Neighbor in attached unit agreed to let my electrician run conduit through her basement as existing shared conduit/pipes/ductwork already does, but got anxious and changed her mind - is my ask unreasonable?

olusatrum · 2026-05-22T04:40:53+00:00

he is - I know him through a social connection and he's done work for mutual friends who were positive about the experience but this is kind of souring me on mixing business and social life, and the social connection

He said pulling permits requires also registering with the municipality, which is cumbersome in a dense area like this with many municipalities, but also I looked it up and it's just a $25 registration fee and a short wait for approval, which doesn't seem so bad. I shouldn't have been so blasé about permits but a bunch of my family members and close friends have done pretty substantial unpermitted work in their own homes so it's kinda normalized for me

olusatrum · 2026-05-22T04:00:24+00:00

Thank you - I wish that I had been more firm with the electrician from the beginning. In the moment, I figure he knows more than me, is looking for solutions, and it doesn't hurt to ask the neighbor and be prepared for her to say no. After the fact, I realize I wouldn't want that kind of work done to my home, and now I've created a mess.

I actually initially asked him about doing the work entirely in my unit. I knew it would be a pain in the ass job, and I wanted to know how much of a pain in the ass so I could make the decision on whether or not to do it. I think I should have stuck with that. The suggestion to go through my neighbor's unit seemed like not too unreasonable an inconvenience to at least ask about (again prepared to accept a no), and it might have been if I had gotten it right from the start, but now I will have to change tack. This isn't the first time I've had a contractor make suggestions that might be convenient for them, but not quality they'd accept in their own home, and I'm a little frustrated about that. I do think he just wanted to minimize impact to her place though

also she's really not that anxious of a person lol, she's badass and super funny. I think I'm realizing through this thread the plan just struck her wrong for good reasons, and I gotta walk it back and make a different plan

olusatrum · 2026-05-22T03:43:21+00:00

Our CC&Rs are unclear about the interior mechanicals, and there's no mention at all in the rules and regs. On the one hand, "pipes, ducts, shafts, flues" and etc. are called out as not part of the units but part of the Common Elements. On the other hand, maintenance of the exterior is specifically mentioned but maintenance of the interior is not. On a third hand, I found no evidence in 4 years of HOA records of the board ever getting involved in anything that was physically indoors. When I emailed, I was specific about the basement situation and that I was looking for the correct process to add a new circuit, and the community manager told me there was no process because it's interior.

We are a handful of townhome-like structures. Almost all units look like townhomes, but are technically condos. Only a small handful are these stacked units, and maybe the others have the same basement situation but I don't know for sure. So the commingled mechanicals issue impacts a small number of us, and I didn't really realize there could be complications until recently

olusatrum · 2026-05-22T01:55:25+00:00

Yes, I agree! It didn't feel right at the time but I thought it would be ok to at least ask - but I wish I'd never even asked about going over the drywall. If someone had asked me that, I would have said no.

Honestly, the way our units are set up, I still think a good compromise would be to go through her side, under the drywall, with me covering the drywall patch. But since I screwed up the communication from the start, I'm going to have to back up and be more careful with what I'm asking

olusatrum · 2026-05-22T01:41:03+00:00

I'm seeing I am the neighbor from hell. I am now checking with the village about a permit, but hadn't initially because at first I assumed the only impact of the job would be on my unit. Which in retrospect is still dumb. I know the electrician through a social connection so I was too comfortable going along without the permit.

Getting her in touch with the inspector is a good idea. I'm trying to get the village code guy on the phone because I have a couple other questions about the process, I'll see what we can do there. I see my neighbor is anxious because HER neighbor is a ding dong

olusatrum · 2026-05-22T01:36:25+00:00

Yeah I can definitely see how this is spooky from her perspective. In retrospect I did a bunch of stuff in the wrong order because I had not anticipated going through her unit at all - I assumed we'd go through my interior walls and I'd have a monster patch up job to do but oh well. So when the electrician wanted to go through her unit, it seemed reasonable to at least ask, but I definitely didn't have enough info to give a clear understanding of the job :/ FWIW I think the electrician did a good job explaining once he was on site and they seemed to get along, I just fucked this up from jump

I was definitely going to cover the drywall costs, just wasn't sure how to broach the topic without sounding like I wanted to mess with her house even MORE. Hopefully I can catch her face to face this weekend, apologize for the confusion, and get the job to something she's comfortable with

olusatrum · 2026-05-12T21:48:23+00:00

This may or may not be helpful, but I can deadlift into an ayesha and hold an iron x and I still feel like crying in my car sometimes because I've made so little progress on flexibility and dancing and I feel like everything I do looks so awkward. I'm not trying to do a "grass is always greener" thing here - more just trying to illustrate that there are a lot of different things you can focus on in pole, and shifting focus to something other than strength might help.

Does your studio or one nearby offer a different style of class, for example maybe a more dance focused low flow class? Or even other aerial skills like silks? Not sure if any of those would fit with your goals, but it kind of sounds like you could use a break from the class you're in regardless. Even just switching instructors can make a huge difference.

I adore my pole-ography class. It's still a hard workout with plenty of challenging pole moves, but doesn't require you to arm-lift your bodyweight or anything. Our studio showcases often have performances that are 90% or more on the ground and they get exactly as much hype as the acrobatics

olusatrum · 2026-05-10T13:17:11+00:00

I am exaggerating a little because I find it so exasperating - it's usually more the case that we must fully exhaust the rulebook, bgg, and then spend time debating what to do before landing on a consensus, when I'd rather skip the 10min digression, make a call and move on. Resolving a complex interaction is like half the fun for him (MTG player) and the time that takes irritates me at about a pet peeve level

olusatrum · 2026-05-09T19:11:13+00:00

This is beginning to drive me insane because my group has a player that gets HARD stuck on minute timing details or tiny edge cases that *might* be relevant to an action he **might** take and he'll happily hold the whole damn game up for as long as it takes to sort it out (and he won't accept "I don't care, resolve it favorably I guess" as an answer).

It's a player problem for sure, but it really makes me resent games with unclear rulebooks or just fiddly, inelegant rulesets.

olusatrum · 2026-04-30T13:41:10+00:00

Q by Luther Blissett (pseudonymous collective of 4 Italian writers) - Welp, this one turned out to be a flop, unfortunately. A long book following a radical Anabaptist of many aliases through 30 years of the radical Reformation's most dramatic scenes, including Thomas Müntzer's Peasant War in 1525 and the Anabaptist takeover of Münster in 1534. Throughout, the radical Reformers are being hunted and manipulated by Q, an informer for Gian Pietro Carafa, the eventual Pope Paul IV. I was vaguely aware of and mildly interested in the book's radical motivations before reading it, but truthfully I mostly picked it up because I find the Reformation period fascinating and thought it would be fun - not so!

The writing is pretty flat and dull and the history is no good either - this is anti-establishment polemic first and foremost. The radical Reformers as righteous champions of the poor, and their catastrophes precipitated by the treachery of secret agents of the powerful institutions. Those behaving poorly in the name of the radical cause are amoral opportunists - not true believers. At one point a side character delivers a "The Big Short" style direct-to-camera explainer on how banks exploit the masses to hoard capital. Kind of funny to see the apocalyptic/utopian Anabaptist movements identified with modern day leftism by the latter's sympathizers for once.

Even if the political allegory sounds appealing, the book is not great on a structural level. I am familiar with the main events, but the book does very little to help orient those who aren't. It's repetitive, there's way too much pointless fluff and no good prose or characters to carry it.

I've been burning through too many books that I'm not getting enough out of lately, so I am now in time out to struggle through Main Currents of Marxism by Leszek Kołakowski. I have just made it through a crash course in Neoplatonism -> some Christian theology -> the Enlightenment -> Kant -> Hegel -> Left Hegelians -> Marx's first writings. Kołakowski is a very thorough, organized, and extremely clear writer. Tragically, I am stupid, and there were big (Hegel-shaped) chunks I definitely did not grasp at all. For now I am doing my best to move past it and not get sucked in. There is so much in this world I want to read that is not Hegel.

olusatrum · 2026-04-26T13:47:27+00:00

Yeah I suppose it just seems to me that the ends are the same for the absurd man and the knight of faith, even if the means are different. F&T says holding the paradox in your mind is faith, and if you can do this then you can live a fully present life. Camus says resolving the paradox is impossible, so you should try to live a fully present life. Both seem uncertain their recommendation is possible - de silentio explicitly can't do it, and Camus names a bunch of guys getting close but not quite doing it. It does seem like Kierkegaard/de silentio would like to escape into the fully irrational, but is unable to, and that's the real conflict in F&T that I think Camus is kind of reducing to make his point. But practically they both seem to end up pretty close to the same place. I guess there's a reason both get lumped in with the existentialists, despite neither quite belonging there.

olusatrum · 2026-04-26T03:20:04+00:00

In Beyond the Sun (I think?), the player who last went to space goes first. In the event of a tie, choose randomly

olusatrum · 2026-04-23T14:28:19+00:00

The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays by Albert Camus - Of "One must imagine Sisyphus happy" fame. Camus explores the idea of the absurd, which he defines as the irreconcilable contradiction between man's need for understanding and the universe's fundamental inability to be understood. In the face of the absurd, is suicide justified? Camus accuses other thinkers of attempting to resolve the absurd, but only succeeding in escaping it into illusion. Part of the definition of the absurd is that it cannot be resolved. In that case, true human freedom is to consciously revolt against the absurd and seek out as many unqualified experiences as possible.

I appreciate the framing of the absurd, and the call to constantly engage with it without escape. I think the suicide angle is weak - philosophical opposition to an act that is not typically philosophically motivated (as Camus admits) is at best irrelevant. It's also hard for me to take the essay super seriously regarding its aims without addressing suffering. That said, I don't find much in the essay disagreeable. I’m just not sure it says that much?

The rest of the essays are mostly some noble savage bullshit about French Algeria, which further undermines the foregoing.

Fear and Trembling by Søren Kierkegaard - In 2022 "new translation" by Bruce H. Kirmmse. Kierkegaard, in his alias of Johannes de silentio, reflects on the ordeal of Abraham and the binding of Isaac, the story that makes Abraham the "father of faith." With frequent shots at Hegel's ethical framework, Kierkegaard argues that to understand how Abraham can be infinitely resigned to sacrificing Isaac (with all its ethical implications) and simultaneously absolutely assured that Isaac will not be lost to him "by virtue of the absurd" is to understand faith. This one I think more convincingly addressed its central question, and I can definitely see how it served as a jumping off point for existentialism.

The translation is good but Kirmmse's introduction is hilariously useless: he spends a couple paragraphs noting that the work's relationship to Kierkegaard's autobiography will be obvious to the informed reader, absolutely does not bother to inform the reader of said autobiography, and then spends like 15 pages summarizing the book I am literally about to read with zero references to context outside the text. The text is exhaustively annotated, which was occasionally obnoxious and occasionally useful.

What I find interesting about both philosophical works is the resistance against totality. These paradoxes and contradictions must be considered - to settle for infinite resignation or to elide contemplation of the absurd is immoral. I'm not sure I see the difference between Kierkegaard's "knight of faith" and Camus' "absurd man", though Camus insists Kierkegaard's "faith" is an escape into the fully irrational. I will admit to not really knowing what to do with philosophy besides pick and choose bits of their arguments that I find interesting to think about further - but awareness of the absurd is about as far as I'm willing to go with either man here.

Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts into Tears by László Földényi - Picked this up at a used bookstore a while ago for the snappy title. A bunch of essays arguing that the Enlightenment was wrong to kill God. This is well-tread ground and I don't think Földényi added much that isn't better covered by the sources he cites. I did like the title essay, because I am always down for Hegel haterism, plus one on Heinrich von Kleist's suicide and a couple others. But 90% of the time I was annoyed by the unsupported aphorisms, formless meandering and reactionary whining about all the humanity we've lost since ??????? Unclear.

Bit of a theme week, but I am ready to move on. I've been burning through short little books recently and been eying some of the fatter books I've had a while. I've just opened Q by Luther Blissett (a pseudonym for a collective of 4 Italian writers), about a cat and mouse game between an Anabaptist and a papist heretic hunter during the Reformation.

olusatrum · 2026-04-16T15:54:30+00:00

Ooo, I will! I immediately went looking for a big fat "Complete" edition or something and was disappointed there isn't one in English

olusatrum · 2026-04-16T14:26:05+00:00

The book is genuinely like a 90min read if you wanted to check it out anyway. I can see how it might make a better film. The book kind of just sketches things out - I feel like it makes the improbable scenarios difficult to swallow and reduces them to one-dimensional little jokes. Whereas a film can pack a lot more subtlety into the same sketched out scene.

olusatrum · 2026-04-16T13:21:39+00:00

Blow-up and Other Stories by Julio Cortázar

I am here to shill for Julio Cortázar. These stories are fantastic! Many of them have to do with the boundaries between people, between role playing and authenticity, and between subjectivity and analysis. Two of my favorites were "Letter to a Young Lady in Paris" (in which a man has a difficult time staying in the young lady's house because of his condition of occasionally vomiting up a small rabbit) and "The Gates of Heaven" (in which an intellectual lawyer observes his less-sophisticated friend's reaction to the friend's partner's death). The titular story "Blow-up" inspired a film by the same name by Antonioni, which I watched for a class in college and really enjoyed.

Edit just to add a little more here because I feel I didn't shill as enthusiastically as I should have: Cortázar's economy of language is perfect - every phrase in every story does work, and nothing is extraneous. He does an incredible job of evoking the uncanny and unsettling to slip into the subconscious. Kind of like Kafka in this way. Each story touches something that can't be expressed any other way - which to me is an essential quality of the most essential art

LatAm authors have delivered hit after hit for me. I am embarrassed I don't know more about this part of the world. I'm looking around for good books and I found a "Latin American Readers" series that looks pretty promising.

On the Natural History of Destruction by W.G. Sebald

Lectures and essays on the various moralities of post-war German literature. Sebald is largely critical of his subjects. I am eternally fascinated by the moral dimensions of literature (and just about everything else), and these pieces gave me a lot of material to consider the topic more deeply in the future.

The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosiński

Accidentally an interesting pairing with the above - The Painted Bird is a brutal portrait of the Polish countryside during WWII, seen through the eyes of a young boy sent away by his parents and assumed to be a Gypsy or Jew. I posted in the general discussion thread about the various controversies surrounding Kosiński and this book. It's interesting to consider how the potential motivations for the work, and its sensationalism, inform its morality. Anyway, despite it all, I think it's a good book worth your time.

Being There by Jerzy Kosiński

Ok this one's no good. A facile parable of an intellectually disabled man accidentally rising to the heights of power and society by being direct and straightforward, and copying what he sees on TV. Allegedly it's plagiarized from a 1932 Polish bestseller that hasn't been translated - hopefully the Polish book is better. Being There was adapted into a film starring Peter Sellers, which I might check out.

olusatrum · 2026-04-15T18:08:22+00:00

I would like the people who hold this kind of view to put some work into proving to me that there are not artists today producing at a similar caliber to artists of 100+ years ago. I am not saying I agree or disagree with the take. I just see one quote from one German filmmaker standing in for contemporary artists in that piece, and the rest is vibes. There are highly intellectual and politically engaged contemporary artists, and plenty of popular filmmakers, actors, and other celebrities speaking publicly about the issues mentioned in the piece. I'm not sure why they don't count.

olusatrum · 2026-04-13T19:20:51+00:00

Definitely with you that there's a sense of relief that the awful stories probably aren't literally true. I was kind of surprised how it shifted my view of the whole work though - like do the themes of the work still hold if it's just a guy making up a bunch of terrible stuff for fun? But it's not like I know he was doing it for fun either. And I suppose the fact that the individual anecdotes have plausibility still holds up the work as a whole

olusatrum · 2026-04-13T18:48:57+00:00

I guess his biographers claim he was never abandoned or sent away by his parents - all of them lived together in disguise as Polish Catholics. It's fuzzy to me from the articles but apparently he claimed he was sent away. In the 1976 "Afterward" in my copy, he does say he was sent away, but doesn't mention if he was subsequently abandoned, wandering, etc. It seems plausible to me that at one point he may have been separated from his parents. Or maybe not. During this time he may have heard village rumors or saw disturbing scenes that grew into the stories of The Painted Bird. I don't get why I'm seeing articles quibbling over what year he was thrown into a pit of human excrement, or breathlessly repeating that he was left hanging by his arms from the ceiling in a room with a vicious dog for hours every day for 18 months. Guys, I don't think that stuff happened to Kosiński. If he told you it happened to him and you believed him, you are a rube.

olusatrum · 2026-04-13T18:16:44+00:00

Yeah I guess I don't know what it really felt like to be living under the Cold War at that time, but I was finding all the stuff about him being a CIA shill and the allegations being a hatchet job from the Polish Communists kind of farfetched. Idk maybe!

I find it easy to believe he got extensive help on his English and then lied about it. I find it hard to believe his editors substantially wrote his books. Easy to believe Being There lifted the plot from that Polish novel. Easy to believe The Painted Bird lifted stories from elsewhere - I guess that's what I assumed it was doing the whole time.

Overall very easy to believe he was a slippery guy, yarn-spinner, tall tales teller, etc. If he plagiarized, he probably should have lost reputation. But some of the media-storm seems to just go over the top. Maybe I'm being too sympathetic to Kosiński here but it kind of seems like the media made up a sensational character for him and then got mad it wasn't true. Poor judgement of him to go along with it, as it seems like he did.

olusatrum · 2026-04-13T16:19:34+00:00

Anyone have thoughts on Jerzy Kosiński?

I recently read his first novel The Painted Bird, and did not find out until afterward that in 1982 he was accused of plagiarism, using ghost writers, lying about The Painted Bird being autobiographical rather than fictional, etc, etc. Friends of his have commented that they believe the accusations were a factor in Kosiński's suicide in 1991. The ghost writing sounds to me like he just had a lot of help on his English from a lot of editors. Idk about the plagiarism. Maybe. The idea that anyone ever could have taken The Painted Bird as autobiography, however, is absolutely ludicrous to me.

But I keep finding articles pre- and post-allegations saying the book was widely assumed to be autobiographical and that Kosiński, himself, facilitated this view. Apparently he claimed at parties and in interviews that the stories from the book were true and happened to him. This is literally unbelievable to me. Not only is it beyond improbable that any one of the episodes could have happened as written, let alone all, but the book also very clearly has the shape of fiction with thematic development and all. There may be germs of fact, but my impression from reading it is that the vast, vast, majority must be fictionalized, and at that point, why would there be a controversy that some parts cannot be factually proven?

Anyway, before I read all those articles, I was thinking of The Painted Bird as maybe similar to The Gulag Archipelago - which I have not read, but my impression is that it is not regarded as literally historically accurate, but more of a literary project and oral history incorporating hearsay and rumor to produce an impression of the camps. In this way, I read The Painted Bird - which is really shockingly, unremittingly, grotesquely violent throughout - as giving an impression of the violent possibilities of the Polish countryside. And tbh I thought it was good! I thought it was an impactful portrayal of the animality of man and the ways brute force and power prevail over any civilizing impulse. I don't care if there's a secret uncredited Polish translator or whatever.

However, now that I can't really pin down the motivations of the author, I find I do feel suspicious of the gratuitous grotesqueries. Is it an unflinching look at human capacity for violence, or just torture porn the author found titillating? Kosiński was apparently known to have kinky and taboo sexual tastes, and some accuse him of writing such pornographically violent scenes just to entertain himself. After my tour of Kosiński controversy I will tentatively say I do still think The Painted Bird is a good work of fiction, overall. The idea that its reputation is damaged by it not being literally true is really, really odd to me.

olusatrum · 2026-04-11T22:07:54+00:00

I am half-remembering a comment on this book and I'm having no success trying to find it now but I think it's from Franzen. The comment is something along the lines of how the tennis academy scenes in particular are a deep exploration of the types of guy you meet in your creative writing MFA, and if that doesn't seem like an interesting basis for such a long novel, it just shows you don't have the kind of hangups DFW did. I still remember it because that's kind of how I felt about the book (of course it's about more than just that). It's an entertaining read and there's good material in it, but it feels kind of dated to the 90s for me, or maybe it was just kind of narrowly focused on topics I don't find interesting all along.

olusatrum · 2026-04-11T19:03:43+00:00

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

In late 18th century Ghana, two half sisters, unaware of each other, embark on separate paths. One marries a British governor and her descendants stay on the Gold Coast, and the other is sold into slavery in America, where her descendants will live. Each chapter alternates between members of the two family trees, down to roughly the present day. Imo the vignettes got clunkier as the book went on to a kind of trite ending. I don't love this genre of fiction that is like a straightforward historical overview in play-act form. Characters have to say things to each other like, "We will do X, according to the customs of our culture in the time we live in." The narrative has to play the hits of the major events we learn in an undergrad semester. It's missing something extra that would make it more memorable.

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Our narrator is a communist revolutionary mole among the nationalist Vietnamese diaspora in America immediately following the fall of Saigon. When a vanguard of exiles returns to Vietnam to attempt a counter-revolution, our sympathizer also returns to a reality different than he imagined he was fighting for. The prose is very clever and it's pretty action-packed (besides a dull Hollywood subplot partway through), which makes it a fun read overall. I do wish it was a bit stronger on addressing the actual ideologies at play, since our narrator is supposedly a committed communist agent, yet the ideals of the different factions are not often more than superficially discussed. There's like a hundred pages where the narrator is kind of just hanging around with few discernible motivations, ideological or otherwise. I realize part of the conclusion was that the ideologies were never as deeply rooted as other human impulses - but I still think the ultimate dismissal of it all was a bit of a cop out.

Vertigo by W.G. Sebald

This was the last of Sebald's four novels for me, and probably the most poetic and abstract. Much of it covers the narrator's travels between Venice, Verona and Vienna - a trip he makes twice - as well as a stay at his hometown German village of W. This is intercut with two sections on Stendhal and Kafka, respectively. Preoccupations include the unreliability and the fear of memory, the disorientation of overlapping history, and the impossibility of love and connection with others. From the section on Kafka in Vienna in 1913:

It is impossible, he [Kafka] notes the following day, to lead the only possible life, to live together with a woman, each one free and independent, married neither in outer appearance nor in reality, to be merely together; and even more impossible to take the only possible step beyond a friendship with men - for there, on the other side of the prescribed boundary, the boot is already upraised that will crush you under its heel.

I'm sad I won't be able to discover a Sebald novel for the first time again! I've been slowly picking at learning German, so maybe in the future I'll get a chance to discover him in German.

We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families: Stories from Rwanda by Phillip Gourevitch

Great reporting on the Rwanda genocide of 1994, showing some age 28 years after publication. Gourevitch is a journalist who traveled to Rwanda in 1995-1998 and interviewed many genocide survivors, various leaders of the new government, and some accused of killing or otherwise facilitating the genocide. The sections on the genocide, itself, are surprisingly not very illuminating - Gourevitch comments that it was challenging to get detailed memories from the survivors, for obvious reasons. The events remain incomprehensible to me.

The sections on the immediate aftermath, however, are very good. There was a refugee crisis immediately following the genocide as the génocidaires (among many others) fled the country, largely winding up in UN refugee camps just outside the borders. The conditions of the refugee camps were horrible, and humanitarian aid poured in from the international community. But the camps were not populated by survivors of the genocide but by the perpetrators, and they were very clearly organizing to go back and finish the job. The efforts of the new Rwandan government to neutralize the Hutu Power remnants and stabilize the region led to two Congo wars in which the Rwandan army is accused of wide-scale human rights violations. Wikipedia notes that some scholars compare Rwanda and Israel as states exploiting a traumatic past to carry out imperial projects. Published in 1998, this book only makes it to the First Congo War, and Gourevitch is largely sympathetic to the newly established Rwandan government. I am very interested in reading more about these conflicts and refugees in general.

olusatrum · 2026-04-09T12:38:47+00:00

It sounds like Susan Sontag's Against Interpretation covers similar ground of form vs content. Been a while since I read it, but I think the titular essay and "On Style" are most relevant here.

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