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Please don't ask me to help you with technical LiveJournal stuff, though. (See below.)

Feeling: helpful
Listening To: New Order: Shellshock

LiveJournal support, oddly enough. I don't work for them any more. Even when I did, I didn't like it when people I didn't know asked questions in my journal, instead of using the support page.

( Original, snarkier version )

Tags: about my journal, livejournal support
Feeling: annoyed

Neurodiversity.

They're right.
She's awesome.

Here's an interesting meme, you say "Words!" to someone, and they give you five words. The deal is that you then have to write something about what those words mean for you. I should have known that saying this to rainsingingwolf would have given me an interesting challenge. I guess that's why I did it :)

Blue is the girl I never was, owing at least partly to the fact that I'm not a girl (that whole 'woman trapped in a man's body' line of thinking has lost all of the appeal it ever had for me, although I wouldn't say I have resolve the 'gender identity' question either). She wants everyone to love her, and she's grown up a lot in the last few years, rocketing up from unstable teenager to a woman who has a sense of dignity and pride. She knows how to become anything that anyone wants her to be, although she's not sure that she wants to do that anymore.

transformation isn't as straightforward (or as complicated) as anyone would have you believe. Changing your body doesn't change your mind (unless it does), and changing your mind doesn't change your body (unless it does). If you decide what you want to be (and you really mean it when you say "I want to be that thing") then you'll become what you're aiming to become. But sometimes the thing you want to be isn't what you wanted it to be, sometimes there's a hidden cost associated with being that thing, or a hidden benefit.

strength comes in various forms. I thought that my strength was my ability to transform, and perhaps it was, but maybe it isn't anymore. Somewhere in the process of being so many things and people, I discovered that there were people that I liked being, and people that I didn't like being. It took strength to break myself down and build myself up again, and now that I've stopped doing the 'break myself down' thing as much as I used to, I find that I'm getting stronger at the things that this me is strong at. Which seems to be all the things that I care about. (Which makes sense, really - when deciding who to be, it's the variables we care about that decide the decision.)

decisions are things that we think we are making, but in many ways, our decisions make us. In choosing one thing, we have to unchoose some other thing. Am I really the kind of person who drinks orange juice, or am I really the kind of person who drinks mango puree? Why is the breakfast juice question so much more difficult than deciding how to solve a complicated technical problem? I think it's the decisions that we don't make that really define who we are. When you can't imagine doing something differently to the way you did it, that's the decision (that you didn't make) that tells you something meaningful about who you are. Nobody knows who they really are, because it's the things you don't notice about yourself that are truly defining.

medicine is something that I thought I had left behind, but I was wrong. I spent today at work writing about diagnosis and treatment methods. Now, admittedly, I was diagnosing and treating a sound-quality problem in a phone system, but I know now that I will never set aside medicine, just as I realised a while ago that I would never set aside systems analysis. Systems analysis is a method for understanding a situation and working out how to get what you want. Medicine is a method for enhancing health and eliminating problems. I turned away from medicine because I turned away from medical training, but now I have a clearer view of the difference between the two.

Feeling: grateful

Had dinner with my father on Friday night. Felt awful all of Saturday, and run-down today. Right now, I feel pretty good.

Pretty good, as these things go.

Feeling: satisfied

Dammit. I knew him. He was a good man. I was going to title this 'rest in peace', but one thing I can't imagine him doing is using being dead as an excuse to stop working for his goals. He told me that I had a responsibility for healing. One of the most shame-filled days of the 6 years since then was when I thought that I had failed to meet that obligation.

Feeling: sad

I had an amazingly good weekend. My game ran well, and was liked by people that I like. I went back to work today, and it was the job that I have, in all it's complex difficult wonderfulness. I got home to an email from my dad; it's been a year and a half since we last spoke, and I know that this time things will go better than last time, I just don't know what that means. And I watched Randy Pausch's last lecture. It's an hour and a half long, and worth every second.

I have an idea for a game at Unicon, something very bold and experimental. I'm looking forward to submitting it to the orgs.

Feeling: tired

Autism is OK.

Giving advice is OK.

Maths teachers are OK.

Lakeview high is OK, although they might not be the best.

Not educating people is OK. (And using the word 'privilege' in a way that I completely agree with is noteworthy.)

I've gone nocturnal again. Odd. Mildly annoying. But OK, I guess.

I wonder if I'll still be in a 'posting frenzy' state tomorrow?

So, the specific thing that got to me on Tuesday had to do with being precise about wording. A subordinate at work told me "There is no difference between these lists" and then went on to explain why one list contained items that were not present in the other list. I explained that the 'no difference' statement was untrue, and was dissatisfied with the response, so I explained it five or six more times, and remained unsatisfied with the responses. Finally, I decided to grit my teeth, and get on with doing something else, instead of wasting everybody's time pursuing a dead-end argument.

Gritting my teeth intensified the pain produced by the fracture in my skull, to the point where I was dizzy, nauseous, and when I phoned a nurse, they told me to "Go immediately to emergency," which I did. I then spent some time working out how I was going to be able to talk to this subordinate again without feeling like I had to grit my teeth, or indeed to tense any of the muscles in my head.

I knew that I had pushed him really hard on something that no normal person would consider important. I asked myself why I had done that, and the answer was that I felt that it was really important. Precise communication is something I had discussed with this particular person before, and I didn't feel that progress was being made. And eventually, I understood why I cared so much, which is because programming is all about precise communication. Words are a programmer's tools, but we don't use them in the way that an author does. Authors use words to convey a story and a feeling, programmers use words to convey precise instructions. And the wrong word, the wrong punctuation mark, is enough to produce a total failure in a computer system. We insist on getting these things right because we need to get them right, and a good programmer is offended by imprecise or incorrect language.

But there was more to it than that, I was angry with myself for being unable to make this subordinate care about the things he needs to care about in order to succeed as a programmer (which is a major part of his job description). Eventually, I consoled myself the way that I had consoled myself over the prospect of killing patients - it is not the task of a medical professional to prevent patient deaths, it is the task of a medical professional to do everything in their power to prevent patient deaths. A harsh reality of medical life is that some patients die. A harsh reality of managerial life (something shared with teachers) is that some people don't learn. Once you've done everything you can, you need to try to let go of your attachment to a particular outcome. The brave knight is the one who goes out to fight the monster, not knowing what the outcome will be. Regardless of the outcome, the knight is still brave.

I've spent a lot of time learning that normal human failings (like imprecise communication) are OK. What I needed to learn is that it's also OK to be unhappy about normal human failings. That it's OK to be angry with someone for making a mistake, especially if you try to express that anger in a constructive way.

When I went back to work, I had a conversation with that subordinate, and talked about how I had pushed him very hard, and why I would keep doing it, but that I would try not to get so upset if things didn't work out. And when I had calmed myself a little, and thought about it a lot, and come up with a new way of approaching the problem, I got a different result. I hope that he'll pay more attention to the precision of his communication in future. If he doesn't, I'll be disappointed. That's OK too.

Some of you may be aware that I'm a fan of one of the most insane sports in the world, Roller Derby. It's a bit like dodgem pedestrians, only it's done wearing roller skates, and actually has rules. (Although the rules of roller derby and the ettiquette of dodgem pedestrians are very similar - your objective is to put the other person off balance, not to actually hurt them.) At the last game I attended, they put out a call for men to establish a men's roller derby league in Victoria.

Which has a lot to do with how I found myself at Carribean Rollerama two Thursdays ago, wearing pads and skates, and not having told anyone where I was going because I didn't want to be feeling any social pressures, I just wanted to find out if I liked it or not. And it was important to me that I be the person doing it, not 'me and my friends'. I wanted to prove to myself that I could take physical risks, and having someone else talk me into it would have defeated the purpose.

Roller skating, it turns out, is a wonderful opportunity for awareness practice. The fear of falling is definitely the biggest inhibitor to skating performance, since the sensation of skating successfully has a lot of the same "I'm moving, but I'm not making myself move" properties that falling has. The trick is to pay attention to what causes you to move in the direction you want to move in, and not worry too much about the fear and the stress and the muscles that are complaining horribly at the new stresses they're under.

I had gone expecting to fall over a lot, and fell over a lot. I also gained confidence rapidly, and after an hour, I was rolling slowly along as a traffic disruption in the flow of skaters, so far from the wall that I couldn't grab it if I was falling. I had accepted my fear, and decided to skate anyway, rejoicing in the successes and the failures, especially since the failures tended to come as I was in the middle of drafing pretentious LiveJournal posts in my head about the relationship between roller skating and Zen. It was hilarious and wonderful and liberating.

And then I was lying on my back, clutching my head in pain. One of my fellow male-roller-derby adventurers had been experimenting with going backwards, and had not yet mastered the art of looking in the direction of his travel while he did so. I was going slower than the traffic, and he'd assumed anyone going slower than him would be against the wall. I took a significant portion of the impact on my arm, as I had been trained to do when I learned Aikido. Had I been wearing a helmet as well, things may have gone differently, and I'd have had a very different experience.

But I wasn't wearing a helmet, and was wheeled off to the side by six people (three holding either side of me) to a lady who seemed to know something about first aid. I engaged her in good-natured conversation and told her that I was fine. She told me that I really shouldn't try to drive myself home, and I eventually agreed, recruiting one of my brand-new friends to drive my car back to my place.

I got home, and my flatmate was pretty concerned about me, so I rang the Nurse On-Call service (if you're a Victorian, you should have 1300 606 024 programmed into your phone, it's a really useful service) and they took my history, and said that I was allowed to go to sleep, provided my flatmate woke me up after 1 hour and 4 hours, to make sure I hadn't fallen into a coma. So that happened (many thanks to my flatmate, who had things to do the next day), although I couldn't get to sleep at all, because I was in a lot of pain.

I saw the doctor the next day, and he confirmed I was basically OK, although the after-effects of concussion can last for up to two weeks. (I'm eternally grateful that I did this 15 days before Phenomenon!)

The thing that gets interesting is the interaction between concussion and PTSD. PTSD is a disorder in which a person focuses their mind powerfully on the things they do want to think about, so that they don't have to think about things that they do want to think about. This is good when there are things that could tear your mind apart if you think about them, but it's inconvenient when things like 'eating' find their way into the list of 'things I never think about'. Post-concussion syndrome is a disorder in which you can't focus your mind, and it becomes very difficult to filter out unwanted sensory inputs, or to direct your thoughts.

It was the interaction between the two that landed me in hospital on the Tuesday, overwhelmed by pain, nausea, dizziness, and my vision finally started to blur as well. I'd been angry with someone at work, clenched my jaw to bite back the things I shouldn't say, and placed stress on my skull as a result. It seems likely that I have a hairline skull fracture, for which there is no treatment other than patience, and no danger, so long as I don't go smacking my head against another bit of concrete.

Very few spiritual practitioners find themselves in a situation where their bad habits are so vigorously and effectively pointed out to them! I spent two days in bed working out how to think about problems work without inflicting so much pain on myself that I wanted to throw up, and one day in bed recovering from the exertion of those two days. (I also spent 4am to 5am one morning working on a theoretical geometry problem that is unlikely to have any meaningful application, but which really bugged me because I couldn't work it out for what seemed like ages.)

I can't force myself to do things at the moment, and there are things that are important for me to do that I haven't been able to do without forcing myself. Things like 'finishing writing the bloody character sheets', which was very important for me to do, having taken a hard line with my employers to insist that I was going to Pheno, because writing a Triptych is something I've wanted to do since 1993, and I had no intention of having that taken away from me, no matter how inconvenient that might be for the company.

So I got out my books on Buddhism (Zen and Tibetan) and embraced the pain, accepted the suffering, reached out with compassionate awareness to the parts of me that were causing the pain, and stayed with them, much more patiently than I would have if there hadn't been a spirit tightening a vise against a fracture in my skull every time I didn't make all the right spiritual moves. On the third day, I remembered my mother, who endured repreated brain surgery, including procedures that involved having devices screwed into her skull and left in place (sticking out of the skin) for a week or two. We all marveled at her capacity to smile, her peacefulness and her composure. I think I know where it came from now.

I'm glad that I've had the opportunity to learn the same lesson without having to have a terminal brain cancer as the reason for the crack in my skull. I have to be glad about it, if I'm bitter and resentful, the muscles around the side of my head tighten up, and the pain get difficult to bear rather quickly. (I'm allowed to notice these facts, and to appreciate the ironic humour of being forced to be happy, it's not my thoughts that are forced into a new shape, only my emotional responses. And I can't stop myself from having those thoughts, not with post-concussion syndrome taking place. I had a brief episode of being bitter and resentful about having my bitterness and resentment beaten out of me, but once my body let me know what I was doing, I learned pretty quickly.)

As I explained at work on Friday, I'm being forced to make changes to the patterns in my mind that give me headaches. Like the best Zen masters, my new teacher is patient, consistent and unyielding, always correcting the fault when it appears. I'm greatly helped by some of the other teachers in my life for setting examples of compassion and benevolence that I can follow in order to find a way to satisfy the demands of the skull-fracture teacher.

And I finished writing the character sheets before starting on this post :)

Feeling: contemplative

My flatmate says that this is the only anime she'll ever watch.

I stopped reading Neil Gaiman's blog because he keeps posting really wide pictures, and I found it annoying. But to every fan who feels betrayed by the writer(s) of whatever it is they're a fan of, they should read this post.

In other news, I'm turning back into someone I like. Life continues to be more and more confusing, but I find that I am more and more difficult to confuse. Thus my personal level of confusion remains constant, despite working out all kinds of useful things about what's going on in my life.

Next item on the self-improvement agenda is 'going back to sport'. This may or may not be ballroom dancing. I like learning new things, and have my eye on a potential shiny new sport that has a lot of ingredients that I like, although I may just be kidding myself, and am probably too old to take up a contact sport (that doesn't have age divisions). We'll see.

Cooler kids than I are doing this, here's some previews of the characters available in Vengeance of the Vampire Lord:


Wang Du, the seer
Having gone with the flow all my life and accepted the destiny my family made for me, it was difficult to renounce the throne, but it is something I had to do.

Shu Mo, the mighty
From that day, I dedicated myself to martial arts, taking what was left of my family's wealth to pay for years of training under the masters of the Dong clan.

Lu Huo, the graceful
I was ashamed that I had been like them – to win with a smaller and aging body requires greater skill, but they could not see that her art was the most admirable that day.

Shan Xue, the courtier
And so I am Shan Xue, dilletante and socializer, ready with a drink and a sympathetic ear. And, since my exalted position does not require any real work from me, I have taken up musical instruments as a hobby.

Jin Ming, the alchemist
But as the saying goes, “One disease, long life. No disease, short life.” Because I was young when I was forced to accept the limitations of my body, I studied how to keep myself healthy. Now that I am older, I know more about how to live a long and healthy life than most people will ever know.

And so we see that I have reached the 'posting frenzy' part of the cycle, the bit that comes after the 'unbearable adversity' and kicks in around about the point where the 'bonecrushing exhaustion' is replaced by the 'intense fatigue' and I actually get a little bit of rest. Meanwhile, fpb embedded a Johnny Cash video, and makes an eloquent, simple point. Rather fitting really.

This has everything to do with Zen, which has everything to do with the cycle that I go through, which has everything to do with what Johnny Cash is singing about, which has everything to do with Zen. There comes a point where you can see the cycle, and the act of seeing that you're trapped in a cycle breaks you out of the cycle, and you get yourself into a cycle of breaking out of cycles, and when you can see that cycle, it might break, but it might not.

The point where I really started to succeed in this stressful job of mine was the point where I decided that I was willing to get fired, which was when I nearly got fired but didn't, which was when I had freedom, but I hadn't lost anything. I don't think freedom is about not having anything to lose, I think it's about being in a place where 'they' can't take anything away from you. Which is not quite the same. Knowing how to enjoy what you've got, that's the secret to everything.

What am I trying to convince myself about? I want to believe that I know how to be happy. I've spent time telling other people that they are not expendable, that they need to take care of themselves. Even imperialdragon knew that 'take care of yourself better' was advice that I needed to hear.

And the truth is, I'm learning. First, I learned to take care of myself while unemployed and living alone. Then, I learned to do it while studying and living alone. Then I learned to do it while working and living alone. Then I learned to do it in a challenging job living alone. Then I learned to do it in a professional job and living alone. Now I'm learning to do it while in a challenging professional job, living with a housemate. I'm learning to take care of myself, and I need to remember that turning up the difficulty is a good reason for my performance to slip.

I remember saluting running_snail by saying that I always met wonderful people at her parties, and that you can tell a lot about a person by the company they keep.

You guys are awesome :D

Feeling: smug

Just under 6 years ago, my life was pretty damned close to empty, and there was this space called LiveJournal, where I could talk, and feel like a few people were listening. And I bound myself into the LJ community and it supported me through some really difficult times. I can remember what it was like in those days, but only just. Except for the best and the worst of it, of course (emotional intensity determines the strength of the memory).

I have much more to talk about these days. In those days, making it outside to buy food was newsworthy. In these days... well, it still is noteworthy, actually, because I'm working crazy hours and doing brilliant work, together with a bunch of crazy, brilliant people. And on those occasions that I leave the workplace, there are more fantastic people than I can count who want to spend time with me, and I manage to spend a little time with some of them, and it's awesome.

But I've never liked writing about other people in this space. People who have made a major impact on my life have rated a mention from time to time, and I'm still angry (but more disappointed these days) with the person I ranted about most, but I don't feel like I should be passing on other people's news. And my life is so full of other people now - most of my work is about relationships - helping technical geniuses have productive relationships with the people who pay the money for the geniuses to build impossible things at bargain prices, and helping the people who pay the money to get the thing that they actually wanted out of the technical geniuses. And even saying that much, I'm afraid I might have said too much.

I look at the literary community that is my flist, and I'm envious. I didn't feel like a sellout as badly as I used to, but I really do want to tell stories, and 'how we valiantly reduced your operating costs' isn't terribly romantic, really. My sister is going to Clarion, and that's excellent news (I'm glad I managed to read LJ enough to find that out). But then, she's pursued the dream of being a writer with much more dedication than I ever have. During that crucial phase of my late teens, I was reading about management and thinking how cool it would be to be a valiant corporate warrior, slashing through red tape and getting motivated people to build great products and deliver them to people who were hungry for a high-quality something in their lives. What that high-quality something was, I didn't know, didn't care about (still don't). But to organize a bunch of people to do something really well, that was my dream. Still is my dream.

And I'm better placed to do it than ever before. I have support within and outside my organization, I've established credibility, and so many other things. And yet, just as the life of a real soldier is 99% boredom and 1% terror, with a few opportunities at glory during the bit where you're so far beyond fear that you can't think anymore, so the life of the corporate warrior is 99% 'showing up', 1% terror, and some fraction of that 1% is amazingly cool.

My boss often asks me how I am, and I've tended to reply to him with something remarkably like a LiveJournal entry - something longwinded, rambling, and filled with self-pity. Yesterday morning, I was feeling like shit, having worked 12 hours the day before (covering the sudden absence of a senior programmer who had a really good excuse), and facing the prospect of much more overtime, just when I had thought it would be over. My boss asked me how I was, and I turned to him tiredly, and he said "I don't want a rant. Tell me you're fine. Tell me you feel good." I can understand why, he'd arrived for work at the same time I had, but had worked considerably later the night before. I paused, looking for something I could say that was honest and positive. "I feel invincible," I said.

And I think it was a turning point. I can spend my time thinking about how tired I am, and how unfair the world is, and about the difficulty of the road I've travelled, and the difficulty of the road ahead, or I can think about how if greatness were easy, everybody would be doing it. And that I have come a long way on a very difficult road, and while my life hasn't gotten better at every step of the way, it has gotten better consistently. Or maybe I can know both of these things at the same time, forgive the world for being unfair, forgive myself for being tired, and for making mistakes, and see just how much the world and I have to offer each other.

Focussing on the negative helps us to see the negative, but when you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. Focussing on the positive helps us to see the positive, but those who imagine themselves gods suffer a painful fall when their heaven is revealed to be an illusion, just as the lives of demigods (like me) are full of strife. But if you can learn to see everything without focussing on it too much, that seems to be the way forward. I'm learning to see the positive and build on it, without denying the negative. I'm starting to think that I am the person I wanted to grow up to be.

Finally, ( A completely gratuitous lj-cut )

Feeling: like one of those old martial artists in the movies who is smiling about something, and won't tell y

So I sent a rather cranky and not-perfectly worded email to my boss entitled 'workload' in which I listed a few complaints. His response?

We're hiring.

As you may have guessed, I've been busy.

I've just come off working a 12-day week that included more than one 16-hour day, and spent much of the labour day weekend lying in bed and feeling sorry for myself. Which is not to say that there haven't been some fantastically positive developments, but damn I'm tired. It has been frightening, allowing myself to return to my workaholic ways of the past. And it has been unpleasant, revisiting the cycle of intense work, followed by intense inactivity. It has also been confidence building; I know now that I really do know my stuff, that the way I prefer to work really is the most effective way for me to work, and my employers are seeing my point, and showing an increased level of willingness to do things my way (they were always interested in doing things my way, but 'doing what Nick suggests' is right up there with 'eating your vegetables' when it comes to doing it when you're stressed out and your bad habits beckon).

I've had meltdowns and seizures recently, although my recent worst is better than my next-most-recent worst. My biggest relationship problem these days is working out what I want, I'm getting better at establishing connections with people, not just at holding on to relationships with women. More about that when the dust has had a chance to settle.

Still working on that whole 'taking care of myself' deal, but I'm increasingly able to see that it's worth doing, and I'm gradually reaching the point where I can be stressed, but still assert that I'm worth taking care of, and do it without massive melodrama.

With a little luck, I may actually get to read an LJ or two....

Feeling: exhausted

My game did not fail. Specifically, some of the people I respect most have told me that it was really good. It had flaws; specifically, it had the flaws that I knew it had, that I had decided I would live with due to the circumstances.

Postcon was incredible.

And now, I'm going to try and recover from it - but I'm nowhere near as tired as I've been at the last few cons. Partly because I didn't play any roles that were as difficult for me as at the last couple of cons, but I think there's an improvement in my confidence and stress handling - which is not to say that I haven't spent much of the last couple of months in serious distress, but I've had worse, under better circumstances.

In other news, I've got a copy of Left4Dead now, and I'm also playing Battlefield 2142. I haven't worked out how the 'friend/buddy/pal' functions work in either of those games, but it would definitely be good to play Left4Dead with some people whose company I enjoy. I also finally played Portal on my own machine, and the ending song is so much sweeter when you've earned it :)

Well, here I am, forced into a quiet moment by the flow of everything, and for the first time in a month or so, I have enough strength to have a quiet moment with my thoughts, instead of needing to find something to do to distract myself. It's been hard.

Being a newly-appointed junior manager is hard. Having 'junior' in my definition again is a large part of the difficulty. I'm very good at getting tasks done, and I enjoy giving strategic advice, and I've worked hard to learn to give good advice. But there's a bunch of not-fun things about having that recognized and getting the authority and the power and all that stuff. Because although I prepared really hard, there's realities that I hadn't faced before; it's like doing anything that you've never actually done for yourself.

I find myself asking people to explain things again, only more slowly this time. I find myself making judgement calls and needing to use my authority to impose my will, but not wanting to do so because I want to persuade rather than force. I find myself discovering that this can make things worse, not better.

I find myself being junior again, wanting to have every part of my job explained to me, to have someone take me by the hand, show me how to do it all, and never stop doing that. The difficulty and complexity of my job is more than I imagined it to be, and I imagined it to be difficult and complicated. I'm supervising people who use tools that I don't understand, and it has scared me witless; and I have more technical ability than most programmers, let alone most managers.

And finally, this week, I'm getting results. I can stop flailing around randomly, because I've found approaches that give me what I want, and I know what they are, and I'll practice them, and I'll get there. 'There' being a place where I can come home from work at the end of the day, and on most days I'll know that I've done all the things I needed to do that day.

I finally know why so many people do such a bad job at management, and why senior managers demand massive salaries. It's an extremely difficult job.

Of course, being me, I've defined 'failure' as 'doing any of the bad things I've seen managers do', and I've done many of them in the last month. But I'm not feeling like a failure anymore. I think that the abject misery is something that helps me to learn quickly. But I still don't like it.

Posting frenzy (using my real name, over on LinkedIn): check.
Gaming binge (Prison Tycoon 4, Airline Tycoon, The Movies): check.
Cancelled social attendances (a wedding (dammit) and a party): check.
Insomnia: (bedtimes of 5am, 5am and midnight): check.
Progress (cleaned the kitchen and did some food preparation beyond 'putting a packet in the oven'): check (hooray)!

Uncomfortable realisation 1: I really do go on these binges because I'm in pain. I got out of the self-hate cycle pretty quickly this time aruond, and OMG the pain of being aware of my body showed me why I was running away.

Uncomfortable realisation 2: Self-destructive behaviour can actually be an effective survival mechanism. When in a hostile environment that features random negative events, deliberately triggering those events when you're stong (and therefore able to cope) can be a much better strategy than letting them trigger themselves (because it might happen when you're weak, and therefore less able to cope). Better a controlled crash than an uncontrolled crash. One day, I'll find a better way to handle the fact that I don't live in a hostile environment anymore.

I want to go on a massive gaming binge. I'm not sure why I don't, actually. Maybe I will.

Every so often, I want to play computer games until I can't maintain consciousness anymore, and then sleep all day. I'm not sure why. Maybe I'm having difficulty coping with how well things are going. I'm not sure.

I'm working very hard at my job right now; in at 8:30, out at 6pm on Monday and Tuesday this week. My boss was very sick last week, and was spending half an hour on the phone with me in the morning, I was then passing messages to everybody else, that sort of thing. Today, I was in at 8:30, achieved a goal that has been eluding me for the last month, and pretty much collapsed from fatigue afterwards. I started packing to leave at 4pm, was gone (with the generous, smiling blessing of my boss) at 4:30pm, home by 5, fell asleep a bit before 6pm. I was awake again around 7, and by 8pm... I was catching up on stuff that I'd intended to do last week.

Specifically, I was listening to some excellent management podcasts. Seriously, if you want to be a manager someday (or are one), you should listen to these guys. They're smart, they know what they're talking about, and I've spent hundreds of dollars to learn less (and felt good about the investment) than I can download from these guys for free.

And management is changing, and manager-tools is a part of the wonderful changes that are taking place. There's an understanding that authority and threats are ineffective tools, that understanding, support, and discipline are more effective. And that there's a vitally important difference between 'discipline' and 'punishment'.

I've wanted to be a manager since I read In Search of Excellence as a teenager. I have rather romantic ideas about what it means to be a manager, to be an authority in people's lives, to challenge them, protect them, help bind a group of people together in such a way that they achieve things that would not have been possible if they'd worked alone. I remember when I was 16 and I got frustrated and angry with the social workers and counsellors who really wanted to help me, but who were powerless to do anything about it. Managers have power, and many (probably most) of them want to help. Some of them even know how to help.

I'm living and breathing my job. I feel uncomfortable about that. A normal person cares more about their personal life than their employment, and I have worked very hard at trying to be normal through most of my life. But I am what I am, someone who is best at being happy when surrounded by happy people. And I have an opportunity at my workplace to make a real difference to the people I manage.

This is my calling. I'm not saving whales, or trees, or any of those glamorous things. I'm (hopefully) saving computer programmers. Because I think they're worth saving. And someday, I'll believe that enough that I won't have to say it anymore.

I wish I was as good at the 'relationships with girls' thing as I was good at the 'corporate strategy' thing. Bleh. Having moved house, changed jobs, and found girlfriend in a very short period, I've gone through the 'omg I can't cope with this new job', followed by 'omg I can't cope with this house' and have now resolved both. Just need to get past 'omg I can't cope with this girlfriend'. I think that if I can remember why I was so excited to get into this relationship in the first place, that'll help me to understand what to do next. It all seems so far away, especially since I have done the 'gruelling high-flying' bit, having left for the airport just before 6 this morning, and gotten home around 9:30pm. I may sleep in tomorrow.

I miss you all. But don't have the brain for reading. I'm going to do something about this problem. I don't know what yet.

Have bought a Wii, and WiiFit. They are awesome. (Especially the encouraging WiiFit instructor who I don't feel self-conscious around, since I know that it's an artificial person who exists in order to please me.)

It turns out that I can find a little time for LJ. 7:30-8:00am, to be precise.

I'm turning into an executive, it is really truly happening, and I'm transforming into what I dreamed an executive was like when I was 16, when the idea that I could make a stack of money and escape the life that I had was the most precious dream that I had. I need to get moving soon, I want to get to McGills newsagency before work to pick up a book on a certain type of corporate change initiative; I have a meeting with the CEO about this stuff coming up, and I intend to be well-prepared. I'm told that I will have the power to hire and fire by this time next year. Not only am I achieving the occasional minor miracle, as I've always done, but I'm reporting to managers who notice this stuff, who hired me because they want someone doing the work that I want to do, and who are genuinely committed to the things that so many managers claim to care about, then forget at the first sign of trouble.

And somewhere in the course of my corporate high-flying-consultant trip to Sydney, I found the zone again. Because I am awesome, and I'm a good captain, a damned fine leader, and a capable soldier when working independantly as well. But it really is time to get to work - I have a proposal to write for a customer, staff to supervise, and some programming to do as well.

Feeling: productive

The guy who sits next to me at work has been a good friend since 1999, and he's also a Jehovah's Witness. Which puts his comment into context:

"Internet Explorer is the devil's own browser, and we don't use it."

(Posted using Firefox)

EDIT: On reading this entry, my friend laughed and then said, "I'd prefer that you not identify that as a Witness viewpoint, that's just a personal viewpoint."

I guess the real question is whether GNU is Unix.

Here's a challenging meme:

Say something nice about each of the last five people you've "broken up with" - romantic break-ups, friendships, whatever.

Your determination and intelligence are impressive.

Compassionate, intelligent, powerful, beautiful, sensitive, insightful... I feel privileged that you wanted to be close to me.

You wanted me to have the things that I wanted to have, and you tried to make that happen for me.

You were on a genuine spiritual quest, and I learned valuable things from walking by your side.

After you left, you made a genuine effort to take care of me; that probably saved my life.

Tags: the meme tag
Feeling: sad

I got tagged by minus9
The TaoTeChingMeme
Repost this invitation, and give us your interpretations/commentary on the Tao Te Ching verses, preferably one verse at a time so you have time to really think about them.

( Verse 1 )

Commentary

I've chosen to translate things in a way that preserves the 'Chineseness' of the original, which means not saying 'The Tao', since 'Tao' is never specified as singular or plural, except when translated into English, which requires us (unfairly) to say 'how many there are'. The whole concept of 'singularity' is flawed from a Taoist point of view, anyway. I am not 'one person', I am the person I am, the person I was, the person I will be, the person I want to be... And we can see that 'the person I am' includes 'the person I am', which is consistent with other aspects of the philosophy.

Verse 1 is a warning against arrogance, a reminder that our knowledge is limited, that to look at the same data and draw a different conclusion is inevitable, that there is a lot of going on underneath the surface that we can't see, that we should not presume to understand.

( Verse 2 )
( Commentary )

( Verse 3 )

Commentary
Verse 3 is commonly translated and understood to be a promotion of 'non-doing' - the words 'wei wu wei' are frequently translated as 'doing without doing' or 'acting without acting', but I have translated them as 'becoming without action'. The original Chinese is very clear, it distinguishes between 'government sage' and 'peasant'. Peasants are made to be without desire by the sage of government. Non-doing, often espoused as the paradoxical height of Taoist virtue, is exposed as a sham, a device used by those in power to maintain their power.

This is not to say that Taoism promotes action, verse 7 talks about how it is wise to get other people to do your work for you. But 'doing without doing' seems like paradoxical nonsense because it is paradoxical nonsense.

Tags: taoism, the meme tag
Feeling: accomplished