Midweek Monday
I stayed up until 5 AM working and pacing and generally being bad at 24 hour cycles. But I got all my work for the day done before anyone got into the office and then slept until noon, so it mostly worked out. I’m still negelcting the SSH bug and my TMA, but I’m caught up on everything else and happy to have the afternoon and evening to chill out.
I told Alex that the reason I can’t talk to her is because I’m afraid she won’t protect me from Mother. I don’t know if she’ll be able to do anything with that information – and since I specialize in one-way messages likely won’t know for years if ever – but I think it was worth speaking plainly even if it doesn’t change anything. It’s more information than I would prefer to leak toward Mother, but the fact that I’m afraid of her is hardly secret. And I suspect it’s something that Alex would have trouble sharing with her in the first place.
I want a job that lets me work intensely for a while and then ignore it for somewhat longer. It’s the operational stuff that kills me, where people want same-day responses every day. I did better at F5 when I had a boss that understood that. I liked that part of running Cynic. It’s the unending on-call bits that I don’t want to repeat. Maybe there’s some sort of disaster recovery gig where I could go work 100 hours/week for 6 weeks after a hurricane and then have a couple of months off. Or something where I could be on-call or even on-site 24/7 for a week and then entirely off for a couple. Or maybe something where I claim to be an expert at quality or process or security or whatever – trade on my grad degrees and age and understanding of 1%ers – and harass executives for a few weeks before disappearing.
I thought it was time for episode 3 of ITwD(M) but the series seems to be operating on an 8-day week. Makes sense to me. Divisible by 2 or 4. Keeps you from getting locked into sync with potential interfering repeating events. Lets you insert a mid-week interstitial when you need to accommodate leap year or other astronomical variances. Still I’m anxious to see what develops this week, if for no other reason than to remind me that the heavy bits of my past week are pieces of the whole, not the entirety of my life.
I tried this today [fig 1]. It’s cool but finicky and slow. And it looks fragile, though I haven’t worn it long enough yet to know if that’s true. But it looks good and I really like the slippery ribbed texture. I’m definitely going to get some numbers and letters; short messages would definitely fit my An Invisible Sign of My Own (2010) feelings about individually frosted nails.
I realized that I can communicate with my siblings about costumes***. We used costumes in our daily lives to collectively influence Mother’s mood and behavior. When you’re so late for a thing that it has already started before you leave* you must be wearing your coat and boots so that merely glancing at your costume and position in the house calms Mother by showing her that you’re ready to go but not waiting for her. If the event ends before you leave you should probably even wait in the car, buckled in, keys in the ignition, garage door open, waiting to go** – then she wouldn’t see you at all until she was mostly ready. That had it’s own drawbacks of course – blinking back into her perception while she felt bad was always dangerous – but it offered almost airtight protection against technical fault on our part. So we put on interstitial scenes and waited around in costumes as part of the Chourus in the road show that was Mother’s life.
Dog class tonight. Still feels like a lot of work to do late in the day. But last week went better than previous weeks, and there’s only one more after this. Soon Rev will be certified to hump any other dog he sees, or whatever this class is supposed to teach. And I’ll have my Wednesdays back. I’m thinking maybe it’s time to get back to same-week Critical Role. We fell out of the habit somewhere in the Melissa Mess and have only watched a handful of series 2 epsidoes, but Halloween feels like a good place to hop in. Costumes are always exciting. And if I get re-engaged with it I can probably be motivated to listen to back episodes in place of books.
ZiB
*Classic Melissa style. I should never have done the Melissa thing like I did, but it did give me a different perspective on Cluster B behaviors, which has been useful for piecing my disjointed and missing memory back together into a single narrative I can understand.
**This was more or less tolerable depending on the temperature, how long you might still have to wait, and the self control of the highly stressed young children with you. The winter was cold but we usually had winter gear and encloser available. The summer was hard to take in an old minivan with one door and no rear windows.
***Alex actually has a degree in it, which I didn’t know until earlier this year.
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Sent from a phone.
