Today September 9th 2024. Woke up around 7:55 (fell asleep around 11:15 last night). Had some Santa Fe salad for breakfast, added an avocado for extra bulk. Had plenty of snacks today -- almond flour crackers, green mango, a leftover custard pastry from yesterday. Coffee at 11:10, dump and go on the Hario Switch, grind setting 4, tasted slightly overextracted hot off the dripper but as it cooled it became milder. (If could've also been the 15ml extra water I added.) Will try a click coarser tomorrow. Took grandma to the optometrist at Walmart to update her prescription -- last time was 6 years ago! -- and what a slog as my Khmer proficiency was very very limited. Called my parents a couple times to translate. Terribly embarrassing and surprisingly complex but, we made it, and we paid. Ordered some glasses at the nearby station which came out to a discounted $565. To be honest I think getting progressive glasses would still be cheaper online but they were right next door so, you know. Well we headed home quick and arrived around 1:15 and I basically binged reading the inner text of S. Ship of Theseus. The direct text is ... okay. Plenty of symbolism and a good enough plot, but it doesn't mesh or illustrate the conflicting interests of S.'s pursuit of Sola and S.'s rebellion against Vévoda and his industrial chemical weapons of mass destruction. The plot also moves a bit slowly and the visual writing style is more reminiscent of a movie, right down to the present tense and "mental proximity" to the target character of S. I feel like JJ Abrams and Doug Dorst could've broken out the style better, especially since the intended publication date within the whole writing universe was 1946 -- only a scant year after the horrors of World War 2. It's eclectic in it's original aesthetic definition: a lot of interesting stuff, in one spot, that hopefully "goes together". With regards to the mystery of the fictional VM Straka it's clear that the inner text of Ship of Theseus isn't a standard roman a clef, but it doesn't seem to exhibit profound complexity either. The fictional undergrad literature major in her fourth year, Jen, in the margins (higher diegesis) claims Ship of Theseus is a love story. Jen's correspondent, disgraced graduate student Eric, would've seen it originally as a mythic adventure. So far it mostly reads as a river of symbolism, not unlike Lord of the Flies. That complexity I imagine would come from prodigious translator-turned-(un)witting-collaborator FX Caldiera, and the continued exchange between Jen and Eric. Uncle Udam came from the airport in an Uber around 6:20. Dinner -- soup and prahok and plenty of veggies.
"[Growing up] is hard and nobody understands." // https://www.homestuck.com/story/2391