Blue Saturday

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.))

But another tip, I remember from dealing with programmers, is that if you have forgotten something you should have known, the one thing programmers love is proving their own smartness. So if you frame it either as "Haha, I have this really fun programming quiz, who here can get a perfect score?" and throw in things you should know but don't, and they will all fall over themselves to give the right answer.

Also "I used to know this, but I have forgotten, argh, my brain is too full of other things... your memory is much better than mine, do you remember?" is better than admitting that you never learned it in the first place. *lays finger aside of nose*

I should get going on the tedious busywork myself but I wish I could farm out understanding the complicated things to you and then download the knowledge from your brain afterwards.

I don't mind said coworker when she's not personally offended by or making veiled digs about my work and/or inability to keep up with best practices, and I do wish I knew as much as her; I'm just super-wary of asking her anything. You're right, flattery and feigning a sudden urge for self-improvement often work, but even the calm explanations take longer than I can spare and impart not much information except "look, I know acronyms and like making graphs!"

Yeah "ha ha I have forgotten, you are good at not forgetting" is a good trick, I'll try that. Have harboured many urges to incinerate brogrammers whose preferred technique is "who would be so nerdy to even want to know that boring shit [flexes gymrat arms]" but to my bemusement everyone else seems to find that kind of schtick ruggedly charming so what do I know.

Ugh ugh, if you are infested with Brogrammers, I am so, so sorry. A pox on all of them and their protein drinks.

I am probably really really projecting onto Shrieking Woman, because I ended up becoming Shrieking Woman at my last job (and actually there totally were reasons for the shrieking, both work-related frustrations, but also the fact that I was at that point having a nervous breakdown of some sort) - but... if I was going to project, based on what you've told me. When I would go for the "Look! I know acronyms and like making graphs!" aspect, it was because No One Ever Listened To What I Said! and I was really trying to establish that actually I did know what the fuck I was talking about (and the brogrammers really didn't - and also they were totally unwilling to learn from me, because I was a Woman, and women are incapable of knowing what it's like to program, even when they had actually written large chunks of the system that they were supposed to be working on etc, blah blah.)

So it may be that the shrieking and the going off on unhelpful tangents is actually because she is trying to establish her credentials in a world of brogrammers?

For me, if anyone asked me "how do you do your job" I would start out on this whole defensive spiel about how I was actually qualified to do my job. Which is helping no one. But when I actually had to teach someone How To Do A Thing, it was much easier and more effective to sit down and say "Right, I'm going to do the thing, and explain what I'm doing, and you're going to take notes. Then we're going to switch places and you are going to do the thing from your notes/or my instructions, until you have proved to me that you can do the thing, too."

It's weird; I always believed I had No People Skills at all, but this is one of the things that therapy has taught me: that actually I have pretty OK people skills, for the appropriate situations I normally find myself dealing with: I have the kind of people skills appropriate for IT Departments. IT Nerds respond to a different kind of flattery: we really like to be made to feel *clever*. The most effective way to get an IT Nerd to like you is not always to prove that *you* are clever, but to get *them* to feel clever. (Also usefulness, but I'm p sure we have talked about this before on another thread: IT Nerds don't care so much about money, status, power, rank, etc, we care about one question: Do you make my job easier, or do you make my job harder? If you want to motivate them to do something for you, convince them that you will make their job easier. This works better as a show don't tell thing, though.)

Aaaah, I am blustering now and not being very helpful at all, I'm sorry if I've started grandstanding. I guess, Spacecadet, you are actually helping me, by reminding me of the bits of my jobs that I really do like. (Fixing things! Learning new programming skillX0rs) And I'm trying to talk myself up to going back into it, and dealing with all that stuff again.

Right now, I totally want to become a freelance consultant and figure out other people's complicated things for them, then go back and explain how to make it easier. This is my dream right now. I don't know if it's a more realisable dream than "no more brogrammers. ever."

Sorry, I forgot to reply because other things kept breaking.

No, my current job is fairly brogrammer-proof (being in a library) but we did have one. He left (hooray) for a better-paid job (ah, jealousy). She liked him though, partly because he actually did take up all the working methods she suggested and partly because she's always conspicuously more interested in showing youngish male colleagues how she gets it, does things right, can show them the ropes, etc. A fairly pragmatic decision, I suppose, but a little more solidarity might be nice sometimes...

Well, I wrote my thought record, except for the bit at the bottom marked "action plan for next time". Ha, so like me not to engage with the idea of doing any actions. Will probably be told off, again.

Ugh, one of those, then? Had one of those at my last job: women who think that young men need to be coddled and placated and fussed over, like hothouse flowers, while completely ignoring the women on the team, and in fact, not just taking the young men's side, always, but holding their damn hands through any disagreement with the other women on the team, because young men, like hothouse flowers, are always right, and even if they are wrong, they need to be ~protected~ from being told of their wrongness, because lord knows, they might actually learn something, or even clean up their own messes, instead of leaving it for other people, usually the women who are disagreeing with them, to do, all the time.

Haha, again, no, sorry, that's my last job, not yours at all. Guess I have a lot of unresolved feelings about that place, huh?

I would have a lot of trouble doing anything but giving the side eye to anything labelled an "Action Plan" but we've already established on the other thread, that I'm a Bad Influence and I mustn't talk to anyone about therapy because I will contaminate them with negativity, LOL. So I'll be Freudian about this instead. Maybe there's a part of you that actually likes being "told off"? Because it reinforces your view of yourself as slightly rubbish? Or maybe if you don't do the thing properly/completely, then if/when it fails to work, you can point at it, go "look, it didn't work, because I didn't do it properly, oh I'm so rubbish" and then there's something to blame for its success/failure which was an actual Thing You Did. Sorry, I'm not explaining this very well. "Look, I half-arsed it, and it didn't work (and I didn't really want to do it anyway)" is a lot easier to live with, in many ways, than "I threw myself at it 100% and it still didn't work, but I actually lost something through the trying" <- which is often the real fear that lurks behind consciously half-arseing something.

But I have no idea what I'm talking about, though, so don't listen to me.

fear of failure - lack of belief in the process - resentment of external factors to you - lack of ability at self-restoration - wrong kind of therapy

such a stew of possible reasons or contributions to stuff not working for us, and so much of it not really in our own control. had another Vaneigem quote i held back from yesterday, it's a bit brutal, but v. relevant:

In a fine passage of The Function of the Orgasm, Wilhelm Reich relates how after long months of psychoanalytic treatment he managed to cure a young Viennese working woman. She was suffering from depression brought on by the conditions of her life and work. When she was recovered Reich sent her back home. A fortnight later she killed herself.

failure to fit in, it's never just one party's fault :\

have reduced the material conditions of contentment today to the prospect of buying some footwear that doesn't leak.

I know this from myself, that it's one of my defence mechanisms - when there are a billion variables on something, most of them out of my control, then introducing another variable, called "I am half-arsing this" which is *totally* under my control, stops the whole thing being so scary and uncontrollable. It still fails, but at least I have a reason for the failure, that was under my control, therefore I don't feel so bad about it. I can point to that single controlled thing and go "a-ha! the real reason!"

it's good to feel like you've got some control. we all do have some control i think. lately i've learned how not to get fired and how not to destroy my internal organs and i thought of that as being free from depression and to some extent that's v. true.

but then the big dark things that won't go away caught up with me again and reminded me that i can't make everything better, i can just work on my survival techniques, cultivate my inner rodent. and just the other night i got a blast of desolation and aloneness so bad i thought it was going to undo all the last months' work.

and i think this is partly cos i kidded myself i could be at home in the work world i inhabit, that i could accept it and be accepted by it and just fucking get on with it, you know, like all those other people do? (my boss's voice) - and that was v wrong, i need to remember i'm in an alien environment and i can't get comfortable and i have to concentrate if i'm gonna survive it

and how my brain/soul/id/inner Shiva got to me is to look at the people i love - my children - and feel vast chasms of space between them and me, feel lost to each other, feel gulfs of separation that are the reality of being in...this world, at the very least

"curing" myself maybe in the end might help me understand why i feel so lost but i don't think it has the power to take me home.

or in short or to try to be clearer i am alone because i think i might be in hell and even the people who i feel closest to don't seem to be sharing the same existential space as me, and i don't think i want them to, but i think they might be stuck in their own hells too

if i can break this down into Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats, i'm golden

weaknesses ftw