Ferris Mx > Recent Status Updates

So Paolo was right after all. I hadn't lied about anything, but I'd massaged my message, manipulated my phrasing to secure the friendliest reception. I couldn't do that in Chinese.

And then, several months or maybe a year from now, there hopefully existed a version of me who wasn't crying all the time. She would be very glad to have had all these cultural experiences, and disappointed if she'd squandered her summer abroad. So if it made no difference to me now, I might as well create some good memories for that future self.

Why did that require killing a fourth of the population?
To rid the country of reactionary thought.
Why didn't the West do anything to help?
Because the West didn't know. Because the West wasn't looking. Because the leftists in the West, the only people who could have found Cambodia on a map, thought that th Khmer ROuge was carrying on a glorious revolution, and were cheering it on.

Take refuge in the back roads of the self, said Marcus Aurelius. Choose not to be harmed and you won't feel harmed. Don't feel harmed, and you haven't ben.
It didn't work. I wasn't resilient enough.

We read an experimentalist science fiction short story by Bei Chuan. I had to read it a few times to understand it. The main character's father has recently passed away, but the main character keeps seeing him pop up on street view in Google Maps. Eventually he is able to confront his father's ghost, who reveals that Google hires ghosts of the recently deceased to photograph distant locations for its navigation apps.

So they had had faculty meetings about me. They had discussed whether I was a good student or not, and if not, then what should be done with me. This had never happened to me before. My best quality was being unobtrusive. I had never posed a problem to anyone, for any reason.

I could pretend that the entire world was limited to things inside my bedroom: my bed, my desk, and my books. I would stay there until the danger had passed. In college I was assigned to read passages from Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, and I learned that this mindset was called Stoicism. You couldn't control external events, but you could control your reactions to them. Things hurt you only as much as you let them.

Or, if I ever fought back, she would say, "Would you prefer that I leave your life forever?" I never knew if she meant this as a threat, or if she herself was afraid - if she was musing out loud about a world where she couldn't be with us. Either way, this terrified me. This made me work very hard to regain her love. If I didn't, then I might not have a mother anymore, and it would be all my fault.

We had revealed too much about how circumstances made us feel, and now we had to kill ourselves.
...
after several silent minutes in the shade, I no longer felt that life was not worth living.
...
JC reached out and snaked his fingers around mine. I had seen this coming. I had felt his hand knocking against mine for the last few minutes, like a boat attempting to dock, so I didn't flinch when at last he made contact.

Anna's mother and Auntie Wen had competed for the same US graduate study, and her mother had won. An American visa was a source of great envy at the time. AW was wealthy now and could hire a private driver to take her across Taipei to eat in a restaurant inside a hotel. But still Auntie Wen had to take Anna's mother down a peg. My parents had their own rivals who liked to call me fat, so I understood the situation.

"But I sound like an idiot," I said.
"In fact," said Teacher Sun, you have always sounded like an idiot. It is considerable progress that you can now hear it."

I could read both writing systems, so I chose Traditional. I didn't have a good reason. It just seemed harder, and I had always felt there was some virtue in choosing the harder path, at least when it came to school.

"You made choices," my grandmother said. "You could have been unhappy anywhere."

The sooner a family can come back together, the less everyone has to regret.

It's Dad. He's having a menty b. Just sitting in the yard.

Thirty thousand dollars, and the thing had just been sitting here, empty in the yard - force-fed with Vivian's purchases like capitalist gavage.

Back during Covid, when Alan had struck a 104-degree fever and Vivian didn't have proof that things would be okay, she still knew that he'd pull through. But this Alan in front of her? Vivian wasn't positive. This pensive, wistful, thoughtful version of Alan frightened Vivian more than the sick version ever had.

I mentioned Futures Past by Reinhart Koselleck and the possibility of bringing something into being by the very act of making a prediction. When an entire nation becomes fixated on the possibility of war, the ensuoing panic may well incite the conflict that has been feared. When you believe a child is trouble, that is what they will become. If there is fire once, there will be fire again.

Natalie's like a border collie, my mother used to say to the other women at church. She needs a project, otherwise she starts chewing the cabinet corners.
Are you saying my son is a project? I imagined Doug saying.
No, I imagined my mother replying. I'm saying he's the cabinet corner.

When I was a teenager I thought she was an idiot because of how obviously her capacity for happiness was controlled by men. I resolutely determined I would never let a lover rule my life, and later on, when I did, I hated her more for my inheriting her disposition.

When I first met Bunny she reminded me of my mother a little, in the sense that she was able to be so profoundly present at times, to make you feel held with even the briefest contact. But Bunny has always been more capable of sustaining that care. My mother only makes you aware it's possible.

You might avoid the string of scumbags that will follow him, including Dad. This sounds like blaming you, but I'm not. It was your mother, all eyes on marriage, pushing you into a horrible situation.

Tell someone so the shame will only maybe try to kill you instead of probably try to kill you. No guarantees it will help, too many people are emotionally and morally incompetent, or just similarly untaught, but try anyway, and speak slowly, all the details, with, yes, again ,the often vain hope that this person will help you, get you medical attention, will not punish ignore or doubt you but will react with kindness

I know that whether or not I see him tonight, I don't have a plan. I also know I should probably abort mission, take a pill, and sleep for upward of three months.

You spot it, you got it, they say. Other people are teaching us things about ourselves all the time. It's unmerciful, but I feel like something spiritually essential has ben taken from Screaming Bird Girl - Robbie juiced her figurative fruit and drank it. Life force drained by the hour. You can watch that happen to a person and be powerless to stop it. I am getting a glimpse of how my friends and family saw me.

...then decide to look at the profile of everyone tagged on @lowlvlcrown's whole grid, eventually landing me knee-deep in the profile of @lowlvlcrown's mother, @donna_dewell54, chiropractor and "Airedale guardian" living in Bangor, Maine. There's no reasoning to my research at this p[oint.

Marion said, verbatim, "You can't stay in a job if you hate your manager."

Jodi (skip manager): "You're in a safe space here, honey. You can tell me anything."

After we met, I sent her copies of my performance reviews, and she zeroed right in on how Marion negged me about enthusiasm and energy when I'd returned from mat leave.
She pointed out how subjective the read - Was this how Google operated? she asked me.

"When someone has challenges with their manager it can work to proactively propose quality time, out of the office." Maybe Marion and I could go for manicures, he offered, coffee, or drinks?
"As I mentioned earlier, Marion and I aren't in the same office," I replied
"Right", he replied. "It can be super challenging to communicate through differences remotely."
Manicures? But the quotes are artful.