Yesterday I hit the wall. I had 40mg of marijuana in the afternoon and my body went, “Hahahaha. You are done working.” Oh.

I could push through. But I would scream. I would be nasty. I would be actively hurting myself. My back and my arms and my neck are doing quite poorly at this point. I only have a few more boxes to pack before I get a break from packing. A few more boxes and… everything is just waiting to be put on a table in the yard. That’s a wee bit terrifying.

We’ve already gotten rid of a lot and we will get rid of the rest.

I am afraid that Eldest Child is not going to be going into Disneyland park this year. I don’t think she will catch up on math. She’s getting real bored of doing so much math. So she’s doing how much in a day she needs to do for maintenance. She uhhhh is less interested in catching up.

That’s fine. You can hang out with whoever is in the hotel room resting. We have a bunch of adults going (5-6 at a time!). We will trade off.

I feel like an ogre. Only I really don’t. This is the natural consequence of your actions. This isn’t a punishment. She still gets to have fun things…. but not much. Dude, you need to catch up. Apparently 4th grade was the Year of History and 5th grade is the Year of Math. I plopped her 5th grade textbook next to her current book and said, “You are finishing both of these this year.”

She’s a bit freaked out. But it would be so manageable! If you didn’t fall behind.

We talked about how after 5th grade…. uhhhh…. then we are getting into pre-algebra, geometry, algebra…. you don’t want to be catching up at that point. Or you will literally never catch up and you will spend the rest of your scholastic career feeling frustrated that people talk down to you because of your math level. This year matters.

It is absolutely irrational the way that we depend on math scores to determine someone’s “smartness” in school… but EC wants to go to high school. She can’t be behind on math. Is it fair? There is no fucking fair in this life.

I mean, she is catching up. Verrrrrrry slowly. At the rate she is catching up she will be fully caught up by the time we come back from Christmas break if she doesn’t take a break.

We aren’t going to do expensive Advent activities if she is still behind on math. Because we will sit around all month doing math. Just…. no.

So this math experience is something she will remember. And let me tell you, Middle Child is keeping up. He doesn’t want to get behind at all. Wise choice.

She was not ready to seriously do math before she was 8. And last year she didn’t want to seriously catch up. Ok. But…. now you have to pay the piper.

I can’t make everything easy for you. If I could I would destroy you. You have to have struggle in this life, kiddo. You have to earn things. That’s life.

I’m doing better with yelling. I pick my authorities carefully and I do my best to comply with orders/directions. Stop yelling. Medicate.

I am less worried about Malaysia because Noah says I did great without medication… until we got to the heavy work part of the cycle. Yeah, I can’t work like this and be nice without medication. It hurts.

And plans with another friend were cancelled because of illness. We can’t risk exposure before going to see a sick person. Which is feeling so bad right now. I miss my friends. And that’s going to accelerate when we move.

Complicated.

I’m trying to not be angry with myself for my limitations. That’s really hard. I feel savagely angry at myself because I am failing and there is so much I want to get done.

I’m feeling a lot of pressure to get the house and yard into a condition where someone will pay me huge bundles of cash. We are not in a bad money position, but I am not being as careful like I would prefer. I do not have the ratio of savings to debt that I want to have. In October or November Noah will get a stock grant from work and then I think I will be able to pay off the small credit card balance, have a bunch in savings, and pay for the remodeling stuff for the house.

And in January all of our debt will go away; I hope.  We’ll see how long it takes to sell the house. Everything near my house is listed for less than $10,000 below a million.  The Trulia current picture for my house is recent and fun. I haven’t even put it up for sale yet with deliberate pictures.

We will definitely not have debt soon.

I keep thinking about IDB stuff. (Incest DataBase) I keep thinking that security is going to be the biggest and most important hurdle. Because the DB will need to be a series of walled gardens. The various sub groups of people will need to have ways to segregate themselves at will.

We need to find a way to get some kinds of metadata out of responses without violating privacy. And we need to find ways to give permission for different levels of disclosure. Like: there will probably need to be a chat room sort of space that is not archived or monitored and it vanishes every 24 hours. So that people feel safe being in there. There need to be layers of “It’s ok to share this data with people in x group” while preserving that security away from other groups.

I need to always be ok with being excluded from a lot of conversations as a white person. I want to help figure out how to make this space. That doesn’t mean I will have full rights to everything there.

How do I help build a system that will partially exist to keep out assholes like me? This is going to be really important.

It cannot exist as a large, multi-ethnic research project unless each group gets to control their own data.

We can’t just automate such roles though. I’m going to have to recruit point people. I am going to have to spend most of my time associated with this program looking for people to promote above me.

It’s interesting learning, through thinking about this, that probably the best character trait I am going to bring to this process is believing that basically every one else is more important than me. That’s not something to eradicate from my base programming package.

That’s useful. Complicated. And useful.

I’m going to find my cohort. I am going to offer up the best of myself and I am going to do everything in my considerable (fuck modesty) power to help us find the best pieces of ourselves. Because we are so different. We have so much to offer the world. Being in the cohort changed us and I want to understand what that means.

I want to help amplify. I do not want to talk over. That’s going to be interesting.

Do you know what is magical about my life? I happen to know some folks who know a fuck ton about security.

I don’t have to know how to do every piece of this work. I have to help make the connections and then get out of the way.

I can do that. I’m good at that.