Dups and Pawns

Got up early for an interview where accents and cell phones conspired to ensure I couldn’t understand most of the answers the candidate gave. Not that it matters anyway, since our processes for hiring are discriminatory nonsense ¹This isn’t unique to F5; it happens most places. Even if we were doing something to help compensate for biases we can’t seem to get our head around what we want. We turned down a candidate because they didn’t want to move to Seattle and now we’re interviewing someone who would work from the Hyderabad office. Apparently so long as you sit … Continue reading. But I got up and did it and then napped for a couple of hours afterward. Didn’t get a ton of other day job done but I think I’m doing okay. Should still be able to close my standing SRs this week.

There’s snow here today, which means Seattle is half closed. Not the half that would actually help people – letting the poors avoid dangerous travel and restricted public transit and deal with closed schools – but it’s still notably quiet. This year I have socks and long sleeves and even warm pants. I still haven’t gotten a real jacket ²I’m still fighting with L’s keeper to make scheduling happen. They have a tendency to cancel a week+ out for feels reasons, which makes things painfully slow. but I’m a lot closer than I have been at any point in the last decade or more.

Played some Oxygen Not Included, after about 2 years off. I’m a sucker for survival sims, and this one has its charms. I like that it does physics simulation for pressures and temperatures. I do not like that it wants power to be ugly and unreliable. I particularly don’t like that it’s hard to assign tasks urgently, or to keep a Dup from leaving half way through a job.

So it’s fun to spend a day setting up a petroleum boiler or working out a closed loop gas filtration system, but I will likely only play for a day or two. Rimworld has more interesting challenges, including psychological and social modeling, so I’ll probably go back to murdering Pawns instead of Dups. It is cute though, with lots of good art and animations, and the resource transformation/closed cycle mechanics are interesting.

I’m not sure what this week’s therapy topic is. Last week I poked at Ben feels. It didn’t pay much directly but after the fact I got to link his feels about helplessness – about not being able to be helped or comforted by others – to the way I felt so hopeless as a 10-year-old. I still don’t know a hopeful sorry for young me. I do know one for Ben, though I don’t know how to share it in a way he can hear. Maybe I can poke at the way help is so often unavailable to me even when I can describe what I need, or can induce a feeling I want to share. That’s a sort of hopelessness that I know is related, and maybe something I can do useful work about.

I considered making the pain of eating this week’s topic, but I did not like the checklist way my therapist engaged with food last time it came up. More than once I’ve seen my therapist be relieved when my topic is something they feel prepared for – something they have a prepared answer about – and that doesn’t really work for me. It smells like a guidance counselor handing me a pamphlet: it’s full of advice that doesn’t apply and is accompanied by someone feeling good about “helping” while definitely not actually helping.

One of the ways I can’t get help is when people see my need and react with fear. When they actually see what I need they are afraid of what it would require, or of the life I must have lead to need that help. So they look away to avoid it (i.e. avoid me). It happened when I was young, when people saw a problem but then ignored it because it was too big. It still happens now, particularly when I am successful at sharing a feel, because just knowing what’s happening to me is too mich for many people This takes many forms, but one of them is that therapists find me challenging, and even if they can avoid having a big stress reaction it’s hard for them to hide relief about it being done.

ZiB

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Sent from a phone.

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