Work, new gadgets, Lifespan

I dived back into work reasonably gracefully, after about 1.5 weeks of that not being the main focus. We are hard into "perf season" now, which means overload for the next few weeks. A few things that happened:

• A structured career conversation with my manager in which I finally managed to say something useful. I said the team needed to understand him and his values better, that when he pulls a tool out of his toolbox ("timeboxing" is a favorite), I and other people don't always understand what's driving that particular choice or what he hopes to get from it. Which makes it hard to represent/defend, so we'd like to understand better. I liked this as feedback because it didn't criticize anything, and I think it legitimately might result in storytime that helps me understand what's going on. At least somewhat. Manager also said he'd been pretty happy with me recently, so maybe my own performance score isn't fucked either, though I still think it deserves to be.
• I managed to do a super informative talk to my wider team about how my company does compensation planning, after a) wrestling HR to the ground regarding what topics I was and wasn't allowed to cover and b) adding significant speaker notes to the one approved presentation (whose slides I absolutely had to use, and was allowed to trim down, but not add to). It's a dicey topic and I was worried about a barrage of rotten tomatoes, but I think everyone got a solid info dump and understands that I went as far as I possibly could.
• Started my 4-meeting extension of my contract with the exec coach. She helped me a lot in the initial 10-meeting engagement and so I introduced to her the question of what I do next, now that I'm a bit less miserable. Is it worth it to get "Director" on my resume before I wrap up this full-time "success in tech" phase of my career? She thinks yes, which is annoying as hell because I'm sure not on track to get there in my current team. We also talked about journaling and I think it's likely that she and I will come up with a custom daily journaling solution for me, which will be fun.
• My new mentee figured out why and when my laptop camera randomly overexposes my face, so now I can basically turn into a bad Patrick Nagel imitation on demand. This is both hilarious (definitely want to play with it for self-portraits) and a mystery solved.

Gadgets: Using Zillian's budget I finally obtained and set up a headset that works on my tiny head--the Arctis 7. It looks ridiculously big on me, but has a stretchy inner strap inside its main band which means it stays on, and it'll be good if it means I can bother the bug less with noise from my meetings. I also have a new insulated tumbler for ice water, too, which is stupid except that I love ice water and hate washing out my insulated bottle. Little thing, why not fix?

I'm in the last few minutes of a book called Lifespan and now I want ALL the potentially anti-aging drugs, yet I haven't actually figured out what I'd like to do for a second act. That would be too much of myself to ask in 2020, though... Norwood and I agree that it's an "appreciate the little things" year.