“Nobody has walked the path that I have walked. They have not seen the things that I have seen. They must, if they truly want to understand me.”
I dunno. Isn’t that the point?
Is it really that important that I drag someone down with me to the muck I came from just to feel not alone in the struggle? No, it really isn’t. I can share my perspective without cursing anyone else with the my own burdens of survival.
It’s why we have society.
Life’s too short to learn from our own mistakes only. We have to share.
Scrambling breathlessly to write and manually place a robots.txt file under my blog to supercede the one built into WordPress in order to keep the chatbots from stealing my words for their profit, suspecting full well that they already have.
I feel like I should be angrier than I am, but all I feel is mute resignation.
The major hailstorm tonight found my car in good condition.
It is no longer in good condition.
Judging from the three holes in the tempered glass, and the four dents on the trunk lid, the hailstone broke up during the fall and became a cluster bomb. It impacted with so much energy, there were fragments of glass and tint all the way up on the front dashboard and floorboard. I am in awe.
At least it wasn’t my front window. Fuck.
I was outside (under shelter) watching the hailstorm during the worst of it, and I think I heard the stone that did my car in. There’s a certain POK! sound when tempered glass is shattered. I heard that sound. I had hoped it wasn’t my own.
There will be a lot of claims filed in Austin this week, so I have no idea how far out until I’ll have this repaired. I filed a claim shortly after cleaning up the car and showering off the shards of glass. Until then, I have a blue tarp covering the window (at least I had the foresight to buy a set years ago). I’ll have no choice but to drive like an old man until I no longer need the tarp taped to my car and pinned in the doors.
And the kicker is that I have an appointment at the tire shop tomorrow morning for new tires, and I need to buy a new battery. I’ve also been wanting to have my tint redone, but was worried about the techs damaging the painted rear window defroster lines. Now I don’t have that concern. They’ll have fresh glass to work with. Upsides, I guess.
In a recent blog post I bemoaned how Duolingo’s streak gaming system has become something of a death march, how it’s an unavoidable slog, and how eventually I’ll be jumping off that treadmill so I can enjoy life and enjoy learning German instead of breathlessly trying to rip out a 3 minute lesson before midnight so I can keep my streak up.
No sooner did I post that, do you know what Google recommended to me in my Youtube feed? A video from some linguist polyglot who gave tips on how to get the most out of Duolingo despite its flaws and, to sum it all up, the secret is to KEEP AT IT.
This is not the future I asked for.
I joke that my only readers here are robots. I sometimes forget that they are big robots, the kind that are bent on convincing me of anything if someone will pay them a buck to try it.
