Community relations, or RIP to the guy across the street
I grew up in Mormon country, down the street from an LDS church and a few minutes walk from two more. My family weren’t Mormon, so we didn’t attend the church, but we were one of the first families to move into the neighborhood so we had a sort of social standing that made up for being heathens.
As my parent’s neighborhood aged, the neighbors lightened up about socializing with heathens and regularly talked to my parents. Of course aging neighbors also means dying neighbors. When I talk to my parents they’ll occasionally mention attending the funeral for a neighbor who’s died, and the funeral is almost always at the church down the street. They learn about goings-on (like deaths) in the neighborhood from people who stop by, let them know what’s going on, etc. So despite not attending the church, and being at arm’s length from the people who do, my parents still ostensibly have relations with, and a sort-of membership in that community.
I don’t have any of that where I live now. I’m not from here and there’s no community here that I’m a part of. This is an established neighborhood with a mix of old and young people living in it, but I have no children so I’m not one of the young families that have grown old here. There’s a church down the street but no one in my neighborhood goes to it as far as I know.
Part of this is totally on me. I have long-standing issues with social anxiety and find it hard to chum it up with strangers, etc. But where I live there’s nothing that structurally creates neighborhood communities. It’s up to me to seek it out and hopefully assimilate into some pre-existing clique. This isn’t something I ever learned to do after growing up in a near-monoculture where everyone had a default community. And the anxiety doesn’t help.
Which brings me to the guy across the street who recently died. Or at least I think he died. All I know about his life is that he’s lived on this street for ages, and the bits and pieces I gathered from talking to him in passing. No one has told me what’s happened to him, and I feel like it’s none of my business to ask his maybe-widow or children since I don’t know them at all. All the oldsters in the neighborhood seem to know, as I see them chatting with the family, but no one’s told me.
My cat’s vet once told me, after my cat had a mysterious bout of digestive issues, that “sometimes we just don’t get to know”. It feels like the maybe-death of a guy I’ve casually known for fifteen years is something I should get to know. But no one will tell me and I don’t know how to ask.
tags: month-of-blogs, anxiety
Parasocial consumption
In a recent post by Rob Horning, he wrote about a 1998 book by Alain Ehrenberg, The Weariness of the Self. This paragraph from Rob’s essay really stood out to me:
“If neurosis is the tragedy of guilt, depression is the tragedy of inadequacy,” Ehrenberg writes. “It is the familiar shadow of a person without a guide, tired of going forward to achieve the self and tempted to sustain himself through products and behaviors.” That would seem to include everything from shopping to substance abuse to social media compulsivity — all the shortcuts to having a legible social self and “being human,” as well as all the distractions from that requirement.
My personal “shortcut to having a legible social self” is a combination of consumption and social media and how the two are bound up in music gear forums. For me, these forums provide both a social outlet, inasmuch as lurking is social, as I never join any conversations, as well as a sense of belonging-by-consuming. I buy what they buy, so without engaging with anyone in a way I feel like part of their milieu.
tags: month-of-blogs, social-anxiety, depression
Selling shit on reverb dot com
A few days ago I sold a guitar pedal on reverb, shipped it off, waved goodbye and forgot all about it. A few days later the buyer told me he’d like a refund, saying the pedal didn’t work as expected. Getting the refund request email kicked off a lot of anxious thoughts and feelings that really interupted my chill evening routine. I really didn’t have the mental energy to argue with a stranger on the internet about whether or not the pedal works, so I told him “sorry” and issued the refund.
One of the anxious thoughts was that the buyer, reverb, this pedal were all sources of pure negative affect so they must go. Get rid of the buyer ASAP, stop selling on reverb forever and trash the pedal if/when it makes its way back to me. I was also thinking about getting rid of all of my pedals, maybe even all of my music gear. These things were all now potential sources of anxiety under the right circumstances.
The next day things seemed less dire, less existential. The buyer was out of the picture, I can choose whether or not to sell my shit on reverb dot com and the pedal itself is sitting at my local PO and presumably will be delivered tomorrow. And I didn’t feel like trashing my hobby because of one uncomfortable interaction. So all in all this felt like a learning experience and not an ongoing source of anxiety.
tags: month-of-blogs, anxiety
Mindfully yours
Today at work I went to a presentation on mental health and mindfulness. It was meant to be a feel-good-type thing, and I certainly felt good afterward. From the comments in the Zoom chat I think a lot of other attendees felt good as well.
The discussion of mental health was very short and only mentioned generalized anxiety and social anxiety, leaving out literally everything else. Despite the flyer saying the talk covered metnal health and “root causes” of mental health issues, the talk was basically a lecture on mindfulness. I really wasn’t expecting too much from a one hour work thing, so not a big surprise. The only “root cause” of anxiety they mentioned was an individual’s use of social media. There’s obviously a lot more to it than that, and I was a little disappointed they didn’t mention anything else.
Anyway, it felt like the presenter was honestly trying to help people feel better. The world we live in is a giant, anxiety-inducing mess. All the mindfulness coach can really do is show us how to feel at ease for a little while despite that.
tags: month-of-blogs, anxiety, jobby-job
My first ISP
Way back in the early 90s, I was in junior high and my brother attended college at a local university. One of the few perks of going there was free dial-up internet access and a shell account on a shared UNIX machine. When he was home and in a good mood, he and I would download Mac shareware from the big Mac archives: infomac, wuarchive, umich, others I’m forgetting. He showed me how to use rn on the shell server to read usenet, how email worked with pine, and from watching him I learned basic shell commands.
Internet access too big a draw to solely rely on his highly-variable moods. I needed my own access. So I called the university computer center help desk, said I was a student and how do I get hooked up with my own dial-up and shell account. It turned out to be very, very easy! All I had to do was connect to the dial-up server and use a special login name. That kicked off a script that let me set up an account. The snag was I needed a valid student id number.
I knew from my brother that the university student ids were just social security numbers: I had one of those! So I dialed up, ran the script, put in my details and my ssn, and boom: I had my very own dial-up access and shell account.
This was simply awesome. I only had this account for a year or so, though. One day I started running random commands in /usr/bin and I guess something I ran drew the attention of the admins. My access got shut off, and I was internet-less once more.
A few years later, I found myself attending the same university. I tried to get an account through the computer center, using what seemed to be a slightly-updated version of the old script. The university still used ssns for ids, and the system said I already had an account. I was in the computer center on campus just then, so I walked over to the help desk and explained I wanted to make an account but it said I had one already. Help desk guy somehow cleared the old account, I reran the script and I was back in! :D
tags: social-engineering, month-of-blogs
Multiple-delimiter madness
For my $JOB I do data engineering at a relatively well-known $DEPARTMENT_STORE. The tech stack is an dizzying mashup of ancient (people regularly mention “The Mainframe”), merely old (big iron DB servers; JSPs) and newish (K8s; The Cloud). Most everything except the $CLOUD parts are opaque to me as I haven’t had to deal with them. But data from the deep, ancient layers often makes its way to me in my cloudy realm.
Recently I’ve been working with product pricing data that must be old, as it defintely gives off tape drive and FORTRAN vibes. There are not one, not two, but three different delimiters! For example, a single product might have a price like this
10.00,1714694400,1715904000,BIGSAVE
Meaning the price is $10.00, is valid between May 3 and May 17, 2024, and has a coupon code BIGSAVE. But there might be a different price after May 17, so now it looks like
10.00,1714694400,1715904000,BIGSAVE:15.00,1715904001,1716249600,LESSBIGSAVE
Notice the :! But maybe after BIGSAVE there are actually two different coupon codes
10.00,1714694400,1715904000,BIGSAVE:15.00_#_9.00,1715904001,1716249600,LESSBIGSAVE_#_MOREBIGSAVE
Now _#_ has joined the party. Three delimiters in one row of data!? Who can live at that speed?!?!?!
tags: month-of-blogs, data-engineering, jobby-job
Ten years with a musical gear hobby
Ten years ago I started buying musical gear as a hobby. At the time my intention was to “get back into making music”, something I hadn’t done regularly since college. (And back then “making music” was mostly learning random songs I liked, never writing my own songs.) So my first gear purchase was a digital 4-track recorder. I already had a decent acoustic guitar, so why not give singer-songwritering a go? I only recorded one or two songs, and those were semi-comedic songs about the neighbor’s lawnmower or whatever.
The intervening years are kind of a blur of gear buying and selling. I have a spreadsheet with my current inventory and it’s embarrassing how long it is. It feels like making music became ancillary to buying gear. I haven’t actually written a whole song (verse chorus verse, etc.) since I was in a band in high school, and I haven’t learned a new song in ages. Maybe making music was not what I was actually interested in. Perhaps making music was a cover, and what I was really doing was trying to avoid dealing with my social anxiety? Maybe I thought making music would open a door to workable social relationships that I didn’t have / couldn’t manage. But my ideal of creating honest, impeccable music set me up to fail at making music. Buying gear was part of the avoidance process, as I never settled on a set up long enough to get good at actual music creation. I felt bad, but feeling bad was the cost of not having to change.
tags: month-of-blogs, anxiety, music