?

The main thing I've got to figure out is income. I'll need a new job, or some other way of getting a paycheck once I move. The app I've been working on the past year and a half is going to be in the App Store soon, but I think of it a really basic, not so impressive thing. It only dragged on this long because I struggled so much with organizing and directing my attention. I want to be able to present some other portfolio pieces.

And do I actually know this stuff? My boss tells me that I must be an expert by now, in some areas. I wouldn't call myself an expert at all. iOS 8 came out, and there are still some developments from iOS 7 that I haven't really internalized. The scope of my preparation is overwhelming.

Thus comes the urgent quest to establish a system to help me compensate for my attentional challenges and train me to focus. Thanks to my friends, I've been exposed to what seem to be the best-in-breed when it comes to productivity techniques. They are great tools that work miracles--when you get them running. Your state of the art appliance work wonders, if you can get it plugged into a reliable electrical outlet, and can ensure that the vermin don't chew through the damn power cord.

It might not help that I've had the itch to be able to write lately. That's different from having the itch to write; the latter would imply that you enjoy the actual process. I don't assume that much.

Hearing Angela talk about what she's doing in her program was encouraging. I've been trying to write for fifteen minutes, maybe half an hour when I'm generous. Junk usually comes out. Angela has to spend large chunks of her days doing prewriting so she can get ideas for her poems. Then a few more days reworking the poem so she can present it to the workshop.

That kind of longer term working and reworking has become pretty alien to me at this point. The last ten years, aside from a few school papers, my model of writing was typing for a while, and agonizing, typing a bit more, setting the permissions, then hitting POST because it's 3AM and if I ain't gonna put it up now, I ain't never gonna.

I used to think that even that dose of pacing and hand-wringing was too much. I've yet to acknowledge, across the board, that things don't only just time, they take whole days, whole months, whole years, whole decades sometimes. I don't suppose I'll have accepted this once my thirtieth rolls around, either. I just hope I'll be too distracted to worry.

We went to an all you can eat Korean BBQ today. It was my favorite all-you-can eat place I can remember. I ate a lot, like everyone else, and that took its toll when I pushed forward with going to the gym. A lot of food in the gut is not a good combination with exercises where increasing abdominal pressure is necessary.

How I ended up going: I was originally just dropping off Marlon at the train station. We were late in leaving, so I drove him 25 minutes to Edison. Along the way, we started talking about PUZZLE, our shared tabletop RPG campaign setting. We stopped at a Rite Aid so he could get cash. He kept asking if I wanted to join and I kept saying no. When we finally arrived, we were still talking. I walked him to the front door and finally gave in.

I felt rather unpresentable the whole time, wearing my sleeping sweatpants. I didn't even have my hat, and my hair was a mess. The place and all the workers were all so proper and nice looking. So were the mostly-Korean families who made up the other clientele. No one in our rowdy college student party-of-ten really cared.

When I got home I had to take a a nap. I woke up with about 90 minutes before the gym closing. Once we got to the gym, we had less than 45 minutes. I made it through squats: 260lbs for the work sets. I'm 5lbs below my all-time personal record of 265lbs for 5 reps. That'll be next Tuesday. The gym was closing, so I'll have to go back to the gym tomorrow to do the overhead presses and deadlifts.

On the way home, Marlon was talking about a friend of his who is on crutches from a running injury. Runners get injured a lot. A lot. Barely anyone gets injured in weightlifting, in comparison, even looking at relative frequencies. It makes sense that people engaged in intimidating activities--such as poking each other with swords or lifting massive amounts of steel and iron with their bare hands--would spend a lot of time making sure it was really safe.

The benefits of strength training are enormous compared to running, too—especially for geriatric populations. Bone density, mobility, strength through normal range of motion, muscle mass to stave off ataxia, and increased output of human growth hormone.

Strength training is something everyone should do. Men and women, young and elderly. It seems to improve the quality of life of most sedentary, non-athletic people more than anything else. Instead, everyone looks to running or dancing for exercise to improve their health. I suppose yoga is pretty good too. But yoga isn't going to as good a job protecting you against osteoperosis.

Here are some videos of elderly people doing deadlifts.





Strength is valuable for these people. They use strength every day--to lift groceries, objects around the house, maybe their grandchildren. Strength lets them get up out of chairs and up stairs without significant strain. They have a better shot of not getting critically injuries when they fall down--and with more strength, they'll fall down less. I think it's a hell of a lot more useful for most folk than being able to run 6.21 miles really slowly.

This 92 year old can deadlift more than I can right now. I'm inspired.



My goal isn't to break records. It's to be that strong when I'm that age. At least that much—secretly I'm hoping for a 300+ deadlift (and with conventional not sumo!)

Since I turn red, experience tachycardia and often nausea when I consume ethanol, I might be at a higher risk of esophageal cancer, says this one paper. The symptoms mean I am either ALDH2 deficient or ALDH2 low activity, so I metabolize a highly toxic byproduct of ethanol, acetaldehyde, much slower than other people. It accumulates and gives me annoying symptoms that people bug me about in social gatherings.

Acetaldehyde is responsible for the facial flushing and other unpleasant effects that ALDH2-deficient individuals experience when they drink alcohol. Importantly, there is now direct evidence that ALDH2-deficient individuals experience higher levels of acetaldehyde-related DNA and chromosomal damage than individuals with fully active ALDH2 when they consume equivalent amounts of alcohol, providing a likely mechanism for the increased cancer risk.

This is from: "The Alcohol Flushing Response: An Unrecognized Risk Factor for Esophageal Cancer from Alcohol Consumption"
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.1000050

I read about this the first time in 2009, but I didn't change anything because I read it completely wrong. It explains there are two types of people who experience flushing--people who don't have ALDH2 activity, and people who have some but very low ALDH2 activity. I mistakenly read it to mean that some people get the flush, but don't increase their risk of cancer. And somehow I dropped myself into that category. (I probably saw what I wanted to see. Somewhere, I probably didn't want to be grouped with those pitiful people who can't drink.)

Here's what it actually says. The first group:

ALDH2 Lys/Lys homozygotes are unable to consume significant amounts of alcohol. As a result, they are protected against the increased risk of esophageal cancer from alcohol consumption. This observation also provided evidence for a causative role for ethanol in esophageal cancer, and a key role for acetaldehyde in mediating this effect.

And the second group:

ALDH2 Lys/Glu heterozygotes experience a less severe manifestation of the flushing response due to residual but low ALDH2 enzyme activity in their cells. As a result, some are able to develop tolerance to acetaldehyde and the flushing response and become habitual heavy drinkers, due in part to the influence of societal and cultural factors (see below). Therefore, paradoxically, it is the more common low-activity ALDH2 heterozygous genotype that is associated with greatest risk of esophageal cancer from drinking alcohol.

So the first group gets so sick they can't really even drink. That means something completely different from what I thought. Good lesson to read the damn thing.

The first case sounds like my dad. He drinks some wine, and within half an hour is very sick. That's why I grew up with neither of my parents drinking. Even when I saw members of my extended family drinking, it seemed weird and vaguely bad.

I'm not a regular drinker, but I've drank a fair amount during college and living in NYC. I feel sick fairly quickly, but it often seems I "sober up" quicker than other people consuming the same amounts. No one in my mothers' family has the flushing response. So I'm probably in the second group.

I can't really evaluate how good this research is. One commenter remarked that if low ALDH2 activity increases cancer risk, then other cancers should . It does seem compelling enough to take precautions.

It's not that hard to quit, since I don't really have drinking habits to begin with. I have a fair intellectual and cultural interest in alcoholic beverages for a while. But I don't remember the side-effects of drinking ever being pleasant. I always thought of it as something I had to put up with to be social, or to be true to the cultural phenomenon. I have wished for some way to (often imagined) peer pressure and social shame on many occasions.

If I stand by this decision to quit, I'll need to confront the social stigma. More than any actual pushback from others, it's the stigma I've internalized that is most daunting. Some folks may joke around, but the people I care to associate with are all very respectful of personal decisions, especially when they have to do with health. On the other hand, my internalized worry about being thought of as lame or weak was powerful enough to cause me to misread this thing in the first place.

I'm glad I checked back on this. Aside from the important opportunity to avoid cancer, it's also given me the opportunity to ponder my own choices and motivations. Even if my symptoms were innocuous, would it be the right decision to drink alcohol when I don't like the side effects the substance has on me? When I know I'll be feeling physically sick while everyone else is having fun?

"You don't have to do it if you don't want to," seems like obvious advice, but in practice it can be very hard on both ends. Sometimes what you want is a confusion of conflicting principles and preferences.

Setting aside time to read real books, no apologies, heals more than 1000 self-help articles.

I reread Duff's article about How to Deal Effectively With Peer Pressure and the JADE heuristic, and it's a great tool for avoiding needless conflict when others are trying to use peer pressure on you.

JADE is for what you're trying to avoid:

1. Justifying


2. Arguing


3. Defending


4. Explaining

It is a good heuristic. There are other times and places it might be worth having a deeper conversation, especially if this is going to be a long-term, recurring thing. There are some cases where it might be better to justify, defend, or explain--e.g. in a situation with legal consequences. (Talk to your attorney.)

Duff gives some caveats about these principles being used to defend harmful behaviors. A lot of stuff can be twisted around.

How should you respond to peer pressure? When someone tries to get you to do something you don't want to do:

• Have a handy catch phrase that affirms your position (Duff uses the example, "I choose what goes in my body")


• Say NO kindly and politely the first 3 times


• The 4th time, make it clear that you would like them to respect your decision.


• Practice saying NO before it happens

The strategy is from Andrew T. Austin.

This also applies to when you've done something wrong. When you've done something wrong:

• Genuinely empathize and apologize for harm


• Only if you are absolutely sure you will follow through state you will do differently; don't deepen the problem through broken promises (otherwise this procedure will become recursive)


• Until you are sure you can keep your word, make the changes in secret

All of this is pretty helpful for me. I've had trouble dealing with peer pressure in the past; my usual response is to feel ashamed for saying no. I'm embarrassed at coming across as stubborn when people just want me to have fun. So I avoid situations where there might be peer pressure. That is a lot of situations. When I do myself into social situations I have in the past expressed this embarrassment and frustration as anger.

The concrete technique of saying no kindly and politely three times before asking people to respect other people's decisions is very helpful.

Interesting "prolegomena", apparently Chapter 33 of the Zhuangzi, which is a survey of schools of thought at the time. I'd not heard of a lot of them, and the conception I had for a few seem different from the description.

Mozi - Mohists, the "ascetics". My concept of them was a rational-empiricist school. But portrayal here is more like the Cynics of Diogenes' mold.

Song Jian / Yin Wen - tolerance, let go of your material possessions, consideration and forgiveness--very Christian (or Cynic in the pattern of Crates of Thebes)

Peng Meng, Tian Pian and Shen Dao ("Temple of the God of Grain group") - detachment, resignation to inevitability, rejection of control over life by reason: live in a state of nature and transcend morality ("P'eng Meng's teacher used to say, 'Al the ancient followers of Tao tried to do was to reach the state beyond praise or blame.") and pretty close to the popular misconception of Laoist thought with a touch of noble savage. Zhuangzi says they only partially understand Dao.

Laozi & Guan Yin - big contrast in the Laozi wuwei vs the Temple of the God of Grain "return to nature". Note that Guan Yin is the officer who persuaded Laozi to write his book, not Guanyin the Bodhisattva of mercy. Instead of "reject humanness, be an animal" we have "appear like clear water", movement in a state of rest. A great deal harder to understand.

Zhuangzi - constant change, lots of questions, radical skepticism!

Hui Shi and the "Sophists" - Why this borrowed term in the translation? Subtlety probably lost on more modern readers, who oversimplify "sophist" as "fake philosopher". Anyway: context dependence of verbal logic, relativity of time and space. Zhuangzi thinks these exercises just amount to playing around with words, no matter how impressed the logicians seem. Later Wittgenstein (according to the summary of others; I've never read the guy) would probably agree with Zhuangzi. Hui Shi really likes to talk, likes to blow other peoples' minds with words, revels too much in the material. But Zhuangzi thought of him as a good friend and a worthy mind.

Cleaning out my Evernote notebooks, I found this quote:

Chris Macleod calls this “epiphany addiction”: “Each time they feel like they’ve stumbled on some life changing discovery, feel energized for a bit without going on to achieve any real world changes, and then return to their default of feeling lonely and unsatisfied with their life. They always end up back at the drawing board of trying to think their way out of their problem, and it’s not long before they come up with the latest pseudo earth shattering insight.”

That's Aaron Swartz from his series of posts called Raw Nerve.

I know I'm definitely an epiphany addict, though it's worse because I get sucked into epiphany hunting on the web. If I find a good author I relate to, or who seems to know something that I don't, I'll throw aside whatever I was supposed to do and go on a reading binge.

But I don't know that the habit is all that bad. They may not make me magically ten times happier or lower my time preference or help me get great grades on classes. But I do learn a lot on the way, and I do have interesting thoughts that lead to other interesting thoughts. I just reread Plato's Allegory of the Cave. I think he would call highly advanced epiphany hunting just "doing philosophy".

How about you? Do you have this affliction? Or maybe you have the opposite attitude--you don't get this frenzy for answers. What do you think?

Addendum 10-24: After a bit of reflection (all it took was responding to comments) I don't think I'm an actual epiphany addict. I'm much more excited about a lot of articles and books before I read them than after I read them. But I'll keep on clicking. Maybe the next one will have the magic formula.

Stories don't happen.

One

I had a good time last weekend. Zach and Adam conspired for me to come to NYC, and I borrowed some money and managed to go. We went to the Met, along with Adam's friend Jing. Just as we were leaving, my cousin Ross joined up with us.

All five of us made our way across Central Park and puzzled for a while about what to eat once we reached the West Side. I was on a five dollar budget, but tried not to make that big a deal of it. On Adam's suggestion, we went to Trader Joe's on Amsterdam. I couldn't figure out a way to get my requisite monsterous amount of protein from a non-dairy source, so I settled on a cheap humus tray, which we could share. Everyone bought some stuff and we had a small picnic back in the park.

I dragged everyone on a detour to see Lawrence and Connie at their apartment on 43rd in Hell's Kitchen, figuring it would be nice for two branches of my LJ friends to meet each other. But our hosts had just gotten back from a 10 day trip earlier in the afternoon, Zach was eager to reunite with Ruchi (just released from a med school studying stint) back at his place, Ross hadn't slept, and I figured that Adam, though quite fascinated with a book Lawrence had gotten at Princeton's Labyrinth bookstore, was eager to get to the part of the evening involving beer. We closed the meeting by discussing some history of New York and New Jersey's respective claims over Staten Island, which lasted until the 1830s. We made our goodbyes; Ross departed for an Express Bus.

Zach, Adam, Jing and I zig-zagged down 8th and 7th Avenues, then across town to Zach's apartment on 26th St. It was just growing dark, and Ruchi met us outside. She declared that we had been drafted as test subjects for her blood pressure reading practice, and that I'd have to take off my shirt, since I was wearing long sleeves.

I hadn't been up to Zach's apartment in more than a year. We pulled up some chairs, and I retrieved the humus, to continue eating. Craft beer flowed freely. Zach's friend Joe from Toronto (and fellow Rate Beer member) came by at just the right time. That, combined with Jing very, very enthusiastically volunteering helped me to escaped being an unprepared test subject for Ruchi. We spent the rest of the evening enjoying good beer and drifting back and forth between conversations.

Near midnight, Adam, Jing, and I said goodbye to Zach and Ruchi. I hadn't seen each of them in person for more than a year--and yet someone saying goodbye didn't seem much like an awkward big deal. These are my friends! I see and talk with them all the time, some part of my brain registered. Our reunion glided smoothly and naturally to a close.

Sometime past midnight last Saturday, Adam and Jing walked me back across town to Penn Station. We had a short conversation that touched upon increasing homelessness in NYC, frequency of brain trauma among the homeless, and maybe that lining up for Saturday night club-going just seemed over appealing, even though I do like to dance (poorly).

In the New Jersey Transit waiting area, I spent a good half hour slumped against a column, waiting for the various mob to gather for the last train of the night. It's become one of my least favorite parts of these infrequent trips--surrounded by lively bunches of partygoers. It's been 10 years since I left high school, four years since the tail-end of NYU, and I still feel intimidated by people who resemble the popular crowd, especially when they seem to be having a lot more fun than me.

This has a tendency to rattle me, and thoughts get stirred up. Being cognizant of my superficial reactions to other people often creates some kind of feedback loop. I have to coach myself about how to handle my own, tired thoughts so that they don't end up collapsing in on themselves. There's always the chance of mildly depressive thoughts intensifying into a deafening squeal.

Whatever I feel was lacking in these trips, I usually pick something having to do with me. Hadn't I dressed like an idiot today, and not even noticed that my navy blue shirt had accumulated white stains by midday? Hadn't I told the same jokes everyone was tired of about the steam engine pipe organ and the tiny violin, and trying to get into the every time someone joined our group? Hadn't I bent everyone unnecessarily to my own agenda? Hadn't I been a shitty conversationalist all day? Hadn't I made myself look like a fat tool by attempting to eat as much of the humus as possible throughout the evening? Isn't it embarrassing that I can only see some of my friends, who live such a short train ride away, only once every few months? Isn't it pathetic that I let my life get in such bad shape that I don't have in-person friends on a regular basis?

Maybe I thought about these things. I probably bounced between that and being self conscious among these random people. But somehow, I managed to avoid falling into an endless struggle. As the track appeared for the train, it was a sign that I'd escaped something of final confrontation with my own mental vices. Riding back along with me, a good visit, unmarred, complete.