Blue Saturday

I no longer know if ILX is the cure for loneliness, or just another symptom. :-/

Oh. It's that day for me to get my "THE CELTS!!!!1" schtick on again.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Bh85oMdCAAAFMBi.jpg

You forgot DRECKLY ;-)

Dreckly is Cornish dialect, but not Kernewek proper. Anyway, take it up with the Bowgie Inn, I nicked it off them.

I actually have a pint of Doom Bar for tonight. Though I'm going to lock myself off the interweb so I don't celebrate my Cornish heritage by getting in a knock-down fight with a SWF speller.

do you really think you procrastinate out of perversity?

my therapist sent me home to read these procrastination worksheets last year:
http://www.cci.health.wa.gov.au/resources/infopax.cfm?Info_ID=50
(warning, not for those with allergies to self-help bollocks or bad grammar)

which, I dunno, I didn't put the effort in to actually turn my life around or anything, but I guess I found it interesting to ponder Different Reasons Why I Might Be Like I Am endlessly from some new angles <-- sentences which summarise my therapy experience and entire life to date

anyway "not wanting others to tell me what to do because how dare they control me" was one of the options, think I was mostly ticking "not doing it bcz I'm scared I'll be rubbish at it" but was scared it might secretly be the former and I was only flattering myself

(xpost oh wow, Cornish orthography fights, that is some good new procrastination fuel. thank you!)

there are definitely things i do because i'm told not do them by lamesters, but i'm pretty sure i like doing most of the procrastinatey things i do, even if i regret them afterwards?

this crosses over with my thought-theme for the morning, which is something along the lines of "does being interested in too many different fields of knowledge leave you dilettantishly paddling without ever experiencing the joy of expertise?" or something like that only, y'know, expressed more clearly

a thought which occurred to me as i tried to read the Cambridge Ancient History and got sidetracked through orders of magnitude in physics, deep drilling expeditions, the Challenger deep and something about worms, while a side corridor was wondering about the availability and usefulness of careers advice for barely-qualified wasters in their mid 40s

plus ILXy miscellanea, obv

oh also spacecadet DANKE! those "imagine being less ineffectual" pdfs look like essential reading

bitte sehr! I hope you get something out of them - I shd probably revisit them myself tbh

I also sometimes think I have too many mild interests which I only have a very shallow knowledge/appreciation of, and then sometimes I think I actually have v few interests but have still managed not to engage adequately with any of them

just as one minute I tell myself life is hard because I was made to feel unacceptable, and then the next I tell myself life is hard because I was patted on the head always for showing only my shallow interests in unexpected fields, without ever needing to engage more deeply, and maybe it would have helped to be made to work for praise a little more

lyfe is contradictory, maan (watch me go in circles itt like I have been in my head forever)

*bookmarks procrastination forms to read when I get a chance*

~KK 4EVAH!!!~

when Aristophanes' frogs say "Brekekek" is he implying they are of Cornish descent y/n?

Are cornichons cornish

Brekekek? Sound suspiciously Breton to me!

So I read about halfway through the procrastination worksheets before I fucking gave up.

And it boils down to the fundamental reason why Workbook Therapy does not work for me: MY REASON IS NOT ON THEIR LIST.

These workbooks, they always act like the entirety of human experience is able to be boiled down to about 5 or 6 general groups, with a short list under each one, and if you find your problem on the list and category, then they will have the therapy that will work for you, and if you just follow all their helpful exercises, then you will be cured. And if your problem isn't on their list? OH WHOA THERE YOU SPECIAL SNOWFLAKE YOU ARE JUST NOT TRYING HARD ENOUGH.

I should probably skip ahead to further pages, and see if I can glean any helpful tips (what? you're going to tell me to make lists, and cross them off? NOOOO, OMG I had never thought of that in my entire life, not since fifth grade.) But it's like... when the authors have already subdivided human psychology into categories, and made it plain that I'm not in any of their neat and careful categories, what use will it be to me, to read any of the rest of it?

honestly i didn't get that from the tone of the first couple of sheets. i'm not saying i think their process will be useful to me but they do go out of their way to acknowledge that the why can be v varied and isn't necessarily related to the efficacy of the attempt to change yr habits

NOPE.

OK, this is one of my no-go zones. When a straight white dude starts telling me about "tone" that I can read that they can't, or vice versa, that is my cue that this is not a conversation that I can be in, no matter what the conversation is about.

Sorry I brought it up.

xps ive not looked at em, but thats not procrastinating thats just naah iykwim

Has it/similar worked for anyone tho? Out of interest.

BB i apologize, i was talking purely from my own perspective.

£60,000 a year for a Senior SAP BO BI. I don't even understand what some of these job descriptions mean. That sounds like something off Teletubbies.

I can probably (some of the descriptions are thrash an the recruiting is weird in BI) tell you a bit about what it means :) So do you know Business Objects?

Thanks, NV, I appreciate the apology though it wasn't necessary. I know you didn't mean anything bad by it, it's just one of those words that (especially if I am in a bad place) just tips me into an untenable place, where I"m reacting to stuff in *my* past, rather than anything necessarily in the other person's statement.

I don' know Business Objects, xyzzzz, I know Crystal, which was a bad career choice along the way somewhere because it seems like BO has bought out Crystal and almost completely taken its market share? I feel "out of the loop" because although Crystal was my area of expertise, I haven't used it in, like, 2 years.

(Basically, what it comes down to for me, with procrastination is one of two things: 1) if I don't see the point of doing something, I don't do it. No matter what the thing is. And there's a sliding scale of existential dread in my own head of what I consider "pointless" depending on the dread-o-meter whether that's "why should I change the sheets when they'll just get dirty again next week" or "why should I get out of bed when the sea is rising and we're all going to die anyway". 2) the complete lack of meaningful any social contact in my life, which means that tiny sparks of contact are way more important than paying the council tax bill on time. God why am I even still typing. I should go and take a shower. Why should I bother taking a shower? My hair will only get dirty again tomorrow. My shrink probably won't really care if I turn up this afternoon stinking with dirty hair anyway. It doesn't matter if I hit submit on this post. It doesn't matter if I don't hit submit on this post. Why am I even doing this. This sounds like a joke, but really, it isn't. This is my life.)

having sat in a classroom full of semi-interested business apprentices this morning discussing the nature of customer service and values, believe me, i am on intimate terms with "what's the point of this i'm going home to play Football Manager"

Hmm, hadn't thought about it but "not going to because I don't see the point" sounds a little like me too. But then so did all the existing reasons: none of them leapt out at me as definitely my reason, but they all made me go "hmm, yeah, a little bit of that I guess".

But yeah, while I found the reasons interesting to consider, the actual suggested actions (i.e. to-do lists) were not a great deal of help. I didn't make it to the last two worksheets so eh maybe I missed the magical fix-my-life page. Let's hope there is a magical fix-my-life page out there somewhere, right?

If only I liked Effort & Fixing as much as Contemplation & Taxonomising.

I don' know Business Objects, xyzzzz, I know Crystal, which was a bad career choice along the way somewhere because it seems like BO has bought out Crystal and almost completely taken its market share? I feel "out of the loop" because although Crystal was my area of expertise, I haven't used it in, like, 2 years.

Well mergers & acquisitions (& fake trends) are a part of life in this field.

I would say you could try R? I haven't myself, just been lamely looking at the pretty pictures - its open source so..

Yeah i always recognise a wee bit of my own lack of application in your descriptions aps, kind of not 'big questions whats the point stuff' but 'meh my eyes keep sliding off this shit im off'

I am going to have to muse through this "what is the point of this, going home to play football manager" because I say that I fucking LOOOAAATHE videogames (mostly because a long-term meaningful person in my life started using them as a way to block me - and everyone else in their life - out) but last week my LOLtherapist suggested that I might treat my novel-writing exactly the same way. Something so all-powerfully consuming that I get completely engrossed and forget the rest of my life when doing it.

And what, really, is the difference between Football Manager and writing-a-novel? Both are about totally enveloping world-building and exercising control over your environment. I guess I hate videogames for the same reason I hate all games - I do not find "points" (LOL) to be an adequate Point, in terms of driving my behaviour or making me do something. Gameification is wasted on me. I don't want "points" or "goals" - how fucking Pointless is that? I even hate the *language* of games/sports - "points" and "goals" attached to completely meaningless things and used to drive a contest over nothing. Meh. (But whoa, if you talk to me about The Charts, and "what is the motivation of this character" - his motivation is, he wants a Number One Record! "What is the point of a number one record, I don't see why he wants it?" and I guess trying to understand why my character wants a Number One Record is as pointless as trying to understand why a football player wants to score a goal.)

But what is the goal of a novel, anyway? What is the point of a story? It is just filling up time before you die, like everything else. Just as pointless as playing a videogame, really, so why do I even do it. Why do I do it so compulsively, to the exclusion of everything else. (because it is the one thing that makes me HAPPY.)

What am I even talking about, at this point. Get to the point. Score points. What the fuck are points anyway. Bring in Euclid.

I have lost my inherent motivation to learn new programming skills like R, or whatever, as well.

Like, if I was at a job, and someone stuck it in front of me and said "this will probably be useful for this task" I'd get the book and learn it, because, really how hard can it be. That's always how I acquire job skills. Because I need it for a task. Someone stuck SAS on my computer once, and I learned it in a couple of afternoons, because it was there. But the idea of going and learning SAS or Business Objects because I might need it to get a new job? What on earth would possess me to do a thing like that.

The licence costs would be prohibitive for a start as far as BO and SAS I think..

I should think like a programmer more often, though.

Because Contemplation and Taxonomising is only the first thing you do when confronted with a bug. You think "hmmm, what could be causing this bug" and go through all of the potential reasons (oh my god, is this that date format issue ~again~) but really, the only thing that actually fixes bugs is to sit down with the code line by line and go "did that fix it?" Nope. Try again. "Did that fix it?" Nope. Try again. "Did that fix it?" Nope. Try again. "Did that fix it?" OH MY GOD IT JUST COMPILED HALLELUJAH PRAISE CTHULHU while your boss is still sitting there talking about second stage normalisation and you're like "Nope, it was a semi colon in the wrong place, the end."

But, y'know, life doesn't come with a compile button where you can try out putting the semi-colon at the end of another line and see if it runs before you commit. Too bad.

I wouldn't buy a license, xyzzzz, you just buy the book and learn it!

(Granted, some of those books are like £30, £40 yeesh, I would have to be pretty sure I wanted to learn it before investigating)

Don't know tbh I just learn on the job and read on the job too.

But in my time where I'm not doing as much open source is good to occupy yourself with. Just d/l, yes get a book and start practising...but you do need motivation for all that..

Yeah, I am pretty sceptical of any other method, TBH. x-post now...

Like, once, exactly once, my boss paid for me to go on a course to learn how to do MySQL administration. And the teacher actually spent the 20 minutes before class started, reading the Daily Mail aloud in the classroom and complaining about ~feminists~ and ~immigrants~ (come on, couldn't you have got in a dig about LGBT ppl as well, so I could go for the full hat trick) and all I learned in that class was WOW AM I EVER NOT WELCOME HERE so I left the second morning and told my boss to ask for his money back. So I have never "trained" to use software or gone for certification ever fucking again.

Not that I'm bitter that this fucking shit happens, in, y'know, 2010, or anything. But that really cooled my ardour for learning any new skills anywhere except with a book.

Couple of courses I have gone to learn toolsets have been well run, no bullshit or cert exam -- although you had an option of taking that at a later date. The exam itself is piss easy and its just a piece of paper the PM can see before justifying the cost of taking you on.

But the course is a starting point, you really learn on the day-to-day grind of trying to meet a requirement.

or day-to-night, I should say.

This is why I'm beating myself up over procrastinating my way out of the running for that other job. Because it was exactly-my-skillset they were looking for, so I would have been perfect for that role.

But, then again, I should know by now that if I accept a job which is currently perfect-for-my-skillset, with no *stretch* involved, I am gonna be bored out of my mind and looking to leave after 6 months, so it's swings and roundabouts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKBAJYceQ54

Ill.

I'm supposed to go and get my blood drawn (for god knows what nefarious ends) but I figure they probably don't want my virusy blood in the place. My fault for going to the doctor. Every time I go to that bloody doctor's office, I get sick. :(

i had some thinks about game-playing but they've gone this morning. something to do with toys/games and play as a doll's house everything-in-its-right-place exercise as opposed to point-scoring in its oneupmanship sense and some weak jokes about playing with yrself as opposed to beating off other people

i often think similar things to what you said about playing/making art, except i'm stuck on the playing side of it when i'd like to do some making too. but playing can be a bit like making sand mandalas i think

have you heard of Mihály Csíkszentmihályi and his writings about "Flow"? - [pause for a second while Beyonce sings "Blow" in my head] - this stuff has probably been perverted to evil managementspeak ends already but it is quite zen-y and interesting to me even as it states something apparently obvious (which is also a zen-y thing to do i guess)

Yes, I have read Flow (and should probably dig it out and read it again) and understand about flow states and their appeal.

I dunno, I've been thinking about games vs play, as well. And I think I'm lying if I say that points don't appeal to me. Because I certainly do check AO3 almost every day to see what the read count of each story is, and how many kudoses they have got, which is a very gameified activity, really. AO3 readers don't leave comments as much as other sites, but it sure is nice to get dished out some big fat kudoses, and what is a "kudos" except a point scoring system.

I suppose what I don't like about sports/games/etc is that the rules are so arbitrary and made up by someone else. It's not as if I don't understand the appeal of constraints (that sand mandala thing, the pleasure, I think, comes from following the rules/constraints and the orderlyness of it). The thing is, I actually think that's why I *prefer* writing fan fiction to writing real fiction, specifically *because* of the constraints. That your rules are reality, and ~this is what happened~ and you have to either fit your story completely within that framework - or justify why you haven't (and some fanbases will really call you out if you get things wrong) Which I guess is "everything in its right place" kind of rules.

It's funny, though, because "making" always has its own rules, no matter what it is that you are making. There really is no such thing as free-form making, no matter what ~experimental artists~ try to tell you. And working out what the rules of your genre is half the full of operating in it.

Oh god that was the doctor on the phone wanting to know why I hadn't had my blood tests, leave me alone you vampires. And no, I don't know what I weigh, and I don't care what I weight and that's very deliberate, leave me alone.

God I hate having my blood taken. No one can ever EVER find a vein on the first go.

I feel like I should start to tell phlebotomoists: that tasty vein all the way over on the left, don't go for that one. There is no blood in it. Every single one always goes for that vein and then says to me, mystified "I don't understand why I can't get blood from this vein." You know what, it's not a real vein. I only grew it to psych you out. Please try another. Ouch.

lol aww

I have no post I just wanted to say "Blue Mar 10"

(yes, I get quite the pummeling whenever I go for a blood test too. "hmm, well, I guess we'll try the other arm again" oh yeah great.)

i am getting quite a knack for telling other people how to help themselfs

whilst casually contemplating oblivion

Well yknow youve got that helpful outside perspective there, imo

Do I feel blue bcz someone wants some impossible work done, and I have to tell them no, contravening a belief that it is not nice to tell people no and people won't like me?

Or do I feel blue bcz my boss talked over me repeatedly when I tried to explain why the work was impossible (despite agreeing), then when I finally finished my sentence went all "well it's no good talking to me, hurry up and x", thus triggering my narcissistic "how dare someone not find my thoughts worthwhile!" reflex, and then some sad "it is vulgar to have this centre-of-the-universe reflex" thoughts?

Also I am a twat because I said something I wouldn't have said if I knew my boss was in the room. Quite a few somethings actually. Nothing outright personal but I listed a billion things I was behind on and complained about moving goalposts with a petulant tone. I am dumm.