Blue Saturday

(((I think I have missed your reference but I suppose it's ironic that I will spend tomorrow bemoaning that my weekend disappeared and I didn't do STUFF and yet I had 3 unexpected bonus free hours this evening which I spent on the sofa reading ILX instead of doing anything. maybe that's what you meant but I don't think it is)))

i was gonna watch Rashomon with Joel but we're both just vegging doing surfy net shit i guess

nah what the hell i nagged him

??? I'm not sure what that reference is about now. How odd. I don't think I was saying you were particularly Proustian - oh yeah, the idea that you had psyched yourself up to see people, then those hours were just "lost".

Or maybe the lost chord.

I post very odd things when I'm half writing a ~story~ and half posting on ILX.

not doing overdue work, thinking abt article, wishing there was some way to work out whether i feel unhappy (in general) because i'm bad at my job and don't like it, or whether i feel bad at my job and don't like it because i'm unhappy (in general)

i mean in some ways it doesn't matter, but if it's fixable at all then it makes a big difference which

Unemployed ATM, but thinking about my recent work gigs, it's been that I didn't like the jobs, so I was disinterested, so I was bad at them (transpires that I can't force myself to be good at something I dislike), so I was unhappy.

Yeah, I feel like that might be the case here, but I can't think of anything else I'd rather do, and I'm not sure in my current state I'd be able to give more of myself to anything else either. My current task is interesting on paper but I've been putting off looking at it for ages and I don't quite know why. Fear of criticism?

Benziger article seems to be basically a plug for various services e.g. her book Thriving in Mind which as far as I can tell goes 1. find your MBTI type, 2. ???, 3. profit. Still kind of interested in seeing if it has a more fully featured stage 2 but I just redid an MBTI-alike and got something I've never got before (ISTP, think I've been all 4 permutations of IN** before but never not been IN) which doesn't sound like me at all, so my hope of fixing my brain via MBTI is not currently too high.

(I guess I got S on the MBTI because
0. article made me think "maybe I have misunderstood my strengths/weaknesses, must not blindly click my usual answers"
1. failure to do background reading for work task led me to pick all the "I hate book learning" answers
2. avoided any reason-over-emotions answers because pissed off lately at people who think their emotions ARE rational logic - one of the questions was "My actions are frequently influenced by emotions" and I do not even believe anyone who ticked "No" for that. you are not Data from Star Trek
3. answered questions about "everything I do is planned meticulously" negatively bcz, well, I spend hours going over and over all the possibilities and not making a decision until I have to go, fuck it, time to get out the door and improvise

but no, I am not a cool-in-crisis skydiving firefighter, I am a risk-averse decision-avoider who goes to pieces in a crisis and all sorts of non-crisis situations too)

yes, whenever I do one of these tests and get to the 'do you plan things in detail' type questions I need an option for 'yes, but I still manage to screw up'. the way these things are formatted, are you better at empathising or rational analysis, spontaneity and inspiration or organisation and rigor, doesn't seem to leave a space for people who are crap at all those things.

guys, i see a satisfying career opportunity here. between us we shd be able to develop the ILX Crap Personalities model, which works out which crap personality you have and then tells you to give up and lock yourself in the house playing video games

Seems like too much work. I'll just sit here in the house playing video games.

Fatigue vs Attention Deficit
Despair vs Mania
Nihilism vs Inability to compromise

need 1 more, whip up a few questionnaires, cracked it

questionnaire is the single word i have most trouble spelling i think

dunno why i am feeling the Philip Seymour Hoffman thing so much, perhaps it speaks to my sullen nihilism. then again he was within 12 months of my age so.

i am supposed to be doing last minute homework and every time i look at an NVQ evidence sheet my eyes defocus and my head shuts down

technically it's not homework when you're at work but you get my meaning. christ i would love a big bag of sulphate about now.

Absent-Minded vs. Obsessive

or is that too close to fatigue vs. attention deficit?

went for a good long walk with a friend yesterday that ended with us trudging thru muddy twilight, felt good, especially when we came across a pair of white-bummed deer gadding about in the dark - Roe i'm guessing

so i'm not anhedonic yet. just trapped in a gleefully anhedonic world.

xp sarah that's good enough dammit, i was thinking of something similar re: carelessness vs perfectionism. plus it's armchair psychology, two concepts being near-identical is kinda the point nicht war?

"aren't 'wish it' and 'want it' really the same thing?"

need to alter either "absent-minded" or "attention-deficient" to avoid a clash of As. maybe change "attention-deficient" to "irritable" or "hyper"

so, the correct response to the Vague-Ell Type questionnaire is to stare blankly at the paper for half an hour then bin it whilst weeping curses

well, in our questionnaire one can be a FOND

"Your type is Horse with Black Bile rising, beware the colour green, lucky number is 15. Avoid working with people."

"You will take a long journey over water but you will still be a moany oaf at the end of it."

"FONDs are good at producing detailed systems which they know will never work because they don't have the energy to fight with people any more"

"Avoid working with people."

Save time and print that on every single results sheet.

'Steely Dan are over-rated' vs 'Steely Dan are under-rated'

I dunno if liking or disliking slow jams is really useful here

OMG, Noodle, I totally want to take this personality test now. DO IT DO IT DO IT, this is the best thing ever, the Vague-'Ell personality index.

Write a short funny book on this in the exact parodic style of management, and I'm sure some publisher would take it on, either as parody or not realising it wasn't real!

This could be as wildly unsuccessful as, well... OK, it would probably sell about as well as "Crap Towns" but I would totally buy the fuck out of it and give it to all my (future) bosses.

Liking or not liking slow jams = Urgent & Key, imo.

I'm going ~out on the town~ today with another ILX0r but please please please make this be a thing!

Social drinking affects my work productivity more than drinking alone
(Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Neither Agree or Disagree, Agree, Strongly Agree)

The only thing more pointless than my job is my existence
(Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Neither Agree or Disagree, Agree, Strongly Agree)

I enjoy watching soap operas because the characters have more serious problems than I do
(Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Neither Agree or Disagree, Agree, Strongly Agree)

slightly reinstated apparently :/

and my ability to turn up for work hungover didn't last so long

i hate doing this to myself. i hate not ever being able to do this to myself.

opening up 4 or 5 Youtubes of the same track at 20-30 second intervals makes some pretty great drones yo

we should do the crap personality inventory

yeah we shd do, how did i not put Procrastinator as a type?

need to snap out of the zombie torpor first

need to snap out of:

nothing looks solid, there is a sheet of glass between me and outside, i can't bear to talk to most people, i'm counting time off in my head constantly, can't bear to go to sleep at night, work doesn't want me to have any time, business going on, dead lifeless world all around, miss my children's constant presence, timetabled, parcelled up into sleep and snatches of inconsequential timewasting and work work, got the creeps from all the wellmeaning creeps around me, not buying into whatever i'm sposed to be buying into, loss of addiction = loss of contact with people i actually do like, nooooooothingness, life = over, out of lives, let things crumble, obligations gonna wind up dying like i lived in debt and unreliable, if i keep going here i can nearly imagine the way OUT but then i remember the way out isn't real if there's nothing to live on with it, endgame, used everything up and stop now

i dunno why what's okay for other people isn't okay for me, must be my own special spoilt failure, pitiful excpt u know fuck that pity

for a bomb that would infern my world and leave everybody else's intact fo them

NV, I know I am on the other side of the glass right now, but yup, I know a place very much like that one down there. Not there right now, but really feeling you being in there.

Hope you find a way to snap out, but completely understand how it works when you can't. If that "leave, but leave everyone else around you intact" button was available, I'd have taken it long ago. But the people whose lives you interact with in a positive way - including mine, in whatever tiny way - are both the glue and the curse.

it's different, in a bunch of ways, and when i try to grasp it i'm not so clear. but i like life, i wanna stick with it - it just relies on being crushed by things which are its opposite

really hit a wall today. i have faked my way thru holding down a job, and i'm really pretty angry at schlubs around me who don't know what addiction is, who don't know what's wrong with the life they're forcing me to live, who don't get why i can't shut up and give up everything just for a roof over my head and food and the chance to look after my loved ones

really year zeroing here, can't see how i can go on at this way of being, a question of time before they realise i can't do it and throw me out into yr authentic poverty

finding it quite hard to think today (today's excuse: face numb after dentist) so not really capable of offering anything more than this but

NV <3

thanks both of you :)

i'm gonna try and practise thoughtful silence for a while. laters.

Thinking of you, NV. <3

I know what helps me in this kinda mood is, oddly, to give in to the meaninglessness and the hopelessness, and to feel that emotion, and accept it and acknowledge the validity of it and inhabit it for a bit, and all those ~therapy speak~ things which sometimes help and sometimes don't. But just say "this is real, this is where we're at" and then wait for it to pass then pick myself up and start climbing the shit mountain again.

But I'm not going to patronise you by even thinking that either you don't know this stuff already, or to assume that what works for me might work for you. Bah!

But really just poking you with a stick and saying you're great, and also I really appreciated your thoughts on the lyrics thread, about "str8 dude listening to Beyonce" because that was a booming post.

give in to the meaninglessness and the hopelessness, and to feel that emotion, and accept it and acknowledge the validity of it and inhabit it for a bit

since i've already broken my sabbatical i wanted to say this is v. good advice i am trying to observe

"how to be in an office without feeling like a naughty kid (because you're not doing what you're supposed to do (because you kind of can't))" is what i ought to be thinking about, from the innermost kernel out, i think

Right now I am trying to do "feel & acknowledge the validity of this anger, inhabit the emotion & let it pass" but this is hard work, emotionally, and I don't want you to feel like I was recommending something without understanding how difficult it can be. x

it was the necessary next step forward, i spent half of last year trying to keep my job, now i need to think seriously about whether i should, whether i can, and what the alternatives would be. and i need to do it without being too resentful of the well-meaning people around me who don't see the quandary.

There are blunt economic realities of "I need to keep this job."

But then there are all those other quandaries around it, of should I, can, I, what are the alternatives.

I'm still kinda not really OK with talking through the details of how I left my last job (or indeed the circumstances of leaving the one before) but there came a point where I felt like I was keeping a job to prove I *could*, to prove that I was not lazy, or crazy, or unemployable, or just suffering from a bad attitude or giving in to blunt force sexism in the workplace. But then coming to terms (LOL therapy) with the fact that there were very real and pressing and important-to-my-health reasons why I had to leave both jobs. (Even if it took a panic attack so bad I went to my GP thinking it was an actual heart attack, to force me to confront one of those sets of reasons.)

I am certainly aware that being able to leave a job is a luxury. But there's also a point where you have to acknowledge if something is a bad fit, even if it looks good on paper or in your idealism or whatever, and find other alternatives. I don't know what those alternatives are, and to be honest, I'm using every diversion technique I have right now to fight own the rising panic.

Sorry if this is me just making an awful noise over in another corner with no relevance to anything. I never know whether to "offer advice" (which will be totally not-relevant and unhelpful) or "tell a similar story from mine own life" (which will also be not-relevant and unhelpful with the added bonus of super selfish and self-obsessed) or say nothing or just say "I hear you" and go away.

this thread was called "mumbling to myself" with the implication that everybody was free to do that, and the understanding that that means that people will overhear and sometimes mumble back

- having just been in a disciplinary wherein we addressed how much i want my job alongside how much i need it and i'll continue to work this thru in my head. cos my "need" for it is predicated on having a proper home for my children and that's a helluva need, but i have to make it stop being the only reason cos on its own it's never quite enough

or, whisper my darkest thought - "kids, i love you enough to not kill myself directly"

there's something in that truth that is the sickest part of my soul

(Sorry, finding a great deal of ILX hard to read: meaning process, correctly navigate socially, cope with vicious outbursts etc, at this moment. Don't want to make things worse.)

((Mood on the turn, feeling catastrophically stupid & naive. Couple weeks of expansive good mood, feeling great, brilliant threads, writing 15-20k words of novel a day does not mean "all cured, better now" it means a massive crash is in the post.))

That "won't kill myself coz of kids" thing goes both ways. The only reason I'm alive is coz my suicide would destroy my Mum.

need to work self-harming tendencies into the fake Myers-Briggs :/

actually if had a passivity/aggression axis and an intro/extroversion axis that wd do the job nicely whilst allowing for homicidal impulses too

bad weekend, bad dreams, bad mood