Behold a rare surviving artifact: a postscript, hand-inked, extracted from a letter sent across a distance of state lines by myself, then nineteen years of age, to my younger brother, aged nine. I had departed the family home abruptly in 1990, drawn by the migratory pull to prestigious university education.
“P.S. Noah — study my handwriting. There is much meaning there left unsaid. Aspire to have scratches as expressive as mine and you will surpass my skill.”
I met Robert when he reached out for an in-person IFS session. At the time, he was on sick leave from employment in corporate IT. He was burned out. Stuck. The income was steady enough that leaving felt irresponsible, but staying felt like it was costing him something he couldn’t yet name.
Robert describes his situation:
I first discovered IFS through an online community focused on nondual teachings, where several members happened to be practitioners. While on medical leave, I realized I needed deep internal work before returning to my career. I started by working through Jay Earley’s Self-Therapy on my own, but while I identified a few protector parts, I couldn’t create true relief alone.
Got home from a Santo Daime work tonight. Then I drank some water. Carelessly. The way a person does who has forgotten that the universe enjoys irony.
Hic.
You’d think I’d have learned to sip like a Victorian lady at high tea by now. Instead, I apparently chug like I’m trying to win a contest. The hiccups arrived right on schedule to collect their tribute.
This is a follow-up to LuaLaTeX Footnote Maze, which documented the long road to making memoir paragraph footnotes work inside breakable tcolorbox environments with hyperref. That solved half the problem. This post solves the rest of the problem: deciding exactly where on the page footnotes appear.
After the earlier work, footnotes escaped their tcolorbox prisons and rendered as proper paragraph footnotes with working hyperref links. But placement was still automatic—footnotes released at the end of a box landed wherever TeX’s page builder decided, sometimes colliding with other content when the combined height of sidebar plus footnotes barely exceeded the page.
UPDATE 2025-12-04: Sidebar Footnote Collision Problem
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Testing revealed a critical issue: when a sidebar with footnotes barely fits on a page, the footnotes can collide with the sidebar content. The sidebar itself fits, but the combination of sidebar plus footnotes exceeds available space, causing collisions with page content and page numbers.
The problem occurs regardless of sidebar length. Tests with varying sidebar sizes—from compact to extended—all demonstrated collisions when the total height (sidebar + footnotes) was just over the page limit.
While vocalization during pain (e.g., saying “ow” or screaming) has been studied and shown to potentially increase pain tolerance, the psychological mechanisms and efficacy of internal vocalization (subvocalization or “silent screaming”) during acute pain episodes remain largely unexplored. This represents a significant gap in our understanding of cognitive pain management strategies.
Previous research has established that subvocalization involves micro-movements of the larynx and speech organs that are typically imperceptible without specialized equipment. These internal speech processes have been extensively studied in reading contexts but rarely in pain management applications.
I had lunch at La Fondita 2 (3330 Center St NE, Salem, OR 97301) today at around 11 a.m.
A man I had barely met paid for my burrito. 🌯
He didn’t mention his name, and the restaurant staff didn’t know him either.
Apparently, I was the accidental beneficiary of a random act of kindness.
I’m not sure whether this has ever happened to me before. ♥️
August 24, 2026
