I think I need to let certain things go. I think I want to take up smoking again. I miss it. I think my heart hurts. I thought yesterday I should leave a manual as to what to do when I die. I have a small unstarted journal somewhere. I'll make some notes.

It is a different kind of thinking with AI. I tell it the idea, it writes it, then I argue it out/develop it. We take it from kernel to product, I don't know if it's that much quicker, but it's more complete. I think I am less attached to certain ideas, or at least have an opportunity to noodle it. I can say, “Hey Claude, read all my stuff and produce for me a manifesto.” And then I can argue about what I really think.

It also identifies threads that are sometimes fun. One has been the idea of a witness. Life, for some of us anyway, wants to be noticed. For us, it is tragic when a life is simply erased, thrown to the curb on trash day, passed by, maybe looked at for a moment, before the trashman comes and consigns it to a landfill for eternity. It's the end of all at some point anyway. But some of us would like to strech it a little while we can.

Continue to have a good week.

My dishes are clean. My kitchen is clean. My book progressed. I am broke again, even with two closings coming up, there is nothing to pay the bills.

I just sent an e-mail to my marketing people to cancel because they have been worthless. I have better avenues, and if I have to be a content creator to make anything work anyway, I'll do that on my own.

I read this and it made me cry. A lot makes me cry these days.

Have a good week.

He's in the building. There should be staff there. The indifferenc is overwhelming.

Just so you know, it still kills me that I seem to have a one-sided conversation with you. You must have thoughts. It would be nice if you actually organized them a little, put them down on paper, and shared them. It is almost as bad as writing to the knesset. I don't know why I torture myself.

And then the A/C guy came to finally install the condenser. He was really impressed. It is a really nice unit apparently, and now I have new HVAC for upstairs. I should be good for a few years.

And a client came. She's nuts, but I like her. I am afraid I am going to be burned again. And then I had a tax filing to get done. There are so many stupid little filings. This was another for the City of Bridgeport regarding the rental property.

And mom's and cards and shul for Kaddish (it's my grandfather's Yahrzeit), and I came home and turned on the computer, and Facebook had a picture of Manu from 16 years ago. I shared it again, but had nothing to comment. It hurts too much.

I wasn't going to say anything about it at Mom's, but then she mentioned that Yakov didn't know when you are getting here. I wasn't going to say anything, but I allowed that to set me off. They didn't even say hello back when I came in last night. No one thought to stop by Shabbat afternoon. No one thought to lend a hand on the painting.

I cleaned my guns and watched a movie, but that was over two hours ago. I couldn't exactly tell you what happened since then, suffice it to say nothing too useful.

Good night.

I caucused with the lawyers this week. The presentation was great, about using AI in your practice, especially on the business bringing side. The criticism was that this doesn't teach best practices in anything but convincing people to use you. The guy came from the world of title, and did well there in Texas. He's with Fidelity now.

Gerry and I did do some work at mom's. It's not done. The cticism there is that Yakov and Dahlia are coming out this weekend. Well, maybe they should have included me in their scheduling.

I am caucusing with . . .

Sorry I ran out. I realized I wanted to print up my letters to share with someone at synagogue. So I did that, and was late, and am now late getting back to Stamford because I need to figure something out for the A/C. I don't think that room is ready before Shabbat, but maybe a bit.

I watched a short Netflix series ending on Sunday. It was backgroundable, so it didn't take me all the way away from what I was doing. It is called Boots, only eight episodes.

When I finished it, I wanted to shave my head and cry. I cry too much these days.

The part after the headline below is the header to todays post.

Someone called today, someone I took a moment to take care of. He asked me about my kids. I told him. It hasn't been easy for me lately. The last week of the Omer was particularly bad. Maybe I just don't feel the kingship.

I am going to paint a little at mom's tomorrow. I might make it to the office too, but I doubt it. I have a 1:30 meeting and a 2:45 call.

My elbow is leaking and possibly getting infected again. I am dressing it with bacitracin now, but I think the hole is getting bigger, which might be a good thing.

Another tortured family. Another maimed child. This happens in Israel too.

When will it stop?

When will you take action to stop it?

It's also unbelievable that you, who sit on the health committee, do nothing as our confused children are told they are the other sex and mutilated and made medical patients for life. And all you need to do is acknowledge that WPATH has no legitimate basis for its standards and that the medical community can not rely upon WPATH as a foundation for "treating" our children.

and another

Another tragedy because those who were supposed to be the adults in the room chose not to be, because the bullies grew up and are now bullying doctors and therapists who are in turn bullying moms and dads and disfiguring their children. Isn’t this your issue, Ms. Shetrit, shouting for the rights of the child?

Is this really what you want to do to your friends, what you want to see their children go through?

This is not helping children, but it is torturing their parents. Maybe you, Ms. Woldiger should take note. Instead of taking care of mental health issues, we are compounding them. Mothers and fathers are also experiencing PTSD, which is compounded by the fact that the enemy is not a terrorist with a machine gun, but the doctors and therapists captured by the trans/queer activists, and the politicians who turn a blind eye.

It is in your power to be the adults in the room.

I only mention MKs Shetrit and Woldiger because they seem to be loudest on my social media feeds at the moment, but they are certainly not alone in ignoring my pleas, and those of thousands of rabbis and doctors and people with plain common sense.

Please end this gender-bending butchery now.

But that is just the last thought. I have wanted to write since the middle of hag, and now it's been out four hours, and I have done everything but.

So going in to the holiday, I had done a little work with Rabbi Grok on two themes. The first was the curse in Bilam's blessings, which I had heard referred to that way a long time ago. I needed to look again. Of course I had it backwards. So the right order apparently is that Bilam intended a whole bunch of curses, but G-d flipped them all into blessings, but we suffered all but one of the curses anyway because we drew them upon ourselves.

I liked my version better: that even though he blessed us, there was a curse embedded. Like "how goodly are your tents" suggesting that we should never have permanent dwelling places. But that is apparently not there. I don't know where I got it from.

Let's set the context first. Chabad does these “TED Talks.” Let's start with the irk there that this is someone else's intellectual property and should not be stolen. (There is one topic for next year).

So I never signed up, but I played with the Bilam idea. I brought it with me, and was working it up a little, but was not comfortable with it. I also looked at the passing the children through the fire of molech, obviously as the parallel to the trans thing. It did not work up completely to my satisfaction anyway, but I had brought that with me too, even more rough.

So it was dinner and then these talks, and they went on, and some were interesting, and some were more just people's Jewish moments.

And then there was Dmitry's. I tried to ask a question early on. He's like, “you'll have to wait an hour until I'm done.” He was going on about the nature of how we are supposed to work only for the sake of Shabbat. And he went on and on, and kept doing “and also,…” I got fed up with it. I tried to ask again, like an hour later, but he wasn't taking interruptions. It was deadly. I left. If I just want to see a lecture, I'll look on youtube. At least I could stop it and ask Grok or Claude or Chat, etc.

I might have done my thing, but I wasn't waiting any longer after an hour (or it felt that long) of this at two in the morning.

But that is not where this miserable holiday started. Maybe it is, but I guess my first break was as I was about to leave to synagogue on Thursday, and I saw this picture of Manu on my fridge, confident, solid. I don't know what he is now. He won't talk to me.

Friday morning, we got to the prayer for sick people, and I go up with my list, and I felt like a part of my heart just broke. And at the bottom of the molech article, there is this reference to a January publication by the Coalition for Jewish Values and Do No Harm, 73 pages long, apparently signed by 2500 rabbis, and I knew nothing about it. And it blows my mind that I didn't, and I made myself wrong about that as well. I reached out to them tonight.

And I didn't stay for Shabbat dinner, and I didn't stay for lunch. It just wasn't in me. And I walked away crying today, and it's probably self-pity, because today was more about Yakov, and my mom, and loneliness.

Miriam knew it was a two day holiday. It was a little annoying that they didn't stop by.

But that wasn't the thing, and I won't tell mom because it won't do anything but disturb people, but mom mentioned that she wanted Yakov to come out when Dahlia is here because she'd like to take them all out for a meal, by which she probably means Kumo.

I made a killer meal last time they were here, maybe light on vegetables (the Brussels Sprouts just didn't have enough time), and here is mom like “I'll take you out, completely ignoring that I am in the same town.”

So he'll come up for her (which is what got him up here last week), but he'll probably bypass me. It just hurts.

I kind of feel like mom discounts the meal I make in the way she presents it as well, like it's nice, but it's just a meal. They should go out to Kumo, and that's a big deal.

Anyway, I was praying today, and my chest hurt a bit (it could have been from standing and holding a siddur too long (we went an hour longer than we should have today), and I thought to myself could I convince Matt and David not to try to help if I have a heart attack. Or would I just be left a damned cripple.

And now I am going to bed. I let it get too late again.

I did start a good book Troublesome Young Men about the context that brought down Chamberlain and made Churchill possible. I am also nailing down the German vocabulary of the 100 Vis-Ed cards. I think the language is a little harder than Hebrew, mostly just with the gender of the noun, which is not clear from the word, It's mostly a matter of memorization, which I have never liked, but came to appreciate more today.

There's a tree on the way to synagogue I thought I had identified, but three tree books in and I am still not sure. It is making me nuts.

Good week.