The Mandelbear's Musings

10:44 am - Done yesterday (20090704)

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Yesterday was very calm and restful, but I ended up feeling rather disappointed with myself for having gotten so little done yesterday and Friday.

We blew off a block party two streets East because Colleen wasn't up for going out in the heat, and I wasn't up for making a salad for the potluck. I did go for a walk in the neighborhood later in the afternoon, taking a perverse pleasure in discovering that we weren't the only house with weeds and grass growing between the stones of our front-yard rock garden.

I also called pocketnaomi - she'd invited me to do so, just as I was heading out for walkies, but it's still unusual enough for me to call anyone that it's worth noting.

I did all the cooking; the beef paprikash came out particularly well. 3tsp sweet paprika, 1tsp hot, an onion, and half a bottle of red wine with about 1.5 pounds of beef boneless short ribs. Yum.

Got a little work done on steve.savitzky.net, adding a top-level style sheet that sets the background color to match the background in my Kelly Freas portrait -- basically a sort of very light brown. Lower-level pages still need the style link, and a lot of Makefiles still need fixing. But it's a tiny bit of progress in a time when doing anything beyond mere survival seems to be more than I can manage.

While puttering around in the office (mostly staring at things and not getting anything much done) I ran across my very first Logitech mouse -- it's roughly as old as Chaoswolf, and has a 25-pin serial-port connector. I'm saving it for nostalgic reasons, but decided there was no reason to keep the rest of the serial-port mice. Then I ran across a picture of a rather young Chaos with Colleen's mom, taken on a San Francisco Bay tour boat probably somewhere between 1992 and 1996. I started getting all sad and nostalgic, and tottered off to bed a little after midnight to collect some badly-needed snuggle.

10:24 am - Done yesterday (20090703)

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As it turns out, I don't appear to have done very much yesterday. A nice long walk by the creek, dinner at home (cooked by the YD), a long drive with Colleen.

A good day. Relaxing.

08:13 am - Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to gridlore, it_aint_easy, figmo!!!!!! Have a great one!!!

And, of course, to the US's Declaration of Independence.

05:33 pm - Good dog seeking a good home

My good friend pocketnaomi is preparing to move, and desperately needs a new home for her dog. The people who originally offered to take her backed out. I've met Juliet; she's a sweet, sweet dog and deserves a good home. More details in this post -- please reply there if you can help.

11:41 am - Done yesterday (20090701)

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A very good day. I woke up to find myself still happy from having finished writing my presentation about git the night before. And it went well; it was planned as a half-hour talk, but ran to nearly an hour with a lot of good audience interaction. Go me! It helps that git is just plain cool; I expect to have the presentation up on the web soon.

The Cat and I went to the Valley Fair mall for our evening out. Parts were almost deserted; I could walk fast enough for exercise, and Colleen could keep up. Delightful.

I'm going to have to re-investigate LJ's set of pre-defined moods; I'm almost completely unfamiliar with the "better-than-OK" range.

10:39 pm - Done yesterday (20090701)

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I was very unsocial yesterday -- fortunately it was a very lightly-populated Wednesday -- and spend basically all afternoon and evening working on a presentation for work (due 1pm today).

I finished it around 11:30; it took me until sometime around midnight to notice that I'd been unusually happy for the last half-hour. I was even laughing, at comparatively small things.

08:41 am - Done yesterday (20090630)

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Colleen decided to sort through some of the boxes of stuff from her (former) desk in the bedroom, and ran across a Bear Bell. It says so on the tag. I wasn't aware of the fact that I needed one.

My watch battery died. I'm wondering whether to replace the battery, replace the watch, or join the growing multitude of people who use their cell phone as a pocket-watch.

I finished configuring my work desktop computer, but it's not talking to me this morning. So much for working from home, not that I was planning to anyway. I did, however, find the website with the source code for my favorite calendar program, complete with instructions for building it in Lenny. I win.

07:45 am - Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to bercilakslady!!! Have a great one!!

09:26 pm - Done yesterday (20090629)

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I do NOT like this "getting enough sleep" business. I'm not getting enough done.

I rarely remember dreams; this one must have come in just as I was waking up. Colleen was trying to give me detailed directions on making a fruit salad, only the details didn't make sense, like putting aluminum foil on the stove and using it as a cutting board. Very weird. The more general insight I got out of it is that it's better to tell someone what needs to be done, and let them figure out how to do it, and ask questions if they get stuck.

The high point, really, was finding out that Colleen used the toilet in the back bathroom (which I'd installed grab rails on over the weekend) rather than the commode. Major win.

Link of the day is this paper on copyfraud -- claiming copyright over material in the public domain.

I upgraded my work desktop to Lenny, finally. When I left yesterday it was only semi-usable, but I would have missed an appointment if I'd stayed to fix the ssh host keys.

09:03 am - Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to kendaer!!! Have a great one!!

10:48 pm - Done yesterday (20090628)

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Colleen went off to Menlo Park with Bev and her daughter C, and found me gluten-free pretzels at Draeger's. Yay!

I spent the day puttering, and did not take a walk. It's been scorching out.

A quiet sort of day. OK, but not special. OK is better than many of the alternatives, though; I'll take it.

10:21 am - Gadget, um...

... not lust, exactly. More like perverse fascination.

There, I Fixed It.

From this post by gmcdavid.

09:04 am - Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to djbp!!! Have a great one!!

11:41 am - Done yesterday (20090627)

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I made dinner in the crock pot yesterday, at Colleen's direction, because the YD didn't want to. She also didn't go to the AJA concert because she didn't want to miss a call from her boyfriend.

I took a walk by Los Gatos Creek, but cut it back to an hour not because I was tired or sore but because it was too damned hot. My mind was rather unfocussed -- too many things to think about -- but it was a good walk anyway. It's going to be another scorcher today; I'll probably walk in the evening when it's cooler.

Colleen and I went to the Alexander James Adams concert in the evening - an all-acoustic gig (so he didn't have to drive). Good, as usual. I don't think it got much publicity; it was even more thinly-attended than the last one. He mentioned the possibility of doing "internet concerts" -- I think it's a good idea.

I made a little progress fighting entropy at the Starport, and got grab bars installed on the back bathroom toilet so Colleen can use it without assistance.

09:54 am - Quote of the day

Colleen (singing): I'm in love with a big blue frog / A big blue frog loves me...

Me: Hey, you didn't tell me you had a new sweetie!

Colleen: *laughs*

09:50 am - It's hot out there

Colleen's going to be hanging around the house all day, so if you're near the Starport and want to borrow a cup of air conditioning and internet, come on over.

09:28 am - Done yesterday (20090626)

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The walker holder for Colleen's scooter arrived -- it should be very convenient for travel, though it would be one more thing to take off and put back on for the car. Especially good for places like hotel lobbies, airports, museums, or anyplace else where she might need a bathroom break or to get up and walk for any other reason away from home.

Signed up for giving a half-hour talk at work about the git distributed version control system. Since I wasn't being nearly as productive at work as I want to be. *wry grin* Next Thursday. Eeep. I also found out that the deadline for the demo I've been working on is sometime in late July. Since it dovetails nicely into my longer-term project, it's not as though the time will be wasted in any way.

And the need for examples will give me an excuse to finally convert some of my websites to git from cvs, which I've wanted to do for at least a couple of years now.

Colleen had a touch of a stomach bug in the morning, and spent most of the day dozing in her chair subsisting on ginger ale and toast. She was fine by evening, and asked for a bowl of ice cream when I came to bed after my bath. And I was able to make her laugh, and give her some good snuggle and late-night conversation.

Good day, on the whole.

08:12 am - Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to filbo and lisa_marli!!!! Have a great one!!!

Current Mood: okay

09:37 pm - A quiet evening along the River

Colleen has gone to bed early, after spending most of the day dozing in her chair and recovering from what appears to have been a stomach bug. I'm feeling calm, but a little lonely.

I need to get back to my River posts soon. (There are some other things I need to get back to, including website work and some long-delayed upgrades, but I'll talk about those in a separate post or three.) It's been a long time, and there have been developments (both in my life and others') that ought to be mentioned, and a big backlog of articles, some on topics that I hadn't even thought of half a year ago.

It's time.

09:15 am - Done yesterday (20090625)

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Found out yesterday morning that Colleen can now stand up for about a minute without holding on to anything! Makes getting dressed a lot easier. She'll be walking with a walker for quite a while yet.

Last night was our first "weekly evening out" -- we went to the Pruneyard, a local shopping mall that we used to enjoy. It's changed a lot, of course. We made note of a couple of interesting-looking restaurants, and had a nice dinner of assorted meze at the little Greek place. Went for a drive afterwards.

We also went to Barnes & Noble; the original plan was just to window-shop, but how could we possibly resist a cookbook with the title The Veganomicon? I picked up an on-sale copy of Body Language by Julius Fast; probably not all that useful, but maybe worth reading. Anyone familiar enough with it to know where the pitfalls are?

Pidgin 2.5.7 fixes the bug caused by Yahoo's protocol change; there seem to be some minor issues with the latest sources, but it runs fine from the build tree. It does not build on Etch -- there are some missing dependencies. One more reason to upgrade my desktop box at work.

Current Mood: okay

10:06 am - Done yesterday (20090624)

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I got my walk in early, while waiting for Colleen to get out of a doctor's appointment. Scheduling them for early on Wednesday helps a lot, it turns out. A little short, but basically a good walk. At least it wasn't too hot out.

Spent the rest of the day working from home, basically saving both commute time and lunch/walk time to get in a full day. It worked pretty well, and I finally got around to setting up an ssh port-forwarding tunnel through my firewall so that I can run GUI applications, rsync, and the like from home. (Geeky details downstream.)

I was surprised and delighted to get a call from Callie -- normally she only calls me if I've called her earlier and left voice mail.

It was rather painful to hear the YD crying because she couldn't talk to her boyfriend. I can understand why I shut down my empathy for so long.

Wednesday was lightly attended, and ended early.

07:27 am - Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to autographedcat and the gorgeous and multi-talented jenkitty!!!!! Have a great one!!!

07:14 pm - Done yesterday (20090623)

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A couple of days ago I realized that the tree on the hill behind the building where I work is extremely climbable. Yesterday on my walk (cut short due to schedule pressure) I took advantage of that fact, combined with the picnic table somebody had thoughtfully put underneath it. Fun, even though I stopped at the first branch because there were people working in the vicinity.

I've been working in that building for nearly 17 years. The tree has been there all that time. It's been a lot longer than 17 years since I last climbed a tree.

I gave my brother a "happy birthday" call later in the afternoon (i.e. after dinner, East Coast time). He was glad to hear from me -- I need to call him more often.

In the evening I had a longish talk, or rather a series of talks over the course of the evening, ending with a couple of things resolved and some wonderful snuggle before we both somewhat reluctantly went to sleep.

Colleen is lonely a lot of the time, and doesn't get nearly enough quality time with me. Now that she has the scooter, we can go walking together again for the first time in maybe a decade. We're planning to spend Thursday investigating some of our favorite local shopping malls, and take at least one walk together on the weekends.

It's been a pretty good week so far.

Current Mood: content

08:11 am - Done yesterday (20090622)

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As I mentioned upstream, an email from cflute left me cheerful and optimistic, a very unusual sensation for me. It was a good day in spite of getting comparatively little accomplished.

Well, OK, I took a walk, and got the quilt washed, and a bulk CD order shipped, and ordered a walker holder for Colleen's scooter. But still.

10:40 pm - Odd feeling

After reading a wonderfully cheering email from cflute just before noon, I went out for a walk. I found myself walking considerably faster than I have for weeks -- maybe months. At one point, walking down the back hill to the pond, I realized that I was feeling both cheerful and optimistic. It was unfamiliar, and very heady.

I can see how one could get addicted to that combination. The trick for me will be making it more addictive -- and more accessible -- than depression, which has been my drug of choice for decades.

08:31 am - Done yesterday (20090621)

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It was a quiet Father's Day yesterday; not much at all got done. I'm not going to worry about it much. The YD made gluten-free chicken noodle soup for dinner.

A friend seems to have taken the advice I gave her yesterday. Given the amount of advice on relationships I've been handing out lately, I'm afraid my self-image as a geeky old curmudgeon may have suffered irreparable damage. I have no idea what to replace it with. Comfort zone? What's that?

That's the trouble with fashion: as soon as you find something that fits comfortably, they stop making it and you have to go looking for another brand. Chi pants, Keen hiking boots, loner, curmudgeon, ... They just don't make 'em like they used to. Anyone else remember having to buy new shoelaces because they wore out faster than the shoes?

Current Mood: awake

09:02 pm - Father's day

I'm sitting in the living room next to Colleen, but I'm oddly lonely and melancholy. My 40th college reunion was this weekend -- there was no way I could possibly have gone. One of my kids is nearly a thousand miles away, as are some of my closest friends.

And my Dad died a decade ago. This is one of the days in the year when I miss him most keenly.

08:36 pm - Hardware wars

In order to get the grab bars installed on the back bathroom's toilet, one must first remove the toilet seat. Which was installed at least a decade ago. With steel bolts. Can you say corrosion? Right. Not really a good time to discover that the household's supply of WD-40 ran out several years ago.

I won this round. The final battle was fought with vice grips and a 12" pipe wrench. I need a new pair of bolts.

05:37 pm - Madness

Went to OSH, my favorite hardware store (even after being bought out by Sears a couple of years ago), in search of I knew not what. Drawn by the eldritch call of gadget lust.

Power squids now come in green!

I bought three.

Current Mood: content

11:44 am - Done yesterday (20090620)

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Yesterday was a good day. Relaxed, contented, even happy much of the time. A lot better than "ok". It had very little to do with anything I actually did, as far as I can tell, and more to do with bad things not happening, a long walk, and a talk with a friend. I'll take it.

I even figured out, by observation, why my bluetooth headset keeps disconnecting from my phone -- it turns out to be shielding from my hand when I'm holding the headset. It also helps to have the headset on the same side of my body as the phone. It seems to be most comfortable in my left ear, so the best place for the phone is my shirt pocket.

We went to dinner at Arya. The YD, when asked, requested the Elephant Bar, but the two local instances were maxed out and Colleen and I were hungry. Arya worked.

For my Father's Day dinner tonight I asked for something I didn't have to cook or use a credit card for.

When we came home for a bathroom break (and to drop off the YD) before going for a drive, Colleen walked (with the walker) from the car to the back bedroom and back. It's about 75ft each way.

But the best part was the walk. It took me a long while -- half an hour or so -- to work myself up to leaving the last verse and chorus of "The Mary Ellen Carter" on cflute's voicemail, but I was rewarded a little while later with a good, long talk. Win.

09:07 am - Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to jilara and julesong!!!! Have a wonderful birthday -- you have the longest day of the year to enjoy it in!!

Current Mood: content

11:47 am - Done yesterday (20090619)

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I got up at an almost-reasonable time yesterday morning, for once, but still didn't get much done.

I'm still finding it deeply weird to be the person some of my friends want to talk to about their problems. I think that of all the things I've found out about myself in the last year and a half, that's by far the strangest and least-expected.

09:57 am - You know you've been depressed recently...

... when your automatic answer to "just ok?" is "That's a big improvement, believe me."

08:40 am - Done yesterday (20090618)

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Basically OK. Any day that includes laughing madly at xkcd (you may have to follow links from the comments if you don't get it), a walk, progress (even small progress) at work, and snuggling with Colleen has to be basically OK.

Add some possibly-good news about my ailing sister-in-law (and the fact that my brother was happy to hear from me -- I think he may be as phone-phobic as I am) and a pleasant, low-key conversation with my sister-of-choice, and it was a good day.

I came very close to crying -- a few shaky, quiet sobs -- in Colleen's arms; a mixture of joy and relief, I think. Not sure relief from what, exactly, but I'm not complaining. The only things I have to complain about were my late start and the hot weather. Minor.

09:49 pm - Stuffalanches

My office at the Starport has just suffered its second stuffalanche this month; this time it was a cascade of envelopes from the charity and investment piles. *Sighs* The previous one was mostly magazines, and still hasn't been picked up -- it mostly went under the counter around the non-functional computer.

It's all going to take a lot more than 15 minutes to clean up, I'm afraid; there's a lot of triage that still needs to be done. Later.

02:54 pm - Is it just me?

... or has anyone else been having trouble connecting to Yahoo Messenger in the last couple of days?

I've checked, and I can still log in on yahoo.com and flikr.com; my password hasn't changed. I'm using pidgin, for what it's worth; Adium on the mac seems to have the same problem.

ETA: it's mysterious, but yahoo has a fix posted

replacing scs.msg.yahoo.com as the server in the Pidgin accounts setup with the IP address of a Yahoo server, say, 66.163.181.189, fixes it. You can choose any of the yahoo servers below:

66.163.181.179 - 66.163.181.180 - 66.163.181.181 - 66.163.181.182 - 66.163.181.183 - 66.163.181.166 - 66.163.181.167 - 66.163.181.168 - 66.163.181.169 .......... etc. ...170....171....172...

Then simply disable your Yahoo account after doing the replacement, and then re-enable it and it will work.

Current Mood: annoyed

09:48 am - Done yesterday (20090617)

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It was a pretty good day, though not muich happened. I took a walk at lunchtime, and sang the two Bears, Wheelin', The River, and Riverheart rather late in the evening since we had a guest who hadn't heard them. I think there may have been a couple of other people who hadn't heard me sing "Riverheart", judging from the surprised looks I got.

I still do not like having to get 8 hours or more of sleep. I feel better, but get a lot less done. Including some important things that make me unhappy not to have done.

The house feels hot and humid. I miss Spring. (OTOH it's only 70F in here -- what's with that?)

In about a month I'm going to be giving a lunchtime talk on the git distributed version control system at work. (The documentation page is a good place to start, BTW.) Expect an outline and slides here at some point, in part because I need to explain how to use it to manage shared websites like the Tempered Glass site.

08:35 am - Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to animekid!!! Have a great one!!

04:15 pm - Good advice in bad times

How to stay up in a down economy

"Everybody is saying you can write off 2009 because there are no indicators it will get any better," Lieberman sums up. "We're praying for 2010."

But that doesn't mean you have to spend the rest of the year as an emotional cellar dweller. It's not easy, but it is possible for tech pros to nurture themselves and even bolster their professional credentials during these tough times, whether you're laid off and looking, or left behind and overworked.

09:35 am - Done yesterday (20090616)

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Another good day. I realized, during a late-evening IM conversation with N, that I need to start responding to "How are you doing?" questions with "OK" now, rather than the "Surviving" that I've been using for the last week or so.

There was also a point in that conversation when I laughed, and noticed that I was laughing. That felt rather odd.

Another odd thing was realizing that some people may be coming to our parties and our Wednesday open houses to see me rather than Colleen. That was rather disturbing, since it indicated yet another multi-decade blind spot in my self-image.

The insight of the day was realizing that my loathing of sports extends to a strong dislike of competition in general. I seem to have a deep feeling that good people should work together, not compete or fight.

It was a very good day for Colleen: she went out shopping (and came home in between for a bathroom break), and walked out to the car both times, and back to the house once. The first time, the car was on the street and she was able to step down off the curb.

This is huge: it's the first time she's actually walked outside the house since the day of her surgery at the end of February.

08:59 am - Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to sdorn!!! Have a great one!!

08:21 am - Done yesterday (20090615)

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The main thing about yesterday was the caregiver support group at Kaiser; it meets the 1st and 3rd Monday of each month, and I should have started going to it back in January when I was doing Colleen's TPN. Yeah, it'll be useful. This time I think I gave more information than I got -- there was a woman caring for her husband there; we spent an hour or so after the group swapping information. She pointed out that stress makes one fuzzy-minded and forgetful; that's good to remember.

The evening's IM conversation pointed out a couple of valuable lessons which ought to get their own River posts at some point:

1. Present half-baked plans by asking "What if we do X?" rather than by saying "OK, we do X." The latter gives the impression that things have already been decided, which is misleading and potentially hurtful.
2. Beware of trying to optimize the wrong function. The main point of an activity may be obvious to one or two people involved, but things around the edges may be much more important to others, or to the group as a whole.

07:33 am - Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to kissmyassterisk!!!!! Have a great one!!!

07:19 am - Done yesterday (20090614)

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Another good day - a three mile walk by myself by Los Gatos Creek, and a st/roll up and down the length of Santana Row (the local high-rent residential/shopping "street") with the RollyCat. It was especially fun seeing some of the surprised reactions she got, though I'm not sure why. Aren't there lots of grinning middle-aged ladies with striking silver-and-black hair out riding around on bright red scooters?

OK, when you put it like that...

And I found the small shoulder bag and laptop bag I was looking for all last week. That leaves only the briefcase that goes with my guitar gig bag still missing.

Fun music link: Saturday, thnidu posted about Monsters of Shamisen with youtube links.

The group `Monsters of Shamisen` was formed in the spring of 2006 when two California based Shamisen players Mike Penny and Kevin Kmetz met with Sapporo based virtuoso Masahiro Nitta. The promise of this group is to offer audiences the most exciting and innovative examples of modern Tsugaru Shamisen in the world. Using their collective musical backgrounds Monsters draws inspiration from a wide variety of music including classical peices, American bluegrass, Irish folk music, and even modern pop/rock. To see this group live is to experience one of the most unforgettable fusions of not only East and West but also of past and future.

Current Mood: awake

09:44 am - Done yesterday (20090614)

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It was a rather small party -- I forgot to make fliers before Baycon, and only posted one announcement on LJ. Some of the regulars were busy elsewhere, as well. I did my usual thing of holing up in the office with one or two other people (maxed out at three, but that didn't last long) and had some good conversations with friends who might otherwise have left sooner. And on IM as well. So everybody wins.

(I finally verified with Colleen that she likes this arrangement, too. She's the one who pointed out that the people who hang out in the office are the ones who, like me, can't handle crowds well and would probably leave early otherwise. Odd that I never noticed that before.)

Colleen was bemoaning the fact that Rosebud doesn't have a good horn; I went into the bedroom, pulled out the train whistle, gave it a good toot in the living room (startling several guests in the process) and put it in Rosebud's basket. I win.

The party wound down earlier than usual after Colleen went to bed around 10pm. It was a good party, though: relaxed and enjoyable. There's still a lot of beer and soda left.

08:20 am - Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to the lovely and talented hsifyppah and kshandra!!!!! Have a great one!!!!

02:42 pm - Party at Grand Central Starport -- right now!

The Savitzky household is having its annual "somewhere around the middle of June" party. If you're reading this and you're not on the Starport WiFi network, you're missing it.

09:38 am - Done yesterday (20090613)

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Going back over my notes last night, yesterday was a very good day. Surprisingly good. Look at all those boldfaced items up there. Somehow I didn't really notice while I was out and about doing things. The YD done with school and passing all her classes (even if by the skin of her teeth), a walk, real progress on the demo I'm writing at work, sushi with Colleen and the Younger Daughter, a drive, a little meditation... It was all good.

I'm caught up on my sleep, I feel rested, there's a party today -- and Colleen's home for it, after missing the last three.

I keep looking for the "but...", and feeling vaguely discontented that I can't find it. Never mind.

09:08 am - Done yesterday (20090611)

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Lots of good things about yesterday, though mainly good in the sense of worse things avoided. I guess the one I'm most pleased about that I actually did was calling the person in charge of the caregiver support group at Kaiser, and signing up. That's pretty big, considering my usual problems with phone calls. I also spent several hours at work writing real code. Hopefully I'll get it running today.

Colleen had a PT appointment at Kaiser; it ate up the entire morning and part of the afternoon, so I ended up walking up and down the four flights of stairs three times instead of taking my usual walk. From the way my knees were feeling by the end of it I'd guess I got my exercise.

Colleen appears to be in pretty good shape, considering. I hadn't realized how much progress she'd made in the past couple of weeks. She still needs to walk more, though, and has started taking steps in that direction.

Her digestive system still isn't back to normal, but she's making progress.

I'm not all that happy about having to go to bed at 10pm, but I'm happy about the time spent cuddling.

09:33 pm - Done yesterday (20090610)

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It was a pretty good day yesterday: a CD order from a dealer, a good conversation with a friend, a little progress with my current project at work, and a potentially-useful insight.

I got off to a rather late start on my walk, after wasting about an hour browsing musical-equipment sites. I ended up spending my time outdoors (in beautiful walking weather) talking to cflute while standing under a tree on the hill behind our building -- I get the best cell phone signal there. But I was calm, and happy, and glad to be out in the cool, clean air after the morning's light rain. Win.

As for the insight: a lot of my behavior around procrastination, and not making phone calls to friends even though I know I'd probably enjoy the conversation, has been difficult for me to understand. It occurs to me that it sounds a lot like a child doing something bad to get attention, because even being scolded is better than being ignored. Hmm. Could it be that the bad feeling I get from avoiding something and beating myself up about avoiding it is at least a feeling, and a predictable one at that? It's under my control, as opposed to calling a friend, where how I'm going to feel depends on whether they answer the phone. Maybe feeling acutely lonely is worse than feeling vaguely lonely and disgusted with myself? Or it has been in the past? Now, I don't know. It's familiar, at least.

Raising the head of my bed a few degrees seems to help me sleep without my nose getting congested. Yay for that!