Friends, Older and Younger

It's fun having friends from different age groups; I think I'm lucky that way.

A few months ago I used the term core memory in a blogpost. Tommy, who is in his 60s and a former software engineer, commented, "I'm old enough to remember when 'core memory' was what computers had before semiconductor RAM."

Last week my friend Wu Chi asked me my MBTI type. I said I did the test five years ago, and can't remember what I got.

"Five years?! MBTI is that old?! Five years ago I was in high school!"

I looked up MBTI on Wikipedia, which said the Briggs Myers Type Indicator Handbook was published in 1944. Wu Chi had to take a few sips of yuzu soda to recover. "1944," she said wonderingly. "That's older than New China."

Adulting

Three things which I do now, which I didn't do, say, 10 years ago (okay I was well into adulthood 10 years ago, but adulting is a work in progress):

• Add birthdays of friends and family into Google Calendar, so that I get a reminder on the day. For a long time I thought I could (or should be able to) just remember birthdays, but eventually I realised that's not happening. There is no shame in taking recourse to technology.
• Give myself treats. To celebrate when something good happens, to console myself when I am sad, or to reward myself for doing an unpleasant but necessary task. The treat itself is usually simple and low-cost, often free – like pizza, or taking some time out of my day to go for a walk in nature. I've done this sort of thing for a while, but these days I do it more intentionally, as a treat. Or self-care, you might say.
• Clean my flat before I go on holiday, to ensure a more pleasant homecoming for future me.

Speaking of holidays, I just got back from a trip to the UK; I'll post some photos soon.

[Edit: Photos are now up.]

* * *

Blog note: Last month I wrote 12 posts, which is a new record for this blog. Granted, some of them were photos with not that much text, but hey it all counts. The previous record was 11 posts in March 2011, and some of those were short extracts.

In my final post of 2023, I wrote that (a minimum of) 24 posts a year is a good number to aim for. With this post, I've already reached that number, and we're only in the first week of June. Time to treat myself, maybe :)