This last post is something that is powered by adrenaline and urgency to get to bed on time. I did not have the courage to write it before, as I wish I had. I have half of the courage I would have wanted for it now, and so writing it as a final post to mark an intentional growth era seems as fitting as anything else.

One of my favorite pieces of writing on substack is Halloween Science Fiction and Fantasy. I had wanted to write my own version, as the author John Encaustum encourages readers in his first essay to play with the structures of essays you like (or dislike!) in various ways, and gives some examples of what he means.

Ever since reading this essay, I wanted to look into what costumes I had worn over the years for Halloween, or other occasions. What did they signify to me? What did I want to become? This felt challenging to look at, and so I waited for a better time.

Spring is coming, and as the sun comes out and as part of Spring Cleaning, it actually feels like a nice inventory to go through previous ways I had been hiding myself or showing myself.

In a way, this is a stream of consciousness writing, which is something I had experimented with in these months as a set of experiments. In another way, this is just trying to write faithfully…what had happened and how I felt about it. And so there is also an interesting integration there.

My first Halloween costume was…Tinker Bell. I had never seen Peter Pan, and the character had no significance to me, but I was very sparkly and I liked being sparkly. I had the green dress, with the intricate layered skirt. I had the wide wings. It was very beautiful, and it suited me. I got a lot of compliments for this costume. I do not have photos, but I was generally a shy and adorable child, and so this would have suited me. I do remember a distinct and very intense self-consciousness about how much of my legs were showing. In hindsight, the skirt was long enough, and no adult ever made a comment about it both because I was too young for it to matter and because everything was indeed fine. I must have been around eight, and although I loved the costume and felt very beautiful, it was not a costume that I had myself chosen, and probably not one that I would have chosen. I wore this same costume for a few years, and was relieved when I got to have a different one. I was relieved, but also confused about the relief. I did not understand my own self-consciousness about the long legs showing. I never had an uncomfortable and painful interaction in this costume that would have created the feelings.

The next costume was a generic witch costume. I wore this one every year for a very long time. This one I did get a part in choosing, in that my parents loved it and I got to approve it. This one came with a hat with a purple-haired wig, and a long black plain dress, and a purple belt, with striped purple and black tights. Everybody really liked this one too. I did not know why. Compared to the Tinker Bell costume it was a lot plainer. Why people liked it so much was a mystery to me, because other girls would be wearing more complicated and more interesting costumes, but people would talk to me as if this was interesting. In hindsight, it just worked very well, and worked a lot better with my natural coloring than most things I wore, and I felt very comfortable wearing it. Over the years, I would have different variations around it. Sometimes I would be too self-conscious to wear the hat and wig, sometimes not. In later years, I created a purple “pimp stick” to bring to school with it. It was a lot of fun.

Next came the Arthur Dent era, from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It did not occur to me that it was in any way strange to want to wear a male character costume. I wanted to come to school wearing a bathrobe, and a towel. I think this was my first costume where I was playing with being “edgy.” I wanted to be seen as the thing I was in costume as. I wanted to be Arthur Dent. The laziness was part of the point. I wanted to be very natural, and for people to see me very natural. I wanted an excuse to be myself. The nerdy iconography was important too. There was a symbolic importance, and the way that the symbol was in conversation recursively with my own reality. I do not remember what comments I got about this one. Of course, some people were really into it. Some people did not get it. On one occasion, at a very large street event, somebody else was also Arthur Dent. But I think part of the point for me with this costume was not really caring what anybody thought about it. I was very thrusty and unapologetic.

Next was…slutty Gregor from Kafka’s metamorphosis. I don’t know man. This was college. It’s not even that I didn’t have a costume. I straight-up ordered enormous googly eyes off the internet to put on my tits, and made a headpiece so that I could have more eyes. I wanted to be absurdist. I wanted people to ask me what I was. I wanted to be slutty something but I didn’t want to be slutty the normal thing. I had to disguise my desire to be slutty. I was having crushes on all these experimental comedy artists. I wanted to be seen and I wanted to be slutty and I wanted to be seen the right way for being slutty. This is probably a costume I would like to redo, in some version, in some spirit, because it made me very happy in my soul. The comments I remember — the people who knew Kafka laughed a lot. A lot of people asked me what I am supposed to be. People were amused by my googly-eyes titties. In a funny way, I think this was the farthest I’d gotten into trying to show up in my feminine, in part because even though it seems like an unhinged joke of opposites (slutty and literary?), it was actually not too far from something like a conscious and integrated feminine. I can imagine ways of taking the feelings for this costume further, and maturing them, and it being really cool.

Next was…Dorothy from David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, as part of a Frank and Dorothy couple’s costume. This was my idea. There was a David Lynch themed Halloween party. We didn’t have costumes. We really wanted to go. I insisted we go. I said I “had a blue velvet dress.” He had a leather jacket and some sleep apnea machine parts. If you have seen the movie, you would know that this is a particularly non-neutral and risky costume! Probably the only time to do this would be to a specifically David Lynch halloween party. There was one more Dorothy there at the party, but she did not arrive with a Frank. Frank is famously…not very nice to Dorothy in the film. Very not nice. He famously yells at her and hits her a lot. But we had enormous fun with this. I had not seen the movie when I proposed it, and was watching it right to the last minute while I was preparing my hair and makeup. My suggestion was based entirely on visual pattern-matching and theme matching, and nothing else at all. Dorothy has a similar enough coloring as me, and as I was looking at David Lynch titles for costume inspirations, there was a clear match. But this is David Lynch, and he plays a lot with the unconscious. There was something like an integrated feminine for me in wanting to be Dorothy, because she is beautiful and I wanted to be beautiful. If Slutty Gregor was original and coming from deep impulses inside me, Dorothy was a more straightfoward, seeing something that someone who thought a lot about beauty thought was beautiful and feeling resonances around what inside of myself is like that.

Finally, the last costume I remember was also a couple’s costume. We were going to an out-of-state Halloween party event, again with no costumes. I mentioned “Don’t we have matching different colored Fanta t-shirts?” I went as Orange Fanta. He went as Grape Fanta. It could be argued that we were going to something like a “fantasy” party as two fantas at a fantasy party. When people asked us who we were, we said “The Kennedy’s! John and Jacky!” One man, on seeing my partner’s shirt, exclaimed, “NO way, There’s two of you????” and had the sort of ecstatic and gutteral emotional reaction that our soda t-shirts sometimes have on the unsuspecting public. I do not understand this. The Mountain Dew Baja Blast t-shirt does something to some people.

And now you have it. The full compendium of my Halloween costumes over my life time, as I remember it. There may have been more occasion for costuming, as when I participated in a Roshni showcase which required certain dress. There was a variety of other performances. I remember trying my hardest to dress up as a pirate, once, and only getting halfway to the exact effect. There were probably other parties. But this is what I remember.

Feel free to leave comments analyzing me or the genre of Halloween Costumes, as long as it is either deep or entertaining, go nuts. I myself will probably reread this list and try to see where I can go harder in my own creative future, or do something else entirely. I am noticing there are arcs that are entirely missing. For example, choosing which Disney Princess you want to be, and doing that, seems like an important arc! And I have missed it!

I had heard of Corning. I had spent time in upstate New York, and so it was a name I had heard of, like “Utica” or “Horseheads.”

I did not know that Corning had the largest glass museum in the world, and so I went to there.

What is interesting about intricate glass objects is that they become unphotographable. The light does not reflect properly at all. It goes in all directions, in interesting ways.

This is in contrast with the crispness and beauty of the show! Of course, a lot of glass is photographable, especially with the cameras that Netflix has. The show also captures pretty well the pacing that goes into making something if you were to for example take a class in Seattle (another mecca of glassblowing, like Corning) or Florida (which has everything). The space is cramped, you have a small amount of time to do anything, and the glass is really hot and I suppose the people who know they are clumsy do not get into it.

And so a lot about glassblowing did end up getting captured by the show. If you go to the Chihuly museum of glass in Seattle, and take photos and buy postcards, you will see that the beautiful colors do get captured very nicely, and sometimes are even more vibrant in good photos than with your eye. The contrast and accents get augmented somehow.

Given all this colorful splendor, for a while I forgot about this idea — that there should exist glass that is either impossible or very very had to photograph.

And so finding uphotographable objects yesterday felt special.

Behold, this furry cube.

Look at this adorable glass marshmallow! It is not that the image is blurry! It is that the cube is blurry! It is blurry because it is made of many small pieces of glass and each piece reflects light in a different direction. In real life, it just looks fluffy and soft and magical.

Another photo! You can see that now from this angle it looks very different. The first photo had more of the right “eye-ASMR-feel” of what it looked like even though it is blurry. You can’t really see how pretty the cube is here.

If I could buy this cube I would, but I am sure they would not sell me the cube.

Another favorite of mine from this museum was this. This glass fish tank of beautiful otherworldly alien hermit-crab trombone-faced lovers.

You sort of can see what it is about, with the depth perception. But again, it doesn’t really look like it looked like in real life. Given the state of James Cameron’s tech, there are almost certainly cameras that can do a good job of photographing this in a way such that you get what is most beautiful about it.

But it still is different — getting the photo that manages to “capture” what is best about it, rather than seeing it in real life and seeing how the light bounces around and changes as you move, and the light is also in the room with you.

I think we are used to the idea that in person there are other senses involved. You can hear things, smell things, touch things, feel the energy of different things. But then that there is still uncharted terrain in the area of what you “see” is also very nice to notice — to see glass arranged in such a way that the light bounces in such stellar ways.

I should post the names of these pieces, but I am sure they are on the website!

I urnaded. Insofar as the insufficient bunlimages and inculcations rose from the rosewater, I knew I wanted it. I tried it once, twice. Three times and it was complete. The crustacean clicked. The gleems gossiped once more. The godmen breathed in the fog.

The godmen and the gleems did not get along. Once they were in a symbiotic relationship, that became polyamorous and that was the end of that. An honorarium was honed in on for the mediation of the conflict between the godmen and the gleems.

Somehow I forgot my honorarium. A handful of stick was all I was left with, some promises.

Insufficient funds, I used to think, before a mirk of sleuth came upon me. Insufficient, ungodly, gleemish.

I raged! I raged against the day, the moment, the rage itself. I looked the mirror in the mouth, I laughed.

I am a swamp monster. I imagine a big sister, dark raven haired, long, sweetness and bitterness in correct integration. I imagine her as my swamp hell.

She writes me letters, leaves me notes. She is dead. She wants me to remember how I can live, without connection. She wants me to read letters from somebody who is not alive, so that I can remember that I can write when I am not alive. I do not need to write for the point of connection. I can write outside of hope, without hope, without the aspirations the existence of desire suggests. I can have desire outside of desire, outside of suggestion, outside of suggestiveness, outside of the hope of increasing aliveness.

She rotates in her own dead arms. Her embrace is infinite. Her embrace is my embrace, she reminds me, and I can be hot like her because she gives herself to me. She gives me her dead caress. I kiss her on the lips. There is nothing erotic about this, but there could be.

I can start to want her. I do not need her. I do not want or need anything. But the buzzing starts. I see her start up, in her fast way, in the quick way she can be while drenched in molasses, the flies are dragonflies, and they dance with her and she does not seem to mind but she is in a fit of intensity with these agnimaux that came of nowhere and now are suddenly in flurry or flesh with her, as alive as she and as alive as anything else.

They distract from her beauty, distract from my pain, distract from the lesson and the letters she left me. The godmen and the gleems do not get along. The honorarium was for naught, the stick was what I had. I rescue her from the buzzing but I drown myself. I look again, the entire atmosphere has moved. She is in her arms, again, looking at me. She rotates. Her embrace is infinite. Her embrace is my embrace, she reminds me.

You can have a wound in your leg, near your knee. It doesn’t have to be romantic, like in your heart, such that you are stuck with the metaphor of going through the world and having your heart filled. You can do it this other way too.

You can have a chip in your spleen. You can have a chip in where wonderment is supposed to be, constantly having to fill it. A book, a song, a crush, a city, a God.

I am thinking about Lacan. I do not pretend I understand Lacan. I only read passable French. I do not even know if this post is about Lacan. I like the idea of having broken organs to irrigate in new ways.

But next time you call an old friend, imagine a wound they are filling. Let them fill it. They are safe. Create a whole new fantasy with them.

You can want to want a thing like this

you can want to need a thing like this

you can need to want a thing like this

you can need to not want

you can need to not want to want

you can not need to want or not want

it all can be pretty scary

i am very tired of all this!

I am not tired because I want clarity. I am tired because I need to sleep. These are different kinds of tired!

I am tired of memories that are not mine, created by not me, embedded into me by things I do not understand

You can imagine having a completely different wound than what you currently have. Have completely different needs. Become enchanted by completely different worlds, by completely different people. You can decide that what you are missing is completely different. Bigger. Grander. You can decide that you want to find someone who is missing what you are also missing, newly invented, so that you can orbit each other, and notice the missing thing not being there together.

You can pick a person and imagine a whole entire life with them, as if you know them. You can make yourself remember that this must be a lie because you do not actually know their wound or who they are or anything about them or even yourself when you are with them.

You can stare blankly at a mirror, and consider your reflection to be an other with a lack, responding to you, bonding with you. You can forget for a moment that you are the same person.

You can ask yourself why does the ugly thing keep coming back to your mind over and over. It is not because you do not know about ugliness or find it confusing. It is because you are settling for something in your life and do not know why you are settling. Do potentially know why other people are settling, and they may have good reasons, but you do not know why you yourself are settling.

Go visit that place you never thought you would revisit from your past. Have it percolate your mind again. You are stronger now. Let your smaller weaker self be held in your strength. The younger you would not even be able to believe it.

What to write about…

• People optimized a lot as teenagers, after playing a lot as kids. Then in adulthood they realize that a lot of the optimizations didn’t get them where they wanted to go. And then they stop doing them because things like social network, relationships, where you are in life, what tragedies you’d had to deal with, all seem like they matter a lot more than if the speed it takes you to unload the dishwasher is optimized based on which cabinets you decided the forks are going to be living in. However, something like optimizing your movements by choosing a drawer for your forks to live in based on proximity to the dishwasher can make your life a lot better.

• It does seem like it is working, on experiment day 2 so far, that if you try to eat a lot more protein you do feel very full and very full in a way such that you do not want to eat a lot of random things because you are very full.

  • Things I ate today:

    • an omelette, 2 eggs, egg whites, cottage cheese with chives, a small onion, a small tomato, some Parmesan cheese extra cottage cheese cold on top after it was done. I ate half of this thing, then saved the other half for dinner, because I was really full.

    • For dinner, I ate this other half of this thing, and then a fist-sized amount of a pasta I made, which was orecchiette with mushroom soup that I turned into a sauce, with sausage, and parsley and basil. Then for desert it was a banana yogurt with 20 grams of protein, and some frozen blueberries microwaved on top.

    • And then bits of cookie that were left for me, that were fun, but that I didn’t really need. And then some vitamins and some tea. Probably 1500 - 1600 calories there, which would be a calorie deficit for me without doing any calorie counting. And “being in a calorie deficit without doing much counting” is my goal.

  • Tired of thinking about losing weight again. Into thinking about just getting jacked again. My body rewards me very well when I go to the gym, treat it like a spa, work out whatever I want, do the massage chair at planet fitness, go home, shower, eat whatever I want as long as it is protein and vegetables. I have put in the hours of pain and torment for years, before. The reward is that I actually have good instincts at the gym and when I eat. In some ways I am a n00b. In some ways I am pretty cool and my body is pretty cool. Generally leaning into your strengths is better, I’d found.

• What else. I allowed a Faust reading group to infiltrate my dreams, in a very literal way, as I joined the call while too sick and asleep, stayed on the call…

• I am coming to grips more with my mortality. I feel much less of a need to be self conscious. Writing on the internet is a beautiful thing. The point is not to be found. The point is not to live a life of constant worry about legacy while doing not much about it.

A few things gave me this idea.

1. I wanted to be good at hosting. Caterers usually have a soup that is easy to make for a large number of people reliably, and that is cheap to make

2. I wanted to make meals that would last the week.

3. I wanted to feed somebody who was quite picky but liked most soups.

4. It was mysterious and I wanted to have a better relationship to fire.

I plan to test myself. I will make a recipe book and see if I can actually make the most popular and common soups.

I think I am ready to try to make some of my favorite Vietnamese soups, and other asian soups that can be hard to get except in a large city, and even then you are limited to what is on the menu and the spice portions.

I accidentally replicated the old sweet and sour chicken soup from P.F. Changs a few months ago.

I want to log what I have learned so far, before making soups becomes too obvious and not mysterious at all.

1. I think that what was mysterious was “where the flavors come from.” Because everything is souping together, and there are herbs, and the broth, you can’t “see” all the ingredients. Imagine a blended sauce, like a tikka masala. You can’t see what is in it at all. It is orange goop, and so intuition about “how it becomes that” is limited before making it.

2. Soups, like fish, are not actually alike! Fish, like crabs, are mostly not much related to each other! Many things evolve to be fish, just as many things evolve to be crabs. They have similar features, but most crabs are not related to most other crabs, and most fish are not related to other fish. In a similar way, a soup is something more watery than a stew, but many soups can be less related to each other, than they are related to other things. For example, wonton soup is closer to…wontons out side of the broth, than to other types of soup.

3. The special ingredients matter! A dash of sherry, a dash of vermouth, bay leaves, or a bunch of fresh dill, or a bunch of fresh lemon, or fish juice, makes a really big difference to the flavor. And then each type of soup has different special ingredients.

4. It is not necessarily obvious which kind of cooking does what. For example, browning the onions as part of a mirepoix is different from throwing an onion in for a very quick chicken soup or stock.

5. There are ~*~*~*~mysteries~*~*~*~ around what stock is and making your own stock. I like making my own stock and putting it in my soups because it is more fatty and the collagen in the stock thickens the soup.

6. You can perfect recipes, but you can also get away with not perfecting recipes. If you don’t have your own stock, but have sherry, or don’t have a certain herb, but the sausage you’re putting in has herbs and spices in it, then this will impact your soup.

7. The cooking of individual components matters. For example, if there are meatballs in the soup, the souping process will not magically assemble and season individual meatballs. There will be a recipe and process for the meatballs that will be going into the soup. If you are making a mushroom soup, you cook the mushrooms first, and then you soupify it.

8. That being said, some of the magic does happen during the souping stage. For example, when you are making gumbo, it is not very intuitive what makes the gumbo gumbo-into-itself to truly become a gumbo, or when that happens. The ingredients seem pretty eclectic — chicken, sausage, and shrimp? And yet the gumboing happens when you soup them together.

9. Which stage is “most important” for any specific soup, or which ingredient, or which cooking method, and which elements you can skip for which soups in order to make the soup faster, depends in part on the soup and depends in part on your personal taste.

10. That “ahhhh” feeling varies between people! The magic of a soup in creating that “ahhhh” feeling is indeed achievable, but can be person-specific and mood-specific.

So we know how to get dopamine, but dopamine is not the only feel-good neurotransmitter that exists. What about endorphins? Those heroin-esque painkillers from working out? What about oxytocin? That feeling of affectionate warmth when you pet a cat in the street? What about serotonin? That feeling of contentment from being where you need to be?

Yes indeed, what about serotonin? Why isn’t there a serotonin slot machine?

I wish I could sign up to have a large man with medium-length dark hair stand there and yell at me, “What have you done today such that you are WINNING ALREADY?” and then I am stressed and have to provide him with answers.

Dopamine is like waiting and seeing what you get, getting something good, and getting that dopamine hit.

Serotonin is like the opposite of humiliation. It is the opposite of being defeated in a fight. It is the opposite of feeling low-status and that there is no way out.

Lobsters feel these feelings too. It is a primitive system!

Imagine starting off the day making a phone call, and on the other line, exactly what you wanted to happen, ended up happening.

Maybe this is what having a certain kind of assistant is like. The point is not just to get tasks done but also to start off your day feeling high status by being able to tell somebody to do something. Then this serotonin boost lets you do other tasks during the day in an a better way.

Serotonin helps with general emotional stability, and mental flexibility. It is a good neurotransmitter to have!

Building IKEA furniture increases serotonin.

Honestly if you’re over 30 and still alive that’s pretty good. Pretty high status already.

Serotonin is usually increased in the long-game. Usually you have to do a hard task that increases your social status to feel a serotonin increase. But if you are low in serotonin, then doing those tasks feels really hard.

Just as there are dopamine slot machines everywhere with social media, there are anti-serotonin slot machines everywhere. Getting an email that something you didn’t want automatically renewed is automatically renewed and you just lost some money and certainly can’t get a refund because it was in the terms that you signed that it will renew automatically and there is nothing that you can do about it is a kind of humiliation that can deplete some of your hard-won serotonin just by checking your email in the morning.

And so serotonin is easily lost and hard-won.

One potential hack here is that serotonin increases when you remember ways that you are already winning. The memories count. Also repetitive outdoor chores.

A Serotonin Slot Machine would probably end up having to work like a dopamine slot machine. Imagine a sparkly shiny journal. You go there and you write down your wins. But it tricks you! It would have pretty pictures and pretty prompts, and so you would get that dopamine hit. It would hijack your dopamine system. But it would hijack your dopamine system to then give you serotonin, which you can use to then do other serotonin things.

This confuses me because I really love Masterclass. It is one of my favorite subscription services, and one of my favorite thing that has been done with the internet.

It has some really incredible gems on there. The Armin van Buuren music production masterclass is really amazing for example. He goes through making a song, just shows you all his process and his tools in a pretty detailed way. It feels like kind of just hanging out with him in a room. There is a parasocial element to it, but also you are learning real things from a real master, and so the parasocial element doesn’t feel odd. It feels like having a teacher teach a class online, but the teacher happens to be a quite famous person, and you get to see “behind the lens” of what they are doing.

And then the Marc Jacobs fashion design class is really excellent. He teaches you how to make clothes, both with general principles and with details, and gives really fun assignments.

The different celebrities put in different amounts of effort into the classes. Some are a bit more sparse. Some are mostly interviews about the person’s lfie. But some are incredibly detailed.

The David Lynch masterclass is really good. I am really glad that they got that one recorded before he died. That one is really inspiring. He goes through his process of creativity and filmmaking. He used to be a visual artist before filmmaking, then did a creative project in school once, and then he kept doing films. He didn’t think he would do films because they are so expensive, but the opportunities were coming and he kept doing them. In some ways he had a very straightforward manner of having a career.

Masterclass is really nice to think about when you are really depressed. There are so many of them on such nice topics, recorded so nicely. It is hard not to be charmed by it and become interested in something on there.

I checked out the Serena Williams one, once. I didn’t know I was holding my racket incorrectly for my forehand this entire time. I changed it and my game instantly got a lot better.

I guess it is an antidote to loneliness. Marina Keegan once wrote an essay titled The Opposite of Loneliness. It is how Masterclass makes me feel. It helps that I was around for when it first launched, and it was like the most wonderful thing ever. My first account got set up as a birthday present, and then I didn’t have the heart to cancel it since then. It was a very streamlined, basic, but at that time not too corporate format. It seemed like somebody’s passion project, and if you watch old interviews this did seem to be true. To record these great ideas from these masterful practitioners and make it widely available. It seemed like a lot of work, to convince people to be on the platform and to film everything beautifully.

It feels like if you don’t really know what to do, or don’t really want to do anything, like a really nice place to be to get inspired somehow again. Being near people who give a shit can be really helpful.

The article is, When Mentally Ill Teenagers Ask to Be Put to Death, by Charles Lane.

The doctor contended with his god, about what was ethical or not, and the piece goes into that question. Two things stood out to me about the piece.

An interesting statistic from the article (and this is commonly known as a statistic) is that women attempt suicide a lot more than men do, and men succeed a lot more than women do.

And so being able to go to a doctor’s office for euthanasia significantly increases the odds that a girl or woman succeeds.

Of the 30 people who died in this manner in 2024, 25 of them were women.

This stood out to me. It is structurally important in that if women are allowed to make attempts in a setting that is more controlled and designed to work, that the attempts do lead in the result desired in the moment.

The second thing that stood out to me, is if a person comes into a medical office with this desire, but they are calm enough, and are allowing a professional to take control of the situation…

I do think there ought to be other options. I don’t think that a “rejection” or a “confirmation” of the ask should be the choice that is going on there. The person coming in is trusting for something to be happening. The doctor should not be projecting the extreme duality of the choice back to the person coming in.

In an office, the calm setting, is the place where potential options can be discussed. I really was moved by this thought.

In an emergency room context, if a person comes in or a person’s friend takes a person to an emergency room, the motivation there is to do whatever is possible to keep the person alive. Sometimes there is a violation of autonomy, in the case of being administered medication you might not want to be taking, or involuntary hospitalization.

There are people who are afraid of going to the hospital or getting help at all, because of experiences like this.

However, if somebody is calm, and seemingly in control of their emotions, and goes into a clean office and says that they want to die, should the prioritization tilt in the opposite direction of respecting autonomy? This experiment is not common, of euthanasia being given not for medical pain. It is not legal in most countries. However if it is an experiment, it should be treated as an experiment and more options for life and for treatment should be offered basically starting immediately, even if we do not know if it would help. Maybe we will learn about what helps.

I do believe that if you are in a state of extremity, that an office where you talk about it is a place where options should be given to you.

There is a lot of research being done on this topic in a variety of contexts. Some of the research likely can be put into a context like that.

Who might have wanted to live if given other options in that office? I don’t think that’s the point — they already were given other options and asked about them. Probably not many — or at least not many that would have said so, immediately, that day, that week, that month.

But in terms of being the people who are given power and responsibility to look out for potentialities for hope across time — I think that’s what should be implemented in these spaces, even if we do not know what to do yet.

If you want to get married, you want to be sharing intimacy with one person forever. Even if you are polyamorous, if you are wanting to get married, you want to share intimacy for life with at least one other person.

What makes this easier or harder?

If you want to practice a very specific religion in your household that few people are part of, that makes it harder.

If you want an unusually specific number of children (for example, 0 or 1 on one end, or on the other end, 7+) .

If you have a specific kind of sexual practice you really need or really want, or you get bored (for example, BDSM, or needing somebody much taller than you to get off, or needing somebody with really nice feet).

And so the probabilities of people matching your basic criteria decrease the more needs you have to do the thing you want to do as an explicit part of the intimacy you want to be doing. Imagine the set of people you could, in theory, marry. Every non‑negotiable cuts that pool down.

This doesn’t include things like location, job, allergies, food preferences…

This is just about the non-negotiable elements of intimacy.

For example if you are gay, then marrying someone of the same gender would not be possible. And all those people are eliminated.

And so for the original question — is it easier for some people to get married than others?

I would say so.

• Alice wants: sex once a week, a few kids. A guy slightly taller who makes more money than her. Christian.

• Bethany wants: Somebody who has left Christianity, but wants to honor certain aspects she cares about in spirit in community with other people, no kids, wants to marry a woman close to her age

Bethany doesn’t have “higher standards”; she just mathematically have fewer possible matches.

Generally, the people who “have it harder” notice it, and know that it’s not just “being picky” or “having high standards.” They might have even been married before, or have been engaged, and it did not work because of one of these specific things that they tried hard to overlook.

I think “being hard to marry” in this specific way is much different from “being picky” or “having high standards” because you cannot loosen your standards in order to “have more options” and you cannot “be more open minded to somebody else” by dating a lot and just meeting somebody.

If you really need to wrestle with somebody and feel overpowered to feel loved, that’s going to be hard to change. If you really just like throwing a dinner party once a month and then going to sleep as your social life, that’s going to be hard to change.

Knowing which of these are really important to you, younger, can probably save a lot of trouble around dating somebody you really really like for a long time but who doesn’t meet your basic criteria for a long-term union at the opportunity cost of other long-term unions.

1. You don’t really care what you do and you want a way to find money.

2. You have something you want to do and want to find a way to make money doing that thing.

There are some funny things here that complicate it.

For 1, a lot of people who do this route enjoy the way they make money. Maybe they like building things, or doing ops, or selling things. Or working with a crew that already has money and they want to help them make even more money. Or maybe they are enjoying building a large company that does logistics.

The point is, there is a complication because most of the people that seem like they are doing option 1, are actually just doing what they want to be doing. They do not hate their job. They really like the game. They do not see it as a necessary evil.

For 2, there is a complication in that a lot of people would do the thing they want to do regardless of if it makes them money or not. They really want to be doing that thing. Maybe it’ll make money and maybe not, but making money is not the mission. Sometimes even, monetizing the passion distorts it in a way. Even if they are open to monetization, they are not thinking about how to fit in the market generally speaking.

And so the advice of “noticing if you are person 1, or person 2, and then picking a strategy” doesn’t seem like it actually works super well.

Hmmm alright. What now?

I guess that schema doesn’t work. Are there other trades that you have to pick between?
Because underneath all this, there are a few different trades:

• “I will tolerate a bunch of nonsense in exchange for a lot of money and some interesting problems. The nonsense doesn’t feel bad because it’s in a pipeline that’s generally lucrative, and that feels good.”

• “I will tolerate being broke or precarious in exchange for doing this one specific thing. I really want this specific thing to exist in the world and really want to be the one doing it.”

• “I will tolerate feeling a bit underused or underpaid in exchange for stability and time. The job isn’t making the full use of my talents because I don’t want it to be. I’d rather put my most emotional self somewhere else.”

That seems a little bit real.

It seems both in the original, and in this revised schema, you can’t really escape this question of want. What do you want to have, where do you want to be, what do you want to be doing?

Even if you decide to “pass the marshmallow test” and not do what you want to be doing until later in life, and swallow a lot of annoying stuff now, you still have to choose what that entails — what train you’re trying to ride to get somewhere later, and what the good things later you are hoping to get.

Maybe it can be hard to see because people are generally already making trades, in real time, and not talking much about it. And then when these questions come up, the real question is “which way to turn the knob” on certain parameters.

You can move up or down on:

• money

• autonomy

• social approval

• stability

• personal feeling of aliveness

I am not sure if these are the real parameters.

Maybe there are other things like

• time spent in metabolic stress

• time spent meeting demands of other people

that are really quite important.

Hmmm

One of the ways to write more and better is to write more about the same thing! Often you do not know how to write better, but you do know how to write more and that is by just doing it. You won’t notice that it is better right away. This is part of your training, and training always takes time to notice.

One of the ways to write more is to eliminate the friction between you and writing. I described the basic idea of going to grab a pen. You go to where you know the pen is (to the penholder) and you are excited. You have the idea that you want to write down. You have it in your head. You’re going to the penholder. And then when you get there…there is no pen, or the pens don’t work. And then now you have to redirect the momentum that you had towards finding the pen, and not being too angry at your penholder, which was just there as it should be. It’s not its fault it is empty.

And then you wanted to write whatever it was,

I wanted to suck on his teet, but he was wary. I saw the redness in his eyes, the redness of his face. He presented himself to me, open, to be extracted from. We looked into each other’s tired eyes. Does this feel extractive to you? That I drink from you as if I’m drinking from the universe, filling myself up with you so that the grayness of my vampiric self becomes more colorful for a moment

or whatever it was

anyway you can’t write it down because you don’t have a pen.

This is one of the problems you generally want to recurse on and perfect, as if you are perfecting a soufflé recipe for catering. If you’re going to be doing something over and over, you want it to be a frictionless process, because otherwise the friction appears in every single instantiation of the process.

So how do you recurse on perfecting this feeling? How do you follow this instruction?

First — noticing the friction. This is a big step because if you notice it, you can do something about it.

Sometimes you are laying on the couch, writing, but your legs are in an awkward position, and you’re actually expending energy to keep yourself from falling off the couch because you don’t have the right ottoman for your feet. That would be useful to fix.

Or perhaps the login for your writing app is kind of weird, and this actually annoys you a bit.

Or you are worried about writing in your notebook because when you run out of notebook you won’t have a new notebook.

Nothing is too petty.

All obstacles must be cleared.

Remember, if you are writing a lot, you are repeating these annoyances every time you run the process of trying to write.

And writing is hard enough that you just don’t need this extra baggage.

Be petty. Let it go.

Somebody asked me what I was most proud of in this time block. I said that what I was most proud of involved the speaker himself! Which was an energetic exchange between the two of us about the power of strategy in times of despair, as an antidote to that despair.

Pieces of strategy that have been the most useful to me:

• Having a container that you like, that makes you feel cozy and safe, where you put different things, like your ideas, where they get saved and undamaged that you trust, and know where to go to check when you need that type of object. Everybody knows that if there is a pen-holder in a house, the pen-holder seldom moves. It is kind of heavy and nobody ever has a real reason to move it. And everybody knows the disappointment of needing a pen, diligently going to the pen-holder, and noticing there are no pens. Or that there are many pens, but none of them work. These are the feelings that you are trying to avoid. You want to go to the pen-holder, see pens you like, take the pens you like, and feel good about the entire process. You want to reduce “pen-holder friction” where it is not necessary.
  

• You want to follow the fun. The things that feel like they are fun, or that they feel like they are working, or that do not feel like work — that’s what you want to be doing more of. When it feels fun and joyful and unhinged and unfiltered and relaxing — these are good feelings! You want to be feeling that. This is important for anything long-term. Trust your own inner critic and your own inner project manager — trust they they will still be there even when you are not looking at them, and they will come out and say stuff to you when they feel like it. These are not particularly self-filtering or self-isolating parts of your psyche. They will come out and have meetings with you. Don’t feel like if they aren’t looking over your shoulder for a bit, that this means you are doing something wrong. Probably it means they trust you to do something right without supervision.
  

• Some is better than none. Generally speaking, psyching yourself out and not doing the thing you said you wanted to do, because it feels like it will be so intense and so much fun and so interesting and so what you need to be doing, isn’t the right thing. You maybe shouldn’t do the thing — maybe there are good reasons you are having all those feelings. But maybe you should find some safe small version of the thing to do anyway, or do a safe thing that you already know is safe that you’d done before, rather than being anxious and doing nothing at all.

I finished my presentation, thinking if I finish my presentation, I would know what I want to write about here. But it didn’t help me as much as point to me where there is just a blank spot in my mind where the ideas should be.

I am watching Harrison Ford’s lifetime achievement award acceptance speech, and it is beautiful. I get very touched by actors who find their people in other actors, as he had, and get to work together, and find great joy and humility in being in this kind of engagement with other people.

This is not an experience I have ever had — to be acting with a group of people, for the sake of delivering some kind of result, to ourselves and to an audience. I had done a small amount of acting for the sake of play, but I hadn’t for the sake of digging deep, and creating a shared experience with other people who I am in direct contact with, to then create a shared experience with other people who are in the room, as in stage acting, or not in the room as in film making.

I try to go to a stage performance, of something, every so often. I am overdue.

One of the things about writing every day for this long is that it’s hard to do without any feedback, and you start to notice spots where you do want the feedback.

It does feel, like a beautiful exchange, and it does feel very deep. Even having a few people interested in your work makes a difference.

On one of the days, one of the coaches told me, when it comes to editing and finishing it up, to think about my already-existing readers who have been kind to me. It has been very interesting, to wake up and see a notification of somebody liking one of my posts that has an exceedingly random title.

What is missing, from this presentation, emotionally?

I was just thinking, about how interesting it has been to look at my own material, more than one time, in various contexts. I look at that picture of the lava hot springs I wanted to perfect more, and seeing the imperfect version in another setting still does something for me. I just made this presentation today, and it is a recursion to see it here on this blog post, especially given there are screenshots of other blogposts in the presentation.

I just had this thought, when I googled it, and saw this thought written out as the first link:

It is a simple enough answer, but it can be surprising how hard it is to get to that answer. You can add emotional layers by going through another iteration of thinking through the emotional layers. Like pressing a “reroll” button.

On Saving Energy:

This ended up being very important. If you are writing every day for five months, there will be many days when you are thinking about other things, doing other things, or otherwise can’t really write. I think that weirdly it was easier to write when I myself was sick, than when someone I really cared about wasn’t doing well and my attention was on helping them or otherwise keeping life things more stable while I was distracted with caring about them.

And so there were a few techniques for saving energy that I relied on.

• Just write it down, without editing it in your brain.

  • If writing is “saying something” then editing it right after you’d already said it means doing a lot more extra work.

  • If you are writing every day, regardless of other things you are doing, “saving energy” writing is important, and spending too many cycles just to say the same thing you wanted to say the first time means a lot of energy is spent.

• Write about what you are already thinking about.

  • This way you do not have to have another process of “coming up with ideas.” You can have a process like this and it can help, but if you are not inclined to maintain a list of ideas because you feel “saturated” in some way, then the process of writing to “clear” the saturated feeling is a perfectly good use

    • If you don’t like what you are thinking about, think about other things

On some days when I didn’t feel like writing anything, it was because I was overwhelmed with some information I wanted to think about or some feelings I wanted to process. One of my favorite things about having written every day was the feeling of surprise at how many things would not have been written ever because I did not want to write. Actually being forced to just write down what I was thinking about that day, because I owed a blogpost that day, mean that the most interesting thing for me that day ended up getting written down.

Perhaps there was some mild dishonesty here and there about what was “most interesting” in that I did not have an explicit goal of writing every day what was the most authentically interesting thing that day. It did not occur to me to keep this as a practice, until now, when I am writing this. And so whatever dishonesty occurred there was as a skill issue.

For example, today I am writing about writing. I am not writing about the shame of drinking, or about the woman with the sparkly brain that I hung out with this weekend, who wrote a book I like, and I like her a lot and her sparkly brain. But also I was not thinking about these things all day today. I could have been thinking about these things if I pushed myself, but I was thinking about this presentation I have to give about writing.

To be Continued in Part 2!

In all honesty though, the whole point of the project was to try to write a book from the beginning by working on it a little bit every day without worrying too much about it. I wanted to see what would come out. I am currently very happy with what came out, and doing the final “polishing” step in a very stressed way would be antithetical to the original goals for the project, which were not quite to finish a book, but to finish a book without any unnecessary strains.

I suppose straining about the presentation would be an unnecessary strain against the spirit of the thing. And so I have to give the presentation and prepare for it without any strain! Ah!

Tasshin is the person who inspired me to think about the muses, and to ask them directly for what they want of me and what is needed. When I asked, they suggested that I not strain this final push, and that it should not be a push, and that it can be pretty chill. This was very meaningful to me.

I don’t know where the meme is about the “final sprint” or the “final polish.” I guess if there is a deadline, making sure everything is really good before the final submission is the general ethos. School and college were like this too.

But for actually long projects the “final sprint” isn’t much of a sprint and is more of a continuation of the project, and so treating it as a new kind of category doesn’t make much sense. And maybe it wants to be sprinted and maybe it wants something else to be happening.

He asked me to ask what my project wants to be happening. I said I felt a sense of large agora bunnies, and that I am just supposed to hang out with them and my project. Everything I want in it is already there. He asked what this means practically speaking, and I said that it means that whenever I feel some strain or annoyance about for example formatting some heading, instead of “pushing through the pain” or ignoring the pain to tap into a certain momentum, I should…not. This is the energy of, stopping and cleaning my screen if it’s bothering me versus…not…doing that because I’m on a roll. The energy that came to mind was one where “being on a roll” wasn’t…what was needed.

This idea that endings do not have to be done a “certain way” and there is no real reason for them not being just as flowy as the beginning is kind of mindblowing to me. I was always somebody who assumed that a middle, a beginning, and an end had different strategies and goals, like in chess. But this is probably a mindset that has held me back over the years that I would like to change.

So…now what.

After the call I sat down to work, with the contents of the call in working memory cache, and this is what came out.

I made this cover today, which is an AI visualization combining a few of my actual real-life watercolor paintings. I like that it spun them up into a world all together, and how many original elements the rendering is very faithful to.

There was no real reason for me choosing these paintings, other than I liked them and sent them to someone today for a different reason, noticing for the first time that they have similar elements, and they are colorful.

This is not at all what I had imagined my cover to look like. I’d imagined something much more basic, because I imagined I would make it myself in canva, and not with AI. I imagined it would be something like this:

But after talking to Tasshin, you know, why not. I like that crazy picture. I like how unrestrained it is. If some smart person later tells me it’s completely deranged, at least I had fun with it for a while.

The key words from our call was to allow myself to be unfiltered, because that’s how the fun will come out. The world needs more people having fun and being unfiltered.

And now the more overtly heaven and hellish version. This amuses me because these kinds of edits are the kind I would make in real life too! I often add more darker colors in the bottom to add some weight to the painting, and then some last light strokes in pencil and some random lifting of the watercolor (the new sunbeams). As in real life, I cannot tell if it is overworked or not.

And so I drink Patron now, neat. I can drink a lot of it. People think I am drunker than I am because I bibble babble. It is true. I bibble babble. But I bibble babble because I want to be bibble babbling. That is why I got drunk in the first place…to clear my mind.

There is better tequila out there. I like the better tequila more. But I like that I can get Patron anywhere.

Things I like.

“There are no good books these days.” There are a lot of good books. A Visit From the Goon Squad is one of them, you can befriend a whole friend group in Los Angeles and adopt their troubles. You can check out the graphic novel for V For Vendetta and feel sexy. You can read a graphic novel about the Holocaust (Maus) and feel sad.

“If I read books there isn’t anybody to talk to people about them.” So much of what is happening on social media is people reading something and then talking to someone about what they just read. Social media is not a definitive nail in the coffin of people reading anything. That doesn’t make sense. What they are doing is tons of micro reading and micro sharing. It’s bad book clubs. It’s not the total destruction of all book clubs ever existing anywhere ever.

What else

Starter plants. Who ever said you have to graduate beyond starter plants? You can just have five Pothos. You can have ten pothos. You can have 17 spider plants. You can have 20 succulents. You can have herbs that you eat so that you don’t have to feel bad that it’s dead, because you ate it. Nobody is being the plant police. The people who do not understand plants just like that you have plants. The people who understand plants also just like that you have plants.

I like mechanical keyboards. If you find one that you really like, that makes you really happy, that is really awesome. There is no reason not to have a mechanical keyboard if you can afford one and you really love one. Why not? The advice it to have shoes you really like, a mattress you really like, a toothbrush you really like. If you’re interacting with it all the time, every day, why not have a keyboard you like? They are a lot of fun. No you don’t have to do crazy hobbyist things like customize every single key…though you could.

Puzzles. I wrote about liking puzzles already here.

Lamps. I like lamps.

This can be a reasonable way to recruit things, people’s help, favors, or just energy into your life that can help you with the things that are not free for you to be doing.

Let me give you some examples.

For some people, listening to people’s problems in a state of acceptance feels very natural and easy. It is “free.” For somebody else, this can be very tiring and straining, and they have to go recover their energy in some way.

For some people, doing mechanical repetitive work feels “free.” It feels not tiring and costs them nothing to be doing. For other people this is exausting.

For some people, solving math problems is fun and easy. For other people it is tiring and hard.

See what I mean?

If you know what kinds of things are very easy for you, you can do trades with people. If you are listening to people’s problems and they are hanging out with you, they might be more than happy to do some mechanical work for you or solve some problems for you that are easy for them.

I have found that a lot of people aren’t very good at noticing both what is “free” for them to be doing and appreciating its value to other people, because it feels free to them, and in noticing what kinds of things they could ask other people for, because they are easy for the other people.

I’d also noticed that people can be pretty bad at noticing which energy aspects of themselves can be hard for other people to metabolize, and which ones are pretty easy. I have found people misidentify what the “hard thing” is about themselves pretty often, and consider the ways around them to be pretty limited. I think this is a shame, and people who can make themselves easier to coordinate with by doing something with what’s hardest about them, even improving on it by 20%, can make a really big difference for other people.

One of the reasons I like the concept of doing free stuff is that as easy as the free stuff feels, making progress on your “hard” stuff can be really hard to get help with or get awareness of. You can ask people who are in a good mood because you helped them to chip away at your hard problem somehow, or keep you accountable on your goals around yourself working on the hard problem. You probably won’t know exactly what would be helpful for you, what would feel good, or what you even need to have more meta-awareness about, but when someone is happy with you and wants to help you out and when you’re in a good mood because you are feeling competent is a good time to chip away at something hard.

People have asked me before, “why are women are so neurotic.” I am not sure I accept this as a starting premise, but I will start with something of an answer. In America at least, there are a few acceptable female archetypes to strive towards: The homecoming queen, the perfect mom, and the perfect sex kitten. Serena van der Woodsen, Martha Stewart, or Ariana Grande.

What do all of these archetypes have in common? They have different values on the surface, as if they are about completely different things, but each of them aims at some kind of perfection, and a perfection at some sort of performance. Performance at public hair, make up, walking and smiling for the homecoming queen. Performance at having nice children and a nice household for the mom. Performance at all kinds of niche sexual acts for the sex kitten. Not only are all these performances, they are all public performances. And they are all performances tailored to impress some group—the student body, other moms and other women, and single, horny men.

Not only are these all public performances, they aren’t even public performances to please the general public. They’re hyper-tailored for some specific sub-demographic and so are taken to an even greater unreasonable extreme than they would be if certain aspects were subdued to please everyone. And these public performances aren’t to be a “good student,” a “good mom,” or a “good sex kitten.” The key word there is perfect.

I am not sure where each of these came from—though I have my theories.

But this brings me to the title of this letter—failure modes. If you are merely a “good” mom, under this schema, you are not actually good enough. If you are a pretty girl in high school, but otherwise a “loser,” then you are not good enough. If you can do a split but refuse anal…well…what is the point of you even?

This is real. I’ve met people who are distraught about the above and who have felt these standards define entire periods of their lives. And they aren’t particularly rule-abiding or particularly self-conscious. This stuff runs deep in our social machinery, and there are actual concerns here. If you sleep with one guy and tell the wrong person about it, now you’re one entire type.

If you forgot to pick up your kid from soccer that one time, nothing happened but Sharon will still tell everyone you’re a shit mom. If you have no kids and work an office job, you’re an uptight she-man. If you do have kids, then you’re a lame housewife who hasn’t made anything of herself. If you have no kids but your boyfriend pays your rent, now you’re a prostitute. If you’re actually a prostitute, well, then if you get murdered it’s not just fair game, it’s funny.

If you’re hot, it feels like you can’t win. If you’re not hot, then you really can’t win, so what’s the point of playing?

I have a suspicion that this is why we have been seeing so many of what people might call “failure modes” of female archetypes. Fuck Martha Stewart, let’s wear spikes and be Billie Eilish! Except Billie is a teenager trying to survive. People cannot meet these impossible standards, meeting them partially does not seem to count, and so people enter a “failure mode.”

Here we see the “fat is beautiful” crowd. The fetishization of clumsiness in Twilight. The cutification and cultification of mental illness on YouTube. We see women saying they hate literally all men, or shaving their heads, or cutting themselves up with extreme body modification.

There are cool and good versions of these of course. But some people might call these “failed” femininity. There can be failed versions, but also successful versions, but I think there is something more interesting, which is a concept of having better failure modes.

A “failure mode of a failure mode” would be something like being presented with alternatives to perfectionism archetypes that are extremely stupid and so your short-circuiting out of society leads you to unchecked and limitless despair.

That is the failure mode of a failure mode, because that is not the point of a failure mode. The point of a failure mode is not to just fail, and keep failing forever until you waste yourself in the dirt. The point of a failure mode is to catch when something is going quite off, and then to get back to processing as usual. A properly set up failure mode is not limitless failure. In fact, by allowing some failure, it prevents total disaster. It sets a floor on failure, and ideally, a mechanism for bouncing back.

We need better failure modes. As a model, I suggest looking at the failure modes for men. Men also have unattainable standards (James Bond), but they also have failure mode archetypes that do not suck. If you can’t be James Bond, you can be Sterling Archer. If you can’t be Batman, you can be Deadpool. If you’re not an amazing dad, you’re still the decent dad in a flannel shirt throwing a tennis ball to his kid off the front porch.

I propose that there is one standard concept for both men and women that is pretty good. If society is feeding you bullshit, we have an archetype for fucking out that does not suck: The Pirate.

What does the female conception of the pirate look like? The point of the pirate is that the pirate is not perfect, and the pirate does not meet all societal expectations. But the pirate is also not hopped up on LSD in a dark alley cutting up his own testicles and streaming it on YouTube. The pirate is not nihilistic. The pirate values his life. The pirate has friends and is a perfectly acceptable mating companion. The despair of the pirate has a floor. The pirate meets baseline competence and mental and physical fitness standards—perhaps more so than the average in proper society. The pirate also has a moral code that is at least 70% based on reality and real dealings with people. The pirate is not perfect, but the pirate is okay. In fact the pirate, in his endeavor to really think about what is really truly good, may end up being more competent and virtuous than even the best of society.

But the pirate famously has vices. Back to that line—tell me what your copes are, and I will tell you what you are. The pirate drinks his rum. Maybe he has sex, or watches porn, or likes poking pufferfish for fun. Maybe he spends too much time on cards or Twitter. His vices may be intentional choices, or they may be the only way he can get any work done, or they may be entirely pleasure.

He sometimes takes these vices pretty far, and they might not be completely harmless—they may on occasion harm people, but he does not let it actually destroy people or himself. I would not say his life is balanced in the conventional sense, but no single vice tips the scale such that the vice stops being a vice and becomes his life. That is why having vices is actually fine: you cannot get rid of all vices. The only way to fully expel them from your stomach is by redefining them as no longer vices—but as just normal things you are allowed to do all the time and frame your life around. Or even worse—you get used to vice so much that you redefine vice as virtue.

What would be the equivalent of acceptable female vices? Is she currently allowed any? Right now, women are allowed to do whatever they want. But the traditional woman does not drink. She does not smoke. She does not have sex outside marriage. She does not watch porn. She is a healthy weight, maybe pleasantly plump without being obese. She smiles a lot, controls her emotions, is not too loud. She creates warmth and hominess wherever she goes. She follows the law. She has sex with her husband without wanting to have sex with anybody else, and she certainly is not a nymphomaniac.

What can the pirate woman do, that isn’t drinking herself into oblivion alone in her house, or burning her boyfriend’s house down, or becoming heroin-chic, to let off some steam and keep herself sane?

The mainstream modes of behavior are either 1. Be a perfect version of either sex object, teenager, or mother, 2. Be whatever the perverted puppeteer men in the media decide is the latest fad for their flesh-puppets (Like heroin-chic), 3. Less common, but be trad.

We need to give them another credible option to blow off steam, have some fun, and have an aspirational archetype that is attainable. The reason the pirate works is because it actually appeals to people’s idealistic aspirations. It actually does serve as a reasonable guide for behavior, like a compass of 80% accuracy.

The traditional companion to the male pirate was the female wench who waits for him to come home. Well—what the hell is she doing in the meantime? Cleaning tables—forever, faithfully? Where is her compass leading her?

I’ll tell you this much. Virtue be damned—I’m not waiting around.

“Americans sometimes would do these very large puzzles, with very tiny pieces, and at the end, put a glue on top to glue all the pieces together and put them in a picture frame.”

We thought about this together, mesmerized, captivated, at this strange Americanism, and marveled in awe and appreciation at this very difficult hobby.

I ended up liking puzzles because they are a nice metaphor for problem-solving generally and also they themselves are…a puzzle to solve.

What had compelled me to make my first 1,000-piece puzzle was having bought a puzzle. It was beautiful edibles — edibles as in, edible flowers — a puzzle from a bespoke little cooking-books store in New York City — and I thought it was a funny joke to have this object in my home.

And so in having the puzzle, I had a puzzle to do. But first I wanted an easier puzzle, and so I bought an 250-piece “trash can creatures” puzzle, which I bought in a museum and really liked, which was a puzzle of a little skunk and a possum and a pigeon friend.

It took me two nights to do that one, but it could have been one night or three nights depending on desired level of intensity. The 1,000 piece puzzle took a lot longer. Since then, I have done a few interesting puzzles, including a 3-dimensional puzzle ~*~vase~*~.

I got to feel myself have different emotions as I pass the puzzle sitting on the table. The emotions when I just got started were different emotions than in the middle stages and in the endgame.

Feeling the different emotions across time was very important. You could just me mindlessly moving your hands, sorting pieces by color. You could have your mind wandering. You would be actively scanning and trying to figure something out. You could be bringing different levels of intensity to different aspects of it.

There is boredom, frustration, annoyance, joy, greed, delight. All kinds of emotions come up around this one puzzle.

Knowing that the problem is bounded makes it feel like feeling the emotions will have a payoff — that the frustration and annoyance now will probably still mean joy later — and not that much later. That’s why a puzzle with a few pieces missing is such a loathed thing — the rules of the game change and your frustration might just be unbounded.

It took me about a month to finish that first puzzle, and then I did end up doing the glue thing that my grandmother and I fawned about.

I would alternate between doing some kind of 3D puzzle, and doing a more classic flat puzzle.

The flat ones — there are easier and harder ones that are 1,000 pieces. If you want to try one, I would advice finding one that has a picture you would like looking at for a long time. That’s what I did. I liked looking at my edible flowers and liked looking at my trashcan creatures. They were also easier because they had a lot of distinct shapes, unlike for example a Van Gogh puzzle.