11/18 I’m quite late to the party, but I programmed more seriously with AI for the first time. A lot of it has to do with my ability, or lack thereof, to delegate. But the joy when I describe a fairly complex setup in a precise, dense paragraph and the AI gets it right, all of it, on the first attempt. Joy when I see it resolving minor ambiguities in my wording. I can see this quickly escalating to not only how to build a system, but also what system to build.

11/17 Played Maiden Voyage against a rocky-funky backing track, literally for hours. I don’t know how good of an exercise that is, but it’s the way I like to play.

11/16 Packed up the gazebo in the backyard on what was a windy, but surprisingly sunny day. We should have taken greater care to roll down the window covers during the past few months so that water and leaves would not collect in there and leave stains on the tarp. We didn’t. We hadn’t even looked at the gazebo for months, never once went out into the backyard. I cleaned as much as I could. In some places there were white circles about a centimeter in diameter with a darker, orange spot inside – no doubt generation spaceships of spiders, which I did not allow to continue their journey.

11/15 Schleiermacher, feeling of utter dependence. What if you don’t have that feeling?

11/14 Weirdest, scariest thing happened to me as I brought something – the metal mount of our A/C unit – to our storage place tonight, about a mile away, after dark. As I opened the big roller shutter and walked into the corridors between the units, I saw a pile of boxes in front of one of the units. As I got closer, I saw that the roller shutter of that unit was also open. I looked inside, it was a bigger unit than ours and also full of boxes and other stuff. Not much light fell into it from the corridor where I was standing. As I kept looking for a second or two, I realized something like the dark silhouette of a mannequin or a scarecrow among the things, and as I kept looking it became clear that it was actually a person standing there and looking at me, silently and motionless. I could have gasped in fear but instead I said “oh wow” and continued on my way through the corridors to our unit. I would have to pass by that unit on my way out again, and I had to lean into a considerable amount of fear while doing it, although of course I had no other choice and there was nothing else I could do. I thought for a moment that taking the iron mount back out with me might have been an option, it could have worked as a weapon, but then again: come on.

11/13 Spent the day in Manhattan rather than going back to Newburgh. That’s making less and less sense.

11/12 Called my mom, and unusual is perhaps only the speediness with which my dad hands over the receiver to her so we can speak. I have no consolation to offer, her heart and her circulation are not doing what they are supposed to do, and she has severe arthritis. All that while being the same girl she must always have been. My mother, who, twenty years after the war in which she was born, went to Germany and found a man there. – Getting old is nothing for cowards they say.

11/11 One of the first effects of listening to more complex music seems to be that I notice how something sounds unusual – without being able to say why and how –, but being unable to calm myself down over just how unusual it is, and how something like that is possible.

11/10 You’d think that ten fingers on a keyboard should be a finite thing to understand. 

11/9 It was remarkably silent in our home all day. It is so silent I hesitate to even put on headphones to listen to some music.