Author: elenloth

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Best friends

I’ve had best friends before.

One, or six, or fourteen at a time?

At this stage in my life, I think the whole concept of a best friend is children play-acting at monogamous marriage before they’re ready or interested in a romantic relationship with anyone.

I still remember the agonizing feelings I had when someone else got to be The Best Friend when I wanted to be.

And I remember the guilt I felt when I drifted apart from my closest friend of childhood. Was I, somehow, divorcing her?

I’ve had “friend breakup” talks, as an adult. They were painful, but a necessary part of being compassionate to someone you once (and still) care(d) about.

One of my friends in college told me, “Best Friends isn’t a single job; it’s a tier.” I didn’t believe her then. I do now. (And her husband is the person I’d pick if I was forced to pick a single best friend, which is an amusing bonus anecdote.) For the most part, I don’t have a single best friend; I have a rotating cast of friends who are all close to me in different ways. One friend is my local emergency contact for everything. The other (aforementioned) is my advance directive POA. Yet another pair are the designated guardians for my child in case both my ex husband and I pass away.

A friend today shared a post about how “best friend” is a term that imitates monogamy, and it made me think about all this. (I don’t have the link handy, but I’ll add it when I do.) It’s been percolating in my mind for a while, but I haven’t really put it into words.

It’s not realistic to expect one person to be all those friends for you; different people are different, and every dyadic friendship has its own shape. They don’t take away from each other, except inasmuch as time and energy are limited things.

I am grateful, though, for all the friends that I do have, and for all the friends I used to have. You have all touched, shaped, my life in one way or another.

I’m glad that I don’t have to pick one friend to be a Best Friend.

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Mens sana in corpore.

I had a small realization just now.

I think part of the reason that I view my body as separate from me (my brain, mind, consciousness, soul, whatever you want to call it) is that my body is starting to break down, and I view that as a personal betrayal.

Just TAB things, I guess. (Temporarily Able-bodied)

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On parenting adult children, and estrangement

Recently, my browser decided to give me this article from Psychology Today.

Why your adult child treats you like dirt

It gives some really thoughtful suggestions for the parents who actually do want to reconnect with their children, and who are willing to be introspective and to think about what their behavior may have contributed to the current situation.

Continue reading “On parenting adult children, and estrangement”
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Letters to my loved ones: Vocation and Avocation

A hand-painted green sign reading “Ernie’s Plumbing Salvage and Center for Interpretive Dance”. Photographer unknown.

Honestly, I think this sign is a perfect illustration of Vocation and Avocation! Like, there’s a whole sermon in just one image.

Not every activity or skill has value under capitalism, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t *have value*! We can and should do both kinds of things. (And we should have time to do both. 8 hours of rest, 8 hours of work, 8 hours for what we will.)

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Word of the day: AI Hallucination

Recently, via this Ask Historians reddit thread, I discovered the term Hallucination in the context of Artificial Intelligence.

I’ve known about this concept for a while; neural-net machine translation will often produce “better English,” at the cost of…yanno….accuracy. But all anyone ever sees is how clear and not-clunky the English sentence is! They ooh and aah over how magical the new tech is; but the problem of “did this actually translate CORRECTLY” has not gone away with the new technology. It’s still as present as it ever was. And the pretty English outputs make us more likely to trust the imperfect tech; the old “your purple cabbage grandmother” outputs gave us an appropriate amount of distrust for the machine.

That’s a suitable analogy for the rest of AI. It can be pretty. It’s not bad. But don’t think of it as the same kind of reliable as human-produced content; it’s not even the same kind of unreliable as human-produced content. That’s the part that worries me most.

April 2023: Found this TikTok about spaghetti photos and how they’re likely shaped by the biased data (the only photos going into the engine are likely of toddlers making a cute mess). As she says, “AI is an Ask The Audience robot, and the Audience is the general Internet-using public.”

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Friendships and Relationships

Years ago, I read this essay on the Atlantic about people who overtly prioritize their platonic friendships over their romantic partnerships.

I no longer have access to read it, but it was in my browser tabs, and I still think about it occasionally.

As a person who is intentionally solo (no cohabitant) at this stage of my life, I’m trying to mainly strengthen my friendships; even if some of those are also romantic or sexual, my overarching goal is to just build up my connections with the people who are in my life. And I don’t need to be fucking them, or living with them, to do that.