• Cooler temperatures! After the hottest week I’ve experienced in months, things were back to comfortable Summer weather. By the time I’m writing this the sky is gray and it’s raining, but this week’s weather was cheerful and moderate.
• On Tuesday and Wednesday I gave two big UX workshops at week to help coworkers understand how they can use UX in their daily work. I’ve been giving workshops for well over a decade, always trusting my instinct to figure out what a particular group or context required. At work, though, we have two wonderful scrum masters who are well-versed in the art of facilitation. I learned a lot from their feedback, and saw a hugh jump between the quality of the first day and of the second day.
• I caught up with a special friend on Wednesday, a young woman I met because we were treated for the same health condition. Her life as a Psych major couldn’t be more different from mine, and yet the red threads our lives resemble one another. I’m fortunate to call her my friend.
• I had missed a few weeks in my RSS reader, but I was pleased to see Manuel Moreale’s People & Blogs is off to a good start. To hell with Anja calling me a geek for being into the IndieWeb, I love visiting other people’s websites. I suspect I love reading what they have to say about those websites even more.
• Last week, I had met an amazing couple of lesbians who invited me over for a casual dinner party on Friday. After a particularly challenging week, it was comforting to hear their experiences as people of color in the world today. I’m already looking forward to inviting them to our place.
• On Saturday, Anja and I kicked off the weekend with a spontaneous redesign of our living room. We finally got rid of my desk, which was a Covid-era purchase used for our home office. What remains now is Anja’s bigger desk, which functions as a dining room table that she hates more than I do. The removal of our home office allowed us to place our sofa there, which has giving the living room a significant amount of extra space. The dining room table continues to double as an office whenever we put our ultrawide monitor there. I like modular living, and I’m feeling less and less awkward about the way we’re going about it in our house.
• At the end of our cleaning sprint Anja mentioned it was a beautiful day for this accomplishment, since it was Rosh Hashanah. New living room, new beginnings.
• After visiting Anja’s mom in the afternoon, we biked to Kriterion to Watch Oppenheimer
• Much like the last few days, I’m not in the best of states. There’s an old sadness that keeps saying hello, and I’m slowly beginning to think it might be time to get some help with it.
• I’m nearing the end of my journal, and I’m surprised by how unnervous I am by the few pages I have left. In this past, like the rest of the world, as it appears, I had trouble finishing a journal in a relaxed manner. Looking at the first entry, I see I have 29 days left until it’ll have been one year exactly. Hello nerves.

Two months of onboarding have rushed by in a blink. The new job is absolutely wonderful: the people are great, the work is complex and important, and the office itself is perhaps the finest I’ve ever worked at. I joined this company because the challenges they have seemed interesting to me. I’m very pleased that, two months in, it’s difficult to think that, at one point in time, these challenges weren’t also mine. I’ve made the right decision.

• Happy Hanukkah and/or Christmas to those who celebrate!
• Even though our house is (reluctantly) multi-religious, we forgot just about every tradition we were ever taught for this time of the year. On Hanukkah Eve, Anja said “where are the tea lights?”, but we had no luck finding them to produce a makeshift chanukiah. Probably for the best. I don’t mind that we didn’t put up a Christmas tree, but I did find myself missing our outrageous ornaments.
• This week was all about the new piano I bought. I can’t stop thinking or talking about it.
• All I’ll say is: this piano project is the first one I’m approaching through a neurodiverse lens, and it’s making everything so much smoother and funner.
• Illegally, I’m mentioning something that happened in week 50. A. took me for my annual Fancy Birthday Dinner. For the first time since we began dating, I told her to leave it a surprise. I suppose it’s one of those benefits of having gone to in-patient eating disorder treatment: chill vibes about food surprises. If you ever have an appetite for exquisite 10-course Asian fusion dining, book a table at 101 Gowrie, where the atmosphere is as beautiful as the tableware, the bread is to cry over, and the umami is so intense that you’ll have trouble putting it into words.
• We needed a two-nighter to finish watching Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. I’m very much at that point in my mid-thirties where finishing a feature film under a warm blanket on the sofa after 8 p.m. is a challenge. I love whodunits — the genre might be in my top three — but I was quite disappointed to learn that both A. and I were able to guess the ending within the first five minutes. Janelle Monáe and Kathryn Hahn looked great nonetheless.
• All week, people kept asking me what I’d be doing for Christmas, and I’d cheerfully reply “Nothing! You?” every time. I feel liberated from the pressure to spend time with family or friends during the holidays, to eat more than I can carry, and to be and have fun. We certainly did have fun, just in a “really couldn’t be bothered” kind of way.
• I made my first batch of heavenly mud, a rich, creamy chocolate dessert. It was heavenly.

As soon as she hands you the gift
you know it’s another one
“Trans Life Survivors”
says the cover
“Merry Christmas!”
says your sister
you have only been using
they/them pronouns
in private
for a year or so
it’ll look so beautiful next to
the ex-gay book
your other sister presented to you
on your birthday last month

At family dinner you
spend bathroom breaks in your
childhood bedroom
five in total
logging on to talk to us
about how the heavy things feel
being the punching bag
on which your 11-year-old cousin
practises her right hook
screaming fire about
her trans classmate
stings
and
it stings
like a shattered jaw

Christmas break is passing by me like it passes by an ambitious teenager. I greeted all the things I could do with great enthusiasm. Sadly, that feeling quickly turned into terror once I realised two weeks isn’t that long and I need to sleep.

Productivity-wise, man can only fail under such conditions, this I know.

Meanwhile, I keep being amazed by the weather in Haarlem. I managed to take some photos downtown last week that remind me of the beginning of September, despite a winter coat here and rain hat there.