Blue Saturday

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

i like a long film if the longness is part of the vibe but if its just a 90 minute idea that got out of hand it annoys me. on the other hand, if you're in the cinema then the lack of conversation removes the need for a swift drink, as you say, and then at least after there is something obvious to talk about

Ooh, going to a film is a really good idea. Because you're right, you don't need to talk. And when you do have to talk, hey, you can automatically talk about the film you have just seen.

Avoid too much gin, have fun on your not-a-date!

so much of my problem drinking was wrapped up in "how can i feel comfortable in this uncomfortable social situation" btw so my medical advice is compromised

xxp That's a good point but suggests this evening is the wrong way round as the talking portion of the evening is before the film and after the film I suspect there will be scuttling for our respective nightbuses

I might be a little bit ADHD (person who endlessly complains on this thread that they can't concentrate at work in inventing neurological reasons for same shocker) but I am highly suspicious of any films which are more than 100 minutes long, which basically means all films made in the past decade

BB I keep reading your display name as part of your post and thinking how you are going to be standing around at a small viking rave with a bad foot. Can you go to the party, say "oh I'd love to stand and chat but MY LEG", and plonk yourself down on a chair or other convenient leaning post and make people come to you? or is that not likely to be appropriate/successful?

BATH CHAIR

THANK YOU.

I firmly believe that nearly all movies should only be about 90 mins long. Going to see one today that is 2 hrs. 9 mins and while I want to see it a part of me is already thinking that that's just a little too long for me. I get so antsy!

like i said, if you are an art movie where nothing happens with looooooong slow shots of people staring moodily into the distance then the longer the better but if it's a genre flick then 2 hours = get tae fuck

LOL, no, I am not going to be DJing at a viking rave with an injured foot, but TBH that sounds like a v v BB thing to be doing.

It probably would actually be totally OK to plonk myself down on a chair at party and say "ow my FOOT (the gout, gout*)"

*it's not actually gout, but this is funny as it is a wine and cheese party

But the big problem is actually the travel. There is a significant walk at the other end which would mean either arriving totally bad tempered and in pain, or else taking 3 separate busses right across London on a Saturday night, and really, no.

Films over 100 minutes long = this is for DVD. I was just talking to my Mum about this, like, I can no longer stomach having to go to a theatre and sit through a film and not be able to pause it to go to the bathroom, or refresh my drink or get dinner or basic human needs. There's a reason long gigs have intervals between movements or support/main band. 90 minutes tops for how long I can hold my attention.

x-post YES YES bath chair!

Especially if accompanied by Charles Ryder lookylike to push it through Hackney. With an armadillo on a string. This would be excellent.

I can no longer stomach having to go to a theatre and sit through a film and not be able to pause it to go to the bathroom, or refresh my drink or get dinner or basic human needs.

YESSSS. Netflix has killed my ability to sit through a movie tbqfh. I'm going to need my drink refilled and a smoking environment and at least one bathroom break, AND it would be good if I could text and read twitter on my phone and pause the movie when I saw an interesting article.

DJ-ing while being held aloft on a Viking shield?

My apologies to movies and everything but my brain is just not made for their presentation model.

I suppose it's funny how films have been getting longer while the average film watcher's attention span has been decreasing

(allegedly, according to clickbait pseudoscience articles everywhere, and also the anecdotal evidence of my own alt and tab keys having no print left on them)

Kind of explains how most big movies have tended more and more towards 'whoa!!! awesome' set pieces every 5 minutes at the expense of plots that make sense.