Mom passed away. I just found out. ...I don't know how to deal with anything right now.

I've been dealing with a lot.

* I haven't been able to work on music for almost two years without getting an anxiety attack, remembering what happened with my old friend Alby.
* I just can't edit at TV Tropes anymore, since they became such nitpicky reactionary culture police. And I loved to trope.
* My mom's in hospice, and she's not talking or coming home again. I miss her. My dad just turned 69, and is active and in pretty good health, but I fear what may come in five or ten years time.
* A lot of my friends no longer have the time to spend time with me. I've felt really lonely sometimes. I mean, I have friends, and that's good. But we seldom do any friend activities together. And there's the generational issue - I'm in my 30s and have the interests I have. Younger people have time, but have increasingly less in common with me. People my own age are adults with very busy lives. I have a pretty good work ethic myself, but have never been able to hold a paying job for very long before I spectacularly crash and burn.
* I've been losing the motivation to play video games. I like the gameplay, but I also like discussing games with friends who are also playing it. Sometimes I like to watch friends play games too. I think I do need at least a minimal social element to gaming.
* My SSRI medication weaning was a failure, and I've been gradually returning to my old higher dose. And meanwhile, the effects of changing dosage in either direction have not been pleasant. One day, it can feel pretty bearable, and another day I feel like I have ten times normal anxiety and depression.
* I've been ostracized from one too many social settings. No matter how hard I try...I'm just too annoying. And recently I was even told that, yes, I am the one giving most of the effort, and no, it probably wasn't my fault. And strangely, that acknowledgment was more galling than comforting to me. Still, a few people are super-patient with me and even really like me, usually because they're just naturally patient, or they have an autistic family member.
* I have no RL social life, nor am I expected or recommended to have one. I have so many vast cultural differences from the surrounding community, and too often we either have very little in common, or some of the differences we do have are social wedge issues.
* In general, I've been having a nasty midlife crisis at 32. It can feel like a daily struggle to preserve my sanity intact.

For me, this holiday season has been dominated by very discouraging news about my mom. She had her stroke in June. She survived, and initially steadily improved. But over the past few months her progress reversed, and has gone into decline. She no longer speaks, she never regained the ability to eat solid food, and barely communicates yes/no answers to questions. She is not expected to get better, and...it is most probable she will not be coming home again.

I'm still trying to digest what all this means - for me, for her, for home, for the future, everything. I've so hoped she could recover well enough to eventually come home, safe and well. I've wanted to be able to have ordinary conversations with her again. And I've also felt...like we've been cheated - she's only 64, and she could be fine if not for the stroke - it struck her so suddenly, like an accident. I'm 32, but also being autistic, I feel like in some ways I'm still a child, not entirely able to completely look after myself - so often I have gone to my mom for the practical answers. Now we've been trying to keep pressing forward without her everyday wisdom.

I miss my mom very much.

This year's holidays have felt so awry. On Thanksgiving, the family visited mom in the nursing home, and ate dinner at a restaurant. My mom loved Thanksgiving, and used to cook most of the meal, and in later years (with her reduced mobility) at least directed the process as the rest of the family cooperated to cook the meal. My dad spent the entire holiday sitting with her at the nursing home. And this Christmas, the family visited her again, and we all exchanged gifts on the 21st in the nursing home room, so that mom could witness it all - but this time she didn't speak a word, and it was very hard to tell whether if she was even conscious. Then on the 24th, here at home, my sister, dad and I exchanged a few straggling gifts we hadn't been able to share on the 21st. That was all over in less than 20 minutes. I appreciate the gifts, but I've been too emotionally numb to feel festive. For us at home, the 25th will probably be another ordinary day - and my dad will spend all of it sitting with my mom and keeping her company.

My mind boggles at it all, and I've been too numb to feel festive.

Because my brain never stops, so it thinks about any trivia it fancies.

For some names I provide multiple possible spellings, representing different phonetic analyses.

If the Hebrew text is too small to read, try typing Ctrl = to increase the page's text size, then press Ctrl 0 to return it to normal.

Akagane: אקגנה (Akagane)
Akira: אקירה (Akira)
Amaki: אמקי (Amaki)
Aotsuki: אאוצוקי (A'otsuki), אאוצקי (A'otski)
Botan: בוטן (Botan), בוטם (Botam)
Chuukichi: צ׳וקיצ׳י (Chukichi), צ׳וקיץ׳ (Chukich)
Gaku: גקו (Gaku), גק (Gak)
Harue: הרואה (Haru'e), הלואה (Halu'e)
Hirama: כירמה (Khirama)
Hiroyuki: כירויוקי (Khiroyuki), כילויוקי (Khiloyuki)
Inoue: אינואואה (Ino'u'e)
Jun: ג׳ון (Jun), ג׳ום (Jum)
Juuichi: ג׳ואיצ׳י (Ju'ichi), ג׳ואיץ׳ (Ju'ich)
Keisuke: קסוקה (Kesuke), קסקה (Keske), קייסוקה (Keysuke), קייסקה (Keyske)
Kenji: קנג׳י (Kenji)
Kodori: קודורי (Kodori)
Kounosuke: קונוסוקה (Konosuke), קונוסקה (Konoske)
Kouya: קויה (Koya)
Kuri: קורי (Kuri)
Kuroi: קורואי (Kuro'i), קולואי (Kulo'i)
Kyouji: קיוז׳י (Kyozhi)
Midoriya: מידוריה (Midoriya)
Mikazuki: מיקזוקי (Mikazuki)
Morenatsu: מורנצו (Morenatsu)
Mori: מורי (Mori)
Nanafuse: ננפוסה (Nanafuse)
Nekonishi: נקונישי (Nekonishi)
Nikaidou: ניקאידו (Nikaydo)
Nishimura: נישימורה (Nishimura)
Ooshima: אושימה (Oshima)
Raimon: ראימון (Raymon)
Shigure: שיגורה (Shigure)
Shin: שין (Shin), שים (Shim)
Shun: שון (Shun), שום (Shum)
Soutarou: סוטרו (Sotaro), סוטלו (Sotalo)
Suigou: סואיגו (Su'igo)
Tachibana: טצ׳יבנה (Tachibana)
Takahara: טקהרה (Takahara)
Tappei: טפה (Tappe), טפי (Tappey)
Tatsuki: טצוקי (Tatsuki), טצקי (Tatski)
Tetsuya: טצויה (Tetsuya)
Torahiko: טורכיקו (Torakhiko), טורכקו (Torakhko)
Torii: טוריאי (Tori'i)
Touno: טונו (Tono)
Tsukishiro: צוקישירו (Tsukishiro), צוקישילו (Tsukishilo), צקישירו (Tskishiro), צקישילו (Tskishilo)
Yukiharu: יוקיהרו (Yukiharu), יוקיהלו (Yukihalu)
Yuuki: יוקי (Yuki)

Heteronormativity - the individually lightest form of subconscious homophobia - can at a societal level still be an enormous long-term hindrance to LGBT rights, equality and social dignity.

I have observed, in social situations in mixed company with straight and gay people, that people have a tendency to inject elements of their own sexual orientation everywhere in their everyday life and discussion. This is not universal, of course - many gay people are legitimately "straight-acting", and come off as inconspicuous from straight people. But the notion of straight-acting as inconspicuous is actually a part of heteronormativity - that to appear straight is normal, and that to appear gay is conspicuous. As such, those straight people who are conspicuously straight (as a matter of discussion-sprinkling and other evidence) are still inconspicuous in a heteronormative social context, and they take this for granted. Of course, gay people like us may find it much easier to notice this, but it doesn't usually bug us because we're so accustomed to straight people being straight.

But I have too often observed, how conspicuously gay people can too often find they provoke the annoyance of so many straight people - even erstwhile "tolerant" people - in spite of themselves. It's one thing to cognitively accept gay people, but it's another thing to expect them to have to necessarily conform their behavior and personality to straight-acting "norms". So when conspicuously gay people keep sprinkling their discussion with topics that have any gay element, the heteronormative consciousness perceives it as talking about one monolithic topic - gay things - all the time. And in this perception, their annoyance grows, and this can translate to abusive behavior toward or ostracism of the conspicuous gay person. And the bitch of this is, it's entirely possible for the gay person to seldom see a recurring theme in their behavior, because it's so subconscious and instinctive to them - so, they will see the abusive behavior as straightforward homophobia. And in essence, being heteronormativity, it is homophobia.

But being conspicuously straight or conspicuously gay are not at all bad things, if they are otherwise respectful. It is unrealistic and unjustifiable to expect someone to have a fundamental personality change just because their conspicuous signs of sexual orientation are irritating to someone who does not share it. Ultimately, annoyance and abusive behavior emanating from heteronormative expectations, is real homophobia, and it needs to be tackled. People need to accept the ubiquitous conspicuous signs of sexuality in their midst, just as we gay people are constantly aware of straight people showing signs of their straightness. It's human nature for our sexuality to influence our words and actions in ways we ourselves are usually not even actively aware of.

So, we must end heteronormativity, and also any corresponding homonormativity (which is much rarer). Instead, each new person's sexuality should be a question mark until revealed. (And it is wrong for a straight person to be offended because someone failed to assume in advance that they were straight.) And once sexuality cues are apparent, they should be accepted and tolerated. Our society is already supersaturated with signs of straight sexuality - society needs to come to regularly respect and tolerate both the conspicuously straight and the conspicuously gay in our midst, on equal parity. Because we know neither is going to go away, nor really should they.

You know, I'm from a fairly progressive family. And I can put my unshod feet up on the furniture and everything. But when it comes to being in the company of strangers or public, I've always been drilled to be polite. "Say please." "Say thank you." "Say excuse me." "Apologize." "Don't stand too close in line." Even in my 30s, I am still routinely drilled to be as polite as I humanly can be. As such, I now have a complex system of honor and integrity, and I feel great anxiety about forgetting my mandatory social protocols. I don't necessarily know how much of this comes from my upbringing, and how much I'm simply just expected to adapt to Utah Mormon public etiquette. I honestly don't know.

But I've found that my eagerness to be polite and courteous does not necessarily translate well online, or internationally. And I always used to think I needed to be extra polite because I'm autistic and still prone to so many social faux pas. But apparently, many people online don't actually care about interpersonal honor and integrity. And more than that, they may actually be suspicious of people who put so much effort into it, think they must want something and are only feigning niceness. And in these situations, my all-important mandatory politeness...actually seems to socially hinder me. And I'm like, "Heaven forbid I should endeavor to be polite and have integrity. Maybe I should start being rude and disrespectful." And that's exactly it - when I forget my manners, I feel like I am being rude and disrespectful - and if I really respect someone, I will always treat them graciously.

So, this seems to put me in a logic bomb. When is politeness...actually rude? When do kind words make me an ass-kisser? When does sincerity appear insincere? It's not exactly as if I can just consciously drop my manners and feel good about it; they have too much personal and RL importance. It just seems bizarre that I at my most honest efforts...appear dishonest by virtue of me making that effort.

This post attempts to describe my native speech accent, using the International Phonetic Alphabet. Since I have two parents who originally had different accents and I was also raised abroad on an atoll with many different accents and some foreign languages, my accent is very heterogeneous. You may want to zoom in to see IPA detail, using Ctrl = on your keyboard. Then press Ctrl 0 to return to normal size.

Consonants are fairly easy to describe. They don't vary hugely from most accents of English, but there are few noteworthy points:

* I speak with both a "light" /l/ and "dark" /ɫ/. And while each are more common in different locations, they are largely the same phoneme in free variation, so I broadly transcribe both as /l/. However, the "dark" /ɫ/ does affect my pronunciation of vowels, which I'll cover in the vowels section. Neither my /l/ nor /ɫ/ are particularly rounded, so I don't often have /ɫʷ/.
* My /r/ is very strongly retroflex and rounded /ɻʷ/. And since it's pretty much always rounded, it's simpler to broadly transcribe it /ɻ/.
* Alveolar consonants /n t d/ become retroflex /ɳ ʈ ɖ/ in proximity to /ɻ/, but this is not a phonemic change. When I was younger, it caused a broad phonemic merger of /sɻ zɻ/ and /ʃɻ ʒɻ/ as /ʂɻ ʐɻ/, so that words like nursery sounded like "nurshry", but I mostly reversed this as an adult. I still say /ʃɻ/ for Sri Lanka though.
* My velar consonants are usually somewhat retroflexized /ŋʵ kʵ ɡʵ/, but this is subtle and not phonemic, so I broadly transcribe them /ŋ k ɡ/. Before /j/ or front vowels, /k ɡ/ instead become palatal /c ɟ/, but this is also not phonemic.
* My pronunciation of /ʍ/ is inconsistent. My dad speaks it, and I was taught it in first grade, so I try to use it when I enunciate. But often in relaxed speech, I slip into /w/.
* Like most Americans and Brits, I aspirate /p t tʃ k/ as /pʰ tʰ tʃʰ kʰ/ at the beginning of stressed syllables. But this does not apply when a syllable starts with /sp st sk/.
* I'm a typical T-flapper. In the common flapping conditions, /t d/ merge as /ɾ/, and /n nt/ merge as /ɾ̃/.

My vowels are the cream of my accent:

* My KIT vowel is typical /ɪ/.
* My DRESS vowel is typical /ɛ/.
* My TRAP vowel is typical /æ/. I also have some degree of æ-tensing in certain words (like glad, man, sand, etc.), where the vowel becomes /ɛæ/ or /æː/. My BATH vowel is the same as my æ-tensing vowel. The distinction between lax and tense is not always consciously made.
* My LOT vowel is /ɒ/.
* My STRUT vowel is /ɜ/.
* My FOOT vowel is usually /ɤ/, but may become /ʊᵻ/ when enunciated.
* My CLOTH vowel and THOUGHT vowel are the same, as /ɔɒ̝/ or /ɒ̝ː/. The distinction between this and LOT is subtle and sometimes may not even be made. My CLOTH lexical set includes the word on.
* My NURSE vowel is raised and rounded as /ɵɻː/.
* My FLEECE vowel is /iː/. It is always a strictly tense long monophthong.
* My FACE vowel is /ɛɪ/.
* My PALM vowel is typical /ɑː/.
* My GOAT vowel is /ɵʊ/, with a central rounded onset.
* My GOOSE vowel is /ᵻu/. The variant /ɪu/ may be used when enunciating words like few, rude and yew, even where there is no /j/, so that do and dew may not strictly be homophones.
* My PRICE vowel is usually /ɑe/ with a back onset. But it becomes /ɑ̽ɪ/ before voiceless consonants, a characteristic called "Canadian raising". (I am not Canadian though.) It is /ɑ̽ɪ/ even before T-flapping, so rider and writer are not strictly homophones.
* My CHOICE vowel is /oɪ/, with a mid-close onset.
* My MOUTH vowel is /æo/ with a front onset. But it becomes /æ̽ʊ/ before voiceless consonants, consistent with "Canadian raising". It is /æ̽ʊ/ even before T-flapping, so powder and pouter are not strictly homophones.
* My NEAR vowel is /iɻː/, with a tense close onset.
* My SQUARE vowel can be /eɻː/ when I enunciate, but often relaxes into /e̞ɻː/.
* My START vowel is /ɒɻː/.
* My NORTH vowel can be /ɔɻː/ when I enunciate, but often relaxes into /o̞ɻː/.
* My FORCE vowel can be /oɻː/ when I enunciate, but often relaxes into /o̞ɻː/.
* My CURE vowel is /uɻː/, but /juɻː/ is usually /jɵɻː/. Additionally, while words like tour are always /uɻː/, words like poor and whore may be enunciated with /uɻː/ but usually relax into /o̞ɻː/. Also, tourist (but not tour) has /ɵɻː/.
* My HAPPY vowel is /i/, but not necessarily long like my FLEECE vowel.
* My LETTER vowel is /ɵɻ/, but not necessarily long like my NURSE vowel.
* My weak vowels are rather complicated, as I seem to have seven of them. Beyond the schwa /ə/ (abbot, comma, Venus) and schwi /ᵻ/ (lettuce, minute, muffin, rabbit), I also have a "schwe" /ɘ/ (harness, open, roses, thicket), a "schwo" /ɵ/ (geographic) and a "schwu" /ᵿ/ (tomorrow).
* Most of my vowels are greatly effected before /l/ in closed syllables, typically by meeting a vowel position that is back and unrounded. /ɪl/ becomes /ɪɤl/ and /ɛl/ becomes /ɛɤl/. The vowels /æl æol/ both become /æɤl/, so that words like Hal and howl are homophones. /ɒl/ becomes /ɑl/, and the opposition between words like doll and Dahl is weak if not nonexistent. /ɔɒ̝l~ɒ̝ːl/ becomes /ʌɑ̝l~ɑ̝ːl/, but may become /ɔɑ̝l/ when enunciated. /ɜl ʊl əl/ all become /ɤl/. /iːl ɛɪl aɪl oɪl/ become two-syllable /iːɤl ɛɪɤl ɑeɤl oɪɤl/. /ɵʊl/ becomes /ɤːl/, but may become /oɤl/ when enunciated. /ᵻul/ becomes /ɯːl/, but may become /uɯl/ when enunciated. Any combination of /Vɻːl/ (where /V/ is any onset vowel) becomes two-syllable /Vɻːɤl/.

Now for some additional splits/mergers details.
* Mary-marry-merry merger: I grew up with this, and it's usually complete in relaxed speech. Distinction may be enunciated though.
* horse-hoarse merger: Same deal. Apparently, even my dad grew up never hearing people distinguish these.
* hurry-furry merger: Mostly complete.
* cot-caught merger: Sporadic. Often appears in relaxed speech, but the words will distinguish themselves in more expressionate speech as well as in enunciation.
* wine-whine merger: My dad distinguishes these, but I didn't used to. They are usually merged in relaxed speech when I'm not very self-conscious, but I try to distinguish them in enunciation.
* mirror-nearer merger: Whoever named this merger didn't come up with the best name for it. Words like Sirius and serious are not strictly homophonous because the former has a lax vowel and the former has a tense vowel. But because I have the mirror-mere merger, the vowel in mirror is also tense (and the word is reduced to one syllable).
* mirror-mere merger: Complete.
* fern-fir-fur merger: Aheh. I may be Gaelic, but not geographically Gaelic. I grew up in a multicultural expatriate community in the tropics and have never been to Galloway much less the British Isles or Europe or the eastern hemispheric continental mainlands. I have never distinguished these three vowels.

Now, I also have two speech registers: formal and informal. In my formal speech register, I am more likely to enunciate vowels and syllables. My informal register is for all casual situations, including when I eat out. My informal register is especially distinctive because I am far more likely to neutralize the length of long vowels, simplify diphthongs, reduce short vowels and elide already weak vowels. Many words reduce syllables, so that sandwich has one syllable, deodorant has two, character has two, theory has two, etc. But even my formal register has word forms that speakers in other accents may possibly consider less formal; sandwich will be two syllables, but the nd are not articulated and all the vowels and w will be nasalized. Also, words like orange are always one syllable, interest is always two syllables, etc.

Here is a short story from the Worldwide Accent Project:See above those clouds, near where the blue sky appears to fold? Some say it is the entrance to the floating isles where pirates still rule the air and dragons choose to live. Only the most skilled pilots can sail their craft close enough to even glimpse the light coming from within. You can't find those who know the way; they find you. Rather, you four lazy tourists must learn from your books and be ready, so that you may not miss an opportunity to travel to that mysterious place. It would be an adventure that you would never forget. Now, I think that's enough with this pleasurable story telling. Go home and join your aunt - she's cooking fine food!...which I will now render in IPA for my accent's formal register:siː əbɜv ðə kʰlæodz, niɻː ʍe̞ɻː ðə blɪu skɑe əpʰiɻːz tᵿ fɤːld? sɜm sɛɪ ᵻɾ ɪz zi ɛɳʈɻəns tᵿ ðə flɵʊɾᵻŋ ɑeɤlz ʍe̞ɻː pʰɑeɻɘts stɪɤl ɻɯːl ði e̞ɻː ən drɛæɡənz tʃᵻuz tᵿ lɪv. ɵʊnli ðə mɵʊsʔ skɪɤld pʰɑeləts kʰən sɛɪɤl ðe̞ɻː kʰɻɛæft kʰlɵʊs ᵻnɜf tʰʊ iːvɘn ɡlɪmʔs ðə lɑeʔ kʰɜmᵻŋ fɻɜm wᵻθɪn. jᵻʊ kʰɛænʔ fɑen ðɵʊz hʊ nɵʊ ðə wɛɪ; ðɛɪ fɑend jᵻu. ɻɛæðɵɻ, jʊ fo̞ɻː lɛɪzi tʰɵɻːᵻsʔs mɜsʔ lɵɻːɳ fɻəm jɵɻ bɤks ən biː ɻɛɾi, sɵ ðæʔ jᵻu mɛɪ nɒʔ mɪs ən ɒpɵɻtʰɪuɾ̃ᵻɾi tᵿ tʰrɛævɤl tʊ ðæʔ mᵻstiɻːiəs pʰlɛɪs. ɪʔ wᵿd biː əɾ̃ ədvɛntʃɵɻ ðət jᵻu wᵿd nɛvɵɻ fɵɻɡɛt. næo, əj θiŋk ðæts ᵻnɜf wᵿθ θᵻs pʰlɛʒɻəbɤl sto̞ɻːi tʰɛɤlᵻŋ. ɡɵ hɵʊm ən dʒoɪn jɵɻ ɛænt - ʃiːz kʰɤkᵻŋ fɑen fᵻud.

I didn't used to think that modern people cared so much about this, but apparently there are people who can still practically get into fistfights over it. That's the issue of prescriptivist usage. vs. descriptivist usage in the English language.

Prescriptivism is a view that the English language must be protected from changes that are socially deemed frivolous or of low class. This adopts a specific polished usage as the standard, and discourages or condemns usages that fall outside this standard. This includes things like slang, portmanteaux, protologisms, and if you really wanna get fussy, you don't say "wanna" or "gonna", contractions aren't considered cool, you are not to blithely use split infinitives, and prepositions are something you don't want to end a sentence with. Prescriptivism may also tend to see English as a tradition whose proper form does not make any large changes in living memory; non-standard usages may be condemned even if they have been a historical norm.

Descriptivism is a view that languages, dialects and accents are all equally natural, and that language naturally evolves and mutates over time, and that it is usually more meaningful to describe a word based on how it is actually used rather than how someone thinks it ought to be used. And anyone who studies historical languages and dialectology knows that this is actually how languages behave - even the most polished accents are prone to generational change, and what is considered proper will inevitably be the same as what is most common among influential people. In a less classist society, the standard is more simply what is most common among the general population.

The political (practically partisan political) divide between these two philosophies of language have embroiled English language policies for centuries. Entire new dictionaries have been founded as prescriptivist or descriptivist reactions against an established dictionary's opposite philosophy - the prescriptivist American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language was founded as a response to the increasingly descriptivist Webster's Dictionary. And usually when words or usages have been stigmatized, it's because they were prohibited by prescriptivist grammarians. For example:
* Split infinitives were already natural in English, but half a millennium ago they were deemed incorrect because split infinitives are not possible in Latin, a popular language of the educated classes that was viewed as superior to English.
* "Ain't" isn't just from an African American Vernacular English realization of "isn't", but was also historically a realization of "am not" for English speakers in general. While "amn't" became the norm among English speakers in Scotland, Ireland and the north of England, "ain't" developed in southern England and in colonial English, but was gradually replaced by "aren't" because "ain't" had developed a low-class stigma.
* "Ax" has pretty much always been used as a synonym of "ask", all the way back to Old English verbs "ascian" and "acsian". Again, "ax" gradually developed a low-class stigma and was discouraged.
* "Span" was originally the standard past tense of "spin", and even appears this way in the King James Version of the Bible. And while many speakers still use "span" in this sense, it later became considered uneducated-sounding, and was replaced with "spun" (already the past participle of "spin") in formal usage.
* I could go on with examples, but you get my point.

You can probably tell that I am a descriptivist. I do enjoy studying English, and I am certainly capable of speaking it in a polished manner. And while it can be important to emphasize communication clarity by adopting common literary standards, these are completely irrelevant to me everywhere they aren't absolutely essential, because language to me is neither "right" nor "wrong", but an instrument of individual expression that simply exists, with its own internal grammatical consistency. Dialect and accent are one of the cornerstones a speaker's cultural treasures - when they are forced to give them up, they lose a piece of their culture. Having grown up in a multilingual multiaccental community, I usually practice sensitivity towards other people's natural speech variations, and I believe all of these deserve dignity, recognition and protection from hostile language attitudes. I embrace and accept natural organic language shifts, and I even enjoy liberal use of portmanteaux and spontaneous protologisms in casual use, so far as they are readily understood by the people I'm with from the context in which they are used.

Language is beautiful and ought to be studied and treasured. Language is also inherently impermanent, and changes over time. Rather than fighting this, we should be going with the natural flow. We should not forget our past either - we should document all the conventions and changes that used to be, because etymology is also a beautiful thing.

This is actually one of my favorite accent study topics over the years. The complicated pronunciation of "sandwich".

Sandwiches have made an impression on English-speaking society as a common informal finger food. And because of its usually informal nature, the word's pronunciation can vary significantly, even among the "educated" classes.

First, let's examine the historical Sandwich. It's a port city in Kent, its name meaning "sand port", and was one of the historical Cinque Ports of England. It was also historically associated with a noble title, the Earl of Sandwich. One such holder of the title, John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, is most associated with the "sandwich" as a food. The actual food itself is believed to be older, and was not invented by John Montagu. But he popularized a form of the food among the aristocracy in the 18th century, and the food became referred to as "sandwich" in his honor. Even in this context it was associated with a casual activity of the aristocracy - playing card games. The sandwich was a popular food for card games because the bread prevented players' fingers from getting messy.

Now, onto the way it's pronounced. In English Received Pronunciation (that's the polished speech in the United Kingdom), there are two primary pronunciations, referring to both the port city and to the food. The more common is /ˈsænwᵻdʒ/ ("SAN widge"). Less common is /ˈsænwᵻtʃ/ ("SAN witch"). But both pronunciations are acceptable RP.

In North America, it gets even more complicated. First of all, the /-dʒ/ pronunciation ending does exist, but it's less common than /-tʃ/ (this is the opposite of the case in RP). But even more variable is the pronunciation of the first part of the word. Pronunciations up to and including /ˈsændwᵻtʃ/ ("SAND witch") are known to exist, but in most of the continent this is a relatively rare articulation, whether people are consciously aware of it or not. The most common pronunciation is /ˈsænwᵻtʃ/ ("SAN witch"), but even this is far from completely dominant. Not counting /-dʒ/ ending pronunciations, there are at least six known everyday pronunciations of "sandwich":
* /ˈsænwᵻtʃ/ ("SAN witch")
* /ˈsændwᵻtʃ/ ("SAND witch")
* /ˈsæmwᵻtʃ/ ("SAM witch")
* /ˈsæmᵻtʃ/ ("SAM itch")
* /ˈsæ̃w̃ᵻ̃tʃ/ ("SA witch", but all the vowels are nasalized)
* /ˈsæʊntʃ/ ("SOUNCH", one syllable)

But it becomes even more complicated with diglossic social speech registers. Many everyday speakers of English may actually have two primary dialects or accents of speech. One is the familiar dialect, used in all casual situations. Another is a former dialect, used in decidedly more formal situations. Diglossia ("two languages") is commonly found among African Americans (African American Vernacular English vs. accented General American English), Scottish people (broad Scots vs. Standard Scottish English), people from various parts of England-Wales (whose regional accents vary between each other more than RP does with American, Australian, etc.), and among bilingual people who speak a completely different language in familiar company.

I myself am relatively diglossic, as my natural speech tends to hop coasts between my casual and formal registers.

In my casual register, my accent is a heterogeneous mix of my parents' different accents and things I picked up growing up out on the atoll. The accent is characterized with short leaps from syllable to syllable, and the most commonly spoken words tend to lose their weak vowels. "Deodorant" becomes "d'yod'rant", "chicken" becomes "ch'k'n" (almost no vowels), "sugary" becomes "sug'ry", "interest" becomes "int'rest", "orange" becomes "or'nge", etc. And "sandwich", is "sounch".

My formal register comes from all the times I tried to polish my speech to enunciate my words. But at the same time, I don't want to sound too pretentious (at least more than I already sound by accident just from being autistic), so I try not to make articulations that sound too stilted. The resulting accent is something I've been told resembles Western New England, but never having lived there I'm not familiar enough with those regional accents. "Sandwich" is a nasalized "SA witch".

These congealed registers came with maturity, as my formal register became clearer, and my casual register settled into its roots. When I was much younger and they hadn't congealed yet, I tended to say "SAM w'ch" in imitation of people around me. But as it became a regular word in my everyday language, it naturally assumed its register pronunciations.

But in virtually all situations, "sounch" prevails. Why? Because it's an informal food. When I'm talking about sandwiches, or want to make a sandwich, or am ordering a sandwich from Subway, etc., I order a "sounch", and not one person IRL has ever misunderstood me or commented on how I say it, because it's an accepted pronunciation variation. The places where I'm most likely to speak of a "SA witch" with two syllables, are formal situations where I am least likely to eat one. And I never say "SAND witch" - it feels too stilted, even in formal speech. And in writing, while people spell "sandwich" for clarity, sometimes I enjoy mentioning the "sounch" I'm eating - it's a bit of accental color on my part.

Now, I have heard a few people playfully saying "sandvich", but that's because they're Team Fortress 2 fans.

And with so many pronunciations of the word existing in English, it's unsurprising that the word is loaned in so many different ways into other languages besides English. In Latin American Spanish, there is sánguche and sánduche, both of which are from English sandwich. Sánguche is more common in some countries, and sánduche more common in others. And the Marshallese form? (The Marshall Islands being where I grew up.) It's jāānwūj.

I have heard over the years that, a lot of people hate it when you tell them you're autistic to try to ease a crisis or to ease future crises you believe might arise. People perceive it as trying to deflect responsibility or as an excuse to not make any effort.

The thing is, autistic people can actually work very hard at trying to do well in any given situation. With an absence of certain social instincts, one has to use what limited cognitive thinking skills they have to try to emulate them, and in real time too. The response is far slower, far less accurate, and much more exhausting to the autistic person. The consequences or failure may be no less negative or grave, but I don't think it can be rightly assumed that an autistic person who failed (where a neurotypical person likely would have succeeded), was not actually giving a real effort. And to presume autism is an excuse for slovenly behavior instead is like cruel social entrapment.

I know a thing or two about human nature. I know most neurotypicals who are already not personally familiar with autism, may not be able to get past their own annoyance. More critically, they may not want to. A very real component of human nature is that humans may simply not want to care at all, and nothing in the world may convince them to. When people simply don't care, this cannot necessarily be remedied, and you just have to move on.

All of this makes me, as an autistic person, determined to try my hardest, and to try never to fail. I've long felt like, the stakes are too high, and I'm not allowed to fail. And yet fail I often do. So does that mean autistic people are screwed from the get go? No, not necessarily. It can be hard, but human nature is also that not everyone is perfect. Just because an autistic person has a serious handicap, does not mean every random neurotypical person is going to be perfect and scrupulous themselves. Human beings are capable of breathtaking amounts of pettiness. Again, this is not something that can in general be solved if it is the case.

Then how does an autistic person proceed when they have a certain social blindness and may occasionally have to rely on the constructive criticism of others for insight? Very, very carefully. You can't shut down, and you still have to push forward. Even if you're feeling tired and worn and mentally injured. The world goes on with or without you.

After about a day of using Firefox again, I accidentally discovered that Chrome was working again, after it recently had stopped working altogether. It's still my default browser, and opening an external URL launched Chrome...which loaded pages and launched subprocesses like it's supposed to. I have no idea what happened.

Well, my mother was finally discharged from the hospital...to a nursing home to continue her physical therapy. I've visited her there, and she's still settling in and they are still preparing her therapy plan. She still can't swallow, but she can...sort of talk. Only some of her words can be understood. Her mental faculties are all there, but she still has trouble talking and writing. Therapy will continue to work on that.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand...Google Chrome has stopped working entirely, and I don't know why. The browser window opens, but the tabs are stuck in "Loading" and never open a page - Process Explorer showed me that the main Chrome.exe process was failing to spawn child Chrome.exe processes as it normally does. Other browsers work fine. I did a full update of Avast Anti-Virus and did the deepest possible scan (5 hours long), and it turned up nothing. Changing the Google Chrome commandline settings to include the switch "-no-sandbox" allows it to work again, but I don't want to browse it without any security settings. I'd been having repeat crash problems already, but this now makes Chrome just about unusable. Googling for forums doesn't provide much help, as this problem has been acknowledged as far back as 2009 and it seems like no one can agree on what causes it or how to fix it. Someone suggested that it's not an external problem, but a serious bug within Chrome itself that arises from a poorly implemented plugin mechanism. I honestly don't know what to think. But for now, I'm writing this journal in Firefox. Sometimes I use Safari too. The main attraction of Chrome was its speed and ability to juggle many tabs at once with relative elegance, but the repeat crashes and now its failure to load just might make me abandon Chrome for good.

For starters, I'm not having an active momentary crisis with this today, or really at all this year. Aside from what happened with my mother, I've been doing relatively well. And I've certainly been doing well today. But still, I think about my old friend sometimes. And I thought maybe I can reflect on it most clearly when I'm feeling relatively well, rather than when it was all harder to think about.

Been so long since I heard a peep from him. And he slammed all available doors of contacting him long before I ever found out why or that there was even such a deeper problem. And he doesn't want to be found by me, which makes it rather futile to try. I don't miss what he became. But I miss what he once was - at least, what I thought he was. But he had a strong tendency toward mixed signals, and perhaps I never stood a chance of understanding him. I honestly don't know what I understand, versus what I have totally mistaken.

Recently, shortly before my mom's stroke (my mom and dad were with me), I had a (now rare) therapy visit with my autism therapist, who is a psychologist in her own right. We discussed various things, including this disintegrated friendship that left me with so many emotional scars and anxiety triggers (to this day I still can't make new music). I told her, in as much detail as I could scrounge, what happened, from beginning to end. I told her my friend was bipolar, and I'd tried to take this into consideration during the entire friendship. But apparently my story set off some professional alarm bells in her. She told me she couldn't elaborate further for certain without actually meeting my old friend (which is an understandable constraint), but she told me that he was most likely much more than bipolar.

I had not expected to hear that, and I really don't know what to make of it. It seems like, the more insights I glean from what happened, the less I understand it. And all the good I had tried to accomplish in my friendship with him, may never have been enough in the first place. But maybe I'll never quite understand what was going on with him, and why he did the things he did, perhaps simply because he was who he was, and I am who I am.

----

My mom is still in the hospital, in in-patient physical therapy. Her progress is slow but steady. She'll be there for the rest of July at least.

A few weeks ago. Approaching a month ago now. It hasn't been easy to discuss - especially when there were still daily updates and uncertainty - which is why I haven't blogged about it until now.

She survived. She had surgeries, and is still recovering at the hospital. But a lot of things happened before then.

It happened on June 20. My mom was in the bathroom doorway, and suddenly had a violent episode of vertigo that made her have to sit down. It wasn't alarming at first, because she frequently has episodes of vertigo. My sister and I were right there, and were able to try to attend to her. (Later, we discovered that our presence there may have saved her life, but it was damn scary at the time.) She asked for some of her homeopathic vertigo remedy, but it didn't get better. She had to lie down on the floor, and her speech started to slur. My dad came home, and a family friend arrived - the latter immediately recognized it as a stroke, and told us to call 911. The ambulance came and took her to the nearest hospital. They did some quick scans there, and recognized a stroke in progress. So we had her medevacked to a much better hospital in Salt Lake, and she was in surgery almost immediately after she got there. It had been a stroke (a hemorrhage, not a clot), and they repaired it. They didn't know yet how it effected her, but thought that she might be able to to recover in between 10 and 15 days.

Her recovery in the intensive care unit (ICU) was steady but good. But a few days later, she had a sudden failure of one of her internal organs, and she had emergency surgery (this time much more life-threatening) to have the organ completely removed, replacing it with a prosthetic. Nevertheless, she resumed recovery, which has again been steady.

Several days ago they moved her from the ICU to the acute care unit (ACU), then from there to in-patient physical therapy. Her brain's cognitive functions are intact, and she recognizes people and such. She hasn't had an opportunity to talk or write yet, but this may be just because of how much the entire episode has weakened her - she may still yet do both. She may still be in the hospital for as long as a month, hopefully regaining her strength, speech, writing and her previous ability to walk. Even before the stroke she couldn't walk but with the help of two canes. She only recently moved in a wheelchair under her own power. Still, she could very possibly recover just about all of her previous function, and we're hoping for the best.

My mom is a very strong and brave person. And she's still relatively young - only 63, not even old enough to be considered a senior citizen. I wish for my mom to still be my mom for at least some decades more.

They've been happening a lot lately, sometimes only minutes apart. It's fortunate that Chrome is good at consistently remembering all the tabs I had had open, or this would be much more annoying than it is. I can't always tell what common activity causes it to crash, but I have noticed it happening a lot while trying to save a file or right after I've saved a file - so it happens most often on sites like FurAffinity and pixiv. Here are the common error reports I get...and other people online have reported this kind of error, but so far I haven't been able to find conclusive help on what to do about it - this only happens to me with Google Chrome, and not with any other program.

One common crash:
Problem Event Name: BEX
Application Name: chrome.exe
Application Version: 20.0.1132.34
Application Timestamp: 4fd80728
Fault Module Name: StackHash_0a9e
Fault Module Version: 0.0.0.0
Fault Module Timestamp: 00000000
Exception Offset: 00000049
Exception Code: c0000005
Exception Data: 00000008
OS Version: 6.1.7601.2.1.0.768.3
Locale ID: 1033
Additional Information 1: 0a9e
Additional Information 2: 0a9e372d3b4ad19135b953a78882e789
Additional Information 3: 0a9e
Additional Information 4: 0a9e372d3b4ad19135b953a78882e789

Another common crash:
Problem Event Name: APPCRASH
Application Name: chrome.exe
Application Version: 20.0.1132.34
Application Timestamp: 4fd80728
Fault Module Name: SHELL32.dll
Fault Module Version: 6.1.7601.17755
Fault Module Timestamp: 4f0412de
Exception Code: c0000005
Exception Offset: 0038ad6e
OS Version: 6.1.7601.2.1.0.768.3
Locale ID: 1033
Additional Information 1: a7aa
Additional Information 2: a7aa91f17ea749d42a4de3b390fa5b3d
Additional Information 3: a7aa
Additional Information 4: a7aa91f17ea749d42a4de3b390fa5b3d

My IQ score is 138.

I have a greater than 99th percentile in several different intelligence tests. But I was rated as very impaired in areas of socialization, processing information, adaptation, and a few others. The results added that this diagnoses me as having an autism spectrum disorder. Of course we already knew that - I was first clinically diagnosed when I was 12.

I can't go back while things are the way they are. Most of my friends have already left there, and lots of people still there are afraid to edit anything new for fear of running afoul of the new culture police. I've been told that, since I left last month, things have gotten worse, if it can be imagined. Lots of pages and works are being deleted, with a preference for American works over other Western works, and Western works over Asian works. The P5 committee is eagerly deletionist and openly brags about it. They routinely belittle users over legitimate cultural differences, further souring the site's atmosphere and driving users away. And I've been told that, now, when a page is deleted, all references are deleted, and no one is allowed to mention that it ever existed...unbelievable. No one is allowed to dispute the new policy, and forum threads are routinely locked or deleted, or thread posts blanked for criticism.

TV Tropes is a site that attracted a lot of people with a respect for diverse legitimate literature, including edgy works, and works that are controversial in the U.S. but not in their country of origin. Now the policy is that TV Tropes must only advance a specific moralistic American cultural view - one that is actually very hard for people like me to intuit since I've long been such a free spirit with so many international(ist) friends in an international culture-neutral atmosphere, and I'm generally unconcerned with whether Americans approve of something or not. It's intolerable to be forced to consider that with every little edit.

...I sank so much work into improving that site, since 2008. I sorely miss the activity. I always strove to be civil, helpful, respectful - I was so loyal to the site. I don't want "an alternative site for the banned stuff". I want a general troping site where diverse editors of good faith can document all kinds of works out there, from tame to mature and everything inbetween. And I miss the sense of free-spirited respectful community. The new policy shattered that community. Even if another site were to clone the wiki's database wholesale and make it separately editable, it would mean nothing if the cloned wiki has all of three or four editors - that's not a community.

And it feels...anticlimactic. I'm rather wary of getting too much older, for some reason.

I didn't ask for presents.

I asked for a velvet cake, but no one wanted one with red food coloring, gluten or refined sugar, no one wanted to risk trying to make one, and I was one of the only ones about to eat an actual red velvet cake, and that feels silly because I could easily get a cake wedge any week...and getting cake no one else will eat feels pointless on my birthday.

The one thing I did ask for, was a particular birthday dinner - our traditional family goulash, which will be nice. It's nothing close to authentic goulash - it's browned beef and pasta with a spicy sauce - but it's absolutely wonderful.

A useful resource for anyone who's been heckled for being furry.

http://edgedestroys.tumblr.com/post.....east-try-to-be

Pistinotuna, pistituna, pistinolepiso. Pistinotuna, pistituleso, pistinotuleso.

Those appear to be the lyrics being sung during the song. But I have no idea what language they are, or what they mean. XD

The song can be heard here (the singing doesn't start for a couple minutes or so), but it's really more spectacular when you hear it the first time when playing the game. For those who don't want Xenoblade spoilers, I recommend they wait and play the game before hearing it. :3

I think I may have been playing this game near-continuously for 18 hours. I decided to give myself a break. XD ...don't know for how many hours that'll be.

And I've had a lot of it lately - both with cause (drama that falls in my lap) and without cause ("free-floating anxiety"). I have a hereditary anxiety disorder that can, at times, make it very hard to be calm and detached. Fortunately, I am clinically medicated for this, though it only makes it easier to manage - it doesn't actually get rid of the anxiety itself. The rest of my treatment comes from my own choices and actions - I try to practice mental discipline and thought exercises to avoid anxiety from flaring up, and smothering anxiety that does arise.

I received a good reminder today that I can't always tell by myself whether my judgment is adequately calm and grounded. As such, I frequently accept reality checks from my friends, many of which have a saintly patience for which I am grateful. I only hope that I have plenty of other life moments where I am grounded in such a way that is helpful to other people.

Paradoxically, this makes me anti-drama while being pathologically unable to permanently avoid it. As a matter of moderation, I think we can all afford small doses of drama in our lives, so that we can exercise being human beings. Of course too much drama is bad. At the same time, absolute zero drama is rather like absolute zero temperature in degrees kelvin - not technically possible to perfectly achieve in nature. Sometimes we create drama, or drama comes our direction - neither is entirely avoidable. And practice will never make perfect. But practice will make better, and I believe it's at least as important to practice a patience in life as it is to be less of a drama queen.

Now that my viral Rainbow Road video in my Mario Kart DS Waluigi series is close to reaching one million views, there's something I want to say on the matter. :3

I had made this series as a gift to Waluigi fans and Waluigi's cheating-obsessed personality. The results went beyond what I ever imagined, and my inbox is constantly flooded by viewer comments.

But there was one particularly quirky fan who actually originally inspired me to do it, though I never told him.

Years ago, I remember  bauske had a thing for Waluigi. I remember him blogging an animated GIF of Waluigi's victory pose from Super Smash Bros. Brawl. I'd never played Brawl, but I had played Mario Kart DS, which I also knew Bauske used to play a lot of. And to me, it was Waluigi Pinball that truly made Waluigi awesome.

One day, I thought to myself, Waluigi's pretty awesome, he's badass, he complains everyone else is cheating and that he'll cheat the best someday. So...I made it happen. :3 The irony is that Waluigi is cheating much more blatantly with infinite gold mushrooms, and otherwise isn't using a lot of basic Mario Kart skill that would also be useful, such as drifting and snaking.

True enough, half my viewers get the joke, and the other half don't get it and can't see past cheating and apparent poor skill. The likes vs. dislikes of my Rainbow Road video are almost dead even. Same with my Waluigi Pinball video, and many of the videos in the series. I like to entertain both reactions. :3

I don't know if you ever saw my videos, Bauske, but I hope you were amused. :3

Recently, I found myself wikiwalking on Wikipedia. You know, looking at an article, click on an interesting link, find another link on that article, and before you know it you're nowhere near where you started.

I found the article on bipolar disorder. And I realized something, reading it - bipolar disorder is a mood disorder, and people with bipolar disorder have trouble controlling their moods.

A few days later, some pieces started to fall in place in my mind. I had known for most of our friendship that Albaster had bipolar disorder. And now I realize, there all these signs that suggested that he couldn't control his moods.

He had pretty poor inhibitions at times. Usually silly stuff. Like... Most of the time I sent him a link to an article hosted on a wiki, he would quickly deface it with a little trollish message. Nothing huge, and nothing too hard to revert. Most of the time it was a little funny. And then one day we were talking, and he suggested I not give him any wiki article links, if he didn't want me to deface them. I realize then that he had the presence of mind that he didn't have the tightest control over this habit of his.

And one thing all my friends can agree on, is that I can be annoying. Not intentionally so, but I have my own quirks I have little to no control over.

When I speak, I tend to always speak the truth, unless it's obvious sarcasm (which seems to work on a different mechanic altogether). I can often conceal information if I really try to. But even since sometime in my youth when I realized that lies are inherently hurtful to people, I had a moment of maturation that made me always empathize with its results, and I haven't really been able to deceive people since. I just can't do it.

But I also know there is a human construct called guile - little benign white lies people tell each other to spare one another's feelings, so as to conceal the potentially hurtful edge of what people are actually feeling. But with my inability to deceive, my guile is zero. I can try to sugarcoat things, but I can't tell people things I believe to be lies. This means that I am blatantly honest, even when doing so screws me over and makes people mad. For the most part, my lasting friends are used to this, and adapt to it as more of a quirk than any serious friendship breaker. But if they're not feeling well, or have had a bad day, or are otherwise feeling mentally/emotionally weakened, sometimes I do something annoying in spite of myself, and there's a moment of friction with my friends. This usually passes, as we both get over it and move on.

And because of my autism, with my frequent inability to rely on instinct to steer my social skills, I have to devote much more expensive cognitive-level thought to make social decisions. This in effect is usually inferior to instinct, because it's much slower to do and much more exhausting to my mental resources. Most of the time, I just wing it, and try not to think too hard. But there are times - especially following a moment of friction - when a friend wishes I'd think things better. Then, feeling bad, I enter a moment of intense emergency thought to consider the situation. Under pressure, my mind considers whatever logic it can, imagines as many theoretical scenarios it can, to figure out how to make this better. The problem is that, in doing this, I end up sitting there drawing blanks for minutes or even hours. This usually makes it useless as a social skill, because by the time I've come up with a tentative idea, the moment has already been lost. And sometimes I can learn from this mistake, but...not always. The weakness of the social instincts, as I mentioned already.

When it came to my friendship with Albaster, I tried hard to avoid the appearance of drama. And it occurs to me now, that he must have been trying hard to control his moods when I made a faux pas. I had always wondered why he was so allergic to a semblance of drama, and why he refused to discuss and workout problems, why he suddenly cut me off one day and found it impossible to so much as tell me why. He just couldn't control his moods well enough to sit still long enough to have a serious therapeutic discussion.

The ironic thing is that, that last thing that happened that provoked him to cut me off, was when he responded to something I said that was a pun. (I learned seven months later that he intended it as a pun.) But it was superficially an insult, and I told him it was a hurtful thing to say. In retrospect, I don't even think the pun rhymed in English, which may have been why I never saw the pun. His first language was Spanish, and his written/read English was fantastic, but in audio speech he would sometimes mispronounce English words - which is very understandable considering so many English words have ambiguous or irregular pronunciations. But it was apparently the last straw of many straws that broke the camel's back. He couldn't handle me.

After February of last year, when he told me off in the angriest way I'd ever seen him, I later spoke with one of our mutual friends. He had asked Alby if he hated me, and Alby told him no. And that friend told me. And for a long time, I didn't have a clue how Alby could do all those mean things...and not somehow despise me. But now I think...if he didn't have adequate control over his moods, his response to me was not out of hate, but out of perpetual anger and dread that he could no longer contain.

Ultimately, I can't easily know if the things I guess here are true. Alby and I haven't been able to hold a two-way conversation or any civil encounter for a year and a half. I can't ask him all the questions that have brewn within me. One of my friends likened it to Alby having suddenly died. In a way, that seems close to how it feels. Alby is still alive, but his ability to stand my presence died long ago, such that he's too paralyzed to speak to me even when he may have the opportunity to do so. And...I'm sorry that my actions led him to feel that way.

And I suppose I also have some mood issues of my own. My transition between interest and disinterest is hard to control, and even harder to disguise. But even more troubling is my hereditary anxiety disorder. If there's a mood that I can't control, it's my anxiety. If my anxiety is given free reign to feed back onto itself, I have a panic attack. So I starve it into submission by trying to avoid the mental panic triggers. I'm also medicated, which helps the situation moderately, but only by making it seem more manageable - I still have to manage the anxiety, which can be even harder under stress.

Unfortunately, since what happened with Alby, one of the panic triggers has been my musical creative ability. I'm still trying to get over it, because it would be a great shame and loss if I never made music again. Sometimes I wish Alby could help me with it and we could bring our friendship to a proper closure. But if the things I speculate here are true, I may never actually hear from him again for any reason.

Well, enough pondering for now. I need to get some sleep. See you all later, and thanks for taking the time to read this.