Layoffs again... among other things

This week was a lot of things, mostly in sequence.

• Nice: The squirrel came back! We went to Yvonne's for our 3-year anniversary dinner, and had mocktails and delicious small plates of various descriptions. Memories of individual dishes are fuzzy, but I would do the lobster dish again for sure. And the desserts.


• Frightening: on Wednesday morning I saw a very skilled aerialist get trapped in a position that was choking them, and need to be emergency-lowered to the floor. I found out later that it was a new apparatus for the person. Scary, and a good reminder to never practice all alone if there are ropes involved in your equipment. (The person is okay now.)


• Dreadful: late on Wednesday, a lot of executives at Zillian sent out near-simultaneous layoff emails. I'm grateful that, thanks to a friend, I had several weeks' general forewarning and then several hours specific forewarning; given my psychology it was better to be online waiting for it, than to be entirely shocked. That said, some of the decisions still shocked me, somewhat including my not losing anyone myself. (Awful to say out loud, maybe, but if there had to be layoffs I could have dealt with managing 11 instead of 12.) So now there's even more work, and it's way more depressing, and I'm glad I happened to have a meeting set up with the Winemaker the next morning, 'cause he understands things.


• Celebratory: I published my annual video of training clips, which is incongruous, but that's how life is: all lumps and weird contrasts.


• Satisfying: on date night with the bug, there was THC seltzer and the final hour or so of Cocoon, which was lovely. This was apparently directed by Jeppe Carlsen, who previously designed Limbo and Inside, so maybe I have a game designer/director who I like and should attempt to follow. Just found out about an old indie platformer he made on the side years ago while working at Playdead, so... that's now queued up for some other moment of free time.


• Sad: on Saturday I took the squirrel and the bug out to Momix to see their new show Alice. I always love their illusions and this show was no exception, but there was an insert to the program commemorating one of their dancers who'd died at age 25... wait... two days before. It gave a macabre twist to our watching, as we unwillingly wondered which parts should have been hers, and tried to see who looked uncomfortable with their part onstage, like they might've been an understudy.

I've continued to try to sleep on a regular schedule and stay super on top of things. Today, lots more bookkeeping regarding the rental property. It's really strange to be in the middle of a 3-day weekend, feeling pretty good about most of those efforts but knowing that there's more bad layoff-related news coming on Tuesday. I went to open studio at LCS, first time in quite a while, and there were no Lions there and folks were friendly enough. That's meant to be my new normal again.

I'm reading a book called Doughnut Economics that's cool and very brain-stretchy. I'm all right with personal finance but never learned classical economics, and it's different (for me) to step back and look at some of it. Especially with a critical eye. I'm reading about how the main drivers of -- or forms of? -- prosperity are the labor generated by humans, land/housing, and capital. Most economists seem to agree that workers, landlords and capital holders are indeed three groups of people with differing motivations. But I still labor, and I also have (saved up) a chunk of capital, and I have my smol adorable rental property which generates about 1/3 what I would need to live on. So am I none of those actors, or all of them? Maybe I was supposed to know all this stuff before. Also maybe the people who invented these terms never anticipated a society that conflated laboring with morality.