Blue Saturday

that is all v. otm and was definitely in my thoughts even when i didn't recognise it :)

yeah, it's the notion of having an ulterior motive for doing stuff that bugs me, i don't wanna have an ulterior motive, i go to Philosophy Club cos i am interested in Philosophy, sometimes people are chatty and interesting there and sometimes not. what i really want is Date Club except for olds like me who do not belong in regular noisy frenetic society

Yeah, I kinda want that too. But for saucy lesbians and genderqueer persons. Which is far too specific an ask, and even if I could, it would probably turn into a geriatric DOMO in 30 seconds flat, and ugh.

What is the opposite of ulterior? Overt? I think overt motives are fine. It's covering it all up with ulterior-ness which makes it icky, not the motives in the first place.

singing "We Want Rum" in my head to the Andrew WK tune, failing that wd settle for a few hours sit-down time with FM2014, or a walk in the sunshine, or a nap and a movie not necessarily in that order or indeed consecutively, or i dunno just not work, i'm full of good will and good intentions it's just come on, this is far from rad

i need to make a game of this in my head

stealth employee

actually just some proper for real coffee might do the job, or hallucinogens

Monday the 13th is the real evil here. I'll put the percolatorix on, make some hallucinogen-grade coffee for you. Send it down the Interpipes 2 U.

Challenge yrself to pass for motivated just for the craic

have reached warp factor "adequately engaged"

Im in my last week here and have an exam on thurs my inner scotty is locked in the engine room with two pints of bells and ten broons annuals

trying to forget there's more to life than completing NVQ modules and monitoring staff absence

noodle vague questionnaires

[Removed Illegal Image]

lolz

clownish

I'd forgotten what a sadistic trick the post-Christmas exam is

darragh I have been enjoying the pictures on this property ad from your fine isle, a couple of them seem to indicate a slightly unusual living arrangement: http://www.daft.ie/searchsale.daft?id=447453

HNY in orbit

― not a player-hater i just hate a lot (a passing spacecadet), Wednesday, January 1, 2014 3:13 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Well, this started out as a pretty OK Saturday afternoon, with a nice walk down to Pollards Hill, and a great view past Croydon to the North Downs.

And it has just turned into the bluest Saturday and I don't even know how to get it back.

NV, do you remember a very long time ago, when I was having a shit day at the bottom of an ILX clusterfuck, and I can't remember the exact words you used, but you told me something like, "why do you get so upset by what people say about you on ILX? No one on the internet really knows anything about each other, it cartoonifies and really, fuck whatever a cartoon character thinks about you." or words to that effect.

That was really wise advice, though it took me forever to understand it. I wish I listened to it more. But the problem is, when people have drawn a cartoon monster around your head, and then start acting as if that monster was real, and that monster was *you*, they start reading every damn thing you say as if you were that cartoon monster. It really doesn't matter how you act, if you act nice or mean or funny or intelligent, or some just-human combination of the above; if people are determined to see a cartoon monster instead of you, all they are going to see is the monster. I know it's not a judgement on me, as you said to me before. It's a judgement on a cartoon monster. But that doesn't stop it from hurting if you are already predisposed to see yourself as a monster. Insults only hurt if you secretly believe that they are true.

OK, this doesn't seem to be doing me any good. But I just wanted to say that those were kind and wise words, and I don't know that I ever thanked you for them. But I'm doing that now. Thanks.

So after the complete emotional blindsiding of yesterday, today I seem to have to have come down with some illness and wondering if that sudden emotional vulnerability was down to incipient illness and low body = low mood, rather than ILX being any more cruel than usual. (I've come to view ILX like weather, there is always someone or other prepared to be cruel, it's a question of whether I feel strong enough to cope with/ignore it.)

Sometimes I get this delusion where I think there's some secret code whereby if you crack it, and say the right things and display the right emotions, you can access that level of mutual support and understanding and acceptance that many, many people on ILX (and elsewhere) seem willing to show and exchange with one another. But... there is no secret code. There is no access level. It's not there are some people inside and some people outside, it's that there is no inside/outside. Some people can ask for sympathy and receive it, and some people cannot. It's just another of life's brutal unfairnesses, which is simply to be accepted, rather than puzzled over and worked out.

A good weekend to anyone that wishes my wishes for one.

I would suggest...logging out. its just a messageboard.

When people say to me "it's just a messageboard" or "it's just a phone" or "it's just a community of people" or other things, that indicates to me that they do not understand the nature of humans, or the nature of human communications.

If the problem is disconnection and alienation (and yes, loneliness and feeling intensely misunderstood) then switching off merely the *source* of communication is not going to make those problems go away. It may in fact make those feelings worse, since all communication (including those that might relieve those feelings) is now gone.

But, thanks for trying to be helpful.

ilx is too big and unwieldy to be consistent. it's the law of the jungle, like you learn in any werner herzog movie. no matter how warm and fuzzy you think the grizzly bears are, at the end of the day humans are nothing more than bear food. don't overanalyze it.

I suppose you're right, GB. It's naive of me to be an optimist. Sometimes all of us play the human, sometimes all of us play the bear, I guess.

But now I am laughing at the idea of grizzly bears posting to ILX and wondering how they get their massive paws on the keys and laughing, so thank you for the image!

I'm going to make a goats cheese omelette now.

hey BB thanks for your thanks, it actually means more than you might think it shd, coming from a cartoon :-)

i know i can't know the flavour of your disconnection and alienation, but i think i know pretty well how those things feel. and i hope you can remind yrself sometimes that the you that "secretly believes" insults levelled against you are true is in many ways not you, but a voice from outside that we learn to let in and make home and mistake four ourself

i dunno dude. some people just say horrible shit sometimes cos it's easy and life-affirming. not everybody feels that way, and most people don't feel that way themselves most of the time. i wish i had some pat bullshit Facebook meme to end this with a hug and send you on your way but i don't. so i just wanna wish you a big internet-distanced hug and remind you of all the strength that you do have inside yrself and hope that you can be yrself and keep on grooving and find your path

NV, you are a beautiful human being - and this is one of those things that makes you such an excellent creature: the willingness to admit that you cannot understand the flavour of a person's pain, yet, still, the acknowledgement that the pain is there, and express empathy with it. Bear hugs (but not grizzly bear hugs because mind those paws) received, and returned with gratitude.

Captain Awkward has a great phrase for that part of you that secretly believes the internalised insults are true - they call it Jerkbrain. It's doubly disconcerting to see jerkbrain statements coming from the mouth of another person. But of course, that's how it works. Those jerkbrain statements came from outside to start with. When I start trying to explain and justify my very existence, instead of just saying "thanks for your opinion, good day to you" it's wrestling with a shadow self that happens to be wearing someone else's face as a mask.

Right. Now I need to hoover and clean the house and prepare another place to sit because tomorrow I'm having a visit from one of my favourite people in the whole world so I should try to tame the dust.

Thanks for the hugs, NV, and thanks again for the advice and the general awesomeness.

The endless minuet of humiliation and its response gives human relationships an obscene hobbling rhythm. In the ebb and flow of the crowds sucked in and crushed together by the coming and going of suburban trains, and coughed out into streets, offices, factories, there is nothing but timid retreats, brutal attacks, smirking faces and scratches delivered for no apparent reason. Soured by unwanted encounters, wine turns to vinegar in the mouth. Innocent and good-natured crowds? What a laugh! Look how they bristle up, threaten on every side, clumsy and embarrassed in the enemy's territory, far, very far from themselves. Lacking knives, they learn to use their elbows and their eyes.

me irl

even when i want to be a tolerably adequate employee i find myself overcome by anxiety, sleepiness. what's that all about?

prefer to do all my writing in pencil nowadays, think this might have something to do with provisionality

What is that from?

reading back the top of this thread is like a reminder of all the ways i fcuked my relationships up so that is useful.

i am trying to find words to explain the particularly depressingness of the management texts i am reading, the way business literature (what's the proper word for that? it's gone) tries to read like scientific analysis but always stands on the sand of "Bolinger and Dickwad (1985) divided management styles up into 13 categories based on the everyday household objects they noticed when staring round the room trying to make this shit up. Meanwhile Hausfrau (1989) discovered that life is like a box of chocolates."

xp Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life, my erstwhile Bible/map of reality

http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/pub_contents/5

every workplace shd have one

i'm just peeved cos i went to bed at 10 last night and i should not be this weary dammit

Truly, there is no bullshit like management speak bullshit. It's kinda half ~SCIENCE!!!!11~ and half this pseudo-mystical power of positive thinking fake actualisation prose. Avoid, avoid.

I sometimes think tiredness is situational. Like, if you are always tired on the morning train because you're usually exhausted, it doesn't matter if you've had enough sleep. Just being on that train and the reminder of exhaustion will make you exhausted. Either that, or a total lack of fresh air.

Instead of just one of my favourite people in the world coming round today, I now have 2 people coming round; also a friend that person has been meaning to introduce me to! Which will be brilliant! Except I only have 2 chairs, and one of us will have to sit on the sofa. Argh.

"Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) analyzed the importance of seating arrangements in facilitating team synergy in their 1985 work 10 Hot Seating Plans for Management Efficacionalism"

probably just still in sleep deficit and need a few more nights to catch up tbh, which is boring enough.

i got no desire to be a leader of anybody tbh but i can't afford to give this up right now, i only applied for this post cos i thought i could help improve the actual service

I really wish sometimes that there were a magical sorting hat for "people who are ambitious and on their way To The Top" and "people who actually just want to Get Stuff Done" and the To The Top people could just be sent off to some management training island, which suffers a mysteriously malfunctioning ferry which can never bring them back and they can just stay out there getting more and more grand job titles and important sounding roles, and just leave the people who are there to Get Stuff Done alone to, y'know, get stuff done.

I mean, there's something to be said for management training that actually teaches people effective people skills, because people are difficult and perplexing and confusing. But honestly, if people skills could be taught from a book, we would have all read that book by now, and we would all have them. :-/

Ah, when the dreaded Sleep Debt becomes a Sleep Mortgage and you find yourself in permanent arrears. The upstairs neighbour that leaves the house at 7 manages to do it quietly enough, but the one that leaves at 8.30 is a total doorslammer so I never catch up.

My first bout of depression was at uni and before I even had any of the other symptoms I had a chronic inability to stay awake in morning lectures no matter when I'd gone to bed or how much sleep I'd had. Fast forward 2-3 years and I was sleeping 14 hours and physically unable to get up for a couple of hours after first waking, like the sheets were lead or an ever-shifting sea rearranging over me and I just couldn't lift them. Definitely some overlap between depression and sleep disorders imo

"Bolinger and Dickwad (1985) divided management styles up into 13 categories based on the everyday household objects they noticed when staring round the room trying to make this shit up."

good job I have the morning off cz I lolled at this in a manner which would have been hard to explain in the office. though I have skipped through a few psychology and self-help books lately and you'd think psychology->self-help->management-speak would form a continuum with SCIENCE at one end and cheese-moving at the other but it's not always easy to tell which you're looking at

anyway good luck NV, you'd be one of the good ones (also hi BB and best wishes)

Hi, Spacecadet!

I've actually been reading a great deal of research lately about sleep deprivation and mood disorders, and there's definitely a noted correlation, but which way causation runs is harder to establish. But yes, they are in some way linked.

Could I just, I don't know, get bitten by a spider and wake up in 2015 with a different life?

Everything seems to be going to shit all of a sudden and I can't see a way out but I'm reasonably certain that getting bitten by a spider would solve all my problems somehow

this is what i call my "run away to the steppe and live in a yurt" approach to problem solving. it seems better than getting bitten but i know that feeling. keep telling (myself) just deal with one thing at a time

sleep and my wellbeing are intimately connected and at least since i've worked that out things have got a fair bit better. i'm just in the wrong job/life and constrained like the rest of us by the need to earn enough to keep a roof overhead and food in the fridge. constraint made a bit more insistent by having children but also a bit more bearable as result, for me.

I am part of an induction in a conference room a desperate man with ridicuous hair is introducing himself by reeling off his cv highlights and its not good stuff and i feel for him but by next week ill hate him

I feel like I am taking the "living in a yurt" or at least "not leaving the house until it all blows over" method right now, and I don't know that it really works at avoiding the general crap of life either. It just delays the problems, it doesn't solve them.

God I am nervous about having people round. I haven't had anyone round since Xmas and I am worrying that I've forgotten how to speak to people that aren't imaginary or living in a silver box on top of my lap.

because i am doing my first team meeting in an age i have been panic attacking all morning, for no obvious reason. it better go away when i've finished.

Good luck

When I get home I might try & stream the gravity/all is lost/leviathan trifecta, feeling that vibe atm: violently adrift in an uncaring universe. If I end with gravity I might even be cheered up, or I might be even more bummed because where is MY ghost buzz lightyear to give me a space peptalk & show me where the vodka is?*

*metaphorical vodka obv. SIGH.

Hmmm bring on the yurt. A large and growing percentage of my work responsibilities are triggering the "I'll never understand this stuff, if I ignore it will it go away?" response. (Yes, sometimes they do go away, but they always come back, is the thing.)

Guess I should try to pin the yawning panic down enough to fill in a thought record so at least I can have done my CBT homework if not my actual job.

yeah and at least you'll look like you're doing something

What did you used to do when there was stuff at work you didn't understand?

Because every job I've had has had a learning curve, some ferocious, some less so. And at the start there's always that yawning sense of "Oh god I will never understand that" followed by "oh wow this is starting to make some sense..." followed by "oh yes! I've cracked it! This is easy now! (or at least familiar)" So how did you get from A to B to C in the past? Reading manuals or "SQL for dummies" books? Looking stuff up on internet help forums? Talking to the other programmers and copying their crib sheets? Can you remember what you used to do, when swamped with impossible-new-stuff, and follow those same kinds of procedures?

(Sorry, I guess I'm still following the "how can we make work not completely awful" script rather than the "work is pointless and we should abandon it" script. It's easy when you're not actually in work. Because right now I would just like a difficult task that someone assigned me that I could lose myself in, rather than staring at the internet and going "god, I should send some CVs out, huh.")

I dunno, I used to pick up new programming languages on the job, you're right, and I have some work tasks looming which should totally just be a matter of reading a book and following the tutorials, except I keep not getting round to it.

I've also inherited a responsibility where I've read the how-to guide, I've been walked through the basics by the one guy here who understands it, I'm on the mailing list where other people's queries get solved and I still have no idea what any of the steps I copied and pasted meant or how it fits together. It just seems like a thing which will never fit in my head.

Unfortunately something related it to it broke this morning, not part of the walkthrough I was given but everyone knows that if That One Guy isn't here (he isn't, this week) I'm the only person he's explained any of it to.

I also have some tasks which are basically just tedious copy-paste-munge-copy-paste-wait-for-db-repeat tasks and there is no sensible reason why I haven't already done them except they're dull, longwinded and fiddly, I guess.

Also "talking to the other programmers" oh god this gives me the fear. Having to admit I don't know things! Including things I should probably have known several years ago! This is a general fear I have but also the one programmer on our small team who's most likely to know the answer is, uh, a little too prone to go into shrieking fits of "nobody else does things properly round here"

I really wish I could do your dull, longwinded and fiddly tasks for you right now. Because that is the mood I am in right now, it would be good to turn off the internet and put some soft techno on the headphones and do fiddly dull things until they are done. (My visitor from Orkney came. I gave her a sketch; she gave me a cold. So now I am just slightly too sick to go for a walk, but not sick enough to go to bed for the rest of the day.)

But that sucks, when you get saddled with Someone Else's Job, and the responsibility for it, and it goes Horribly Wrong when the Someone Else is not there to fix it. That's the kind of thing that used to make me feel worse than useless. (But also, conversely, if I did somehow find the right bit of code and fix it, my god, I felt so smart then, even if I had no idea what I did to get it running again.)

((And as the person who used to be the "shrieking fits of nobody else does this properly" all I can say is, this usually comes from a place of stress and having to sort out other people's clumsy attempts to fix things which make things worse, argh, it is not a fun place to be, though maybe not as awful as being shrieked at. Though "how do I NOT do this wrong, oh gracious smart-person, I am not worthy etc..." can be a way of heading off the shrieking.))