Suomalaisen Päiväkirja

[Biscuits and Gravy]

Speculate away. Maybe it’ll take your mind off of TSLA.

[suomalainen]

It's the littering thing that bothers me.

Not the first thing you have in common with a 5 year old.

@gravy low blow

[chenda]

Speculate away. Maybe it’ll take your mind off of TSLA.

[Henry]

On the volatility scale, I think TSLA stock and your daily commutes are probably weighing in just about equally. So I figure final results for both are a few years out.

[suomalainen]

Speaking of volatility, I couldn’t deal with it with the orange king. So I sold almost all my stock except for two slugs - my Roth IRA that is 100% vanguard dividend and some former employer stock in that old 401k. I figure the Roth is small enough and the timeline long enough that I can dollar-cost average the reinvested dividends without giving me anxiety. But the 401k … well, I just didn’t want to watch it go down. So it’s split about 50/50 in stable value and high yield. High yield may experience some volatility, but I’m thinking of it as a yield play, so it’s easy for me to ignore the price volatility. My personal accounts are mostly cash and some high yield. Maybe if there’s a crash I’d suck up the remaining volatility and go back in. Or maybe I’ll just sit out this presidency. Could be a bad move it it lasts more than 4 years.

[delay]

Speaking of volatility, I couldn’t deal with it with the orange king.

Thanks for sharing! Interesting name for he who must not be named... I first read the alias in John Michael Greer's The King in Orange. Where did you first hear the name Orange King?

[chenda]

William III

[suomalainen]

I just made it up. I call him various things at various times. Orange idiot. Orange clown. Orange king. Orange megalomaniac. Oompa Loompa. You get the idea. We don’t need to get into any politics / policies, if he even has any outside of “me, me, me”. I just intensely dislike him as a human. Here’s my favorite moniker for him: King Mierdas. Cuz everything he touches turns to shit.

In any event, sold my company stock the day before the tariff thing and my 401k is largely protected from the orange idiot’s mundane idiocy. If it turns apocalyptic then of course I’m fucked, but I dunno how to hedge against that. I’m not an assayer so physical gold seems dumb. In any event, down 10% in two small accounts (forgot about the hsa account) that I left in equities as I’ll dollar cost average into those for another two decades and they’re small enough to not affect me psychologically. Losing 10% in the 401k would have been very painful given its size.

I briefly considered playing sdow/spxu, but I just don’t think playing Nostradamus to a megalomaniac’s whims is possible to any meaningful degree. And the stress of doing it with like $10 grand just for hoohas to earn a few grand doesn’t seem worthwhile psychologically. The only way to win the game with him is to ignore him until he comes after you, at which point, the only option is to fight back.

Edit: also, people at work keep giving me rewards points. Gravy and I scrolled through the rewards website trying to find something to “buy”. Forced consumption when I don’t need or want anything is very strange. Anyway, she finally saw the “gift cards” link so I bought her and my kids a bunch of gift cards. $390 worth. Next day I was given more points. lol. Another $200 in gift cards for gravy at target. Moving to this new company has been extremely lucrative for me. Very happy how it’s worked out.

[suomalainen]

Long ago, when I was 30 and he was 66, the late Donald Richie, the greatest writer I have known, told me: “Midlife crisis begins sometime in your 40s, when you look at your life and think, Is this all? And it ends about 10 years later, when you look at your life again and think, Actually, this is pretty good.” In my 50s, thinking back, his words strike me as exactly right. To no one’s surprise as much as my own, I have begun to feel again the sense of adventure that I recall from my 20s and 30s. I wake up thinking about the day ahead rather than the five decades past. Gratitude has returned.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ar ... is/382235/

Work was very busy for 4Q24 and 1Q25. I am a person who prefers working on one big, hard problem at a time rather than juggling ten small problems at once. The last six months were a blend of the two at the same time and I could feel myself getting more and more jacked. I wonder if that’s what being on meth or coke is like.

In any event, this busy period coincided with winter, so I felt more down than usual as well. I even started to feel really burdened by my travel schedule, which was somewhat perplexing to me at the time, because I remember that when I first started dating @gravy, I felt like I was so lucky, like I was getting away with something. I would fly down during a workday and no one at work would know and I would fly back on Sunday. This was after covid had jump-started the WFH lifestyle. There simply isn’t a way this could have worked without covid. Silver linings. Anyway, so feeling like travel was a drag was a sharp contrast to how I had been feeling about it for a long time now (coming up on four years).

A few days ago, I was reminded of this as I sat in the plane in CLT during boarding. And the above quote occurred to me. Sometimes, our inner mental state can be so overwhelmed by external factors and their accompanying physiological effects that we simply can’t look at things the same way we would under normal circumstances. Now that I have had a week or two of space from the end of Q1, I can feel gratitude returning. Maybe there’s a bit of spring mixed into that as well, but I feel like mostly it’s just that my mental load has reduced sufficiently that I can return to baseline. I have time for sex at 8 in the morning and at 1 in the afternoon.

It pretty much boils down to does your lifestyle allow you to have sex at 10 in the morning or 2 in the afternoon any day of the week or doesn't it?

And that does make me feel grateful - when I can do a little work, but still have time to enjoy some time off in the middle of the day to do what I want. I know there will be a day when I will want to eschew having to report to anyone, but until then, I am very grateful for WFH, for gravy, and for our gaggle of crazy kids, even when they won’t stop screaming “I am a snowman!” in the middle of kindergarten class as DS5 took to doing the other day.

[suomalainen]

I went to see my parents with all three of my bio kids in tow, along with my wife, my sister and her boyfriend. So many thoughts and feelings:

1) Although I was once accused here of being a sociopath (I won't link to it as it's not really worth reading), I am highly attuned to others' emotional states. In my family of origin, that basically meant being awash in my dad's anxiety and everyone else's orientation to it. That dynamic remains in play, but it's "interesting" to see it manifest in different people in different ways. Suffice to say that 4 days together is the perfect amount of time.
2) I am grateful that my parents and my kids have made some memories together and have had moments of connection. I know it's less than what my mom would have liked, but she made her choice to acquiesce to my dad's anxieties rather than differentiate at the risk of him pouting, blowing up or divorcing. C'est la vie. I work hard at letting go, not always successfully.
3) My oldest ventured forth from her room for the trip and spent some time with us, but a lot of time on her own. My mom sort of cornered her for 15 minutes to have a chat about her life and afterwards remarked to me how proud she was of her and how far she's come. Sometimes it's hard to see progress since, as a parent, you often compare your kids to other kids, your own desires or other standards rather than against their own. This transition to "parenting" adult children has been hard for me. Perhaps I should find a book on the topic by an author who has thought about / researched the topic more systematically. Recommendations welcome. Recently, I was trying to have a conversation with my youngest child about whether he has autism (spoiler, no) and why he wants to be diagnosed with autism and was getting nowhere and I was getting frustrated and I finally got out of him that "I don't like having these 'conversations' with you because it just turns into a lecture." And so I come back to this:

In any event, back to the quote - I guess where I've come out is that I don't trust my kids ... to do it the way that I would do it. But that's not the point, is it? They have to figure themselves out and then figure out how to navigate that self through the world that they are experiencing.

It feels ... weird or wrong even, to let them flail around and do stupid shit when the "right" answer is RIGHT THERE. But then maybe the answer isn't right, or there isn't only one right answer or maybe there is no right answer and it's just a preference. I have previously thought generally that many things can't be taught, they can only be learned, but it's much harder when you're a parent forced to watch a struggling child. But then the differentiation question comes in:

But then, the question - am I wanting them to take that first step for themselves, or for me? And if it's for me, then I can just adjust my orientation to identify what need of mine I'm trying to address (back to the quote, it's the freedom from worry/responsibility) and just address it myself. Bird parents don't push their kids out of the nest. They just fly off and make a few encouraging calls back to the nest.

Is it just that I am impatient "having" to watch them "struggle" and I'd rather skip the crappy re-run, or is it truly that they're doing something beyond their skillty and they're going to kill themselves if I don't save them from themselves? For the most part, the answer is going to be the former, and I need to learn to identify that anxiety and keep it to myself rather than trying to foist it onto others (as my dad did and does). Something something cats in the cradle something something I hear @henry singing.

[suomalainen]

Having had a few days of quiet, a few observations:

- Bearing the anxiety for another - anxiety over outcomes when there is neither responsibility nor authority, seems to me to be pretty stupid. Alas, I appear to be quite stupid. I am working hard at being less stupid, mostly unsuccessfully.
- Another point of stupidity seems to be comparing myself to those whose outcomes I admire when I realize … I admire that person because they’re doing something other than parenting. While it remains stupid to ruminate on what might have been, perhaps in smaller doses, it could be instructive / therapeutic while being poisonous at higher doses. I come back around to Lin Yutang’s meditation to create a life that’s “fairly carefree and yet not altogether carefree”. This is mostly a problem on this forum, when I read about all the interesting things you all are doing / trying.
- I’m working through my emotions and habits to try to become a new parent, a different parent, to my emerging adult children. Sometimes I feel selfish, like I’m abandoning them, when I don’t step in to do the adult thing but rather hang back and let them do it on their own. At the same time, I feel selfish, like I’m suffocating them, when I do. I’m doing my best to follow their lead and to manage my own emotions. This is hard.
- Work has slowed from the breakneck pace to the lumbering “business as usual” pace. I could get used to this. Until I get bored again. With any luck, the ebbs and flows will come with some regularity so that my remaining career years are “fairly carefree, yet not altogether carefree”.
- I’ve been consistent on lifting. I haven’t lost any weight, but I have gotten stronger. Maybe I’m plateauing, but that’s cool with me. I just want to plateau at a strength higher than “no lifting at all”.

[7Wannabe5]

Well, at least you're not yet to the age/phase where you don't admire anybody else's outcomes.

[suomalainen]

Continuing (ruminating?) on the theme of what one should do with one's time, I came up with this super-scientific explanation that encapsulates all possible reasons for anyone doing anything - ready? It's all about the DEMP. Every action is done on the basis of various amounts of the four ingredients:

• Distraction
• Engagement
• Meaning
• Purpose

Pretty good, yeah? Think about it.

I also realized that I'm overly harsh on myself, in particular about those comparisons that I mentioned earlier. I have the "ambition" of a person that doesn't have kids. I want to follow my curiosity and learn things and skills and try new things and travel and be outside a ton. But I can't, because I feel drained as hell after parenting. Relax. It's normal. So you have to put most other projects on hold for 20 or 30 years while you engage on this one (five) big project(s) that you picked up when you were young and dumb. But you're not really missing anything other than superficial variety - variety that nevertheless still just boils down to you taking a DEMP. There is no grand scale whereby one project is objectively "better" than all (or any) others. We're all just doing stuff. Todd needs something to do; do what you love with the people you love; stay busy, be useful; freedom-from; freedom-to; time-agency; optionality; going back to work for the non-monetary benefits; side hustles; and on and on. Viewed through that lens, swapping one activity for another isn't really all that different. They're all just vines. So what if you're "stuck" on one for 20 or 30 years? You gots to be on a vine anyway - there is no ground, and this current vine is just as good as any other one. Maybe the trick is just to make sure the mix of activities you have gets you the blend of DEMP that you need. Parenting may be chock full of all four, but maybe it drains the engagement out of you, so your other activities need to be mindless or pure distraction (tv, video games, running). Maybe you need a different type of meaning than "family togetherness" (solo activities, friends). Maybe you have to have a job where the primary or even sole purpose is to provide for the family, devoid of DEM. Maybe later in life you can get a job that provides more solo-purpose, or meaning even. Maybe this is why different vines appeal to us at different times. To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.