Thursday
Endurance. We’re told it’s a virtue, but I find more and more it’s just the label we give burdens when no one wants to share them. It’s certainly been a problem for me. I have learned to endure things that are really quite bad for me.
Last night walking up the hill, without Shanda to provide a sane pace or social distraction, I worked hard enough to feel terrible, to turn my body against me because I couldn’t be bothered to care it was slightly dying. Which is insane because no one (including me) cared when I got home, and the dog didn’t even want to come. But still I marched, undeterred by such petty limitations as breathing.
When I finally stopped I felt like crap, and it reminded me of all the times I’ve endured pain, injury, illness, fatigue, hunger, etc. not just for survival reasons but merely to help other people manage their feelings**. So often in fact that I’m basically incapable of responding even to clear signs of distress without cognitive intervention; it’s not that I don’t know it’s happening, or how it might get better, it’s just that I’ve externalize the triggering conditions for doing something about it. I’ve successfully conditioned myself to endure anything, and it makes me worse at almost everything.
I used to joke that I could run a marathon but only if you include the part where Pheidippides dies immediately afterward††. Turns out that was a cry for help. These days I rarely put myself into positions where such behavior is likely, but it would clearly be better to make closed-loop regulation the default instead of hoping that avoidance is sufficient; avoidance is a better regulation strategy than endurance, but I’m pretty sure there’s still room for improvement.
I’d also like to give a bug fuck you to everyone who told young me this was a good plan. The way we value only compliance in young people (and many others) is so hurtful.
This morning I realized how far from control I have drifted in the past week or to, as stress mounted and free time grew short. I’ve been recovering since Tuesday, and I expected recovery to take a few days, but I hadn’t had a chance to see what that might be. Step one has got to be stopping the sugar coma sleep diet, wherein I simulate pre-diabetes by recreating the gorge-and-sleep diet from childhood, with no eating all day and then having 1500 kCals of sugar while I stand in the kitchen before going directly to bed. It’s great for falling asleep while stressed and terrible for continuing to be alive.
Still, chicken. Fried chicken and mac salad. And I didn’t even have to defend my societal role before ordering this week.
Today I was mandatorily trained about Unconscious Bias. And by that I mean I was asked to believe that it’s important to adjust for our biases not because it hurts people or makes the world worse but because it might make it harder for the company to maximize profits. I also learned that if I use a standardized process — apparently even if that process is itself discriminatory — that the problem goes away, from the perspective of the company having to spend money defending a lawsuit. I’d like to assume that the people producing this content are trying to sell the concept to racists as a cost-savings measure instead of a moral responsibility, but even that would require them to be wildly incompetent. I feel like it’s just a way for the company to try to pass responsibility for their bad policies onto individuals. Like the one where they ask employees to start confrontations with strangers outside the building entrance as part of “security” instead of, you know, having security. Or the one where they ask development staff to run interviews without any training or even standards for evaluation. But I watched a video that told me we might lose money if I discriminate against cat owners, so if that happens it’s my fault and not F5’s.
I’m so excited that Rev likes his toys, and likes getting new toys. He can often sniff them out in packages we get and the new ones are always his favorite. He goes to get toys from all over the house before settling in, or when he wants to tug, and when there are multiple toys around he carefully chooses the best one. I know toys are commonplace and dogs will chew anything, but the only kind of toy play I remember* is the kind where I had to physically perform “play” for Mother with whatever object she selected, and that’s nothing like what dog does. He actually likes his toys and wants to communicate about them and it makes me smile.
Chatted with M today about colors and meetings and eventually actual life. Between that and an upward trend in taco frequency† I have reassured myself that their life is still in motion — a thing I’ve been worried about for some time, and which felt particularly hard while my own life was mired over the past week or two. I know my worry doesn’t actually help and that M can run their life perfectly well without my prodding, but sometimes when I prod they’re in a sharing mood and lets a bit of their life leak out into text. And that sort of thing is hard for me to resist.
Shanda’s going on a first date tomorrow, assuming she’s feeling well by then. Her first first-date in a goodly while. She’s nervous about it but I’m excited. She’s been telling me she wants to go on more first dates for the better part of a year and I’m glad it’s finally happening. I can’t wait to hear how it goes; she leaves for such things looking scared but she usually comes home smiley and energized. I’m a little worried that she’ll passively collect all of her dates into a harem she doesn’t want instead of enjoying a series of independent first dates, but that might well be my anxiety and not a realistic concern.
I can’t write when I’m overstressed. I’ve done a bunch of these now and even the ones before I knew what I was doing were less work than the ones over the past week. No The Screed for 3 days in a row, followed by a couple thin lame ones with more facts than feelings and very few stars for latter. Probably some bad ones before that when I didn’t know I was having a problem yet. There’s no reason for that to be a surprise — it’s literally the thing I accuse M of when my most versatile fruits run thin — but it’s something I could understand as a meaningful indicator of my ongoing state and not just a failure in scheduling or motivation (or personhood). Come to think of it that might be something @BPS needs to know too, given their recent struggle to produce daily diaries. Maybe I’ll catch them on VIM Live next week.
ZiB*There was also the game where I would be presented with a literal pile of trash, asked to sort through it to select the part I like best, and then asked to throw those parts out one at a time while Mother selected pieces she wanted to keep from future “play” sessions. It let her pretend to give things to me, to optimize her future “play” observations, and to take from me the things I liked best without her having to figure out which things those were. But that was more play for her than me.
**Those were often the same decisions — survival and managing people’s feelings — but even when they were different the outcomes are similarly terrible.
†Taco frequency factoid: The Taco Bell at 1801 Watt Ave, Sacramento, CA uses 33.400 MHz and 154.540 MHz for their drive thru radios.
††Also why do we celebrate a story wherein a dude runs for the better part of a day before dying, for no purpose more meaningful than breaking the news of a victory in battle a few minutes sooner? Even if the people of Athens were really worried about an attack with their local regimes out in the field the time difference doesn’t seem terribly important. I know there are lots of versions of this tale, but the popular modern understanding doesn’t seem like a useful moral tale. At least not unless you’re part of the class of people who get to feel powerful by watching their lessers die.
