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Reorg, Olympics, sociopath book
Jul. 28th, 2024 11:58 pmThis week the reorg news did break. I have too many direct reports and will have to become a manager-of-managers again, or at least one manager. There's a plausible prospect among my directs, and tomorrow he and I will talk some more; if he says no then I'm in a more difficult spot than I'd prefer, but... it's just work. I'll deal.
On Friday I broke through a really frustrating communication logjam I was having around getting my house re-painted. I think painting won't happen until next spring, and that's bad, but better than being stonewalled.
I set up weekly donations to Kamala Harris because that's the format she's asking for, and I'm looking into ways to volunteer for her campaign, although I can't do much on the actual day of polling because I'll be in Costa Rica. (The jokes about not coming back, under certain circumstances, just write themselves.) Subscribed to Peacock, started watching some Olympics, laughed really hard to hear a commentator refer to pommel horse specialists as "the meerkats of the gymnastics world".
I'm having a terrifyingly interesting time listening to Sociopath: A Memoir. I identify with the narrator quite a lot, in terms of feeling she had an "emotional learning disorder" that made it difficult for her to learn and access the "social emotions", even though my exact ones are different from hers (and I was never violent). There's weirdly specific shit too. We have the same hair color and we both had ferrets as children. Check this out:
Uh... holy shit? Holy shit. She's my age too. The only reason nobody is going around thinking I wrote this damn book is that she grew up in a much nicer neighborhood than I did, and describes having a sister. The ferret though? And get this: we loved our ferrets, but we both made our parents uncomfortable, to the point of anger, by not acting sad enough when the ferrets died. A core memory, by the way, and I still worry about other people's responses to my response to death. She basically talks about cognitive empathy, too, without using the term. Anyway, there's some controversy around this book and some people think her diagnosis and/or credentials might be BS, but for me it's so truthy that these things are mostly beside the point.
On Friday I broke through a really frustrating communication logjam I was having around getting my house re-painted. I think painting won't happen until next spring, and that's bad, but better than being stonewalled.
I set up weekly donations to Kamala Harris because that's the format she's asking for, and I'm looking into ways to volunteer for her campaign, although I can't do much on the actual day of polling because I'll be in Costa Rica. (The jokes about not coming back, under certain circumstances, just write themselves.) Subscribed to Peacock, started watching some Olympics, laughed really hard to hear a commentator refer to pommel horse specialists as "the meerkats of the gymnastics world".
I'm having a terrifyingly interesting time listening to Sociopath: A Memoir. I identify with the narrator quite a lot, in terms of feeling she had an "emotional learning disorder" that made it difficult for her to learn and access the "social emotions", even though my exact ones are different from hers (and I was never violent). There's weirdly specific shit too. We have the same hair color and we both had ferrets as children. Check this out:
I was more like a blonde, ferret-toting Wednesday Addams, leisurely repelling everyone in my path. Occasionally I tried to fit in, to act normal like the other kids around me, only it never lasted. For one thing, my exposure to conventional behavior and reactions was limited to my immediate family, so I could only fake it for so long. But more importantly, I didn't have anyone who could teach me.
Uh... holy shit? Holy shit. She's my age too. The only reason nobody is going around thinking I wrote this damn book is that she grew up in a much nicer neighborhood than I did, and describes having a sister. The ferret though? And get this: we loved our ferrets, but we both made our parents uncomfortable, to the point of anger, by not acting sad enough when the ferrets died. A core memory, by the way, and I still worry about other people's responses to my response to death. She basically talks about cognitive empathy, too, without using the term. Anyway, there's some controversy around this book and some people think her diagnosis and/or credentials might be BS, but for me it's so truthy that these things are mostly beside the point.
