site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   1518 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for December 17, 2025

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

2
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I don't know why I'm doing this, but I can't exactly stop myself. Maybe it'll help someone else who finds themselves in a similar situation in the future.

I visited my father in the hospital today. The drive down was awful. I traveled the highway by myself for several hours, alternating between grief at what was happening and absolute self-loathing that I had not made the journey to visit more often over the last several years. I try to get there at least four to six times a year, but it doesn't feel like it was nearly enough.

When I arrived, I wandered through the hospital in a daze. The facility is gigantic, and it took me nearly fifteen minutes to even find the reception desk. The staff was friendly, but every one, from the security guard at the weapon check to the thoracic surgeon, had become numb to the suffering that people experience inside those walls.

I had last seen my father over Thanksgiving, and I was shocked at how thin he had become. He seemed to be taking things well, but the hospital also had him dosed to the gills on an antidepressant that sees off label use as an "appetite stimulant". It's hard to tell how much of that is organic.

I have always been a good actor, and that was vital today. I could tell that he was glad that I was there, but he was clearly more worried about all of us as he was himself. I kept it together whenever I was in the room. I made sure I absorbed everything the medical staff said, kept up conversation, and even got a few smiles from a joke here and there. When I had to leave the room, however, I couldn't hold it together anymore. The click of the door produced an almost pavlovian response. The hurt felt like a living thing trying to claw its way out of my chest. I could barely breathe. I threw up into more than one trash can. But when I got back to the room, I pulled my shit together, because that's what he needed.

We spoke with the oncologist, who told us that the cancer has metastasized. He was very clear that a cure is off the table now - at best, we're looking to buy time. They'll be using a combination of chemotherapy and immunotherapy in an effort to slow the progression.

Last summer, the doctors said he was cured. The scans had repeatedly come back clean, and there was no sign of it anywhere in his body. Fate is cruel like that sometimes. I wish it weren't.

Some of you here are Believe. If you do, I would ask that you pray for not just him, but anyone who might be experiencing the same thing.

I am so sorry for what you're going through, especially the gut punch of the clear scans a year ago.

the security guard at the weapon check

??? Is this a thing? Where do hospitals need to have weapon checks

Where do hospitals need to have weapon checks

It only takes one gang banger coming in to finish the job before the hospital changes policy.

If you mean "check" as in a metal detector or other assessment for weapons, pretty much everywhere. If you mean "check" as in coat check less common but well red states exist.

Angry family members, psych patients, the delirious, people coming to finish the job...... healthcare workers do get assaulted and murdered every year, and I've found weapons on patients who have been "searched" plenty of times.

I meant metal detector and the like

I have never experienced this, but I am not American. Crazy stuff.

While guns are pretty American specific, ridiculous violence against healthcare workers is not - India has a HUGE problem with this, many other countries do also.

It's very "kill the ref because my team lost" energy.

I will dedicate the merit from my meditation today to your father.

I genuinely appreciate it

I'm really sorry to hear that, man. I will pray for him, and for you. I hope you aren't too hard on yourself for not visiting more - it's genuinely hard to see the ones we love as much as we would like, and doesn't reflect a failing on your part. You're doing a great thing by trying to give him support, keep it up!

Thank you for the kind words

Re: distant (if even feasible) 100x100 on 100sec swim goal, have commenced lessons, doing lots of kick drills, often with a snorkel. Starting to feel good body position when prone, still struggling with body position/fore-aft balance when rolled approx 45 degrees to one side. Flip turns have gotten a lot better and more consistent. It's kinda fun! Hard to say whether it's a meaningful cardiovascular load at this point, but it's something different, anyway, and I've certainly heard guys claim that swimming enough seemed to have some carryover to e.g. bike and run.

Re: Patrick O'Brian and what to read after you finish Aubrey-Maturin, I recently read Beat to Quarters, the first-published Hornblower novel. It's okay, definitely not as fun as O'Brian. There's a sort of dynamic where Hornblower is internally tortured by self-doubt but externally distant, steely, and always right that annoys me a bit and vaguely reminds me of certain animes.

Re: last week's "plan F" thread, I'm starting to engage with a sort of inverted version of this in a not entirely theoretical manner. tl;dr got a degree, hated the white-collar world, took a blue-collar job with lots of time away from home in remote locations for ~8 years, met nice girl, now want to be home more. There are offramps within the field that would probably work for me but I haven't been able to take one in the last six months or so of trying. My academic background wasn't professional, as such (econ, math, phil, UCs) and I didn't really stay in touch with anyone from the programs. I've been semi-seriously looking at nursing school, there are some accelerated programs that would theoretically work for me, but I'm not at all sure that it's something I even want to do and I would have to take a fair number of pre-reqs before applications close in May or June. I think they'd accept online coursework for most of it (and am about to reach out to confirm) but it feels awfully committing to drop a couple grand at Modoc County Community College or whatever to laugh my way through Anatomy and Physiology.

/deerdiary

Re: Patrick O'Brian and what to read after you finish Aubrey-Maturin, I recently read Beat to Quarters, the first-published Hornblower novel. It's okay, definitely not as fun as O'Brian. There's a sort of dynamic where Hornblower is internally tortured by self-doubt but externally distant, steely, and always right that annoys me a bit and vaguely reminds me of certain animes.

I read those books when I was about 12. I loved them at the time, perfect for a tween boy. But yes, in retrospect Hornblower is very much a Mary Sue and they're not nearly as sophisticated as the Aubrey-Maturin novels. It's more interesting to me that he was also literally working for the British Ministry of Information at the time, writing propaganda, so I wonder how much of the series was influenced by that.

I think The African Queen is his best book for adults. It has an interesting setting that you don't see much (African riverine warfare, circa 1914) and more realistically flawed characters.

I think The African Queen is his best book for adults. It has an interesting setting that you don't see much (African riverine warfare, circa 1914) and more realistically flawed characters.

I'll look into that one. I'm still finishing up The Wine Dark Sea.

That swim goal is amazing. I'm really curious to follow your progress on it.

Regarding your professional future, don't worry about where you start, worry about opportunities for progression. If you're an average mottizen you're smarter than the average bear, even if you start out at the bottom of the field you'll find yourself promoted in the long run.

If your background is math/econ you could take a look at government jobs related to your blue-collar profession, if there are any.

Yeah, those are basically the off-ramps I'm thinking of, and they're probably my best choice on net. Just hasn't panned out quite yet.

Reflections After One Year of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu

-- I recently read our friend @jdizzler's substack for his Infinite Jest review, which linked to his post of ten books he wants to read before he dies.* That's how I felt about BJJ going in. I'd always felt like it was something I should learn before I die, to be a complete person. About since I discovered the UFC on SpikeTV**. At the time, I took up boxing and Muay Thai because those gyms happened to be closer to my house, then fell out of combat sports after a bad concussion senior year of high school left me nervous about accumulating too many. I'd always thought of grappling as something I ought to master at some point in my life, as one of the "true" martial arts. At some point in my life, I needed to, if not master, at least become fluent in BJJ. It was on that list of athletic things I ought to do before I died, like running a marathon, squatting 4 plates, or maybe one day hiking the Appalachian Trail. When a gym opened near me, it seemed I'd finally found the time to do it, and of course being in my mid-thirties I instantly started to regret not starting sooner. Why didn't I start training when I was in college***? Why didn't I join the wrestling team in middle school, which would have been so valuable now****? A year in, I understand most of BJJ, even if I can't execute it. I think another year at least is going to be required to reach the level of learning that is on my bucket list. I may or may not stick with it past that, but it was absolutely worth it for me to reach this level. If, like me, learning Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is somewhere on your bucket list, I highly recommend going for it, and do it soon.

-- What makes BJJ such a compelling hobby is that you get most of the benefits of fighting, with relatively little downside, so you can do it four or five times a week without dying. I couldn't spar this hard in boxing five times a week, I'd probably do permanent damage in a month. In a way I think this is why wrestling and grappling develops across cultures as a practice, it's a way to simulate a fight without killing anyone. For the most part, MMA has shown us that the superior grappler wins the fight 90+% of the time anyway, absent a significant difference in other training or skills. I get to struggle against a real live resisting opponent ten or twenty times a week, and live to tell the tale. The primal rush makes it worth it.

-- "Fight Club became the reason to cut your hair and trim your fingernails." I started BJJ as a kind of adventure in fitness, one more thing I'd do along with all my other fitness interests, and quickly it became the focus of all my fitness interest, it took over my life. While comparison is the thief of joy, avoiding comparisons is impossible in BJJ, you know the hierarchy of the gym, and I know that if I miss class the guys who I roll with are getting better and I'm not. My work schedule is complicated, I couldn't reliably go on certain days, and minor injuries were a constant problem, so I never really got on a solid schedule of when I went to BJJ and when I didn't, and I just went every day that I could go. So between prioritizing going to BJJ whenever I could, and the constant minor injuries, I never really got into much of a workout rhythm. I still lifted and climbed and did weird kettlebell stuff, but every time I tried to start a program or plan, I'd yoink something in my shoulder or throw out my back or get caught in a bad armbar and my elbow hurts or it's guillotine week and the Poconos Gorilla pulled my neck out of line, and then I'd prioritize getting back to class and put the lifting on the backburner. I want to fix that in the second year, my goal is to get into a good rhythm of lifting and jiu jitsu, I'm sort of on a blank slate this particular second as I had about two bad weeks of minor illness and work stress, so I'm fresh to start over. I lost a good ten pounds, I want to work on a 5/3/1 template this winter, and build some more strength. Aim for 3-4 days a week of BJJ, and take proper off days instead of going until I get injured, try to consistently stick to certain days.

-- I'm also considering checking out open mat hours at other gyms, rather than only doing classes at my gym; and then on the flip side being more willing to go to class at my gym and just drill instead of staying to roll every time. We don't do a regular open mat at our gym, but when we do on holidays I find I get more out of that hour than I do out of a typical class. I also need to be better about going just to drill and not rolling, when I don't want to get hurt or don't have much time. I also might try to get a buddy to just drill with me some days. I need to venture outside of the class structure, try to guide my own learning process.

-- I feel like I'm developing a style, and I still can't decide if that's a good thing or a bad thing. I tend to be very "position over submission," a station to station offensive approach: from top I mostly pass full guard by passing to half guard, then passing to side control from there, then aiming for low percentage submissions like americanas to open up higher percentage submissions or advance position; from bottom I mostly try to get to half-guard if I'm stuck in side control or mount, then try to get to a tight waist and sweep or get back to full guard and sweep or submit from there. Half guard is where I win or lose the round. I'm constantly attempting moves that don't give up position, I only go for moves that do give up position when I have a good opening; for a while I joked that attempting an armbar was just how I gave up side control. I don't know to what extent I should lean into my style, versus trying to develop the weaker parts of my game. Probably everything, I mostly just suck.

-- BJJ has definitely proven my theory developed in rock climbing: if you keep at something, you will get better, but you mostly will always feel like you suck exactly as much as you feel like you suck at the start. At first you'll feel like you suck because you don't know anything; when you get better, you feel like you suck because you should know more. At first you feel like you suck because everyone is better than you; when you get better, you'll feel like you suck because he's better than you and started after you, or because you're just at some nowhere gym in PA anyway. This has been my experience with BJJ so far. At first I was the absolute worst, and I hated myself for sucking at it; now I'm more like bottom third or so, and I hate myself for only getting this far in a year. This is pretty much true in all hobbies: you'll feel as weak as you did when you started lifting no matter how many plates you put on the bar, as slow as you felt when you started running, etc.

-- Leglocks: Friend or Foe? is the great debate for BJJ aficionados right now. Are they too dangerous to train? You don't get the same pain feedback before the blow up someone's knee that you get before an armbar goes too far, so it's risky, put it on wrong or too jerky and you can really hurt someone. They are absolutely necessary to train for high level competition. But, you can't use most of them in lower level competitions, and if you go to another gym the "unwritten rule" is that new guys aren't to be trusted with most leg locks until you know them, so you risk causing a scene if you try a heel hook and they don't judge you worthy. As a result, I've more or less given up on using any leg locks except the straight ankle lock live, I haven't committed to competing yet but if I do I see no reason to practice moves that I can't use in a comp and screw up my flow. I also, in general, avoid moves that I have to worry about hurting my partner, because I don't like double-clutching when I'm rolling, I prefer moves where he has plenty of time to tap***** before he gets hurt. I've gotten a pretty wicked straight ankle lock when rolling by focusing on applying it, and it's become my go to in a lot of positions: it's what I fight for in a dueling leg lock, and I sometimes go straight into it from open guard to single leg x or pop it on when I can't get by a knee shield. My coaches, who are deep in the black belt competitive scene, keep encouraging me to do more heel hooks, and I drill them, but I don't really see much use for them yet, I don't really wind up in a position where I can hit the heel hook but not the straight ankle. To be honest, if you take out the straight ankle, the americana/kimura, and the triangle, I probably only finish about three or four subs a week.

-- Goals: Eleven months ago, I was getting depressed at how little progress I felt like I was making, and told myself that if I didn't get a sub by the end of February I'd quit. That night I got lucky against another white belt, pulled off some kind of half-remembered muay thai hip throw from the clinch, got his back, and tapped him on a rear naked choke. Over the next couple of months I set goals of hitting different subs, of hitting a single leg takedown, of tapping a blue belt, and finally last month I managed to, just once, sub one of the coaches. I got lucky on an ankle lock. I'm not sure what my measurable goals are anymore. The one thing I don't like about BJJ is that it's so random, at least at my gym, depending what day I show up and who shows up that day, I can be anywhere from dominant over the other guys, to just struggling to survive, it can be anything from needing to play light to avoid winning too easily to knowing that my opponent is just toying with me. So I'm not sure how to set useful goals, now that "hit X once" has mostly been exhausted. Suggestions?

*Footnote: dizz, while I admire your effort to read books in their original language, within a blog post written in English you should stick to English when giving book titles for consistency. The books were mostly familiar enough to recognize, even for a dirty monolingual, but it kinda threw off the flow, especially with Mishima in English at the end. Also, out of curiosity, do you intend to read the whole Sea of Fertility series? Runaway Horses was one of my favorites, but I stalled out midway through the next book, probably in a teenage boys inability to read books about girls.

**Is that still on? Apparently not, it was "rebranded" to Paramount, which I think is the home of stuff like Yellowstone and other boomer-fantasy TV. I wonder to what extent the audience stayed consistent, or it is only a rebrand in the sense that it's the same like channel number. I used to like Spike when I was a teenager, I wouldn't actually watch it now, but still, a shame.

***I was too busy, when not studying, trying to make the men's eight for the Head of the Charles, drinking, or courting Mrs. FiveHour; all of which seems less important in retrospect now that I see the value of being pretty close to training with early career Jon Danaher.

****Because I liked baseball and basketball better, and all the wrestling kids were juvenile delinquent tough kids who would have beat the piss out of me and stolen my copy of The Return of the King and never given it back.

*****I still shudder thinking about the one roll where I got my partner in an Americana, and started to apply it, what I thought was very slowly, giving him a long time to tap, and then this awful grinding sound came out of his elbow.

if you keep at something, you will get better, but you mostly will always feel like you suck exactly as much as you feel like you suck at the start

Don't knock nowhere PA. I've done a few tournaments there, and even though I'm 95th percentile strong, a surprising number of those guys could ragdoll me.

I've been lucky enough to be able to train with champions in Muay Thai and BJJ within ten minutes of my ancestral farm. And we've got such high quality wrestling that I'm consistently getting smeared by D1 guys in class. I'm not knocking the quality of the training here, moreso if one day I find myself the best in the gym on any given day, I wouldn't feel like I was good at Jiu-Jitsu, I'd feel like I'm a big fish in a small pond who would get eaten alive at b team or whatever.

I went to a BJJ gym this summer; just visiting to check it out. Some free rolling at the end, and I pulled a muscle, was out of it for a few weeks. Then a HEMA tournament, then a cold, then overtime at work, then a few weeks of single parenting, another HEMA tournament, then a flu...and here comes your post, reminding me of the fact that today, this very evening, I could go to the local (non-Brazilian) Ju-Jutsu gym for another trial visit. I had one scheduled ages ago that didn't materialize due to one of the aforementioned flus. Which means that I need to quickly figure out an excuse as to why I can't go today. Guess I'm still out of sorts from the flu? Didn't get enough sleep last night? Feels bad, but I'll be able to live with it better than with showing up and getting trashed because I'm in just that bad a shape.

So let me derail this a little to talk about the most recent HEMA tournament. Because that one was at my old club, and in the evening - what kinds of madmen start training martial arts at 19:00 and go on until 22:00? Well, we did, back when we were university students. Oh how the sinful life of my past catches up with me now. I was tired before I even got there, and ignoring the signs of the oncoming flu on the two-hour drive.

Normally, when I arrive for a tournament, I gear up as quickly as possible, but do only the lightest of warm-up exercises. Basically just a few fencing steps, a few guard transitions and a handful of strikes. To see whether the gear sits correctly, and to remind myself of which way to hold the sword. Usually this comes with me noticing the same things every time.

  • Damn I'm out of shape. Why is this so exhausting?
  • My hands hurt. Why is this sword so heavy? Why won't it go where I want it to, and stop where I want it to stop?
  • This move is supposed to be done with a sideways jump, or a lunge, or drop step, why won't those happen when I will them to?

The answer to all of those is, of course, "Because you haven't actually trained at all, or done any other sports or athletic exercises with any regularity, since early 2020. And you're getting old.".

Not this time though. Because this tournament simply took up the time slot of a regular training session, and the trainers were present, they started the event with communal warm-up exercises. The stuff that, six years ago when I was still a regular, would have come as naturally to me as climbing a flight of stairs. Well, not anymore. I was close to vomiting by the end of it, heart hammering, drenched in sweat, out of breath and all strength. And of course the schedule was tight and I had to gear up and get ready to fight immediately anyways.

So I went and did the needful. Terrorized some of the newbies with guards they had no idea how to deal with, with creating the illusion of distance to land unexpected thrusts, with letting their strikes repeatedly wiff because they don't actually utilize their range (until I got a very embarassing bonk on the head when I overplayed that hand) and some cheap shots to the hands when separating from a bind and they mistook that for deescalation (Though in one such separation, one of the newbies got a beautiful thrust to my throat in). Notice a theme here? It's all tricks and leveraging experience. When fighting against the more experienced comeptitors (who of course all know me and what I'm up to), they just went all-in and either trashed me through superior strength and/or speed, went into grappling distance and folded me up, or even sprung my own dirty tricks on me. I don't hold up under actual pressure anymore; the muscle memory may be there but the muscle isn't anymore.

I still enjoyed it. It was fun. I recovered somewhat over the course of the evening; the fights themselves being less strenuous than the warm-up. I chide myself for going in without a plan this time and just screwing around; I know I could've performed better because the competition wasn't much stronger than at the last tournament, and there I actually got a lot done purely by merit of having that good plan. I met some old friends I hadn't seen in a while. Felt a sense of homecoming to a familiar place and familiar activities. The chairman even gave me special patch for the ten-year anniversary of my membership. Which I chuckled a little at, because I had been a member for several years prior to that in the predecessor club, but apprently that didn't count for the current-day buerocracy. Nevermind, I really did appreciate that they thought of me and thanked them accordingly.

But of course nothing is the same anymore. For every old friend I met again, there was one stranger and three empty places. More on those empty places later. You can't leave your jacket in the locker room anymore because of rampant theft. Adults are not allowed to be in the locker room at the same time as children anymore. O tempora. But that's marginal. What bothers me is the following. We had always had a culture of stupid jokes. Nothing worth retelling, basically just inside jokes that functioned much like 4chan memes; easily memorized applause lights for socially inept nerds. Some drove that, some were the butt of it, some tried their best to ignore it and focus on the fencing. And I know, I know that I'm a grumpy old man now, and badly out of touch, but those jokes have gotten out of hand. Not worse, or crossing boundaries, but oppressive in their repetitive omnipresence. Every conversation is just a nonstop exchange of meaningless in-group signals. "A game of emote-with-me", this stuff was called recently. Sometimes variety is inejcted by quoting the internet meme du jour. If anyone present was serious about the sport, they didn't show it. Most of the newbies were busy trying to one-up each other with statements meant to showcase how crazy or special each one was. Socially inept nerds still, but I just don't gel with the new generation.

Beyond this point comes the Culture War.

After the tournament, we went to a nearby pizza place. At 10 PM, fuck me, and with a two-hour drive still ahead of me, but I don't get to be there often. Turns out I regretted that part of the evening and I should've just headed straight home. Because the next hour was a non-stop leftist ranting session. It started off with a twenty-minute hate session for the autistic club treasurer who managed to antagonize everyone. Then came the politics. Comparing everyone right of the social democrats to literal Hitler. The anesthesiologist telling us what he would do if he learned that one of his patients was such a "nazi". Someone else recounting how he taught his kid vulgar anti-fascist songs. Condemnations of the EU's relenting on the internal combustion engine ban. A general agreement on the inability of the market to do anything positive, and the need for more regulation. Several rants about how ridiculous it is to exclude foreigners or attribute anything negative to immigration. Three cheers for diversity. By a table manned (and womanned) exclusively by straight upper-middle-class white native Germans who managed to bully all the non-believers out of the club (the working class, the sexist-jokes-maker, the non-vaccinated, the German-paganism-inclined, the Christians, even the one foreigner we used to have) . Oh, and dear Americans, they were not kind to your democratically elected President of the United States. The big orange satan was the ultimate boo-light. And to cap it all of, a big announcement of how the people present finally managed to march through the institutions of larger organization our club is part of to change the statutes so that membership of or support for any right-wing organization will be grounds for immediate exclusion in the future.

Guess who ate his apple chips, kept quiet, and half-pretended to fall asleep in his chair? Please ignore me, I'm just an old fossil trying to die in peace.

Back when, we'd generally not discuss politics. It just wasn't what anyone was there for. Occasionally conversations strayed there, but effectively only in 1-on-1 situations, and then we genuinely did accomplish polite disagreement or laying out differences in basic assumptions, and left it there. But I guess everything is poltical now, and you're either with them or against them. I don't know whether I'll ever make another trek to my old club. It pains me to say this. I paid my dues and earnestly tried to keep up over the last few years, wore my club regalia and all. But given how much of a hassle it is to get there, and how few of the old guard are left, and how much the new people there grate on me...I think I'll just hit daytime tournaments across the region, diassociate myself from the club, and avoid the social get-togethers from now on. This used to be a very important part of my identity, but it just doesn't work anymore.

It's almost funny how the HEMA people I actually had producive sports-centric interactions with over the last few months included honest-to-god flag-waving communists and nonbinary gendersomethings, but the polite good decent moderate people are rabid ideologues whose politicization of previous apolitical institutions disgusts me. They think I'm one of them. I don't want to deceive them, but I really did not come there for a hill to die on, and so I kept quiet. Almost funny, but ultimately I'm just sad.

Sorry for steering this into CW territory. I just wanted to talk sports, but apparently I had some venting to do.

Which means that I need to quickly figure out an excuse as to why I can't go today. Guess I'm still out of sorts from the flu? Didn't get enough sleep last night? Feels bad, but I'll be able to live with it better than with showing up and getting trashed because I'm in just that bad a shape.

I've been fighting off a series of colds for a month now. It really interferes with things.

Politically my BJJ gym is kind of opposite of my rock climbing gym experiences.

Climbing gyms are self-consciously aggressively blue tribe, but secretly conservative because of the naturally white, elitist, nature of the sport. Serious outdoor sports cannot by nature be really inclusive. They can be friendly, welcoming, but ultimately the nature of the sport is that it revolves around travel to remote locations, the more remote the better, the more difficult to reach the better. No rock climber likes crowds. Rock climbing forwards the myth of complete gender equality (to be fair, rock climbing comes closer than any other real sport), and does its best to promote women's climbing, but if you're going to climb a 5.10 and she only climbs 5.9, sorry. Rock climbing gyms circa 2020 loved to do BLM stuff, often to distasteful extents, but they're all lily white. There are probably more socialists than Republicans in your average gym, but the nature of any workout is that it makes you conservative, correlates your personal development with your personal effort.

My BJJ gym, by contrast, is self-consciously red tribe, but actually very inclusive. It's full of serious Christians, gun nuts, cops, divorced dads, off color jokes, and a full understanding that the women are playing along but in a different class. But, it's also the United Colors of Benneton. The owner is Puerto Rican, the Monday coach that gave him his black belt is white, the Thursday instructor (whose classes I mostly avoid because the moves are too complicated for me) is black, the weekend coaches are two puerto ricans one a doctor and the other a truck driver during the week, the other black belts are bearded white guys. Racist jokes are occasional, but the rules aren't enforced by anyone glaring at you or shaming you, but if you cross a line you risk a bad round with Andre. Gay jokes are constant (how do you even do BJJ without gay jokes), and to my knowledge we don't have any gay guys, but if one joined and played the game, I don't think anyone would really care.

I actually explained this to a friend of my wife's who runs the local LGBTQWERTY youth center, that if she wants to help trans kids who are looking for an athletic outlet, send them to our BJJ gym instead of telling them to join the track team. As long as they don't enter a comp, which 80% of people never do anyway, they'll just be them around the gym, nobody is going to bother them. I'd just understand that if I roll with Pat that I roll harder than I would with a woman, but not as hard as I would with a teenage boy. This is already an adjustment we're all making constantly to accommodate size or experience differences. As long as you show up and try, there's not going to be any hatred.

How fit and strong do you have to be for BJJ to make it enjoyable? Is it a bad sport for someone who picks up injuries easily (tendonitis in various places)? :P

Cool writeup! Almost sold me on this, but I think it'll interfere with running!

I'd like to try to convince you it won't, but it would. You're younger than me, so maybe less so. I've had multiple months in the past year where I really couldn't run. Once in the spring with a niggling knee injury, then again in the fall with a torn hip flexor. Both recovered, but I couldn't run at all during that period. Partially what got me started on cycling this past summer, running kept aggravating something from BJJ, buy cycling was lower impact. I'm curious if that will hold up in the second year of cycling.

if you keep at something, you will get better, but you mostly will always feel like you suck exactly as much as you feel like you suck at the start. At first you'll feel like you suck because you don't know anything; when you get better, you feel like you suck because you should know more. At first you feel like you suck because everyone is better than you; when you get better, you'll feel like you suck because he's better than you and started after you, or because you're just at some nowhere gym in PA anyway.

It was eye-opening for me to share my closest hobby with a friend and realize this was his meta-philosophy about it. I think it's a very American attitude, and a huge point in Americans' favour. I prefer to just try a bunch of things, find something I'm effortlessly good at, and aura farm there, but people who enjoy being in that place of improvement-oriented awareness of ignorance can bootstrap themselves into anything.

I prefer to just try a bunch of things, find something I'm effortlessly good at, and aura farm there

This is just the same point I'm making, but with the valence reversed: You start out feeling good, and you keep feeling good. You get better, no doubt, unless you pick a really stupid hobby with no depth. But at first, you feel good because you are effortlessly succeeding, and isn't that nice to succeed without effort? And then, as you get better, you feel good because you are getting better. Your net self esteem barely changes, even if your talent level improves.

12/2025 FiveHour could absolutely manhandle 12/2024 FiveHour on the mat. I can tell because I dominate the big strong novices that join now. A 6'2" strapping blonde college kid just joined the gym a little before Thanksgiving, and I ran into him for the first time at the Thanksgiving open mat. I don't give new guys too much slack when I first roll with them anymore, got surprised and embarrassed too many times by guys I thought were new who had previously experience, so I tapped him twice pretty quickly with my A game. Arm drag to back take to RNC, then back to the feet snapdown to ankle pick to side control to americana. That all took about a minute and a half. I took a breath and realized that he was really new, and I shouldn't be a dick, and instead work some stuff that I don't normally hit and only take subs on a silver platter. So I laid down and let him work from standing, let him get me in bottom half and bottom side and bottom mount. I still tapped him three more times, just taking stuff that was so obvious and easy I couldn't let it go without making an even bigger fool of him. After, he tells me my guard is "terrifying, I never know what's going to happen."

And that round feels good for a minute or so, it's a huge sense of victory to win a round, even a meaningless open mat in rural PA on Thanksgiving morning. Last year this time I would have been euphoric about that performance, when barely ever hit any subs on anybody. Now, I shrug, I'm still frustrated by some of my performance that day. Because earlier in the open mat I rolled with Chad and while I held him in half guard he dominated me with head pressure all round; and Big John still stumps me and what's the point of my Jiu Jitsu if I can't beat somebody bigger than me? The standard I expect myself to reach has changed.

BJJ is probably also a bad fit for my neuroticism, in that I too quickly (for my own mental well being) recategorize guys from "peer" to "he's smaller/weaker/newer, I shouldn't be a dick to him."

BJJ has definitely proven my theory developed in rock climbing: if you keep at something, you will get better, but you mostly will always feel like you suck exactly as much as you feel like you suck at the start.

HAH! So it is universal.

Kind of figured it was, but it's fun to see others confirm it.

I feel the same way right now. Brothers 🤝🏻

My father is still in the hospital. He wasn't doing well after the biopsy so they kept him for observation, only to discover pericardial effusion. They removed 350 ccs of fluid and placed a drain. We are still waiting on results from both the biopsy and the drained fluid.

Every single symptom he has could be explained by an infection, or by metastatic cancer. We're all sitting on a knife edge waiting for the results. He's lost 20 pounds in the last three months.

I had to go back home for work, but I'm hoping to get down again on Friday. I want to see him, and I think he wants to see me, but I'm afraid that I'm going to break down in front of him. He's my father. I don't want to put more of a burden on him that what he has already endured, but I don't know if I'm strong enough.

I’d recommend breaking down in front of him if that’s what is called for. I lost my dad when I was eight years old and I’d give anything for the chance.

Good luck. I hope you get more time with him.

Hey. My condolences. One of the scariest moments of my life was when my dad to go in for a thryoidectomy after a biopsy found something too suspicious to let lie. He also has a heart condition that hospitalized him once, so I can relate even harder.

Hoping yours pulls through, and I'd say it's better to cry in front of him if that's the cost of seeing him. If he has any wisdom (which most fathers do), he'll know it's your way of saying you love him when words fail you.

I'm sorry for what you're going through. I would recommend seeing him, no matter what, no matter what burdens you think you're laying at his feet.

I lost my mom to cancer in 2017. She was in a outpatient care home for a few weeks near the end and I would leave work to go visit her. Then one day I just forgot, went straight home, and it wasn't until I was already settled that I panicked and thought to go see her. I never did, that night, and went the next day. She and my dad told me to brush it off.

When she died, she was in the hospital, and I left earlier that night to go home. She died in the middle of the night. My brother was there. I left.

I don't think anything would have changed if I had made it, or I had stayed, but in both cases, I wish I did. It was hard to stay that night, too hard, and I didn't. But I should have.

Go spend time with your father, especially if this turns out to not be cancer. See him as a human being, and your father, and spend your time with him. It will not be easy, but it's not supposed to be easy. It's supposed to be worth it.

I am going to try to be there as much as I can. I know that no matter what happens, I'm going to feel like I haven't done enough, and it's probably true.

He lives three hours away. We've always had a bit of a precarious relationship - he's only been in my home three times in the last twenty years. He doesn't disapprove of my lifestyle, but he doesn't really understand it. There's always been a gulf there that I feel like I've never been able to bridge. I just wish I had more time to keep trying.

I'd second the notion that it will not be easy, and add that sometimes you will feel useless, or in the way, or that you're not clicking and just making matters worse, disruptive, doing nothing, etc. And then you should stay anyway. I do not wish to try and trump your situation by going into a long narrative of my own parents' deaths, but based on having myself lived through those times, I'd say yes, your instinct to be there is the right one. Edit: I am not trying to prematurely push your dad into the grave. Just relating.

I Can Just Do Things

People like to say that if you know your destination, you’re already there. These are usually the same people who claim that "pain is just weakness leaving the body" or that a kale smoothie tastes "just like a milkshake." If they are correct, however, I am currently residing in a state of pre-emptive heartbreak, a destination I seem to book a ticket to with alarming regularity.

I had flown back to India to escape the Scottish winter, a season that is less a weather event and more a personal attack, a psychic shearing of the very paltry amount of wool keeping me warm. The goal was to thaw out. Instead, I found myself running a familiar experiment: meet someone nice, become infatuated, and then watch as reality arrives like a wet dog at a picnic.

Some time ago, I had attempted to catalog the women I’d dated, which is the sort of neurotic bookkeeping one does when procrastinating on actual work. There was one particular entry: a fashion designer. My notes described her as "very cute, very sweet, and very depressed." It sounds like the tagline for a memoirs section at a bookstore.

Our early courtship was a non-starter. A few dates, no touching. Then, inevitably, the dramatic medical emergency. She messaged me in a panic because her brother was at the ER. I went, of course. I’d like to say it was entirely out of altruism, but I was mostly willing to brave a hospital haunted by my ex-girlfriend just to get in the good graces of a new one.

I arrived to find the brother sweating and complaining. He’s a difficult person under the best of circumstances, and kidney stones rarely bring out the best in anyone. The doctors were performing that unique hospital dance of terrifying the patient while offering absolutely no useful information. I worked in Oncology before I caught the psych train, I'm not an emergency physician, but I took a quick history and laid hands on him and felt fairly certain it was a stone. This was soon confirmed by imaging. The hospital staff, sensing a customer with insurance, wanted to perform surgery on a pebble the size of a grain of couscous.

I couldn't exactly go argue with them. In India, contradicting a senior doctor is a social crime on par with kicking a cow. So, I did the passive-aggressive thing and slipped the brother some medical PDFs, instructing him to argue his own case. It worked. He peed it out, he was fine, and I got a pity date out of it.

It went well enough, though I got the distinct impression she was only there to pay off a karmic debt.

There was also the time she called me in the middle of my shift, suicidal. I was in the ICU. People were literally dying around me, monitors were screaming, and I was on the phone using my "soothing voice", which usually just puts people to sleep, to convince her to put down the scissors. It worked. She went to bed, and I went back to restart someone’s heart.

Then, silence. She vanished. I was in Scotland. I had my share of problems. I had more than my share of other people's problems, that's just my job.

Months later, I noticed her Instagram was deactivated. In the language of modern dating, this is the equivalent of a boarded-up house with a pile of newspapers on the porch. It means a breakdown. I messaged her. Four days later - an eternity when you are waiting for a reply from a pretty girl and genuinely concerned about her wellbeing - she wrote back.

"Heyoo pretty boy."

She was back in town, living with her brother and sister-in-law, having traded fashion design for financial calculators. She was studying for her CFA. It was a pivot from fabrics to derivatives, which I suppose is just a different way of obsessing over tiny details and patterns.

The texting... It was sublime. I began feeling uncanny, like it couldn't possibly be real that a pretty girl would laugh at all my jokes, even the really awful puns. And that she'd make me laugh too, hard. That we would get each other. It made me wonder why it hadn't happened the first go around. Had we learned from our mistakes? Or had we simply been battered by the passage of time, had our rough edges sanded off? Had we learned to settle for "good enough" and call that good?

We met at a café. She refers to herself as "smol," a spelling that makes my teeth ache, but she looked fantastic. She spent the entire time insulting herself, and I spent the entire time telling her she was wrong. We laughed until she claimed she was in physical pain. She said her cheeks ached. I pointed out the innuendo, and asked her to wait a while. I dropped her off home, and accepted an invitation that I hadn't thought I'd ever receive. Come upstairs. Her brother would be home soon, and she told me that he usually threw a fit if she wanted to bring a boy over. But when she told him it was "the doctor", he only expressed calm acceptance that in a more expressive person, might constitute outright approval. I guess good deeds remember their names.

I left at 3 am, after drinking quite a lot of her lemon rum. It didn't quite drown the butterflies in my stomach and the aching desire to see her again.

We both told each other that our date had been the highlight of a rather dreary year. I know I meant it, and I choose to believe she did too. Fuck that qualifier, "choose", I genuinely do.

Then came the family vacation. My mother dragged us to the nicest beaches India has to offer, a tropical paradise where she immediately developed a swollen cornea because she refuses to listen to her ophthalmologist, or her doctor son about contact lenses. Between applying eye drops to my mother and drinking beer by the beach, I spent most of my waking moments texting her. When my mom's eyesight recovered, she had to ask who I was talking to all day, with a goofy grin on my face.

We wrote essays to each other. She told me about her anemia, which she treats with chia seeds sprinkled on her chocolate pancakes. I told her pretty girls will do literally anything but take their iron tablets. She told me she’s terrified of needles. I told her about the time I almost died of appendicitis because I was too scared to go to the hospital. In my defense, I was six years old. We debated whether she was "vanilla" or a "sex goblin." I had made the mistake of assuming the former. I was pleasantly disabused. She sent me a picture of herself in a saree that was so attractive it actually made me angry. I tried keeping the messages light, PG-13. Suggest, don't tell. I was rather shaken when she threw caution to the wind and made it rather clear that she wanted me. I blushed. I tossed and turned in bed till 4 am with a boner because she was an utter tease who I could tell was deriving great satisfaction from making me squirm.

On December 12th, I got my exam results. I had crushed them. The sensible thing to do was to fly back to Scotland, return to my job, and accept that this was just a holiday romance.

Instead, I stood in the ocean, ignoring the coral reefs and the fish, and changed my flight. I bought VIP tickets to a concert I didn't want to see. I delayed my return to the real world for a girl who thinks her uterus is a "pink balloon."

They say if you know your destination, you’re already there. My destination, apparently, is standing in the surf, staring at a phone screen, waiting for a "trash panda" to tell me she wants pasta. I've saved a bottle of my best scotch for her. It costs more per shot than the whole bottle of her rum, but it's a fair trade for her company.

Man, self_made_human, you know this can't work. You have a job. You live a very large and a rather small continent away. You aren't incapable of loving well-adjusted women, they're just thin on the ground, few and far between. Probably snatched up in uni and happily married by now, unlike you. You tell yourself they you're happy in the market for lemons, you bite into them, skin and all, and enjoy the juices running down your face, staining that one floral shirt you intend to wear till it's ragged. You let your dumb-ass heart override that frontal lobe, and you enjoy your limbic system running itself ragged too. You know she doesn't want kids, and she's adamant on that point even when you tactfully, haha only joking, attempt to suggest otherwise. You know you want those. You know you're in for pain. You write essays about it. You intellectualize, you rationalize, you romanticize.

You're a poor bastard trapped between two kinds of death: the slow death of "stable but boring" or the fast death of knowing exactly how the crash will feel before you even take off.

You're a doctor who's seen too many terminal cases, except the patient is your own capacity for unguarded hope. You're grieving the version of yourself who could still be excited about a future with someone without immediately cataloging all the ways it won't work. The undefended, optimistic, "butterflies and bees" version of you who could look someone you loved, talk with her and laugh and imagine and not immediately start writing the breakup essay in his head. You've spent several hours tracking down all the essays you once wrote about falling in and out of love. You've charted your trajectory: it's a biased random walk through a minefield. You've looked over every explosion, remembered the pain of amputation, jettisioning who you once were, the slow healing that left your heart sclerosed and cramping. You've seen yourself become a better writer at the cost of becoming cynical. Your muse drinks your blood and in turn pisses out digital ink, with just enough ground glass in it to hurt.

Fuck it, fuck me, fuck you. You're just tired, enjoy the ride and don't look at the expiry dates on the bottle, liquor keeps.

(Is it a postscript if it's written before publication? I think that's just script.)

That was going to be it. Another neat little vivisection, another essay where I dissect my own heart while it's still beating and call it insight. File it next to all the others in my ever-expanding catalog of romantic catastrophes, each one slightly better written than the last because at least I'm getting something out of the wreckage.

Except here's the problem with pre-writing your own eulogy: sometimes you don't actually die.

I had spent half my vacation in a state of wanting. Not the casual kind, the obsessive kind, the kind where you check your phone every thirty seconds like a lab rat hitting a lever. I wanted another date. I told her as much. The obstacle course was predictable: her parents had just moved into her brother's place, trading their retirement for the privilege of asking pointed questions every time their daughter wanted to leave the house looking nice. They're not tyrants. They're just Indian parents, which means they're constitutionally incapable of letting their adult children exist unobserved. Mine can be guilty of the same, but I am thickskinned enough to threaten to decamp to a hotel if they kick up too much fuss. They love me enough to relent.

The surveillance wasn't the worst part. She could physically leave. But she was drowning in guilt, the kind that only comes from having tasted freedom and then having it revoked. She'd had her own apartment, her own money, her own life. Now she was back to being a broke student and a daughter under parental scrutiny, except with the psychological damage of knowing exactly what she'd lost. The thought of dolling herself up to see me, of explaining where she was going, of lying by omission or commission, it strangled her.

I liked her too much to push. I told her I'd give a great deal to see her again, and soon. I left it there. Sometimes the best move is to wait and see if someone wants you badly enough to navigate their own obstacles.

She did. She dropped the "going out with friends" bomb in the middle of a conversation about groceries and fled before her parents could cross-examine her. I did my part. I got the best haircut I'd gotten in months, the kind where the barber actually listens instead of just buzzing everything down to institutional length. I did skincare, which for me is practically revolutionary. I unpacked the suit that had been living in my luggage like a well-dressed corpse, travelling across continents but never actually getting worn. I looked good. Better than good. I looked like someone who gave enough of a shit to try.

I had a work meeting first, because apparently my job follows me everywhere like a well-trained dog, including on vacation. The moment I could escape, I bolted. I showed up early at our meeting spot, flowers in hand, but this time I had a plan. That cutesy Japanese store, the one that assaults you with pastel aggression the moment you walk in, I'd spotted something there last time. A plushie. Hot pink and goth black with a little skull, the kind of thing that was so perfectly her that it felt like fate. Or at least like good pattern recognition. I bought it. I wanted to see her face light up. I wanted to be the kind of person who notices these things and acts on them.

I'd offered to come get her when she arrived, but she was too proud to accept the offer. I will admit to some schadenfreude when she got lost in the building. Of course she did. The floor plan was designed by someone who hated intuitive navigation. I talked her through it over the phone. I ambushed her at the elevator, flowers hidden behind my back like some kind of rom-com protagonist. There she was, a tiny short-haired tomboy with an accent I found delicious. She'd dressed up, and she looked ravishing.

When she appeared, I kissed her hand (who even does that? Apparently I do now) and produced the bouquet. She beamed. The plushie came later, hidden at the restaurant table. She loved it, then immediately started catastrophizing about where to hide it from her parents and her klepto friends. I told her I was good at gift-giving when properly motivated. She told me I'd motivated her quite effectively.

The date was absurd in the best way. We ordered Long Island Iced Teas, which is what you do when you need liquid courage to have conversations you've been avoiding. They were great, or had copious amounts of liquor in them, which are interchangeable if I squint. She dabbed carbonara sauce from my moustache at the exact moment I realized she'd seen that scene from The Lady and the Tramp. We were disgusting. I loved it.

Then we had the talk. The real one, not the pleasant surface chatter and smoldering flirtation. The fact that I'd be flying back to Scotland while she was stuck here, treading water. The kids thing, that perennial dealbreaker lurking in every serious conversation like a landmine you both know is there but keep walking toward anyway.

It went easier than expected, which might mean something or might just mean we were drunk enough to be honest. I told her I'd be back if she wanted me back. I suggested, with the kind of boldness that only comes from Long Island Iced Teas and desperation, that I could fly her over for a few weeks. The idea made both of us dizzy. We sighed about the kids. We acknowledged it was big, maybe the biggest thing. She'd already told me her brother's marriage was crumbling because his wife had sprung the no-kids revelation on him after the wedding, knowing full well he wanted them. I'd already told her they should divorce. There's more to that story, but not for here.

We unpacked her reasons for not wanting children. The body horror of pregnancy, the way it transforms you into something alien. I told her the right man wouldn't care about stretch marks or loose skin, which I believe is true. If it's not, he was never the right man. Labor terrified her, the sheer physical violence of it. I reminded her that c-sections exist, that my entire family of gynecologists chose them. She told me about past boyfriends who'd been astonishingly tactless about the whole thing, who'd made her feel defective for not wanting what they assumed she should. I deployed all the tact I had like a drone strike. Call me Clausewitz. It's one of the few things I'm genuinely good at.

The concert became collateral damage. I'd bought a single VIP ticket earlier, planning to confirm she'd be free before getting hers. She wanted details. I, being an idiot, let her see the invoice. Her eyes watered. She said I absolutely couldn't spend that much on her. I pointed out I'd spent three times that just changing my flights at peak season, but she wouldn't budge. I didn't push, although I told her I'd been imagining her on my arm, showing her off to my friends like some kind of trophy I'd actually earned. We compromised: I'd go to the concert, get respectably drunk on the drink vouchers, then meet her at a hotel after. It's not ideal, but it's something.

Here's what I didn't expect: we never stopped talking. Hours of conversation without a single dead zone, without me having to fill silences like I was spackling drywall. Most women I've dated have required constant verbal maintenance. I can do it (I can hold a conversation with a brick wall if it's the polite kind), but it's exhausting. With her, words just kept coming. Machine-gun banter, jokes that built on jokes, puns that made us both groan and laugh simultaneously. Vulnerability disguised as stories. The kind of rapport that's rare enough that, once tasted, you notice its absence everywhere else.

She said I was spoiling her, ruining her for other men by setting standards the locals couldn't match. I told her that was the entire point. When I lovebomb someone, it's scorched earth baby, carpet bombing, not a single daisy left standing. I told her this was completely out of character for me. My previous ex had to formally demand flowers like she was filing a complaint with management, and even then I only did it once. Changing international flights at obscene cost? Buying VIP tickets to shows I don't care about in the hopes I could take her with me? Six months ago, self_made_human would have assumed he'd suffered a traumatic brain injury. Now I'm calling it something else, though I'm still working out what.

If this was just about sex, I could achieve it for a tenth of the investment. There's something else happening here. I'm figuring it out in real time, which is either growth or just a different flavor of self-deception.

I told her about this essay. The version I'd written before our date, where I'd already scripted the ending. I laid out my neuroses like medical specimens: the way I sublimate my own wounds into fixing others, the way my ex with BPD recalibrated my tolerance for chaos so thoroughly that stable feels boring and volatile feels like home. The way I've sabotaged perfectly good relationships by simply losing interest when they proved to be well-adjusted. I told her I thought this would end in heartbreak, that the odds were stacked against us in ways neither of us could control.

She asked me not to show her the essay. She said it would hurt, that it would make her cry. I promised I wouldn't. Not yet. Not until the dust settles, if it ever does.

Then she recalibrated everything. She told me she'd thought I was out of her league the first time around, that she'd been into me all along. I'd spent months assuming she was there out of obligation, paying off some karmic debt from the kidney stone incident. Apparently I'd just been too oblivious to notice. If we'd gotten this right the first time, my entire year might have been different. Or maybe it would have been exactly the same, just with different timing. I'm not sure which possibility disturbs me more.

We fucked up by not checking the time. Too busy staring at each other like teenagers. By the time we looked up, it was late. Her parents called, asking when she'd be home. Fuck. It was already ten. I offered to bring her to my place, break open the bottle of scotch I'd been saving, before it aged to the point where it was too expensive for me to drink. We both knew exactly what would happen if she ended up on my couch. She couldn't do it. Guilt about being late and disappointing her parents, again. We compromised on one more glass of wine, then another, until we realized eleven o'clock was bearing down on us like an oncoming truck.

I insisted on dropping her off in an Uber. Every minute felt precious, like something I needed to hoard against future scarcity. I was taking a puff on a hookah of aerosolized gold and pixie dust, I just had to hold it all in my lungs until I gasped, till my very blood glittered and fizzed. And then I'd do it all over again. She agreed.

The car ride was everything. We were all over each other, making up for lost time, making out like we'd just discovered the concept. I won't give you a blow-by-blow. You're not here for erotica, and I'm selfish enough to want to keep some things private. But I will tell you this: the best moment was when I pulled her into my arms and let her rest her head on my chest while I kissed her hair. That's the image that keeps replaying. I felt obligated to tip the driver generously for being discreet about it, since we were anything but.

I'm glad she lived far away. By the time we reached her building, we were both wrecked. Flustered, craving more, feeling like addicts who'd been Narcanned mid-high. I said goodbye with all the recalcitrance of a toddler being dropped off at daycare for the first time. She looked like she felt the same.

The moment I got home, the texting resumed. Except "texting" is far too innocent a word for what we were doing. No holds barred. Every ounce of my wordcel vocabulary bent toward crafting the filthiest prose I could manage. She matched me, word for depraved word. We're both wordsmiths when properly motivated, it turns out.

Eventually, after what felt like both an eternity and no time at all, I told her to go to bed. I said I'd do what I always do with feelings I can't quite process: write them into submission, pin them to the page like butterflies in a collector's case.

So here I am. The taste of her still mapped on my lips. An essay that needs its ending rewritten because I'd already decided how this would go before it even started. I thought I knew my destination, thought I was already there in that state of pre-emptive heartbreak.

Maybe I bought a ticket to the wrong place. Maybe this me realizing it's possible to reschedule certain flights, and stay on the beach just a tad bit longer.

I've got things to figure out. The distance, the kids thing, the fact that I'm pathologically attracted to women who come with warning labels. But for once, I'm not writing the autopsy report before the patient dies. I'm not cataloging the failure before it happens. I'm just here, wanting this badly enough to be stupid about it, willing to believe that maybe my diagnostic abilities can do more than just identify the disease. It feels good to undon the cuirass of cynicism, set my back straight and let the tension bleed out for once. Music hits hard - every lyric dripping with cosmic significance, the world seems brighter and more vivid. Is this what happiness feels like? Is this- no, don't jinx it.

Wish me luck. I'm going to need it.

The obstacle course was predictable: her parents had just moved into her brother's place, trading their retirement for the privilege of asking pointed questions every time their daughter wanted to leave the house looking nice. They're not tyrants. They're just Indian parents, which means they're constitutionally incapable of letting their adult children exist unobserved.

For all the educated girls from non-WEIRD cultures I knew, "he's a doctor - and no he's not married, you know I'm not that kind of girl" would have made this problem 90% less troublesome than you are making it out to be, or in some cases 110% (as in her mother would have become an actual ally). Was this true in her parents' corner of Indian culture?

Some more context:

The "modal" model of a typical relationship in India is that the couple will start seeing each other largely on the down-low. Things don't blow up immediately? Loop in your friends. Things don't crash after a few weeks or months and they really like each other? Then parents are (usually) informed. Things are serious? Introduce them in person. By the time the parents are meeting each other, you're practically engaged.

Theres definitely major variance. Stage in the life cycle. Liberal vs conservative, in social terms. Sanity, maturity. But that's roughly how it works for most of us. I don't think it's that different in most of the West, but each step is a bigger milestone here.

You're right, but the denizens of even a specific cultural group aren't homogenous. I won't pretend to have the full picture, but she is scared to introduce me because:

We don't know for a fact where this is going. Just knowing where we want to take this isn't sufficient for it to happen, even if it's necessary. Neither of us are quite delusional enough to make promises about marriage just yet (well... now that I say that. She was drunk, it might have been a joke).

If she brings me over, that raises the stakes massively. I can see she's deeply anxious about what they might say, or the pressure they might put on her. In her words, her parents simultaneously want her to get married ASAP and are also deeply disapproving of her dating around. Even if it's serious dating. Don't ask, it perplexes both of us. But I've heard of much worse. Seen much worse: the girl I'd seen for 5 years had hidden my existence from her family for the entire duration (!)

(Indians can be quite culturally conservative, not that I don't know millions of relatively liberal folk.)

I think the biggest barriers might be mental. Hers. I'm good at charming the average parent. I'm very polite, funny, and yes, a doctor who is doing pretty well for himself. That matters a lot. I would bet good money that if she'd let me meet them, I'd win them over. But she knows, deep down, that if this happens and it doesn't pan out, it'll make the heartbreak all the worse.

I won't push her. I've raised the idea, to prove I'm serious. I'd bring sweets. Perhaps she might change her mind on that when she realizes that the infatuation is permanent, but I'm here to date her and not the family, as much as I'm fond of her brother.

Like you I’m a neurotic, which is unfortunate in this particular aspect of life, in which neuroticism can so easily ruin everything.

I needed a framework to take risks (otherwise I would take none), which ended up being instrumental to my own happiness. It was something like this (unlike you, I never write anything about my personal life, no journals or diaries, but I had it in my head):

  • Are they not a (known) cheater, known to be very promiscuous or otherwise have signs, explicitly or implicitly, of a wandering eye?
  • Are their parents happily married (the happily is almost as important as the married)? You can usually get the answer to this very quickly because people enjoy psychologizing their own parents, even on an early date
  • Do they want to settle down and are they looking for something permanent, now?
  • Are they not a liar? You can figure this out quickly, it’s just a matter of not deluding yourself about the implications.

If the answer is yes to all, and you like all the other stuff, then you owe it to yourself to pursue it, even if it seems hard or unlikely or you have doubts (which a neurotic always does).

I think you meant "yes" to "are they not a liar?". Or at least, if you were looking for liars that seems inadvisable.

Very true, I fixed it.

Like you I’m a neurotic, which is unfortunate in this particular aspect of life, in which neuroticism can so easily ruin everything.

I am normally the opposite of neurotic. For the past few years, the only thing I've gone full throttle on is academics (my parents are beaming at me). The romantic neuroticism is quite new, courtesy of a particular relationship you already know too much about. I won't repeat myself.

I enjoy being able to put that aside, and hopefully keep it aside. That being said, a pinch of neuroticism probably makes me a more considerate partner.

(unlike you, I never write anything about my personal life, no journals or diaries, but I had it in my head)

I have the memory of a goldfish, so if I don't write, I forget. Also, writing is cathartic.

Funny. While talking to her yesterday, I suddenly recalled one of the reasons we'd pulled apart after our first few meetings. She had asked me once, probably over text, whether some of her menstrual symptoms might be due to pregnancy.

This threw me for a loop. I hadn't slept with her. My reaction was to point out, with some indignation, that I was really the wrong person to ask given that I don't know who she slept with or when. Getting that out of the system, I then proceeded to give her actual advice, because of course that's what I did. Just helpful like that. She then told me it was 4/5 months back, after which I told her that if it was a pregnancy she'd damn well know by now. It was something else.

I took that as a not particularly polite sign of a lack of romantic or sexual interest. I thought she'd either hinted that, or simply saw me so platonically that the notion that I'd care hadn't even occurred to her. I put aside my aspirations for another date, low as they already were. I busied myself with even crazier women.

I told her this. She was initially taken aback, but then recall struck like lightning. Oh, she said, and then proceeded to type out a very lengthy and heartfelt apology. She wasn't entirely sure what her rationale had been back then, but it wasn't malicious. Perhaps a tad bit inconsiderate, but I've been there myself. I hemmed and hawed a little bit, but I did accept it. I said I'd forget, and for now, it didn't spoil a good thing.

Ah. Mature conversations and being able to talk to someone. I missed this.

The points you've mentioned are good. I can see that being the foundation for a good relationship, happy husband/wife = happy life.

I would personally make a longer list, tacking on such things as intelligent, looks, a sense of humor etc etc. I'm sure you don't mean to say these aren't valuable by refraining from mentioning them specifically. I can excuse them being a liar, or at least I can this girl when she calls me a "pretty boy".

I must say that the whole "look at the parents to gauge their offspring" is wise, and something I learned from bitter experience. A girl from a well-adjusted, caring family? There's cause for hope.

I must say that the whole "look at the parents to gauge their offspring" is wise, and something I learned from bitter experience. A girl from a well-adjusted, caring family? There's cause for hope.

That is the most important thing. When I was maybe 14, my friend’s mother, scion of the single most politically important dynasty in a small Latin American nation of little note, told me that when marrying, you marry a family more than a man or a woman. The advice has stuck with me since, and it was correct.

Bloody hell. My mom told me the same thing, in the same words. I can only wish she came from such a noble lineage, but I've been trying to live by them nonetheless.

My parents told me the same thing, it's generally good advice!

Also, any problems your spouse has with their parents/siblings will become your problems as well when you're married.

"Oh to be young, and feel love's keen sting." Good luck. If it all goes south, you'll still have the memories.

As an aside, are you familiar with the poem Politics?

War and war's alarms, yes, more than thirty years ago that I read that one.

It is difficult to overstate how different your love life is from mine. I am in almost every way the opposite of you. Partnered for ten years, soon to be married. Almost constitutionally incapable of big romantic gestures, inclined to focus on the smaller day to day things. Generally into women who are healthy, sane, and on the other side of the kids conversation.

But damn do I enjoy reading about it.

I wish you luck. You've had a hard run of it. But there's no rhyme nor reason to these things. Sometimes it works until it doesn't, or doesn't until it does. There's little more you can do than try and learn from your mistakes, and you're doing that. I hope you find all the happiness of stability while keeping hold of the passion. My dad likes to say the most important thing we can do in life is find the one person we're going to share it with. If you do that right, the rest all falls into place.

I am both pleased and regretful to say that while I'm only 10 years in, not 40, all my experience suggests he is probably correct about this. Hopefully this is the last of your excellent romantic catastrophe dissection essays.

It is difficult to overstate how different your love life is from mine. I am in almost every way the opposite of you. Partnered for ten years, soon to be married. Almost constitutionally incapable of big romantic gestures, inclined to focus on the smaller day to day things. Generally into women who are healthy, sane, and on the other side of the kids conversation.

Lucky man. I'm jealous, but also grateful, because it proves there's hope for the rest of us.

A large part of my struggles isn't just stochastic. It's awkward to date with intent when you keep hopping between countries, and are unsure where you will be or can be in a particular place. It's almost like the UK training scheme is designed to reduce medico fertility to nil. On a few occasions, I've met people I could see myself being happy with indefinitely, with minimal drama, but either or I they couldn't stay.

It sucks.

But damn do I enjoy reading about it.

Thank you. I suppose we all need a reason to be grateful for the eggs that did hatch.

I wish you luck. You've had a hard run of it. But there's no rhyme nor reason to these things. Sometimes it works until it doesn't, or doesn't until it does. There's little more you can do than try and learn from your mistakes, and you're doing that. I hope you find all the happiness of stability while keeping hold of the passion. My dad likes to say the most important thing we can do in life is find the one person we're going to share it with. If you do that right, the rest all falls into place.

Thank you, I mean it. I'm doing my best to minimize the role of luck. Every girl dreams of being lucky enough to find Mr. Right. It's worth considering what that gentleman had to do to get there.

Good luck with your upcoming marriage. Given the track record, I can only assume it will be happy and productive. You sound sane, and that's more than many can say. Probably me too.

Oh, we're all mad, I was just lucky enough to meet someone whose neuroses are complimentary to my particular eccentricities. Whether your own romance works out or not, I'm sure it won't be because you didn't treat the endeavor with the gravity it deserves. And if fate does intervene, you are building all the skills and temperaments that will help when you do finally have the stability to date off intercontinental hard mode.

I don't really understand the need to artfully describe 95% of your love life to a forum.

Dude, no. I need this.

One day he'll Hank Green this into a blockbuster and I'll be here feeling all hipster.

You're making me blush. No one more hopelessly romantic than a lapsed cynic.

Writing a book is hard work, though I might have enough material for "crazy women and how to love them (don't)". But I think of how much people make writing sappy bullshit on Substack and wonder if I should pivot away from writing about Chinese web fiction and niche hard scifi novels. Of course, ¿por que no los dos?

We all have our ways of coping. Writing just happens to be mine.

(It's far less than 95% if I'm being honest. Only the highest highs and the lowest lows make me feel like bothering. Squeaky wheels, grease, all that jazz)

It's more interesting than most comments in WW, like my stories about bike rides or open mats.

If you don't like it, don't read it.

I did read some of it. The parts I read were well-written. I just question if intimacy means the same thing to everyone if someone feels the need to detail their feelings of intimacy to the entire world.

Since you're here, can you confirm if a 5 hour marathon is good or bad, relatively? I seem to recall that the 4 hour mark was a huge milestone in athletic history, so I'd presume 5 would be solid for an amateur.

The average finishing time for most marathons is in the high fours. So it's not awful, but it's not good.

I'm not a runner, you'd be better off asking Walterodim or @jdizzler about it.

My impression is that Five hours is roughly just under the cutoff time for most organized marathons to finish and close the course up. So it's basically the max time you can hit and still say you ran a marathon. 5mph for five hours is 25miles, so you really only need to jog part of it to finish in five hours.

You're not here for erotica, and I'm selfish enough to want to keep some things private

Hey don't make this about us. Some of us are here for erotica.

I'm sorry for my lack of inclusivity. I will listen, I will learn, and you will pay for a Substack subscription. Well, probably not, that's just an OnlyFans for "spice" addicts and I want to hold on to the last tattered shreds of my dignity.

Wish me luck. I'm going to need it.

will say few things:

  1. don't hold back yourself (depraved prose is good beginning).
  2. such uber rides are rides of a lifetime (whatever may happen in the future).
  3. don't psychoanalyse deeply - let yourself flow. not yourself, and not her. not past, not future.

Thank you. I thought myself congenitally incapable of living in the moment, but that's probably not true!

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats