Onward

It felt like a wild week, but most of the wildness didn't happen to me exactly:

• Tech chaos - two giant reorg emails landed in the last week at Zillian. There were also protests in two offices that resulted in police arrests (!), firings, and a scolding email sent to the entire company; and a friend of mine is caught in a shitty situation because high-ranked executives are acting (afaict) like children. These are dimly lit and strenuous times in tech, indeed. My own manager and other org leads have been basically absent, trying to onboard the new VP, and who knows what weirdness they'll come back down that mountain with, but in the meantime I'm focused hard on knowledge transfer.


• Fangs and peepers -- I had a dental cleaning and an eye exam, and all is well. On the eyes, in particular, I still don't need reading glasses, and I finally made a real promise (with matching calendar event) to change out my disposable contacts every two weeks: fiiiiine. Both of these were rescheduled and should have been done earlier, so it's nice to have them done.


• Heart problems -- not mine, my dad's. He is really impossible to reason with and wants me to not visit because of all this, but, as of last night, it's looking like he could really use two stents and an aortic valve replacement. In the meantime he's not supposed to lift more than 5 pounds, on which topic he says "I can't live with that." And the nurses are telling him blockage percentages of more like 70%, as compared to the 55% people were talking about a month ago. I basically have no idea what to expect from all this, so I just wait with my usual dad-related numbness and I wonder if anything will change this year.


• Progress toward a next thing: I took two steps that maybe seemed good. One was writing to the "retired Zillianaires" mailing list about something I'd found concerning; in particular, I've been wondering how people deal with losing that satisfying sense of being an expert in something. The responses were really kind and encouraging, including from one guy who I think might have been my manager's manager one time and clearly remembered me from ages ago. And that guy was able to use a good work-domain-related metaphor to make me feel a lot better about my continued employment even as I feel I'm slowly on the way out. So very useful. And the second thing I did was sign up for these expensive aptitude tests, the same ones Perse took, for the day before my birthday.


• Therapy book: as if that weren't helpful enough, our ACT book also had a really good chapter about long-running stay-or-go type decisions that take forever and can frustrate. The tips were basically to a) be compassionate with yourself, b) hold your ruminating down to a pre-set block of time (so that you can say hush, brain, we'll think that through tonight), and c) finding ways to live within your values even before making the final decision. I like the implied notion: that any part of life that's lived in accordance with one's values isn't wasted.


• Snuggly times both at home and at the squirrel's, where everyone is recovering from that surgery I mentioned, and a bit of final planning for my trip in late May, and that rounds out the week. It looks like I'll be taking a class with my last contortion teacher's contortion teacher, while on that trip, which is scary but exciting.

Today's mildly intriguing find: good headphones for kids didn't used to exist, but they sure do now, because pandemic schooling changed the entire equation. I don't feel like gadget shopping right now, but this is noted for later.

And now I am off to read/approve/comment on some work documents, in an effort to have a cleaner plate for tomorrow. SIGH.