flexagon | If I spread my hands wide, maybe I can catch 23!

Today's self-defining vocabulary word is recherche. Kind of a precious word for something that can mean "overly refined and pretentious", don't you think? Not only is it right up there with lagniappe for unnecessary Frenchness, I think it would be an amazingly good word for hangman considering all those e's. Think about it. People would go more or less in the order of letter frequency, and they'd probably get e and r first.

re__er__e ... what?

re_her_he... what?? (my guess is that most people would guess t and s next, before c, even if they were thinking of creating diphthongs with the h.)

In short, quite awesome. I think I'd heard the word before, but this time I'll remember it.

I want to talk about life (by which I mean work), but I feel a little blocked. Both my parents independently called me this weekend because they were worried about me, which is not exactly a rockin' sign. Still, I feel better than I did last week. I've decided on a classic 'fake it til you make it' strategy... my boss, who I'm going to call the Noid from now on, is not someone I trust enough to admit the truth, which is that I (sometimes) feel miserable because I (usually) feel like I'm on probation. And anyway, a well-timed Psychology Today article reminded me of something I already knew... it's much more important to act confident, optimistic and all that than it is to feel that way naturally. Optimistic people aren't magic -- they often have better results in life because, imagining a better future, they do things to prepare for and create that future. Between that line of thinking and the much harsher fact that the Zillian culture doesn't seem very tolerant of non-cheerfulness / insecurity, yeah, I'm just going to act like everything's great and forge ahead. I don't see any other options that make sense.

Also, I'm purposely trying to do more visible stuff. I'm organizing a day-long effort this week to improve our testing process, and my second feature has gone into production as of last week. I'd rather focus on doing good stuff than visible stuff, yeah, but it seems like a necessary evil for now that I have to think about both. There's still no way I can be "fully up to speed by the end of the quarter"... sigh... but maybe that's just another fake deadline that came out of the boss's mouth without anything serious behind it, like all my other quarterly objectives/deadlines have been.

All I really want is an assurance that the Noid is definitely not going to fire me, but I can't ask for that, because I don't want him to know I've been that worried (and don't want to put the idea into his head, either). It's a nasty catch-22.