I felt gross in the morning. Not sure why–I suppose to some extent I always feel gross in the morning. Figuring out some hack around this would be extremely valuable. But a nice breakfast put me on the right foot again–I finished “The Great Crossing”, a short Asterix cartoon linked on Ribbonfarm.
I did more RIAI studying, went to return Muriel’s books at the library (they had this cool book return machine), had a quick tasty lunch, went to play hoops. I played really tenacious defense, and offense started out really well (one guy I’ve been playing with said I was improving week by week!), but after the 90 minute mark I got tired and sloppy and then started getting annoyed, which only sometimes focuses me, and other times just makes me play wilder.
Anyway, concentrating on the first hour and a half before I was totally exhausted, we see an interesting phenomenon. This happened when I was dancing swing every week, Monday nights and Wednesday nights and sometimes Friday nights–extremely rapid improvement and cultural fit. I had thought that it was the honeymoon period, that I was learning so rapidly then because I had so much to learn. That hypothesis, which motivates bouncing from thing to thing, fit better with my do-everything ethos of the time. But I think now it’s really because of how often I went. This means that you can build on what you learned last week, before you forget it. And successful fit to the culture also depends on frequency. It comes from system 1 absorption of norms (and confidence from learning fast) that, for example, I lost when I stopped going to swing quite so often. Maybe I should switch my strategy from “do-everything” to “do one thing often, you can do multiple things but in blocks”. Hmm.
Then I went home, nearly finished my OpenAI application (those things just eat up time). Made myself a quick dinner (both my cheese and my sausages were inexplicably missing, maybe I left them out, ate potatoes and my two remaining eggs unfazedly). Then it was off to meet two of Muriel’s high school “Six Chicks” group and watch a movie!
I met Muriel for a quick walk beforehand at the Baden Bahnhof. We walked around the Aldstadt arm in arm and, on my urging, went down to a lovely bridge on the river. (It was, of course, dark and rainy, but whatever) Then we went to a little cafe Muriel knew, that had some odd stories associated with it. We got our overpriced espresso-30-minute-indoor-parking passes and sat down in a beautiful little room upstairs, where apparently the owner would hold lectures on “erotic history”. It was all paneled in red velvet, too. But it was a nice place to sit and chat :)
Then we met Florence and Michele at the Bahnhof again. As we were waiting for them, tried to come up with a word to describe words whose sound represents the emotion they convey (a sibling to the onomotopoeia). Like “Bummer!”. We couldn’t quite reparse the Greek though.
Florence and Michele were really nice. We walked over to the theater. Thankfully, Muriel had insisted that we watch “Darkest Hour” about Churchill and Dunkirk, rather than some comedy with Hugh Jackman. (I hadn’t said anything when she mentioned it). It was really good, very dramatic, I’m curious how much of the decisions that were attributed to Churchill really fell to him–according to the movie he masterminded the whole evacuation, which required some controversial military sacrifice, and singlehandedly persuaded the British government not to sue for peace. There was an intermission in the middle, which was weird. And, via a mutual figurative fencing process, Muriel and me got to do some hand holding during the incredibly dramatic final Parliament scene (I’m getting the hang of this!).
After the movie, we hit a nice little cocktail-cafe place, and conversed for a while. Topics oscillated and I had a lot of fun :D By the end I was nearly completely socialized out, my tank drained, and when I got on the train after saying goodbye to the ‘Chicks’ I plugged in my headphones and disappeared into Ribbonfarm.
Got back home, listening to some classic Past Spencer songs, wrote this log and hit the hay.