A quiet day
------------

This felt like the first full day of the new
year, since the first almost doesn't count when
you stay up most of the night and take the day
as a kind of transition between old and new.

Tor went to work. Carolyn and I stayed in. I
read Mary Roach's new book Fuzz while we let the
twilight hours of a 24hr meme stream play in the
background.

The book was decent, not amazing, but decent. I
think it was not quite irreverant or serious
enough for my preferred tone of non-fiction. It
was mostly a very upsetting book because the
intersection of animals with human
law-enforcement and government is just generally
not a happy topic.

I did, however, learn that elephants---if
they're killing in anger and not accidentally
because they were startled--- will rip
someone to pieces after killing them in their
fury. That's apparently how you know someone was
intentionally murdered by an elephant: whether
the body is dismembered.

But, yeah, it was a book that reflected on the
conflicts we have with non-human animals and the
ways we create conflict by taking away
resources, encroach on territory, and take away
the natural checks and balances of other
predators.

Apparently there are folks researching using
crispr to genetically modify "pests" such as
mice to spread genes through the population that
will cull them. This seems like a terrible idea
given just how badly most of our efforts to make
large scale environmental changes go, just big
bundles of unintended consequences.

Other than reading this was a day for reflecting
on a lot of things. I've been realizing lately
how bad my inability to actually, in the moment,
know or name my own feelings and needs truly
is. I guess you could call it alexithymia, at
least descriptively. My own needs always feel
very abstract. I have *goals*. Lots of *goals*
but needs, wants, things like that? They feel
like such gibberish when you get right down to
it. I need to deal with concrete things
instead: problems I can solve, things that have
definite causes. It's not that I don't
understand emotions. They make perfect sense to
me but I just don't have access to them in the
moment. One of the reasons why I write is
because until I write something down I haven't
even felt it yet, not really.

And that's hard. It's hard feeling like I'm
failing at one of those very basic human tasks
like being able to even read your own being.

I don't even really know what to do about
it. I've wondered if I need to lean into how my
brain works and try to put numbers and concrete
estimates to all these needs. In other words,
I'm very much not a utilitarian but maybe I need
to pretend to be just for myself so I can try to
take better care of myself and prioritize things
better.

In any case, I'll end this post here because
it's evening and I'm going to go spend some time
experimenting with live coded music.