House fix-ups, random babble, tired evenings

[flexagon]

The new condo is pretty much ready to go. There is something in the HVAC system where the heat doesn't reach the back bedroom; it's covered under warranty but the HVAC guy failed to get into the place today using the key I left out for him. Aside from that, though, the last few things are done; this mostly meant installing two hinge pin door stops (a huge pain in the ass, I actually bought a specialized tool for pushing out sticky hinge pins) and cutting plastic drawer-liner stuff to protect most of the drawers and cabinet bottoms in the kitchen. I've brought home all the tools, and gotten almost all of them put away. I also spent a while bagging up leaves in the back yard over there, and got added to the condo association bank account at Chase. I am, by virtue of sending over a sample budget based on my own house and saying I wanted the job, going to be the treasurer.

So that fix-up project won't be keeping me physically away from home so much more, which is good, because I've been away a little too much. My birthday present for the squirrel was a day of handyman-type labor around his house, both for the tenants and in his unit -- I assembled a weight bench, installed some hooks in his closet, fixed the gate to the kitchen and swapped out a bunch of batteries in smoke detectors in all three units. Ah, and got the air conditioners down from the tenants' windows. Satisfying, but tiring. He liked it... he'd wanted activities or acts of service rather than products of capitalism.

Physically I'm doing ever-better backbends, and did my TGUs at 60lb this week for the first time in 2025. My hip has been hurting from doing too much compression work and I've re-started my PT exercises for that, but I'm feeling good in general about where my capabilities are and how my athletic mojo is doing. Only acro is a little bit stalled out, and that's mainly due to my base's schedule.

I had two unusual social events -- one with a guy I lent some books to about 13 years ago and forgot about, but when he reached out, heck yeah I want my books back. And one with my friend A from the Costa Rica handstand trips; neither of us is going this year, so we met up over a giant breakfast sandwich in Boston instead. He's moving to LA, which I possibly shouldn't be sad about but am, in fact, slightly sad about. I like casting a fairly wide social net, because it's often the more distant connections that bring in the new and interesting recommendations -- plus there's more to catch up on when I don't see a given person often -- but this is one who I would have enjoyed running into more regularly. Like, I wish we'd had a weekly class together or been coworkers.

We saw a student show for the circus school, and I also watched the new Frankenstein movie (pretty, but too much cruelty for me to really enjoy).

I seem, by coincidence, to be reading a lot about Jewish stuff lately. There's The Yiddish Policemen's Union, which is fiction, and Ezra Klein's episode about groypers, which sadly isn't. I find it interesting how Jewish culture has a strong "resisting assimilation" thread to it. But some of the Ezra Klein episode made me feel weirdly naive -- like when some noted anti-semitic guy always mentioned Goldman Sachs but not Morgan Stanley, for instance. Did I just miss some class, maybe in high school, where I was supposed to memorize which last names are associated with which countries/regions/cultures? Asking because I would never have noticed that particular difference. If asked flat-out "is Goldman a Jewish name" I might have said yeah, sounds plausible. But I wouldn't have known that Sachs was, or that Morgan or Stanley weren't. I don't know how and where people learn all this.

I'm getting tired early, with the short winter day and the return to Standard Time. I'm not quite sure what to do with tired evenings -- play games, and make lists of things to do in the morning, maybe. Or just keep crunching along and accept that it'll be slower. What do you do, gentle readers?

Comments

[justplainuniverse]

haha, i remember wondering when/how/where i was supposed to learn about jewish names and stereotypes. going to school in nyc fixed me right up. but if you're not exposed to a lot of jewish people, especially in a context where it's clear they're jewish (like, they talk about it, go to student groups about it, go visit their family for jewish holidays) i don't think it's easy to learn.

[flexagon]

Fair answer! I thought I eventually learned a lot while working in big tech, especially when managing someone who was pretty observant, but it wasn't enough to notice any patterns with names.

[randysmith]

Yeah, I had the same "I think it was going to school in the NYC area" reaction :-).

[justplainuniverse]

also i would LOVE that gift!!! great idea.

[bolson]

a couple years ago I met someone and their family name flagged to me as likely German but not necessarily Jewish (but they were of formerly-German Jewish ancestry).

I bet if you'd been raised to hate those people you'd have gotten a lot more education in identifying those people.

[flexagon]

Very interesting point. And I think "who were you raised to hate?" would be a fascinating, if dark, question for one of those question decks.

I think I was theoretically raised to hate communists, but it wasn't considered likely that I would actually meet such a person so this was all fairly abstract (and, I'd note, really about an ideology rather than human people). I was definitely taught hyper-individualism and to avoid victim mindset / people who blamed the system for all their troubles, but that's about it. I wasn't warned to watch out for people who wanted nice things for everyone, like universal health care. It's amusing, in retrospect.

[bolson]

I definitely grew up deep in the heart of the Cold War (Los Alamos) but didn't learn to hate the other side. They were just kind of there and the big terrible thing might happen, but most likely if someone did something stupid.

I think my parents did a pretty good job raising me to not hate anyone, but if there's a target it's "stupid people". Raised in lots of highly educated culture, "stupid" people were ever the cause of all problems. Like, my early conception of racism is just people who had some dumb incorrect idea about the qualities of people of other races. In that model, racism is just a subclass of stupidity. People on the other side of politics just had bad data and hadn't thought about the problem correctly. Etc.

[islenskr]

Jewish names: there is a fairly large Jewish community where I live, and I think growing up, I just associated the German-sounding names with Judaism somehow. But I'm really good at pigeonholing languages and such, so maybe that had something to do with it? Goldman Sachs (both German names) seems like they're probably Jewish (to be fair, you can't be absolutely sure just by the name), but Morgan-Stanley sounds Welsh/English to me, or at least British.
I really have no idea how I would come to these conclusions! But it's the kind of thing that when I read how you're not sure where people learn this stuff, I keep thinking, "How do people not know this?" Oh dear. I gotta think about this.