short post

i finished a pattern language 🙂 it was definitely enjoyable and great for thinking about livability and design, though the first two sections (on towns and buildings, respectively, around 1000 pages) were much more readable than the last section (on construction, around 200 pages). my somewhat rigorous reading and notetaking schedule coupled with the sheer text length has made me a bit tired of reading books though, so i think i will take a break for at least a week

here’s a map update! unfortunately i already exhausted all the low-hanging fruit near where i live, so i haven’t been able to explore new areas of sf as much as i’d wanted to. i’m not really sure what to do during my final week here – a lot of bay area mit people are coming home so maybe i’ll visit them, but almost everyone lives at least an hour away by caltrain and i am finally getting somewhat tired of moving around all the time so i’ll probably just end up seeing whoever feels like coming to sf

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recently a friend changed their pronouns from she/her to they/them. it was the first time this had happened with someone i was close to, so i was worried i’d have trouble adjusting or would accidentally use the wrong pronouns or something and decided the most reasonable thing to do was just to try referring to everyone by they/them. this all happened a few weeks ago, so at some point i stopped thinking about it… and then yesterday my roommate talked about their female friend who would be visiting and i kept using they/them when asking about the person and eventually my roommate got confused and asked “you know there’s only one person coming, right?” and i was pretty surprised to realize that they/them had largely become a completely automatic response

the other day someone asked me to rate how lucky they were on a scale of 1 to 7 for a personality test they were taking, and without hesitation i said 7, because they were living in the usa in the 21st century. after a that’s-obviously-not-what-the-personality-test-was-asking-please-recalibrate from them i said 6, because they had a nice brain/body and friends and whatever, which, now that i think about it, also deserves a 7 but is still not what the personality test was going for. but the amount of gratitude i’ve internalized since writing about it a few posts ago is ridiculous; if you’d asked me these same questions at any prior time in my life i would never have given out sevens so easily, especially not for these reasons, and especially not instinctively

a few weeks ago i had a conversation with a stranger about ways in which we’d changed over the past year. i told them about how some of my friendships collapsed and how i had a history of seeing my flaws reflected in people close to me and often ended up implicitly blaming or resenting them for my problems. i’m not sure if this is a behavior i’ve actually resolved though; it hasn’t occurred for over six months now and i think i process these interactions more healthily nowadays, but this is the kind of problem where you receive negative signals whenever you relapse and never observe your successes (ie. i’ll never know if i avoided a falling out that past-vincent would not have avoided, since past-vincent failed fairly unpredictably). so i’ve tried to change but can never be particularly certain about it, and this is still one of the main aversions i have to things like entering new relationships, especially with people i’m already friends with

when the days and weeks blur together as they have been for me lately, the idea of progress feels unfathomable, foreign, impossible to measure; the notion that i can live differently and eventually stop hurting people close to me seems completely absurd. but when i look at how readily i was able to adopt things like feeling gratitude and using they/them, things which are trivial but which i would never have considered a few weeks ago, i’m reminded that yes; you can change; you are already changing; you have been changing every single day