I swear, only a little bit of decade-recapping

Happy new decade. I'm on kinda an emo tear right now, and I was going to post something more mopey and grim about how I'm not gonna post a best-of list because the earth is a cold dead place or something, but I tend to regret doing that. It's been a hell of a decade. Here's some highlights in media that are somehow roughly connected to when they came out or when I first experienced them. These are the moments that stick with me.

2010
Life in Cartoon Motion by Mika
For the best parts of Burning man. I tried this! I tried a bunch of things in Seattle. None of them stuck. I always felt like I was intruding on someone else's party. (Especially at Burning man.) But when you're at someone else's party and they're having a great time, sometimes you can get a little infected by their joy. It's not enough to live on, but it's fun in the meantime.

2011
My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kanye West
Gosh I mean, this is a masterpiece and can be all things to all people. To me it's originally two memories: "Lost in the World" walking over the bridge on Pine St feeling a sense of well-being, and singing along to "Monster" riding my bike as I "visiting scholar"ed (read: sat in a lab and did my own thing) at UW. Monster in particular is still a favorite.

Eye Contact by Gang Gang Dance
I started my gap-year-travel by flying to Delhi, busing to Manali and then on to Leh, just jumping as far into the deep end as possible, and spending 3 days in bed with altitude sickness. This album is about as out-there as you feel at 15,000 feet, trying to stay warm in a parachute dhaba in the More Plains.

Sir Lucious Left Foot the Son of Chico Dusty by Big Boi
This one, on the other hand, is a welcome taste of home when you're just leaving the dark Nepalese border town of Mahendranagar where you spent a mildly worrying night, strapping into a 12 hour bus ride, and wishing that something could be easier.

2012
Odd Blood by Yeasayer
I'm in Pecs, Hungary, just killing time looking at whatever local medieval castle. It's sunny and pleasant. Somewhere around "ONE" or "Love Me Girl" I wonder about the travelers I've met who are basically wandering indefinitely, and I get a sense that I'm wasting time. I'm glad I'm headed back to the US and getting back to nerdy computery things, and building a life. But dang this is nice in the meantime.

Juicy Lucy by Jupiter
Turn back on the adrenaline; I'm back in Pittsburgh, starting grad school, meeting new friends and an exciting new relationship, and everything's working. Wow. This music is what I would make if life was always working so well. Bouncy, infectious, smooth, perfectly produced. Makes even me want to dance.

2013
Shrines by Purity Ring
6 months later: OH WAIT grad school is awful and I am bad. And we call my house the Pretzel House because it feels like it's made of pretzels. This album, though, opens with a creepy synthy bit about "they'll sew their own hands into their sleeves, to keep the crawlers out" and just gets better from there. I played it in the Pretzel House kitchen in Pittsburgh fall/winter and immediately put it on repeat. In contrast to the previous album, Shrines is dark and weird and beautiful. I don't care if I can only use that word once in this whole post. This is probably my favorite album of the decade.

DUKE 2 by Mrs. Paintbrush
Part of what helped me deal with grad school was the Pittsburgh connection. I have friends, and I know some local culture and stuff, and Mrs. Paintbrush (half of Grand Buffet) is all the things I love about Pittsburgh. A rapper who's funny as hell, but doesn't act like he thinks he's funny as hell.

2014
Inspector Norse by Todd Terje
This summer was electric as it seemed like a way out of the grad school doldrums. Tati interned at Facebook, I interned at HP Labs, I lived in a shared house in San Francisco, I did a lot of Caltrain and burritos, but it was ok because this seemed like an exciting new world that's worth going for more. Inspector Norse is a song that seems right at home exploring this goofy new city, or a song that you can listen to on headphones while you work.

Edit: Space Is Only Noise by Nicolas Jaar
This is the dark shadow side to the excitement. The title track especially, but really the whole album, is the moodiest dark-sidewalk-at-night kind of music that's a great accompaniment to being a bit of a stranger in a bit of a strange land.

2015
Art Angels by Grimes
Man, this year's kind of a blur. I was traveling back and forth between SF and Pittsburgh, trying to finish up grad school, and geez I don't know what was happening but this album is start-to-finish brilliant multifaceted pop. "Over the first 6 tracks you go from epic symphonic overture to top-40 to aggressive Taiwanese hip-hop back to top-40 to... whatever Kill v. Maim is." - me, at the time.

Edit: Strange Desire by Bleachers
If all emo music sounded like this, I'd listen to more of it. Tracks 1-4 remind me of Silent Alarm in that they'd all be great on their own, but make a solid album kickoff all together. I can't really access this year's emotions very much, but neither can I very well tell what this album feels like, but hey that is fine.

2016
Edit: Without My Enemy What Would I Do by MADE IN HEIGHTS
This and Strange Desire make me want to be a producer. (Or a singer, but I don't think I could ever sing as well as Bulkin. Not that I could produce as well as Sabzi, but eh, one can dream.) I don't know what any of these songs mean, but there are really great sounds on it. It's so crisp and polished and just like... a peppermint? It's not just straight sugar; it makes me feel good afterward.

Stop Making Sense by Talking Heads
Ok this isn't new, but: the key event of this year was Tati and me getting married. Our first dance was This Must Be The Place. I still cry when I watch David Byrne sing this song to a lamp. There's something about that: weird smart nerd who sings about buildings and food realizes he can sing love songs too.

2017
Life Will See You Now by Jens Lekman
The lyric "it's been a long, hard year" in "Evening Prayer" is my version of "I'm gonna make it through this year if it kills me": a kernel of real, hard truth wrapped in a juicy pop song. This year was kind of a long, hard year: finish a thesis, graduate, move, find a job, get frightening imposter syndrome. Jens writes the kind of songs that make me feel like someone gets me: "To know your mission" and "Wedding at Finistere" especially. Plus, I challenge you to find a better riff than "How we met, the long version."

Solitary Flight by Theo Parrish
I started spending a lot of time in an open-office workplace. I got into deep house for a while - it's pretty great work music and I wish I knew more of it. This is among the best tracks I can remember. At one point I put this on while at a ski trip with some new friends, one of them made fun of me about it, and still I felt like, nah, it's ok, I still belong.

2018
Over the Garden Wall
This animated series is so perfectly in the Venn diagram overlap between me and Tati. It's charming, cute, weird, spooky, very funny, perfectly acted and brilliantly animated. I know it's not everyone's definition of cozy, but it makes me think of a time in our SF apartment that's more cozy than full of our neuroses.

Dirty Computer by Janelle Monae
Like Art Angels, this is a multifaceted pop masterpiece. It's very California, in the good ways; it's like the kinds of warm weather I like, and the kinds of people who still want, humbly, to change the world. (Unfortunately, these things seem rarer and rarer; California seems to me more NIMBYs, cars, and WeWork startup nonsense.)

2019
Clemency for the Wizard King by Mountain Goats
I finally got into the Mountain Goats. Of course they have a ton of great stuff. This is probably my favorite. I don't know if it's because a recurring D&D campaign has been a really nice thing in my life the past couple years; I don't think it's just that. The tone almost feels religious; they're pleading with the captor of their king, but it feels like pleading with God or the universe or something. Did I mention my recent emo streak? I cry more now than I used to. This song makes me also.

Annihilation
It's a sci-fi thriller about journeying into the unknown. It's a psychological thriller about self-destruction. It's cosmic horror about the universe being weirder than we can even perceive. Obviously I love all these things. (yeah the books are better; they're kind of dense though.) I love art that gives you a sense of the sublime and of life outside our little comfortable cocoon, and this does more than most. The sublime and real happens to be terrifying. This fits with how I see the world now. 2020s, prove me wrong.

Cutting off bad experiences, or somehow integrating them into your life

Sometimes people get in a bad state. They become homeless or go to prison or something. There are two ways that a non-homeless non-incarcerated doing-pretty-ok person can respond to this.

1. The "separation" approach. Just say "well, that's not me", and do all you can to avoid that becoming you. Cut those parts off from your world.
2. The "integration" approach. Try to include those parts in your world. Which means, you try to make those situations not so bad, and you try to behave with as much compassion as possible towards those people.

I think integration is better.

(I'm trying not to make this so obvious, though in 2019 America this is obvious, because an individual has so little control over whether they end up in these situations. Especially if you're black or brown or poor or whatever. But let's imagine a more ideal world, a just world where only people who do a crime get thrown in jail, and you've got some control over whether you become poor, etc. I want to argue that the "integrative" vision is better for everyone in it, even in this more ideal world.)

I've got more feelings than logic about why integration is better, and those feelings are based on comparing the world to your body.

Sometimes your body gets in a bad state: you get sick. There will be times you're in the hospital - or at least, sick in bed. And at some point you'll die! You can take the days that that's happening and cordon them off, and say, "well, I'm healthy, not gonna think about that now." Then when you get there, you grit your teeth and you get through it. (Or you don't, and you die - that'll happen once! Either way, it eventually ends.) This "solution"... feels bad? Sure, being sick always feels bad, but being sick and unprepared, knowing that you're in the place you've tried to pretend doesn't exist, makes the sickness feel worse.

I glossed over "unprepared", because I'm not sure what it means. Obviously taking care of your body helps - if you're usually pretty healthy, your illness might not be as bad. And sure, if you're a meditation master, for example, you'll be able to see each moment coming and going, and knowing the impermanence of it all makes it sting less, and hell maybe you can jhana out sometimes and get some relief. But I'm wondering, positing, guessing that maybe there's an emotional component to this "preparedness" too; that you might be better able to deal with the "sick" parts if you're more emotionally open to them. (I don't know what this means, or how you become emotionally open to them, but it feels true.)

I'm guessing, if you've done this preparation more, then even the times when you're feeling well will be better, because you'll have less fear of the sick states.

So, likewise, imagining "well, I'm never going to be in prison, so who cares" - it's unstable because what if you mess up, but it also just allows your mind to have unspeakable horrors in it, which invariably leads to worries even during the good times. Alternately: it's better, say, to have one yacht but no possibility of going to hell-prison, than 10 yachts *with* that possibility.

(I wonder if this is universally held! I'm sure there are some people who would say "nah, f 'em, I got mine!" I guess I'd just assume that those people are a little bit emotionally underdeveloped, or they've got other issues?)

How do you make spending decisions?

or, "in which I let my privilege hang out" - so, if that kinda thing bugs you, you've been forewarned

How the hell do y'all make money decisions? (Where here "y'all" means "most of my friends and family who do have some disposable income") Like, "friend invited me to dinner at expensive place; should I go?"

Ok, so you make the easy decisions. You switch from AT&T to Fi so your phone bill is $45, not $95. You cancel the gym you never go to, and you share your Netflix account with family or friends. Cool. And then, if you're on a tight budget you might say "my budget for restaurants is $x this month and I literally never go over it." Fine. Or, if you're super rich, you might say "sure, I don't even think about it." What if you're in between? If you've got money to spend, but you're trying to save, and you don't know whether this restaurant is worth it?

In practice, I usually act on the "super rich" side, but that feels unsatisfying. It works - my friends and salary are such that it's never been a problem, and our expenses are below our income - but am I hedonic-treadmilling? How would I know?

I've been trying to do something about this, to at least semi regularly do a little bit of a review, so last year I downloaded all Tati and my transactions from Mint, and tried to categorize them as well as possible, and... well... had no idea what to do. I noticed we spent more than I expected on airfare, but, I mean, what are we going to do there? Not gonna stop flying home for the holidays. We spent more than I expected on uber/lyft, so we both said "huh, I guess let's try to stop taking uber/lyft so much." We spent $x on food, which... I dunno, I guess it's fine? I already cook a decent amount, and certainly I would probably feel like I'm missing out on relationships or experiences or something if I canceled more things because of money (penny-wise, pound-foolish; or scroogey).

But man, we're hedonic treadmilling so hard! My expenses (even just mine, not counting Tati's) are such that if I were an artist or a not-particularly-affluent-nonprofit worker, or something, I don't know how I'd make ends meet! (Yes ok, it's SF, but even our obnoxious rent is still only like 40% of our expenses.)

One thing I've found we can do is to look at particular things, quantify the money spent on those, and think if there's a way to reduce them. But that feels like stabbing fish instead of using a big net - we might make a few targeted changes but it's pretty unsystematic.

So, I don't know, if you have a principled way of thinking about spending, I'm curious to know.

project one-and-a-halfclops

ok, time passes: how's the "shutting off the noise" working?

well, it's pretty ok. it was easier than I expected. I mostly just don't go into a big loop of searching for information to soothe myself now, beyond just my emails and slack. arguably, I'm just satisfying the same urge with slightly different and less satisfying means, but it doesn't last as long though, so that's ok.
some days I don't yell at cars. I do still play video games, because I hadn't beat a20 with Defect yet. (now I have. it's way easier than the Silent, I gotta say. but now I gotta get on the Watcher train!)
I log into twitter maybe once a day, usually when I have something to toot. I like it as a mostly-write-only medium.

I kinda want to know about good jokes from the McElroys, webcomics, and any good memes. (apparently now we've got problems clown? it's pretty good.) But I feel like maybe I'm making a little progress towards something - or rather, I'm taking it on faith that maybe I'm making a little progress towards something. Ideally I'd be more attuned to feelings, and maybe kinder and more patient, because those seem like skills that could make life more pleasant. I realized recently that one of the most important skills in life seems to be the ability to understand and predict your feelings - then you just do the things that will make you feel good! (for some value of "good", of course.)

(anyway, is all this working? who knows? this is frustrating - it's hard for me to take things on faith! but otoh I'm not losing much. reading a bunch of webcomics and listening to a bunch of podcasts: I guess these were not providing as much value to my life as I thought.)