ice water and ocicats

(To catch up any readers who aren't seeing access-list only posts, my last day at Zillian was 4/4 and I'm now very much taking a break). This has been a really interesting week of trying to remember how not to be in a hurry, and reaching out to some people I haven't seen in a long while. Zillian now goes on without me, and had a big round of layoffs on Friday without me too.

Crashing out -- after a few nights of continuing to not sleep too well, I started to get through the nights, and now I'm getting properly tired. The eyelid twitches are less present, or less often present. I think I'd be entirely justified if I just turned into a zombie for all of April, and haven't really done that (yet?) but I'm at least resisting any big new commitments while I remember how to not be rushing all the time. It's partly in this vein that I haven't reconfigured things like my workout and chore schedule, yet, even though they should probably change. And I keep telling myself "do it the nice way" -- put the stuff back in the cabinet instead of leaving it on the bathroom counter, clean the litterbox every morning because it's not actually difficult, walk the friend to their subway stop after lunch. The days are not infinite, but I can choose to do fewer things better when I'm not (also) required to do someone else's damn to-do list. Right now that feels like a good start.

Estrogen, peri, etc -- I went to the doctor on Tuesday morning and came away with prescriptions for estrogen and progesterone, as well as information about vaginal moisturizers, which are not the same as lube. ( Read more... ) I got a super uncomfortable hot flash on Thursday that seemed to go on forever, with accompanying queasy feeling, so I'm hoping this stuff works. Mmmmm, and also I weighed in a little heavier than I like at the doctor's office, which might be all part of the same thing or might be all the Pocky I ate in order to get through promo discussions. So I'm gently keeping that in mind also.

Identity updates -- I updated LinkedIn and FB to indicate clearly that I'm an ex-Zillianaire, but haven't found the words to write public posts about the transition yet. I took all related T-shirts out of my closet though (ordered a couple of new ones: behold The Female Gaze). I also cancelled the Thistle meals that we'd been eating on Mondays and Tuesdays -- which resulted in my seeing melebeth IRL, for the first time in ages, when I was looking for a way to return the final bag. Sometimes you try to cancel a subscription and you end up meeting a (big) puppy!

Having Some Damn Fun -- Level99 with motyl and curiouserrandy was really excellent and delightful, and the next day I had lunch/coffee with another recent-ish Zillian escapee who feels like a peer. It was ultra useful to speak with people who are just a smidgen ahead of me on the same exact journey, and two people said it was a relief to talk to me too. Also, Trident still has its breakfast burrito, which I have loved since the mid-90s. In a nod to my recently past self, I have also now done the NYT crossword puzzle Monday through Saturday; Saturday was hard enough to be on the edge of stressful, but it succumbed after 43 minutes. I'm sure I'll get faster... not that I have to, given that it's just for fun, but I think faster will be more fun.

I've been doing a bit more reading, and may yet again be bouncing off Terry Pratchett, the same way I think I did in college. Slowly realizing that I love a snarky main character, but snarky omnicient narrators often come off as unkind to me.

There's so much more -- I came across some great writing prompts! And I'm angry about how they handled the main character's glittery hair in Anora! One of my tenants lost their job, which sucks! And there's a half-baked poem in my head, and quite a lot of et cetera! But now it's time to go shopping for sushi ingredients and get on with handstands, which are their own topic for another day.

I need to post weekly-ish or I get the feeling of things building up in my head: things I want to remember or things that want to come out.

• I went to a zoo for the first time ever, that I'm aware of. Norwood and I only went there because we needed to be on mask/oudoor protocol last weekend and it seemed like a decent outdoor date, but he found out I'd never been, and got all excited. :) Apparently this is a thing parents do? Take kids to zoos? I've recognized and purposely filled in some things that I think of as "missing" from my basically-missing childhood, but this one somehow was never on my radar. Rectified now. Although I still have never seen an elephant or a giraffe in real life, so Norwood wants to take me to at least one more.


• Several new handstand records. I've been feeling strong. On Sunday I held a straight handstand for 1:07 (previous record was 1:04). Also in the last week: caught 5 kickups in a row on my bad side, pressed from 17" and succeeded at a weird little pike drill that I'd failed at before. And learned a whole new way of doing a straddle jump, which is interesting and different.


• New realms of ridiculous delight at having a Short Boyfriend. It turns out that, with human wingspan usually being about the same as human height, if someone is shorter than me I can spread out my arms and just SPAN THEM FROM HEAD TO TOE and pet both ends of them. I don't remember ever doing this with Smitten, oddly, but it's my new favorite thing. (My other partners could presumably do this to me, and they ought to! It is really fun!)


• Work is a writhing pile of ambiguity. More reorgs coming, but when? On the plus side, I got a random $2000 spot bonus for something I'd forgotten all about helping with; it's still that kind of place.


• Several people in my life are having trouble. There are dying parents scattered around, and probably an exploding marriage (poly situation: the spouse said you need to pick her or me which is basically the poly nightmare).


• Covid: I've been watching the case numbers fall. My county moved down into "high" risk on covidactnow.org this week, and my state seems likely to follow in 3-4 days. For myself I'm 8 days out from my 2nd mRNA shot, have had my last masked/distanced date with an existing partner (am soooo looking forward to seeing Norwood without all that on Sunday), and have sent in the last of my kits for weekly PCR testing today; by the next time I would have sent one, I'll be fully vaccinated. Amusingly, heisenbug and I talked over a lot of "will X be okay for me to do after we're both fully vaccinated" scenarios last week, and flat-out forgot to talk about the gym and the subway.


• We did our taxes over the weekend, with the aid of drinks and takeout, so that's done.

I'm going to want a new default icon when I'm fully vaccinated and I think I just picked it. Next time.

I went to LA (the Venice part of LA, if you know the area) and that was a first for me. My hotel was a 20-minute walk to the office, along Venice beach, which I'm told is peak SoCal and is certainly peak something. I've never seen a beach so wide and nice, or so many people living outside in tents (I wasn't sketched out by the latter at all, just amazed at a place whose benevolent weather allows it). I looked at sunsets over the ocean, and walked with a few others to Muscle Beach just to hang from the rings there and say we did it. Was going to have dinner with my ex Smitten, but she flaked on me.

I also cried a lot, missed about half the summit because I was having intense 1:1s instead, and probably figured out a huge part of why my skip-level director is so unhappy with me. ( Sigh, work )

Now for a broader observation: the level I'm at objectively sucks. It's very much halfway between two better-understood levels, and I know three women at my level, in my office, with my score. All of us are blazingly unhappy. So some of this is baked in, and can't be helped. The obvious solution is to get to the next level but I don't even want to anymore, and the other one is to lower my expectations. Or at least go back to first principles: my career has already gotten me the one thing I wanted most out of it. The rest is extra credit. As it happens, I'm going to spend my next six months playing hard for that extra credit, but maybe I'll be able to keep some perspective as I do that? We'll see.

Work did bring a litter of kittens to the office last week, and also gave me a flower (an insane rainbow-colored rose) so there was that, too: the bizarre and occasionally delightful perks.

For my fellow Fluevoggers, a shout-out to the new Soft Rock lace-up platform boot. Yes, I know they're weird. They're weird and 100% me, they have the right toe-box shape (same as the Axe 2.0 and at least one other pair that I have), and they give a nice ankle snuggle. I am going to wear these puppies with EVERYTHING.

I also spent a few days inserting my nose into the Dark Forest trilogy, aka Remembrance of Earth's Past, by Cixin Liu. It started off slowly, but each book went faster than the last and, damn, I love it when the world ends. Not every science fiction author has the nerve, but nerve is not Cixin's problem. And reading is good for me.

I also watched a lecture on the biological underpinnings of religiosity. Some of it is stuff I was familiar with, but not all. For instance, I hadn't noticed that the four most typical focuses of OCD are also the four most typical focuses of religious rituals: in particular the cleansing of the body, ritualized preparation/consumption of food, entering and exiting places (typically churches; many folks with OCD have trouble with doorways); and numbers/numerology, like things coming in threes and tens. There is also a form of epilepsy (temporal lobe epilepsy) whose giveaway symptom is extreme interest in religion and philosophy, along with a reduced sense of humor and a manic desire to write... wow. Kind of gives you an idea how religious tracts and books might get written in the first place.

heisenbug is now officially more stressed about work than I am, or at least surpassed me for a while earlier this week, so that's a thing.

I'm on a plane back from California to Boston. This week was a trip in three parts: first a leadership / career management training thing with other senior women in my part of the company at a somewhat swanky resort place, then two days running around like a caffeinated ferret on the mothership campus, then one night/morning of socializing with an actual IRL friend. I'm behind on email now, but decided to catch up on personal email and blogging before diving back into work.

What I learned in leadership training (and the lunch I had later with more junior members of my friend's team): in any group of high-earning women, conversation will turn to "it's so awkward to make more than anyone else among my friends/family" and "do your parents know how much you make?" and "it's so awkward to earn more than my husband / boyfriend / partner", and various mitigating tactics are shared. In case you are curious: no, nobody's family knows how much she makes. Everyone's family guesses $100,000, because that's universal code for "a lot", and everyone kind of nods and smiles and lets that pass.

(The exception to the above is my old friend Chia, whose husband is now a house-husband and whose job is to save her from ever, ever having to miss a day because of a sick kid; she enjoys her job and plans to finish funding retirement for both of them. But I'm uncomfortable with this deal and would not choose either side of it.)

I also learned that my job is a good one for letting me express my values while on the clock. And that I have no idea what to work on with the executive coach whose time I will get, as part of this same program, over the next few months... anyone who does have an idea on this, I'd love to hear it.

Visiting California is always good for Pokemon Go, and this was no exception: a few species are more common there, allowing me to evolve stuff I wouldn't get a chance to at home, and I spun a whole lot of new-to-me stops.

Sleeping in three different beds/places in five nights made the trip more arduous physically (more carrying around of bags) but easier psychologically (no getting tired of a place, or feeling static). I managed to work out on three days, prioritizing flexibility stuff, which is not awful. I'm glad to be going home though; since Sunday I have gotten two (2) hugs from friends, minor cat-petting and a 22-minute massage and that's it for anyone touching me.

Last week I went to view the mountains! No, not really. You'd just think that from the name of the town I visited, where my company is based. I had a good visit, and kept things simple by avoiding most social obligations and simply getting a massage on Wednesday to get my dose of physical touch.

On the flight back I got great news from the minion whose fate was hanging in the balance in my last corporate-whining post: he's found a job in his new office, helped along perhaps by my own letters to his soon-to-be-manager. Which means that my bumbling (and the director's bumbling) didn't ultimately cost him his job, and he's not lost to Zillian just because he's lost to my team -- which now happens at/around the end of October, rather than in two weeks. My relief practically made me melt on the plane.

In weirder news, norwoodbridge went from an OKC hello chat to "yeah, I liked her, we had sex!" with a new person while I was gone. I spent about a day having no idea how I felt about that, because I don't always access my emotional side too well while on a business trip (and I hadn't seen norwoodbridge for a week and a half at that point, so he wasn't feeling very real either). I was pleased a day or so later to find that I felt fine: the new girl seems cool, the whole thing is reasonable, she lives far enough away that she can't be, uh, super spontaneous in a way that would bother me. Basically I know Norwood's been wanting a new thing and this new thing seems good. I might even be compersing, mildly? Too early to say, but this very initial response seems decently in line with, I guess, being the person I'd like to be. More generous. Not so damn scared all the time.

(heisenbug also has a first date on Thursday. The poly network is really hopping.)

I finished The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, a lovely SF book that focuses on the humanity of the characters (yes, even the alien ones) and generally satisfies. I foresee it making an appearance around Christmas for certain people who like it character-driven, and I also foresee its sequel arriving at my door in a couple of days. I'm trying to think what to compare it to... it has a small cast of specific characters kind of like Starfish or The Sparrow, but its characters have a warmth and depth more like The Book of Strange New Things or Never Let Me Go. At any rate, recommended.

Today, my primary purpose at work was to be a lightning rod for other people's anger. I remember being in a meeting once where my manager told me that was part of his job sometimes -- to let people get it all out, in his direction, while staying calm himself -- and apparently I have his job now.

After a while the angrily snapping person realized (and typed) that she shouldn't be snippy at me, given that I'd already intervened in a helping/effective way. I sighed and said it was safer to aim at me than at someone outside the team, even so. Which is true; enough had already made it to the other team in question that the other team's manager had asked me (quite rightfully) to give some communication style feedback.

They are so marvelous yet so prone to spatting, my direct reports; they really are like cats. Shhhhhhh kitties, there now, it's all okay, it's okay, it's okay. No need for claws.

I flew out to California on Monday morning, and back on Saturday. The point of the trip was to scheme and get brain-dumps regarding a new project my team is taking on -- and it was also my first trip to the Mothership in a while, due to various other things taking up my mental travel budget in the last two quarters.

They rhythm of the days is completely different in California. They have... they have... meetings in the morning, and I mean like all the time. I realize this is a normal business day, that I've become very used to the east-coast ramifications of being 3 hours shifted off of normal.

Here's how it goes in the East, roughly:
* Morning is for working, working out, sleeping in, being productive or lazy. Only once or twice is there a meeting, particularly local Hiring Committee. There's a smallish pile of email to bash through, and one does.
* At noon the Mothership wakes up (9AM there), and there is a block of meeting-heavy time until perhaps 5 or 6. Emails are also flying. Maybe a few code reviews, but not too many.
* In early evening one eats dinner or takes a circus class, and/or just commutes home or works out at the gym.
* One logs back on from the couch and oh, THERE is the pile of code reviews for the day, kicked out by Mothershippers in their afternoon / my early evening. Also, more emails, ditto. One does the reviews, because the authors may themselves log in later in their evening and one doesn't want to delay them; then one does email until sleepy.

See how pulsed that is? Not perfect, but it's definitely possible to take the day in reasonably focused phases. California, no, it's confusingly all mashed up, and meetings happen ALL DAY so I have no idea when workouts are supposed to happen. I only worked out twice -- should have scheduled more aggressively. I avoided evening engagements and fun things (just had lunch with three friends), and just slept early and heavily. A smooth business trip, kept my brain working; I'd say overall it was productive but lonely, and I'm amazingly glad to be home again.