It's 9:30am Monday and I'm at the office. The wedding on Friday was nice, I got to speak to a lot of people, in no small part because of some social games the newlyweds organized. A fun one was to have a "people bingo", so for example you'd have a grid of phrases on a small piece of paper and you'd ask people if they fit the description, e.g.: "I'm very adventurous" or "I like wine".
At a certain point I only had one orphan phrase, which was "I have tattoos" (out of all things). The newlyweds must have very conventional taste in friends (and I include myself) as I only noticed then, it was difficult to find people with tattoos. Finally I saw a woman with green hair across the room which I thought "sure she has tattoos" and I went to speak with her. My stereotypes did not let me down.
Valentine's I spent as any other day. I went to two yoga classes and then to a small urban music gig. The guy was from Bolivia, and ugly as hell, but he had the confidence of a gigachad and the ego of an Argentinian so he more than made up for his lack of looks. On my way back, again tempted by the temptresses of Montera, which by now feels less disconcerting and more amusing.
I finished all the food from last week on Sunday evening, without going to the supermarket yet. But I also dined out four days of the week, so I significantly underestimated the amount of food I'd eat for the week. However, this lucky because I didn't really plan those outings: Thai dinner with V, Govi's wedding refreshments, sandwiches at the office housewarming party, and a McDonald's double quarter pounder with soda and fries on Saturday.
There's six eggs, two half eaten bags of greens, half a pack of bacon, one avocado and two lemons in my fridge right now. It gives me a strange satisfaction knowing it. I'll pick up food from the grocery store this evening. The only dinner I could skip should be on my birthday, but this year I have no inclination to celebrate. The past year was not bad but I already did that. Hmmm I see now is the time to make a decision and I will make now so it's not on my mind: I won't celebrate.
Post-lunch stupor, unable to work for 30 minutes but also without anything interesting to write about. Perhaps I ought to register the conversation I had with V. I waked her back home: Govi, the bride, has lost a lot of friends lately. She's a gregarious person who has a meetup group and invites everyone to the events that interest her and meets up for dinner later. She is very friendly, but with time you notice that she has expectations of you, and strong opinions about it.
Particularly painful to her was a splintering of her meetup group into an alternative (but similar one), a move done by the people closest to her. V. and myself debate if she knows why this is happening, and if she should be "intervened" as to prevent future hurt. My take is that the reckoning has to begin before you give advice, and you must wait for the right moment to give it. You shouldn't say "hey Govi do you know why this happened? because we sometimes feel inadequate about being your friends, which you communicate in no uncertain terms".
Examples of this are recriminations for unaccepted invitations (you might feel pressured into making up good reasons to decline), opinions on how you lead your life, and sometimes she acts like a chad deciding where and what we are going to eat without a democratic consensus. It's not notorious enough as to confront the behavior, and at the same time it wears you down, so people often choose to leave her group after a while.
Even if she asked me "what am I doing wrong?" I would have trouble articulating the actions, it just often feels like you are expected to behave and do certain things, whereas with true friends you are expected to be yourself. On her birthday last year she told me afterwards "you were pretty quiet and barely spoke to anybody" and I answered "that's who I am in large groups". I feel if I relayed this information to me she would say "so what? that's a description not an insult" and I would say "I know, but it's not about what you say, but how you make people feel with what you say, and you may not know this about me but I dislike my awkwardness and inadequacy, when you point it out it's hurtful" and she may say "Oh I'm sorry but how was I supposed to know that's a sensitive spot for you?" which is a fair point, and sometimes in a friendship we will step on each other's toes, but to have this happen frequently and with different people might point towards a lack of sensibility towards other people's feelings.
In the end I told V: in my opinion I think one of her friends (and that could be you or me) has to get her at the exact right moment of reckoning ("I wonder why my friends are leaving me...") and encourage the train of thought "why do you think they left?" and then support introspection when the key hits the note. Something we both feel uneasy about is meeting her lack of acceptance with the same coin: we want her to be more accepting for us to accept her. I still don't know how these paradoxes are resolved, perhaps by having a sense of self-assuredness that does not require the slightest bit of outward acceptance, through honestly I can only dream about it.
I'm struggling to get Netlify to serve a prototype application made in go with templ. The problem is in the build script because dependencies must be correctly installed in Netlify so that it can serve the files statically. Claude is helping me along the way via Cursor. I see what it's doing and I'm understanding it. However, doing this from scratch would require a thousand years of understanding the underpinnings of what it's doing (the fact that I understand what Claude is doing it pretty remarkable in itself, but I know Netlify beforehand so that narrows the gap).
Whatever change it made failed. I claim understanding, but then I copy Netlify's AI debugging message for Cursor to fix and deploy changes without even looking at them. Failed again, now I read the message, it's different from the previous one. I understand it: it will be impossible to deploy without first uploading library dependencies. Sigh. At least I'm not utterly stuck as often happens to me when I used to explore beyond what was familiar and battle tested. In all my apps I've avoided using even npm because I've often ended up in dependency hell whereas I know very well what to do when I manually manage everything.
I'm writing this the next day because I forgot to post it. Shrug, I'll post and write the new entry.