Blue Saturday

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

What you said to me earlier was really helpful, NV - that no human being can ever completely understand the true dimensions of another person's hell. But recognising that you're in hell, and they're also in a hell, and these hells are different but similar, that's a way of surmounting the vast distances between each other.

I kinda wanna say "strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats" - is that all you got? Is that *all*? Where are ecstasies and agonies and joys and devils and moments of transcendence? What kind of data analysis world is this? Reducing the world down to that is as point-missing as the dude on the OKC thread with his "clusters" of women that didn't get him any nearer a relationship because he didn't actually know how attraction and romantic chemistry even worked.

Work is an alien environment for everyone, I think. It's the inherent oddness of putting together strangers with a task to meet. It's rare and lucky to get a group of people that actually make you feel comfortable, and it can happen in the oddest places. But if you don't build a world of your own, and of your own choosing, outside work, you're doomed, dooooooomed. Putting a supportive community back together in the rest of your life is way, way, harder than finding a job you don't hate.

Yeah, lookit me, all trying to be helpful when I can't even help myself. Give it up, blow it out your arse, Branwell.

Life is endless grating tedium with occasional bursts of joy growing less and less frequent.

I really need to get out of bed. Today is a "jog and then shower" day and there's no avoiding it. It doesn't matter if I jog and then shower and then get straight back into bed, so long as I've done it.

small victories. yay!

Customer service training, clips from the IT crowd, now we're learning AND laughing oh such a world such a world

I have jogged! I have showered! I have ignored 3 misogynist little piggies, and if I can take some library books back and buy some bogroll I will call myself a productive member of society! Yay me.

there's a horrible trick that my booze-deformed cells play on me where they pretend that booze is some temporary communal nirvana - which, y'know, it sort of is - but they're only telling me that because they want booze

I dunno. Booze is kinda like a roulette wheel that half the time points to "temporary communal nirvana" and half the time points to "EXTREME BADNESS DO NOT GO" so I can't really hold "booze" responsible for either, I think it's a trick that my brain does, and booze just facilitates.

But I have developed this whole complicated system of Rules About Booze, and number one is Do Not Drink Just To Cope With Social Circumstances. So I'm going to whack your booze-deformed cells with a rolled-up newspaper and shout "NO! Bad booze cells. NO." I'm sure this will help!

This is me right now:

http://img0.etsystatic.com/009/1/6532289/il_340x270.467641904_ac5e.jpg

NO BAD BOOZE CELLS! NO!

thanks Babs

it's not just the imaginary community, it's the sudden appearance of purpose and other people where there are none

to go back to an old thought - i don't want to use other people to mortar the cracks in my life but jayz the cracks are outstripping the walls

then i hang onto the habit of sober isolation out of half bloody-mindedness and half lesser of two evils, the system works

I spent most of yesterday evening in the pub, I didn't drink but nor did I talk to anyone. It was shit.

i can imagine.

don't get me wrong there's a ton of good things about not drinking, and much as i love drinking for me it is half nihilism in its purest form and i nihilism i don't want to embrace right now, and many of the people i like to talk to in the pub are interesting and amusing in their own right but come on

it's a bit scary how much of our society's recreational opportunity is built around it. it's not great when yr own brain's recreational imagination is locked onto it

also champions of sobriety still mostly make my inner street urchin want to climb into the nearest bottle of rum

That's what always did for it, for me. The whole kind of "cheerleaders of sobriety" thing, when people took that attitude around me, my inner contrarian would just dig in her heels and down a load of bouze just to prove I could. (But I've managed to turn that attitude round to sic it on itself, when people tell me "you'll never stay clean or sober or temperate without doing AA and giving up bouze FOREVER!!!!" I just turn around and say "fucking watch me." Inner contrarians can be useful when directed in other directions.)

yeah i seem to have formed an uneasy alliance with mine "i will stop on my own terms cheers and not yours"

I think in the end, for a certain kind of brain, that's the only useful attitude to take.

(Me, I am so fucking bored of this all right now. I'm bored of being unwell. I'm bored of being unemployed. I should be doing something, I should be composing symphonies or writing novels or drawing comic books, and instead I'm just back at this "yay, you got out of bed today and took a shower, gold star for you!" and it's like, come *on*, am I 6? Why am I back here?)

i know :(

and like i said maybe i (or you) end up back here a lot cos a lot of what makes us feel this way is real and is outside us and near impossible to control

which makes the things you have made that were worthwhile that much more worth celebrating, and they also remind me that i could do it again

sailed out of sight of land today, looking for realness, realness lost or never really real

touch of fingers touch of lips touch of touch

a few bleak psychedelic moments into the buffeting wind along George Street with the concrete of the multistorey phazing in and out of the concrete of the sky, kinda glimpsing real but the reason i didn't wear glasses for so long - they get in the way, they screen the world out, they goldfish me in

take them off everything's still flat and not quite there, just blurrier

the wrong day to be too full of books and not quite here

the reason Hunger Games made feel so tense and sad, i guess - all dystopias look like documentaries to me

Retreat into surrealness, it's much better here.

i just had a pleasant morning doing Braille with a student and talking about Dungeons and Dragons so y'know there are compensations

http://www.benziger.org/articlesIng/?p=32

shiny diamonds of recognition in my brain

yep yep! thank you for the link

but, how can a person find the thing which does not make them feel like this? what if that thing is not something that allows them to survive? what if they don't even have that thing? and all the other predictable questions

(I agreed to go out tonight and am wondering what I've let myself in for. It's been a while. "Social anxiety" I guess though I'm not sure it's exactly social anxiety. I've got my comfy nest where I don't have to try to make faltering stupid boring conversational noises which fall out of my mouth in the wrong order and where I don't have to be constantly reminded of what other people see when they see me.)

i'm still digesting the Benziger/PASS stuff, trying to decide what's wishful thinking and what might be science-ish; sometimes these things give me a model for thinking about what's wrong, even if they don't help much at finding ways to improve the situation. i guess there's alw

interrupts typing cos the ice cream van came. resumes thought now we all have ice creams

ays something to be learned about little things we can do or avoid to make the work world a shade less worse.

going out is usually worse in anticipation, right? sure things will be fun when you're out there. judicious application of gin is indicated for social anxiety disorder.

Aw, I hope you have an OK time, Spacecadet. Social anxiety and "going out", yeah, bad combination. I find I'm better if I make myself a little comfortable nest while I'm out - a booth in a pub or a particular seat at a party - and not leave it, so that I feel safe and have a space to retreat to, even "out".

I am supposed to be going out tonight, but my sodding heel is still not OK. Like, it's fine to walk up to the high street and back, but just knowing it would not hold out on the loooong bus-train-walk trip and back I would have to make, and it's likely to be a "standing around" party which I'm not physically up to (and scared I'd damage myself if I got drunk enough not to remember the injury). And then I just start thinking "wow, parties are so scary, and I like all these people *LOTS AND LOTS* and if I could sit down with all of them and chat to them individually one at a time, for maybe 20 minutes tops, that'd be great. But all at once, in a party, while feeling in significant pain, this is not a bright idea. :(

I'm going out to have dinner and watch a too-long film (NB not a date, or at least if it is a date then many hilariously wrong assumptions have been made - but no, it is not a date)

so I may have to weigh up the application of gin vs the importance of not needing to walk out and look for the cinema toilets more than once (not at all is best but I figure once is the socially acceptable maximum)

why are films so long, why? but at least they remove the need for conversation

sorry about your foot and the party scariness, BB